STAR TREK: TOS #80 - The Joy Machine Page 10

  “Well said,” Marouk said. “I admire your courage.”

  “If not your vaunted logic,” McCoy growled.

  “The Joy Machine has other, more persuasive arguments,” Marouk said. “Have your arms begun to tingle?”

  “I have noticed that for several minutes now,” Spock said calmly.

  “I thought my left arm had gone to sleep,” Uhura said.

  “I was hoping I was mistaken,” McCoy said.

  “Soon it will begin to hurt,” Marouk said, “and then the pain will become excruciating. It will end [103] only when you agree to become citizens and accept your paydays from the Joy Machine. I wish there were something I could do, but it is out of my hands.”

  “And into ours. You’ve done quite enough,” McCoy said menacingly, advancing toward Marouk.

  But just then someone knocked at the front door.

  The three of them, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura, left Marouk’s villa, escorted by Wolff and a half-dozen of his uniformed officers, each with a small, flat sleep-inducer leveled at the backs of their captives’ heads. Spock turned his eyes from side to side as if gauging the possibilities of escape.

  “Keep your gaze to the front,” Wolff said. “Think about it! Even if you escaped, where would you go? Any citizen you encountered would report your whereabouts, the Enterprise won’t beam you aboard, and soon your left arm will be extremely painful. You might even be tempted to cut it off, particularly if you are a surgeon such as Dr. McCoy. Perhaps you will be begging Dr. McCoy to cut off your arm.”

  “Never!” Uhura said, but she shook her arm as if it were hurting.

  “I think you underestimate our capacity to endure pain,” Spock said.

  “I would refuse to do it,” McCoy said, “and I certainly wouldn’t amputate my own arm, like some poor wild animal.”

  “In any case,” Wolff said, unruffled, “I caution you that the interaction of surgery with the bracelet’s control over your nervous system might be fatal. No one has survived it yet.”

  Spock shook his head. “How did you switch allegiance so easily, Agent Wolff? I would have thought that loyalty was a primary characteristic in a Federation agent,” he said.

  Wolff looked at Spock without rancor. “I am a pragmatic person,” he said. “I tested for a high level [104] of loyalty when loyalty to the Federation made pragmatic sense. No one ever thought to test for loyalty to a system that made greater sense.”

  “And you think that the Joy Machine does?” Spock asked.

  “There’s no use talking to this traitor,” McCoy said.

  “Is the pain becoming unbearable yet?” Wolff asked McCoy with a mockery of concern, and then to Spock, “Of course the Joy Machine makes greater sense. Its rewards are immediate, measurable, and universal. No broken promises, no illusory goals, no disappointments. Just pure happiness offered freely and accepted without guilt.”

  “And what about the degradation that comes along with it?” Uhura asked.

  Wolff shrugged, “Do I feel degraded? No. Do I see it around me? Sometimes. Joy is too much for some people. Natural selection will take care of them. And if they have to die out, they will die happy, leaving those of us behind who can be happy and still function.”

  They had reached the edge of City Center, and Spock was still looking for an avenue of escape. McCoy had dropped back to walk beside him.

  “We’ve talked bravely,” he said so softly that only Spock could hear him, “but I’m not sure how much of this pain I can stand. Or Uhura.”

  “Try meditation,” Spock said. “The mind has great capacities for controlling the pain centers.”

  “That’s easy for you,” McCoy said.

  “No whispering!” Wolff said.

  “Where are you taking us?” Spock said.

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Wolff said.

  They found out when they entered the World Government building, and Spock pointed out bolts on three of the first-floor doors.

  “They’re separating us,” McCoy said when he saw the doors.

  “Be calm, Doctor,” Spock said. “Uhura, even [105] though we are separated, we are all working as one unit.”

  “Of course,” Uhura said.

  “And whatever happens,” Spock said to both McCoy and Uhura, “remember that each of us must do what he or she can for the good of the group.”

  The first door clanged shut on Uhura and the bolt was thrown.

  “Spock!” McCoy said. He was pushed into the second room. “Spock!” he said, as if warning against whatever Spock had in mind.

  “Agent Wolff,” Spock said, as the door closed on McCoy, “I would like a word with you.”

  “Spock!” McCoy shouted from behind the door.

  Spock turned his head gravely toward the former Federation agent.

  The submarine was tiny. The living quarters consisted of two rooms equipped with hammocks. One of the rooms formerly stored equipment; some of the places where it had been bolted down still had holes, and some had bolts in place. The other room functioned as a dining facility during the day, with a table for four that swung out from the wall and a bench that folded down from it. A tiny galley was beyond, lined with food lockers and a microfusion oven, and beyond that was a toilet, that the sailors called “the head,” that was a marvel of compact efficiency. Linda slept in the single private cabin, which was scarcely bigger than a closet. The others, including Kirk, rigged up their hammocks in the evening and took them down in the morning.

