Corona

  There was a cold appraisal in her eyes that went beyond the constrained emotions of a Vulcan.

  "Very impressive," Kirk said diplomatically. Grake walked them around the perimeter of the dome until they came to a raised platform, on which was mounted a small control panel. The FNS recorder positioned itself near the edge of the platform, motors within whining softly as its lenses followed Grake up the steps.

  "It is a preliminary construction," Grake said, motioning for T'Prylla to join him. Radak followed his mother. "But what it does is much more impressive than its appearance suggests." Radak stood at the control panel. Grake seemed to hesitate before continuing his explanation. "With the Transformer, we are in control of all forms of matter, energy, space and time within the vicinity of the station. Our researches have given us mastery of the very foundation of the universe, from which all creation arose. Our work is tentative, but we have accomplished a great deal."

  Mason saw McCoy's lips move. He seemed to be saying something about madness.

  "My son will prepare a demonstration."

  Radak reached out to the dimly lighted switches on the panel and touched a few with the conservative grace born of long experience. He knows the system better than his father, Mason thought, wondering why Grake himself didn't perform the demonstration. The machinery in the dome made itself felt with a sensation beneath sound, a reminder of the presence of great power.

  Then, very slowly, Radak faded. It took the visitors some seconds to realize what was happening. Chekov, even tightly controlled, jumped in startlement as the boy simply vanished. Mason believed she saw a flicker in the spot where the boy had stood, but it could have been a trick of her eyes. Spock observed the dematerialization without reaction.

  While Radak's exit was quite interesting, Spock had noticed something very peculiar while walking around the dome's perimeter. Some of the equipment had been scavenged from a Starfleet unmanned rescue vessel—no doubt, the one that had been sent out years before, never to return.

  Some of the puzzle, for him at least, was starting to fall into place.

  Shallert was standing the watch in the main transporter room, duty which did not require constant vigilance, so he spent much of the time studying updated equipment manuals.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something move on the transporter platform. He looked up. A smiling Vulcan youth stood on the reference disk. Shallert blinked, and the boy was gone. Mouth open, he checked the transporter console. It was not turned on; besides, there had been none of the characteristic sound or transporter effect.

  He hesitated, then called for security on the com. "Olaus here," came the reply.

  "Edward, Jonathan here. Clear out the padded cell in the brig. Are you registering an intruder?"

  "No," Olaus said. "What's up? Wait a minute … there's a warm body in quadrant 2, deck 7 … nobody was there a second ago."

  On deck 7 of the saucer, or primary hull, in a corridor just outside engineering and the impulse power plant, Radak walked alone, staring at this and that, marveling at the construction of the metal ship. He stretched his hand out to touch the door to engineering. It was locked, but that did not matter to Radak. It opened and he peered into the multi-level chamber. Engineering was almost empty; only one junior watch officer stood on the second level, facing the grid which divided engineering from the impulse engines. The impulse engines were shut down; very little orbital adjustment was required by the Enterprise at the moment, and that could be handled by the docking and positioning engines mounted at various places around the outside of the ship's engineering and primary hulls. Very quietly, very boldly, Radak strolled by the control panels without attracting the officer's notice, and quickly realized that this was not the Enterprise's main power plant. He visualized the outboard nacelles housing the main propulsion units, but decided against touring them for the moment. He had been gone for thirty seconds, and it would be best to return …

  "We're rather used to that sort of coming and going," Kirk said as soon as he had recovered. "We do it often ourselves." He was aware of the difference between transporting and what Radak had just done, but he wasn't about to reveal his astonishment to Grake.

  "The boy has not been dematerialized and assembled by a transporter," T'Prylla said, stepping on to the platform. "He has had his body exactly replicated at another point in space-time, balancing the event with a complete transformation of his past structure. In essence, the individual disturbances of all his atoms have been unwound and rewound at different coordinates. Some would call it controlled coincidence. We can now master synchronicity itself, Captain."

  Radak reappeared next to his mother, reached to the console, and touched another series of switches. T'Prylla stared at Spock as if searching for understanding.

  "I assume," Spock said, "that the apparent identity of certain subatomic particles with like particles, wherever and whenever they may be in the universe, has been taken advantage of. What is the range of your ability to transform coordinates?"

  "Under the present circumstances, two hundred kilometers," Radak said. "I was in the process of just such a transform when I encountered your first landing party."

  "That would explain the anomalous tricorder readings," Chapel said.

  "Would it, Spock?" Kirk asked.

  "I would assume so, Captain."

  "We're doing a lot of assuming here," McCoy said. "We could take advantage of this to move the sleepers to the Enterprise … assuming," he said emphatically, "that your technique has none of the disadvantages of the transporter."

  Grake shook his head. "No, Doctor. Theoretically, it is possible, but not now. At the moment, our equipment can only handle masses not much larger than my son. Not even I can be transformed, though my wife falls just within the limits. We could not transform hibernaculum and sleeper at the same time. But we are not through with our demonstration. T'Raus has been working on her own special project." He held his hand out to help his daughter onto the platform.

