Authors: Alan Dean Foster
Slightly to one side of their intended route the gritty yellow-and-brown soil erupted. Sand streamed from crevices and cracks, and a nightmarish skull fringed with spines, its skin decorated like a Gothic cathedral, burst from the ground and turned warty jaws toward them.
"Left . . . run!" Spock yelled, barely in time.
The rippling mouth opened and belched a second stream of fire. It scorched the sand where they had been standing only seconds before.
Stumbling backward even as they pulled their phasers, they found themselves backed against the steep inward side of the dune. All three weapons fired, aimed to strike the monster in that cavernous mouth. The monster paused, then swung ponderous jaws to face them again.
"The lining inside the mouth of a creature that can spit fire," Spock lectured hurriedly, "would seem to be composed of organic material highly resistant to—"
Without knowing what prompted the thought, Kirk yelled, "Aim for the underside of the neck!"
Once more three beams of intense energy crossed the space between the men and their assailant. All three struck the creature in the area between the lower jaw and forelegs.
Once again the effort seemed futile. Instead of trying to incinerate them this time, the monster lunged forward, jaws agape. It was slow, however, and clumsy. The little group scattered. The primitive machinery of its mind turning slowly, the monster singled out one victim—Kirk. It turned toward him, then rose suddenly on thick hind legs.
Broad spadelike claws on its forelegs reached inward, clawing confusedly at its throat. Then it toppled like a leathery gray iceberg to lie unmoving in the yellow sands.
The impact of the monster's fall had thrown Spock to his knees. Now he glanced around in concern as he slowly got to his feet.
"Captain?"
"Here, Spock," came the reply from nearby. "Are you all right?"
"I am undamaged."
Kirk joined him, brushing the sand from his tunic. "Where's Dr. McCoy?" He looked around, suddenly conscious of the fact that the doctor was nowhere to be seen. "Bones . . . Bones!"
A distant, faintly desperate reply sounded. "I'm . . .
mmpggh!
"
Kirk and Spock turned, looking for the source of that brief cry. There was no sign of Dr. McCoy. Then it sounded again, muffled to the point of unintelligibility.
Worriedly, Kirk glanced to his left, then gestured. "I'm not sure. I think the sound came from back there."
They moved slowly down the length of the unconscious creature's massive body. Spock was the first to notice the two spinelike forms protruding from beneath the thick tail.
"Hang on, Bones," Kirk shouted, "we'll get you out!" The officers moved alongside the two projections, which proceeded to twitch insistently. They shoved, but to no avail. "Again, Spock!"
A second effort, both men straining and heaving, failed to move that limp, incredibly solid bulk. And the shifting sand provided poor footing.
"It would seem," a panting Spock ventured, "that another solution is called for, Captain. We cannot lift the tail. Therefore, we must move the doctor."
Kirk eyed him uncertainly, then nodded in understanding. They dropped to their knees and began digging sand with the speed and efficiency of a pair of small mechanical shovels. The thrashing of the doctor's legs added desperation to their efforts, growing more and more frantic with each passing second.
Finally a lower torso and then a pair of arms became visible. Pulling and additional digging brought the rest of the ship's chief physician into the open once more.
McCoy drew his knees against his chest and locked his arms around them, taking long breaths and digging sand from his eyes, nose, and ears.
Spock and Kirk waited and watched worriedly, until McCoy acknowledged the concern in their eyes. "I'm okay, thanks, but the air was just about gone under there." He glanced back at the sloping pit now leading under the tail. "The flesh was slightly humped above me. I had a small air pocket. Smelly, but I wouldn't have traded it for a bottle of the Federation's finest perfume."
"You're sure you're not hurt?" Kirk pressed.
"No . . . just surprised. I didn't even see the tail falling. It isn't every day a dinosaur falls on you." He sneezed and rubbed his sand-scoured nostrils. "If the ground hereabouts had been hard, I'd be just a smear now. But the sand was deep enough, and soft enough, and I was hit just right for the impact to bury me instead of smash me. I lost a little wind, that's all."
