by Diane Carey
“It’s not an old ship,” Kirk snapped. “It’s the second starship Enterprise. A remake of the first Constitution-class sh—”
“Who cares? It uses a classic deflector-shield method, doesn’t it? My method . . . which I never got credit for?”
Moss phaser-pointed them across the bleak, rocky landscape pocked with a few archaeological tents and pathetic excuses for hiking paths, under an eerie, unnatural glow from the miles-long dome, but he kept his phaser at McCoy’s back and eyed the others the whole time, and they eyed him back.
“Hmm?” he badgered. “The method which was stolen from me? Any of you going to admit it?”
“There were others working on it who would’ve broken through soon,” Kirk said. “You never got credit because you didn’t stick with the project. You didn’t do the development.”
“Because I was sitting in a rehab colony, thanks to you and your papa. I sat there till I was twenty-five. Thinking the whole time. Then, I came here.”
Moss didn’t sound angry, yet his tone was laced with a disturbing irony and a devious grin that bothered the Starfleeters. He obviously liked the bothering part.
Spock’s voice buttered the crunchy purple landscape.
“We diagnosed your special deflector shield decades ago. You found a way to focus the deflection against isolated threats, and no more. It made your shields seem a hundred times more powerful than they actually were. Federation engineers dissected your theory, applied it, combined shields with sensors—”
“Stole my ideas.”
“Expanded,” Spock repeated firmly, “your theories and further developed them, because they know that every scientist stands upon the shoulders of those who come before. It is a building process.”
“And you’re a needle-eared regurgitator. Big deal. It’s all talk.”
Jim Kirk suddenly stopped walking and scraped around in front of Moss. “You think everyone else should start from scratch at the Stone Age, even though you didn’t, right?”
Stock-still, Moss gripped the phaser tightly between them. “People who came before me were idiots.”
“You don’t give any of them credit for the foundation you’re standing on. Take from all, give to none, share nothing, fear being robbed—your obscurity was your own choice. You could’ve continued work on those shields, but you fumbled the ball, Roy. You made your own purgatories. Don’t blame anybody else.”
“Purgatory?” Moss waved his free phaser in a big arch. “I don’t need any security out here! Tourists come and go, delegations come and go, diggers come and go, boatloads of students . . . I’ve been working here undisturbed for thirty years. I wasn’t going to take any chances that a little oinker like you would ruin my plans again. Now I’m ready. All this ancient equipment is lined up and cleaned—it’s fairly simple. I figure it all happened about a hundred thousand years ago, and the problem was that the stars have shifted. So I had to recalibrate it.”
Kirk felt his features crunch when the subject suddenly changed in such a bizarre way. He used what he knew about Roy Moss to try to deduce what was happening. His feet got cold, as though he’d just stepped into a pool of ice water.
“‘It’?” he prodded.
Moss glared at him analytically, then all of a sudden looked at Spock. “Ohhhh . . . you brought the Vulcan here to figure out my science, didn’t you? That means this other one . . . is a psychiatrist. He’s supposed to figure out my motivations or my mental stability, right?”
McCoy gave him a dirty glare. “I’m Leonard McCoy, ship’s chief surgeon. I’m here in case of injuries.”
“And in case of insanity,” Moss was sure. “The other side of the balancing act. I know how these command things work. And everybody sends the chief surgeon down in case of skinned knees and splinters. That’s all right—you’re still a hell of a good target, Doctor, and your captain over here knows I’ll drill a juicy hole in you if they don’t behave, so go ahead and analyze me up and down the cliffs for all I care.”
He waggled his phaser directly at McCoy’s head to make his point, and something about the way he did it erased any doubt that he would shoot.
“Get down there. Down that ladder.”
He pointed to some kind of geological bowl, crater, or dried pond bed that opened before them and went down two choppy levels, where he had put a simple wooden ladder.
Moss grinned as they started down before him, and he stayed up on a small, glittering promontory, then pulled the ladder up behind them, and they were trapped.
