As Lieutenant Uhura played the incoming signal, it flowed over the bridge like a melodious breeze, turning heads, stirring memories, setting eyes aglow.
From his science station, Spock met her dreamy gaze. "Fascinating. The harmonic structure is distinctly Vulcan, though I cannot identify the composer."
She cast him an incredulous look. "Vulcan? Spock, those are the Blues. Just listen…"
Raising a quizzical eyebrow, Spock tilted his head and concentrated on the complex interplay of flute and lyrette.
Nearby, someone sighed.
"A Russian folksong," Ensign Chekov was saying, "like my grandmother used to hum on snowy evenings in St. Petersburg."
Nearby, Sulu smiled sadly and said nothing. A single tear welled up and found his cheek. Absently he wiped it away.
But there was one person who did not find the signal at all pleasing. Seated in the command chair, Captain James T. Kirk gritted his teeth as a thousand little fingernails scraped over a cosmic chalkboard. Abruptly he shouted, "Cut that signal!"
Uhura casually swiveled and smiled at him, her teeth very white against her smooth dark skin. As her long fingers drummed the console, Kirk suffered each tap in his skull. Charging at the Communications board, he slammed the circuit closed, but the noise seemed to echo dully through his head. Shaken, he leaned there collecting the indignant glares of his crew, assuring himself that there was no reason to feel threatened, no reason at all.
No one moved for the space of several heartbeats. No one spoke. Noticing the telltale sweat at the back of his neck, Kirk cleared his throat and said, "Your analysis, Uhura."
She reviewed her instruments. "The signal is jamming all frequencies, both incoming and outgoing communications. It seems to be part of the very fabric of space."
Kirk glanced over at his second-in-command. "Dangerous, Spock?"
One Vulcan brow shot up, and turning, Spock saw that the captain was quite serious. "At this point the gravest threat I anticipate is that of distraction. Analyzing the anomaly promises to be a most…agreeable…duty." Screwing a receptor into one pointed ear, he set to work.
Kirk winced.
"Sir, it's just music," Uhura said soothingly.
His head gave a throb. Music? That nerve-peeling cacophony? Teeth on edge, he sank into the soft upholstery of the command chair and ordered, "Steady on course, Mister Sulu."
His thoughts rushed ahead to the far-flung outpost gripped by Rigellian fever, desperately awaiting medical assistance from the Enterprise. Time was running out for those poor devils. The race against death had sent him warping through this uncharted finger of space, a risky situation at the best of times. Now, this com-jamming phenomenon, this…space "music" was twisting his nerves even tighter. The headache promised to be a beaut.
oooo
The music in his mind was lovelier than a wail of bagpipes drifting over the heather. Montgomery Scott hummed along as he surveyed his engineering kingdom from a catwalk—that one corner of the ship that seemed his very own. In a very real sense, it did belong to him—not almost, but truly. He was its chief. The chief engineer of the starship Enterprise, the guardian of her great throbbing heart.
Could the captain—good man though he was—rouse her energies to such a fine peak of efficiency? Would young Kirk know just where to lay his hand, and when? No. That came only from days of quiet toiling, weeks of patience, months of devotion. Sacrifices. Missed leaves. Lost sleep. And above all the shared crises, the heated space battles, when she lay horribly shattered, and Scott almost despairing.
Those were the times that told.
Looking over her now, untarnished, humming peacefully to herself, it was hard to dredge up those painful memories. Harder still to imagine it happening again—phasers slashing through shields, torpedoes ripping her innards, exploding death in every direction.
Scott paced the narrow walkway, longing to spare her from any future damage. As she was now, in polished perfection, was how she should remain. Surely it was only natural for him to feel that way. And if it was natural, even desirable for him to protect the great starship engines from undo stress and harm, if such sentiments were actually expected of him, admired and rewarded, then…it was his duty…a duty in which he had been derelict for a shamefully long time.
Scott acknowledged his guilt and knew what he must now do. His hand caressed the guardrail as he descended the steps. Deep in thought, he headed for his office to review the main structural diagrams and emergency procedures. Aye, there was a way. A man with his experience, his knowledge of the ship's innermost workings, could override and bypass and jury-rig his way to a primary hull separation. Almost singlehandedly. The final release of the docking latches would trigger an alert, but not in time for the bridge crew to do more than stare in horror and curse impotently. The main saucer with its bridge full of senior officers would detach as he piloted the star drive section with its engineering pod and nacelles from the auxiliary battle bridge.
Aye, he would rescue the poor bairns. Never again would any captain overstrain their delicate balance or thrust them into the line of fire. No more burnt circuitry or battle scars. They would glide serenely through space together, safe for all time. It was, after all, his duty.
oooo
The persistent tune fretted Doctor McCoy like the buzzing of a lazy bee. Slow and twangy, melancholy banjo strings, front porch rockers, crickets chirping under a fat yellow moon.
