entrance to the shuttlecraft as a whole, would trouble himself to mine only parts of it.”
“I can think of several,” Kirk said. “If I wanted to use the gig again, to get off Organia in a hurry, I wouldn’t booby-trap the door; I wouldn’t even lock it. But I’d put a trigger on the controls, which only I could make safe easily, and nobody else could find at all.”
“Risky,” Scott said. “Somebody might touch it off by accident; might as well put a trigger on the pile and be done with it, so the gig would blow nae matter what was touched, an’ thot’s easiest done by wirin’ the lock, as Mr. Spock says. But maybe I’d want to blow the gig only if somebody fooled wi’ my invention; otherwise, I’d save it for mysel’ until the vurra last minute.”
“The miniature warp drive?” Spock said. “Yes, I might do that also, under the circumstances. But that would not be simple. He could have done so only after landing on Organia, and the probability is that he did not have nearly enough time to design such a system while in flight from the Enterprise, let alone complete it after a fast landing and a hurried escape.”
“We are going to have to take all those chances as they come,” Kirk said.
“Mr. Spock, actuate the lock. But Scotty, once we’re inside, touch nothing until Mr. Spock has checked it.”
“Sairtainly not,” Scott said indignantly. “D’ye take me for an apprentice, Captain?”
Spock approached the airlock, scanned it once more, replaced his tricorder and took out his communicator. Into this he spoke softly a chain of numbers. The outer door of the airlock promptly rolled aside into the skin of the shuttlecraft, almost without a sound. Under the apparently emotionless regard of the three Organians, they went in, almost on tiptoe.
The single central corridor which led from control room to engines was lit only by the dim glow of widely spaced “glow-pups” — tubes of highly rarified ethon gas which were continuously excited by a built-in radioactive source. That meant that all main power was off; the glow-pups themselves had no switches and would never go out within the lifetime of humanity, for the half-life of their radioactive exciter was over 25,000,000 years.
By unspoken consent, Spock and the engineer moved toward the shuttlecraft’s engine compartment. Kirk followed, feeling both useless and apprehensive; but after a moment, a great sense of peace unexpectedly descended upon him.
“Och, thot’s a relief,” Scott said. Even Spock looked slightly startled. It took Kirk several seconds to fathom the cause: the pressure of the field upon their minds was gone. The Organians were shielding them. He had become so used to fighting against it himself — it had become so much a part of his expected environment — that the feeling of relaxation was strange, almost like sleepiness.
“Keep alert,” he said. “This feeling of well-being is at least partly spurious. There could still be traps aboard.”
“A useful reminder,” Spock agreed.
The gig’s engines had not been modified noticeably, except for a small, silver-and-black apparatus which squatted, bulging and enigmatic, atop the one and only generator. Spock inspected this cautiously, and Kirk, his mind still a little erratic after its concentrated course of hallucinations, had the odd feeling that the machine was looking back at him.
Scott ignored it. Instead, he sat down before the very small maintenance board and began to unload the contents of the kits which were hung from his belt. Shortly, the board was littered with tiny parts, small snippets and coils of wire, and tools which seemed to be almost too miniaturized to be handled. Scott’s fingers, indeed, almost engulfed the first one of these he picked up, but he manipulated it, as always, with micrometric precision. For still finer work, he screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his left eye.
In the meantime, Spock was busy with tools of his own, taking the faceplate off the mysterious addition to the generator. It was slow work, for after each half turn of a screw he would step and take tricorder readings; evidently he suspected that the possible concealed bomb or self-destruct mechanism might be triggered after any one screw had been removed a given distance, and he was checking for preliminary energy flows which would mark the arming of such a trigger. This thoroughness was obviously sensible, but it made the time drag almost intolerably. It seemed to Kirk that whole battles could have been won or lost while they labored in their silent, utterly isolated steel cave on this inaccessible planet…
Scott’s apparatus, a breadboard rig of remarkable complexity and — to Kirk — complete incoherence, at last seemed to be finished. He was now wiring it into the maintenance board at various points; two such connections required him to crawl under the board, into a space that seemed scarcely large enough to admit a child.
“That’s as far as I go the noo,” he said, emerging at last. “Now, Mr. Spock, can I have a leetle power from yen generator, or have you bollixed it completely?”
“The generator is of course, intact,” the first officer said frostily. “I disconnected the replicate’s warp-drive device from it at the earliest opportunity, and made no alterations at all in the generator proper.”
“Sair gud for ye. Then I’ll just pour a leetle central heatin’ into my construction here.”
Scott snapped a switch and the generator hummed itself decorously up to operating level. Telltales lit up on the maintenance board under his watchful eye.
“I dinna ken,” he said dubiously, “whether I’ll be able to strip an energy envelope off a whole world with only a trickle of power like that to work with. Bu’ hoot, men, there’s only one way to find out.”
Slowly, he turned the knob of a potentiometer, still watching the board intently, as well as his own jury- rigged apparatus.
“We’re getting some feedback,” he said at length. “The battle is joined. Now to value up the gain a mite…”
The knob turned once more.
“‘Tis David against Goliath,” Scott muttered. “And me without my sling. Captain, somethin’s takin’ place out there, all richt, but I canna tell from these meters just how much effect I’m havin’; this board wasna designed to register any sich reaction. Mickle though it fashes me, I’ll ask you to request our friends outside tae step pretectin’ us, or I’ll get no read-out I can trust.”
Kirk started to turn back along the companionway, but the Organians must have picked up Scott’s request instantaneously from his mind. The eerie oppression of the thought-shield returned promptly. It was much less strong now, but Scott clearly was not satisfied.
“I’m only setting up a local interference,” he said. He turned the knob again. The sensation diminished further, but only slightly. “It’s nae gud. Even with the Organians’ help, I canna combat a planet-wide screen with no source but the gig’s generator. The necessary power just isna there.”
“I believe I can be of assistance,” Spock said. “I have worked out the principle of this warp-drive adjunct. It appears to draw energy directly from Hilbert space, from the same source out of which hydrogen atoms are born. In other words, a method of tapping the process of continuous creation.”
“What?” Scott said. “I’d as soon try to stick a thirteen-ampere tap directly into God. I’ll ha’e nothin’ tae do with thet.”
“It’s a hair-raising idea,” Kirk agreed. “But, Mr. Spock, obviously it did work once, for the replicate. Can you connect it back to the generator without starting some kind of catastrophe?”
“I believe so, Captain. Anything the replicate could do, I can probably do better.”
“Hubris,” Scott muttered. “Overweenin’ pride. Downfall of the Greeks. If ye don’t get a catastrophe, ye’ll get a miracle, an’ thot may well be worse.”
“At this point we need a miracle,” Kirk said. “Go ahead, Mr. Spock — plug it in.”
Spock worked quickly. Grumbling, Scott advanced the knob again. The sensation created by the thought- screen dwindled like the memory of a bad dream. His face gradually lightening, the engineer turned the knob all the rest of the way.
Five minutes later, Organia was free — and…
“Good day, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said. “Mister Spock, assume command. All department heads, report.”
Chapter Fourteen — A VISITATION OF SPIRITS
