Everything the do-ityourself sorcerer needs.
Astrology charts, home remedies for everything from
bellyache to unrequited love, all neatly
labeled in English and Latin and what I assume
is Arabic. Shelves lined with skulls, most of
them human, all the latest up-to-the-minute
necessities for turning lead into gold, eye of
newt and toe of frog, even a genuine crystal
ball!"
Something in the shape of a largish melon sat alone
on a small table in the center of the room, glowing
softly.
"You may sneer, Mr. Mitchell," Parneb
said lightly, "but those trappings will earn me a
marginal living in a less enlightened era than this.
And the "crystal ball" actually works."
Kirk had gone at once to one of the high arched
windows; the view from there confirmed his worst 203
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
fears. Centuries of debris had built up
around the walls of their underground room, forming a tel
that from the outside gave the appearance of a natural
hill. At the base of that hill, some three
stories below them, a busy street out of any
Middle Eastern metropolis teemed with
pedestrian and vehicular traffic. But it was all
wrong. The vehicles, the clothes people wore, were at
least two centuries out of date.
Kirk moved away from the window. Among the
runes and glyphs and zodiacal symbols everywhere
about the room, his eye caught a perpetual
calendar, conveniently set at October 2045.
Perfect! Kirk thought.
"Okay, Parneb," he said, rubbing his
hands together. "We're convinced. What do we do now?"
"You sit," Parneb advised, availing himself of a
small prayer rug on the floor. "And indulge
me by listening to a fable."
"That does it!" Mitchell exploded, immediately in
character. "Jim, how much more of this are we going to take?
I've had it up to here with this clown and his mystical
mumbo-jumbo his
He lunged at Parneb as Kirk had
downstairs. Kelso, playing along, intercepted
him.
"Easy, Mitch his
Mitchell shoved him aside, grabbed for the
crystal ball, and let out a genuine yelp of pain.
"It gave me a shock!" He shook his hands
to stop their stinging. "The damn thing's wired or
something."
"Actually, Mr. Mitchell" Parneb had not
batted an eyelash during the entire performance "it
is attuned to my wavelength. That makes
it sensitive to being touched by anyone else. Next
time, consider that one man's
"mumbo-jumbo" may be another's science and a
third's religion."
"Parneb?" Elizabeth Dehner was
once again taking surreptitious readings with her
tricorder, humoring the 204
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
conjurer in her own psychiatrist's fashion.
"Does your "fable" have to do with getting us back
home?"
"It most assuredly does, dear lady." He
sighed, looking at Mitchell askance. "However,
some require a demonstration first. Malesh, I will
indulge Mr. Mitchell's scepticism!"
From beneath his djellaba he produced a thin silver
chain, pendant from which was a smaller piece of the same
"crystal" as the large orb on the table, except that
neither was crystal at all, but some murkily glowing
opalescent stone that at times seemed to grow softer,
change its shape, become gelatinous, pulsating,
almost alive. And, at its center, it created
images.
Parneb closed his eyes, clasped the smaller
crystal in his two hands, concentrated. The milky
center of the larger crystal grew clear, became a
starscape in which floated an angry flaring sun and
its single gray-green unprepossessing planet.
"Kapeshet!" Jim Kirk recognized it.
"And M-155."
"Is that what you called it?" Parneb wondered,
opening his eyes. "Oh, dear, how boring! Well,
but it is a boring little planet, isn't it?
"I chose this boring little world for my experiment,"
he went on, "because it was so remote and I thought
uninhabited. Also,
admittedly, the name of its sun intrigued me,
Kapeshet being a contemporary of mine in
Ancient Thebes. But how was I to know my
interstellar sleight-of-hand would attract your
attention and bring you poking around down there? By the time
I saw you all stirring up dust it was too late.
If I had not retrieved you and brought you here, well
. . ."
He let his voice trail off, frowned at the
crystal for a moment before reverting to his normal
benign expression. "At any moment now you will see
your Enterprise placidly orbiting as if nothing
has happened. Because, you see, as far as they are
concerned, nothing has yet."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"How does it work?" Kelso gawked at the
crystal, awed by a device that worked without visible
mechanism. "Where does it come from? How do
you his
"Pretty impressive holography." Gary
Mitchell sneered, still in character.
"Mr. Mitchell, I assure you his
"I don't see the Enterprise," Kirk said
tightly. "What's happened to my ship?"