  "At the scale of the very small—what Vulcans call numosma and humans call the Planck-Wheeler length—space breaks down into a maze of singularities," T'Raus said, standing at the edge of the platform with her hands clasped in front of her.

  "She looks like a student about to give a piano recital," Chapel whispered to Mason. Mason thought she looked a lot more self-confident than that.

  "Until now, we have had no way of studying these extremely small regions, and have had to deal with them in theory alone. Yet we know that it is at these levels that the nature of matter and energy is determined. Now, through the transformer, we can create virtual simulations of small regions of space and time—and of very large regions as well, up to the size of a universe. These simulations are correct in every detail but one—they are not themselves 'real.' Soon, we may in fact be able to recreate regions of space-time with that final touch of reality, and our work will near completion."

  She was almost offhand in the way she pronounced her next words. "Our goal must be quite obvious, of course. We intend to create a new universe, on a scale where we can control and study its development. When we can do that, we will be close to understanding the most interesting period of our own universe—the first few minutes after creation. Everything after that interval has been decay and decline."

  "Not quite that bad, I hope," McCoy said.

  "Fascinating," Spock said.

  Mason was more confused than fascinated. Kirk hardly blinked an eye.

  T'Raus lifted an arm and touched several buttons on the console with the same easy, familiar grace of her brother. "Please watch the transparent chamber to the right of the platform. It is there that our demonstration of the very small will begin."

  Chapter Sixteen

  The glass sphere, mounted on a single silver rod, filled with what looked like the shadows of trees. The shadows began to whirl together, drawing dark bands around the sphere's perimeter. The bands smeared and merged until the sphere's interior was a unif
orm neutral gray.

  "Our eyes can only perceive things they are familiar with," T'Raus said. "For that reason, most of the simulation will be lost to us. And again, because our eyes rely on light to carry information to them, what we perceive will not be totally accurate. Still, the simulation contains all the information necessary for a thorough understanding of the foundations of space-time. What we have difficulty perceiving, our machines can interpret for us." The sphere was now filled with elusive colors, rising from the neutral gray and being absorbed back into it.

  Mason felt as if she were being hypnotized. Even at a distance of five or six meters, the display soon filled her field of vision. For an instant she thought she saw the sphere fill with snakes, but the snakes became clouds of floating balls. In turn, the clouds became twisting sheets of rubber—sheets soon riddled with holes which flexed inward and touched other holes. Then the sheets disappeared, leaving only the holes, which pulsed and seemed to both grow and shrink at once, following some outlandish rhythm both regular and chaotic. Next, the sphere was a haven for nested tunnels. The tunnels shrank and became strands of spaghetti. The spaghetti turned a wondrous blue-gray and danced so vigorously the entire dome seemed to spin around her.

  Kirk saw something completely different. He was reminded of the propellers on old-fashioned airplanes—thousands and thousands spinning, varying in pitch, the blades lengthening and joining until all were connected, yet still spinning individually.

  Chekov felt a kinship with what was in the sphere. He recognized it—or rather, what was controlling him recognized it, with the same bizarre nostalgia one might hold for the burned-out wreck of an old home. It made no sense to Chekov, but he participated nevertheless.

  Chapel saw an infinity of bizarre flowers, their petals linking and unlinking.

  Spock made an effort to see only what was there. He could not. There was nothing real in the sphere, nothing on to which he could hook the rigid logic of his race. He was instantly and uncomfortably aware of the limits of his conditioning; Vulcans sought total logic in a universe built on controlled chaos. The effort ultimately had to be futile. The display saddened him, depressed him, aroused his human half …

  And he suddenly became aware of the paradox. Vulcans had done this research, ostensibly; created these displays. T'Prylla, for all her unorthodox methods of logic, was still as constrained as he was, perhaps moreso. Such researches should have been extremely difficult, perhaps impossible for her, for any Vulcan.

  Then who, or what, had performed the research? The human physicists who might have aided the researchers and shared such insights were all in cold storage. Spock turned away from the sphere, unwilling to tolerate much more.

  McCoy turned away also, for similar reasons. For him the sphere was filled with faces, and the faces were turning into skulls, the eye-sockets of the skulls elongating into infinite corridors of death and misery, the teeth glinting and flashing. The insight that forced him to turn away was that all the stars in the universe were simply reflections from the teeth of skulls. The sphere showed him how he could go mad, if he ever lost control.

  T'Raus touched the buttons lightly, and the sphere once again became a vacant ball of glass. Throughout the demonstration the observers had been completely silent, and the silence lingered.

  Kirk spoke first. "I'm not sure I'm capable of judging your accomplishment," he said, touching his hand to his forehead. "Breakthrough or not, I also fail to see what all this has to do with our immediate problem."

  Radak stood near Kirk. He turned slowly toward the captain, his face betraying very un-Vulcan signs of agitation. "In a year, our mastery will be so complete that we can duplicate the bodies of our sleepers without the apparatus on your ship, without any machinery at all. All this will be discarded, and with our minds alone we can travel wherever we wish, transform anything." He stared fixedly at Kirk. "We will no longer be confined to our planetoid, nor will we require Federation starships."

