peculiarly shaped flask of an amber-colored drink, Canopian brandy, Kirk’s favorite.
He set the curved flask down on Kirk’s desk, took two snifter glasses from the wainscot cabinet which ran along the inner bulkhead, and filled each glass halfway. He handed one to Kirk, and the two stood silently for a moment, sipping the potent brandy slowly and appreciatively.
McCoy’s seamed, leathery face peered at Kirk over the rim of the glass he held, his dark blue eyes fixed on his captain, waiting for him to speak.
“Ahhh, lovely! Much better than that green Saurian stuff you like, eh, Bones?” Kirk said. He held out his glass. “A little more.”
“I’m an equal opportunity drinker, Jim,” McCoy remarked. “Here you are.” The doctor refilled Kirk’s glass, then his own.
The two men sat and began to discuss the malfunctioning of the telescan implants. McCoy frowned as Kirk described the reasons for the early return of two of the survey team members.
McCoy let out a sudden, startled whistle when Kirk relayed Dawson’s report on Ensign George’s problem.
“Sara did that?” he said incredulously. “Jim, she couldn’t have. She’s the starchiest female I’ve run into in years. I gave her a friendly pat one day and she almost took my head off. It’s a shame such a lovely woman should have such anachronistic beliefs about the human body.” McCoy shook his head, then asked Kirk, “Have you had much of a chance to talk with her?”
Kirk shook his head.
“She’s on special assignment from Cultural Survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the cephalic implants as a survey tool,” McCoy began. “One of her jobs has been selecting likely native matches for survey team linkages. It looks as if she didn’t do such a good job on her own. Come to think of it, she was giving Spock the eye when they were getting ready to beam down the day before yesterday.”
“Oh, no,” groaned Kirk. “Not another one! Why does nearly every woman assigned to the Enterprise set her cap for that walking computer? Doesn’t she understand Vulcans?”
“I imagine so. She must be aware that Vulcans only have the mating urge—the pon farr—every seven years.” McCoy shrugged. “But be that as it may, we’re going to have to tune Sara’s implant to a new dop. She doesn’t seem to be able to handle the one she’s linked to now. With all the profiles she had to choose from, I’m surprised she didn’t pick one whose personality was more like her own.”
“How many Kyrosian profiles do we have?” Kirk asked.
“Over two hundred. Sara did the collecting herself. We picked up enough information by tight-beam scan to be able to outfit her in native dress. She was transported down just outside the city gates at night with a personality scanner hidden in a pouch. When the gates opened in the morning, she pretended to be a mute. Through sign language, she found an inn at the center of town, rented the rooms we’re using as a transporter terminal, locked the door, set up the scanner, and began recording natives.”
McCoy paused a moment and sipped from his glass. “She beamed up with quite a collection—town people, hill people, even a couple of Beshwa.”
“Beshwa?”
“Kyrosian gypsies. Anyway,” McCoy continued, “the native neural patterns she recorded on magcards give detailed personality profiles as distinctive as fingerprints.
“The next step was to select the profile that would be most useful to a particular survey party member in his particular mission, tune a telescan implant to it, and insert it surgically behind his right ear. Once it was turned on, a telepathic link was established with the selected native that gives the investigator an immediate command of idiomatic Kyrosian and the ability to react behaviorally in any situation exactly as his dop would.”
Kirk gave a wry grin. “And that, as George and Peters found out, can create problems.”
“But don’t worry, Jim, we’ll get the bugs worked out. Even with the minor problems we’ve encountered so far, the implant is the best survey device the bureau has come up with yet. We picked up more information, so Dobshansky tells me, on how Kyrosian society works in the last few days, than we could have in a month using the old system. Of course we’re lucky that the natives are humanoid enough that, except for colored contact lenses that duplicate their unusual eye pigmentation, little is needed in the way of disguise. The links make it possible for our people to go almost anyplace with complete acceptance. Within limits,” McCoy added, waving his glass for emphasis. “If you’re linked to a street beggar, you’re going to behave and talk like one. And that means you won’t be able to pass yourself off as a Kyrosian aristocrat. But as I said, we’ve been rather successful in matching profile to mission, though I should have checked on Ensign George more closely. I’ll get her on the operating table tonight and tune her implant to one which isn’t so… so friendly. I’ll see if I can dig up a man-hater so she’ll stop pestering Spock.”
“I’ve a better idea,” Kirk said. “Why don’t we pull her off the survey detail and put her to work with you on the whole problem? And by the way: I’d like to see the circuit diagrams for the implant. I think I’d better find out what makes that thing tick.”
“I’ve programmed them into the computer already, so I can show you right now,” McCoy said, sliding from his perch on the desk. He turned around and pulled a vision screen erect from the surface of the desk and pressed the intraship communicator button.
“Computer…”
“Recording,” replied the flat, feminine voice of the starship’s main computer.
“Display the circuitry of the telescan implant on the captain’s visual monitor.”
“Working,” the computer replied, and a moment later a glowing hologram appeared on the vision screen. The diagram was color-coded. Kirk saw what appeared to be thousands of dots strung on layered spiders’ webs. The three-level display turned as McCoy made an adjustment.
“Here it is,” the doctor said. “The first section, once tuned to a profile of a native, establishes the telepathic link. This second section acts as a feedback shunt to keep the dop from being aware that his brain has been tapped.” McCoy traced a path with his finger. “Next is an input filter stage which passes behavioral information but cuts out thoughts of the moment. Having the constant mental chatter that goes on inside everyone’s head coming across would be too distracting.”
“I know,” said Kirk, nodding sober agreement “That’s one of the reasons Spock, like others with telepathic ability, rarely uses his talent. He finds mind-melding an extremely distasteful process.”
“Hah!” McCoy snorted. “The real reason is that he doesn’t want his pristine computer banks contaminated with a lot of emotionally tainted and questionable data.”
“I think you may be right.” Kirk laughed. “But, Bones, you know how infernally curious Spock is. I couldn’t keep him from this survey with tractor beams!”
McCoy snorted again and turned back to the diagram. “As I was saying, the implant is a honey of a job of psychoelectronic engineering, especially when you consider that all of its circuitry is encapsulated in a half- centimeter sphere.”
“This is where the problems must be,” McCoy continued, stabbing a forefinger at the input filter stage. “It looks as if this section isn’t working as well as the lab tests predicted. Too much of their dops’ personalities are leaking into Sara’s and Ensign Peters’ brains.
“I think I have an idea.” McCoy peered at the diagram with pursed lips. “If you do take Ensign George off the detail, she can help me get to work on it at once. Microminiaturized circuitry is tricky to work on, but with a little technical assistance from the engineering department, we shouldn’t really have too much trouble ironing out the problem.”
“Good,” Kirk said approvingly. He held out his empty glass for another refill, then thought better of it. “Guess I’d better hold off,” he murmured regretfully. “They’ll be beaming up the rest of the survey team soon and I’ll have to be at the debriefing. I’m curious as to what Spock has been up to for the last couple of days.”
“Me, too,” McCoy agreed and looked into his glass. “Maybe I’d better cut off also, if I’m going to be doing surgery tonight.”
Kirk pushed the visual monitor back into his desk as McCoy rinsed the glasses in the cubicle provided in the bathroom. He replaced them in the wainscot cabinet and turned to Kirk.
“Come to think of it, if you’ve got no objection, I’d like to remove Spock’s implant as soon as he gets back. He’s not essential down there, and I didn’t like the idea of implanting him in the first place. Kyrosian emotional makeup is pretty much like ours, and even if Spock was linked to a cold fish, he has enough trouble keeping his
