Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Short Stories Read online

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  It was on our first voyage, Scott said. A year out, maybe a little more. We all knew each other, though Chekov hadn’t been promoted up to the bridge yet. Things were settled in, or getting there. We’d met that rogue Harry Mudd, and Kevin Riley had had his run; the captain had bluffed them with the Corbomite maneuver and we’d discovered Kodos the Executioner and had a brush with the Romulans. Mister Spock had helped out Captain Pike, and we’d had a rung-in with the cursed Squire of Gothos. We’d all survived a most curious shore leave, and the captain had fought the Gorn. It happened about then.

  There was this little settlement on a backwater world called Alva. Edison II it was, a little two-world system near the Klingon line. Thomas and Alva, they were the planets. Cute, huh? Never know what people are going to call things, do you? Some like the classics: Athos, Plato, Capricorn. Some like naming things after the folks who paid for the trip. The Spaniards used to do that when they were exploring the New World. Name things for saints’ days and queens, kings. Christmas Island, San Francisco, you know them?

  Well, sometimes they get too cute, know what I mean? But you never have people calling their planet by the legal terminology. Would you recognize SSL-1833-VI? That’s the 1,833 star listed in the Starfleet Star List, the sixth planet thereof. Which is it? Don’t know, do you? Not that way, but say Ulysses and you know, right? Sixth world of Homer. People don’t like numbers, they like names.

  I’ve gotten off the track. Spock, right. We went over to Alva, on of those Starfleet services no one ever notices. Too far out it was for commercial freighters, so when we go from point A to point B, we try to stop in, see how things are, offload stores, medicines, check things out. Routine. Usually routine. Not this time.

  Have some more wine, Foster. No? Then some good Triacus pod wine? Good stuff. You’ll develop a taste, we’ll see to that. No use going out and risking your neck and losing good people like Mister Spock and not getting some of the advantages, is there? The potato, for instance. Tomato. Corn. Philarda. Grizmalt. Lassfass. All good stuff, in their way. All brought from new worlds to old.

  Alva, right. Tiny little Terran colony there. Commercial colony planted, oh, fifty, sixty years before by an investment group on Earth. Stock bought and sold. Glamour stock, y’know. “Our colony on Edison II,” that kind of chitchat. Like people talking about “their Broadway show.”

  Broadway? New York, you know. Before tri-D. Live drama, musical? Never mind. There we were, Mister Spock, Doctor McCoy, and me, beaming down. The doctor to check out the medical things, me to see if they needed any technological help—you know, copying out some manuals, tech stuff from the library, show ’em how to repair things. Mister Spock, he was to do a culture check. Know how a doctor will take your temperature, a blood test? Well, Spock, he was to look over the culture, like. Sometimes these little isolated colonies get right off the track. Petty tyrants evolve, maybe they actually mutate because of bacteria or radiation that got missed during the initial survey. Once we found a colony of Terrans that had completely forgotten about Earth or America or anything. Still went by the Constitution, though—even if they only had a few fragments of it left.

  Anyway, there we were. Captain Kirk took the Enterprise over to Thomas, up close to the sun, which kind of complicated things, as you’ll see, because the solar wind was so strong we couldn’t radio them.

  Oh, forgot: coupla security men beamed down, too, and Pat Bradley. Yup, same Pat as is down in the engine room right now.

  Everything looked just fine. We always beam down—if time permits—just a bit out from where the people are. Especially those without much technology, or primitives. Don’t like to scare folks. So there we were, and there was this village, and out steps a whole squad of Klingons!

  “Don’t move,” Spock said. There were too many of them, nearly twice as many, and they had their phasers on us. I was so angry I could have chewed dilithium crystals!

  No reason to expect them, no ship on the screens as we came in. Life forms, sure, but they were all mixed in with the colonists.

  Ambushed. Our weapons were taken away and we were trapped. The Klingons had us, they had the colonists, but we didn’t know what they were up to.

  Of course, we knew that pretty soon the Enterprise would be back, and there’s no Klingon ship can best her. Isn’t that right, baby?

  I’m talking to the Enterprise, Mister Foster, who did you think?

