Worlds in Collision (71 page)

Wilforth waved his hands at Spock. “Just a minute, Mr. Spock, this isn't making any sense. If the Talin governments officially denied the existence of these extraplanetary craft, why did they then upgrade their defenses?”

Spock asked for datachannel two hundred and ten. Scott brought it online. A geopolitical map of Talin IV appeared. Moments later, a flurry of hundreds of green dots flashed on and off across it.

“The dots represent major military outposts, airbases, space launch facilities, and nuclear power plants.” Spock reached across the console and pressed a switch. The green dots were almost overwhelmed by a second flurry of flashing red triangles. “The triangles represent sightings of the alien shuttles. As you see, they are almost exclusively centered on the military installations.”

Hammersmith joined Spock by the console. “Mr. Spock, there's nothing remarkable about trying to analyze military and industrial capability—no matter which Talin group was doing the analyzing.”

Spock pointed at the screen. “Look at the frequency of sightings, Vice Admiral. There are far too many of them to be accounted for by any need by Talin's nations to analyze each other's military strength. I submit that these alien craft were engaged in a systematic series of provocative sorties designed for one reason only—to heighten the fear of war on Talin and to make the military and political leaders of the planet arm themselves to the point where stability would no longer be possible.”

“Are you saying that
aliens
were attempting to start a war with Talin?” Hammersmith asked incredulously.

“Not
with
Talin,” Spock corrected. “But
on
Talin. Preliminary tapes collected by the FCO team indicate that the incursion into polar air space, which almost brought the Talin to war while the
Enterprise
deployed satellites, was the result of provocative overflights by one or more of these shuttles.”

Hammersmith shook his head. “This can't be right, Mr. Spock. It's impossible to—”

“You're wrong, Vice Admiral!” Kirk was up by Spock and Hammersmith now. “Whatever you think about the existence of any unidentified aliens, Spock is right in his conclusions. The data came from the Talin themselves. The data cannot be ignored. Someone was trying to get the Talin to destroy their own world.”

“Then the Prime Directive wasn't broken!” McCoy shouted. He joined Kirk and Spock. The three of them faced Hammersmith together though the vice admiral directed his gaze solely at McCoy. Knowing what he did about the two men's last meeting, Scott wasn't surprised.

“The doctor's right, Vice Admiral,” Kirk said. “The Prime Directive does not apply here. Talin IV's normal development had already been altered by the aliens' attempts to increase political and military tensions. It was right for the
Enterprise
to step in. The military exchanges on Talin were the result of extraplanetary interference. The Prime Directive compelled us to act as we did to prevent those exchanges!”

Hammersmith backed off, obviously shaken. “But to make an entire world blow itself up? Why, Kirk? What possible reason could there be to force a planet to destroy all life in a nuclear war?”

Spock reached for another switch on the console. “But not all life on Talin has been destroyed, Vice Admiral.”

A new image came up on the viewscreen. It was a realtime feed of the dayside of Talin IV, transmitted from one of the
Enterprise'
s sensor satellites. Scott bristled as he saw that the insulting caption—KIRK'S WORLD—was still displayed. Behind him, he heard the Talin ambassadors make a sound of anguish that needed no translation.

The choking clouds of dust and radioactive poison which had swept the world were almost gone now. But the destruction they had brought would scar the planet for centuries, if not millennia. The land masses were still streaked black and brown. The once-white polar ice caps were gray with soot from the worldwide firestorm that had raged for weeks after the disaster. The only sign of life remaining on the planet was in the oceans now choked with the deep purple algaelike organism that had mutated and bloomed in the days after the planet's death.

“What could possibly live down there?” Hammersmith asked in sorrow and anger.

“Mr. Cardinali,” Spock said, “cycle back in memory one month.”

The image of the world shifted as the viewscreen presented the earlier recording. The clouds were thicker, but the ravaged land and purple-stained oceans were unchanged.

“Another month back,” Spock said.

The image shifted. A brown-streaked hurricane battered the primary continent. Some patches of blue could be seen in the oceans among the purple, but more than half the planet was obscured by smoke and clouds.

“Two weeks after the incident,” Spock said.

Shift. The world was wrapped in a black pall. Through small breaks in the almost solid cloud cover, fires raged.

“Two days.”

The planet was hell.

“Mr. Cardinali, have the computer run through that day's recording, extracting all portions of the images that show what lies beneath the clouds to construct a composite picture of the land masses and the oceans as they appeared then.”