It had been a long spell since he had felt so homesick. All through day watch in the medical department, he asked himself, What the hell am I doing here? Then simply, What the hell am I doing?
Alone in his office, he poured a shot of bourbon and downed it and somehow kept moving, though his heart was a leaden weight that made his feet drag from patient to patient.
What the hell was he doing? Saving lives? No. He couldn't save a single life, for the life of him. Prolong it a few years, perhaps, but not save it. Never save it.
The fact was, they were all slowly dying. Why couldn't they see that? Why were all these dying people bustling through the galaxy as if anything mattered besides life—real life—warm sunshine, genuine food, family. All theirs to enjoy for such a brief time, yet here they were, languishing under light panels, eating synthesized meals, separated by rules and rank. Days regulated by chronometers, nights of artificially darkened corridors. Oh, there were stars to be viewed on computer screens, but through the viewports only a nauseating whirl of warp space. And not a single porch on the whole damn ship.
McCoy stopped at a mirror to study himself, and was shocked. Where had the boy gone? His face was a relief map of the aging process—dying process. He was half dead already, but too stupid to realize it until today.
Nurse Chapel startled him. "Something wrong, Doctor?" she asked worriedly.
He turned to look at the newest member of his department with silent pity. Degeneration and decay everywhere. Leaving her presence, he went to his office and locked the door, wanting only to be away from the bitter sight of his dying shipmates. There was not a blessed thing he could do to help them. He could not even help himself.
For a time he sat at his desk, pinching a fold of skin on the back of his hand. How long before the ridge stood in stubborn testimony of his deteriorating condition? Like the slack-skinned hands of the old geezers, rocking peacefully, taking a boy on their bony knees. Great-grandpa and his cronies, the dark one with the tune-worn banjo.
Plunk…plunka…plunk…
Gone now, all dead and buried, Grampa and Great-uncle Joel and even—yes—his own father.
In his medical career, McCoy had eased the way for many a dying patient. Fatal diseases, accidents and injuries. But of every pain he had encountered, it was the lingering death that most disturbed him. And now he saw that they were all lingering. Kirk and Spock and Scotty and that cute little lab tech in Botany. Julie, wasn't it? Twenty-three and dying, a ripe peach fallen to the ground, moldering away.
For years he had suffered torments for releasing his father from an agonizing illness, an illness for which a cure was found shortly afterward. But now he clearly saw the futility of delaying the inevitable by even one day.
How, by God, could he allow this?
Locked in a cabinet behind him was a small bottle carefully sealed to protect the unwary, one sample among many gleaned from countless planets. Ingesting a single drop could extinguish this frail little spark called life. Actually, far less than a drop. A droplet. An infinitesimal speck. So very fragile was life. A flickering flame, bending before the breeze, awaiting the final gust for its extinction.
At the thought of the murky liquid, a bit of joy surged up. Death serum! More than enough to inoculate the entire crew. No more headaches or strained muscles or sleepless nights. No broken bones or bloodied lips or…or colds!
He laughed out loud. Hadn't Spock once snidely said, "You may yet discover a cure for the common cold"? Well, my Vulcan friend, here it is…and so simple, so ridiculously simple…
oooo
The captain had retired to his cabin, rather testily, it seemed to Spock.
Humans. Would he ever become accustomed to all their odd, bothersome ways? Across the bridge, Nyota Uhura had been humming for hours, and though he had made several attempts to distract her, now she was at it again, tapping her long polished fingernails in counterpoint.
It had been like this since the music.
The music. Once again he plugged in his aural receptor and used a hand to block the bridge sounds from his other ear. His lean body tensed with concentration as the music called to him—an intriguingly distant chorus of Vulcan instruments…and now words…a single repetitious word, just beyond capture.
The distant words defied all computer enhancement and filtering techniques, so Spock had long since abandoned his fruitless attempts at scientific analysis in favor of personal curiosity. Mentally, he had all but abandoned the Enterprise. He listened without moving for half an hour.
When the junior helmsman disturbed him, he answered brusquely and turned away, slipping back into the music. He closed his eyes, and sinuous images danced under his eyelids—dark silhouettes against flame. Tribal dancers. The ancient ones, the chanters of war and passion, the arousers of brute emotion. Drawn by their primeval lure, he strained to catch the words. Even one word. Just one.
"Sir, excuse me. Sir…"
"Yes?" Deeply annoyed, Spock scribbled his signature over some official-looking forms to be rid of the persistent yeoman. All the while, music droned into his ear.
He noted with mild interest the flashed warning of some unusual activity in engineering. Scott, tinkering again. Tomorrow the engines would function a bit more smoothly or supply a fraction more power.
