Strangers From the Sky (24 page)

“No need to imagine, gents.” Mitchell switched off the vid, laconic as usual, but with a touch of cynicism. “Just tune in to the news for ten minutes on any given day. Border squabbles, unsettled reparations still outstanding from Colonel Green’s war, terrorist factions. All this on a supposedly United Earth. I wouldn’t give two lonely Vulcans a snowball’s chance.”

“And if anything had gone wrong, if anything goes wrong—” Kirk stopped himself, realizing he had begun to slip back and forth in time as Parneb did. “If any harm comes to those two Vulcans, there might be no Federation. No Starfleet, no
Enterprise
—”

“And no Spock,” Mitchell chimed in.

No!
Kirk thought.

No!

Admiral James T. Kirk thrashed about, flailing his arms, catching Spock on the jaw. Ordinarily so minor an annoyance need not disrupt the meld, but Jim Kirk’s mind was flailing too, searching in vain for what was in fact at hand, hurling Spock backward out of the meld—

To where McCoy steadied him, gripping his arm.

“Enough, Spock, enough! Bring him up and leave off. It’s too much for him!”

Spock oriented himself, shrugged McCoy off; his concern was elsewhere. Seldom was Kirk’s force of will powerful enough to break the meld, yet that was apparently what had happened. Jim Kirk curled near-fetal in the deepest recesses of his chair, lost somewhere between now and memory, reliving who knew what nightmare in his mind. Spock touched him.

“Jim?”

Kirk flinched, shuddered, groped unseeing.

“Spock?…Spock!”

The voice was a child’s voice, lost and alone. Spock focused all his will on bringing Jim Kirk home.

“Jim, I am here. Be with me!”

“Spock?” Kirk’s vision cleared, his face lighted. “Spock, you
are
here!”

“Yes, Jim.”

Slowly Kirk uncurled himself, aware of McCoy’s hovering.

“I’m all right!” he insisted, drawing on all his dignity, lurching to his feet and straightening his clothes. “Spock, did I hurt you?”

“Of course not.”

Kirk nodded, uneasy with the concern in his companions’ eyes. What the hell had happened?

“Take Five!” he suggested, trying to make light of it.

He was no sooner out of the room than McCoy was rummaging for a hypo.

“It’s happening too fast, Spock. Let me give him something so he can rest awhile.”

Spock gripped McCoy’s wrist, intercepting the hypo. “Doctor, we have scarcely begun. And there is very little time.”

“Dammit, Spock, it’s dangerous to keep pushing him like this! Maybe you can keep up this relentless pace, but I won’t let you overtax Jim!”

“Do you think it does not tax me as well, doctor?” Spock asked softly, reasonably.

Only then did McCoy trouble to notice how haggard he looked; this thing was draining him as well.

“Thought you Vulcans were supposed to be indestructible!” he growled.

“Would that we were,” Spock said sincerely. “But we are not.”

“All the more reason why you ought to take it easy!” McCoy argued. “If you fold on me, what the hell am I supposed to do? Go back to Krista and say, ‘Sorry, I lost them both’? You’d better make damn certain you strike a balance here between what you’re searching for and how much you’re willing to expend for it.”

“We know what we’re searching for,” Kirk said, coming back from the bathroom looking, not refreshed, but at least ready for the next round. “And essentially we’ve found it. But Galarrwuy said something about being certain our reality conforms to history and not to dream. We haven’t begun to find out why there’s such a divergence, and I for one won’t rest easy until we drop the other shoe. Whether we were pulled back through history by design or merely blunder, we somehow altered its course. I can’t rest until I know whether what we did was, to use your expression, for weal or for woe. Spock?”

“If you are asking my opinion,” the Vulcan said mildly. “It concurs with yours.”

Jim Kirk smiled. “I thought it might. Insatiable curiosity is a trait common to both our species. What I was asking for was your consent to continue the meld, now. Unless you agree with the good doctor that we should rest first…”

The Vulcan raised an eyebrow. His tone was dry. “Would you be content to rest in nonexistence?”

Kirk took his point. “Which is essentially where we’ve left you, isn’t it, old friend? Well, can’t have you missing in action too long. Lord knows what sort of mischief you might get into.”

“Jim, there’s enough on that tape right now to convince the shrinks,” McCoy blustered. “Let it go at that. Quit trying to be a hero!”

“I’m not!” Kirk snapped irritably, protesting too much. Was it heroism or pig-headedness that drove him on? “I’m trying to find answers! The tape solves our immediate problem, but it doesn’t answer to history. And we have an obligation to answer to history.”

“Even if it pushes you over some kind of edge where I might not be able to—”

“Bones, that’s what you’re here for—to keep us from going over the edge. But you’ve got to trust us to know our own limits, too.”

