Chapter 2

The gray weight of fatigue settled on Kirk again. He saw the Ambassador and his party, perhaps thirty of them, standing in a circle, each with a hand touching the back of the neck or base of the skull of the next one. They wore short white-belted robes, some over dark tights. They were men and women-predominantly young, but centered around a powerful figure of authority: Gailbraith. Their eyes were closed and the aura of some contact between them was almost palpable, even to Kirk. He could have held that sense of contact in his hands. Or perhaps it could have held him…

He saw his First Officer react to it with the sensitivity of Vulcan attunement to telepathy, and Spock’s reaction was to step in front of Kirk with something blazing from his dark eyes which Kirk had not seen before.

The Ambassador’s eyes opened and locked with Spock’s, and now Kirk could sense the unified power of the Oneness directed toward himself. Then he could sense the Vulcan’s mental fight against it.

Kirk felt shockingly drained, and suddenly he wondered if this could be having some effect on him beyond his own fatigue and half-healed injuries. But if it affected him-what would it do to a born telepath?

Kirk stepped forward himself and stepped in between the Ambassador and Spock. The circle parted and Kirk crossed to confront Gailbraith. Eyes popped open around the group, and some carrier-wave was broken. Some of the group remained to watch their meeting, and some drifted off.

“Ambassador,” Kirk said, “you are, of course, welcome to practice your customary mental disciplines on this ship, so long as you respect the rights of other beings. However, we have a number of species aboard who are sensitive in some way to mental emanations. I do not expect you to use your Oneness to broadcast hostility, ill will, or attempts to proselytize.”

The Ambassador shrugged. He was tall, broad-shouldered, of an aristocratic bearing, gray-eyed, his face carved out of some crag. He was perhaps the last man anyone would have suspected as a candidate for Oneness. If an artist had looked for a model of rugged individualism, he would have picked that face.

“Oneness is our life,” Gailbraith said. “We-the-One include both love and anger. We cannot be ordered not to be One for all our purposes.”

“On my ship,” Kirk said, “you will confine yourself to purposes compatible with your Ambassadorial mission, with the mission of this ship-and with the well-being of its crew.”

“On this Federation ship,” the Ambassador said, “you will not delay an Ambassador of the Federation in the assumption of his rightful duties. Whether you are acting on orders in these delays or on your own initiative and prejudice, I will carry the matter all the way to the Federation Council. You-and the source of your orders, however high-will answer to a board of inquiry, together with anyone who abets you…” He looked at Spock.

“Then I will answer to a board of inquiry,” Kirk said, “but you will not disrupt my ship.”

“Captain,” the Ambassador said, “you are a dinosaur. Obsolete. A dying species. You have had your day, and now the day is ours. You can be replaced. And you will be.”

“Can I?” Kirk said. “Do you really believe that a collective could run this ship-or build her? The Enterprise flies on single thoughts from single minds, from the first man who tamed fire to the last one who tamed the fire of a starship.”

The Ambassador smiled fractionally. “Are you certain, Captain? What if that individual creativity springs from a collective unconscious? What if your own strength as a commander comes from a unique unity? Your command crew is celebrated as having a rapport unmatched in Starfleet. What, Captain, if you are us?”

Kirk shook his head. “I’m not. We are not. Our kind of rapport is based on nothing more than an old four-letter word. Obsolete-but not extinct.”

“Love, Captain? It is a fable-unless it is the love of Oneness, of the other as self. And if it is, then you are us.” He looked at Spock. “Or do you claim that your ship has taught even a Vulcan to love?”

“Mr. Spock is what he is,” Kirk said. “He is not a subject for discussion. I merely came to inform you that we will be detained, briefly, I trust, while we investigate the center of the starship disappearances. We will maintain subspace silence until we are through the dangerous sector. Until then you will confine your objections to my actions to direct statements to me, and keep your hostility and your zeal to your individual selves.”

The Ambassador shook his head. “Captain Kirk, you are in many ways an admirable specimen of a limited species. But you must accept your own limitations. Could an amoeba understand the simplest multicelled animal? Would it ask that animal to disassemble itself periodically into its individual cells? Would it know that that would be death?”

For a moment Kirk looked at him, wondering. The Ambassador and his party still looked like individual beings. The temptation was to assume that they were merely that-perhaps with some modest mental link. But what if they really were a living thing, a new thing under the sun…? What if he was the amoeba?

“Ambassador,” Kirk said, “I am prepared to consider the possibility that you have something. What I am not prepared to do is to see it imposed by force, physical or mental. Not on Zaran. And not here.”

Gailbraith looked at him with steel-gray appraising eyes. “Captain, the first multicelled animals must have absorbed a great many amoeba-curtailed their freedom, violated their individual amoeba rights. Doubtless the amoeba protested. But butterflies were born, and tigers, and men.”

Kirk shook his head. “A man is not an amoeba. The argument of the good of the many or the good of the superior being has been made before-by every dictatorship.”

“A dictatorship is not a Oneness. You would not know, Captain, until you have been a Part-Whole.” He bowed fractionally. “I will show you.”

He put his hand up toward Kirk. The forefinger parted from the other three in a V-not the Vulcan sign of paired fingers, but the hand sign of One, set apart from the Unity. Kirk knew it was an invitation to match it, palm to palm, and to share-thought? Feeling? Oneness?

There had been many times when he had not backed away from some form of mental contact-the Vulcan mind-meld, occasionally some other sharing. He was not set against the new, or he would not have been out here. But his deepest instinct rebelled against this-and he saw Spock’s face set against it, almost as if he would move to intervene. Then the Vulcan did speak.