On his console, banks of telltales began to glow like constellations. Spock stared at them, wondering how he had never before noticed their jewel-like beauty. The blinking computer board spread out before him—the central cortex of the ship's brain. The pulsing nerve center. From here, one could accomplish almost anything. A single knowledgeable touch, the touch of his own hand…and disaster. Or, should he choose, the crew would sleep as safely in their beds tonight, as in their mothers' wombs.
From here he could command. If, in fact, he sought command…
A strange excitement stirred deep inside him and grew rapidly to fever pitch. His pulse raced, his breathing quickened. In his ear, the music rushed to keep pace. And he could not deny this new truth, this sudden lust for domination sprouting in his heart like an evil weed. Perhaps it had always been there, but now it blossomed and bore the bitter fruit of a thousand insults, and tasting it, he vowed that he would never, ever again sting with humiliation. He would never again take second place to anyone.
Suddenly the single word in the music came clear. The word was "power". And at that fateful instant, Spock chose to take command. Now it remained only to inform Jim Kirk of that fact.
The hand reaching for the orderly rows of controls trembled only slightly. The fingers of the newly anointed captain hovered over life support, deck by deck. Then air locks, shuttle bay doors, and…
No. No loss of life…yet. The Enterprise must merely be hobbled, not maimed. That should be sufficient to convince as intelligent a human as Mister Kirk. Jim would acknowledge a Vulcan's inherent superiority, and yield. He had served under Spock's command before.
Captain Spock turned in his chair to briefly survey the bridge, and took satisfaction in his crew's quiet attention to duty. Every one of them sat working busily over their instruments. Even Nyota had ceased humming. Her moody rhythms no longer interfered with the Vulcan harmonies pouring into his ear, speaking to him…
Swiveling back to his board, he found sudden chaos. His panel was ablaze, every department buzzing with dangerous, senseless activity while the computer flashed silent warnings.
EMERGENCY…EMERGENCY…EMERGENCY…
Stunned, he reached for the power banks. Block by block, he slapped them into darkness. Level by level the Enterprise fell dead—laboratories and weapons and security and medicine, recreational areas and food processors and living quarters. And then even the bridge went dark.
One remaining amber eye blinked balefully at him. As shouts sounded from every direction, he balled his fist and slammed at the stubborn indicator.
The ship dropped abruptly from warp. Battery powered alarms screamed and emergency lights flickered. Then something with many arms uncurled from the confusion and seized him.
oooo
Below decks, Scott greeted the blackness with rich Gaelic curses. Now, of all times, with the rigging so near completion! It might take an entire shift to untangle this one. Lads crawling over every bit of circuitry, poking about, testing and retesting. Inevitably some bright one would discover the new arrangements—probably Keenser. Never satisfied with a simple answer, that oyster-head.
Lanterns were popping on already, and there was Keenser himself darting about like a Denevan fire-swift. Oh, for a good stiff scotch…
oooo
The turbolifts froze in their shafts between decks, blackened boxfuls of astonished crew. Officers and enlisted knocked into each other, banged against walls, fell to the floor.
Alone in one lift, Doctor McCoy lost his footing and dropped the shatterproof duraglass bottle. Somehow it broke, and his miracle cure splattered over the flooring with a sour stench. Stranded in the dark, he stood there with the answer to mankind's ills wetting the soles of his boots. This couldn't be happening. By God, it couldn't…
oooo
In his cabin, Kirk abruptly roused from a nap. An alarm was shrieking, the emergency lights flickering into pale luminescence. He thumbed the nearest intercom, but found it dead. Heart banging, he squeezed out his sluggish cabin door and ran past the shrilling alert beacons. As he reached the deck five turbolift, its circuits came to life, and he hopped aboard. Preparing himself for the worst, he arrived at the bridge and stepped out.
To his right on the upper level, a fight seemed to be in progress, with much shouting and a great tangle of bodies. Uhura stood watching in mute horror while Chekov steadfastly worked the controls at Spock's science console. The main lights came on. Instrument panels all around the bridge hummed and brightened. Vents sighed with fresh air.
Mystified, Kirk stalked forward. "What the hell is happening here? Uhura, cut that blasted siren!"
The noise level fell dramatically. But where was Spock? While Kirk glanced around for his second-in-command, the other bridge officers began to separate from the melee—arms and legs and reddened faces rising from the disorderly heap. They formed a sheepish semi-circle before their captain, until only one body remained on the deck. Then Spock picked himself up and attempted to straighten his torn uniform tunic. Beside the others, his stoic face appeared quite green.
"Captain," Spock said formally.
