Chapter twelve — a combat of dreams

 

 

From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4200.9:

The Klingon force consists of two battleships, two cruisers and ten destroyers — very heavy stuff to sick onto a single starship. They must be really worried. It’s also an unwieldy force to have to maneuver this close to a planet, and under other circumstance, I’d be tempted to stay right here in orbit and slug it out with them. Captain Kirk’s orders, however, are to cut and run if we appear to be outgunned, and there’s certainly no doubt that we are. Hence we are now headed for Star Base Twenty-Eight at Warp Factor Four, with the whole Klingon pack howling along behind us. The battleships could catch us easily at this velocity, but they aren’t trying, which leads me to believe we are being herded into a trap. Well, if so, at least we have got a substantial percentage of the Klingon’s fire-power tied up in this operation, which is nice for the Federation — though not so nice for us.

The Picasso-like illusion still persisted, and Kirk made no move which might risk shattering it. He badly needed thinking time. To begin with, the class ring was revealing in several different ways: Spock at his normal level of efficiency would never have overlooked so glaring a giveaway, and Kirk could not believe that a replicate Spock, no matter how twisted, would have, either. Its persistence, therefore, probably meant that the thought-shield was also impairing his thinking — and though surely not as much as it was Kirk’s, quite probably more than he himself realized.

Then was the stoppage of time in this particular hallucination affecting him as well? If so, there was a chance that Kirk could make a fast draw, and stun him before the illusion broke. But that would leave unanswered the question of why Spock One had shown up here in the first place. His intention, almost surely, was to mislead Kirk — which in turn would mean that he knew what the right direction was to reach the Organians, or at least to get something done that the Klingons would rather leave undone. Why not play along with him for a while, and try to find out what that was, and how he knew it?

It was, Kirk decided, worth the risk — but he would have to act quickly, for his own mental deterioration was bound to be accelerating, and outthinking Spock had never, under the best of circumstances, been his chiefest talent.

He plodded forward again. The scene wavered as though someone had shaken the canvas it was painted on, and then tore down the middle without a sound. Once more, he was back in the rock-tumble…

…and once more, he was confronted by two Spocks.

The two men, original and replicate, did not seem to notice Kirk at all. They were squared off at each other across the rubble like ancient Western gun fighters, although neither showed the slightest awareness of being armed, let alone any intention of drawing. They simply stared at each other with icy implacability. Was there also a slight suggestion of hatred on the face of Spock One? Kirk could not be sure; the two faces were so alike, and yet, and yet…

“It is well that we should ‘meet again at last,” Spock Two said. “Your existence and your plotting are an offense against the natural order, as well as a source of displeasure to me. It is high time they were brought to an end.”

“My existence,” said Spock One, “is a fortuitous revision, and a necessary one, of a highly imperfect first draft. It is the scribbled notes which should be eliminated here, not the perfected work. Nevertheless, one could in confidence leave that to the judgment of time, were the total situation not so crucial. Perhaps, crude recension though you are, you could be brought to understand that.”

“The true scholar,” Spock Two said, “prizes all drafts, early and late. But your literary metaphor is far from clear, let alone convincing.”

“Then to put the matter bluntly: I reasoned out the nature of the screen around Organia long before you did; I have acquired further data from the Klingons since I left the Enterprise; and I now control this environment completely. You would gain nothing but your own destruction by opposing me under such conditions. In short, if you indeed prize your smudgy incunabular existence, it would be logical for you to quit the field and preserve for yourself and your cause what little time history will leave you.”

As they sparred, the sky was darkening rapidly above them. Kirk did not find their argument very illuminating, but the current of threat flowing beneath it was all too obvious.

“History cannot be predicted in detail,” Spock Two said. “And were your control as complete as you pretend, you would not now be wasting time arguing with me. In logic, you would have eliminated me at once.”

“Very well,” Spock One said calmly. As he spoke, everything vanished; the sky was now totally black.

Then it was bright again, in the lurid blue-green light of a lightning bolt, at the bottom of which stood Spock Two, flaming like a martyr at the stake. The shock and the concussion threw Kirk and rolled him bruisingly more than a dozen feet over the rubble.

Tingling and trembling, he scrambled to his knees, clawing for his phaser. But he was astonished to see that Spock Two was still there — or rather, a sort of statue of Spock Two which seemed to be made of red-hot brass, cooling and dimming slowly. Kirk had expected to see nothing but a shrunken and carbonized corpse — though he was not sure if this was any better an outcome.

Then the statue spoke.

“‘Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?” it quoted mockingly. “As you see, I am grounded. But as for you…”

The replicate, illuminated only by the fading light of his original, sank abruptly into a stinking quagmire. A slow-rolling wave of viscous mud was just about to fold over his head when, out of that same black sky, rain fell in a colossal torrent, more like a waterfall than a cloudburst. Kirk had a moment’s vision of the mud being sluiced away from Spock One before the dim glow of Spock Two hissed and went out under the deluge. A moment later, a flash flood caught him and carried him another dozen feet away from the scene before he bumped into a boulder big enough to clutch.

