COMMANDER ANSFIELD WAS waiting in the Cochise transporter room as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a security detail of three, led by the imposing figure of Lieutenant Ingrit Tomson, materialized.
"Very pleased to meet you, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy," Ansfield said, offering a firm handshake to each as they stepped down from the platform, "although I can't say I'm overjoyed at the circumstances."
"I understand, Commander," Kirk said. "What you had to do couldn't have been easy."
"You have a gift for understatement, Kirk. No, it wouldn't have been easy under any circumstances, but I've known Micah—Captain Chandler—since he was a boy. But I had no choice." She paused, shaking her head. "I'm a science officer, not a starship captain, and I don't want to be one a minute longer than necessary."
"Understood, Commander," Kirk said, "although you appear to have things well in hand."
"I didn't say I couldn't be one, just that I don't want to be. Now, the quicker we can get things wrapped up here, the quicker we can be on our way to Starbase 1. For a start, I assume you and your medical officer would like to have a look at the captain. And his log."
"Those would be good places to start," Kirk said as the group made its way into the corridor toward the turbolift. "On our way to sickbay, you can fill in a few details. Just what has been happening since Chandler's message to Starfleet?"
"I wish I knew. You saw—or heard, at least—what Captain Chandler was like. To some extent, he's been that way since we stumbled across this gate or whatever it is. I've never seen him in such a state. He's absolutely convinced that either the gate itself is ready to gobble us up or something that came through the gate is dead set on wiping us out."
"Was there any evidence to support him?"
She shook her head as they entered the turbolift. "Not a shred. Our sensors show nothing."
"And you? And the rest of the crew?"
"Did we go paranoid too, you mean? No, although we've all been on edge since this started. But that's probably largely because of the captain's behavior. Because we didn't see things his way, he's been acting as if he were afraid of us, too, not just that gate. He seemed to trust me a little more than the others—as I said, I've known him since he was a boy—so I was able, just barely, to talk him out of having most of the officers put in the brig or executed, particularly Commander Ortiz, who was in charge on low watch when the gate was found. You heard what he said about you, Captain. He was convinced you and your whole ship had been taken over by—by whatever you ran into when you went through that gate yourself a couple of months ago." She paused, her dark eyebrows arching inquisitively. "You weren't, were you?"
"Not that I know of," Kirk said with a faint smile. Then he added, "At least not by anything that two days of painfully thorough testing at Starfleet Headquarters could find."
The turbolift door opened, and they emerged into the corridor next to sickbay. "Right this way, gentlemen," Ansfield said, stepping out briskly.
Seconds later, they approached the bed on which Captain Chandler was restrained. On the diagnostic screen above the bed, his respiration and heart rate, already high, spurted even higher as his darting eyes fell on Kirk and the others from the Enterprise. A nurse stood next to the bed, and Dr. Nkrumah hurried from the nearby lab to meet them.
"Any progress, Doctor?" Ansfield asked.
"The paralytic agent has worn off, as you can see. All tests—"
"Paralytic agent?" McCoy asked, frowning.
Nkrumah nodded. "Commander Ansfield and I agreed. We knew the captain would realize what was happening the instant I used the hypo spray. We therefore wanted him to be immobilized as quickly as possible, before he had time to harm himself or us in a last-minute struggle. In his state of mind, even a few seconds of mobility could have been dangerous. Short of a phaser or a physical blow to the head, this was the quickest, most efficient method. This particular agent also has the advantage of wearing off more quickly than any sedative."
"And it leaves the victim conscious," McCoy said, still frowning. "Conscious but totally helpless."
"We felt that that, too, was an advantage, Doctor," Ansfield said. "That way, he could see what we were doing at all times. As paranoid as he was, if we'd knocked him out, who knows what he would've thought we did to him while he was unconscious?"
Grudgingly, McCoy had to admit that Ansfield was right. "And the tests you've run on him?" he asked.
"All results so far are perfectly normal," Nkrumah said. "Normal, that is, for someone in a constant state of uncontrollable fear. The brain activity, the blood pressure, brain and blood chemistry, hormonal levels, cellular activity, everything is consistent with a normal, healthy male human who just happens to be terrified."
