"You had best fill us in on exactly what has taken place," Spock suggested gently.
"The man's name is Jaiao," she began tiredly. "One of our excavators. Just because he's not as bright as some of our scientists was no reason to suspect him of harboring dishonest thoughts. Jaiao's difficulty is not unique. He simply feels he's not as wealthy as he would like to be." Her face twisted into a sardonic grin. "That's the problem."
"He stole the box by himself, then?" inquired Spock. "He is acting alone?"
"As far as we can tell." Masid gestured toward the distant domes. "Leastwise, no one's rushed to help him so far."
The criminal bent of certain humans never ceased to perplex Spock, and the present situation appeared founded on less logic than most such incidents.
Masid shook her head. "Be stunned if I know what came over him." Again she gestured at the domes, taking care to indicate the bulge farthest from their right "He's locked himself in a storage dome."
"Have you tried to reason with him?"
She eyed the first officer strangely. "For some five minutes, until it became clear the devil himself couldn't talk him out of his foolishness. We also tried exhausting the air in the dome, but he has a life-support belt and plenty of power packs for it, so that didn't work."
"What can he do against you, to keep you from simply rushing him?" Sulu asked.
"He has a weapon in there, a model 6BB displacer. That's one of the portable tools we use for excavating the ruins. It's clumsy compared to a hand phaser, but in the hands of someone like Jaiao, who knows how to use it, it makes a pretty nasty weapon, as Charlie here can tell you."
The man with the ugly burn mark on his neck nodded. "He's not fooling with that thing. He didn't miss me by much—and I don't think he was trying to miss me at all."
"If you tried exhausting the air in his dome, he'd just cut his way out into thinner but still livable atmosphere," Sulu pointed out. "You must have some weapons, or at least other displacers and people who know how to run them. How many of you are there here at the station?"
"I know what you're thinking, Lieutenant." Masid nodded. "It won't work. I didn't mean to imply that Jaiao is stupid. He's not, he's just not as brilliant as some of our higher-ranking professionals here. But he knew what he was doing before he took the box, had his strategy pretty well planned out. He went straight for the storage dome, with its ample supply of water, power, and food.
"If we rush him," she finished somberly, "he's threatened to use the displacer to try and open the stasis box."
"If we could be certain there was nothing in the box for its mechanism to protect . . ."
"Oh, it's sealed all right, Commander," she told him.
"Isn't there some way we can neutralize the field without him knowing about it, Mr. Spock?" The helmsman looked hopefully at his superior.
"I fear not, Mr. Sulu. An unopened, sealed box maintains its stasis field by means we still do not understand. Inside that field, time stands still, perfectly preserving whatever its original owners wished to put inside.
"There are methods of safely opening a stasis box. It has been done a number of times. But if the opening is not carried out with the utmost care and proper instrumentation, the results can be disastrous. I personally know of one stasis box that was opened hastily and improperly. It contained a variety of disruptor bomb. It may also have contained many other things, but we will never know of them. When the box was tampered with in that sloppy fashion, the bomb went off.
"I have heard of other means, equally lethal, which the Slavers employed to assure the security of their boxes. This person's threat to open this one in a hasty, crude fashion is a very real threat to anyone nearby."
"Sorry. I apologize, Director Masid." Sulu looked contrite. "I should have guessed you had reasons for not having made a direct attack on him already."
She smiled back at him. "We're researchers here, not members of the military. We don't know how to proceed or what to do next. We do have one shuttlecraft, located far on the other side of the domes, for emergency use. Our main relief ship isn't due for another three months. There are several inhabited systems within the range of our own shuttle."
"I can imagine what he is demanding," said Spock knowledgeably.
She nodded, once. "Free access to the shuttle and a guarantee of noninterference until he reaches it. He won't get that from me. We'd sooner have him break the box seal and destroy the whole base rather than let him slip away to maybe sell the box to someone with belligerent intentions." There were murmurs of agreement from the two men flanking her.
"Of course," Spock pointed out, "the box may not contain anything that might be of use to such people. Neither weapon nor weapon-adaptable device."
"But we can't take that chance . . . of course." Masid eyed Spock approvingly. "We think alike, Commander."
"I will accept that to a certain point," Spock agreed cautiously. "I still believe our best attempt to, ah, defuse the situation is to reason with the man."
"It's hard to reason with someone who has most of his sense in his back, Commander," declared Masid firmly. "Maybe you can do better than we have, but I doubt it." She eyed him with suspicion.
"We must at least give the appearance of negotiating in good faith." Spock looked thoughtful as he glanced toward the domes. "I want to see what the physical situation is, before deciding how to proceed. In order to do that we must convince him to talk with us."
"All right," agreed the director. "The fact that you're Federation military might have some effect on him. I'm afraid he's convinced himself that he's gone too far to back out now."
"I don't think so," Uhura disagreed. "So far he's guilty of nothing worse than simple theft."
"And assault with intent to kill." That came from the unforgiving-sounding man on Masid's left, the one with the burn from the displacer.
"Perhaps he will talk to you." Masid appeared ready to half persuade herself that something might be done before someone was killed. "Just remember that Jaiao has visions of endless wealth running through his head and he figures this is his one chance in life to get it."