“You should see the looks on your faces. You’d think you were midshipmen.”
“Why don’t you get to the point?” Kirk demanded. “What is it you want?”
“Respect.”
“You won’t get it from me. You’ve got to earn it.”
The words were barely out and—zing—back forty-five years to the sound of his father’s voice. The same words, the same feelings, new dangers.
“You’ll give it to me,” Moss said, “when you see what I got here. About four thousand miles from here, there’s a machine. Its power core is a hundred and sixty miles straight down underground, so your ships can’t find it. Here—watch this. You’ll like this.”
He fingered his control box without even taking it off his belt, and things started to change in the very rock.
Behind Moss, a picture of the Bill of Rights formed as though projected on the rock. There was no projector, but there was the picture, as tall as Moss.
“Jim, look out!”
McCoy shoved him from one side and Spock pulled him from the other just in time to keep him from dropping into an opening that appeared at the pond bed’s center. Before they could react any more than that, a set of dull-colored pill-shaped orbs the size of melons rose in no particular order out of the ground. There was no noise, no metallic substance about the oblong things, and they were disturbingly unarranged.
“Control center, Captain,” Spock said. “Probably a computer access. Obviously built to the social taste of the ancient culture.”
“They must have thought Faramond was pretty, then,” McCoy commented when the orbs stopped rising.
Only to the educated eye did this smooth collection of bowling balls appear to be a computer of any kind. To a child it might look like a gathering of balloons, each independent with a glowing interior and a pliant, almost gummy surface, all different colors, but all versions of the ivory-to-ash spectrum.
In the side of the pond bed, right out of the dry rock there, part of the rock separated and revealed what looked like a child’s idea of a library—books or tapes, stacked side by side, in long, curved racks. Apparently, these and the balloons were meant to be used together.
At least, that was the symmetry of their movements.
Spock’s eyes lit up when he saw the volumes, but he didn’t say anything.
Kirk and McCoy pushed up behind Spock for a look at the brilliant past culture. Certainly the collection seemed alien. Though neither captain nor physician dared touch the balls, Spock was on them like a bee on pollen.
His long fingers left marks on doughy surfaces, but the marks filled in almost immediately, as though he had pressed wet mud.
“Poke all you want,” Moss said. “Unless you know the order of information feed, you’re just poking at rubber. At first I thought they might be kids’ toys.”
“Where is your power center?” Spock asked him.
Roy looked at him in a disgusted manner. “It’s built in.”
“But where is it,” Spock emphasized. “Physically?”
“Underground, I told you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I put it there. It’s the only thing that was missing. It took me my whole adult life, but I added a matter/antimatter converter to the central core complex. It’s almost as powerful as what you have on your pretty ship, Mr. Brock.”
“Spock,” McCoy corrected fiercely.
“Fine. Where did you idiots think I was getting t
he power for my dampening field? Magic? Anyway, the machine is ready to go and all I have to do is turn it on. All you have to do,” he added, “is watch.”
“What does this machine do?” Kirk asked. “Wait a minute! Don’t start it up yet! Tell us what it does!”
Moss squared off before them, squared his shoulders, squared his brows, squared everything about his posture, as though to build himself into a castle before their very eyes.
“I’m going to move the fastest thing in the galaxy a hell of a lot faster than it can go. I’m going to show how you move things around if you’re Roy Moss. I’m going to take your big fancy Bill of Rights, all its six hundred eighty crewmen, and all the Faramond archaeologists, and transport them all the way back to Starbase One in a single beam. And you’re going to serve as my living witnesses. How’s that for a destiny, hm?”
Roy Moss stood above them, looking from each to the next as though to taunt them. His eyes were wide, brows up, arms fanned outward.
“You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” he quizzed. “I’ve given you enough information—”
“You have discovered a long-distance transporter,” Spock said. His interruption sliced Roy’s insult in half. “Some form of frequency-focus method of travel.”
