Spock Messiah

CHAPTER ONE

Captain’s log. Stardate 6720.8.

This is our eighth day in orbit around the Class M planet, Kyros. Dr. McCoy has reported that initial trials of the telescan cephalic implants devised by Starfleet Cultural Survey Bureau have been generally successful. Though some survey team members complained of disorientation on first being linked with the Kyrosian minds, Dr. McCoy is confident that once each team member realizes he can consciously control the feelings of personality intrusion caused by the link, present complaints of feeling like two different people simultaneously will cease.

Successful completion of our mission on Kyros will mean the acceptance of the telescan implant as a routine survey tool.

Captain James T. Kirk, commanding the United Starship Enterprise, pressed his forefinger against a button on the log computer’s control panel, shutting it off.

He yawned and stretched. The survey team had been beamed down for its third day on Kyros early that morning while he was still asleep. His watch had been strictly routine and a bit boring. He was looking forward to a long drink, a good meal, and an hour or so of solitude before the debriefing later that evening when the survey team was beamed up for the night.

He leaned back in his thickly padded black command chair and gazed around the bridge of the great starship, nodding his approval of the quiet efficiency with which the bridge crew went about the complex and demanding business of running the Enterprise.

The bridge was a circular chamber located on the top deck of the huge, saucer-shaped, detachable primary hull. It began to his left with the main engineering console, currently manned by Lt. Comdr. Montgomery Scott, and continued around to the ship’s environmental control console, engineering sub-systems monitor station, the visual display monitor—a viewing screen which could show any part of the ship’s exterior, but which now showed cloud-wreathed Kyros turning in its orbit some sixteen hundred kilometers below—then on to the defense sub-systems monitor, defense and weapons console, navigation, main computer and science station, now manned by the second science officer, Lt. Comdr. Helman, and lastly communications, where Lt. Uhura, a lovely woman of Bantu descent, was setting up another scanning program for the normal light and infra-red cameras trained on Kyros.

Directly in front of Kirk was a double console containing the navigator’s station on the right and the helmsman’s on the left.

Kirk raised his brown eyes from the twin console and studied the view of Kyros on the visual monitor. As he watched the televised image, he heard the turbo-lift’s doors hiss open behind him.

Navigator Vitali and Helmsman Shaffer swiveled in their seats and nodded to the entering officers.

Kirk turned and waved a greeting at the approaching pair.

“Lieutenant Sulu…” began one.

“Ensign Chekov…” chimed in the other.

“… reporting for duty, sir,” they finished simultaneously.

Kirk smiled. “Carry on, gentlemen, and a good evening to you both.”

The two officers—Lt. Sulu, an Oriental of mixed ancestry but with Japanese predominating, born on Alpha Mensa Five; and Ensign Pavel Chekov, a terrestrial Russian with bushy black hair and a round, youthful face—took their seats at the combined console in front of the captain, as their off-duty counterparts stood and stretched luxuriously.

“A long watch, Ensign Shaffer?” Kirk asked the young man.

Shaffer nodded and said, “Aye, sir.” He gestured toward the image of Kyros on the monitor screen.

“The first few days aren’t too bad; a new planet’s always sort of interesting, but after a while it can be a drag.” The ensign quickly added, “… sir.”

“After the long run out here, just sitting with nothing to do is pleasant,” the female navigator said. “Some of the courses I had to plot were a little hairy. Opening up star routes in an uncharted sector of the galaxy can put wrinkles on a girl.”

“We were lucky, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. “Finding life in only the third system we visited was like throwing ten sevens in a row.”

“Well,” said Sulu, “a routine one-on and two-off schedule with no problems for three hundred parsecs is infinitely preferable to spending the rest of your life as, for instance, the plaything of a superpowerful alien juvenile delinquent.”

See: “The Squire of Gothos,” STAR TREK 2, Bantam Books, 1968

“Small chance of that happening here, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said with a chuckle. “The Kyrosians have a D+ rating on the Richter Cultural Scale, at least the city-dwelling lowlanders do. The hill clans are fairly primitive nomadic herdsmen, as far as we have determined. When Spock and the rest of the survey party beam up tonight, we should be able to fill in the blanks. But you can relax, Sulu; we’ve picked up enough to know that there’s nothing down there that’s a threat to the Enterprise.”