  But, y’see, we had to survive. I guess that’s where the angel came in.

  See, we ran the records coming into orbit. What all the other Starfleet ships had reported on Alva. Remarkable record: no fights, no revolutions, no strife worth noting. Yet nothing was run from the top, as if some despot had taken over. Just good folks living together in peace. Remarkable, in a way, but hardly unique. Guess that’s another reason we came in so blind. Nothing had ever happened before. There were no animals that were dangerous except humans, and they had this record of peace.

  So, as I said, the Klingons had us and the top dog among ’em was this Klandor. Called himself a king, but I think it’s a bit like the Irish—all descended from kings, they say. Insisted we call him Your Majesty and such. Obnoxious fellow, but so are all Klingons. Do it just to be nasty, sometimes even to their own disadvantage, I think.

  Klandor was up to something, we knew that. It was Mister Spock who figured it out. “They will force us to signal the ship to beam them aboard, threatening to kill the colonists if we do not,” he said. They’d be holding the communicators, you see, and automatically the transporter beams would take them up, and they’d go in firing.

  It was Spock who figured the rest out as well. The Klingons knew we were in the area—we weren’t exactly sneaking around, and Starfleet likes to remind the Klingons we have ships all over. So they knew our policy and figured we’d drop in on Alva sooner or later.

  So we had to trust that Captain Kirk would be able to decipher this code word that Spock planned to slip in. Didn’t work that way. We didn’t know it, but as the Klingons were interrogating us they had been making recordings and they had put together messages from each of us that would fool our voice decoders because they would be our voices.

  But Klandor was smart—or so he thought. He sent up Spock in the front, backed up by Klandor and five Klingons. That moment before the transporter crew got up the nerve to fire into a group of Klingons with Mister Spock standing in front was the crucial few moments.

  Only none of it happened that way. Oh, the Enterprise came back and the voice recordings worked and they beamed up Spock, Klandor, and the six assault troops.

  And nothing happened. At least nothing seemed to happen. They didn’t arrive. We never did find out what happened to the six troopers, but Mister Spock and this Klandor got somewhere. Limbo, Spock called it. A nothingness.

  There they were, alive and well and in nowhere land. Spock and Klandor and the angel. Of course Spock isn’t of any religion that has angels in it, but he does know about them. Klandor … well, to him it was some kind of winged creature—yes, Foster, big white feathery wings—and that’s it. Spock said there was no halo. But then, I don’t think angels have halos; at least this one didn’t. The halos you see in paintings are the invention of medieval artists.

  A Vulcan, a Klingon, and an angel.

  No, Foster, I don’t think I should like down and sleep. Mister Spock is lying down and asleep and he’ll be forgotten if everyone lies down and goes to sleep, doncha see?

  I know, Foster, they’re gonna give him the highest award, the United Federation of Planets Golden Medal of Honor. Posthumous, of course. But I’m telling you of when he was alive, when he was Spock!

  A Vulcan, a Klingon, and an angel.

  How do I know? ’Cause I was there when he reported to Captain Kirk and when it was sent to Starfleet and when Starfleet put a cap on it. It won’t be in the records, son. Some things just aren’t. Starfleet policy, y’know. Have some more wine, boy.

  All in
limbo. The Klingon, of course, he went on the attack right off. With one of them Klingon roars, he charged Spock like an animal. But Spock was cool and tossed him. The Klingon, he came again and just knocked Spock down and tried to strangle him, but Spock got his hands inside Klandor’s arms and broke the hold and flipped the Klingon off. They were about to go at it again when the angel said, “Stop.”

  They stopped. Just like that. Spock realized the voice was in his head. Telepathy, you know. Not uncommon, though very few from Earth seem to have it. Stopped ’em dead, it did. Oh, shouldn’t have said that. Not dead. They, they stopped, is all.

  The angel said … well, telepathed … oh, blast, the angel said, in their minds, “Opposites do not attract, they repel when dealing with life forms.”

  The Klingon, he tried to attack the angel, but he took only one step, Spock said, and he couldn’t go any farther. Like a wall was there. Didn’t faze the angel. Are angels hes or shes, Foster? Supposed to be neutral, aren’t they, but what about Saint Michael and … oh, I’m off the subject again. Here, I need more wine. You, Foster?