Moss confirmed Spock’s words by looking a bit disappointed.
“Wait a minute,” Kirk said. “Is this thing operative? Do you understand how it works?”
“I don’t have to,” Moss said. “I’ve figured out how to operate the controls. You drive that ship up there, but could you build a warp engine? Of course not. You don’t need to. That’s for mechanics to do.”
Jim Kirk moved dubiously from one side of the dry bed to the other, just as he had paced the sunken command deck of his bridge, never taking his eyes from Roy Moss.
“This thing has been shut down for a hundred thousand years,” he said, “and you’re going to plug power into it and go from there?”
“I’ve got it aimed. What can go wrong?”
“Have you tested it? Put any power to it before today?”
“No. Why would I?”
McCoy rolled his eyes. “Uh, boy . . . ”
Moss looked at the doctor. “If I did that, Starfleet would have heard it and come in and taken it all away from me. After all, one little buzz and here you are, right?”
Above them on his ledge, he huffed a sigh, pushed his phaser into a pocket, and looked at the ground.
“I’m the only one who figured out how to make it work,” he said. “Faramond’s an old, cold system and I’m the one who made it warm again. When I was fourteen, we salvaged a ship on its way back from here—”
“You mean you pirated a ship,” Kirk drilled.
“Shut up. The ship had all kinds of relics from here that made the Federation decide to dome and dig. But archaeologists are always looking backward. Even though I was fourteen, I was the only one who looked forward. I’m the one who figured out the normalized symbols, that the language over here under this rock was the same as the language over there under that outcropping . . . I found the commonality and discovered that it was a device for frequency-focus travel . . . instantly stop existing here, start existing there. What would that be worth to the settled galaxy? The Fabrini and a half-dozen others have found this stuff, and none of them knew what to do with it.”
All three Starfleet men surged forward.
“The Fabrini were here?” McCoy gasped. “Have you had this checked?”
Even Spock let a trace of shock run through his question. “A race as advanced as the Fabrini passed this by?”
Kirk stepped as far forward as possible and pressed, “Doesn’t that tell you something?”
Moss couldn’t ignore their reaction. In fact, he seemed proud that an extinct but far superior race had come here and gone away without the prize.
“They just couldn’t figure out how to work it,” he said. “I’ve turned up a dozen artifacts from past digs of other visiting civilizations. None of them were as patient as I was. They came and went, and after a few years they got used to me and I just went about my work.”
Kirk felt Spock step forward to ask a question, and caught his old friend by the wrist just in time to keep him silent. “How do you know you’re doing all this correctly?”
“Because it was simple! You don’t think for a hobby, do you? If I took your shuttlecraft back a couple hundred years, it would still be obvious which way it points and where the pilot sat, wouldn’t it? Drop a World War Two biplane into King Arthur’s age, and a clever person could figure out how it steered.” Moss nodded at them with raw pomposity. “I told you—I had it figured out when I was a kid. Before I even met you, Jack.”
“Jim,” McCoy spat.
“Yeah, Jim, Jim, right. All I had to do was ask why any advanced race would put an instrument here. It’s a cold system, right? Nothing growing, no heat, no life—a giant gravitational field and not much else. A big magnet. So that’s what I went looking for. I let the Federation archaeologists set up the domes and the artificial atmosphere, then I started picking.”
Moss pecked at the dirt and stone with his toe, as a child pecks at beach sand.
“Those Federation dopes ran around here, scooping up trinkets and brushing off fossils, while this incredible technology sat idle just a few miles away. They never figured out what happened to the Old Culture, and I had it figured out when I was fourteen.” He looked at them as though to be sure they were paying attention to his win. “Somehow the gravity or mass of this planet, or maybe its effect on surrounding space, were necessary to their project. But why a cold planet? I asked myself that question—and I answered. They needed an inactive core, because that’s exactly where the heart of their transporter is—at the gravitational dead center! That’s where I found it when no one else was smart enough to look. Great, right?”
