by Jerry Oltion
But when they neared their destination, he wondered if they would have to use a transporter after all. A hundred feet short of their goal the stone-lined corridor they were in came to a halt against solid rock, and Scotty's tricorder showed no cavities within scanning range beyond it. That was only about fifty feet, but they couldn't cut through fifty feet of rock without special equipment. All of which would have to be carried down again after they climbed back up the stairs to get it.
This was the only corridor they had found that led even this close to the transmission source, and the tricorder revealed no more levels below them, either. "Looks like a dead end to me," Scotty said. His voice echoed in the long expanse of stone. They were well below the level that had been lit by overhead panels; they were proceeding by flashlight now. The dancing shadows and the echoes made Scotty's neck hairs stand out.
Mudd was panting from all the walking and descending of stairs. "Of course it looks…like a dead end," he said. "If I were trying to hide something I'd make it look like one too. That doesn't mean it is one."
"Then where is the passage?" Scotty asked him a bit testily. He was tired too.
"Back there somewhere," said Mudd, waving off down the corridor the way they had come. Doors opened off to the left and right every dozen feet for a hundred yards or more. "One of those rooms obviously has a hidden passageway that bypasses this false lead."
"That is entirely possible," Spock said. "It would be a simple but effective diversion."
Scotty sighed. "I guess there's an advantage to thinking like a crook," he muttered.
"I am not a crook!" Mudd spluttered, his jowls quivering as he shook his head in vehement denial.
Scotty and Spock both looked at him without speaking a word, and after a moment Mudd said a bit sheepishly, "All the charges have been dropped. Check and see."
"We already have," Spock said. "But at the moment your criminal record is irrelevant, except where it helps us find our objective." He moved back down the corridor, scanning each room as they passed it. Scotty followed along, checking for forcefields, trapdoors, or anything else Spock might have missed.
"Here," Spock said a moment later. He opened the door before him and entered the room. It looked like an empty stone cube, maybe a dungeon cell, but Spock walked confidently across to the far wall and pushed against a protruding rock, and a panel slid aside to reveal another even smaller chamber.
"Doesn't look like it goes very far," the Grand General observed.
"No, it doesn't." Spock stepped into the room. It was more of a closet, really, with just room enough for one person to stand in comfortably. Scotty shined his flashlight through the doorway to help Spock see, but there was little to examine. The wall opposite the door had been scribbled on by a child, or so it seemed, though someone would have had to hold him up to do it, since the scribbling was chest-high.
"This appears to be a map of the tunnel system," Spock said. Scotty looked at it again, and realized that Spock was right. "However," Spock went on, "it shows no passageway to the area we want to reach, which I estimate to be about here." He poked his finger at the wall to the left of the squiggles.
"No, wait!" Scotty shouted, but it was too late. There was a flash of light, and Spock disappeared.
"Now what?" groaned Scotty. He checked his tricorder, attempting to measure any residual radiation from the phased matter beam that might give him a clue where Spock had been taken, but he hadn't been looking for transporter traces. He already knew where Spock had gone anyway. This was the same kind of system that the Nevisians used in their public transporters. Just touch the map where you wanted to go, and they would send you there. Except this one would send you to places not on the map. Like into solid rock, if Spock had guessed wrong.
Cautiously, like a cat in a roomful of dogs, Scotty entered the transporter chamber and scanned the map for clues. Maybe there was a way to bring someone back from wherever it had sent them, or—
When his communicator beeped for attention, he nearly dropped his tricorder. He took a deep breath, unclipped the communicator from his belt, and flipped it open. "Scott here."
"This is Spock. I believe I have found what we are looking for."
Mudd hesitated at the edge of the transporter chamber. He didn't like this blind leap into nowhere. But Spock had assured him that it was all right, and Scotty wouldn't leave him behind, and the Grand General wouldn't go until he had seen a second person do it—which left Mudd to make the leap.
It seemed like it always came down to something like this. A life-or-death choice made at somebody else's urging, the real choice lying not in the act itself but in whether or not to trust people who openly disliked him. And of course if he declined, they would think him a coward. How did he keep winding up in situations like this? Really, he would have to put an end to it before it killed him.
This seemed as good a time as any. If he merely pointed to a spot at the top of the map, the transporter would take him upstairs again, where he could contact the Enterprise and have them beam him back to safety.
Whereupon he would still be at the mercy of these same people, who would dislike him even more for skipping out on them.
A bad choice was no choice at all. And Mudd was curious to see what was hidden behind all this subterfuge. He might even find the interstellar transporter he had been looking for, or something else equally valuable.
"Well, are you going or not?" Scotty asked impatiently from behind him.
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," he muttered, and he reached out to the spot of bare rock that Spock had touched. It was cold and rough beneath his fingertip.
