Captain, do not engage in the employment of jokes.
Practical or otherwise. There was a
planetoid. My only error lies in my
inability to explain why it is no longer there."
If Kirk had been a little less of a
greenhorn, he might have apologised right then. But
he was still a greenhorn and he didn't like to be
second-guessed.
"Very well, Mr. Spock," he said, keeping his
temper tightly in check. "We wilWindulge
you for the next twenty-four hours. We will, for that
amount of time, circle this variable star of yours in
search of anything that remotely resembles a
planetoid. For your sake, I sincerely hope
we find it!"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
He had planned a dramatic exit, strode
toward the lift to find his way obstructed by his
ship's new psychiatrist. How much of the scene had
she witnessed, and what sort of martinet did she
think him? Elizabeth Dehner followed Kirk
into the lift.
"That was pretty," she remarked, her credentials
giving her partial immunity from charges of
insubordination.
"Is that a professional opinion, doctor, or
are you just minding my business?" Kirk asked.
"I was wondering if that was some new
command trend or if you had a personal reason for
being so hard on him," Dehner said incisively.
"Neither, as a matter of fact," Kirk said.
"I can't abide incompetence, and I can't
abide a
smart-ass. I was no harder on Spock than
I had to be."
The lift had stopped. Kirk had given it no
instructions, and Dr. Dehner apparently intended
to follow him wherever he was going. Kirk decided
to take advantage of that.
"Rec Room 3," he instructed the lift.
"Besides, doctor, he's a Vulcan. Of ficially
they have no feelings."
Dehner had been watching the numbers on the lift
panel, might have gone to the rec room with him if it
weren't for that last remark. She turned on him, her
silken blond hair flailing about her face in her
anger.
"Every intelligent being has feelings, Captain.
The greater the intelligence the more highly developed the
feelings. Mr. Spock is just better at hiding his
than you are. Why do you dislike him so much?"
"I don't dislike him," Kirk defended himself.
The lift had opened at the rec room. He stepped
out but Dehner didn't. "I don't especially like
him either. All I ask is that he do his job."
"Maybe if you were a little clearer on what your
job was, Captain," Elizabeth
Dehner challenged him through the closing doors, "you
might be less paranoid about the way Spock does
his."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Mixed reviews, Kirk thought grimly, striding
down the corridors as if he were in a great hurry.
The Vulcan won't mess with me anytime soon, but
the lady shrink thinks I'm a bully. Nobody
ever said this job was easy.
He was just stepping out of the shower the next morning when
Gary strolled in without knocking. He and Kirk had
always had the run of each other's quarters; Kirk's
recent change in rank wasn't about to alter that.
"Feeling better?" Mitchell asked with
exaggerated solicitude, lolling in the doorway
with his arms folded.
Kirk grunted by way of reply. He seemed
to remember Gary had been on his side yesterday.
"You'd better tread softly on that bridge this
morning, kid. Spock's found his missing
planet."
Kirk began to dress, looked at Gary's
reflection in the mirror.
"Is it for real, or are you part of the gag
this time?"
Mitchell shrugged off Kirk's paranoia;
they'd both pulled a few in their midshipman days.
"Scanners say it's real. Oh, and FYI,
they first picked it up on an infrawhite
wavelength. Something Vulcans can see but we can't.
That's why no one else spotted it."
"I wasn't aware of that," Kirk said
quietly, humbly. Gary always seemed to know little
out-of-the-way facts that he didn't.
"Spock's taken some pretty impressive
pictures this time," Mitchell went on.
"Verified and confirmed by everyone on each watch
to avoid any further misunderstandings. his
"Why wasn't I informed?" Kirk snapped, on
the defensive again.
Mitchell detached himself from the doorway, made
himself comfortable in Kirk's best chair, propped his
feet on the bunk.
"I guess in view of yesterday's tantrum he
didn't
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
want to risk waking you," he said casually.
"His pictures range from 2300 last
night to about five minutes ago, at half-hour
intervals."
Kirk stood with his shirt in his hand, stunned.
"He's been monitoring this thing all night?"
"From what I understand, Jim, he never left the
bridge after you called him into question in front of half
the crew. Hasn't eaten or slept since he
came on this time yesterday. I hear tell
Vulcans get points for stamina, but . . ."
He let his voice trail off, let his silence
do the rest. No one could put the guilts on Jim
Kirk the way Mitchell could. He watched Kirk
pull on his shirt, glance in the mirror one last
time, then spin the entire vanity back into the
bulkhead as if he didn't much like the face he
saw in that mirror.