“Captain,” Spock said, “I must point out that your exposure to an unknown, powerful group mental effect could require me to assume command.”

Kirk measured the depth of the Vulcan’s resistance by his willingness to say that in front of the Ambassador. “Mr. Spock is quite correct, Ambassador,” Kirk said immediately. “No. Thank you. If I were not in command, possibly. I could afford the luxury.”

Gailbraith smiled. “No, Captain, you could not.”

Kirk looked at him and revised an estimate. There was something dangerous about the man, and something which could not be dismissed.

“Be that as it may, Ambassador, you and your people will refrain from drawing any member of my crew into a Part-Whole demonstration of any kind. Good day, Ambassador.”

Kirk turned to leave. From around the corner of an alcove where some of Gailbraith’s party had wandered off Kirk heard a peculiar strangled sound-not quite a scream. A man’s scream.

He and Spock moved as one, charged through the alcove doors—

And saw Mr. Dobius, the seven-foot Tanian with bifurcated head-who could give Spock’s Vulcan strength a workout-held by a slender girl.

It was a moment before they saw that the white-robed girl matched Mr. Dobius’ big hand in the One-apart gesture the Ambassador had offered Kirk. Her other hand reached up to the back of Dobius’ neck, and it was as if a current flowed which Dobius could not break. She was moving their separated forefingers toward a joining with the Unity of the other fingers.

“She must not complete the joining!” Spock snapped.

Kirk was a fraction ahead and couldn’t have agreed more. He reached to pull the girl’s hand away from Dobius.

He might as well have locked onto durasteel. Suddenly he sensed the power flowing through her-not her own but the power of a Oneness. Even as he had spoken to the Ambassador, the multiheaded Oneness had also been doing its work here.

Spock did not try to move the woman, even with his Vulcan strength. But he lifted Dobius bodily and flung him clear. The Tanian crumpled against a bulkhead.

And the girl turned on Kirk. For a moment he tried to ward her off gently. Then her hands closed on his temples and he could feel the flow of a current which somehow included the Ambassador and a lurching Copernican Revolution in the way Kirk saw things, as if indeed the amoeba saw that the Oneness was always at the center of things…

Kirk tried to hurl himself back, then felt chivalry go and tried simply to break her hold. But his arms were lead, his legs were melting…

Spock’s hands closed on him and also lifted Kirk bodily away and around behind him as Spock turned to face the girl-and the Ambassador and his party who had come in behind her.

“That will do, Viana,” the Ambassador said quietly. “The Vulcan has his own disciplines.”

The green-eyed girl appraised Spock momentarily and bowed her head slightly. “A pity,” she said.

Behind Spock Kirk felt in astonishment that his legs were failing him. He was crumpling to the deck. Suddenly it was not Spock but Gailbraith who moved-past Spock and locking on to Kirk’s arm with one hand. It was not a way in which a man could stop another man from falling-even the Vulcan would not have tried it. And yet Kirk felt himself held up, lifted, supported as if by a living power which flowed into him through the touch. Then Spock turned and from somewhere Kirk managed to lock his legs into position and straighten away from Gailbraith’s hold. It was like disconnecting a life-support system. For a moment Kirk crumpled against the wall. Spock moved in, but Kirk waved him off and reached for the intercom.

“Effective immediately,” he said, “the Ambassador and his party will confine themselves to the VIP Guest Areas. There will be no fraternization with the Enterprise crew. Kirk out.”

“You would deny a Federation Ambassador the freedom of a Federation starship?” Gailbraith said.

Kirk drew himself up. “I have known Federation Ambassadors of the stature of Sarek of Vulcan,” he said. “Never have I known one who would order or condone the imposition of unwanted mental contact on an unwilling being. I intend to take that to the Federation Council.”

Mr. Dobius came up to stand before Kirk. A Tanian, Kirk decided, should not attempt to look sheepish.

“Sir,” Dobius said, “I have to reportI wasn’t entirely unwilling. I just-I believe your expression would be- ‘got in over my head.’ Sir.”

Kirk looked up at him. “Mr. Dobius, you got in over both our heads-which in your case should have been rather more difficult. Report to Doctor McCoy.”

“I’m all right, sir.”

“You have been in mental contact with an alien life-form, Mr. Dobius. Report.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kirk turned back to Gailbraith. “My order stands. There is no being on this ship, with the possible exception of Mr. Spock, who could be certain of standing against your Oneness. But I will see that no one is obliged to try.” He nodded to Spock. “See that the doors close, Mr. Spock.”

He saw the Vulcan advance on the Ambassador’s party as if the peaceable Vulcan only wished the Ambassador would not step back. But the Ambassador’s party saw something in Spock’s eyes which must have made them decide against pushing their luck.

They stepped back and the doors closed in front of them. Spock pushed a lock signal.

He turned in time to catch Kirk’s shoulders as he sagged.

But after an instant Kirk straightened against the wall and waved Spock off. “Don’t fuss over me, Mr. Spock. I’m not quite a lost cause yet.”

Spock’s look did not soften. “Captain, I recommend you give me the con and report to Doctor McCoy.”

Kirk pried himself off the wall. “In that case you would have to face Gailbraith’s board of inquiry.”

Spock shrugged.

Kirk grinned. “And you would do me out of a perfectly good outing to meet a Free Agent.” He was able to walk more steadily now. “Transporter Room, ten minutes.”

“Captain,” Spock said, “you have been in mental contact with an alien being.”

Kirk stopped. “Yes, Mr. Spock. I have.” He looked at Spock. “Not for the first time, Spock.” He turned away abruptly. “Ten minutes.”

He could feel the Vulcan’s eyes boring into his back.