Strangers From the Sky (31 page)

“Says you!” he snarled, coming as close to the armed Racher as he dared, glaring into those unblinking metal eyes. “Think yer God, do yer?”

Aghan rolled his eyes at Red, who ignored him. Their leader was hell-bent on prolonging their stay in the cold with this show of bully-boy arrogance; better to be snug inside the plush, well-heated snowmobiles, gift of an arms dealer experiencing some lean times since Colonel Green’s demise and looking for fresh territory.

“Yer don’t give me orders!” Easter growled, scuffing his feet against the ice when Racher did not deign to respond. “Hear me?”

“Together we are too visible,” Racher stated flatly. “You wish to be captured? Perhaps you do not trust me? Or perhaps you are afraid?”

This earned him a string of curses which he dismissed with an indifferent shrug; even his shoulder joints had a metallic sound. He fondled his small laser rifle and glanced over his shoulder at his troops, who smirked in unison at their leader’s cool.

“You are finished?” Racher asked when it looked like Easter had run out of spit. “We split up.”

Easter cursed a final time, motioned his lot into their two snowmobiles, though not before Aghan decided to take some target practice at a flock of penguins.

He aimed his automatic and let off a full clip, laughing manically at the splatter of blood and guts and feathers and the prodigality of noise rolling flat out over the ice with nothing to rebound it.

“Lookit, Easter, look!” He danced in delight. “I got me a whole bunch of spacemen!”

Racher spat on the ice. “
Verrückter!
”

His troops in their snowmobiles soon vanished over the horizon, far from already gelid splash of innocent blood, across a landscape of white on white.

White lather foamed in pleasing soft billows against the sides of the shaving mug as Spock stirred it with the badger-hair brush. The brush had given him pause the first time Jeremy Grayson asked him to assist an old man with shaking hands in the ritual of shaving, but Spock considered finally that the badger might not have minded overmuch the honor of offering its small life in service to a fellow creature who had done as much good as Grayson.

“Hate to put you through this rigamarole, Ben,” Grayson said as Spock, expertly now, stroked the lather onto his weathered face and began to ply the razor. “I’m probably the last man on Earth who cherishes an old-fashioned barbershop shave. Consider it a point of vanity. I like to look my best even if no one can see me. Does that make sense?”

“Of course, Professor,” Spock replied. One of such age was permitted his own illogic. “And the ‘rigamarole’ does not inconvenience me.”

Rather, it is something of an honor, Grandfather.

They were in the kitchen again—Jeremy Grayson seemed to live in the kitchen, except when he had visitors—and the vidscreen was just coming up for the early morning news, Grayson’s way of “keeping a finger on the pulse of mayhem” as he put it.

“I’ve decided it may be safe for me to pass on soon,” he remarked, watching the screen with the volume down as Spock trimmed his sideburns. “I do believe we’ve finally gotten over the need to kill each other on a global scale. I’ll leave the minor skirmishes to the younger generation. Lord, I do get tired sometimes! Though I may stay around to learn if the
Icarus
mission finds anyone on Alpha Centauri.”

Spock wiped the remaining lather off the professor’s face in silence. Grayson was scowling at the vidscreen.

“Turn that up a bit, would you, Ben? Your ears are obviously better than mine. This looks like something that may need our attention.”

Together they listened to several of the saner versions of the space-aliens story.

“Well, what do you think of that?” Grayson mused.

“Possibly a hoax?” Spock wondered aloud, his mind awhirl with permutations and calculations, none of which made much sense in the abstract. If the stories were true, if there were in fact aliens present on Earth, might their presence be connected with his untimely arrival?

“Maybe, maybe not,” Grayson said, pulling himself to his feet and groping for his cane. “But if it’s anything like the truth, I have a fair idea the next thing I may have to ask you to do is help me pack a suitcase.”

As if by some prearranged signal, the commphone began to beep. Grayson looked at Spock, eyes twinkling beneath their tangled brows. He switched the vidscreen from news to the commphone. Within moments he was conversing with a former student, now head of the Peace Institute in Stockholm.

Shortly Spock would indeed be helping him pack a suitcase.

“Oh, Sally?”

