Strangers from the Sky
Page 31
nevertheless?
For herself T'Lera would accept this, but not for her
son. Whatever she could bargain for Sorahl's safe
return to their world, up to and including the limits of a
Vulcan's honor, she would give.
Would they free Sorahl if she agreed to remain
as surety, possibly for life? She whom no
planet could contain would be no more an exile on
Earth than anywhere else. She who as a growing child
had remained awake for the first half of the twenty-year
journey while the adults rotated in two-year
cycles through cryogenic suspension, knew what it was
like to be alone.
That she might never again share a Vulcan's thoughts
with a kindred soul might have given her pause.
Surely there were humans with whom she could hold such
discourse Jason Nyere had the potential to be such
a one but the powers who would decide for her life would
make certain she never encountered them. Yet she who
had lost her soul's companion in the death of
T'Syra could endure this as well. And if a
Vulcan's mourning belonged to the realm of
solitude, what
opportunity would she have to mourn those she had lost!
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Let permanent exile be her fate, then. She
might only request a desert less frigid than
the one for which the ship was bound.
This for herself, but not for Sorahl. The time would come
when he must return to Vulcan, for reasons no
Earthman could comprehend. She must find a way
to return her son to their world, by ten-year voyage in
a sublight Earth vessel if need be, and alone,
but this was what she must do.
The only alternative, that which she had attempted
in the destruction of her ship, might no longer be
available to her once she was Earth's hostage.
The noise of the great ship surrounding her had
increased then, became a grinding, crushing ferocity as
Delphinus pushed its way upward through the polar
ice as Captain Nyere had told her it would do.
The engines had stopped, the noise ceased. They had
arrived. All was silence, and the swift susurration
of a Vulcan heart.
Holding the inquiry into the Vulcan Problem in the
big cold dining hall at Byrd had been
deliberate, intended to impress the panelists with
their own importance, if not the Vulcans. The
high-domed room, entirely surrounded by armed
Ground Forces sentries (two deep in places,
not counting the snipers on the roofs of the auxiliary
buildings), dwarfed its fewer than two dozen
inhabitants, transformed their voices into echoes and
their breath into vapor in the inadequate heat. Jim
Kirk's feet were cold through boots and heavy
socks; he wondered how the Vulcans could stand it.
The medical team had seen them first,
submitting them to a battery of tests that took up
the entire first day. They'd been poked and prodded
physically and psychically until medical
personnel had arrived at the satisfactory
conclusion that they were what they claimed to be.
"They've put them through so much!" Dr. Bellero,
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
me Definer, lamented to Kirk when they could snatch
some surreptitious time together.
Officially, when they passed in the halls or sat
on the same inquiry panel, they did not know each
other. "Most of it's legitimate, but some of it's
downright silly, not to mention humiliating.
I'm embarrassed for them, Captain, and for us!"
"Stay with it, doctor," was all Kirk could
tell her. "And hold on to your files. You're our
best hope for containment there. How'd they do on the
psych tests?"
Dehner smiled her wi/l, crooked smile at
him.
"Flying colors, of-course. I'm doing my
best to spoon-feed the results to my
"superiors." Can't make them look too
brilliant or integrated. And I've glossed
over the scary stuff the self-healing and the telepathy.
No sense making them seem too different."
"Good," Kirk said, half listening. His primary
concern since he'd gotten here had been the search for a
way out. Considering the heavy artillery, there didn't
seem to be any. "What's the feeling among the rest
of the medical people?"
"The internist walked away shaking his head,"
Dehner said wryly. "He's been holed up in his
cabin ever since, probably on a bender. He
doesn't like finding hearts where livers should be; I
think it shook him rather badly. The neurologist was a
lot more sympathetic. She was the one who suggested
reconstructive surgery for T'Lera,
if they could risk transfusions from Sorahl."
"What did T'Lera say to that?" Kirk wanted
to know, expecting a typical Vulcan response.
"She was very appreciative, but she "questioned whether
the aesthetic merits outweighed the risk to the
physician of losing a patient." Unquote."
Kirk smiled. "Meaning she'd rather have a broken
nose than a posthumous malpractice suit."
"Smart lady," Dehner said, and they went their
separate ways.
* * *
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Elizabeth Dehner managed to sit in on all
of the inquiry panels eyed when she wasn't
required, citing "professional curiosity."