“In that case, sir,” Shaffer said, “Lieutenant Vitali and I are going to devote the first part of the evening to the pursuit of a thick pair of Terran beefsteaks.” Turning to the woman, he asked, “Care to chart a course in that direction, Navigator?”

As the pair stepped up a short flight of stairs to the upper part of the deck and entered the turbo-lift, Kirk gave the bridge a last quick glance.

“Everything seems to be in order,” Kirk said. “Mr. Sulu, you’ll take the con this watch.” He glanced to his left and saw Engineering Officer Scott stretching. “Ready to call it a day, Scotty?”

The big, bluff, red-haired Scotsman nodded and his relief, Lt. Leslie, slipped into the padded black swivel seat at the console.

“But, Captain,” Scott began in a thick burr, which somehow disappeared completely when he was under stress, “d’ye think it’s a gude idea to leave the Enterprise in the hands of sic a wee lad as Sulu?” He flicked his left eyelid at Kirk.

Kirk caught the wink, and fell in with the jovial feud between Scott and Sulu, which had been underway ever since a debate over the merits of hot saki, as opposed to Scotch.

“As helm officer,” Scott added lugubriously, “the bairn may be able to hold orbit—gie’en the proper supervision o’course—but the con, now; I think it’s a bit more o’ a load than those young shoulders can bear.”

Kirk gave a mock frown. “You’ve a good point there, Scotty.”

Sulu swung partway around in his seat to gaze in astonishment at the muscular captain who stood staring at him, hands on hips.

“But, if Chekov could just keep an eye on things…” Kirk went on. “How about it, Navigator? If Sulu should start pushing the wrong buttons and send the Enterprise out of orbit and into a nose dive, do you think you could show him how to get back?”

Chekov glanced at Sulu, then looked away. Helman snickered.

“I’ll do my best, Captain,” he said in a Russian accent so thick the last word sounded like “kyptin.”

“But would you straighten me out one more time… Do I push the green button for Up or the red one?”

“Don’t tell him, sir,” Scott said. “Let him find out the hard way.”

Laughing, the two officers turned and mounted the stairs to the raised deck, the engineering officer slightly ahead. As they were about to enter the turbo-lift, Chekov leaned forward, studying the screens on his console intently.

“Captain!”

Kirk swung around. “What is it, Mr. Chekov?”

“The scanners have picked up a radiation front coming toward us on course…” Chekov paused, did some fine tuning, then continued, “… on course 114, mark 31.”

“Intensity reading?” Kirk asked levelly.

“Intensity two at the moment, but a narrow scan indicates the beginning of a build-up.”

Kirk stepped briskly to the science console on the raised deck. “Mr. Helman, verify please,” he ordered, now all starship commander rather than bantering superior. As Helman bent over his instruments, Scott moved back to the engineering console and began to perform his own operations.

Moments later, Helman straightened up and said, “Something’s coming in, all right. How do you read, Mr. Scott?”

“I can verify Chekov’s readings, too, but there’s nae to worrie aboot. The hull shielding’s good to intensity twenty. If the front builds beyond that, we can put up the deflector screens. Except for a nova’s blast, they’ll stop anything long enou’ for us to leave the vicinity.”

“Mr. Helman, if you please,” Kirk said as he stepped to the science console. His strong fingers moved over the colored controls pressing and switching. He studied the results displayed in a small viewing screen.

“I thought so… Mr. Helman, do you see it?” Kirk asked the science officer. “I thought it looked a little odd.” Helman murmured agreement. Turning, Kirk said, “Mr. Sulu, tie the science scanners in with the navigation computer. I want a time factor on that.”

“Aye, sir,” the officer responded and turned with brisk attention to his console.

Kirk remained standing at the science station, but he could see Sulu’s slim fingers dance across the double board. Scott followed suit, running a parallel check.

Sulu suddenly let out a low whistle.

“Problem?” Kirk asked.

“Could be, sir. I’ll recheck,” Sulu replied.

“Ye don’t have to,” Scott said. “My readout checks with yours.” His thick, blunt fingers pressed several switches and a spectrographic image of Kyros’ sun appeared on the forward visual monitor blanking out the image of the planet.

Kirk looked at the picture and heard Scott mutter, ‘That dinna make sense.”

“Explain,” Kirk ordered. He glanced back at the screen as Scott began to talk.

“That radiation front shows a Doppler shift to the violet; a primary sign o’ a star gaein’ nova. But yon spectrograph shows Kyr as quiet an’ calm as a sleepin’ babe. It’s still a placid G5.”

