Mr. Scott and his staff have reconverted the transporter and we are now preparing to embark to Organia, as planned. From this hour until my return, this log will be kept by Mr. Sulu.
It took less than two hours to put the Enterprise into a standard orbit around Organia; but even at the maximum range beyond which the transporter would not function — sixteen thousand miles — the emotional effect of the thought-shield on the officers and crew was so profound that it took another forty-eight before anyone was working at even half his usual efficiency. And even this much would not have been possible had not McCoy, in a vast breach of his usual preference, doled out huge quantities of tranquillizer and antidepressant pills. These Spock Two refused to take except upon direct order from the Captain, but for everyone else they were an absolute necessity.
There were no new Klingon ships in the vicinity yet. Harsh, clacking calls on subspace radio, however, made it clear that they were on the way.
Nevertheless, the transporter room, once more its old familiar self, shimmered out of existence on schedule around Kirk, Scott and Spock Two. The transporter officer had set up the same coordinates that had been used for the very first visit to Organia. Then, the arrival site had looked quite like a rural, fourteenth-century English village, complete with thatched cottages, oxcarts and people in homespun in the streets, and a lowering, ruined castle as massive as Caernarvon in the distance. The village had turned out, by no accident, to contain the chambers of the planet’s Council of Elders; all this had actually been an illusion arranged by the Organians for the accommodation of their visitors and the preservation of their own peace. But it had been completely convincing — until Commander Kor and his Klingon occupation force had shown up, polite, mail-clad and utterly ruthless.
But there was nothing like that village here now. Instead, the three Starship officers seemed to have materialized in the midst of a vast tumble of raw, broken rock, stretching away to the horizon in all directions. Overhead, the sky was an even gray, without even a brighter spot to show where Organia’s sun might stand; and the air, although nearly motionless, was thin and bitingly cold. To Kirk, this wasteland was overwhelmingly depressing, like that of a planet which had lost its last beetle and shred of lichen a million years before.
As indeed it might have, for Organia’s sun was a first-generation star and the Organians themselves had evolved beyond the need of bodies or other physical comforts well before the Earth had even been born. As for the emotional depression, that might be a product of being under the thought-screen. If so, it was unexpectedly bearable, though decidedly unpleasant.
Kirk confirmed planetfall with Lieutenant Uhura, then turned to his companions. “It could have been worse,” he said in a low voice. “In fact, I think I feel a little more chipper down here than I did when we were aloft, though I can’t be sure. What are your reactions, gentlemen?”
“Gloom and doom,” Scott said in his most Caledonian tone. He too was unconsciously almost whispering. “But you’re right, Captain, it’s nae sa bad as I feared. But which way do we go frae here? There’s nary a landmark t’be seen from hell to breakfast — and my tricorder reports nothing at all in the way of electromagnetic activity. Stone-cold dead it all is.”
Spock Two slowly scanned the endless stretches of. worn and crushed stone with his own tricorder.
“Nothing registers,” he agreed. “But on our first visit, we found the Council chambers about two point two kilometers north-north-west of our present position. Since there is no visible reason to prefer any other heading, I suggest that we proceed in that direction, and see whether the Organians have left any marker or other clue to their whereabouts.”
“Whereabouts would a thought hide, anyhow?” Scott said. “But ‘tis doubtless as good as any other course.”
Kirk nodded, and took a step forward — and was instantly locked in the grip of nightmare.
The rocky desert rippled and flowed as though it were only a reflection on the surface of a disturbed pool, and then dissolved completely. In its place, there stood before Kirk a monstrous object, dull green in colour but with a lustrous surface, whose exact nature he found impossible to identify. It was at least as big as an Indian elephant and just as obviously alive, but he could not even be sure whether it was animal or vegetable. It had no head, and seemed to consist entirely of thick, bulbous tentacles — or shoots — which had been stuck onto each other at random, and which flexed and groped feebly. One portion of the thing’s haphazard anatomy was supported by a wooden crutch, a device Kirk had seen only once before in his life, and that in a museum.
The thing did not look dangerous — only, somehow, faintly obscene — but Kirk drew his phaser anyhow, on general principles. At the same moment, its uncertain movements dislodged the anomalous crutch, and the whole wretched construction collapsed into a slowly writhing puddle, like a potfull of broad-bean pods which had been simmered too long.
Behind it, Kirk now saw, stretched a long length of shell-littered, white-sanded beach, sweeping into the distance to a blue sea and a low line of chalk cliffs which blended into a beautifully blue sky. A sun shone brightly, and the temperature had become positively Mediterranean. There was no one else around him at all, unless he counted the fallen monster and a few far wheeling white specks in the sky which might have been gulls.
“Mr. Spock!” he shouted. “Scotty!”
Two tentacles thrust up from the dull green mass, thickened, grew two side tentacles, and then gourdlike knobs at their ends. Strange markings, almost like faces, grimaced along the surfaces of the gourds. Was the thing about to go to seed?
But simultaneously, the sunlight dimmed and went out. The landscape turned colorless. Everything but the two tentacles faded into a thick gray limbo.
The tentacles turned into Spock Two and Scott.
“Where were you?” Kirk demanded. “Did you see what I saw?”
“I doubt it,” Spock Two said. “Tell us what you saw, Captain.”
“I was on something that looked a lot like the southern seacoast of Spain. There was a huge biological sort of object in front of me, and I was just wondering whether or not to shoot it when I called your names. It turned into you two and the rest of the scene washed out.”
“Any emotional impression, Captain?”
“Yes, now that I come to think of it. There was an underlying feeling that something terrible was about to happen, though I couldn’t specify what. Nightmarish. What about you, Scotty?”
“I dinna see any monsters,” Scott said. “Everything around me suddenly turned into lines, black on white. It was a wirin’ diagram, and sair ancient, too, for there were symbols for thermionic valves — vacuum tubes — in it. An’ I was plugged into it, for I couldna move, an’ I had the feelin’ that if anybody turned up the gain I’d blow out. I just realized that all of the valve symbols were caricatures of faces I knew, when I heard you callin’ my name, Captain, and hey presto, here I was back — wherever this may be.”
“I saw no change at all, nor did either of you disappear,” Spock Two said. “You simply stopped walking, and you, Captain, drew your phaser and called out. Obviously this is an effect of the screen around the planet, and I am resisting it better than you are, thus far, as we thought might happen. Tell me, Captain, were you ever on the southern seacoast of Spain?”
“Yes, once, on holiday from the Academy.”
“And Mr. Scott was imprisoned in a student or antiquarian wiring diagram. Apparently we can expect these hallucinations to be projections of our own early experience; knowing this may be of some help to us in coping with them.”
The mist lifted abruptly, revealing the same rock-tumble into which they had first materialized.