by Джеймс Блиш
Behind it, Kirk now saw, stretched a long length of shell-littered, white-sanded beach, sweeping into the distance to a blue sea and a low line of chalk cliffs which blended into a beautifully blue sky. A sun shone brightly, and the temperature had become positively Mediterranean. There was no one else around him at all, unless he counted the fallen monster and a few far wheeling white specks in the sky which might have been gulls.
“Mr. Spock!” he shouted. “Scotty!”
Two tentacles thrust up from the dull green mass, thickened, grew two side tentacles, and then gourdlike knobs at their ends. Strange markings, almost like faces, grimaced along the surfaces of the gourds. Was the thing about to go to seed?
But simultaneously, the sunlight dimmed and went out. The landscape turned colorless. Everything but the two tentacles faded into a thick gray limbo.
The tentacles turned into Spock Two and Scott.
“Where were you?” Kirk demanded. “Did you see what I saw?”
“I doubt it,” Spock Two said. “Tell us what you saw, Captain.”
“I was on something that looked a lot like the southern seacoast of Spain. There was a huge biological sort of object in front of me, and I was just wondering whether or not to shoot it when I called your names. It turned into you two and the rest of the scene washed out.”
“Any emotional impression, Captain?”
“Yes, now that I come to think of it. There was an underlying feeling that something terrible was about to happen, though I couldn’t specify what. Nightmarish. What about you, Scotty?”
“I dinna see any monsters,” Scott said. “Everything around me suddenly turned into lines, black on white. It was a wirin’ diagram, and sair ancient, too, for there were symbols for thermionic valves — vacuum tubes — in it. An’ I was plugged into it, for I couldna move, an’ I had the feelin’ that if anybody turned up the gain I’d blow out. I just realized that all of the valve symbols were caricatures of faces I knew, when I heard you callin’ my name, Captain, and hey presto, here I was back — wherever this may be.”
“I saw no change at all, nor did either of you disappear,” Spock Two said. “You simply stopped walking, and you, Captain, drew your phaser and called out. Obviously this is an effect of the screen around the planet, and I am resisting it better than you are, thus far, as we thought might happen. Tell me, Captain, were you ever on the southern seacoast of Spain?”
“Yes, once, on holiday from the Academy.”
“And Mr. Scott was imprisoned in a student or antiquarian wiring diagram. Apparently we can expect these hallucinations to be projections of our own early experience; knowing this may be of some help to us in coping with them.”
The mist lifted abruptly, revealing the same rock-tumble into which they had first materialized.
“Have we made any progress?” Kirk asked.
Spock Two checked his tricorder. “Perhaps five or six meters, though I doubt that any of us has actually walked that far.”
“Then let’s move on. At this rate we’ve got a long trek ahead.”
But as he stepped forward again, the nightmare returned…
…with an utterly appalling clamor. He was surrounded by a jungle of primitive machinery. Trip hammers pounded away insanely at nothing; rocker arms squealed as if their fulcrums were beds of rust; plumes of steam shot up into the hot, oil-reeking air with scrannel shrieks; great gears clashed, and great wheels turned with ponderous groans; leather belts slapped and clicked; eccentrics scraped in their slots; a thousand spinning shafts whined up and down the scale, a thousand tappets raffled in as many tempos, and somewhere a piece of armor plate seemed to be being beaten out into what eventually would be thin foil. Over it all arched a leaden roof in which every sound was doubled and redoubled, like the ultimate metaphor for an apocalyptic headache.
And once more there was no other human being in sight — nor, this time, any sign of life at all.
Kirk found it impossible to imagine what part of his experience this mechanical hell could have been drawn from, and the din made coherant thought out of the question; it was not only literally, physically deafening, but very near the lethal level. All he could manage to do was take another step forward…
Splash!
He was swimming for his life in a freezing black sea, in the ghastly, flickering light of a night thunderstorm. Great combers lifted and dropped him sickeningly, and the howling air, when he could get any at all, stank peculiarly of a mixture of seaweed, formaldehyde and coffee. Yet despite the coldness of the water, he felt hot inside his uniform, almost sweaty.
The sense of unreality was very strong, and after a moment he recognized where he was: in a delirium he had had during a bout of Vegan rickettsial fever on his first training assignment. The odor was that of the medicine he had had to take, a local concoction which had been all the colonists had had to offer. Still, it had done the trick.
As the next wave heaved him up, he heard through the thunder an ominous booming sound: breakers, and not far away, either, pounding against rock. Illusion or no illusion, Kirk doubted that he could live through that. Yet clearly, no amount of physical motion was going to get him out of this one; he was already swimming as hard as he could. How…
…it had done the trick.
Holding his breath, Kirk gulped down a mouthful of the bitter waters. At once, his feet touched bottom; and a moment later, dry as a stick, he was standing in even gray light amidst the rock-tumble.
He was still alone, however; and calling produced no response. He took out his communicator. It too was quite dry, though that had not been a major worry anyhow; it was completely waterproof, and, for that matter, gas-tight.
“Mr. Spock. Mr. Scott. Come in, please.”
No answer.
“Kirk to Enterprise.”