"I was rather abrupt with him, wasn't I?" the
captain of the Enterprise said humbly.
Gary grinned up at him. "Two things you never
question about a Vulcan, James, are his
competence and his veracity. You managed to do both
simultaneously. Always said you were talented."
"I'll have to apologise to Spock," Kirk
said, steeling himself.
He motioned Mitchell to his feet.
"Let's go have a look at the cause of the
controversy."
Spock straightened from his viewer, sensing
Kirk's arrival by the watchful quality of the silence
on the bridge.
"Captain," he reported at once, "the
planet is no longer there."
The silence deepened, grew profound, became so
entire that the machine noise from the dozen bleeping,
whirring, chirping, humming consoles seemed to heighten
in an attempt to fill the vacuum, deafening.
Kirk felt his blood pressure rising. Was
there no end 179
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
to this nonsense? He envisioned his ship trapped in
endless orbit around this glaring, unfrly sun like some
interstellar Flying Dutchman, eternally in
pursuit of a figment, a rumor of a planet,
while he and his science officer remained locked in
mortal combat, his hands forever gripping the
Vulcan's throat....
He took a deep breath, waited for the
red haze
to clear from his vision, and saw that Elizabeth Dehner
was also on the bridge, tucking her blond hair
casually behind one ear, watching him.
Paranoid, am I, Doctor? he thought.
"Mr. Spock?" he asked in the calmest of
tones. "What do you mean it's "no longer there"?"
Spock made note of the change of tone, as
well as of its probable cause.
"Captain, as illogical as it may sound, this
planet apparently has the capability to appear and
disappear at random intervals, which I have plotted in
this series of holo-images. It was literally here a
moment ago, and gone the next."
The halos were genuine, verified by all three
watches, incontrovertible. But what did they mean?
Garth of Izar had given an electrifying guest
lecture at the Academy once. Jim Kirk
had been there, crammed into the back of the SRO
auditorium with about a hundred other cadets.
"Consider the minuscule portion of space we have
managed to explore in our time," Garth had
addressed them, his slender hands gripping the edges of the
podium, his magnificent voice rolling out over
them without need of augmentation. "As well surmise the
nature of an entire ocean from a single
surf-washed stone. Gentles, assume that space will
always be more unknown than known, and nothing you encounter in
its reaches will surprise you."
As a cadet, Kirk had taken those words
to heart; they had saved his life more than once and his
face more often than that. As commanding officer, Kirk
seemed 180
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
to have forgotten them. Maybe there was some phenomenon,
operative in this area of space and as yet unknown
to human science, that could account for an entire
planet's whimsical
appearance and disappearance. Maybe he should have thought
about that before he shot off his mouth yesterday.
"Explanation?" he asked Spock now.
"Insufficient data, Captain," Spock
replied evenly, as if yesterday's humiliation had
vanished along with the planet. "I shall need to study this
phenomenon further."
"No," Kirk said softly. "Not you, Mr.
Spock. Have someone else from your department relieve
you. Boma'sAstrophysics, isn't he? Or
Jaeger. Have one of them come to the bridge. You're
long overdue for some rest. And an apology."
"Sir?"
"I had insufficient data for coming down on you so
hard yesterday. I'm sorry."
Spock hesitated. He had never
understood this human concept of apology so casual,
so
commonplace, so different from the formalised
Vulcan asking of forgiveness. Among equals, he
had learned, apologies were frequently dismissed with
some offhand response like "that's okay" or "forget
it," neither of which was logical. To state that the offence
being apologised for was "okay" implied that it did not
require apology in the first place, and to suggest that
the offender "forget" the offense was not only
unlikely, but apt to encourage a repetition of that
offence..
Further, one could hardly tell one's superior
officer to "forget it." What other responses were
possible?
""The first is to understand,"" Sarek his father,
diplomat to all species, would say, quoting
Surak. ""Thence to accept the one, not as you would
wish to be, but as the one would wish to be, for this is the
essence of Diversity.""
Estranged though he was from his father, Spock 181
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
could respect his wisdom. First to understand. Spock
had attempted to understand humans all his life, had
come to understand only his lack of understanding. How
was he to accept an apology he did not understand?
"Take it in the spirit it was intended and don't
analyse it to death!" Amanda, his ever-human mother,
would say, quoting no one's wisdom but her own.
