Putting his compacted weight behind the push, Kirk had no trouble opening the grid. Making his voice strong enough for the pickup to be activated was another story. He had to bend and shout into the mouthpiece at the top of his lungs.
"Kirk to Engineering! Scotty, can you hear me?" A pause, then the chief engineer's voice acknowledging, altered, faint, and weak - but comprehensible.
"Just barely, sir."
"Get a crew down to the transporter room!" Kirk yelled. "We have twenty minutes left in which to operate ship's controls - including the transporters."
"How many beamin' down, Captain?"
"Just one, Mr. Scott. Me!"
"Aye, Captain," Scott replied solemnly. "Dinna worry ... we'll rig somethin'. Scott out."
Kirk stop, kicked at the deactivation switch to shut off the communicator.
"I'll meet you in the transporter room, Mr. Spock. Meanwhile, see what you can manage in the way of a doll-sized communicator. Anything at all, even something that just broadcasts a pulse signal. I'll send in code, if I have to."
"Yes, Captain."
"I won't be long. I've got to make one more check of the bridge and issue final instructions."
"I understand, Captain."
Uhura, Arex, and the others took the announcements with typical calm. They had an advantage - nothing Kirk said came as any surprise.
As he headed for the distant transporter room, Kirk kept their faces, reactions in mind. There wasn't one among them who felt those last instructions would not be implemented in a dozen minutes or so. He still retained private hopes, though.
There was one last thing they could try to halt the lethal bombardment. If an intelligence was behind it, then one had to assume the waves could be shut off as competently as they had been turned on the Enterprise.
In the absence of any attempt at contact from the surface, Kirk had to assume paranoid reluctance on the part of any such intelligence. In which event a personal appearance might be the only thing that could convince "them" of the peaceful intent of their visitors. He would beam down and search them out.
Alternatively, they would reduce him on sight to something considerably less than a centimeter in height - a thin layer of smoking dust, for example.
With admirable foresight, the doorway to the transporter room had been locked open, and a metal plate had been secured over the sensor eye. As Kirk walked toward the transporter console he spotted Scott and Gabler working at its base. Chief Kyle was busy with a crew nearby. They were rigging a doubled-back piece of strong wire to the console, bracing it against an empty wire spool secured to the deck.
A rapid examination revealed that the other end of the doubled-back cable looped around the first manual lever of the transporter control. Fortunately, that crucial switch moved vertically. If a horizontal control had been involved they would have had all sorts of problems, requiring at least one and possibly more miniature pulleys.
The other end of the wire was being played out to a crowd of patient crewmen. Each was taking up a firm stance and a tight grip on the wire.
Kirk placed a hand on Scott's shoulders. Sweat dripping from his face, the chief engineer turned quickly, even managed a smile.
"Well be ready in a minute, Captain. We can still manipulate the switches properly. It's workin' them at the proper speed that's goin' to be touchy, but I think we can manage it."
"Good, Mr. Scott." Kirk looked up, following the wire into the heavens to where it looped tightly around the handle of the transporter lever, now looking like a gray sequoia angling over the console cliff.
"I estimate our height is now down to about five centimeters," Scott ventured. "With maximum leeway I think we can manage controls for another fifteen minutes - no more."
"That will have to do, Scotty."
Kirk noticed Spock hunched down over a pile of material. He walked over as the science officer stood, trailing microscopic wire and hastily reduced hand tools.
The crudely made boxlike instrument he handed the captain looked ready to fall apart any second. Kirk hefted it, was gratified to see it was more solid than it looked.
"Unattractive but functional, Captain," Spock informed him. "This is the best I could do in rigging so small a communicator in such a short time."
"It's fine, Spock. Thanks."
"It is proportionately about ten times the size a hand communicator should be, Captain," Spock went on, still apologizing for the incredible feat of improvisational engineering he had just accomplished, "and its range cannot be guaranteed. How shall we locate you for return if it fails?"
"We haven't much time anyway, Mr. Spock, so that problem solves itself." He called back over his shoulder. "Scotty, set an automatic return for me. If there's anything to be found down there, ten minutes should do it."
"Aye, sir," Scott agreed. "Well set it now." He turned, yelled to several crewmen hanging on another wire. "You there - Johnson, Massachi, Nikkatsu - let go of that wire and give me a hand with this servopole." The men hastened to obey as Scott started to take up a grip on the long hollow tube.
"A disconcerting thought, Captain," Spock ventured, "that I have been pondering while working here. The transporter relies on a banked record of the body's molecular structure. Will that record adapt as well to your present height?"
"There is the chance, I suppose, that it can't adjust to the transporter pattern," Kirk admitted, "in which case, either I simply won't go anywhere - or else I'll go everywhere, in pieces.
"We'll know shortly. And in fifteen minutes it won't matter whether the transporter can bring me back or not. Prepare to energize." Kirk started for the transporter platform. Spock took a step to head him off.
"Captain, may I wish you all..." Spock hesitated, unusually. "I hope logical eventualities prove that ... good luck, sir," he finally finished awkwardly.
