only three days and a few odd hours left to save Kyros from a brutal, theocratic dictatorship ruled by a mad genius… and save our own necks and the Enterprise in the process.” He turned back to the photograph displayed on the large vision screen and pointed again, continuing his briefing.
“Just north of the mining settlement is one of the main east-west migration trails of the hill people. Well swing left there and approach from a less suspicious direction. Our best plan would be to join with one of the clans which is riding to join Spock, and journey along with them. A gathering that size would be a natural place for Beshwa to set up shop.”
When the conference broke up a half hour later, the general structure of the plan to sever the link between Spock and Cbag Gara had been worked out. Its keystone would be Ensign Sara George.
Well guarded as he was, Kirk realized, there was no way strangers could get close enough to Spock for the implant nullifier to be effective; but the gross sexuality he had inherited from his doppelganger, Chag Gara, might be his undoing. If…
There were too many ifs in the scheme, as Kirk was the first to point out. But the alternatives were unacceptable.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It had been three hours since the meeting broke up. Captain Kirk was sprawled out on his bunk staring at the ceiling, his mind busily working on the details of the coming expedition, when the intraship communicator sounded. He rolled off the bunk.
“Kirk here.”
“Sorry to bother, Jim,” McCoy’s voice said, “but we have a neelot problem. Can you come down to the cargo transporter?”
When he got to the transporter room, crewmen were wheeling a gaudily painted Beshwa wagon off the stage and over to one side. Chekov, a miserable expression on his face, was braced against the control console, his Kyrosian shorts down around his ankles. McCoy finished applying an antiseptic spray to one bare buttock, then sprayed a layer of flesh-colored foam that hardened into a thin, flexible sheet.
“There,” he said. “In a couple of days the dermolastic will dry up and fall off, leaving a nice, pink gluteus.”
“What happened to you?” Kirk demanded with a grin.
Chekov pulled up his shorts and turned so that Kirk could see a jagged tear in their seat
“Damn neelot bit me, sir.”
“His not to reason why,” McCoy put in softly.
“So where is it… them?” the captain asked.
“Still down there, sir. While I was trying to hitch one of them to the wagon, he let loose with a kick that could have taken off my head if I hadn’t jumped back out of range. When I did, another one just reached around and took a sample. Is it true that once they’ve tasted blood—”
“I’ll see that you’re mentioned in the log… sometime,” Kirk interrupted. “However, we’ve now got a Beshwa caravan and nothing to pull it with.”
“That’s what happens when you send a boy to do a man’s job,” McCoy drawled. “Especially a city boy.”
“I can’t help it if my dop isn’t a neelot tamer,” Chekov said defensively. “I’d like to see what you would have done if you were in my shoes… sir.”
McCoy made a modest gesture. “Once I’d shown them who was boss,” he said, “they’d be eating out of my hand. As an old Georgia farm boy raised around Missouri mules, I’ve yet to see a meaner, more ornery critter than a terrestrial jackass, in spite of all the planets I’ve been to.”
“Well,” said Kirk, folding his arms across his chest, “it looks like we have a volunteer, doesn’t it, Ensign?”
“Yes, sir!” came Chekov’s enthusiastic reply.
“Now, wait just one little old second, Jim,” McCoy protested.
Kirk looped his arm through one of McCoy’s and escorted him to the transporter stage. “Shouldn’t be any trouble at all for an ‘old Georgia farm boy.’ ” He turned to the officer behind the control console. “Lieutenant, energize, if you please.”
With a huge grin on her face, the woman officer did so.
“Yours not to reason why,” Kirk called gaily as McCoy faded from sight in the glitter of the carrier wave.
Ten minutes later, the chief medical officer reappeared with six docile neelots in tow. “I was waiting a full five minutes,” he said, as he led the animals to the wagon and rapidly hitched them up. Kirk noticed that his right knuckles were bruised and bleeding.
“Was that… eating out of your hand, or eating of it?” he asked.
“Couldn’t find an ax handle, so I had to use my fist,” McCoy explained. “They may have heads that look like alligators, but they’re soft. A proper Missouri mule would have reared back and hee-hawed.” Crooking his finger, and with a mock evil grin he said to Chekov, “Come along, Ensign. I wouldn’t want you to get hoof and mouth disease at a time like this. I have an old-fashioned needle…”
Sometime later, Kirk, programmed with a Beshwa dop, lay on his bunk again and began to sample the store of knowledge of his new identity. He had become accustomed to the Androsian mind he was previously linked to, but the Beshwa were products of a different culture. As he gingerly began to probe the memories and attitudes of his dop, the communicator sounded.
This time it was his chief engineer.
“What’s the problem, Scotty?”
“It’s this Beshwa caravan,” Scott explained. “I just canna make sense of some of its parts…”
Kirk grinned and realized he could get one up on his engineer because of his Beshwa dop.
“Hang on, Scotty, I’ll be right down.”
When he arrived in the cargo transporter room, which he had left only an hour before, he found his engineer standing by the odd-looking wagon, fists on hips, muttering softly.
“Can I be of any help?” Kirk asked innocently.
“Well, sir,” Scott said, “if you can tell me why the wagon tongue is hinged so it can stick straight up in the air, and why the van can be disconnected from the wagon in front and, above all, why the blazes there’s a telescoping boom twenty meters long and connecting the twa parts… I’ll… I’ll nae take a drink for a month!”
“You don’t mean that?” Kirk asked in mock surprise. Scott nodded.
“Well,” Kirk began, “even though I’m not an engineer, of course, it seems simple to me. I imagine the reason the two parts can be disconnected is so the Beshwa, if they have several short trading visits to make in one day, can unhook the van and park it somewhere convenient. As for the rest…”
Scott’s jaw dropped farther and farther as Kirk went into a detailed explanation of the use of the various special features.
When he finished, he added modestly, “I may be way off base, though, Mr. Scott.”
Scott turned wide eyes on his captain. “But you’re right, Captain. That’s the way it has to be. Now, why couldn’t I have seen that?”
“Because I have a Beshwa dop and you don’t, Scotty. Now, get down to sickbay and have Dr. McCoy link you into yours, and then you can check this caravan over thoroughly. We’re beaming down before dawn tomorrow, and I don’t want a wheel coming off the first hour on the road.”
Scott turned to go, then swung back. “Captain, aboot that pledge…”
“Scotty,” Kirk said, “Do you really think I would make you go on the wagon?” Kirk grinned. Relieved, Scott went to sickbay.
Early the following morning, the landing party lined up before the Beshwa caravan for a quick inspection. The experiment of hooking two men into one dop had worked out well; the only thing that betrayed the overlapping was when the officers went into character. In spite of their physical differences, in intonations and mannerisms Kirk and Chekov were almost like identical twins. The same was true for Scott and McCoy, who had been double linked to