Kirk helped McCoy to his feet, then brushed sand from his hands as he turned his gaze beyond the motionless tail. "How much additional desert do you think we'll have to cross, Mr. Spock?"
The first officer checked his tricorder and pointed in the direction the terse signal had come from. "I have no way of judging for certain, Captain, but, extrapolating from temperature and atmospheric readings, at least several additional kilometers. It could be hundreds."
"No," Kirk objected. "The signal wasn't that strong. But we'd better pick up our pace, regardless. There's no cover here, either from the sun, or from any of the other hungry locals. I'd like to make a bit more progress along the signal track before Scotty beams us aboard for a rest period."
They resumed their march across the sands, detouring around the still-stunned mountain which had almost trapped McCoy. But as soon as they resumed walking, Spock lapsed into an introspective silence which Kirk recognized immediately. Something was troubling the first officer. If Spock had something on his mind, something not yet sorted out, he would inform them about it in his own good time.
His own good time came several dozen meters farther into the dry basin. "You know, Captain," he suddenly murmured, "it was unusual the way I seemed to know, rather than guess, that our phasers would be ineffectual while aimed down the carnivore's throat. The creature itself . . . did it not seem familiar to you?"
Kirk thought a moment, and found, to his surprise, that he didn't have to search his memory for very long. The familiarity of the monster had bothered him all along, but it took Spock's query to crystallize it.
"Of course . . . I've seen soloids of something just like it on Canopus Three. That's impossible, though. Canopus is many too many parsecs from here." He squinted into the unyielding sunlight.
"True, this desert is very similar to those found on Canopus Three." His voice faded. "Very similar. In fact, those isolated growths, the color of the petrographic outcrops—they're all remarkably alike."
"Are you suggesting, Captain, that a similar environment presupposes identical evolution?"
"My shoes," McCoy broke in, with undisguised distaste, "are full of sand."
Spock's concentration was broken. "Doctor, your lack of scientific interest is a constant astonishment to me."
"I'll be glad to discuss that with you, Spock, the next time you drop into Sick Bay for some medication, or a checkup."
"No need to become belligerent, Doctor. That was merely a simple observation."
"Spock, your simple observations," McCoy rasped as they trudged toward the top of the next dune, "tend to get on my . . ."
He stopped in mid-sentence, mid-thought, to gape at the scene before them. And he was not alone. Spock and Kirk had also come to a momentary mental halt.
Spread out at the base of the dune was a wall of green so lush and colorful in comparison to the dull plain they had just crossed that it was almost painful to look at.
Clusters of thorn-laden trees and broad, thick bushes interwove with taller emergents and exotically contoured growths drooping with strange fruits. Practically at their feet a stream emerged, vanishing in a sharp curve back into the thriving jungle.
There were distant hints of moss and fern forest, of swamp and tropical lowland. They could almost feel the humidity, smell the rankness of rotting vegetation.
For all that, it looked a lot friendlier than the country they had just traversed. "Food and water—anyone would have a better chance of surviving in there than on that frying pan we just crossed" was McCoy's opinion.
Spock wasn't as sure. Turning slowly, he studied the terrain behind them. His gaze lifted to the far dune. Beyond it, he knew, lay a violently active thermal region bordering a vast, steaming lake.
Again he directed his attention to the riotous landscape before them, listened thoughtfully to the soft susurration of small living things picking their cautious way through the undergrowth.
"Does it not strike you as peculiar, Captain, that two—possibly three—radically different ecologies exist literally side by side? Steaming, unstable shoreline, backed by a thin line of desert, and now another extreme change of climate and living things."
"I've seen stranger sights in my travels, Mr. Spock. What are you driving at?"
"Nothing yet, Captain. Simply another observation." His voice trailed off as he glared at the rain forest beneath the dune, taking this perversion of natural law as a personal affront.
Kirk flipped open his communicator again. "I don't plan to do much walking through
that
—not without extra equipment." He directed his words to the tiny pickup.
"Landing party to
Enterprise
." There was a brief pause, rife with static and interference. But the special tight-beam broadcast Scott employed penetrated the mysterious distortion layer in the atmosphere. Kirk heard the chief engineer's reply clearly.