Cardinali typed in the commands. Slowly the clouds disappeared from the image of Talin as the computer assembled the clear areas from thousands of separate shots to create a master picture of the planet's surface. Walls of fire followed the coastlines where the cities had been clustered. Forests and farmlands blazed.

Then Scott thought the computer made an error as the oceans were reconstructed. The first section cleared showed that a mutated bloom of purple algae had already appeared. More of the oceans cleared. Scott saw another bloom. And another.

He felt his flesh creep as the rest of the planet appeared as it had been that day.
The algae blooms were studded across the oceans in a regular, geometric pattern.

“Good Lord,” McCoy whispered.

“No,” Hammersmith gasped.

“Exactly,” Spock said without inflection. “The algaelike organism which has taken over the entire ocean ecosystem of Talin IV is not a mutation brought on by radiation. It is an artificial life-form which is not native to Talin, and which was seeded on that planet quite deliberately. Just as the nuclear holocaust was deliberately induced to ensure that the world would be made…fertile for it.”

Scott was horrified by the atrocity that Spock had just described. He heard the Talin keen with high-pitched wails of sorrow as their translators told them what Spock had said.

McCoy's face was splotched red with anger. “Who would do such a thing, Spock?”

Spock calmly changed the display back to the pictures of the streamlined, pinch-waisted alien shuttles. “They would,” he said.

Kirk's face was grim and set. “But
who
are they, Spock?
Where
are they?”

“To answer that question, we will need help from two additional sources,” Spock said. He turned to Hammersmith. “The
Enterprise,
which will enable us to find the aliens…” He turned to face Richter. For the first time Scott noticed that the old man's face was drenched in sweat and pale with shock.

“…and you, Dr. Richter,” Spock concluded, “who have always known about them.”

McCoy felt the sudden pressue of Hammersmith's hand on his arm with anxious relief. He had known that this confrontation was coming and he was glad to get it over with.

“Could you wait in my office?” Hammersmith asked Kirk and Spock, who walked just ahead with Wilforth and Richter. “The doctor and I will be along in a moment.”

Kirk looked at McCoy, subtly asking if the doctor needed help, but McCoy shook his head. “I'll catch up, Jim.” Then he and Hammersmith waited as the other four disappeared around a corner in the corridor.

“Don't worry, Dr. McCoy,” Hammersmith said when they were alone. “I'm not going to ask you to apologize.”

Fat chance of that,
McCoy thought.

“Not that I'd expect you to, anyway,” Hammersmith added. “I just wanted to know what the hell it is you think you're doing here?”

McCoy could feel every muscle in his body tense with anger. “I'm here to do what you wouldn't let me do in the first place—get to the bottom of this mess.”

Hammersmith shook his head. “I didn't stop you from doing anything, Doctor.”

McCoy spoke hotly. “You transferred Spock and me to San Francisco. You wouldn't bring formal charges against us so we couldn't get a decent hearing. And—”

Hammersmith held up a single finger and McCoy instantly stopped talking. “Doctor, you
had
a decent hearing. Starfleet chose not to bring charges when it became apparent that Kirk was going to resign. And where else would you have wanted to transfer? Another starship patrolling on the other side of the Arm? Some starbase out on the frontier? You think you would have been able to do anything about Talin out there?”

McCoy stared at the vice admiral, not following what he was saying. “So what was I supposed to be able to do in San Francisco?”

“Dr. McCoy, I sent you and Mr. Spock back to Command, to the Council, and to the headquarters of most of the intersystem update bureaus. Don't you think that was one of the best places to do something about Talin? It certainly worked out for Mr. Spock.”

McCoy didn't want to believe what the vice admiral was hinting at. “Are you saying that you transferred us back to Earth
on purpose,
because we could do the most good there?”

Hammersmith's face went blank. “Of course not, Doctor. That wouldn't fall under my orders as commander of Starbase 29.”

McCoy felt even more puzzled.

“Look, Doctor,” Hammersmith said, lowering his voice, “I know why you slugged me back at the starbase. I know why you're feeling you'd like to do it again. And that's okay. I understand. It's because you've run out of things to say. And the only reason a person like you runs out of things to say is because you know that I'm right. And you don't like that one bit.”

“Now wait just a minute,” McCoy sputtered.

But Hammersmith cut him off. “No, sir, it's your turn to wait. I've already put in my years to get to this rank and I've got a few more levels to go. And the reason I've gone as far as I have is because this is what I want to do. This is how I give something back. But like I said, Doctor, I don't know what it is you're doing here.”