  So, well, there they were. The angry Klingon—I don’t think they come in any other type—and the cool Vulcan and the neutral angel. Great winged creature, white robe, the whole works. Symbol of Goodness, but maybe an absence of Evil and an absence of Good, a lack of emotion, would make us think of someone like that as “good.” Spock, he had emotions. Oh, he tried to hide it. He was ashamed of emotions, you know. Half-Terran, half-Vulcan, he had emotions and he fought always to hide them. Except maybe to the Captain. He was loyal, you know. He believed in what we are doing out there in space, seeking intelligence, finding order, extending our knowledge. Pour me some of that, will you, Foster? Good lad.

  Spock’s dead, you know that, Foster? Dead. On the Genesis planet. Dead saving us all. You, me, everyone. People ought to know a man like Spock. Great man, Mister Spock.

  Hey? Oh, yes. The angel and the Klingon and Mister Spock. Good, Evil, and Neutral. The angel said, “The classic confrontation.” Spock was probably the first to understand. Good against Evil, with the stakes high. But how high? Were they to fight for their own futures? For the Enterprise and Alva? For the future of mankind or Klingonkind? Spock did not know, only that there was to be a battle.

  “The limbo grew vast,” he said, Spock said. “It became a vast plain, gray and neutral, with white lines making a vast grid. Squares of the grid rose and fell, becoming obstructions, hills, mountains; other sections became pits, holes, canyons. And they changed, up and down, some slowly, some abruptly.” He told us with a kind of cool wonder and he said he had tried to analyze the mechanism, but he didn’t have the information and he didn’t have the time.

  The Klingon attacked. The angel had the floor or ground or whatever it was drop away from beneath, but he or she or it just hovered there, watching. The Klingon knocked Spock down, but they both fell, and when they rolled to their feet there was a gully of depressed squares between them and cliffs behind. Changing square columns of cliffs rippling as they rose and fell like some great biological pipe organ. The gully leveled off and the Klingon came on, but the squares rose, carrying the Klingon up. He leaped off, but Spock dodged him, striking a solid blow.

  Spock knew that it was a matter of life and death and the stakes were unknown but high. He had dealt the Klingon a mighty blow, enough to kill a man, yet the Klingon lay still only for a moment, then rose. “I knew we were not functioning under the normal laws of space and time,” Spock told us. “We could not be killed—or rather, we could be killed but instantly repaired.”

  “The Metrons,” Captain Kirk had said later. We all nodded. They’re a mysterious race, who put Captain Kirk against the Gorn on a lifeless asteroid with their races as the prize. The winner’s race lived, the loser’s died. It didn’t work out quite like that, but those were the stakes, y’see, Foster.

  “But they were not the Metrons,” Spock said, and again we all agreed, since the Metrons had kept themselves invisible to us. The angel was seen, the angel was physical.

  “We could have gone on fighting forever,” Spock said. “Gaining and losing the advantage. I sought an answer, but the Klingon kept attacking. It is difficult to be logical while you are engaging in basic survival.”

  Captain Kirk and I smiled at each other over that. How like Spock to be coolly logical during a life-and-death struggle. “I knew,” he told us, “that I must find the key. Perhaps we were entertainment for this winged creature and nothing more. So in moments out of combat—that is, as we gathered strength to attack each other again—I spoke to this astonishing life form.”

  Y’see, that was so like Spock. Foster, your glass is empty, lad. So Spock says, “Are you an angel?” The creature says, “I am as I appear.”

  “Could you change your appearance?” Spock asked, and the creature does not respond, but this did catch the attention of the Klingon, amazingly enough. “What are you?” bellowed Klandor. “How dare you toy with Klandor!”

  The Klingon went on like this for some time. All emotional and egotistic, Spock says, but it gave him time to think. “King Klandor,” Spock says with great solemnity, “I perceive we are engaging in combat under false pretenses.”

  “Any opportunity to kill a Vulcan or their pet dogs, the Earthmen, is a welcome opportunity,” the Klingon said.

