Star Trek - Blish, James - 01 Page 10

  Kirk felt his own pulse, and sounded himself sub-jectively. Insofar as he could tell, there was nothing the matter with him but a headache which he now realized he had had for more than an hour. He strode quickly to Uhura's console and rang the engine room.

  There was a click from the g.c. speakers, and Riley's voice said hesitantly: "Riley here."

  "Mr. Riley, this is Kirk. Where are you?"

  "Sir, I... I seem to be in the engine room. I'm... off post, sir."

  Kirk drew a deep breath. "Never mind that. Give us power right away. Then open the door and let the chief engineer in. Stand out of the way when you do it, because he's trying to cut in with a phaser at full power. Have you got all that?"

  "Yes, sir. Power, then the door-and stand back. Sir, what's this all about?"

  "Never mind now, just do it."

  "Yes, sir."

  Kirk opened the bulkhead override. At once, there was the heavy rolling sound of the emergency doors between the sections opening, like a stone being rolled back from a tomb. Hitting the general alarm button, Kirk bawled: "All officers to the bridge! Crash emergency, six minutes! Mark and move!"

  At the same time, the needles on the power board began to stir. Riley had activated the engines. A moment later, his voice, filled with innocent regret, said into the general air:

  "Now there won't be a dance in the bowling alley to-night."

  Once a new orbit around the disintegrating mass of La Pig had been established, Kirk found time to question McCoy. The medico looked worn down to a nubbin, and small wonder; his had been the longest vigil of all. But he responded with charactertistic indirection.

  "Know anything about cactuses, Jim?"

  "Only what everybody knows. They live in the desert and they stick you. Oh yes, and some of them store water."

  "Right, and that last item's the main one. Also, cactuses that have been in museum cases for fifty or even seventy years sometimes astonish the museum curators by sprouting. Egyptian wheat that's been in tombs for thousands of years will sometimes germinate, too."

  Kirk waited patiently. McCoy would get to the point in his own good time.

  "Both those things happen because of a peculiar form of storage called bound water. Ordinary mineral crystals like copper sulfate often have water hitched to their molecules, loosely; that's water-of-crystallization. With it, copper sulfate is a pretty blue gem, though poisonous; without it, it's a poisonous green powder. Well, organic molecules can bind water much more closely, make it really a part of the molecule instead of just loosely hitched to it. Over the course of many years, that water will come out of combination and become available to the cactus or the gram of wheat as a liquid, and then life begins all over again."

  "An ingenious arrangement," Kirk said. "But I don't see how it nearly killed us all."

  "It was in that sample of liquid Mr. Spock brought back, of course-a catalyst that promoted water-binding. If it had nothing else to bind to, it would bind even to itself. Once in the bloodstream, the catalyst began complexing the blood-serum. First it made the blood more difficult to extract nutrients from, beginning with blood sugar, which starved the brain-hence the psychiatric symptoms. As the process continued, it made the blood too thick to pump, especially through the smaller cap-illaries-hence Joe's death by circulatory collapse.

  "Once I realized what was happening, I had to figure out a way to poison the catalysis. The stuff was highly contagious, through the perspiration, or blood, or any other body fluid; and catalysts don't take part in any chemical reaction they promote, so the original amount was always present to be passed on. I think this one may even have multiplied, in some semi-viruslike fashion. Anyhow, the job was to alter the chemical nature of the catalyst-poison it-so it wouldn't promote that reaction any more. I almost didn't find the proper poison in time, and as I told Lieutenant Uhura through the wall, I wasn't sure what effect the poison itself would have on healthy people. Luckily, none."

  "Great Galaxy," Kirk said. "That reminds me of something. Spock invalided himself off duty just before the tail end of the crisis and he's not back. Lieutenant Uhura, call Mr. Spock's quarters."

  "Yes, sir."

  The switch clicked. Out of the intercom came a peculi-arly Arabic howl-the noise of the Vulcanian musical instrument Spock liked to practice in his cabin, since nobody else on board could stand to listen to it. Along with the noise, Spock's rough voice was crooning:

  "Alab, wes-craunish, sprai pu ristu,

  Or en r'ljiik majiir auooo-"

  Kirk winced. "I can't tell whether he's all right or not," he said. "Nobody but another Vulcanian could. But since he's not on duty during a crash alert, maybe your antidote did something to him it didn't do to us. Better go check him."

  ''Soon as I find my earplugs."

  McCoy left. From Spock's cabin, the voice went on:

  "Rijii, bebe, p'salku pirtu,

  Fror om-"

  The voice rose toward an impassioned climax and Kirk cut the circuit. Rather than that, he would almost rather have "I'll take you home again, Kathleen," back again.

  On the other hand, if Riley had sounded like that to Spock, maybe Spock had needed no other reason for feeling unwell. With a sigh, Kirk settled back to watch the last throes of La Pig. The planet was now little better than an irregularly bulging cloud of dust, looking on the screen remarkably like a swelling and disintegrating human brain.