He and Kirk exchanged shoulder claps. Then Kirk hurried off down the endless metal plateau toward the alcove.
Spock watched him for a minute, then moved to take up a place along the doubled cable. There was a short wait while Kirk scrambled up the low cliff of the single step leading to the platform proper. The super-strong wire made an excellent "rope" ladder.
Once on top, Kirk ran to the center of the nearest disk, turned, and waved both arms.
Scott, lost in other thoughts, eventually became aware Spock was speaking to him.
"What?"
"The captain instructed us to energize, I believe, Mr. Scott."
Energize. He had a job to do. First wire one, then the two servopoles were adjusted, turned. Spock took up a place in front of Scott, both hands on the wire. Speed was critical now. Five seconds, ten...
"Heave, lads, heave! Heave for your lives!"
The line of tiny figures on the floor started backward. As the slack in the cable was taken up the line grew taut, held. Straining, straining, for millimeters at a time, they pulled on the wire. Pulled until triceps howled with the demand and shoulders threatened to pull from their sockets.
The lever began to descend. Slowly, condescendingly, but it moved. Servopoles made minor adjustments again. A dial was turned as men broke their backs on twin wires.
On the transporter platform a waterfall, a cascade of color, splinters of a rainbow, began to form. It was normal in shade, normal in flickering speed, normal in shape - normal in all respects except for its incredible, abnormal thinness.
It completely enveloped the near-invisible figure standing at its base. The figure wavered, blurred, became a standard transporting silhouette...
...and was gone.
V
Even though he had seen it only from kilometers above, the landscape was far from alien to Kirk. He was studying it even as he materialized on the plutonic scoria.
What was surprising was the amount of vegetation holding its own against the threatening tremors underfoot, green-brown roots and branches offering defiance to lack of moisture, promises of sulfuric rain.
Kirk was aware of this,
of the constant intrusive growl of smoking peaks all around - and something else, something indefinite and indefinable. Not the ash-filled purplish sky overhead, nor the thin layer of pumice that crunched under his boots. Something much more immediate. Something like...
A lessening of weight, weight on his right arm, weight that should have been nestled in the crook of arm and ribs and no longer was. Instead it rested neatly in his palm, a miniscule shard of badly worked metal and plastic.
The communicator Spock had presented to him only moments ago. He smiled.
Spock's suspicions about the touchiness of the transporter memory bank had been justified - only not in the way he had imagined. Instead of the transporter pattern adapting to his smaller size, it had operated on the old pattern stored in its cells, had forced Kirk's body to adapt to it. He was back to his normal size.
From a distant peak, an intense beam of light shot like a yellow bar across the valley and disappeared in a far-off crevice. To his right was another, beginning lower down but also meeting somewhere over a nearby ridge.
Turning a slow circle he saw that a network of light converged at one point just beyond his vision. He started walking toward it.
As he started up the slight grade he raised the communicator, handling it carefully. If it slipped out of his grasp he doubted he would find it again in the loose gravel and detritus. Peering at the tiny device he used his fingernail to put the lightest pressure possible on the activation lever.
A violent rumbling began in the distance, grew rapidly loud. Here was a throaty ripping sound, like an underground freight-liner rushing past. A flank eruption burst the side of one of the volcanoes behind him.
He spared it only a brief glance. At the moment he was more concerned about the tiny beep from his palm. He spoke at the communicator, hoped Spock's. improvised pickup would modulate his voice properly at the other end.
"Kirk to Enterprise. Enterprise ... do you read?" No reply from the tiny speaker. Maybe they were trying to talk to him, and his ears couldn't pick up their minute voices. He continued on the chance they were picking him up.
"I think we have the answer to the height problem. It seems the transporter beam returns our molecules to normal spacing. Nothing to indicate that once realigned and transported back aboard the whole compaction process wouldn't start all over again, but at least we've got a stop-gap now."
Still no reply. He tucked the communicator away in a pocket. The slope grew steeper here and he wanted to concentrate on keeping his footing. Also, the eruptions on the valley fringe were growing in violence and he wanted both hands in case of a fall. One particularly sharp tremor almost did knock him off his feet.
Once the dust and volcanic ash in the air grew so thick he had trouble breathing. And then, without sound or warning of any kind, the beam of light he was paralleling abruptly winked out. He looked around, across the valley, up the slopes of distant mountains. The network of lights he had observed on beam-down had been completely extinguished. He brought out the communicator, tried again.
"Kirk to Enterprise, do you read me?" This time there was an answer. Faint and unnaturally high-pitched, but for all that immediately recognizable.
"We read you, Captain," Spock told him. "It was necessary to readjust power flow to the main communications board to boost your transmission to audible levels. Your makeshift communicator carries less power than I believed.
"A most interesting thing has just happened. If sensors are to be believed, wave bombardment of the ship has just ceased."
"I think I know why," Kirk told his astonished listeners. But before he could elaborate he felt an agonized heaving underfoot and the ground bulged. A crack like a sonic boom followed, and this time Kirk was knocked completely off balance.