For a sinking moment Kirk thought Elizabeth Dehner would fail to respond to her cover name, but it was only his tone of voice that made her hesitate—a particular tone in the male voice she was too accustomed to ignoring in her role as Elizabeth Dehner. But training got the better of reflex, and she turned to find Jim Kirk standing in the doorway of his cabin, smiling his charming-as-ever smile and crooking his finger at her. When she approached, he grabbed her, pulled her inside, and shut the door.

“Captain, what the hell…?”

“‘Colonel,’ if you must call me something. As you were, doctor.” Kirk dropped the act immediately, became all business. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Unlike Mitchell, I’m concerned with a different sort of—diversionary action.”

Dehner seemed visibly relieved. “Sorry.”

Kirk dismissed it. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.

“I want you to do whatever you can to remain here when the others leave,” he instructed her. “Up to and including faking an affair with me as a reasonable excuse. We can’t take the risk of their moving you somewhere where we can’t find you.”

Dehner relaxed, sat on Kirk’s narrow bunk. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

“How much do you know about this ‘wiping’ process?”

“Mandatory reading for any history-of-med course,” Dehner replied. “Mostly the administering of large doses of meperidine and the neo-dopamines combined with selective hypnosis. Banned during the Mind Control Riots. It’s crude by our standards, but effective.”

“Could you do it if you had to?” Kirk wanted to know.

Dehner thought about it. “Theoretically, given the right drugs. But I’m not sure if I’d want to—morally, I mean.”

Kirk sat beside her on the bunk. “If it meant the difference between this—mess we’re in now—and getting history back on course, could you? Morally?”

“I think so,” Dehner said after a long moment.

“Good!” Kirk patted her knee fraternally, was on his feet to check the door and the corridor beyond. Satisfied that no one could overhear them, he shut the door and stood with his back to it. “As nerve-racking as all this is, it’s working in our favor. The government will make sure everyone who leaves retains no memory of what happened here. That leaves only the people aboard that ship. And you and I, doctor, are going to get aboard that ship.”

He told her about his encounter with the pacifists and how he’d managed to contact their Professor Grayson via Stockholm. The pacifists’ wingboat had lifted off less than an hour before.

“If Grayson turns up, he’ll be one extra factor we’ll have to consider,” Kirk said grimly. “But I understand he’s an old man, and not well. He might not show. We may get lucky. What about the other medical personnel?”

Dehner smiled her wry smile. “They couldn’t wait to get out of here. I think they were looking forward to being ‘wiped.’ Being confronted with anything so different was frightening to them.”

“‘So different,’” Kirk repeated. “Wonder how they’d cope with some of the
really
different types we’ve encountered. We forget how parochial we were in these times.”

In these times? Dehner thought, but said nothing. Kirk was already off on another tangent.

“You all have had to file reports.”

“Right,” Dehner confirmed. “They’re stored in the computer system down the hall. It’s an antique even by today’s standards. Took us half a day to figure out how to store things instead of dumping them.”

“That’s useful,” Kirk said, suddenly animated. “See if you can get back into the computer room. Sweet-talk the guards, do whatever you have to. Get into the system and dump whatever you can—your reports, the other medics’, anything the other civilian personnel might have entered.”

“Is that all?” Dehner asked dryly, already on her feet. “Where will you be?”

“Right here,” Kirk promised. “At least until morning. Mitchell hasn’t reported in for two days. He may just be moving around, or he could be in trouble.”

Watching the Ivory Coast slip rapidly by to his left, Comrade Engineer Jerzy Miklovcik tried not to grin as the captain of the speedcruiser grunted and handed him back his departure orders.

“Beats me why they have to divert an entire ship to transport one engineer to the ends of the Earth,” she growled. “What the hell you going to be doing in Antarctica anyway?”

“Building igloos,” Gary Mitchell joked in his best Polish accent. “Ours not to question why—correct, Captain?”

She gave him a sour look and went below. Mitchell stood at the rail with the wind ruffling his close-cropped hair and hoped he’d be in time.