Whenever Kirk sought her out at the other end of the
L-shaped table, she made eye contact and gave
him a vague little shrug.
The arrangement of the tables had also been designed
to impress, if not intimidate. The
interrogators, anywhere from ten to fifteen of them at
any given session, sat at two long tables
arranged in a chevron, bracketing and slightly
higher than the single table provided for the
Vulcans and their human sponsors. Jason
Nyere had appeared steadfastly at every session, but the
two civilians who had rescued the Vulcans,
after repeating their story for about the sixth time, were no
longer there. The young woman Tatya had burst
into tears at the previous session, and on the
recommendation of Dr. Bellero, she and her male
companion had been escorted back to the ship.
The questioning had continued throughout the second day, with the
Vulcans the only ones showing no signs of stress
or fatigue. Sorahl answered only those questions
put directly to him. As commander, T'Lera
answered everything else, no matter how
aggressively phrased or how often repeated
calmly, rationally, and with an almost embarrassing
honesty.
"So you're saying in essence that there will be no search
parties, no one to come looking for you?" one of the
military types a three-star general who, from the
embittered look of him, had spent his life in a
futile search for a war to fight demanded.
"That is correct," T'Lera replied evenly.
> "Once gone to ground, a craft is considered lost.
There will be no attempt at search or rescue."
Jim Kirk winced. Did she have any
idea how vulnerable that made her and her son?
"That's strictly on your say-so," the general said
belligerently. He held an expensive gold
pen in his
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hand despite the recorders, used it more as a
bayonet than to take notes. He had it pointed
at T'Lera now.
"I beg your pardon, General?"
"All we have is your word that your people won't launch
a search or worse," the general said loudly.
"I'd ask you to prove that."
T'Lera seemed momentarily taken aback, as
if she'd forgotten that this species could lie, did
lie, had in some contexts the military among
them elevated the lie to an art form, and would thus
assume that she was Iying without concrete proof to the
contrary.
"You have my word," she said slowly, precisely.
On her world it would have been enough. "Could you raise
my ship from the ocean floor, you would find it carried
no weapons, nor did any of my crew. And
surely your planetary defences have detected no
additional vessels within your system?"
The general had the good grace to look
embarrassed at that. All the defense systems
around Earth, Luna, and Mars had been on a
full-scale alert since the crash, had detected
nothing as big as a Rea amid the clutter of
satellites and space debris of Earth origin.
Score one for the Vulcans! Jim Kirk thought
as the delegation's chairperson banged her gavel
to settle the murmurs in the big room. It was
bleak comfort, Kirk thought, chafing at the endlessness of the
proceedings, and what he saw as no escape. None
of this should be happening, and the further it spread, the more
impossible his task became.
"Now, as I understand it" the general had apparently
recovered himself sufficiently to continue his line of
questioning "you've had ships out there observing us since
1943, you say?"
"The first mission to your world arrived 102.4
Earth years ago," T'Lera explained for the
fifth time. "If that is how you number your years, the
answer is yes."
"So you were orbiting up there spying on us all that
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time," the general began, but T'Lera could
not allow his misconception to go uncorrected.
"I resist the term "spying," General. Our
purpose was nothing more than to observe a world which has
been studying other worlds since the time of your scientist
Galileo. If you consider this an invasion of your
privacy, I must ask forgiveness for my people. But
since your radio telescopes have been
"eavesdropping" on other star systems since his
"That is not the point!" the general bellowed, and the
murmurs broke out again. The
chairperson hammered them into silence, but not before
Jason Nyere, T'Lera's long-suffering right-hand
man, began to chuckle.
"You find something amusing in all this, Captain?"
the general demanded hotly, glaring the chairperson's
gavel mto silence m midair.
"Sorry, General. Must be battle
fatigue," Nyere replied. "It just seems to me
the lady's got a point. If we had the
technology, we'd be doing the same thing what the
hell else did we send a ship to Alpha
Centauri fore. andwitha lot less grace about it than
these people have shown."
"Suggest if you're that tired you put in for a few
hours of R and R. Captain," the
general advised humorlessly, ignoring everything
else Nyere had said. The internecine war between
Aeroationav and Ground Forces had its roots in
navy vs. marines and probably went back to the time
of the Caesars; it would hardly be resolved here and
now.
