Unfinished Business
Chapter 43 : Bright
August 2275
Over the years, they had been in very strange places, but this had to be one of the strangest. The atmosphere had no clouds whatsoever. The sun shone down strong and bright, full in a clear sky, both night and day, every day of the year. It was fairly disconcerting. He noticed that the other members of the team were vaguely uneasy, for no reason that they could ascertain, and he judged it must be because they were used to the random appearance of clouds in the sky, and here there were none.
It was only after they had been on the surface for some time that people began to complain of eye problems. And it was not until his inner eyelid involuntarily closed that he realized that they had a real problem. It was too bright. The passing clouds of most other planets gave momentary relief from the brightness of the sun, but here there was none. It was always bright.
They tried several different remedies, but in the end, it was only goggles that worked. The goggles shaded the eyes, and protected them, and allowed the crew members to do their jobs. But they lost peripheral vision. Hopefully, this would not be a problem. There did not seem to be any large predators on this planet.
Large turned out to be the operative word. The predators were not large, but they were fast, and traveled in groups. They barely managed to beam out in time to avoid being overrun. There must be another solution that did not make them blind to danger. It was up to McCoy to figure it out. He fussed and fumed, but eventually came up with contact lenses, which he had found in very old medical journals. No one had used them for a very long time, surgical correction being done at a young age, as soon as problems with eyesight were diagnosed.
They had a practice day, when everyone that might go down to the surface had to wear them. People complained bitterly, their eyes watering and red. McCoy reformulated the wetting agent, and gave them some relief. And then there were three crewmen who 'lost' their lenses somewhere in their eyes, and had to go to sick bay to have them retrieved. Perhaps this was not the best solution after all. He began to question what there was on that planet that was so important. Jim couldn't say, either, only that StarFleet had requested a completed survey.
They wound up putting four sentinels on an elevated platform, each one watching in a different direction. The entire platform had to be moved periodically, and was unwieldy as well, but it seemed to work. The survey was finally completed, and everyone returned to the ship.
But the eye problems were not gone. Some people had suffered from sunburned eyeballs, and others had had allergic reactions to the wetting agent. There were two men who seemed to have lost their peripheral vision from wearing the goggles, and McCoy said they had undiagnosed eye problems that he would now have to correct. Spock seemed to have been the only one who suffered no lingering problems with his eyes, for which he was extremely grateful.
This did not stop Nyota from examining his eyes very carefully, every time he returned from that planet, and for several weeks after that. She wanted to be absolutely certain that there was no unobserved damage. He was quite touched by her concern, but assured her that he was undamaged.