Strangers from the Sky
Page 21
"Dr. Dehner's next up on the med list,"
Mitchell grimaced. "Jim, she's a shrink, for
crying out loud. I'll lay odds she can't remove
a splinter."
"Spock assures me the flora are
pre-xylemic," Kirk said, deadpan.
Mitchell gave him a blank look.
"No trees yet," Kirk explained, having
trouble with the corners of his mouth. "No wood, no
splinters."
"Hilarious," Mitchell remarked, adding
Dehner's name to the roster. "One lady shrink, per
captain's orders."
"Give her a chance to get dirt under her nails
like us ordinary mortals," Kirk said.
"Opportunity to study interpersonal relations
outside of lab conditions, that kind of thing. Be nice
to me, Gary, or I'll see that you personally get
to take her in hand."
Now Dehner was holding up the landing party and the
joke had gone flat.
"By the time she gets here we'll lose our window
on that planet!" Kirk lamented for the benefit of one
and all. "Scotty, page her. If she's not here
in one minute we'll his
"Reporting for duty, Captain," a cool
voice reported from the doorway. "I had to
double-check my equipment." Dehner joined them
on the transporter pods.
"Energize," Kirk barked to Scotty, the only
way he could think of to have the last word.
"Fan out," he instructed his party. "Spock
to six o'clock, Lee to nine. Gary to three, and I'll
take twelve. We'll rendezvous back here on
my signal."
His eyes went from Definer to Gary and he was
tempted, but only briefly. "Doctor, you'd
better stay with me."
The others moved off to reconnoiter.
"Making sure I get dirt under my nails,
Captain?"
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the psychiatrist inquired archly. "Or do you think
you're apt to be the first to skin your knees?"
"Belay that," Kirk said, wondering how
she'd gotten wind of what he'd said to Gary on the
bridge. Gossip, like everything else aboard a
starship, travelcd at warp speed. "We're here
to get some work done, not to play personalities.
He was not about to tell her his stomach was in knots,
watching the people under his command moving off into the unknown.
He didn't think he'd ever get used to it.
"Oh, I see!" Dehner said, seeing through the
toughguy act but playing to it. "Snide comments are
your exclusive bailiwick. Rank bath its
privileges, and all that."
"Did you bring that tricorder down for show or do you
plan to take some readings?"
They traveled in silence after that. -
Scotty had set them down on the night side;
there was too much radiation from Kapeshet's corona,
Spock had warned, for them to remain long on the day
side unprotected. As it was, the raging sun
spat enough of its radiance out over the horizon
to lighten the night sky abnormally, obscuring all
but the brightest stars, creating weird skittish
auroras at the poles, and giving the landing party an
adequate if fickle fairylight to walk by.
The atmosphere was thinner than was strictly
comfortable for humans, and Kirk cursed himself
for not ordering airpacks. Well, he'd set himself
a time limit of fifteen minutes; they could hold out
that long.
Underfoot the soil was sandy and an unnatural
cobalt-blue in color, though it could have been some
trick of the light. It was fine and dusty and clung
to boots and uniforms, irritated eyes and skin.
Kirk heard Dehner cough more than once, but
unobtrusively. He was probably the last
person she'd let know she was uncomfortable. His own
eyes were stinging, and he had 187
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
a sneaking feeling this stuff was gumming up the
tricorders despite their shielding.
"Anything?" he asked Dehner when she came to a
halt, shutting off her tricorder with a shake of her
head.
"Between the dust and the ionization from that infernal sun,"
she answered, disguising another cough, "I couldn't
tell you."
Kirk wouldn't have expected her to find anything under
ideal conditions; it wasn't part of her training. But
he nodded to let her know it didn't matter, cleared
his throat, and pulled out his communicator, motioning
to Dehner to keep absolutely still so the
dust would settle. He homed on Kelso's
frequency.
"Landing party, report."
He heard static and the sound of coughing.
"Kelso here, Ji tilde aptain." Old
habits die hard. "I'm about a thousand meters from
where we split up. Can't find anything unusual,
except that there are pockets where there's no air.
Makes you a little light-headed if you're not careful.
That and the dust was He broke off, coughing again.
"Take it easy, Lee," Kirk advised.
"Try to keep the dust out of your equipment. And your
lungs. Rendezvous back at starting point in
five minutes. Kirk out."
Mitchell's report was much the same, with more
vociferous complaints about the dust. Kirk gave him
the same instructions he'd given Kelso.
"Can this stuff harm us?" he asked Dehner,
wiping his eyes on his sleeve, which only made them
bum more.