"And don't be such an infernal
perfectionist!"
There had never been estrangement from his mother; could not
be, for Amanda would accept him whatever he became.
Spock took her wisdom as it was intended.
"I accept your apology, Captain," he said
at last. "But I request permission to remain on
the bridge. The study of this phenomenon would be a
rare opportunity."
Kirk's first instinct was to deny him, but on
second thought he realised Spock needed the
vindication as much as he.
"Very well, Mr. Spock," he said, settling
himself into the command chair for the first time that day; he felt
he'd earned it. "Between us maybe we'll solve this
thing. Who knows, we might even name the planet after
you."
That will not be necessary, Captain, Spock started
to say, but again his mother's wisdom intervened and he
restrained himself.
"Main screen," Kirk said.
"Aye, sir," Kelso replied.
Out of the corner of his eye, the captain of the
Enterprise could see his ship's psychiatrist leaning
over the comm con chatting with Uhura. When she
glanced in his direction, she was smiling.
Planet M-155 popped back inffbeing within the
hour.
Considering the uproar it had caused, it was an
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
unprepossessing little planet, essentially a
drab greenish-grey rock with a tenuous
atmosphere, little free water, and scant
primitive vegetation. There was no evidence of
And no indication, from this distance, of what was making it
disappear.
Enterprise hovered at 40,000 perigee, as
far away as scanners could work effectively.
Kirk was not about to get his ship in too close.
"No evidence of structures or dwellings of
any kind," Spock reported. "No evidence of
any civilisation or present, or of any advanced
life form. Dubious such a thin atmosphere could
support sentient life."
"Then what's playing tricks on us?" Kirk
wondered aloud. "Could there be some power source from
offworld? A transfer beam or
displacement wave from another solar system? Even
a ship powerful enough to pull a planet off course?"
"Nearest inhabited solar system is forty-six
parsecs distant," Mitchell reported from his station.
"No vessel of any description within a radius
of ten degrees."
"And no disturbance of surrounding space, Cap-
tain," Spock interjected. "Whatever the
phenomenon is, it is affecting only this
planet."
Kirk digested this. "Could it be a natural
phenomenon? A time warp or or something?"
"Exploring that possibility at present,
Captain," Spock replied.
Kirk crossed to the science station, leaned on the
rail. "Are we in any danger?"
"Inconclusive," the Vulcan said. "However,
at this distance, I do not believe so."
Kirk didn't like the smell of it. "Shell
game!" he muttered evilly. "Cosmic
three-card monte with us as the tubes."
Kelso looked at Mitchell who
looked at Kelso. They'd lived through enough of
Kirk's metaphors to 183
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
know what was going on in the captain's head. A more
cautious commander would record the
planet as an unexplained phenomenon, set out
warning buoys, and move on.
James Kirk had not become the youngest
captain in Starfleet history by being cautious.
"Spock, what's the longest it's been
"present" since it first appeared?"
"Four-point-one-three hours, Captain."
"And the shortest?"
"One hour six minutes, sir. However, that is
no guarantee his
One hour and six minutes, Kirk thought. More
than enough time to beam down, have a look around, and, with
Mr. Scott on the button, zip back up again.
He glared at the greenish-grey blob on the
screen; it seemed to be taunting him.
"Mr. Mitchell, organize a preliminary
landing party and have them on standby," Kirk said.
"We'll give this beast one more prestidigitation. The
next time it pops back in, we're going down
there."
Chapter Two
" I RETTERATE, CAF-RATN: the fact
that the planet remained 'with us" for one hour and six
minutes at minimum once before does not
guarantee that it will not remain for a far shorter
period this time."
"Mr. Spock, if you'd like to excuse yourself from the
landing party, feel free to do so," Kirk said
shortly, itching to start.
"Negative, sir. Mathematically, the odds are
in our favor. I merely point out his
"Good," Kirk cut him off, stepping up on the
transporter platform with Spock, Mitchell, and
Kelso. "Then let's get going!"
"Still waiting for Dr. Dehner, sir," Mr.
Scott re- ported from the transporter control.
Kirk threw up his hands in despair, stepped
down from the platform. It was his fault for insisting she
tag along.
"I'd like a Med staffer along," he'd told
Mitchell, who presented him with a preliminary landing
party roster consisting of himself, Spock and Lee
Kelso, when M-155 popped off the
screen again and they
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
waited for it to reappear. "In case one of you
falls and skins your knees."