“Are there any novae or supernovae in this quadrant?” Kirk asked Helman.

The science officer replied, frowning, “None detectable, sir. The only possible candidate is a blue Class B main sequence star about nine parsecs away, out of range of our longest range scanners. However, assuming it did blow thirty years ago, the front just reaching us now wouldn’t be much beyond point oh-oh-one because of the square of the distance and all.”

“It has me worried, too, Commander,” Kirk said, noting the frown. “If we don’t know where it is, we can’t be sure of which direction to run in order to avoid it.”

“To run, sir?” Uhura asked from the communications console.

“It’s a possibility right now, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. He turned back to study the peaceful spectrograph still on the monitor. “All right, gentlemen, keep after it I want to know as much about that front as we can learn in the shortest possible time. If you haven’t licked it by the time Spock and the others beam up, I’ll detail him to help you.” Kirk’s voice took on a small note of worry. “If he’s feeling up to it”

Uhura spoke up again, concern in her voice. “What’s wrong with Mr.. Spock?” Her deep respect for both the captain and the half-human first officer sometimes manifested itself in a maternal fashion.

“He’s been feeling the effects of his implant a little more strongly than the others on the survey detail, though he’s assured me he can control it,” Kirk replied. “If he’s still acting as strangely as he did the night before last, I’ll have to order McCoy to remove it. It seems that Mr. Speck’s dop is giving him a real migraine.”

“Dop?” Scott asked as he walked from the engineering console to the gap in the rail which ran around the inner edge of the upper deck. “What the divil is a dop?”

“Dop is from an old German word—doppleganger—meaning the ghostly double of a living person. Ensign George made it up,” Kirk replied.

He peered at the monitor screen a final time. “I’ll be in my quarters until the team is beamed up. Keep on that front and call me if there’s any change.” He turned to Scott. “Coming, Mr. Scott?”

Once in his cabin. Kirk lay down on his bunk. Behind him, and built into the bulkhead, was a cabinet. Kirk reached back, rolling over onto his stomach as he did so. From a small shelf of real books, rather than microtapes, he took a dog-eared copy of Xenophon’s Anabasis. He flopped onto his back, opened the book, and began to read for the hundredth time that ancient Greek’s account of being trapped in hostile territory a thousand miles from home, and of the months of battles, marches, and countermarches until, at long last, the small army of mercenaries arrived safely home. Unstated in the matter-of-fact account, but apparent behind the scenes, was the loneliness of command, the agonizing decisions that tune and again had saved the isolated band from certain destruction. Kirk approved of Xenophon. Born a few millennia later, that worthy would have made a brilliant starship commander.

The captain had just reached the point in the battle of Cunaxa where the Persian commander Cyrus was killed, when the intraship communicator bleeped.

“Kirk here.”

“Transporter Room One, Lieutenant Rogers, sir. Lieutenant Dawson requests permission to have Ensign George and Lieutenant Peters beamed up ahead of schedule. He says they’re both having dop trouble.”

“What kind?”

“The beggar Peters is linked with also picks pockets. Peters says that if he gets preoccupied and forgets to override his dop’s normal behavioral patterns, his hands keep sliding into other people’s pockets. He finds it so distracting that he can’t concentrate on his duties.”

“And Ensign George?”

“She can’t seem to keep her hands off men, sir—and vice versa.”

Kirk sighed. Every time he decided to allow himself the luxury of spending a few hours with his nose in a book, something came along to spoil it.

“Permission granted. Beam them up and tell them to report to Dr. McCoy. Are the rest of the party having any similar problems?”

“Nothing they can’t handle, sir.”

“How about Commander Spock?”

“I don’t know, sir. He hasn’t reported in since he beamed down yesterday morning. That’s not like him.”

“He’s probably on the trail of something ‘fascinating,’” Kirk said. “We’ll hear all about it when he beams up tonight. Kirk out.”

He cut communication, looked longingly at his book, closed it reluctantly, and put it to one side. He switched on the intraship communicator again and called the sickbay.

The voice that answered belonged to the ship’s chief medical officer, Dr. Leonard McCoy, the only member of the crew with whom the captain could associate on terms of human friendship rather than command.

“Evening, Bones. We’ve got problems,” Kirk began.

“Anything serious?” McCoy asked.