"All I require is that you tell him who we are and aid us in getting to talk with him." Spock started toward the car. "The sooner we begin, the better it will be. We are on a tight schedule ourselves."
The cargo compartment of the battered little land vehicle was spacious enough to hold them all without crowding, if not in comfort. Once inside, Masid piloted the vehicle over a circuitous course across the surprisingly rugged terrain. Lava had flowed here in the recent past and there were cracks and rills to be avoided.
On the way they passed other members of the expedition. All of them worked hard at being interested in their assigned duties, but they glanced furtively and often in the direction of the car and the new arrivals within. Sulu noticed several of the anxious faces. He couldn't blame them. If the undoubtedly nervous man in the storage dome tried to force open the stasis box, everyone nearby might instantly vanish from existence.
The lock leading into the domes was simple in design and fragile in execution, and heavy-duty seals weren't necessary. The lock was present for convenience only, to permit the expedition to maintain the slight comfort of normal atmosphere within its living quarters. On dour Gruyakin, even the slightest luxury was worth a little extra expense, the helmsman mused.
Inside, they followed a corridor to where a man and woman were crouching behind a tripod-mounted device of metal and plastic. Spock recognized it as a displacer of a type similar to the one Director Masid had already indicated was in the hands of the thief. Such a device was designed to move modest quantities of earth and stone with fair precision. His own small hand phaser contained more destructive power. The displacer could still neatly remove a man's head from his body, however.
As they approached, the woman rose, eyed the three officers speculatively, and addressed the expedition head. "He's still holed up in there, Director. He's been very quiet."
"
Asleep?" Spock queried.
She looked up at him. "No. We heard some crates being opened. He's using the time to build up his easily accessible supplies, I think."
"We thought of that too, Commander," Masid said regretfully. "I told you Jaiao had this planned out. He says he's set up an alarm system to warn him if anyone gets within three meters of him. That's not much warning, but I don't want to risk the lives of any of my people finding out how fast his reaction time is. Anyhow, we can't tell when he's sleeping and when he's not. He blew out the visual monitors in the dome's roof, and he stays out of sight."
"Sounds like he's ready to settle down for a long stay," observed Sulu as he moved forward.
Masid took a couple of quick steps, cut him off. "Take it a little slower here, please, Lieutenant. Jaiao's shown a tendency to be a bit trigger-happy." She gestured upward and they saw the dark streaks on the tough dome material where blasts from the displacer had struck.
Keeping close to the near wall, they moved cautiously toward the storage dome. They reached a place where the corridor opened into a two-story-high single large chamber. In places, it was stacked almost to that curved ceiling with tubes, cylinders, and crates of all sizes and colors.
Sulu was in the lead and cautiously peeked around the last bend in the corridor. "I can't see him," he whispered back to the others.
"A little to the left of room center," Masid advised him. "He's built himself a nice little barricade with a couple of big gas tanks in front."
Sulu shifted his gaze slightly, located the bulky metal cylinders. "Still can't see him . . . He's well hidden, all right." The helmsman kept an eye on the disconcerting arrangement of containers. One of the brightly colored shapes moved slightly. "I see him now. He's staying down low, Mr. Spock. I don't think we could get a phaser on him clean."
"What about reflective surfaces, Mr. Sulu?"
The helmsman stared long at the makeshift fortress in the center of the room. "No good, sir. Everything that's piled close to him is plastic, ceramic, or some other dulled material. Nothing polished enough to risk bouncing a beam off."
"I didn't think of that." Masid looked impressed. "But don't attribute it to Jaiao's intelligence. I don't think he's that smart. We just don't have much stored in metal or glass cases, that's all."
Spock started forward. "Let me have a look, Mr. Sulu."
The lieutenant hugged the wall as he edged back into the corridor, trading places with the first officer. Spock peered around the corner, immediately located the thief's makeshift ramparts.
"What is his last name, please?" he asked.
"Beguin," Masid told him.
Spock nodded, turned, and leaned as far into the room as he dared.
"Jaiao Beguin," he called sharply. No answer. He tried again. "Jaiao Beguin!"
A rustling sound reached them from the jumble of crates and cylinders, though no face appeared among them. "You know what I want! I'm getting impatient!" The voice was high-pitched, angry.
Sulu leaned over, whispered to Uhura. "Not even Mr. Spock's going to be able to reason with this one. The director's right: He's a little crazy."
Ignoring the byplay behind him, the first officer of the Enterprise concentrated on analyzing the reply to his call, dissecting every nuance, building a temporary psychological profile of the speaker out of a couple of short, terse statements.
"This is Commander Spock of the Federation cruiser Enterprise. I am in command of a landing party from that ship. We are here to recover the Slaver stasis box, which is valuable property belonging to the Federation government and all its peoples.
"At this very moment, heavy phasers are trained on you both from my position and from outside this dome. You cannot escape. We can kill you if we have to, instantly, before you can damage the box—and the box and its contents will not be affected.
"Thus far you can only be charged with simple theft and assault. If you turn over the box and surrender, it will go much easier on you."
