“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
From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4200.9:
The Klingon force consists of two battleships, two cruisers and ten destroyers — very heavy stuff to sick onto a single starship. They must be really worried. It’s also an unwieldy force to have to maneuver this close to a planet, and under other circumstance, I’d be tempted to stay right here in orbit and slug it out with them. Captain Kirk’s orders, however, are to cut and run if we appear to be outgunned, and there’s certainly no doubt that we are. Hence we are now headed for Star Base Twenty-Eight at Warp Factor Four, with the whole Klingon pack howling along behind us. The battleships could catch us easily at this velocity, but they aren’t trying, which leads me to believe we are being herded into a trap. Well, if so, at least we have got a substantial percentage of the Klingon’s fire-power tied up in this operation, which is nice for the Federation — though not so nice for us.
The Picasso-like illusion still persisted, and Kirk made no move which might risk shattering it. He badly needed thinking time. To begin with, the class ring was revealing in several different ways: Spock at his normal level of efficiency would never have overlooked so glaring a giveaway, and Kirk could not believe that a replicate Spock, no matter how twisted, would have, either. Its persistence, therefore, probably meant that the thought- shield was also impairing his thinking — and though surely not as much as it was Kirk’s, quite probably more than he himself realized.
Then was the stoppage of time in this particular hallucination affecting him as well? If so, there was a chance that Kirk could make a fast draw, and stun him before the illusion broke. But that would leave unanswered the question of why Spock One had shown up here in the first place. His intention, almost surely, was to mislead Kirk — which in turn would mean that he knew what the right direction was to reach the Organians, or at least to get something done that the Klingons would rather leave undone. Why not play along with him for a while, and try to find out what that was, and how he knew it?
It was, Kirk decided, worth the risk — but he would have to act quickly, for his own mental deterioration was bound to be accelerating, and outthinking Spock had never, under the best of circumstances, been his chiefest talent.
He plodded forward again. The scene wavered as though someone had shaken the canvas it was painted on, and then tore down the middle without a sound. Once more, he was back in the rock-tumble…
…and once more, he was confronted by two Spocks.
The two men, original and replicate, did not seem to notice Kirk at all. They were squared off at each other across the rubble like ancient Western gun fighters, although neither showed the slightest awareness of being armed, let alone any intention of drawing. They simply stared at each other with icy implacability. Was there also a slight suggestion of hatred on the face of Spock One? Kirk could not be sure; the two faces were so alike, and yet, and yet…
“It is well that we should ‘meet again at last,” Spock Two said. “Your existence and your plotting are an offense against the natural order, as well as a source of displeasure to me. It is high time they were brought to an end.”
“My existence,” said Spock One, “is a fortuitous revision, and a necessary one, of a highly imperfect first