The sky lightened, but the rain continued to fall, and the rushing stream of water to broaden and deepen. Odd objects were being carried along its foaming sullenly muddy surface: broken planks, disintegrating sheets of paper, fragments of furniture, bobbing bottles and cans, the bedraggled bodies of a wide variety of small animals from a dozen planets — rabbits, chickens, skopolamanders, tribbles, unipeds, gormenghastlies, ores, tnucipen, beademungen, escallopolyps, wogs, reepicheeps, a veritable zoo of drowned corpses, including a gradually increasing number of things so obscene that even Kirk, for all his experience in exoteratology, could not bear to look at them for more than an instant.

He cast about for Spock Two and found him still further downstream, sculling grimly against the current in what looked like an improvised kayak. Apparently his memory of kayak design had been clouded by the screen, or a kayak was harder to operate for a beginner than he had realized, for he was Losing the battle; most of his effort was going into keeping the canvas craft from capsizing, while in the meantime, he was being carried farther and farther away.

Upstream, there was an enormous, broad-leafed tree, like a baobab, fixed in the middle of the raging waters. On a lower branch. Spock One sat comfortably, muddy but safe. Kirk, shifting his grip on the boulder — which was in any case about to go beneath the surface of the flood — climbed up onto it and tried, slipping and sliding, to level his phaser at the replicate.

But before he could get any sort of a decent aim, the great tree wilted, rotted, and fell into the water in a shower of dead leaves and punky sticks and chips, as if it had been attacked all at once by mildew, black spot, canker, fireblight and the Titanian mold. Spock One fell with it.

Instantly the rain stopped, a glaringly hot sun came out, and the water sank without a trace into the sands of an endless white desert. Spock One was unharmed, but Kirk realized at once, from years of experience at playing chess with the original, that the replicate had lost ground; he had made a move which was purely defensive, and did not at the same time threaten his opponent.

Spock One must have realized it at the same time, for immediately an immense cyclone dropped its funnel out of the sky and came twisting and roaring across the sands, not at Spock Two, but at Kirk. It was a shrewd stroke, for Spock Two could not defend the Captain without dangerously exposing himself.

By now, Kirk thought he understood at least some of the rules of the game. Everything the two combatants had done thus far had been, essentially, to change the environment. Evidently their abilities to make changes in their own physical structures, or to provide themselves with defensive equipment, were relatively limited. But Kirk’s mind, though entirely without the telepathic/hypnotic skills of the Vulcan hybrids, was also being acted upon by the screen; it was at least possible that he could produce a reaction, though certainly not an equal and opposite one; this was not a Newtonian situation.

He concentrated on pushing back the cyclone. Slowly, slowly it came to a halt, spinning and howling exactly between the two Spocks, who had not narrowed the distance between them which had widened during the flood. Then, gradually still, it squatted down like a great beast and began to broaden, and in a few moments had engulfed them both.

Kirk had a brief glimpse of Spock One soaring aloft in a widening circle, seemingly borne upon bats’ wings, before the rim of the funnel reached him too; and then everything was obliterated by the maelstrom. For what seemed like years, he was aware of nothing but the roar, the scorch, the sting of the madly driven sand.

Gradually, however, the sound began to fade, not as though it were actually becoming less noisy, but as though it were instead retreating into the distance. After a long while, nothing was left of it but a reminiscent ringing in Kirk’s ears, the air had cleared, and he was standing in the rock-tumble — with Spock and Scott beside him.

Scott looked dazed; Spock, tranquil. Kirk shot a quick glance at the first officer’s fingers. No ring. That was almost certainly diagnostic; since Spock One had not thought to remove it when he had had the upper hand, he surely hadn’t had time to think of it during the subsequent wild scramble of combat and of pseudo events.

“Mr. Spock! What happened? Where is he?”

“Dead,” Spock said. “I used his own tornado illusion to drive him into the thought-shield. He was a creation of the screen to begin with, and knew he could not survive a second exposure. I was seriously affected myself, but as you see, I escaped. I could not have prevailed, though, Captain, had you not intervened just when you did.”

“Well, that’s good — but I still don’t understand how you did it. Surely no tornado could reach as far as the screen. The atmosphere itself doesn’t.”

“No, Captain, but you must understand that nothing you have seen in the past hour or so actually happened. In fact, probably many of the events you witnessed looked quite different to me. It was a combat of illusions — and in the end, the replicate believed he had been driven into the screen. That was sufficient.”

Kirk frowned. “Can a man be destroyed by nothing but a belief?”

“It has happened before, many times, Captain,” Spock said gravely, “and doubtless will again.”

“That’s true,” Kirk said thoughtfully. “Well, finis opus coronat, as my Latin professor used to say when he handed out the final exams. Mr. Scott?”

“Eh?” the engineering officer said, starting. “Oh. Here. Och, Captain, ye wouldna credit…”

“Yes I would, I assure you, but I don’t want to hear your story just yet. We’ve got to get moving. The question still is — where?”

“To the Hall of the Council of Elders,” Spock said. “And, if I am not mistaken, there it is.”