Pacing again, he started grumbling as though talking only to himself.
“I tolerated those piratical pigs in order to get my stake for the big score, then you came along and set me back years. I never depended on anybody else again. Just me. I knew what a long-distance transporter would be worth to the Federation. Or anybody. Klingons, Romulans, I don’t much care. It’ll make me one of the most powerful beings around to control the LDT. The LDT . . . good sound to it, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Roy”—Kirk glared up at him and pushed—“you cling to that ‘it.’ You don’t have anything else. You’ve always expected ‘it’ to come in the future. Forty-five years and you still have nothing but a someday. Even after all these years, you still have no today.”
Silence fell suddenly and left only the buzz of the dome.
Roy Moss had counted on having to immobilize a starship to use as his example. He hadn’t counted on having to immobilize Jim Kirk.
Deprived of respect, he went hunting for it. His eyes were boiling.
“What do you have?” he asked. “You’re a captain. So what? You’ve risked your life a hundred times, I’ll bet. What’ve you got to show for that? A couple of stars and bars? You’re at the end of your career, you’ve run all over the galaxy, you’ve gotten a lot of people killed, and for what? You don’t even own that ship out there! Everybody says ‘Kirk’s ship,’ but it’s not your ship. You’ve been in charge of a machine that could lay waste to anything! You could’ve flown into orbit around some planet and declared yourself god to any culture fifty years younger than yours, and there’s nothing they could’ve done about it. They’d have to say, ‘Yes, you’re god, you sure are.’ You never knew what you could’ve had! Which of us has wasted his life?”
Abruptly, cruelly, Jim Kirk’s attention was dragged back to the most potent weapon anyone could strike him with, and he went bitterly silent, a prisoner to the words from up there.
“If you hadn’t stopped me forty-five years ago,” Moss badgered, “I would’ve developed this back then! All the deaths in four decades of exploration and accidents at high speeds—they’re all your f
ault! Who are you now, Jim Kirk?”
To Spock and McCoy’s unexpected dismay—a dismay he could feel on either side of him—the captain didn’t say anything.
The control box on Roy’s belt started yelping at him, and he grabbed it and read something on it.
“All right, what’re your friends doing in that stupid ship?” he demanded.
“Okay, I’ll just hit ’em with another damper. I’ll just go pull the stopper out of the bathtub again. Something must be broken. Equipment failure or something. Stay down there, because you can’t get out. I’ve got the area electrically sealed. Sure, Mr. Vulcan, I see your face—play with the machine all you want. You couldn’t figure it out in twenty years, and you couldn’t hurt it with a phaser. Even I don’t know what it’s made of. I’ll be back as soon as I beat your friends off. I can’t wait to see your faces when you see history happen.”
“Spock,” the captain said.
Immediately Spock turned to the ancient, alien controls and the snakelike shelving of ancient books, or cards, or whatever they were. He scanned the books first with his eyes, then with his tricorder, then picked up one and began leafing through its stiff, leatherlike pages.
“I am uneasy with this,” Spock puzzled. “Others have been here, including races as advanced as the Fabrini, yet even they could not make the long-distance transporter operate. It is unlikely that Roy Moss is the most brilliant creature to come along in the galaxy . . . ever.”
“Don’t tell him that,” McCoy drawled.
Spock turned to him and added, “There must be a reason these intelligent races have left this mechanism alone. His assumption that we could not locate this machine’s core simply because it is underground—”
“Makes perfect sense, Spock,” McCoy shoved in, “given his psych profile. He only sees weaknesses in others. He was never formally trained, learned everything on his own, and didn’t even realize his flushback could be detected from far away. One of us said it before—gaps in his knowledge—”
“Spock said it,” the captain supplied.
“Well, one of us said it,” McCoy went on. “Moss is smart, but he’s learned only enough in life as he’s needed to know to achieve his goals or protect himself. He sees no value in knowledge itself, did you notice that? Only in knowledge as it leads to power.”