An instant later, light flooded his eyes. He blinked and waited for them to adjust to the brightness, and slowly the scene around him resolved. He was in a long, high-ceilinged corridor that seemed to stretch on toward infinity. Unlike the hallways he had just been in, this one was brightly lit from overhead, though Mudd noticed that at least a third of the panels were flickering as if about to burn out, and maybe one in ten had already done so. This place hadn't seen maintenance in a long time.
Nor ventilation. The air smelled stale, and there was an unpleasant tinge of burned electronics just at the edge of detectability.
Machinery lined the walls on both sides of the corridor. Unlike the lights, most of the tall, rectangular racks of components still seemed functional. A few banks were dark, but most of them hummed softly, and activity lights glowed on front panels that were labeled in Nevisian script. Mudd didn't need labels to recognize what he saw, though. This was a computer system. A big computer system. Just the part that he could see from where he stood made it easily the biggest Mudd had ever seen, and he had the feeling that this corridor went on for miles.
And now that he looked, he could see side passages leading away, probably to still more corridors like this one. And stairways at the junctions led downward again to even more.
Big didn't always mean sophisticated, he reminded himself, but even if these things used vacuum tubes and relays, there was a lot of computing power here.
"Impressive, isn't it?"
He flinched at the voice, then turned and saw Spock standing a few feet away. The Vulcan was as pokerfaced as ever, but Mudd thought he could see a gleam in his eye that betrayed his excitement. He was a technophile, and this sort of thing was techie heaven.
The corridor ended a few dozen yards beyond him, and occupying most of that space were pedestals and low platforms bearing various pieces of hardware. It looked like a shopping display, only none of the goods were familiar. No, Mudd recognized one item: a gods' eye just like the one that had materialized upstairs in the altar.
"Mudd has arrived successfully," Spock said into his communicator, and a moment later the Grand General blinked into existence next to him. And a moment after that, Scotty showed up.
He whistled softly when he saw what they had discovered. "Well now, would you look at that," he said.
Spock was already examining the a
rtifacts at the end of the corridor with his tricorder. "This gods' eye is identical to the one we saw upstairs," he said. "Down to the molecular level. I suspect it is the template from which all gods' eyes are created." He moved over to another device, a mushroom-shaped business with a stem about the size of a man's chest and a flat-topped cap twice that diameter. "This appears to be a modular transporter platform. Also a template, I suspect. Grand General, am I correct in surmising that the 'gods' provide you with your transporter technology as well?"
"What?" he asked. He had been staring in rapt fascination at the endless rows of humming machinery. "Oh, yes." He turned around to see what Spock was looking at. "Yes, that's a transporter module. And that"—he pointed at a rectangular box with a glass screen on one end—"is a communicator, and you of course recognize a disruptor."
Indeed, there on a pedestal of its own was the same hand weapon that Mudd had seen in the hands of so many armed fanatics, including the ones who had fired on him upstairs in this very palace. The very same weapon, apparently, duplicated over and over again each time someone asked the "gods" for a gun.
Now he began to recognize some of the other items. Shield generators, laser cutting tools, microfusion power packs…in fact, nearly every technical gadget he had seen during his entire stay on Distrel. All ready to be reproduced over and over again, as often as a person could push the button.
"Do you actually manufacture anything on your own?" he asked.
"Of course we do," said the Grand General, but he didn't elaborate. He had gone back to staring wide-eyed at his surroundings, still unable to quite believe what he saw. He looked, Mudd thought, a bit like an old-world Catholic suddenly discovering a mechanical Jesus.
Spock moved back down the corridor to the first of the rack-mounted computer elements and examined it with his tricorder. "Molecular circuitry," he said, obviously impressed. "And holographic memory. There is considerable computing and storage capacity here." He looked off into the distance and said, "Enough, I believe, to direct the affairs of an entire civilized race."
Calling the Nevisians "civilized" might be pushing the definition, Mudd thought, but he couldn't deny there was a lot of computer power here. One might even say an almighty lot.
And there was enough profit potential to tempt a saint.
Chapter Twenty-two
SPOCK HAD NOT BEEN entirely surprised to find the computer. After listening to the experiences of the people who had been killed and resurrected, and after watching the android Stella reappear again and again, he would have been surprised to find anything else. But figuring out how it worked was another matter. He could guess some of the general principles, but the specifics would require more study.
Scotty stepped up next to him and said, "Do you really think this thing's behind all the resurrections?"
"It seems the only logical explanation for the phenomenon," Spock replied, glad for the opportunity to check his reasoning with someone who could detect any flaws in it. "To bring someone back to life without the memory or the biological effects of dying would require a sensor array that could record a person's entire subatomic structure while they are still alive and in good health, plus the ability to store that information until the next scan."
"So the computer could use the previous pattern to regenerate the person from if they were suddenly killed," said Scotty. "Aye, that makes sense. It could also explain why they use disruptors to fight with, too. Doesn't take long to die after you're hit with one, so a person wouldn't lose much subjective time in the resurrection."
