"It's happening too fast, Spock. Let me
give him something so he can rest awhile."
Spock gripped McCoy's wrist, intercepting
the hypo. "Doctor, we have scarcely begun. And
there is very little time."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Dammit, Spock, it's dangerous to keep
pushing him I ike this! Maybe you can keep up this
relentless pace, but I won't let you overtax
Jim!"
"Do you think it does not tax me as well,
doctor?" Spock asked softly, reasonably.
Only then did McCoy trouble to notice how
haggard he looked; this thing was draining him as well.
"Thought you Vulcans were supposed to be
indestructible!" he growled.
"Would that we were," Spock said sincerely. "But
we are not."
"All the more reason why you ought to take it easy!"
McCoy argued. "If you fold on me, what the
hell am I supposed to do? Go back to Krista and
say, "Sorry, I lost them both"? You'd
better make damn certain you strike a balance here
between what you're searching forand how much you're willing
to expend for it."
"We know what we're searching for,"
Kirk said, comung back from the bathroom looking, not
re- freshed, but at least ready for the next round.
"And essentially we've found it. But Galarrwny
said something about being certain our reality conforms
to history and not to dream. We haven't begun to find
out why there's such a divergence, and I for one won't
rest easy until we drop the other shoe. Whether
we were pulled back through history by design or
merely blunder, we somehow altered its course. I
can't rest until I know whether what we did was,
to use your expression, for weal or for woe.
Spock?"
"If you are asking my opinion," the Vulcan
said mildly. "It concurs with yours."
Jim Kirk smiled. "I thought it might.
Insatiable curiosity is a trait common to both
our species. What I was asking for was your consent
to continue the meld, now. Unless you agree with the good
doctor that we should rest first . . ."
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow. His tone was
dry. "Would you be content to rest in
nonexistence?"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Kirk took his point. "Which is
essentially where we've left you, isn't it, old
friend? Well, can't have you missing in action too long.
Lord knows what sort of mischief you might get
into."
"Jim, there's enough on that tape right now to convince the
shrinks," McCoy blustered. "Let it go at that.
Quit trying to be a hero!"
"I'm not!" Kirk snapped irritably,
protesting too much. Was it heroism or
pig-headedness that drove him on? "I'm trying
to find answers! The tape solves our immediate
problem, but it doesn't answer to history. And we
have an obligation to answer to history."
"Even if it pushes you over some kind of edge where
I might not be able to his
"Bones, that's what you're here for to keep us from
going over the edge. But you've got to trust us to know
our own limits, too."
McCoy glowered, fiddled with the tricorder, out-
flanked as usual. "Goddammit his
"Come on, Bones," Kirk wheedled. "Double or
nothing. We have to know."
Taking the doctor's silence for assent, Jim
Kirk readied himself for a return to the meld.
was "Once more unto the breach, dear
friends . . ."" he said, unable to resist.
Muttering to himself, McCoy turned the
tricorder back on.
"Spock's half human," Mitchell
explained for Parneb's benefit. "If Earth and
Vulcan never get together . . ."
The information brought the conjurer violently alive.
"I did not realise!" he cried, jumping to his
feet, wringing his hands. "Oh, dear! Oh,
impossible! I am admittedly a bungler, but I
will not be a murderer as well!"
When Kirk grabbed him this time, he did not turn
to
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
cobwebs and disappear, but instead went limp and
began to whimper.
"I never intended . . . all my fault . .
." he babbled.
"Pull yourself together!" Kirk ordered him,
gripping his shoulders and shaking him. "You've got
to help us! You're our only connection with this
century. You've got to help us get to the
Vulcans before it's too late hide them, get them
off the planet if possible, if we have
to build a ship with our bare hands . . ."
Elizabeth Dehner, awakened by the uproar, sat
yawning on her couch, beginning to understand why this man was
a born leader. Gary Mitchell hauled a
sleepy Kelso to his feet.
"Polish your Scout knife, Lee. Jim's
leading us into the deep woods again."
Spock, meanwhile, far from nonexistent for all
Parneb's concern, was visiting family in Boston.
Chapter Five
PARNEB HAD BEEN correct in one thing: his
was a skill founded not on science, but upon the shifting
sands of sorcery. His only tomfallible psychic
ability, running counterclock and imprecisely at
the best of times, augmented by the not-quite-understood power of
an amorphous uncut alien crystal, was prone
to error.