  That is not the truth! T'Prylla agonized, struggling to break through to Spock, anybody. Corona would finish its work long before such things could be accomplished.

  Kirk turned to Grake. "Does your son speak for all of you?" Grake and T'Prylla nodded simultaneously. "I can appreciate the magnitude of your … future accomplishment," Kirk continued. "But I have to deal with present realities. And Federation law dictates that I do everything in my power to save its citizens from harm. The sleepers are in danger. We must do as our medical expert says. I … I can guarantee that your fears for their safety are unwarranted. They will not be injured during their journey to the Enterprise." McCoy nodded with satisfaction.

  "There are several more things which must be done to our shuttle to make travel completely safe for the sleepers," Spock said. "We will return to the Enterprise, perform the final installations, and ferry the sleepers as soon as possible."

  "Very well," T'Prylla said, acquiescing with a nod.

  That, Mason thought, was entirely too quick and easy after all the objections they had made …

  Chekov returned to the storage dome first. Wah Ching and Pauli stood outside the boarding tube. He conferred with them briefly, then walked down the tube and closed the shuttle hatch.

  Inside the small craft, he looked around with drugged slowness and walked forward through the passenger cabin to the pilot's seat and control panel. With a service hex wrench, he unfastened the top cover and peered at the maze of glass cables and power beam guides. He took his phaser and set the beam for minimum width, shallow penetration. At low power, the phaser would spall insulation off the beam guides. The shuttle self-diagnosing system would detect a fault, but since there were no sensors directly attached to the insulation, the shuttle computer would not be able to explain the trouble, only to locate it. It would be difficult to notice any difference just by looking …

  The shuttle would be disabled.

  He fought every step of the way, until his body ran rivers of sweat … but to no avail.

  He belted the phaser, mopped his forehead with his sleeve, and opened the hatch. He put on an angry face and stormed back through the tube. "Who's been in here?" The guards looked at him, astonished. "The panel cover is open," he said. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chapel and Mason walked across the decking. Chekov approached them, wishing he could simply die and get the misery over with. "Mr. Spock …" he began.

  Spock emerged from the shuttle and shook his head. "I suspect sabotage, Captain."

  McCoy swore under his breath. "I feel like we're wading through glue, Jim. They're thwarting everything we do."

  Kirk glanced across the storage dome. "Spock, run a tricorder check for listening devices or … anything else suspicious. Chekov, keep a guard on the dome entrance."

  Spock ran his check and announced there were no detectable listening devices. "But I cannot guarantee we will speak in privacy."

  "Then we'll take the risk. Spock, what in hell is going on here?"

  "Something is seriously wrong, Jim. I have seen equipment in the research dome which I am certain was removed from the unmanned rescue probe. Apparently, at the time of the probe's arrival, Station One was reluctant to be rescued, but in need of all available instrumentation and raw material. Furthermore, the station personnel are not behaving as Vulcans should behave. They are not even behaving like insane Vulcans. The excuses they offer are weak and contradictory. The children appear to be more in control than Grake and T'Prylla, and that is totally uncharacteristic."

  "Couldn't that be explained by the isolation?" Mason asked.

  "No," Spock said. "There is a pattern to their behavior, but it does not match any pattern for my people. It is the pattern of a controlling presence, with goals dissimilar to our own."

  "But there's no life here," McCoy said. "We know protostar clouds are completely sterile. Oh, there are the usual organic molecules—"

  "I do not believe they are being controlled by an organic life form," Spock said. "The evidence points to something very knowledgable,
very interested in the processes the researchers claim to have mastered."

  "Any ideas what that might be?"

  "I suggest we contact the Enterprise and see how Mr. Scott is doing with the transporter. I doubt that he has found anything wrong. If my hypothesis is correct, the transporter is in perfect working order, but the beam itself is being tampered with. That could explain my clumsy arrival in the station, and it could also explain Ensign Chekov's difficulties."

  "Then what the hell are we going to do?" McCoy asked.

  "We are going to play our hidden ace, Dr. McCoy. We are going to request materials be sent down to repair the shuttle."

  Veblen looked at the algorithm models, biting his lower lip. Half on impulse, he typed on the keyboard. Are you serious?

  These are the best models the stochastic algorithm can currently produce, the computer replied on the screen. Veblen had shut the voice off; he much preferred working with displays. It was so much easier to track programming errors.

  "Mr. Veblen to the bridge," Uhura called over the com. Veblen transferred the model data to his portable notepad and ran for the turbolift.

  Scott was on the bridge, talking to Kirk in the station. "I find Mr. Spock's conclusions a great relief," he said.

  "We don't," Kirk said laconically. "Is Veblen there?"

  "Present, Captain," Veblen said.

  "Mr. Veblen, Spock has a special request for shuttle repair parts." Veblen and Scott looked at each other; Veblen was certainly not the man to handle parts replacement.