Star Trek - TOS 38 Idic Epidemic Read Free Page B

your theory on a single case. But if I do become ill, I won’t die. Someone has to be around who knows you for what you really are!”

Chapter Two
    Captain James T Kirk sat in the command chair on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, feeling rested and alert at a single Earth-normal gravity. During the past month on Vulcan, he had become accustomed to a constant nagging fatigue. By his last days there he no longer took notice of it. Now, though, it was a relief to have it gone.
    On the other hand, he had acclimated somewhat to Vulcan’s summer heat and now felt slightly chilly at the starship’s temperature intended for Human comfort. Perhaps he should wear an undershirt, as Spock did, for a few days.
    Sitting still didn’t help. He decided to tour his ship, glad for an excuse to wander the corridors he had missed while he was away from her. If the activity didn’t warm him up, he’d—
    “Captain!” the intercom blurted, a female voice he didn’t recognize.
    “Kirk here.”
    “Walenski here, sir. Our Vulcan ‘guests’ are making trouble. There’s two of ‘em squaring off for a fight, with deadly weapons!” He heard the tension in her voice, and remembered that part of her duty included assigning the use of the ship’s physical facilities. She was clerical personnel, not security or combat.
    “Where are they?”
    “Deck five, gymnasium A.”
    “On my way!” Kirk told Walenski. “Mr. Spock, you have the con. Call security to the gym.”
    Damn Sendet and his crowd, anyway! They were not truly guests aboard the Enterprise, but political prisoners being transported to an uninhabited Vulcan colony planet, where they would be left to work out their own way of life as they saw fit.
    With the exception of Sendet, however, the Follow ers of T’Vet, as they called themselves, had commit ted no crimes—because they had been caught before they could put into effect their plans to overthrow the government of Vulcan. The Vulcan High Council had given them a choice of mental reprogramming or transportation off-planet. Under such circumstances, Kirk certainly knew which he would choose!
    When Starfleet ordered the Enterprise to transport the rebels, Kirk had decided there was no reason they should not travel comfortably in guest quarters, as that meant less work for his crew.
    As he understood it, while the Followers of T’Vet espoused a belief in racial purity that Kirk found hard to stomach, their philosophy was otherwise a kind of commonsense belief in survival of the fittest, comple mentary with many of his own beliefs. He hadn’t expected trouble—certainly not less than two days out from Vulcan!
    Gymnasium A was the large one, with bleachers for an audience to watch the many athletic contests that came up among a young and fit starship crew. It was not intended as an arena for blood games.
    When Kirk arrived, two muscular young Vulcan males were circling one another on the mat. Had they been unarmed, Kirk would have simply joined the spectators, but the two held lirpas, a Vulcan weapon with one end weighted stone, for bashing, and the other end a razor-sharp curved blade, for slashing. Either end could kill.
    “Captain!”
    That must be Walenski—a small woman in red services uniform, seated on the bleachers, surrounded by Vulcan women. “Quiet, Human!” one of them said to her. “The combat is not to be interrupted.”
    “It most certainly is! ” Kirk exclaimed, striding between the fighters. “Kroykah!” he shouted, hoping that even to the Followers of T’Vet that word used in ceremonies dating back to Vulcan’s “Time of the Beginning” would mean “Stop!”
    It did. Without protest, the two fighters stopped their circling, backed a few paces from one another, and rested their weapons with the weighted ends on the floor.
    “How dare you profane Vulcan custom!”
    A man rose from among the assembled Vulcans—a man as tall and imposing as Spock’s father Sarek, of the same generation, and with