"
Enterprise
, Scott here."
"Any new information, Scotty? We're a little puzzled by what we've found down here."
"We've got plenty of confusing readings here, too, Captain," Scott confessed. "There appears to be a large concentration of life forms slightly less than a hundred kilometers north-northeast of your present position. How large we can't tell—this blasted distortion effect jumbles every sensor reading we get. I'm informed that it
could
be a city . . . or just a central gathering place for migratory animals. I said our readings were inconclusive.
"That's all so far. Lieutenant Arex is supervising information resolution. He hopes to have a more specific analysis of the data within an hour."
"Very good, Scotty." He muttered to himself, "Northeast." Then, louder, "That's the direction of the signal we received, Mr. Scott."
"I could transport you to the region of life-form concentration, Captain."
"Negative to that, Scotty. We don't know that the missing crew is part of that concentration. They could be anywhere in between, and we can't risk skipping over them. We'll have to do this kilometer by kilometer. Let us know the moment Mr. Arex comes up with a determination of that reading, though. We'll continue in the plotted direction for a while longer. Kirk out."
"Aye, Captain. Engineering out."
Kirk put the communicator away as they carefully picked their way down the dune. They paused at the edge of the jungle, fascinated by the way the rich flora appeared to spring with supernal suddenness from the periphery of bone-dry desert.
"I don't like it, Jim," McCoy finally ventured. "Too many unlikelihoods here. Why only the one short signal? You can argue all you want, but to me that implies something other than mechanical failure."
"I'm not ruling out anything, Bones," Kirk replied slowly. "Their inability to respond further could be due to something we can't imagine. It does prove that at least one member of the survey team is still alive, though. Alive and alert enough to be monitoring an unexpected query."
"Apparently alive, Captain," Spock amended. "The signal could have been sent by other than human hands."
"There's no profit in pessimism, Mr. Spock. For the moment I choose to believe they are alive."
They reached the edge of the stream. McCoy glanced at it briefly before kneeling to satisfy the thirst that had built up in him during the desert crossing.
His hands had barely broken the surface of the water when Spock put a restraining hand on his shoulder. The doctor looked up, puzzled, to see Spock staring at the pool.
"Allow me to test the water first, Dr. McCoy."
McCoy eyed the first officer dubiously, then turned his gaze downward again and stirred the water with a finger. He shrugged. "Go ahead, Spock, but I've analyzed enough water to know a drinkable stream when I see one. You know that, too."
"Nevertheless," Spock insisted. The readjusted tricorder was played over the surface of the rippling brook. Spock concluded the brief survey and studied the subsequent readouts, sending semaphore signals with his eyebrows.
"Well?" an irritated McCoy finally pressed.
"As you surmised, Doctor, the water is certainly drinkable."
McCoy looked satisfied, if still irritated, and bent again to drink.
"However, that is not what prompted my uncertainty," Spock concluded. McCoy looked up at him. "Captain, this water is
too
pure."
McCoy grimaced and scooped up a double handful. He downed it, sipped a second and third, concluding by wiping his parched face with wet hands.
"It tastes just fine to me, Spock."
"Despite that, it is too pure, Doctor," Spock insisted emphatically. "Consider what that means."
Kirk chose his words carefully. "Then what you're saying, Spock, is that it's too good to be true?"
"I would say that evaluation is decidedly understated, Captain." Spock studied the silent wall of green as if it might disgorge a hostile alien horde at any moment.
"Water of this purity flowing freely through thick vegetation growing on loose, loamy soil is not only unnatural, it is positively illogical. As illogical"—and he made a sweeping gesture with one arm—"as the proximity of such a rain forest as this to the desert we just crossed." He knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt.
"Note the composition and consistency of the ground we are standing on now." He sifted it through his fingers. "Fine sand and well-worn gravel of feldspar, quartz, and mica." He stood and dropped the dirt. "It barely supports a few stunted shrubs."
He took two steps forward. "Suddenly, I am in a region of climactic floral development, standing on soil"—and he kicked at the thick soil—"of self-evident fecundity."