“Have we made any progress?” Kirk asked.
Spock Two checked his tricorder. “Perhaps five or six meters, though I doubt that any of us has actually walked that far.”
“Then let’s move on. At this rate we’ve got a long trek ahead.”
But as he stepped forward again, the nightmare returned…
…with an utterly appalling clamor. He was surrounded by a jungle of primitive machinery. Trip hammers pounded away insanely at nothing; rocker arms squealed as if their fulcrums were beds of rust; plumes of steam shot up into the hot, oil-reeking air with scrannel shrieks; great gears clashed, and great wheels turned with ponderous groans; leather belts slapped and clicked; eccentrics scraped in their slots; a thousand spinning shafts whined up and down the scale, a thousand tappets raffled in as many tempos, and somewhere a piece of armor plate seemed to be being beaten out into what eventually would be thin foil. Over it all arched a leaden roof in which every sound was doubled and redoubled, like the ultimate metaphor for an apocalyptic headache.
And once more there was no other human being in sight — nor, this time, any sign of life at all.
Kirk found it impossible to imagine what part of his experience this mechanical hell could have been drawn from, and the din made coherant thought out of the question; it was not only literally, physically deafening, but very near the lethal level. All he could manage to do was take another step forward…
Splash!
He was swimming for his life in a freezing black sea, in the ghastly, flickering light of a night thunderstorm. Great combers lifted and dropped him sickeningly, and the howling air, when he could get any at all, stank peculiarly of a mixture of seaweed, formaldehyde and coffee. Yet despite the coldness of the water, he felt hot inside his uniform, almost sweaty.
The sense of unreality was very strong, and after a moment he recognized where he was: in a delirium he had had during a bout of Vegan rickettsial fever on his first training assignment. The odor was that of the medicine he had had to take, a local concoction which had been all the colonists had had to offer. Still, it had done the trick.
As the next wave heaved him up, he heard through the thunder an ominous booming sound: breakers, and not far away, either, pounding against rock. Illusion or no illusion, Kirk doubted that he could live through that. Yet clearly, no amount of physical motion was going to get him out of this one; he was already swimming as hard as he could. How…
…it had done the trick.
Holding his breath, Kirk gulped down a mouthful of the bitter waters. At once, his feet touched bottom; and a moment later, dry as a stick, he was standing in even gray light amidst the rock-tumble.
He was still alone, however; and calling produced no response. He took out his communicator. It too was quite dry, though that had not been a major worry anyhow; it was completely waterproof, and, for that matter, gas-tight.
“Mr. Spock. Mr. Scott. Come in, please.”
No answer.
“Kirk to Enterprise.”
“Uhura here, Captain,” the communicator said promptly.
“Can you give me a reading on the positions of Spock and Scott?”
“Why, they must be in sight of you, Captain. Their location pips on the board overlap yours.”
“No such luck, and they don’t answer my calls, either. Give them a buzz from up there, Lieutenant.”
“Right.” After a moment, she reported, “They answer right away, Captain. But they don’t see you and can’t raise you, either.”
She sounded decidedly puzzled, which made her in no way different from Kirk.
“Par for the course, I’m afraid,” he said. “Any Klingons yet?”
“No, sir, but there’s a lot of subspace radio jamming. That’s their usual opening gambit when they’re closing in.”
“Well, Mr. Sulu has his orders. Keep me posted. Kirk out.”
Clenching his teeth, he took another step…
The rock crumbled to rich loam, and around him rose the original pseudo-medieval village of the first expedition to Organia. But it was deserted. All the buildings seemed at least partially burned; and as for the castle in the distance, it looked more as if it had been bombarded. A skull grinned up at him from the long brown grass, and from almost infinitely far away, there came a sound like the hungry howling of a wild dog. The whole scene looked like the aftermath of a siege toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
Nevertheless, this might be progress. It was more like the “old” Organia than anything else he had experienced thus far, and just might mean that he was drawing closer to a real goal. What good it would do him, or all of them, to arrive there without his engineering officer, who alone had the key to the whole problem now, he did not know; he could only hope that Scotty was somehow making his own way through whatever hallucinations he was suffering. He was hardheaded and skeptical; that should help. But why was he also invisible?
“Never mind. First things first. Another step…”
The only permanent aspect of the landscape now around him was change. Through shifting mists, an occasional vague object loomed, only to melt into something else equally vague before it could be identified. The mists were varicolored, not only obstructing vision but destroying perspective, and tendrils of faint perfume lay across them like incense.
He moved tentatively forward. The scene remained as it was; he began to suspect that this hallucination was going to be permanent. As he progressed, hands outstretched in the multicolored fog, he began to encounter what he could only think of as tendrils of emotion, invisible but palpable. About half of these carried with them a murmur of not-quite-recognizable voices, or fragments of music; and almost all of them Were unpleasant.
How long this went on he had no idea. For that matter, he might well have been walking in a circle. At long last, however, one of the dark shapes that appeared ahead refused to melt, becoming instead more definite and familiar. Finally, he could see that it was his first officer.
“How did you manage to get here?”
“I have been here all the time, Captain, in the real world, so to speak. But I had no access to you because of your present hallucination, and finally I was reluctantly forced to meld my mind with yours — to enter your illusion, as it were.”
“Forced?”
“By circumstances. You are going the wrong way, Captain.”
“I half suspected it. Lead on, then.”
“This way.”
The first officer moved off. As he did so, he appeared to become oddly distorted; to Kirk, it was as though he were being seen from behind and in profile at the same time. Around him, the scene froze into prismatic, irregular polygons of pure color, like a stained-glass window, and all motion ceased.
“Mr. Spock?”
There was no answer. Kirk inspected the silent, motionless figure. There seemed to be something amiss about it besides its distortion, but he could not figure out what it was. Then, all at once, he saw it.
On its right hand was a cartoon image of Kirk’s class ring.
Kirk whipped out his communicator.
“Lieutenant Uhura, Kirk here. I’ve got Spock One suddenly on my hands, and he seems to be in much better command of the conditions here than I am. Have the transporter room yank us both out, grab him and imprison him securely, and then send me back pronto.”
“I’m sorry, Captain, but we can’t,” Uhura’s voice said. “A Klingon squadron has just this minute popped out at us and we’re under full deflector shield. Unless you want to change your previous orders, we’re probably going to have to make a run for it.”
“My orders,” Kirk said, “stand.”
Chapter Twelve — A COMBAT OF DREAMS