McCoy glowered, fiddled with the tricorder, outflanked as usual. “Goddammit—”

“Come on, Bones,” Kirk wheedled. “Double or nothing. We have to know.”

Taking the doctor’s silence for assent, Jim Kirk readied himself for a return to the meld.

“‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends…’” he said, unable to resist.

Muttering to himself, McCoy turned the tricorder back on.

“Spock’s half human,” Mitchell explained for Parneb’s benefit. “If Earth and Vulcan never get together…”

The information brought the conjurer violently alive.

“I did not realize!” he cried, jumping to his feet, wringing his hands. “Oh, dear! Oh, impossible! I am admittedly a bungler, but I will not be a murderer as well!”

When Kirk grabbed him this time, he did not turn to cobwebs and disappear, but instead went limp and began to whimper.

“I never intended…all my fault…” he babbled.

“Pull yourself together!” Kirk ordered him, gripping his shoulders and shaking him. “You’ve got to help us! You’re our only connection with this century. You’ve got to help us get to the Vulcans before it’s too late—hide them, get them off the planet if possible, if we have to build a ship with our bare hands…”

Elizabeth Dehner, awakened by the uproar, sat yawning on her couch, beginning to understand why this man was a born leader. Gary Mitchell hauled a sleepy Kelso to his feet.

“Polish your Scout knife, Lee. Jim’s leading us into the deep woods again.”

Spock, meanwhile, far from nonexistent for all Parneb’s concern, was visiting family in Boston.

P
ARNEB HAD BEEN
correct in one thing: his was a skill founded not on science, but upon the shifting sands of sorcery. His only too-fallible psychic ability, running counterclock and imprecisely at the best of times, augmented by the not-quite-understood power of an amorphous uncut alien crystal, was prone to error.

And as every jeweler knows, the most perfect of crystals possesses its hidden flaws. One perfect plane of Parneb’s stone had brought four human wayfarers to his bosom in the nick of time. The minuscule asymmetry of another had cast their Vulcan comrade ashore simultaneously, but half a world away.

Unlike his crewmates in their Egyptian crypt, Spock had the advantage of coming to himself beneath a clear night sky. There was no disputing the logic of the stars, which stated unequivocally that the world they overarched was Earth. The logic of where was clear at once. The logic of how and why was irreducible under present circumstances. The logic of when was a function of the latter two and, on the whole, the least credible even upon proof.

What was to any Vulcan’s disadvantage, Spock acknowledged at once, emptying brackish water out of his boots and his now totally useless communicator, was to find oneself in the middle of a frost-rimmed New England salt marsh during the Northern Hemisphere’s quixotic autumn.

Vulcans, as a rule, do not subscribe to something as immeasurable as serendipity, and Garamet Jen-Saunor would not coin her phrase about coincidence for another two centuries. Yet there was no logical explanation for whatever placed Spock within a night’s walk—at least at a Vulcan’s measured, untiring pace—of one of the few places on Earth he would recognize even in a prior century.

He had not examined this world extensively during his years as a cadet, preferring the self-contained intellectual cloister of the Sciences Division of Starfleet Academy. Not until he was science officer aboard Chris Pike’s
Enterprise
had he taken rare advantage of some leave time to place himself “on loan” to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for participation in a botany project requiring the services of a Class A-7 computer expert.

In addition, he had visited the Boston Museum. And Boston had a significance to his family history shared by no other of his species. One of his mother’s ancestors had made his home here in his last years. Among the many threads of oral history woven into the colorful fabric of the child Spock’s memory was the tale of Professor Jeremy Grayson.

“He was my great-great-great-grandfather,” Amanda had told her son, cherishing that small, somber, eager face turned up toward hers like a flower to the sun, craving knowledge as if it were life itself. Amanda had had to explain the periods of human generations to a child of so long-lived a species, as well as the vagueness of human genealogy as compared to the complexity of the Vulcan. Spock had listened, rapt and silent as always when an elder spoke, but most especially with his mother. “Jeremy Grayson was in a sense our first ancestor, because he is as far back as we can trace the line. Records were lost on Earth during the wars, and people with the same last name need not have been related. He was a remarkable man, an unshakable pacifist. He survived Khan’s war, was responsible for saving countless refugees, was imprisoned and tortured. When he was very old he lived quietly in an old frame house in Boston. People came to him from everywhere, seeking him out through some underground network—strays and vagabonds, poets and pacifists, philosophers and dreamers. They were rewarded with a hot meal, clean sheets, and no questions asked….”

Professor Grayson’s house had not been Spock’s original destination. Had he been
when
he thought himself to be as well as
where
, the logical course would have been to report immediately to Starfleet and wait for them to provide transportation. A touch of the door chime of the first household encountered beyond the salt marsh in Earth’s virtually crime-free twenty-third century would have earned him instant access, the use of the householder’s private comm screen, and an automated aircar dispatched from Comm Central to whisk him to the Admiralty to report on his misadventure, no matter how improbable.