"No foreign substance of any kind, Doctor?" McCoy asked, remembering uneasily the time he had accidentally been injected with an overdose of cordrazine. The state he had been in then—filled with terror, convinced with paranoid certainty that everyone around him, even his lifelong friend Jim Kirk, was his deadly enemy—was not unlike the state that Captain Chandler appeared to be in now. "No accidentally administered medication that could account for his agitation?"
Nkrumah shook his head, obviously taking no offense at the question. "The computer found nothing but small amounts of the mild tranquilizer I have been prescribing for him for the past eight months. And the remnants of the paralytic agent, of course. Nothing else."
"You wouldn't mind if I looked him over myself?" McCoy asked. He knew Nkrumah only by reputation, a good doctor but one who perhaps put too much trust in the infallibility of machines.
"Of course not, Doctor," Nkrumah said quickly. "I would be glad for any assistance you can render. I have to admit I'm totally stymied at this point."
McCoy stepped forward and looked down at Chandler. "Captain Chandler, I'm Dr. Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer of the Enterprise." As he spoke, his southern drawl was a little more pronounced than usual, his crooked Georgia smile a little wider, a little friendlier. "Hope you don't mind a little more poking and prodding."
Chandler said nothing as McCoy took the scanner from his tricorder and brought it toward Chandler's body. Chandler twitched momentarily, then lay still, but his eyes, unnaturally wide, darted toward Kirk and then, even more rapidly, toward the others from the Enterprise.
Still holding the scanner a few inches from Chandler, McCoy turned to the others. "No offense, Jim, but you're frightening the patient. Why don't you and the rest of this mob go tend to other business? Dr. Nkrumah and I will tend to Captain Chandler."
Nkrumah looked momentarily discomfited by McCoy's directness, but Kirk nodded, smiling faintly.
"Good idea, Bones. See what your bedside manner can do." He turned to Commander Ansfield. "Why don't we adjourn to the bridge? I'm sure Mr. Spock would like to study the readings associated with the appearance of the gate. Wouldn't you, Mr. Spock?"
"Of course, Captain." The briefest of sideward glances indicated, though only to Kirk, that Spock regarded the question, and accompanying answer, as one of those totally unnecessary exchanges that humans so often indulged in.
"And take your giant storm trooper with you," McCoy added, scowling as Lieutenant Tomson looked as if she were going to stay behind.
Outside in the corridor, Kirk nodded toward the door to sickbay. "Lieutenant," he said quietly. "I don't expect any trouble, but stick around, just in case. Stay out of Chandler's line of sight, but keep your eyes and ears open, and be ready for anything."
Tomson nodded her understanding and took up her post next to the door.
A minute later, the remainder of the group emerged onto the bridge. Spock went immediately to the science station and its links with the library computer. The computer's capacity was not quite as great as that of the Enterprise computer, but it would do.
The viewscreen, linked now to the bridge of the Enterprise, showed Engineering Officer Montgomery Scott seated uneasily in the command chair, watching the Enterprise viewscreen. When he saw Kirk and the others come onto the Cochise bridge, he breathed a sigh of relief.
"Ye made it, Captain. No problems?"
"None so far, Mr. Scott. Dr. McCoy stayed in sickbay to give Dr. Nkrumah a hand with Chandler. Spock is going to check through the Cochise's records of the gravitational disturbances that led Chandler to suspect the presence of a gate. Are things still quiet at your end? No activity at the gate?"
"No' so much as a twitch, Captain."
"Good, Scotty. Carry on."
Turning from the screen, Kirk found himself the object of Commander Ansfield's pensive gaze.
"This 'gate' we seem to have stumbled across," she said. "Starfleet's communiqués weren't exactly brimming over with information."
"There isn't much information—reliable information, anyway—to be had."
"Possibly not, Kirk, but I'm not fussy. I'll settle for whatever unreliable guesswork you can give me. You've been through one of them, and, unless I miss my guess, you didn't come back either empty-handed or empty-headed."