  The resemblance, Kirk thought, was strictly super-ficial. Once a planet started disintegrating, it was through. But brains weren't like that.

  Given half a chance, they pulled themselves together.

  Sometimes.

  Miri

  Any SOS commands instant attention in space, but there was very good reason why this one created special interest on the bridge of the Enterprise. To begin with, there was no difficulty in pinpointing its source, for it came not from any ship in distress, but from a planet, driven out among the stars at the 21-centimeter fre-quency by generators far more powerful than even the largest starship could mount.

  A whole planet in distress? But there were bigger surprises to come. The world in question was a member of the solar system of 70 Ophiucus, a sun less than fifteen light-years away from Earth, so that in theory the distress signals could have been picked up on Earth not much more than a decade after their launching except for one handicap: From Earth, 70 Ophiucus is seen against the backdrop of the Milky Way, whose massed clouds of excited hydrogen atoms emit 21-centimeter radiation at some forty times the volume of that coming from the rest of the sky. Not even the planet's huge, hard-driven gener-ators could hope to punch through that much stellar static with an intelligible signal, not even so simple a one as an SOS. Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer of the Enterprise, picked up the signal only because the starship was at the time approaching the "local group"-an arbitrary sphere 100 light-years in diameter with Earth at its center-nearly at right angles to the plane of the galaxy.

  All this, however, paled beside the facts about the region dug up by the ship's library computer. For the fourth planet of 70 Ophiucus, the computer said, had been the first extrasolar planet ever colonized by man-by a small but well-equipped group of refugees from the political disaster called the Cold Peace, more than five hundred years ago. It had been visited only once since then. The settlers, their past wrongs unforgotten, had fired on the visitors, and the hint had been taken; after all, the galaxy was full of places more interesting than a backwater like the 70 Ophiucus system, which the first gigantic comber of full-scale exploration had long since passed. The refugees were left alone to enjoy their sullen isolation.

  But now they were calling for help.

  On close approach it was easy to see why the colonists, despite having been in flight, had settled for a world which might have been thought dangerously close to home. The planet was remarkably Earth-like, with enor-mous seas covering much of it, stippled and striped with clouds. One hemisphere held a large, roughly lozenge-shaped continent,
green and mountainous; the other, two smaller triangular ones, linked by a long archipelago in-cluding several islands bigger than Borneo. Under higher magnification, the ship's screen showed the gridworks of numerous cities, and, surprisingly more faintly, the checkerboarding of cultivation.

  But no lights showed on the night side, nor did the radio pick up any broadcasts nor any of the hum of a high-energy civilization going full blast. Attempts to com-municate, once the Enterprise was in orbit, brought no response-only that constantly repeated SOS, which now was beginning to sound suspiciously mechanical.

  "Whatever the trouble was," Mr. Spock deduced, "we are evidently too late."

  "It looks like it," Captain Kirk agreed. "But we'll go down and see. Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Yeoman Rand, and two security guards, pick up your gear and report to me in the transporter room."

  The landing party materialized by choice in the central plaza of the largest city the screen had shown-but there was no one there. Not entirely surprised, Kirk looked around.

  The architecture was roughly like that of the early 2100s, when the colonists had first fled, and apparently had stood unoccupied for almost that long a period. Evi-dences of the erosion of time were everywhere, in the broken pavements, the towering weeds, the gaping win-dows, the windrows of dirt and dust. Here and there on the plaza were squat sculptures of flaking rust which had perhaps been vehicles.

  "No signs of war," Spock said.

  "Pestilence?" McCoy suggested. As if by agreement, both were whispering.

  By the dust-choked fountain near which Kirk stood, another antique object lay on its side: a child's tricycle. It too was rusty, but still functional, as though it had been indoors during much of the passage of time which had worn away the larger vehicles. There was a bell attached to the handlebar, and moved by some obscure impulse, Kirk pressed his thumb down on its lever.

  It rang with a kind of dull sputter in the still air. The plaintive sound was answered instantly, from behind them, by an almost inhuman scream of rage and anguish.

  "Mine! Mine!

  They whirled to face the terrible clamor. A humanoid creature was plunging toward them from the shell of the nearest building, flailing its arms and screaming murder-ously. It was moving too fast for Kirk to make out de-tails. He had only an impression of dirt, tatters, and con-siderable age, and then the thing had leapt upon McCoy and knocked him down.

  Everyone waded in to help, but the creature had the incredible strength of the utterly mad. For a moment Kirk was face to face with it-an ancient face, teeth gone in a reeking mouth, contorted with wildness and hate, tears brimming from the eyes. Kirk struck, almost at random.

  The blow hardly seemed to connect at all, but the creature sobbed and fell to the pocked pavement. He was indeed an old man, clad only in sneakers, shorts, and a ripped and filthy shirt. His skin was covered with multi-colored blotches. There was something else odd about it, too-but what? Was it as wrinkled as it should be?

  Still sobbing, the old head turned and looked toward the tricycle, and an old man's shaking hand stretched out toward it. "Fix," the creature said, between sobs. "Some-body fix."

