“Damn it, Bones,” Kirk exploded, “you should have wakened me! We might have thought of a way to stop him!”
“Impossible,” McCoy said. “He was gone by the time Elkins heard about the breakout. What could you have done? Beam down and chase him on foot?”
Kirk didn’t answer. Instead, he rose to his feet and punched the bridge call button on the communicator. “This is the captain… have all department heads report to the briefing room in forty-five minutes.”
McCoy suddenly burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Kirk demanded.
McCoy pointed down. “Do you usually go to bed with your boots on? Rx this time is a cold shower and a clean uniform.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Kirk said, as he lifted a foot and slowly inspected his Kyrosian half-boots. Then he sat and began to untie the complicated laces.
“Coffee, Captain?” a yeoman asked Kirk. He shook his head, and she passed down the briefing room table. Several officers selected cups. Kirk glanced at the chronometer on the walclass="underline" 10:45. They’d gotten a lot of work done in the last three hours. McCoy had been right; drugs were no substitute for sleep. Now he was able to view the previous day’s events from a proper perspective. He glanced at a scribbled agenda on the table in front of him. He’d just checked off another item. Kirk looked at the small visual monitor on the table. It showed Ensign George propped up in a diagnostic bed; several sheets of paper lay about with hastily scrawled diagrams on them.
“Are you sure it will work?” Kirk asked.
The woman nodded confidently. “I know it will. Once it’s switched on, it will jam the input stage of Speck’s implant and cut his connection with Chag Gara. In theory, once that hill preacher’s paranoia stops surging across, Spock will revert to his old self in no tune at all. But I’m afraid he’s going to be in for a few bad moments when he takes a Vulcan look at some of the things he’s been doing the last few days.”
“I don’t like that ‘in theory’ part,” McCoy muttered. “In theory, the telescan implant was supposed to have been thoroughly debugged, and look at the mess it got us into.”
“Don’t blame the implant, blame me,” the girl said. “If I hadn’t been so damn stupid…” Her voice trailed off.
“Ensign!” Kirk’s voice was stern. “Self-recrimination is a luxury we can’t afford at the moment. Is there any way to increase the range of that thing? The way it’s presently designed, somebody’s going to have to get close enough to Spock to almost touch him. And that raises certain practical difficulties.”
Sara brought her attention back to the discussion.
“It’s power supply has to be small enough so Mr. Spock can’t detect it with that rigged tricorder. But that does give us an advantage; with subminiaturization, we’ll be able to conceal it in a native bracelet where it’ll be un-detectable.” She gestured at her healing stomach. “Tissue regeneration is almost complete, Dr. Mbenga told me, so I’ll be out of here in a few hours and Lieutenant Uhura and I can get to work.”
“Bones, will she be fit for duty soon?” Kirk asked.
“She’ll be wobbly for a while, but otherwise she’s as good as new.”
“Good!” He glanced along the conference table. “Now, we need ideas on how to get close enough to Spock so that the nullifier can cut the link between him and that crazy preacher. Suggestions?”
“All I can think of are a lot of reasons why we can’t,” Uhura said.
“Scotty?”
“Naething in my department. If it was technology that was needed, my lads and I are sitting on top of the best the Federation has to offer. But we canna use it down there because of the divilish hob Spock has played with his tricorder.”
“McCoy?”
“After yesterday’s try, his followers aren’t going to let anybody they don’t like get within half a mile of him.” He shook his head gloomily. “I don’t know, Captain, I just don’t know.”
“Navigator?”
Chekov glanced at Kirk. “Mount a field phaser on a shuttlecraft and let me take it down,” the young Russian said. “I’ll find him and…”
“And have the tricorder self-destruct long before you got within firing range?”
“And what difference would that make?” Chekov demanded hotly. “We’re going to have to abandon ship soon, the way it looks now. At least we can burn out that cancer before it can spread!”
“Mr. Chekov, you’re here because it’s part of your education as a Command staff officer,” Kirk said. “If you ever hope to be a starship captain, you’ll have to think of ways to preserve your ship and yourself. I suggest you start now.”
Kirk glanced at the other officers and received only mute head shakes and shrugs to a second query for suggestions.
“I can sympathize with Chekov’s feelings,” he said, “but insane as he is, Spock knows that I know enough about history to realize that he is safe from direct attack. Killing him would make him a martyr; in a week there’d be stories that he rose from the dead and appeared among the faithful crying for vengeance. Stopping a living messiah is something we may yet do; a legend would unleash forces beyond anyone’s control.”
He paused and stared at the vacant chair where Spock customarily sat. “I don’t think I’ve ever missed Spock—our old Spock—as much as I do right now. If he were sitting there, he’d wait until we all had our say and then cock a quizzical eyebrow and come out with a solution that would make us all feel like children, it would be so obvious and simple. But since we no longer have his Vulcan brain to rely on, we’ll have to do the best we can with our human ones. We still have a little time left, and we have a device that will bring him back to normal if we can get close enough. So we’ll try.”
Kirk turned to the lieutenant commander in charge of exosociology. “Commander Dobshansky, are you familiar with the old tribal group on Earth—the Gypsies?”
The burly officer knit together gray brows and thought for a moment. “I remember something about them, sk. Why?”
“Because they were able to wander anywhere they wanted. No boundaries could stop them. A Frenchman in a small English village would have stuck out like a sore thumb, but Gypsies, being so widely scattered and relatively harmless, hardly excited comment. Are the Beshwa anything like that?”
“Beshwa? Let’s see… Yes they are, come to think of it. They’re sharp traders, good tinkers, fine musicians, and some have the reputation of being magical healers. They even travel around in caravans the way the Gypsies used to.”
“I know,” Kirk said. “McCoy and I saw one the other day in Andros. That’s what gave me the idea. If we’re going into the hills after Spock, we’ll need a disguise that’ll pass muster.”
“You know, sir,” Dobshansky said, “I think you’ve hit on something. This is the beginning of their trading season and a Beshwa cart wouldn’t seem at all out of place in the hills. Shall I have the computer check the data banks to see what we’ve picked up on them so far?”
“By all means,” Kirk said. “Bones, you said there were some Beshwa profiles among those that Sara took… How many?”
“Two,” McCoy replied,
“Any reason two of us couldn’t be hooked into the same dop?”
“None. All we need is access to language and behavioral patterns to be able to pass as the real thing.”
“All right, then,” Kirk said, “that gives us our identities. Transportation is next. Scotty, that should be your department. The Beshwa travel around in an odd-looking two-unit contraption, a sort of wagon in front with a high, closed van in the back—for sleeping, I suppose. They probably put trade goods in front. If we dig up some photographs, do you think you can build us one?”