And then Kirk noticed the silence. Oh, the communication board babbled on, unattended, and various panels beeped and chirped busily to themselves. And the intercom whistled twice, and there was a sound of anxious breathing. But at long last, the scraping fingernails had left the chalkboard. He relaxed suddenly and completely, like a taut rubber band sprung loose.
"That's better," he sighed.
The crew relaxed somewhat, too, except for Spock, who never seemed to understand the concept of relaxation.
"Captain," he said now, "if I may speak…"
oooo
Twenty-four hours later, Kirk was still listening. More than three hundred confessions had been recorded, from pilfered scribers to unauthorized course changes, from sabotaged torpedoes to Spock's short-lived but exciting mutiny (which had probably saved them all from the climactic effect of the ship-wide madness).
With the warp drive under repair, the Enterprise travelled on impulse power as Kirk sat facing his senior officers across the briefing room table. "Have you nothing to add? Nothing at all to say in your defense?"
By the book, they should all have been arrested and confined to their quarters, but that was hardly possible when the vast majority of the crew stood accused of one crime or another.
Noting Scott's peeved expression, he said, "Yes, Engineer?"
"Ach," Scott muttered. "Meanin' no disrespect, sir, but ye just couldna' understand…"
Spock, who had been staring down at his fingertips, looked up. "Captain, I am forced to agree."
"Me too," McCoy piped up. "We've been talking among ourselves and have formed a pretty interesting theory."
Spock took over. "Our instruments are detecting a substantial amount of drifting debris. Analysis confirms that it is the wreckage of space vessels."
"This place is a bloody trap!" Scott cried. "Cloudin' a person's mind with its siren calls an' leadin' us straight to ruin."
Spock eyed the fanciful engineer with mild disdain. "Mister Scott's poetic 'siren calls' are a psycho-energy field, likely meant to guard…or isolate…some as yet undetected presence. Captain, I believe we are dealing with an extremely sophisticated starship trap."
Beside him, Uhura nodded in agreement. "Since traveling on impulse power, communication has cleared, right along with our minds. It happened the very instant we dropped from warp."
Spock added, "The field's disruptive effect is apparently confined to hyperspace."
"An interstellar speed trap?" Kirk suggested.
"Exactly," McCoy said, slapping a palm on the table.
The "Ulysses" theory was as good as any, and since Spock ascribed to it, Kirk was inclined to accept it as an explanation, log it, and be done with the whole sorry incident. Sitting back, he gazed at his officers and friends, the mutineers and saboteurs and potential murderers, wanting badly to trust them.
"Alright, I'm listening," he said. "Now kindly explain why a small portion of the crew, myself included, was immune from this force of yours? That so-called 'music' only gave me a splitting headache and a bad case of nerves."
"Why, that's easy!" crowed McCoy. "Captain, I can answer your question with absolute medical certainty, and supply all the substantiating data."
"Aye, that." Scott beamed, and there were smiles and approving nods all around.
Even Spock looked somewhat pleased.
"The fact is," McCoy went on, "you and every unaffected member of the crew share a physical peculiarity that would directly account for your exclusion. As Spock here would say, 'It's only logical'."
As the doctor paused dramatically to draw a breath, Spock declared, "Captain, you and those others are tone deaf."
McCoy shot the Vulcan a prickly glance, but Kirk was too startled to notice. Of course! A sort of inborn wax of the ear—and that was as much sense as it was likely to make in this arm of the galaxy. After swiftly reviewing the medical data, he dropped all charges and adjourned the hearing. Even Spock headed for the proverbial hills, and Kirk found himself alone. It was just as well. There was a dull ache gnawing at the base of his skull—not harmonics this time, just worry. In their relief, his officers seemed to have forgotten the point of their current mission. Keeping the Enterprise to impulse power would doom that plague-torn outpost. Those colonists needed medicine now. And frankly, the prospect of a months-long odyssey through normal space was not a pleasant one. Particularly when it involved unknown territory and mysterious phenomena.
Later that same day McCoy walked onto the bridge, grinning broadly, and held out a palm full of little yellow things. "Wax," he said, "for the ears of Ulysses. These ultrasonic-sensitive earplugs are guaranteed to shield us from that signal's frequency."
Hopefully Kirk chose a pair and snugged them into place. He could scarcely hear himself speak as he asked, "You came up with these all by yourself?"
McCoy mouthed something about a joint effort using medical and mathematical models. Spock, Scotty, and Bones putting their heads together. A sure recipe for success.
"Good work," Kirk said in relief. "Distribute them to the crew immediately."
Over at his duty station, Spock was seeing that the ship functioned smoothly. Soon Scotty would be wringing the last bit of power from the Enterprise warp drive while Doctor McCoy reviewed the medical protocol for Rigellian fever.
Smiling to himself, Kirk thought, Now that's more like it.
oooOOooo