Worse, the pacifist contingent, relegated to the
lower ends of the tables and not permitted to approach the
Vulcans informally, had taken to Nyere from the beginning
and applauded him now. Jim Kirk, in his
intell-agent guise, wished he could do the same;
he had great respect for the burly ship's captain,
considered him a worthy antecedent and a potential
ally, possibly the only one in the room.
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The general, aware of Nyere's growing
popularity, was hardly about to yield the floor
to him and a bunch of peaceniks. He tapped the table with
his gold pen until he had everyone's attention, then
jabbed it toward T'Lera again.
"You mean to tell me your people sat out two of our
world wars and did nothing?"
"Correct," T'Lera acknowledged. She had
re- strained the intensity of her far-searching
eyes these two days, mindful of their effect on every
human she'd encountered save Jason Nyere. Now
she permitted those burning laser points some of their
intensity and directed it at the general. "What would
you have had us do, General?"
"Well, if you're as damned peaceful as you
claim" the general lost himself momentarily, feeling the
heat of T'Lera's eyes but not yet knowing its
source "why didn't you intervene somehow? Stop the
wars, prevent all those millions from being killed?"
The general's face had gone an alarming color
and he was breathing hard. T'Lera chose her next
words carefully, knowing they would condemn her and her kind
in the eyes of many in this room.
"I regret I must point out, General, that our
Prime Directive precluded the role of
avenging angel. It was our duty, however
unpleasant, to permit you to make your Own
mistakes."
There were murmurs from all sides at this. Some of the
pacifists seemed to be wavering, a few of the
intell-agents nodded knowingly, drawing from
T'Lera's statement conclusions that no one who
wasn't an intell-agent could fathom, and Jim
Kirk found himself thinking
uncomfortably of the Vulcanian Expedition.
"dis . . one of the most callous, inhumane
attitudes I have ever . . ." the general was saying,
and by the time the delegation's chairperson restored
order he was totally out of breath. Jim Kirk
seized the moment.
"The chair recognises Colonel Kirk."
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"Commander T'Lera," he begeaan as heads
turned; he had not spoken at all yet, and most
of the factions had no idea who he was.
"Colonel Kirk," the Vulcan acknowledged.
This is it! Kirk thought. "Commander, if you were in
charge of this situation, how would you resolve x"...97
The question brought the entire oversized room to an
uneasy standstill, silenced the ill-mannered
mumbling from the diplomats' quarter, caused the
military types to straighten in their seats and the
intell-agents to lean forward in theirs, silenced the very
echoes in the corners. Above and outside, the
sentries could be heard changing shifts in the frigid
air, boots scraping, automatics clicking.
"Colonel Kirk." T'Lera spoke
undaunted into that silence. "I would not
presume to dictate policy to those who know your people
far better than I his
Damned Vulcan hair-splitting obsession with
protocol! Jim Kirk steamed, wishing she'd just
answer the question.
"Let me put it to you another way,
Commander." He had to clear his throat to hear himself.
"If you and your son were free to leave this room, what
would you do?"
The silence became a startled, angry murmur,
through which the general's stage whisper to an aide carried
like cannon;
"Who is that man? I want his credentials!
Who the hell does he think he his
Whatever answer T'Lera might have given was lost
in the groundswell and in the tumult that followed.
The abrupt sound of wingboats, twice the number
that had brought the delegation here, punctuated the icy
stillness outside. Sentries could be heard running
across the pack ice; two of them, flanking a Ground
Forces lieutenant, burst into the room. The
lieutenant whispered
something urgently in Captain Nyere's ear,
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and he and the Vulcans were escorted abruptly out
of the room.
The chairperson sought futilely for order.
Kirk found himself pushing through the delegation, all of
whom were on their feet trying to get past the sentries
who were blocking all the exits.
Something's happened, Kirk thought.
Something outside, up north, in the rest of the world.
Something bad. Gary, Lee, my people
"You did what!" Jason Nyere's voice
shook with anger, and he had begun to sweat again.
Messages had been streaming across the comm screen
for over an hour, messages from Norfolk Command,
from Ground Forces Central and the PentaKrem.
Someone had leaked a news story about alien invaders
being held incommunicado somewhere in Antarctica,
and it was all over the media. Every major information
source carried some version of it, from the mildest
hearsay to the most fantastical eyewitness account,
and any number of reporters and thrill seekers were
chartering transportation to go and see for them- selves.