Bracing himself he landed without being more than dazed, but something he had feared had come to pass. Despite his best efforts the tiny communicator had gone flying. Flaming bits of ash and lava started to fall around him as he searched for it on hands and knees. The fiery fallout was dense behind him, though less so in the direction he had been headed.
Several minutes of fruitless searching failed to locate the lost communicator. The rain of lava was growing worse and the sharp-slivered pumice had nearly butchered his knees. It seemed a good idea to move on. He was nearly to the top of the ridge and he ought to find some protection from the sizzling hail on the other side.
Scrambling to his feet he started upward again. Occasionally a hot ash would land on him and he would beat frantically at the ember as it smoldered on his clothes. But he still found no sign of whatever existed at the center of the vanished lights.
Once, a lava bomb - a tear-drop shaped dollop of molten lava cooled to hardness during its fall through the cooler atmosphere - shattered near him. It must have weighed a hundred kilos at least. It would take a far smaller bomb to make a real mess of him. No use wishing for a solid duralloy umbrella, nor could he dodge the unexpected missiles.
But it was hard not to think about them.
Another sharp tremor. Ready for this one, he kept his feet. A meter-wide crack opened in the ground to his left, forcing him to change the direction of his climb slightly. Even without the time limit imposed on him he didn't think an unarmored man could spend much time roaming this surface. Sooner or later the steady assault would either batter him unconscious or cause him to break an ankle in the plethora of tiny crevices and cracks.
He topped the rise, ready for a sight of the unexpected - but not ready for the mental shock he received.
Down in a steeply walled hollow, not five meters from the base of the slope he stood on, rose the walls of a city. Graceful towers and arching branch structures were brilliantly lit from within, the whole metropolitan network intersected by a complex webwork of covered highways.
To one side were stadiums and a huge amphitheater, while another boasted a large factory complex. Parks and lakes studded the landscape throughout, while the entire city was surrounded by concentric rings of cultivated land, farms and dairy country. In all respects it was one of the most thoroughly planned yet exquisitely wrought cities Kirk had ever seen. It differed from the great cities of Earth and Vulcan and the major colony worlds in only one respect.
The whole metropolitan area was just large enough to fill the floor of an average-sized room aboard the Enterprise.
He stepped over the ridge, sat down in the grinding pumice, and stared at the scene from a book of children's stories. The tallest spire of the city came just about up to his waist.
As he sat frozen with fascination, another cycle of tremors shook the ground. He was certain that the delicate towers and bridgeways of the tiny city would be shattered, yet they barely moved. Obviously those spires were built on some kind of flexible foundation, constructed to give with the constant quakes.
But this series of shakes opened a branching canyon near the outskirts of the farthest agricultural section. Kirk could have stepped over the largest crevice in the crack, but it would swallow the biggest building in the city with room to spare. Even as he watched, one arm of the canyon moved like a bolt of brown lightning in slow motion toward the city.
It was easy to conclude that despite its miniscule size, he had come upon an intelligent civilization which possessed enough science to immobilize and threaten the Enterprise. Despite the threat to himself and his crew, he still could experience a sudden fear that he might have crushed some outlying farmhouses on his approach. He resisted the urge to retrace his steps.
Right now he had to make contact with the inhabitants of the city. Clearly, their intellect was in no way proportional to their size. He studied the plan of the metropolis, decided the best thing to do was get as close to the city center as possible.
Rising, Kirk started carefully down the slope, edging around toward what appeared to be a section of farmland lying fallow. He could do the least damage by approaching the city center from there.
Even as he did so, a familiar tingling started on his s
kin.
"No, no...! He repressed the shout. There wasn't a thing he could do. The ten-minute time period was up and the automatics were bringing him inexorably back to the Enterprise. And then he had a moment to consider a horrifying thought.
Was this pattern the one the transporter computer would retain? Or would he be rematerialized back aboard ship in his smaller size?
Too late to stop the action, too late to change, too late to worry. His vision blurred; he felt a second of total disorientation and nausea, and then the tingling left him and his vision returned. He was back on board.
Kirk looked down at himself, around the room. He was still his proper size. He stepped off the disk, danced around urgently.
"Scotty, Spock..." No answer, no gratified replies. Maybe they could not shout this far.
Moving rapidly to the transporter console, he examined the place where the crew of straining wire-pullers sad pole-handlers had worked alongside the first officer and chief engineer only ten minutes before. No sign of them.
He took a moment to examine the whisker-thin wire still looped around the transporter lever, marveling from a new perspective at the ingenuity of Scott and his assistants. Dropping to all fours he commenced a detailed survey of the area, but found no sign of the crew.
Surely they could not have shrunken to microscopic size! That would be far beyond Spock's projected lower limit of a sixteenth of a centimeter.
Knowing the automatics would return him, they had probably gone to another part of the ship in need of their attention. The bridge, for example. He got to his feet.
After covering kilometers of scaled-down corridor, it was a pleasure to make it to the bridge at what seemed ike superhuman speed. The door was still locked open, the metal plate still taped over the sensor.
A quick look showed all panels and instrument consoles still operating. Impulse power was still keeping the basic functions of the ship operational, then. But still no sign of any of the crew.