human side under control without having things complicated by leakage from his dop.”
“Sounds good,” Kirk said. “I’d want him to get to work on the source of that radiation front, anyway. The only reason I let him go down was that he insisted so strongly. Sometimes I think his only purpose in life is to keep feeding a new supply of esoteric data into that logical brain. But he did behave oddly…”
“I’ve always thought Spock was odd,” McCoy muttered.
‘… after he was transported up last night,” Kirk went on, not hearing McCoy’s remark. “He had nothing to say at the debriefing and took off by himself when it was over. I’ve had reports that he spent most of the night wandering around the ship by himself.”
Kirk faced the doctor. “Bones, could anything have gone wrong during his operation?”
McCoy considered for a moment. “I doubt it,” he replied. “It was a routine insertion; he was the last one done, anyway. When he was linked, I ran a language test. Without having to think about it, he replied in flawless, idiomatic Kyrosian. There was the expected period of disorientation because of such intimate contact with an alien personality, but Spock seemed in control of the situation. If I’d thought the linkage would have caused him harm, I’d never have let him beam down.
“But,” McCoy went on, “I must admit to feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing, in spite of all the information we’ve acquired. The bright boys at Starfleet are always cooking up gadgets that violate a person’s physical integrity. Having my atoms scrambled every tune I go through that damn transporter is bad enough, but hooking one man’s nervous system to another’s with electronic widgets…” He grimaced his distaste. “Be only a matter of time before we’re all literally worshipping a transistor, or some bloody thing…”
Kirk slapped his medical officer on the shoulder. “Bones, transistors were old stuff two hundred years ago.”
“You know what I mean,” McCoy grumbled.
“Can’t fight progress. If man hadn’t kept trying to find ways to do things better, we’d never have climbed down from the trees. We’d still be in them, scratching for fleas and swinging from limb to limb.”
“So, now we’re swinging from star to star,” McCoy said sardonically. “And still scratching. We’re as much the slaves of our glands as our ancestors were, and most of our behavior makes as much sense. I hope poor Spock hasn’t caught the itch. In spite of his dop’s low EQ, I’m concerned about permanent effects on that finely tuned Vulcan brain of his.”
“Stop fretting,” Kirk said. “Spock’s used to that sort of thing. It’s been a struggle at times, but he’s always managed to keep what he considers his illogical side under tight control. Being exposed to a little added irrationality may make him uncomfortable, but Spock’s too smart to let it run riot.”
The captain grinned slyly at his medical officer.
“You are fond of our Vulcan iceberg, aren’t you, Bones?”
McCoy stared at Kirk, harrumphed crustily, and got to his feet.
“I’d better get down to surgery and set up for the removal of Ensign George’s implant,” he said, unwilling to continue a conversation which might force him to reveal his true feelings for the half-alien first officer. “I’ll try to be at the debriefing.”
“Hey, Bones,” Kirk called.
“Yes?”
“You forgot your bottle.”
“Tell you what,” McCoy replied. “Keep it. Tomorrow night, put Spock on second watch and we’ll lock the door, cut off the communicator, and kill the rest of. the bottle. Call it doctor’s orders.”
Kirk grinned and McCoy stepped toward the cabin’s door. He turned suddenly, raising an admonitory finger. “But don’t go nipping. That jug punched a nice hole in my budget.” McCoy lowered his finger, grinned, and stepped into the corridor.
As the door hissed shut, Kirk lay back down and picked up his Xenophon. With luck, he could get in a. couple of chapters before the survey party came aboard. He had just found his place when the communicator bleeped again.
Kirk dropped the book onto the bunk and went to his desk.
“Kirk here. What is it?” he said, trying to keep annoyance out of his voice.
“Lieutenant Commander Helman, sir,” came a worried voice. “We are in condition yellow…”
“Specify!” Kirk snapped.
“The radiation front is building. The science computer has projected a geometrical progression on the intensity scale. There’s a point 72 probability that the front will pass intensity twenty in the next few days.”
Kirk swore silently to himself. That would mean putting up the deflector screens, which would make it impossible to operate the transporters. “Do you have a duration estimate?”
“It’s still too early for an accurate prediction, sir,” Helman went on. “The computer says that it could die down in a week or two, or go on more than a month. Its configuration is unlike anything in the data banks.”
Kirk sighed. “Very good, Commander, thank you. I’ll be right up.”
He glanced at his book. Scooping both it and his dirty uniform up, he put the book away and tossed the uniform into the autowash chute.
He strode to the door of his quarters wondering when he would finish Xenophon. Then he exited and walked quickly down the corridor to the turbo-lift.
CHAPTER TWO
As the turbo-lift doors hissed open, Kirk stepped onto the bridge. Sulu, vacating the command chair, reseated himself at his helmsman’s position.
“Report,” Kirk ordered as he sat.
Helman, a tall, thin officer with close-cropped blond hair and a protuberant Adam’s apple, straightened from the science console and turned toward the starship’s captain.
“The radiation front has jumped to intensity 2.4 in the last hour, sir. At first the increase looked like a random fluctuation; but when the computer had enough data to run a curve, it reported a possible condition red, which is when I recommended a yellow alert to Mr. Sulu.” Helman gestured at the science console upon which glowed several red lights. “The front has all the characteristics of a nova, but the local sun is still perfectly normal.”
Captain Kirk frowned. “You can’t have a radiation front without a source. Have you backtracked along its course?”
“Aye, sir,” Helman replied. “The only star the coordinates fit is Epsilon lonis, the black-hole binary we checked out last month. But how a nova shell could increase in intensity so rapidly… It’s got me stumped, Captain, and there isn’t enough applicable data in the computer to come up with a working hypothesis.”
“You will continue to try to pin down that source, but right now I’m more concerned about the possible danger to this ship. We’ve got to get a more precise reading on the projected radiation increase.
“Lieutenant Leslie,” Kirk said, swinging his chair around to face the stocky engineer.
“Sir?”
“You and Mr. Sulu will tie in your banks with the science console. I want exact data on the nature of that front.”
A chorus of “aye, ayes” sounded, and the officers turned to their consoles to feed in requests, collate incoming data, and to coordinate the operations of their stations.
“Ready, sir,” Helman said finally.
“Project,” Kirk ordered.
The image of Kyros disappeared from the great screen and was replaced by a grid on which each radiational component of the strange shell of energy was plotted on the ordinate against the abscissa of time.
Helman touched a button and, like glowing worms, the component projection lines began to creep across the screen, crawling forward through tune and upward in intensity.
“What a hash,” Sulu muttered. “It’s almost as if we’re running into a solar prominence.”
Kirk watched intently as the ship’s computers continued the projection.