“I'm trying to set things right.”

“I don't mean here, on this moon. I mean why were you in Starfleet at all.” He held up his hand again to keep McCoy silent. “I checked your record, Doctor. You were a brilliant medical student. You could have gone anywhere and had success, wealth, whatever you wanted. But for some reason, you chose Starfleet, and then you chose a starship. And I happen to know what starship duty means for a doctor. Most of the time you don't know what to do because your only patients are probably among the fittest and healthiest humans since the dawn of time. And the rest of the time you're frantic with frustration because you're facing diseases and toxins that no one has ever seen before, or even dared imagine.”

McCoy didn't interrupt. He had to admit that Hammersmith wasn't far wrong. But he was damned if he knew what the vice admiral was driving at.

“Now, I know you try to make yourself out to be some sort of rebel with a pioneering spirit and that's one of the reasons you chose starship duty. But I've watched you with your friends, and I know you envy Mr. Spock for his clear-cut reasoning—no emotions to cloud the issues. And you envy Kirk's cut-to-the-heart, full-speed-ahead ability to just make a decision and make it stick. And I wonder what might happen if you let some of Kirk's spontaneity, or Spock's logic, out in yourself?”

Struck by the vice admiral's insight, McCoy tried to make his face as unreadable as Hammersmith's. But he hadn't had the practice the vice admiral had had.

Hammersmith zeroed in as he caught something in McCoy's eyes. “Or have you already tried it? Have you already done something—out of compassion, out of logic—and realized it was the worst decision you could have made?”

“I'm not in Starfleet anymore,” McCoy stated flatly. “I don't have to stand here and listen to this.”

Hammersmith shrugged. “I know you don't have to hear this, Doctor, because everything I've said…you already know.”

McCoy turned to follow the others.

Unperturbed, Hammersmith kept talking. “You know, Doctor, when we had our big argument at the starbase—with all of your objections, and your reasoning, and my counter objections and all of that—there were a couple of times there when I thought that maybe you had me and I had better work a lot harder in trying to convince you what was the best thing to do—for yourself as well as Starfleet.

“But when you finally stopped talking and hit me, that was the moment that I knew you'd lost—you'd given up.”

McCoy turned back to him and spoke angrily. “You didn't win anything. I quit.”

“I can see you've been spending too much time with Kirk, Doctor. I didn't say I had won. Sometimes, the point isn't to win. Sometimes the point is just not to lose. And I didn't lose. Starfleet procedures required you to be transferred, so I sent you where you could do the most good, if you were interested in doing it. But to tell the truth, I never expected to hear from you again.”

“I guess you don't understand me as well as you think you do, after all.” McCoy's words were clipped with sarcasm.

Hammersmith stopped beside McCoy. “I understand you better, Doctor, because Starfleet and the Federation are a lot like you. We've got humans on one side, Vulcans on the other, and we're stuck in the middle trying to make everything work. And though we might not win every fight, what I can tell you is that we are never, ever, going to lose.”

Hammersmith began walking down the corridor again. McCoy decided that meant the lecture was at last over.

But the vice admiral hadn't finished with him yet. “Oh, and Dr. McCoy, one last thing. I'm a very forgiving person, but if you ever try to hit me again, two things are going to happen.

“One, I'm going to have a new set of trophies for my office wall back at Starbase 29, and two, you're going to spend six months in a regen tube growing a new pair of lungs.” Hammersmith patted McCoy on the arm he had grabbed the doctor by. “I understand you, Doctor. This is just so you understand me.”

 

Spock understood why Zalan Wilforth was so agitated. It was not just that his First Contact assignment had apparently been fatally compromised from both within and without. It was the inner conflict of his two different halves that truly troubled the man. Spock could look at Wilforth and see how his suppressed human side wanted to scream and rage at Alonzo Richter for what the scientist had done. But Wilforth's other half—his Centauran heritage—struggled to avoid the confrontation altogether. The outpost's former director was trapped between wanting the wrong resolution or none at all. Spock tried to think of something he might say to Wilforth to help ease his turmoil, but he knew from experience that help like that could only come from within. Spock wished Wilforth peace and returned to observing Vice Admiral Hammersmith. The vice admiral was someone Spock thought he could handle.