“The dop links,” Kirk continued. “Drawing on a native’s brain for language and other behavior is great in theory, especially when the native isn’t aware of it. But too much is coming across in some cases. Two of

Dawson’s party are having trouble controlling the dop input and he’s asked to have them beamed up early. I’ve given permission and told them to report to you, but I’d rather you put someone else on it and come up to my quarters. I’d like to discuss this whole thing.”

“Sure thing, Jim,” McCoy replied amiably. “I’ll have Mbenga handle it, he helped with the original surgery. I’ll also bring along a little something to help lubricate our thinking.”

It was going to be a long evening. Kirk stripped, stepped into a shower cabinet set in one bulkhead, and set it for frigid needle spray. He gasped as the high pressure jets buffeted his taut, muscular body, massaging and cleansing at the same time. The water cut off abruptly and was replaced by a blast of hot air which dried him in seconds. He stepped out of the cabinet and pulled on a fresh uniform.

“Good timing, Bones,” he said as his cabin door hissed open and McCoy stepped in. The doctor carried a peculiarly shaped flask of an amber-colored drink, Canopian brandy, Kirk’s favorite.

He set the curved flask down on Kirk’s desk, took two snifter glasses from the wainscot cabinet which ran along the inner bulkhead, and filled each glass halfway. He handed one to Kirk, and the two stood silently for a moment, sipping the potent brandy slowly and appreciatively.

McCoy’s seamed, leathery face peered at Kirk over the rim of the glass he held, his dark blue eyes fixed on his captain, waiting for him to speak.

“Ahhh, lovely! Much better than that green Saurian stuff you like, eh, Bones?” Kirk said. He held out his glass. “A little more.”

“I’m an equal opportunity drinker, Jim,” McCoy remarked. “Here you are.” The doctor refilled Kirk’s glass, then his own.

The two men sat and began to discuss the malfunctioning of the telescan implants. McCoy frowned as Kirk described the reasons for the early return of two of the survey team members.

McCoy let out a sudden, startled whistle when Kirk relayed Dawson’s report on Ensign George’s problem.

“Sara did that?” he said incredulously. “Jim, she couldn’t have. She’s the starchiest female I’ve run into in years. I gave her a friendly pat one day and she almost took my head off. It’s a shame such a lovely woman should have such anachronistic beliefs about the human body.” McCoy shook his head, then asked Kirk, “Have you had much of a chance to talk with her?”

Kirk shook his head.

“She’s on special assignment from Cultural Survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the cephalic implants as a survey tool,” McCoy began. “One of her jobs has been selecting likely native matches for survey team linkages. It looks as if she didn’t do such a good job on her own. Come to think of it, she was giving Spock the eye when they were getting ready to beam down the day before yesterday.”

“Oh, no,” groaned Kirk. “Not another one! Why does nearly every woman assigned to the Enterprise set her cap for that walking computer? Doesn’t she understand Vulcans?”

“I imagine so. She must be aware that Vulcans only have the mating urge—the pon farr—every seven years.” McCoy shrugged. “But be that as it may, we’re going to have to tune Sara’s implant to a new dop. She doesn’t seem to be able to handle the one she’s linked to now. With all the profiles she had to choose from, I’m surprised she didn’t pick one whose personality was more like her own.”

“How many Kyrosian profiles do we have?” Kirk asked.

“Over two hundred. Sara did the collecting herself. We picked up enough information by tight-beam scan to be able to outfit her in native dress. She was transported down just outside the city gates at night with a personality scanner hidden in a pouch. When the gates opened in the morning, she pretended to be a mute. Through sign language, she found an inn at the center of town, rented the rooms we’re using as a transporter terminal, locked the door, set up the scanner, and began recording natives.”

McCoy paused a moment and sipped from his glass. “She beamed up with quite a collection—town people, hill people, even a couple of Beshwa.”

“Beshwa?”

“Kyrosian gypsies. Anyway,” McCoy continued, “the native neural patterns she recorded on magcards give detailed personality profiles as distinctive as fingerprints.

“The next step was to select the profile that would be most useful to a particular survey party member in his particular mission, tune a telescan implant to it, and insert it surgically behind his right ear. Once it was turned on, a telepathic link was established with the selected native that gives the investigator an immediate command of idiomatic Kyrosian and the ability to react behaviorally in any situation exactly as his dop would.”

Kirk gave a wry grin. “And that, as George and Peters found out, can create problems.”