“Uhura here, Captain,” the communicator said promptly.
“Can you give me a reading on the positions of Spock and Scott?”
“Why, they must be in sight of you, Captain. Their location pips on the board overlap yours.”
“No such luck, and they don’t answer my calls, either. Give them a buzz from up there, Lieutenant.”
“Right.” After a moment, she reported, “They answer right away, Captain. But they don’t see you and can’t raise you, either.”
She sounded decidedly puzzled, which made her in no way different from Kirk.
“Par for the course, I’m afraid,” he said. “Any Klingons yet?”
“No, sir, but there’s a lot of subspace radio jamming. That’s their usual opening gambit when they’re closing in.”
“Well, Mr. Sulu has his orders. Keep me posted. Kirk out.”
Clenching his teeth, he took another step…
The rock crumbled to rich loam, and around him rose the original pseudo-medieval village of the first expedition to Organia. But it was deserted. All the buildings seemed at least partially burned; and as for the castle in the distance, it looked more as if it had been bombarded. A skull grinned up at him from the long brown grass, and from almost infinitely far away, there came a sound like the hungry howling of a wild dog. The whole scene looked like the aftermath of a siege toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
Nevertheless, this might be progress. It was more like the “old” Organia than anything else he had experienced thus far, and just might mean that he was drawing closer to a real goal. What good it would do him, or all of them, to arrive there without his engineering officer, who alone had the key to the whole problem now, he did not know; he could only hope that Scotty was somehow making his own way through whatever hallucinations he was suffering. He was hardheaded and skeptical; that should help. But why was he also invisible?
“Never mind. First things first. Another step…”
The only permanent aspect of the landscape now around him was change. Through shifting mists, an occasional vague object loomed, only to melt into something else equally vague before it could be identified. The mists were vari
colored, not only obstructing vision but destroying perspective, and tendrils of faint perfume lay across them like incense.
He moved tentatively forward. The scene remained as it was; he began to suspect that this hallucination was going to be permanent. As he progressed, hands outstretched in the multicolored fog, he began to encounter what he could only think of as tendrils of emotion, invisible but palpable. About half of these carried with them a murmur of not-quite-recognizable voices, or fragments of music; and almost all of them Were unpleasant.
How long this went on he had no idea. For that matter, he might well have been walking in a circle. At long last, however, one of the dark shapes that appeared ahead refused to melt, becoming instead more definite and familiar. Finally, he could see that it was his first officer.
“How did you manage to get here?”
“I have been here all the time, Captain, in the real world, so to speak. But I had no access to you because of your present hallucination, and finally I was reluctantly forced to meld my mind with yours — to enter your illusion, as it were.”
“Forced?”
“By circumstances. You are going the wrong way, Captain.”
“I half suspected it. Lead on, then.”
“This way.”
The first officer moved off. As he did so, he appeared to become oddly distorted; to Kirk, it was as though he were being seen from behind and in profile at the same time. Around him, the scene froze into prismatic, irregular polygons of pure color, like a stained-glass window, and all motion ceased.
“Mr. Spock?”
There was no answer. Kirk inspected the silent, motionless figure. There seemed to be something amiss about it besides its distortion, but he could not figure out what it was. Then, all at once, he saw it.
On its right hand was a cartoon image of Kirk’s class ring.
Kirk whipped out his communicator.
“Lieutenant Uhura, Kirk here. I’ve got Spock One suddenly on my hands, and he seems to be in much better command of the conditions here than I am. Have the transporter room yank us both out, grab him and imprison him securely, and then send me back pronto.”
“I’m sorry, Captain, but we can’t,” Uhura’s voice said. “A Klingon squadron has just this minute popped out at us and we’re under full deflector shield. Unless you want to change your previous orders, we’re probably going to have to make a run for it.”
“My orders,” Kirk said, “stand.”
Chapter Twelve — A COMBAT OF DREAMS
From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4200.9:
The Klingon force consists of two battleships, two cruisers and ten destroyers — very heavy stuff to sick onto a single starship. They must be really worried. It’s also an unwieldy force to have to maneuver this close to a planet, and under other circumstance, I’d be tempted to stay right here in orbit and slug it out with them. Captain Kirk’s orders, however, are to cut and run if we appear to be outgunned, and there’s certainly no doubt that we are. Hence we are now headed for Star Base Twenty-Eight at Warp Factor Four, with the whole Klingon pack howling along behind us. The battleships could catch us easily at this velocity, but they aren’t trying, which leads me to believe we are being herded into a trap. Well, if so, at least we have got a substantial percentage of the Klingon’s fire-power tied up in this operation, which is nice for the Federation — though not so nice for us.
The Picasso-like illusion still persisted, and Kirk made no move which might risk shattering it. He badly needed thinking time. To begin with, the class ring was revealing in several different ways: Spock at his normal level of efficiency would never have overlooked so glaring a giveaway, and Kirk could not believe that a replicate Spock, no matter how twisted, would have, either. Its persistence, therefore, probably meant that the thought-shield was also impairing his thinking — and though surely not as much as it was Kirk’s, quite probably more than he himself realized.