Jim Kirk had told him to stay put in Gdansk unless and until he ordered him to come to Byrd. Mitchell was acting against orders, acting on an internal order—an absolute psychic certainty that Jim Kirk would need him soon, if he didn’t already. Mitchell had had such flashes of insight with uncanny regularity all his adult life; they rarely misled him. He hoped he was wrong this time, hoped he’d get to Kirk in time to earn a reprimand for disregarding orders over something as harebrained as a “feeling.” But, better safe.

Besides, considering what Parneb had told him to look for in the Western Desert on his way here, Jim Kirk should be pleased to see him no matter what.

“Lee’s gone to ground and I can’t take the time to look for him,” Mitchell had told the sorcerer, popping in on him unexpectedly, if it were possible to do that with a true psychic. “It doesn’t feel right to me, but right now I’ve got to get to Jim. I figured if you wanted something useful to do…”

“I too have been searching for Mr. Kelso since his last transmission,” Parneb announced in an injured tone. “As I continue to search for your Vulcan companion.”

“Yeah, well, you keep at it,” Mitchell advised, not expecting results on either search, but it kept Parneb out of further mischief. “See you around. I’ve got a ship to commandeer.”

“Mr. Mitchell.” Parneb pulled himself up to his full height in an attempt at hauteur; in such a comic-opera figure it was hopeless. “There will never be any love lost between us; I can appreciate that. But there is a larger consideration here, which is why I will tell you one thing: if you chance to be passing over the Western Desert in your travels, you might wish to observe from your window what appears to be an abandoned petrol refinery. It is in fact an installation left over from the Third War…”

Flying over the neatly disguised half-ruined silos in the special AeroNav plane reserved for transporting high-level personnel, and using the on-board computer to cross-reference certain files he’d left open in Gdansk, Gary Mitchell wondered if Parneb was a total bungler after all.

A sudden blizzard waylaid Easter’s band less than a hundred kilometers from where they’d started, bringing both snowmobiles to a standstill. Worse, one of them had developed a fuel leak, the result of a stray shot from Aghan’s penguin massacre.

“Must have ricocheted and hit the tank,” Aghan offered, as if it were nothing.

Even if they siphoned some fuel from the second mobile there might not be enough, and there was no way all five of them, with their weapons, could travel in a single vehicle. Easter sat at the controls and cursed himself hoarse. Red, disgusted, kicked the hatch open and braved the flailing ice storm to huddle in with Noir and Kaze, while Aghan shrugged and went to sleep, oblivious to the rage of his leader and the wind outside.

Meanwhile, Racher’s dozen, unstopped by either storm or stupidity, continued on their deadly way.

“You look unwell, Professor,” Spock observed, pausing in his task. “Perhaps if I could accompany you…”

“Accompany me?” Grayson wheezed, breathless from the preparations and perhaps something more. “Lord, Ben, I almost wish you could go in my place!”

He sat on the bed beside his single battered suitcase as Spock packed it for him in his purposeful, methodical way.

“Quite seriously,” Grayson said. “I’d take you if I could. Even send you alone. I don’t know what it is about you—maybe it’s nothing more than the way you look a person in the eye when he talks to you—but I believe I could trust you with my life. Or any number of lives, for that matter.”

There was no logical response to such an accolade. Spock’s hands continued their work, folding sweaters and shirts and extra handkerchiefs, while his eyes met his ancestor’s blue-eyed gaze in their characteristic steady way.

“But there’s a strong chance they’ll turn
me
back at the borders,” Grayson went on. His breathing was labored, as Spock had never heard it before. “I’m sorry, but I can’t risk antagonizing them. They’ll have to make their best use of one old man, that’s all.”

Spock had heard the report from Stockholm, and Grayson had added his knowledge to the journalese still pouring from the vidscreen on the topic. Extrapolating from these scant facts and his knowledge of the time and place and of Vulcan scoutcraft procedure, Spock had come to the disquieting conclusion that the aliens in question were in fact Vulcans.

Their untimely presence must be linked to his own, to the disappearance of his crewmates, to the distortion of present history. Ironic that it was to be his ancestor who attempted to set things right, while he could only stand helplessly by. But if Grayson failed…

“Professor, if I may ask”—Spock closed the suitcase, set it near the bedroom door preparatory to bringing it downstairs—“if these are indeed beings from another world, what can be done about them?”