“But don’t worry, Jim, we’ll get the bugs worked out. Even with the minor problems we’ve encountered so far, the implant is the best survey device the bureau has come up with yet. We picked up more information, so Dobshansky tells me, on how Kyrosian society works in the last few days, than we could have in a month using the old system. Of course we’re lucky that the natives are humanoid enough that, except for colored contact lenses that duplicate their unusual eye pigmentation, little is needed in the way of disguise. The links make it possible for our people to go almost anyplace with complete acceptance. Within limits,” McCoy added, waving his glass for emphasis. “If you’re linked to a street beggar, you’re going to behave and talk like one. And that means you won’t be able to pass yourself off as a Kyrosian aristocrat. But as I said, we’ve been rather successful in matching profile to mission, though I should have checked on Ensign George more closely. I’ll get her on the operating table tonight and tune her implant to one which isn’t so… so friendly. I’ll see if I can dig up a man-hater so she’ll stop pestering Spock.”

“I’ve a better idea,” Kirk said. “Why don’t we pull her off the survey detail and put her to work with you on the whole problem? And by the way: I’d like to see the circuit diagrams for the implant. I think I’d better find out what makes that thing tick.”

“I’ve programmed them into the computer already, so I can show you right now,” McCoy said, sliding from his perch on the desk. He turned around and pulled a vision screen erect from the surface of the desk and pressed the intraship communicator button.

“Computer…”

“Recording,” replied the flat, feminine voice of the starship’s main computer.

“Display the circuitry of the telescan implant on the captain’s visual monitor.”

“Working,” the computer replied, and a moment later a glowing hologram appeared on the vision screen. The diagram was color-coded. Kirk saw what appeared to be thousands of dots strung on layered spiders’ webs. The three-level display turned as McCoy made an adjustment.

“Here it is,” the doctor said. “The first section, once tuned to a profile of a native, establishes the telepathic link. This second section acts as a feedback shunt to keep the dop from being aware that his brain has been tapped.” McCoy traced a path with his finger. “Next is an input filter stage which passes behavioral information but cuts out thoughts of the moment. Having the constant mental chatter that goes on inside everyone’s head coming across would be too distracting.”

“I know,” said Kirk, nodding sober agreement “That’s one of the reasons Spock, like others with telepathic ability, rarely uses his talent. He finds mind-melding an extremely distasteful process.”

“Hah!” McCoy snorted. “The real reason is that he doesn’t want his pristine computer banks contaminated with a lot of emotionally tainted and questionable data.”

“I think you may be right.” Kirk laughed. “But, Bones, you know how infernally curious Spock is. I couldn’t keep him from this survey with tractor beams!”

McCoy snorted again and turned back to the diagram. “As I was saying, the implant is a honey of a job of psychoelectronic engineering, especially when you consider that all of its circuitry is encapsulated in a half-centimeter sphere.”

“This is where the problems must be,” McCoy continued, stabbing a forefinger at the input filter stage. “It looks as if this section isn’t working as well as the lab tests predicted. Too much of their dops’ personalities are leaking into Sara’s and Ensign Peters’ brains.

“I think I have an idea.” McCoy peered at the diagram with pursed lips. “If you do take Ensign George off the detail, she can help me get to work on it at once. Microminiaturized circuitry is tricky to work on, but with a little technical assistance from the engineering department, we shouldn’t really have too much trouble ironing out the problem.”

“Good,” Kirk said approvingly. He held out his empty glass for another refill, then thought better of it. “Guess I’d better hold off,” he murmured regretfully. “They’ll be beaming up the rest of the survey team soon and I’ll have to be at the debriefing. I’m curious as to what Spock has been up to for the last couple of days.”

“Me, too,” McCoy agreed and looked into his glass. “Maybe I’d better cut off also, if I’m going to be doing surgery tonight.”

Kirk pushed the visual monitor back into his desk as McCoy rinsed the glasses in the cubicle provided in the bathroom. He replaced them in the wainscot cabinet and turned to Kirk.

“Come to think of it, if you’ve got no objection, I’d like to remove Spock’s implant as soon as he gets back. He’s not essential down there, and I didn’t like the idea of implanting him in the first place. Kyrosian emotional makeup is pretty much like ours, and even if Spock was linked to a cold fish, he has enough trouble keeping his human side under control without having things complicated by leakage from his dop.”