"Undoubtedly it is orbiting the far side,"
Parneb said too quickly, slipping the smaller
crystal back inside his robe. The image in the
larger crystal vanished abruptly. "Malesh, I
must rest now. Later we will devote ourselves to finding
your Vulcan."
He resettled himself on his prayer rug, waited
for Dehner to finish her tricorder readings. "Yes,
my dear?"
"Do you realise that when you go into
that trance or whatever it is with the crystal," she
said, "your body readings all go paranormal? Your
pulse was over two hundred just now, and your
neurological patterns his
"Yes, it is quite exhausting actually." Parneb
sighed. "The price one must pay, I suppose.
Which is why you are best advised to do as Mr.
Mitchell has suggested, and humor me."
Mitchell managed to look surprised
at being found out.
"Which is not to say you are not a consummate actor,
Mr. Mitchell. You almost had me fooled. But you
see my hearing is also paranormal . . . A
fable, then," he began once he had everyone's
attention. "The tale of a being, seemingly human,
who for some inexplicable reason was born backward in
time, a being whose tms are yesterdays, whose destiny it
is never to be entirely certain if what he
remembers has already
happened or is about to happen at some future
time, with or without his participation."
"Merlin," Elizabeth Dehner said out of nowhere.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Her three contemporaries goggled at her.
"There's one version of the Merlin legend I think it's
<
br /> T. H. White in The Once and Future
Kin tilde whereMerlin's magic is explained
by his having been born backward, so that he can
foretell the future because it's actually his past."
"Except that Merlin was only a legend,"
Kirk pointed out, vaguely irritated. One of his
officers an Egyptologist, another suddenly an
expert on medieval legends; it was all
rather unsettling.
"Interesting," Parneb mused. "Except that it was
not entirely true of Merlin." He looked
fixedly at Kirk. "Merlin was not legend,
Captain. That one's dilemma win be an
immortality similar to mine, though he will have the
advantage at least of running with the clock. I will
know him as Ahkarin, in quite another century. If I
live that long. Are you beginning to fathom the
magnitude of my problem?"
"You're asking us to believe that you
were" Kirk struggled with it "born in the
future, and that you win live out your life in the past?
How is that possible?"
"How is it possible that you are here, in a time before
you were born?" Parneb countered mildly.
"But where were you born, when? Who were your parents?"
"I do not knowI" Parneb said plaintively..
"I have no clear recollection of my origins,
though I know I was born not far from here. The past and the
future flow together and switch back on each other
until I scarcely ever know where I am. I seem
to have lived in your twenty-third century; the scant
knowledge I have of that time seems to confirm it. And I age
far slower than an ordinary mortal. I
have already survived several centuries and am doomed
to live for several thousand years more, at least until
the twelfth century B.c. when I shad his
"Parneb," Lee Kelso said. He was not
addressing the sorcerer by name, but recalling something
he knew
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
from history. "Parneb of Thebes. Construction
boss under Ramses III, master architect under
five pharaohs. You're not you can't be his
"I'm afraid I am, Lee," Parneb said
sadly, familiarly. "Or will be. That is why I
was curious about what you thought of the chamber beneath us. I
will design a temple, and supervise its construction
on this site, in 1198 B.c. It is one of the first
and last things I remember."
Lee Kelso lapsed at last into silence. It was
all too much for him.
Jim Kirk was far less awed.
"Now that you've explained it," he said to Parneb,
"it makes sense for you. But what does it have to do with
us, with that planet?"
"I had hoped, by means of a science I
mastered will mastery in another century
to use the crystal to focus my innate psychic
abilities and reverse the chronology of my
life," Parneb said, as if it were simplicity itself.
"All I have ever desired is to be an ordinary
human being, to live out my life in the proper order
and to die in the fullness of time. When I succeeded in
moving that lonely little planet across time and space,
I thought I had found the key. But the experiment
proved a failure, and in addition it endangered you and
your people, Captain. I am sorry!"
No one spoke for a long moment. Suddenly
Parneb seemed no more nor less a madman than
any of them might be, given his circumstances.
"I ask you to consider" there was no trace of joy
on his usually smiling face "the plight of one who
awakens each morning not knowing if he is older or
younger, who dares not give himself in friendship or love
lest he watch those he cherishes grow younger even as his
children live to become his elders. Consider one who must
stand helplessly by as humanity unlearns what it
knows, grows ever more superstitious and diseaseridden and
primitive. If he tries to intervene, to speak
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
what he knows, he is stoned for a fool
or persecuted for a sorcerer. I will live to see
six thousand years of war beset this part of the world,
Captain, and there is nothing I can do about it. Even
you, who are here because of my dilemma, believe me
only because to deny my reality makes you the madmen!"