  “Even if it makes a fool of you?” Spock asked, and the Klingon roared and was about to attack again. The landscape shifted again and a crevass appeared between them, then began to reverse itself and fill in, the square gray columns rising. As the Klingon waited, he apparently thought. They are a crafty lot, the Klingons, and suspicious. They see treachery everywhere, the galaxy is against them. But their egos are so big it makes them vulnerable.

  “No one makes a fool of King Klandor!” the Klingon bellowed.

  “This creature is making a fool of us both,” Spock said. “It assumes the form of an angel, a creature of myth, a religious icon, to confuse us. We are pawns for its pleasure.”

  The Klingon growled and stared hotly at the angel. The white wings fluttered and folded and darkened as they looked. The pale skin reddened, a pointed tail grew, horns grew, and before their eyes it became a traditional devil, with pointed ears and slanted eyes like a Vulcan … and like a Klingon, too, for that matter.

  The devil laughed. “I am everything, everyone, every race. I am Good and Evil and whatever I wish.” Then it changed, each form flowing into the next, a devil, to a likeness of a mature Klingon, to a Romulan, to something shapeless and green with weaving tentacles to a winged Pegasus to a human female to an Andorian Alpha to Captain Kirk to Kang, one of the Klingon leaders.

  “What are you?” Klandor yelled. Spock said the Klingon was afraid, but had courage in defying whatever it was.

  “I am your mind, Klingon, and you, Vulcan. I am your deepest thoughts, the creature from you reptile brains, the thing that crawled from the warm salt oceans. I am Fear, I am Death.”

  “You are a child,” Spock said. “You are none of those things. You are Ego. You toy with those of lesser powers like a cat with a mouse. You are a bully.”

  The creature grew larger, looming over them, a dark horned and clawed creature neither could identify. The Klingon caught on fast. “Yes, you are a nest warden, petty and tyrannical, a poor substitute for a clan leader!”

  Spock drilled in hard. “A petty tyrant who bullies children! An illogical creature who fears the world of logical adults!”

  The creature changed again—to a Terran bull, a Vegan wart-worm, a giant scorpion-analog, a Vulcan legged snake, an ogre from children’s fantasies. But both the Klingon and Spock stood against it, whipping it into a frenzy with their biting comments and insults.

  The creature fired bolts of lightning off into the boiling skies. The gray plain rippled and cracked. Impossible spires shot into the sky and deep crevasses split the surface. The sleek, crisp edges of the square columns crumbled and rotted, revealing a dull black interior, whi
ch boiled and writhed.

  “Bully!” shouted Spock. “Egotistical and immature!”

  The Klingon shouted insults in Klingonese, and the creature shrank.

  It reversed itself, back through all the personas it had assumed, back through the white-winged angel, back through humanoid and alien shapes, shrinking, dissolving. The gray plain, too, changed, back to the neutral limbo, back to a shabby, ill-defined surface, an asteroid world with foul-smelling air.

  Then the creature stopped changing. It was a small creature, weak-limbed and pale, with a large head and large, dark eyes.

  “Send us back,” the Klingon demanded.

  “You’re no fun,” the creature said.

  “Pick on someone your own size!” the Klingon snarled.

  “There is no one my size!” the creature said petulantly.

  But Spock was still curious. That was our Spock, Foster, eternally curious. Spock said, “What is your name?” The thing did not respond. “From what planet, what race?”

  “No. You’ll tell on me.”

  “Send us back!” roared the Klingon. “I have Earthmen to kill!”

  “Oh, very well. But you’ll never find me. You’ll never punish me!” The creature disappeared then. Just poof! gone. Then the Klingon just went away, and Spock, too, and they found themselves arriving on the Enterprise, on the transporter deck. And Spock recovered first, knocking out the Klingons with his Vulcan nerve pinch before any of them knew what was happening.

  What happened then? Well, lad, we put the Klingons back on Alva, but we had to build a prison for them. Sooner or later a Klingon ship would come by and they’d be released.

  Now you ask, why had that Earth colony been so peaceful? It had been a trap. It had amused the angel—or whatever you want to call it—to control the life forms there. Perhaps it knew no others. When the warlike Klingons arrived, it saw an opportunity for entertainment.