“Sounds good,” Kirk said. “I’d want him to get to work on the source of that radiation front, anyway. The only reason I let him go down was that he insisted so strongly. Sometimes I think his only purpose in life is to keep feeding a new supply of esoteric data into that logical brain. But he did behave oddly…”

“I’ve always thought Spock was odd,” McCoy muttered.

‘… after he was transported up last night,” Kirk went on, not hearing McCoy’s remark. “He had nothing to say at the debriefing and took off by himself when it was over. I’ve had reports that he spent most of the night wandering around the ship by himself.”

Kirk faced the doctor. “Bones, could anything have gone wrong during his operation?”

McCoy considered for a moment. “I doubt it,” he replied. “It was a routine insertion; he was the last one done, anyway. When he was linked, I ran a language test. Without having to think about it, he replied in flawless, idiomatic Kyrosian. There was the expected period of disorientation because of such intimate contact with an alien personality, but Spock seemed in control of the situation. If I’d thought the linkage would have caused him harm, I’d never have let him beam down.

“But,” McCoy went on, “I must admit to feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing, in spite of all the information we’ve acquired. The bright boys at Starfleet are always cooking up gadgets that violate a person’s physical integrity. Having my atoms scrambled every tune I go through that damn transporter is bad enough, but hooking one man’s nervous system to another’s with electronic widgets…” He grimaced his distaste. “Be only a matter of time before we’re all literally worshipping a transistor, or some bloody thing…”

Kirk slapped his medical officer on the shoulder. “Bones, transistors were old stuff two hundred years ago.”

“You know what I mean,” McCoy grumbled.

“Can’t fight progress. If man hadn’t kept trying to find ways to do things better, we’d never have climbed down from the trees. We’d still be in them, scratching for fleas and swinging from limb to limb.”

“So, now we’re swinging from star to star,” McCoy said sardonically. “And still scratching. We’re as much the slaves of our glands as our ancestors were, and most of our behavior makes as much sense. I hope poor Spock hasn’t caught the itch. In spite of his dop’s low EQ, I’m concerned about permanent effects on that finely tuned Vulcan brain of his.”

“Stop fretting,” Kirk said. “Spock’s used to that sort of thing. It’s been a struggle at times, but he’s always managed to keep what he considers his illogical side under tight control. Being exposed to a little added irrationality may make him uncomfortable, but Spock’s too smart to let it run riot.”

The captain grinned slyly at his medical officer.

“You are fond of our Vulcan iceberg, aren’t you, Bones?”

McCoy stared at Kirk, harrumphed crustily, and got to his feet.

“I’d better get down to surgery and set up for the removal of Ensign George’s implant,” he said, unwilling to continue a conversation which might force him to reveal his true feelings for the half-alien first officer. “I’ll try to be at the debriefing.”

“Hey, Bones,” Kirk called.

“Yes?”

“You forgot your bottle.”

“Tell you what,” McCoy replied. “Keep it. Tomorrow night, put Spock on second watch and we’ll lock the door, cut off the communicator, and kill the rest of. the bottle. Call it doctor’s orders.”

Kirk grinned and McCoy stepped toward the cabin’s door. He turned suddenly, raising an admonitory finger. “But don’t go nipping. That jug punched a nice hole in my budget.” McCoy lowered his finger, grinned, and stepped into the corridor.

As the door hissed shut, Kirk lay back down and picked up his Xenophon. With luck, he could get in a. couple of chapters before the survey party came aboard. He had just found his place when the communicator bleeped again.

Kirk dropped the book onto the bunk and went to his desk.

“Kirk here. What is it?” he said, trying to keep annoyance out of his voice.

“Lieutenant Commander Helman, sir,” came a worried voice. “We are in condition yellow…”

“Specify!” Kirk snapped.

“The radiation front is building. The science computer has projected a geometrical progression on the intensity scale. There’s a point 72 probability that the front will pass intensity twenty in the next few days.”

Kirk swore silently to himself. That would mean putting up the deflector screens, which would make it impossible to operate the transporters. “Do you have a duration estimate?”

“It’s still too early for an accurate prediction, sir,” Helman went on. “The computer says that it could die down in a week or two, or go on more than a month. Its configuration is unlike anything in the data banks.”

Kirk sighed. “Very good, Commander, thank you. I’ll be right up.”

He glanced at his book. Scooping both it and his dirty uniform up, he put the book away and tossed the uniform into the autowash chute.

He strode to the door of his quarters wondering when he would finish Xenophon. Then he exited and walked quickly down the corridor to the turbo-lift.