And as every jeweler knows, the most perfect of
crystals possesses its hidden flaws. One
perfect plane of Parneb's stone had brought four
human wayfarers to his bosom in the nick of time.
The minuscule asymmetry of another had cast their
Vulcan comrade ashore simultaneously, but
half a world away.
Unlike his crewmates in their Egyptian
crypt, Spock had the advantage of coming to himself
beneath a clear night sky. There was no disputing the
logic of the stars, which stated unequivocally that the world
they overarched was Earth. The logic of where was clear
at once. The logic of how and why was irreducible
under present
circumstances. The logic of when was a function
of the latter two and, on the whole, the least credible
even upon proof.
What was to-any Vulcan's disadvantage,
Spock acknowledged at once, emptying brackish
water out of his
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
boots and his now totally useless communicator, was
to find oneself in the middle of a
frost-rimmed New England salt marsh during the
Northern Hemisphere's quixotic autumn.
Vulcans, as a rule, do not subscribe
to something as immeasurable as serendipity, and Garamet
Jen-Saunor would not coin her phrase about
coincidence for anoth er two centuries. Yet there
was no logical explanation for whatever placed
Spock within a night's walk at least at
a Vulcan's measured, untiring pace of one of the
few places on Earth he would recognise even in
a prior centur
y.
He had not examined this world extensively during his
years as a cadet, preferring the self-contained
intellectual cloister of the Sciences Division of
Starfleet Academy. Not until he was science
officer aboard Chris Pike's Enterprise had
he taken rare advantage of some leave time
to place himself "on loan" to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology for participation in a
botany project requiring the services of a
Class A-7 computer expert.
In addition, he had visited the Boston
Museum. And Boston had a significance to his
family history shared by no other of his species.
One of his mother's ancestors had made his home here
in his last years. Among the many threads of oral
history woven into the colorful fabric of the child
Spock's memory was the tale of Professor
Jeremy Grayson.
"He was my great-great-great-grandfather," Amanda had
told her son, cherishing that small, somber, eager
face turned up toward hers like a flower to the sun,
craving knowledge as if it were life itself. Amanda
had had to explain the periods of human generations to a
child of so long-lived a species, as well as the
vagueness of human genealogy as compared to the
complexity of the Vulcan. Spock had listened,
rapt and silent as always when an elder spoke, but
most especially with his mother. "Jeremy Grayson was
in a sense our 225
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
first ancestor, because he is as far back as we can
trace the line. Records were lost on Earth during
the wars, and people with the same last name need not have been
related. He was a remarkable man, an unshakable
pacifist. He survived Khan's war, was
responsible for saving countless refugees, was
imprisoned and tortured. When he was very old he
lived quietly in an old frame house in
Boston. People came to him from everywhere, seeking him out
through some underground
network strays and vagabonds, poets and
pacifists, philosophers and dreamers. They were
rewarded with a hot meal, clean sheets, and no questions
asked...."
Professor Grayson's house had not been
Spock's original destination. Had he been when
he thought himself be as well as where, the
logical course would have been to report immediately
to Starfleet and wait for them to provide
transportation. A touch of the door chime of the first
household encountered beyond the salt marsh in Earth's
virtually crime-free twenty-third century would
have earned him instant access, the use of the
householder's private comm screen, and an
automated aircar dispatched from Comm Central
to whisk him to the Admiralty to report on his
misadventure, no matter how improbable.
But Spock's awareness that all was not as it should be
began a scant few meters beyond the salt marsh, and
was reinforced by everything he observed before retreating from the
major highway he had chosen as his original path
to seek shelter from human eyes in the shadows of off
road trees. The scarcity of dwellings, the uniform
antiquity of the vehicles that passed him, the strains
of two-century-old pop music Dopplering from them
in their haste, the absence of the weather shields erected
over most of this inhospitably cold, damp,
rainy, humid, muggy corner of Earth during his
century 226
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
confirmed the improbable. The discarded
small-town newspaper with the day's date
blown across his path as he skirted the hamlet where it
was still run off on hundred-year-old presses was
unnecessary.
Spock evaluated his situation, and acted in the
only logical manner open to him. Foremost, he
must conceal himself from a world that did not yet know of his
existence; then he must consider what, if anything, to do
next.
