Unfinished Business
Chapter 48 : Giants Lived Here
March 2277
Long-range scanners could only tell them so much. There were obviously ruins on this planet, scattered widely. There must have been a civilization at one point, but they could not now detect any signs of life larger than a small arboreal mammal. There were several types of small mammals, and some lizards as well, and flying things of some sort. Not abundant life, but it was not scarce, either. It was as though this planet was recovering from some disaster, and had not yet made it all the way back.
The captain prepared carefully for this excursion. The threat that had been made seemed to have sunk in, and he acted in a more restrained manner now. McCoy had remarked to Spock one evening in the mess hall, that he thought Kirk had been threatened with a desk job again, for he had been acting very strangely lately. Spock considered, and wondered whether that might not be behind his exuberance on the away teams, that possibly he had been acting out against the feeling that he was too old for this type of duty. Whatever, the reason, he seemed to be more in control of himself now, and acting with more caution, and more consideration of possible danger.
There would be four teams going down, in different areas. They would all report to Uhura every half hour, and their progress would be tracked and mapped. Kirk headed one team, Spock the second, McCoy the third, and Sulu the fourth. As Sulu rarely got to participate in away teams, and even more rarely was in command, and he was grinning widely as the teams decked themselves out in paraphernalia. McCoy was muttering, as usual, and Spock was scanning the crowded room, making sure that everyone had the correct equipment. Scotty called the first team to the pad, and Kirk and his three scientists and two security guards stepped up and positioned themselves. McCoy's team went next, followed by Sulu's team, and Spock's team went last, after he was assured that everyone else had arrived at the correct location with the correct equipment. What they did after that, he could not control, but at least they would start off on the right foot.
Each team reported in to Uhura with their initial location, and she marked the display above her station, using a different color for each team. She split the main viewscreen into four parts, and projected one team's visuals into each part. Scotty got to the bridge just as she had finished that, and settled down into the command chair, looking from the marked map above her console to the viewscreen, until he felt that he knew where everyone was. And then they waited.
Each team had a designated quadrant to search, and it did not take very long at all for the comments to start coming in. Each team had found ruins in their quadrant - and what ruins they were! "They must have been giants!" Sulu was so excited that he was practically yelling. "These buildings are 30 meters tall, and that's for one floor!" He was standing inside a building, directing the camera he carried up at the ceiling, far above him.
Kirk's team found a park, with fountains and benches, and sent pictures of the scientists sitting on the benches, their legs swinging freely, far from the ground. They couldn't even reach the lip of the bottom tier of the fountains.
McCoy's team had found some badly damaged murals, and were trying to clean them off so that they could be photographed. They couldn't really tell yet what sort of beings were depicted. And they could only reach the first two meters to clean, which wasn't really going to give them a good idea, anyway.
Spock's team had found what appeared to be a library. Most of the books were so old and disintegrated that they could not even handle them, but they had found some sort of electronic recording media as well. They were trying to figure out what it was, and how it worked, without much success as of yet.
As time passed, there were more and more indications that the being that had built these buildings had been far taller than any other beings known to the Federation. Compared to the size of the animals on the planet now, it made no sense. If there had only been these very small animals available, they would have spent every available hour of the day trying to find enough food to simply survive. Nyota became more puzzled the longer the teams were on the ground, sending up information. It was not until McCoy's team got a large portion of that mural cleaned, and could see what was revealed, and Spock's team figured out how to activate the ancient electronic recordings, that a picture of the failed civilization began to emerge. There had been larger animals. And apparently, they had all been eaten. And then the civilization began to starve. One by one, cities had been abandoned, and people had moved together into smaller places, trying to raise enough food by farming to survive. But it had not worked. Their metabolisms had required so much protein that vegetable sources could not provide enough. Eventually, their numbers grew so small that the gene pool was not large enough to be sustainable. And practically all animal life on the planet was gone. The seas were practically empty. They were reduced to eating small fruits and vegetables, and they began to fail.
When all the teams were back aboard, the information was all compiled. McCoy still could not understand how such large beings had evolved, when the vegetable life on the planet was so much smaller. It made little sense. And there was not enough information left in usable form for them to determine how this had happened. But it was very clear that the intelligent beings that had built the buildings now in ruins, had starved to death because they had eaten everything possible that lived on their planet, and could no longer maintain their huge bodies with what was left. It was a sobering thought, indeed.
They sat around the table in the mess hall, pondering what they had learned. Surely there was a lesson in there that could be applied to all the other species in the galaxy. Never outgrow your food supply, one man suggested. They were all familiar with colonies that had failed because their food supply had not grown quickly enough to maintain them. And planets where famine had decimated the population before help could arrive. They shook their heads, and were very glad that they had access to synthesizers and stasis units. Hopefully, such an ending would never come their way.