But Spock’s awareness that all was not as it should be began a scant few meters beyond the salt marsh, and was reinforced by everything he observed before retreating from the major highway he had chosen as his original path to seek shelter from human eyes in the shadows of off road trees. The scarcity of dwellings, the uniform antiquity of the vehicles that passed him, the strains of two-century-old pop music Dopplering from them in their haste, the absence of the weather shields erected over most of this inhospitably cold, damp, rainy, humid, muggy corner of Earth during his century confirmed the improbable. The discarded small-town newspaper with the day’s date blown across his path as he skirted the hamlet where it was still run off on hundred-year-old presses was unnecessary.

Spock evaluated his situation, and acted in the only logical manner open to him. Foremost, he must conceal himself from a world that did not yet know of his existence; then he must consider what, if anything, to do next.

He secreted the communicator in one of his boots for possible later use, detached the Starfleet insignia from his gold uniform tunic and buried it in the soil beneath a drift of leaves, tore a strip from the hem of that tunic to bind around his brow and conceal his problematical ears. With a Vulcan’s innate time sense and unerring sense of direction he triangulated off the stars, and set out for Boston by the least populated route.

He covered the distance in half the time a human might, though the chill in the air lessened his efficiency. A roadside phone of a kind he recognized from some museum or other provided free access, with a little judicious tampering, to an electronic directory that yielded an address not far from the places Spock had known in another time.

Boston proper was waking to a brisk October morning when a chilled-to-the-bone stranger trod a mossy brick walk between overgrown privet hedges and touched an antique brass knocker whose nameplate bore the simple legend: Grayson.

Spock possessed no physical description of his ancestor, expected perhaps a wizened, enfeebled old man, shrunk into the shell of his former self as humans tended to be in old age. The human who answered his knock was nothing like this. He was powerfully built, much as Sarek was, and in fact taller in a shambling, stoop-shouldered way. Spock found he must look up to meet the eyes beneath tangled thickets of eyebrows in that craggy face, and those eyes were the pellucid blue of Amanda’s.

“Yes?” the human inquired not unkindly, in a voice that by reason of its resonance might have originated somewhere in the vicinity of his toes. His heavy eyebrows were raised whimsically. “What can I do you for?”

“Professor Grayson?” Spock began tentatively, wondering what those clear blue eyes made of the alien apparition on his doorstep. “I do not wish to intrude, but I have been told you offer assistance to those in need…”

“Of course, son, of course!” Grayson said at once, offering a stranger access to his hearth and home with a sweeping gesture. “You certainly look like you could use a square meal, and you’re hardly dressed for the weather. Come in!”

Only Grayson’s walk betrayed his age, or some misfortune suffered long before age; he leaned heavily on a stout oak cane and shuffled painfully, listing precariously to one side.

(“His legs were crushed during his imprisonment and never healed properly,” Amanda had said. “When he was released, there were several attempts at corrective surgery, but one leg remained shorter than the other, and as he grew older…”)

Spock, following his slow progress at a respectful distance down a long hall opening into several cosy, book-filled rooms leading to the kitchen, noted the small velvet skullcap Grayson wore on the back of his thinning gray hair and wondered at its significance. As if sensing that curious gaze on the back of his head, Grayson stopped, shifted the cane to his other hand, and felt for the object of that curiosity, removing it and looking at it as if he’d never seen it before.

“Senile dementia!” he chided himself. “I forgot to take it off. Don’t mind me, son; at my age the memory isn’t what it was. My wife passed away a year ago; the unveiling was yesterday. Afraid I’ve been sitting up feeling sorry for myself ever since.” He gestured Spock ahead of him into the warm, bright kitchen. “Come, sit down. I’ll make coffee.”

The clutter on the kitchen table suggested that considerable coffee had already been drunk there, no doubt by an old man alone and beset by memory. Spock recalled all that he knew of human mourning customs and wished he had not come here.

“I did not know,” he said simply. “Professor, I apologize for the intrusion. No doubt you wish to be alone at this time…”

“Probably the worst thing for me.” Grayson hooked his cane over the back of a chair and braced himself against the sink so he could clear away the dishes without having to move too much. As an afterthought he stuffed the
yarmulke
in his sweater pocket. “Lord knows, Dora and I had forty-two years together. Gratitude seems more appropriate to that than mourning. Doubtless there’s a Yiddish proverb for it; Dora would know, but I’m only an honorary Jew for having married her.” He fussed with the coffeepot, shook off his contemplative mood. “Well, son, what’s your pleasure? Bacon and eggs or something simpler?”

Spock sat at the kitchen table, though he had not intended to eat.