Kirk couldn't resist a quick smile. "Not empty-handed by any means. Empty-headed is another matter. We brought back almost a thousand people, humanoids calling themselves the Aragos. They were originally from a planet a few parsecs from the gate in the Sagittarius arm. They'd gone through about fifteen thousand years ago and were—"
"Their ancestors, you mean."
Kirk shook his head. "No, not their ancestors. To make a long story short, when they went through the gate, they emerged into the middle of an interstellar war, and both sets of the combatants mistook them for the enemy. Luckily, they found a place to hide, a place already equipped with a hibernation system big enough for the lot of them. They were still there when we came through the gate. And the war was still going on."
"A fifteen-thousand-year war?" Ansfield shook her head disbelievingly. "Even the Klingons—"
"Strictly speaking, it wasn't the same war," Kirk went on. "The whole affair was a chain reaction. World B destroys World A. Years later, World C comes out into space and is attacked by World B, who thinks they're only wiping out a group of survivors from World A. C fights back and destroys B, and pretty soon D comes along and is attacked by C, and so on. I know it may be hard to believe, but it had been going on for at least forty thousand years. We saw the results, hundreds of worlds, possibly thousands, melted down to radioactive bedrock, some a few thousand years ago, some tens of thousands."
Kirk paused, shaking his own head, as if to try to drive the images away. "It was that way for dozens of parsecs in all directions from the gate. We were lucky enough to get the current pair of combatants to start talking to each other, so maybe the chain has been broken. I sincerely hope so, at any rate."
Some of the color had drained from Ansfield's face. "But how in God's name did it get started?"
Kirk shrugged. "Maybe one truly insane, sadistic race, a race bent on wiping out everyone but themselves. Nobody knows, and at this late date I doubt that anyone ever will." He paused, glancing toward Spock, who was still absorbed in the records of the Cochise's discovery of the new gate. "However, the ones who built the hibernation facilities left records indicating that they suspected that whoever or whatever had started the chain was somehow associated with the gate."
"Something came through the gate, you mean? But what could have—" Ansfield broke off, her eyes darting to the command chair normally occupied by Captain Chandler, then back to Kirk. "You can't possibly think that what happened to Micah has anything to do with something that happened—that may have happened—millions of parsecs away, hundreds of centuries ago!"
"You seem to have made the connection quickly enough yourself."
"Well, yes, but I'm always having crazy ideas! I mean, I was over forty with a guaranteed lifetime job in one of Earth's better, if stuffier, universities when I decided to enter Starfleet Academy and start a second career. You're a starship captain, which I always assumed meant you had to be more levelheaded than that."
"Levelheaded doesn't mean unimaginative, Commander. Once we saw how Chandler was acting, the thought of a possible connection between his actions and the appearance of the gate was only logical. Mr. Spock hasn't calculated the precise odds against its being a simple coincidence, but I'd say they're inordinately high. And you did say that Chandler would have fired on the Enterprise if you and the other officers hadn't stopped him. If this had happened near Romulan or Klingon space and he had been allowed to fire on another ship, whether Romulan or Klingon—or even another Federation vessel—anything could have happened."
"But if you thought we had some kind of plague on board, why did you beam over? Weren't you worried?"
Kirk shrugged. "We decided that if something had indeed come through the gate and reached the Cochise across forty million kilometers, it wouldn't have much trouble reaching the Enterprise whether we came over or not." He paused. "What we have to do now is find out if something did come through and, if so, what it was. And what we can do about it. Starfleet has been advised of the situation, and they've quarantined this entire sector of space."
Ansfield's eyes widened, letting some of her inner turmoil show through. "Which I assume means we're not allowed to leave the area." She sighed. "So what do we do?"
"It's already being done. We keep a close eye on Captain Chandler, we try to find out what happened to him, and we stay very alert to the possibility that, whatever it is, it may happen to someone else."
Even as he spoke, an odd uneasiness brushed him. Frowning, he turned toward Spock, who had just looked up from the instruments of the science station. For a moment, it was as if he were listening for something, his slanted eyebrows raised a fraction, his head cocked slightly to one side.
"Captain," he began, but before he could say more, McCoy's voice came from the bridge intercom.
"Jim, Commander Ansfield, you'd better get down to sickbay, fast! Something is happening to Captain Chandler!"