"It's insane!" Elizabeth Definer said
quietly. All of her professional cool was
gone; she was genuinely moved. "How sad!"
"What's the crystal made of?" Mitchell
asked, cutting across the mood, refusing to pity
Parneb, refusing to succumb to any kind of feeling.
"Where did it come from?"
"A meteor," Parneb said dispiritedly, as if the
whole subject wearied him more than he could say.
"A chunk of rock of no composition I can
analyze, retrieved from the desert, whence it drew
me on a moonless night, and probably not mine
to keep. I suspect it will in its time become an
object of great value, even of worship. Perhaps the
celebrated Philosophers' Stone? I do not
know."
Having told his fable, he seemed to gather it
back into himself, put it back in its box while he
resumed his characteristic affability.
"Vulcans have a saying, do they not, that
none can know the future? Obviously no Vulcan
was ever trapped in my situation. Malesh, at least
I have managed to encounter interesting people in my times.
"I do not know entirely how the crystal works,
lady and gentlemen, only that it works. In that
respect I am not a scientist, only a sorcerer
after all, Captain. But not a con man, nor quite a
lunatic, if you please."
"I'm sorry," Kirk said sincerely. "As my
first officer might say, I have a tendency to
be precipitous."
"Which is why we must locate that first officer, in
order that he might continue to perform that invaluable
public service," Parneb quipped, unfolding
himself like an oversize grasshopper and taking out the
smaller 209
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
crystal again. "I surmise that in pulling him off
the planet before I caught the four of you, I
simply caused him to materialise somewhere else on
Earth. The crystal is not without its flaws. I
trust, Captain, he has sense enough to assess his
situation and not tamper with present history?"
"Of course!" Kirk said impatiently; he was
surer of that with Spock than anyone else.
"Assuming you didn't dump him at the North
Pole or in mid-ocean, he's perfectly capable
of surviving on his own."
"And as he is the only alien on this
pre-interstellar planet," Parneb said, leaning
into the larger crystal as they all were, anxious for it
to clear, "this should be quite simple."
But it was not. The large crystal did not clear, but
continued to swirl and glow and pulsate. Only
Parneb saw something in its depths and what he saw,
&nbs
p; to judge from the expressions that came and went like
lightning across his face, at first delighted, then
profoundly distressed him.
"Ah, there we are! Your Vulcan is in fact
in the middle of an ocean, Captain, but altogether quite
high and dry. He oh, dears"
"What is it?" Kirk demanded, nerves stretched
to the snapping point.
"This is not possible! It is too soon!"
Parneb cried, releasing both crystals and clasping
his brow in distress. "I find not one Vulcan, but
two!"
Chapter Four
WHAT DID MELODY Sawyer
expect to find
when she followed Jason out of the sunlight into the
main room of the agrostation? Little green men, talking
petunias, creatures so uncanny she could
justify blowing them out of the water to protect future
generations from the very sight of them?
They are not human, she told herself over and over
again. They are something completely other, and we can't have
any idea what they want here. That makes them
dangerous until proven
otherwise.
"You all right?" Jason inquired as she swung
the red-detector up to him out of the skiff. "You
look a little green."
"Save that for 'them," why don't you?" Sawyer
said wanly. "I'd feel better if I had my
hardware is all."
"State you're in, I'm damn glad you
don't!" Jason rumbled. "If you didn't shoot
your foot off, you'd get me in the back. Sure you
don't want to wait in the boat?"
"And let them kidnap you for a love slave?"
Melody swung herself up onto the dock and grabbed
the medical equipment. "Damn the
torpedoes and all that."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Right," Nyere said, and they went in.
They'd had to wait on the dock while Yoshi
brought the clothing bundle in. Now the young man
held the door and tried to slip out past them.
Melody's hands instinctively went for the weapon she
didn't have.
"Where d'you think you're going, Buster?" she
nailed Yoshi with her voice.
"Out!" he sulked. "It's too crowded in there,
and I don't want to watch, okay? I have to go
check my crops. I'll be back." He jerked his
head angrily in the direction of Delphinus.
"Besides, how far could I get?"
"Let him go," Jason interceded before Melody
could get hard-nosed about it. "See you're back before
dark," he told Yoshi.
"Sure!" Yoshi let the door slam behind them.
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