The reply to Spock's carefully worded combination of promise and threat was a peal of barking, none-too-stable laughter that bordered on the hysterical. "I don't believe you!" it declared imperiously. "If you could kill me and not damage the box you would have done so already, without giving me any warning. Who do you think you're fooling with?"
Spock could have answered the man's question, but it would do no good to antagonize him further. Besides, Spock hadn't expected the man to give in readily.
"Didn't you hear our shuttle land?" he called.
"Yeah, I heard it," Beguin admitted, his voice a bit softer and more speculative now. "You could have a cannon trained on my forehead for all I care. I've got the box right in front of me, between my legs. It's sitting on the workplate of a compacter. You know what that means?"
Masid looked startled, and whispered to Sulu and Uhura. "Our compacter is a device for crushing rocks and other material for detailed analysis of their constituent parts. It's got an idle control. If it's running and he trips the trigger for fast release, it'll throw about a thousand kilos of pressure onto the stasis box!"
Sulu looked worried. "Is that enough to crack the box, Mr. Spock?"
"It is possible," the first officer finally replied after considering the problem thoroughly, "depending on the strength of the field inside the box and how much of it shields the box material itself. I would prefer not to risk it."
The nervous, taunting voice of the thief interrupted them. "Go ahead and shoot, why don't you, Mr. Spock of the Enterprise? Why don't you shoot? You might kill me before the auto-release I've set on the compacter can trigger it . . . but I don't think so. In any case, I'm betting my life that you're not willing to take that gamble. I'm going to bet that you're not going to risk the lives of all the people in this station, including your own."
"You are quite correct," Spock shouted back at him, "but neither can you escape with the box. It is a stalemated situation you cannot win."
"I don't see why not." Bravado mixed with assurance in the man's voice. "I've planned this pretty careful. You can't do anything to me without having me throw the compacter pressure onto the box. And while you sit and make up your minds I can get along nice, thanks."
"What about sleep?" Spock countered. "All the food and water in the world won't help you when you need rest, nor will your imaginary warning device if we rush you from several sides simultaneously."
"I figure with the stimulants I've found," Beguin responded, "I can stay awake operating efficiently for another forty hours or so. But you're right, Commander Spock. You could make trouble for me if I fell asleep. So this is what we're going to do: If I don't hear something positive about my request for the shuttle in forty hours, and I find myself falling asleep, I'll just have to assume you've all outsmarted me. That'll mean all my work's been for nothing, won't it? I'll be very discouraged and depressed. I think," he concluded, his voice rising slightly, "that in that event I'll just let the compacter go on the box anyway, to see what happens."
Spock and the others ignored the laughter drifting out of the room. "We now know how much time we have left to work in."
"What happens if the forty hours are up and we haven't figured out how to pry him loose from that box?" Uhura stared straight at Spock.
"We will deal with that eventuality in thirty-nine hours, Lieutenant," Spock informed her crisply.
"He's got it all planned out, all right," she observed. "He's smarter than I thought."
"There is a difference, Lieutenant, between true intelligence and animal cunning. The latter is the virtue our opponent possesses and it is that we must cope with."
"Whatever, it's working for him," she argued.
"True enough." Spock turned his gaze to the attentive director. "Are there any other entrances or exits to this storage dome?"
"No, none," Masid informed them.
Spock nodded knowingly. "Given the care with which this theft has been carried out thus far, I would not be surprised if that is yet another r
eason why he retreated here. Did you consider cutting another entrance?"
"We did," she confessed. "I decided there's no way we could do it without Beguin hearing or seeing us, or both, and the last thing I wanted to do was panic him."
"Quite right." Spock eyed his companions. "I have a thought . . . but I would prefer an idea with a better chance of success than I postulate for my own."
"What about inducing some kind of odorless, colorless gas into the dome's ventilation system?" Uhura proposed. "If it was seeped in gradually, it might knock him out before he knows what's happening."
"I would almost consider that, Lieutenant," Spock admitted, "save for one drawback. If he is staying as close to the compacter and the box as he insists he is, then I would be surprised if he is not keeping a hand close by the compacter trigger at all times. The danger of knocking him out without anyone else around is that his hand or body might fall on the compacter trigger." He glanced briefly back into the chamber.
"Somehow we must get someone close to him, so that he cannot possibly throw the compacter switch in a last futile, defiant gesture." He paused. "I see one possibility. There is a very large container just to the left and rear of his likely resting place." He glanced backward. "What does it contain, Director Masid?"
She crawled forward, peered around the corner. "I see the one you mean, Commander, but I don't know what's inside. I can't keep track of everything that comes in in the way of supplies. Just a minute."
She retreated, climbed to her feet, and disappeared down the corridor. Several minutes passed before she returned with a tall man in tow, the one with the scar on his neck.
"Charlie's our quartermaster. It's his bailiwick that Beguin appropriated. That's how he got that burn." She gestured to him and they both managed to glance into the room. "The big crate on Beguin's left, Charlie . . . what's in it?"
"Give me a second." The man leaned farther into the room, squinted at the container in question. Just as he ducked back into the corridor, a faint but lethal bolt from the displacer scored the floor where he had been a moment before.