"No worse than an attack of hay fever,"
she said, allowing herself to cough in earnest this time. "But
cumulatively his
"Understood," Kirk said. They weren't going
to learn anything this way, he realized.
"Let's go."
Against his own advice about gumming up the ma188
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chineryeahe tried to contact Spock as they hurried
back the way they'd come, stirring up dust as they
went.
Spock answered the communicator signal
reluctantly. Neither the thin atmosphere nor the
dust affected him; there were portions of his planet where
such conditions were a constant. And the absolute
normalcy of his tricorder readings for this kind of
planet puzzled him. There must be an answer to its
disappearances, and he must find it.
"Spock here."
"Time we were getting out of here, Mr. Spock.
Get back to the beamdown point at once."
Spock had positioned himself on a small rise
above the worst of the dust; with his acute vision he could
distinguish the distant figures of the others gathering like
ants around their point of origin. He did not
require their dubious security in numbers, would be
perfectly content to remain where he was, alone on
the planet if necessary, in order to pursue his
research.
"Captain, request permission to remain
and continue my tricorder readings. There are still
several possible explanations for the phenomenon which I
have not yet had opportunity to explore."
/> The captain seemed to be having some
difficulty getting his breath. Spock heard
sounds of acute upperrespiratory distress.
"Negative, Spock . . . dust getting
to all of us . . . back here on the double."
"Captain, I am unaffected by the dust.
Respectfully request his
"Dammit" cough "Spock, don't" choke;
splutter; coug tilde "argue!"
"Very well, sir," the Vulcan said
reluctantly, and started back to where the others
awaited him.
"Och, what d'ye make o'that, Kyle?"
"I dunno, Mr. Scott. Never seen anything
like it."
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Scott signaled to Kirk on the surface.
"Captain, is your landing park all together down
there?"
"All but Spock," Kirk reported through a
surge of interference from the corona, tapping
the dust out of his communicator. "He's on his way
in. Why?"
"I was afraid of that!" Scott said. "I had a
fix on the lot of you like you ordered, in case we had
to beam you up quicklike, and all of a sudden one of you
popped off my screen, just like that blooming planet!"
"Stand by!" Kirk ordered, switching
frequencies just as Elizabeth Dehner shouted.
"Captain! Mr. Spock he's gone!"
She'd been standing a little apart from the others, facing
in the direction Spock had gone, had caught a
glimpse of the spare, angular figure moving
purposefully toward them, as she'd watched first
Mitchell then Kelso appear out of the swirling
grit moments before. Suddenly, she saw nothing.
It might have been nothing larger swirl of dust
obscuring the Vulcan, a sudden depression in the
landscape momentarily hiding him from view; he might
even have fallen and skinned his knees, Kirk thought
bitterly, choking on the thought as violently as on the
dust were it not for what Scotq had just told him.
Kirk's mind raced. They'd been down here
scarcely twelve minutes by his chrono. The
planet had not disappeared that soon for as long as
they'd been monitoring it. Was it about
to vanish now, and take them with it?
"Spock!" Kirk called into the communicator,
knowing it was useless.
The entire expedition was useless. Worse than
useless because it had endangered his crew. It was all his
fault. He was running toward where Dehner had seen
Spock vanish, shouting into the communicator at the
same time.
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"Scotty! Beam the others aboard now! I've
got to find his
But the communicator failed, jammed by the
interference and the dust he'd kicked up in his
impatience. Kirk flung it aside, whirled as
if to take one from someone else when he heard
Kelso yell "Mitch!" and watched in horror as
Mitchell, too, simply popped out of being.
The shout had not died on Kelso's lips before he
too disappeared. Kirk spun around in time to see
Elizabeth Dehner's eyes go wide as she
Helpless to get a fix on anything, Scott and
Kyle stood at the transporter control and watched
as the landing party vanished one by one. Then the planet
itself popped out from under them. Enterprise,
suddenly robbed of its orbit, lurched violently
before gravitational control compensated and the
automatics locked in. Helping Kyle to his
feet, Scotty looked at his screen in dismay.
"Bridge!" he called at once. "Who's up
there, then?"
"DeSalle here," came the reassuring voice
from the helm. "Uhura at Navigation. Somebody's
rocking the boat."
"Aye, Mr. DeSalle," Scott breathed.
"Take us out a remove from that blasted sun. There's
namore between us and it. The whole kit's disappeared
again and taken the landing party with it!"
Kirk hit the sand too hard to break his fall,
landing on his backside in an undignified
sprawl. He could see nothing. The first thing he
heard was a voice, speaking heavily accented
Standard.