Hammersmith sat behind what had once been Wilforth's desk in the director's complex. He leaned back in Wilforth's chair, reading the data that came up on the desk display. The vice admiral's body was completely relaxed, but Spock saw how his eyes moved rapidly to scan each screen of information, absorbing everything.

The datafile came to an end and Hammersmith turned to the others in the room. McCoy sat in a chair in the corner of the office, arms folded defensively. Kirk didn't move where he stood near the office's closed door. Richter slumped in his own chair, staring past his folded hands at the floor.

Hammersmith's tone was compassionate, though it hid a trace of anger. “When did you know about them, Dr. Richter?”

The scientist exhaled with a rattling sound from deep in his chest. “I suspected them…I
suspected
them, when I saw the first Richter Scale rating of Talin IV. That was maybe six or seven years ago.”

Hammersmith rubbed at an eyebrow. “How can a Richter Scale of Culture rating indicate the presence of alien observers?”

Richter looked up defiantly. His eyes were red rimmed, his lips moist, his skin sallow. “I
invented
the thing. I know how to read it.” He tapped his cane on the floor once, but only weakly. “What you people don't understand is that life is the same no matter where it comes from. It has different colors, different forms, different chemistry, but what drives it is the same.” He looked at Spock. “Even Vulcans have the same drives and needs and emotions. They just have better discipline than most.”

The vice admiral tried to remain polite, despite the pressure Spock knew he was under. “What point are you trying to make, Doctor?”

“It's so predictable, life is. The development of culture, of civilization, I wrote an equation about it. It makes the Richter Scale work. And the Talin didn't
fit
the equation.”

“How?”

Richter coughed. From the sound, Spock noted that the congestion in the man's lungs had increased since their trip from Earth. “If you had twenty years, I could teach you. If I had twenty years…Listen, the Talin culture was just like a thousand others—but for their level of understanding about the universe, for their technological achievements, they thought too much about the stars. They wanted to get to them too badly. Much more than most races do at their stage.”

“I still don't understand, Dr. Richter,” Hammersmith said.

“They saw something. They knew there was something more beyond their planet. It was like a transtator current through their entire culture—their literature, their art. And that desperation to leave their planet when their technology still wasn't ready—that skewed their entire Richter Rating.” He tried to tap his cane again for emphasis but almost lost his grip on it instead. “This isn't just me blathering. Other people saw the problem with the rating, too. That's why Starfleet called me to consult. That's why they ended up bringing me out here. Everyone saw the problem, but I was the only one who knew why it was there.”

Spock glanced at Kirk. He showed remarkable patience. Spock had no doubt that if another, younger, scientist were being questioned here, Kirk would be asking questions faster than anyone could follow.

Hammersmith persisted. “Why didn't you tell Starfleet what you suspected?”

Richter mumbled something to the floor.

“I beg your pardon, Doctor?”

“The Prime Directive,” Richter snapped. “The bloody damn Prime Directive, that's why.”

Hammersmith shifted in his chair, brows knitted. “Let me get this straight.
You
didn't want to interfere?”

“No! Of course I wanted to interfere. I hate the Directive. It slows everything down so much. It keeps secrets from us. Hobbles our research. Impedes…” He broke into a fit of coughing. McCoy was up instantly, holding a small medical scanner over the man's back. Before Richter could recover enough to push him away, McCoy had held a spray hypo to the scientist's arm.

Richter took in a deep breath. His congestion was noticeably lessened. “But what could I do about it?” he continued irritably, waving McCoy aside. “One scientist among many here. And all so dedicated to noninterference—to just standing back and doing
nothing.”

This time he managed to keep his grip on his cane as he rapped it against the floor. “But the others—the aliens—
were
interfering. I didn't know why. I wasn't sure how. But that wasn't important. The Talin saw them, talked about them, tried to hunt them down. I thought that if I kept what I suspected a secret, kept the controversy over their Richter rating going, then someday the Talin would succeed. They'd capture one of the aliens' ships. Or one of our own Wraiths.”

“You wanted that to happen?” the vice admiral asked accusingly.

“Yes,” Richter said. “Because then the Talin would know for certain that there were other civilizations in the galaxy. And that would mean, according to the Federation's own rules, it would be time for their ‘normal' development to be at an end. The Prime Directive would cease to apply and we could finally talk to them. Learn from them. Know so much more.” Richter closed his eyes. Spock could see tears of frustration well up in them. “You people just don't understand how much there is to know. How little time there is to find it all out.” He covered his face with his hands.