“I do not require sustenance, Professor. My need is only for shelter for a time. I will provide for myself in all other—”

“Nonsense!” Grayson would hear none of it. “You’ve got ‘trouble’ written all over your face, and trouble can’t afford to stand on ceremony. It is an interesting face, by the way. Love to know the ethnic mix that went into creating you!”

Indeed, Spock thought. Grayson seemed to take his silence for apprehension.

“Sorry, son. Sixty years in the refugee business, and you think I’d know enough not to ask nosy questions. Breakfast, then. Are there any dietary restrictions I should know about? Allergies, that kind of thing? My last customer was a Hindu poet who drove me nuts with straining at gnats, literally, but you—”

“I am vegetarian,” Spock stated simply, hoping it would not prove a difficulty.

“Ah!” Grayson nodded. “That’s easy. Some orange juice, a little old-fashioned oatmeal. I’m not the greatest cook, but I do well with the simple things.”

He puttered while Spock watched, fascinated by the literal mundanity of miracle. By no logic that he understood could he have expected to find himself in the presence of an ancestor several generations removed, and in such ordinary domestic circumstances.

“There are a few necessary questions,” Grayson said, dishing up oatmeal generous with raisins and cinnamon and joining his guest at the table with a great deal of shuffling and scraping of chairs. “I don’t need to know the specifics of why you’ve come here. If you got my name through any of my regular contacts, I can assume your difficulty falls into certain benign categories. But I do have to know this: you’re not running because you’ve killed someone, are you?”

“No, sir, I am not.”

“Didn’t think so.” Grayson nodded. “The other thing is, I’ll need a name for you. Doesn’t have to be your real name, but I can’t keep calling you ‘son,’ can I?”

In fact, you can, Spock thought. More legitimately than you will ever know! He considered what name he might give.

“I am called Spock,” he said at last. Truth might prove difficult, but it was logical.

“Do you have a first name, Mr. Spock, or can’t you tell me that?” Grayson asked, then interrupted himself before Spock could answer. “Spock—unusual name. There was a Spock in the last century—a pacifist long before it was fashionable, one of the forerunners of the United Earth movement, and considered a crackpot for his troubles. Dr. Benjamin Spock. You wouldn’t be related to him?” He took Spock’s silence as negation. “Didn’t think so. Lord, your generation probably doesn’t even know who he was.
Sic transit gloria mundi!
”

“
Sed magna est veritas, et praevalebit
,” Spock replied without thinking; it was Amanda who had taught him Latin. He regretted his words instantly; Grayson was staring at him, a spoonful of oatmeal poised halfway to his mouth.

“I didn’t think anyone knew Latin anymore,” he said, studying his guest anew. “You’re quite an enigma, Mr. Spock.” He put down the spoon and pounded the table suddenly, startling his guest. “But it’s not going to work!”

“Sir?” Spock’s apprehension was tangible this time. Was it possible Grayson had penetrated his crude disguise?

“This last-name business,” Grayson was saying. “‘Mr. Spock. Professor Grayson.’ No sir. You’re to call me Jeremy, understand? And I think I’ll call you Ben, in honor of my predecessor. Any problems with that?”

“You may call me whatever you wish, Professor,” Spock said formally. “But with all due respect, I cannot readily address one of your years in so informal a manner. Where I come from, the father image holds much meaning, and is worthy of great respect.”

Grayson shook his head, bemused, went back to his oatmeal.

“Wherever you come from, they sure know how to rear the next generation,” he said warmly. “Whatever suits you, Ben. I want you to feel as much at home as you can. Now eat that while it’s hot.”

In a terrorist bunker somewhere between Europe and Asia, a grubby hand yanked a translation out of a jury-rigged decoder.

“Wake Easter and tell him I got something,” the one named Aghan grunted, kicking his companion’s boot sole to get her attention. “Tell him I translated the Kiev bug. It’s about spacemen!”

“Tell him yourself!” she snarled. She had her weapons dismantled and the parts spread over the stained and sagging couch; he’d knocked the recharger out of her hand and she had to crawl under the furniture to retrieve it, pushing her stringy blond hair out of her face. “
Verfluchte
cockroach! Spacemen!”

“I’m telling you!” Aghan grinned manically. He was called Aghan because it meant “November” where he came from, because he’d been a part of the Twelve November Uprising and rumor had it he bathed only once a year in honor of the rebellion. “I been bugging Kiev and Posnan Newscenters for months. Everybody laughs at me. ‘Nothing ever happens in those backwaters,’ everybody says. Even Easter laughs. Now I got something to show him. It took me a day and a half to translate this, but I got something. Something we could sell to a lot of people. Spacemen landing in the ocean. That’s what the fat girl was telling Mariya Yevchenkova before she got cut off.”