He secreted the communicator in one of his
boots for possible later use, detached the
Starfleet insignia from his gold uniform tunic and
buried it in the soil beneath a drift of leaves,
tore a strip from the hem of that tunic to bind around his
brow and conceal his problematical ears. With a
Vulcan's innate time sense and unerring sense of
direction he triangulated off the stars, and set out
for Boston by the least populated route.
He covered the distance in half the time a human
might, though the chill in the air lessened his
efficiency. A roadside phone of a kind he
recognised from some museum or other provided
free access, with a little judicious tampering, to an
electronic directory that yielded an address
not far from the places Spock had known in another
time.
Boston proper was waking to a brisk October
morning when a chilled-to-the-bone stranger trod a
mossy brick walk between overgrown privet hedges
and touched an antique brass knocker whose
nameplate bore the simple legend:
Grayson.
Spock possessed no physical description
of his ancestor, expected perhaps a wizened, enfeebled
old man, shrunk into the shell of his former self as
humans tended to be in old age. The human who
answered his knock was nothing like this. He was powerfully
built, much as Sarek was, and in fact taller in
a shambling, stoop-shouldered way. Spock found he
must look up to 227
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
meet the eyes beneath tangled thickets of
eyebrows in that craggy face, and those eyes were
the-pellucid blue of Amanda's.
"Yes?" the human inquired not unkindly, in a
voice that by reason of its resonance might have
originated somewhere in the vicinity of his toes. His
heavy eyebrows were raised whimsically. "What can
I do you for?"
"Professor Grayson?" Spock began
tentatively, wondering what those clear
blue eyes made of the alien apparition on his
doorstep. "I do not wish to intrude, but I have been
told you offer assistance to those in need . . ."
"Of course, son, of course!" Grayson said
at once, offering a stranger access to his hearth and
home with a sweeping gesture. "You certainly look
like you could use a square meal, and you're hardly
dressed for the weather. Come in!"
Only Grayson's walk betrayed his age, or
some misfortune suffered long before age; he leaned
heavily on a stout oak cane and shuffled
painfully, listing precariously to one side.
("His legs were crushed during his
imprisonment and comnever healed properly," Amanda
had said. "When he was released, there were several
attempts at corrective surgery, but one leg
remained shorter than the other, and as he grew older
. . .")
Spock, following his slow progress at a
respectful distance do
wn a long hall opening
into several cosy, book-filled rooms leading to the
kitchen, noted the small velvet skullcap
Grayson wore on the back of his thinning grey
hair and wondered at its significance. As if
sensing that curious gaze on the back of his
head, Grayson stopped, shifted the cane to his
other hand, and felt for the object of that curiosity,
removing it and looking at it as if he'd never seen
it before.
"Senile dementia!" he chided himself. "I forgot
to take it off. Don't mind me, son; at my
age the memory 228
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
isn't what it was. My wife passed away a
year ago; the unveiling was yesterday. Afraid
I've been sitting up feeling sorry for myself ever
since." He gestured Spock ahead of him into the
warm, bright kitchen. "Come, sit down. I'll
make coffee."
The clutter on the kitchen table suggested that
considerable coffee had already been drunk there, no
doubt by an old man alone and beset by memory.
Spock recalled all that he knew of human
mourning customs and wished he had not come here.
"I did not know," he said simply.
"Professor, I apologize for the intrusion. No
doubt you wish to be alone at this time . . ."
"Probably the worst thing for me." Grayson
hooked his cane over the back of a chair and braced
himself against the sink so he could clear away the
dishes without having to move too much. As an afterthought
he stuffed the yarmulke in his sweater pocket. "Lord
knows, Dora and I had forty-two years together.
Gratitude seems more appropriate to that than
mourning.
Doubtless there's a Yiddish proverb for it;
Dora would know, but I'm only an honorary Jew
for having married her." He fussed with the
coffeepot, shook off his contemplative mood.
"Well, son, what's your pleasure? Bacon and
eggs or something simpler?"
Spock sat at the kitchen table, though he had not
intended to eat.
"I do not require sustenance, Professor.
My need is only for shelter for a time. I will
provide for myself in all other his
"Nonsense!" Grayson would hear none of it.
"You've got "trouble" written all over your
face, and trouble can't afford to stand on ceremony. It
is an interesting face, by the way. Love to know the
ethnic mix that went into creating you!"
Indeed, Spock thought. Grayson seemed
to take his silence for apprehension.
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