  "Sure," Kirk said, watching intently. "We'll fix it."

  The creature giggled. "Fibber," it said. The voice grad-ually rose to the old scream of rage. "You bustud it! Fibber, fibber!"

  The clawing hand grasped the tricycle as if to use it as a weapon, but at the same time the creature seemed to catch sight of the blotches on its own naked arm. The scream died back to a whimper. "Fix it-please fix it-"

  The eyes bulged, the chest heaved, and then the crea-ture fell back to the pavement. Clearly, it was dead. McCoy knelt beside it, running a tricorder over the body.

  "Impossible," he muttered.

  "That it's dead?" Kirk said.

  "No, that it could have lived at all. Its body tem-perature is over one-fifty. It must have been burning itself up. Nobody can live at that temperature."

  Kirk's head snapped up suddenly. There had been another sound, coming from an alley to the left.

  "Another one?" he whispered tensely. "Somebody stalk-ing us... over there. Let's see if we can grab him and get some information... Now!"

  They broke for the alley. Ahead of them they could hear the stalker running.

  The alley was blind, ending in the rear of what seemed to be a small apartment house. There was no place else that the stalker could have gone. They entered cautiously, phasers ready.

  The search led them eventually to what had once been a living room. There was a dusty piano in it, a child's exercise book on the music rack. Over one brittle brown page was scribbled, "Practice, practice, practice!" But there was no place to hide but a closet. Listening at the door, Kirk thought he heard agitated breathing, and then, a distinct creak. He gestured, and Spock and the security men covered him.

  "Come out," he called. "We mean no harm. Come on out."

  There was no answer, but the breathing was definite now. With a sudden jerk, he opened the door.

  Huddled on the floor of the closet, amid heaps of moldering clothing, old shoes, a dusty umbrella, was a dark-haired young girl, no more than fourteen-probably younger. She was obviously in abject terror.

  "Please," she said. "No, don't hurt me. Why did you come back?"

  "We won't hurt you," Kirk said. "We want to help." He held out his hand to her, but she only tried to shrink farther back into the closet. He looked helplessly at Yeoman Rand, who came forward and knelt at the open door.

  "It's all right," she said. "Nobody's going to hurt you. We promise."

  "I remember the things you did," the girl said, without stirring. "Yelling, burning, hurting people."

  "It wasn't us," Janice Rand said. "Come out and tell us about it."

  The girl looked dubious, but allowed Janice to lead her to a chair. Clouds of dust came out of it as she sat down, still half poised to spring up and run.

  "You've got a foolie," she said. "But I can't play. I don't know the rules."

  "We don't either," Kirk said. "What happened to all the people? Was there a war? A plague? Did they just go someplace else and accidentally leave you here?"

  "You ought to know. You did it-you and all the other grups."

  "Grups? What are grups?"

  The girl looked at Kirk, astonished. "You're grups. All the old ones."

  "Grown-ups," Janice said. "That's what she means, Captain."

  Spock, who had been moving quietly around the room with a tricorder, came back to Kirk, looking puzzled. "She can't have lived here, Captain," he said. "The dust here hasn't been disturbed for at least three hundred years, possibly longer. No radioactivity, no chemical con-tamination-just very old dust."

  Kirk turned back to the girl. "Young lady-by the way, what's your name?"

  "Miri."

  "All right, Miri, you said the grups did something. Burning, hurting people. Why?"

  "They did it when they started to get sick. We had to hide." She looked up hopefully at Kirk. "Am I doing it right? Is it the right foolie?"

  "You're doing fine. You said the grownups got sick. Did they die?"

  "Grups always die." Put that way, it was of course self-evident, but it didn't seem to advance the questioning much.

  "How about the children?"

  "The onlies? Of course not. We're here, aren't we?"

  "More of them?" McCoy put in. "How many?"

  "All there are."

  "Mr. Spock," Kirk said, "take the security guards and see if you can find any more survivors,.. So all the grups are gone?"

  "Well, until it happens-you know-when it happens to an only. Then you get to be like them. You want to hurt people, like they did."

  "Miri," McCoy said, "somebody attacked us, outside. You saw that? Was that a grup?"

  "That was Floyd," she said, shivering a little. "It happened to him. He turned into one. It's happening to me, too. That's why I can't hang around with my friends any more. The minute one of us starts changing, the rest get afrai
d... I don't like your foolie. It's no fun."

  "What do they get afraid of?" Kirk persisted.

  "You saw Floyd. They try to hurt everything. First you get those awful marks on your skin. Then you turn into a grup, and you want to hurt people, kill people."

  "We're not like that," Kirk said. "We've come a long way, all the way from the stars. We know a good many things. Maybe we can help you, if you'll help us."

  "Grups don't help," Miri said. "They're the ones that did this."

  "We didn't do it, and we want to change it. Maybe we can, if you'll trust us."

  Janice touched her on the side of the face and said, "Please?" After a long moment, Miri managed her first timid smile.