Then was the stoppage of time in this particular hallucination affecting him as well? If so, there was a chance that Kirk could make a fast draw, and stun him before the illusion broke. But that would leave unanswered the question of why Spock One had shown up here in the first place. His intention, almost surely, was to mislead Kirk — which in turn would mean that he knew what the right direction was to reach the Organians, or at least to get something done that the Klingons would rather leave undone. Why not play along with him for a while, and try to find out what that was, and how he knew it?
It was, Kirk decided, worth the risk — but he would have to act quickly, for his own mental deterioration was bound to be accelerating, and outthinking Spock had never, under the best of circumstances, been his chiefest talent.
He plodded forward again. The scene wavered as though someone had shaken the canvas it was painted on, and then tore down the middle without a sound. Once more, he was back in the rock-tumble…
…and once more, he was confronted by two Spocks.
The two men, original and replicate, did not seem to notice Kirk at all. They were squared off at each other across the rubble like ancient Western gun fighters, although neither showed the slightest awareness of being armed, let alone any intention of drawing. They simply stared at each other with icy implacability. Was there also a slight suggestion of hatred on the face of Spock One? Kirk could not be sure; the two faces were so alike, and yet, and yet…
“It is well that we should ‘meet again at last,” Spock Two said. “Your existence and your plotting are an offense against the natural order, as well as a source of displeasure to me. It is high time they were brought to an end.”
“My existence,” said Spock One, “is a fortuitous revision, and a necessary one, of a highly imperfect first draft. It is the scribbled notes which should be eliminated here, not the perfected work. Nevertheless, one could in confidence leave that to the judgment of time, were the total situation not so crucial. Perhaps, crude recension though you are, you could be brought to understand that.”
“The true scholar,” Spock Two said, “prizes all drafts, early and late. But your literary metaphor is far from clear, let alone convincing.”
“Then to put the matter bluntly: I reasoned out the nature of the screen around Organia long before you did; I have acquired further data from the Klingons since I left the Enterprise; and I now control this environment completely. You would gain nothing but your own destruction by opposing me under such conditions. In short, if you indeed prize your smudgy incunabular existence, it would be logical for you to quit the field and preserve for yourself and your cause what little time history will leave you.”
As they sparred, the sky was darkening rapidly above them. Kirk did not find their argument very illuminating, but the current of threat flowing beneath it was all too obvious.
“History cannot be predicted in detail,” Spock Two said. “And were your control as complete as you pretend, you would not now be wasting time arguing with me. In logic, you would have eliminated me at once.”
“Very well,” Spock One said calmly. As he spoke, everything vanished; the sky was now totally black.
Then it was bright again, in the lurid blue-green light of a lightning bolt, at the bottom of which stood Spock Two, flaming like a martyr at the stake. The shock and the concussion threw Kirk and rolled him bruisingly more than a dozen feet over the rubble.
Tingling and trembling, he scrambled to his knees, clawing for his phaser. But he was astonished to see that Spock Two was still there — or rather, a sort of statue of Spock Two which seemed to be made of red-hot brass, cooling and dimming slowly. Kirk had expected to see nothing but a shrunken and carbonized corpse — though he was not sure if this was any better an outcome.
Then the statue spoke.
“‘Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?” it quoted mockingly. “As you see, I am grounded. But as for you…”
The replicate, illuminated only by the fading light of his original, sank abruptly into a stinking quag
mire. A slow-rolling wave of viscous mud was just about to fold over his head when, out of that same black sky, rain fell in a colossal torrent, more like a waterfall than a cloudburst. Kirk had a moment’s vision of the mud being sluiced away from Spock One before the dim glow of Spock Two hissed and went out under the deluge. A moment later, a flash flood caught him and carried him another dozen feet away from the scene before he bumped into a boulder big enough to clutch.
The sky lightened, but the rain continued to fall, and the rushing stream of water to broaden and deepen. Odd objects were being carried along its foaming sullenly muddy surface: broken planks, disintegrating sheets of paper, fragments of furniture, bobbing bottles and cans, the bedraggled bodies of a wide variety of small animals from a dozen planets — rabbits, chickens, skopolamanders, tribbles, unipeds, gormenghastlies, ores, tnucipen, beademungen, escallopolyps, wogs, reepicheeps, a veritable zoo of drowned corpses, including a gradually increasing number of things so obscene that even Kirk, for all his experience in exoteratology, could not bear to look at them for more than an instant.
He cast about for Spock Two and found him still further downstream, sculling grimly against the current in what looked like an improvised kayak. Apparently his memory of kayak design had been clouded by the screen, or a kayak was harder to operate for a beginner than he had realized, for he was Losing the battle; most of his effort was going into keeping the canvas craft from capsizing, while in the meantime, he was being carried farther and farther away.
Upstream, there was an enormous, broad-leafed tree, like a baobab, fixed in the middle of the raging waters. On a lower branch. Spock One sat comfortably, muddy but safe. Kirk, shifting his grip on the boulder — which was in any case about to go beneath the surface of the flood — climbed up onto it and tried, slipping and sliding, to level his phaser at the replicate.