"I hadn't thought of that advantage to disruptors," Spock said. "I was considering the memory requirements of storing multiple scans. That amount of data would take up considerable memory, so I had assumed disruptors were used to reduce the number of past samples required to ensure a healthy subject."
"Could be," Scotty agreed. "But how do you explain the android? It's certainly not a healthy subject."
Spock felt the thrill of the logical chase coursing through him. "Precisely," he said. "The android is damaged because the computer falsely assumed it was healthy when it overwrote the previous scan with the current one. It was still moving, after all, and speaking. But it was already damaged beyond repair. So when the computer detected its 'death,' it attempted to restore it to life by using the previous pattern, but that pattern was nonviable."
"Why would that lock up the whole system, though?" asked Scotty. "This can't be the first time it's lost a resurrection subject. I'd imagine people die of heart attacks and such all the time."
Hmm. That was another good objection. "A valid criticism of my theory," Spock said. "Unfortunately I do not have a good answer for you, other than that the android is not a person."
"That's not the only problem with the theory," Scotty said, almost apologetically. "Those bathhouses where we wound up were shielded from transporters."
Spock nodded. "That much, at least, I believe I can explain. If the data-gathering devices—the 'gods' eyes'—also function as transport signal emitters, which we have already observed that they do, then the pattern stored in the computer's memory could be sent to them over conventional communication channels, to which the shield is transparent. No phased matter beam needs to penetrate the barrier, because the transporter is already inside it."
Scotty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "The bandwidth would have to be incredible to carry that much data."
"The sensor network would provide multiple transmission pathways," Spock replied.
"There'd have to be all sorts of error-correction techniques to make sure nothing got scrambled along the way."
"Requiring massive amounts of computing power." Spock gestured down the seemingly endless corridor lined with computers.
"Aye, but enough for everyone on two planets? Could anyone build that much hardware?"
"That's the beauty of it," Spock said. "Given the technology to replicate anything they have a template for, the sheer volume of computers becomes a trivial production problem. Storage space would have been the biggest obstacle, but transporter technology would make carving these tunnels a simple process as well. For that matter, I imagine the caverns provided the raw material to build computers out of."
"Well, it's a passable theory," said Scotty. "Barring the problems I pointed out. And there's no denyin' they've got plenty of equipment here. If you're right, then somewhere in here should be a control station. Let's see if we can get it to talk to us."
They found the control computer easily enough, by the simple expedient of looking for the one that was physically different from the others. Interfacing with it was more difficult, since it apparently didn't accept verbal input and there was no keyboard or other input device that either of them could recognize. The Grand General tried the laying on of hands and beseeching the gods to respond in their hour of need, and Mudd poked about in the nooks and crannies between consoles for an operator's manual, but neither approach was any more successful than Spock's or Scotty's.
At last Spock gave up and simply began monitoring the state of the internal electronics with his tricorder. It was a slow, tedious process, and he was keenly aware of the mounting political tensions overhead, but he could think of no better course of action. This computer was the key to everything, of that he was sure. He just needed to find out how it worked.
Scotty had moved on down the line of identical substations, scanning each one in turn. After a few minutes of that he returned to Spock and said, "Well, I've got one bit o' good news. It looks like there's still transporter patterns in some of these buffers. It takes about ten racks per person, by my guess, but there's plenty of 'em to go around."
Spock looked up from his tricorder, real hope filling the emptiness inside him for the first time in hours. "Is the captain in any of them?"
Scotty shook his head. "It'd take decades to scan 'em all, and even then we have no idea what kind of data compression techniques they're using. All I can tell you for sure is there's something in those me
mory banks."
"And it's stuck there until we can figure out how to unlock the computer," Spock said.
Mudd had been poking around among the artifacts at the end of the tunnel, asking the Grand General what each one was. Now the two of them came back to Spock and Scotty and Mudd asked, "Making any progress?"
"Some," Spock admitted. "I have discovered a periodic data flow that seems to match the resurrection cycle of the android. I suspect it's a self-check routine, since it seems to involve the entire processor and program storage areas, but I have not yet determined what it is checking for." He didn't mention his growing suspicion that the computer was trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the android.
"Grand General," he said. "Is anything other than a Nevisian—or humanoid alien—ever resurrected?"
"What do you mean? Other animals? No, the…the Gods…" He hesitated, then squared his shoulders and said, "The Gods bring back only people. People killed in battle, at that."
Spock nodded. He had suspected as much. "Something apparently filters the input for a 'humanoid' signature, and disregards all else, probably at the source. That would cut down on the amount of data flow necessary for the central processor to handle. But since the android was also considered humanoid, the definition must not be too strict."
"Certainly you can't believe that the android fooled the Gods!" the Grand General said indignantly.
"It was good enough to fool you," Mudd reminded him.
Spock ignored them both. He was speaking mostly for his own benefit, and for Scotty's. "The rematerialization process, however, must be considerably more sophisticated. It must check for transmission errors that could damage the subject. It no doubt scans a newly revived being's medical condition before it considers the restoration complete."