"Oh, dear! I have done it this time, haven't
I?"
Chapter Three
"SHOOT ME TF I'm wrong, Ji tilde
aptain," Lee
Kelso's voice echoed up the steps
to Kirk and Mitchell. "This is going to sound nuts,
but I think we're in Egypt."
There was no response at first from the dark at the
top of the stairs, only the sound of both men
scuttding and straining against the great stone slab that
abruptly cut off the stairway, effectively
imprisoning the four of them.
"You need any help up there?" Kelso asked.
"No," Kirk panted, and the sounds of scuffling were
replaced by footsteps, echoing, growing nearer. "It
can't be moved. We've tried."
First Kirk, then Mitchell, emerged from the
darkness, down the ancient crumbling stone steps to the
huge, echoing chamber where Kelso and Elizabeth
Dehner waited.
"You did say Egypt?" Kirk said, dusting his
hands, looking around.
"Either that or the best reproduction I've ever
seen," Kelso maintained.
"Egypt," Kirk said again, incredulous. "First
disappearing planets, then disappearing Vulcans, now
you
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want me to believe we've been yanked
off a planet a thousand light-years away and ended
up back on Earth. Well, why not?" He sat
heavily on the stairs, forgetting the bruises he'd
earned on arrival here wherever "here" was and tried not
to wince. He gave Kelso the floor. "Convince
me."
"For starters, I guess we all agree we're
not on M-15So anymore," Kelso began,
waiting for
someone to contradict him. "Spock did say no
structures, no evidence of civilisation."
"Spock..." Kirk said with a sick feeling. The
Vulcan was missing, had not turned up with the others.
His responsibility.
"Well, here we are inside a structure, all
right," Kelso went on. "And it's got all the
earmarks of dynastic architecture: heroic
proportions, mortarless construction; it's at least
three thousand years old I can tell you that even without
a tricorder and probably underground because there are no
windows and the only way out is up his
"Why don't you call it a dungeon, Lee?"
Gary Mitchell chimed in. He'd ensconced himself
halfway up the stairs where the light from some sort of
antique electric fixtures was
strongest, and was dismantling one of the communicators.
"Because that's what it is. That stone upstairs won't
budge. That means we're stuck here."
"Thanks, Mitch." Kelso grimaced,
deflated. "Nothing like looking on the bright side."
"That's Mr. Mitchell's job," Elizabeth
Dehner spoke for the first time from her chosen spot against
one wall, deliberate
ly distanced from the others,
keeping her own thoughts on dungeons at bay.
"Playing the cynic makes him feel superior to the
rest of us!"
"Always expect the worst, doe." Mitchell
grinned down at her. "You'll never be disappointed."
"Egypt," Kirk said for the third time, jumping
down 193
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
from his step and beginning to pace. There didn't seem
to be anything else for him to do, and he couldn't just
sit. "Earth. It seems impossible.
Megalithic architecture is common on
humanoid worlds throughout the galaxy, Lee. What
makes you so sure?"
"I've been studying the walls," Kelso
explained. It was true. From the moment the foursome had
picked themselves up from the sand-strewn stone
floor, Kelso had been groping around the
perimeter of the huge empty room, poking his
fingers into crevices, measuring, calculating, at
times crawling on all fours and muttering to himself
until Kirk had demanded to know what he thought he was
doing. "They're sandstone, originally dressed to fit
so snug they didn't need mortar, particularly in
a desert climate, although they've shifted in
places, probably because of earthquakes. That's why
there's sand on the floor. There were major quakes in
Egypt in the
twentieth century and the twenty-first when they built
the dam at Aswan, and again when they opened the old
Gibraltar Locks. Too much water pressure
in places where there'd never been water before."
"I see," Kirk said, but Kelso was just getting
warmed up.
"If you look closely was He began moving from
place to place, pointing, scuttling around like a
slightly crazed spider, his voice bouncing back
and forth against the emptiness so that he seemed to be
everywhere. "The blocks alternate headers and
stretchers short ones with long ones in a pattern the
Egyptians called talatat or "threes" no
one seems to remember why which was the
pattern for interior masonry from the Golden
Age, around 1400 B.c. Except for the women's
temples, which were done in headers or short blocks
only, like the temple of Nefertiti, which was
dismantled after the worship of Aten was discredited,
literally chopped apart stone by stone . . ."
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He trailed off, as if realising for the first time that
he had said more in five minutes than he usually said
in a day. Quiet, diffident Lee Kelso, known