  Their vessel, Linda told Kirk, had been constructed as an oceangoing research project. Its primary goal had been to discover more about the wampus. It had been built to look like a wampus and to move like a wampus, and even to sound like a wampus, with the hope that eventually scientists would learn how to communicate with these giant creatures that had such [106] oversized brains. All that had stopped when the Joy Machine took over, but a few scientists had fled to sanctuary and a few more had come to join them until now there was a band of rebels waiting for an opportunity to take back their world.

  She refused to say how many belonged to her band and where they were going. “What you don’t know you can’t reveal,” she said.

  “You know your chances for success are small,” Kirk said.

  “Small is better than none.”

  “Sometimes small is worse than none, if it only gets you killed in an attempt doomed to failure.”

  “Not if you consider the alternative.” Linda shivered.

  Kirk shivered, too. They were cruising on the surface now, to renew their air supply and let the general stench of underwater living be flushed from the vessel. They stood on the narrow deck outside the hatchway, clutching a railing that rose, at a touch, from the deck. The ambient temperature had declined each time they had emerged, until now occasional ice floes could be seen bobbing in the water. Kirk had been loaned a sweater, but it was not enough to ward off the chill.

  From the temperature and the persistent position of the afternoon sun off the larboard, Kirk understood that they were headed north. The ship made good speed, whether on the surface or submerged. Its wampus-like shape provided good streamlining against the friction of the water, and the power source, a sealed atomic unit, needed no attention. Apparently there was automatic navigation and automated obstacle avoidance as well, because occasionally Kirk felt a change in direction when no one was at the controls.

  The first time they had surfaced, Kirk’s arm pained him so badly that he soon went below, where he was partially protected by his position below the water [107] level. The second time the pain had been almost absent. The third time the pain had been excruciating but the scenery was so fascinating that Kirk stayed on deck, his arm hugged against him. Once his arm had throbbed with sudden delight, and a wave of inexplicable joy swept over him. That had sent him below faster than the pain.

  The ship had passed among schools of strange-appearing fish with broad orange streaks down their bodies and others with purple circles around thei
r tails. In fact, the ocean was alive with color. Many-hued, minnow-like creatures had been clustered so thick in places that the water had seemed alive. Kirk had seen huge, diaphanous, globular creatures that floated half-in, half-out of the water, like rainbows settled on the waves.

  There were so many different species that Kirk lost count. Kirk felt like Darwin on the Beagle, and if the problem presented by the Joy Machine had not been so pressing and the fate of his friends not been so great a concern, he would have considered the experience one of the great moments of his life.

  Then there were the predators: the dark, silent, gliding shapes that moved among the schools of fish and pulled down the ones that lingered unwisely at the outskirts; the armored creatures that shut their eyes and ate away at the diaphanous globes; the alien birds that snared unwary single fish in their talons or scooped up a body of water and let everything but the fish it contained drain through a sieve-like beak; a school of leaping creatures that made of the eating process a kind of carefree game; and what Linda called a wangle of wampuses that moved slowly past, also on their way north, and strained the minnow-like fish from their path as they went, gray and interminable and, Kirk thought, marvelous and perhaps marvelously wise.

  In the early part of their voyage they had passed islands, verdant in the distance and perhaps [108] inhabited. At least Kirk had detected a trail of smoke from one of them. In later surfacings, the only sights of land had been distant and forbidding, either sheer cliffs or flatter surfaces covered with rocks or ice or both. Once Kirk saw a white creature, which must have been huge to be visible at that distance, standing up to look at them, but it was an animal, not a person. Fish were less frequent, but wampuses were common—feeding, Linda said, on tiny crustaceans that thrived in this cold climate—as well as furry creatures that dived through the waters or came out to lie upon the land and bask in the arctic sun.

  They had been passing through an area where ice floes were everywhere, and an iceberg had been seen slipping past in the evening. Now it was too cold to stand on deck. The next morning he felt a small shiver run through the ship as he sat at the ship’s second sitting for breakfast, and then a jar, and the ship stopped. For a moment Kirk’s body had difficulty adjusting to the absence of vibration. Linda said they had arrived.

  When they came out onto the deck, Kirk saw that the ship had pulled into a dock whose rounded front and exact dimensions suggested that it had been built to fit only this vessel. Linda confirmed that this was the original home of the wampus research project. Behind the dock were a little cluster of metal huts and a plastic-covered framework that probably was a greenhouse. And behind that was a cliff made entirely of ice, looming hundreds of meters above the little settlement built at its base, like a frozen fist poised to smash the huts into the rocks and tundra on which they stood. The glacier was embraced within a half circle of snow-covered peaks, shining in distant sunlight while clouds shadowed the surface where they stood.

  “Come along,” Linda said. “We’ll get you out of the cold.”

  Kirk realized that a freezing wind was blowing off [109] the ice beyond the little settlement, and he was shaking. But that was not as great a sensation as the disappointment he felt at the size of the rebel force. The huts could not house more than a few dozen people, at most. “For a revolutionary,” he said, trying to cover his dejection, “you’ve taken me a long way from the place where the revolution has to happen.” But his teeth were chattering.

  “This is one of the few places on Timshel where we are free from the influence of the Joy Machine.” Linda led the way, walking quickly from the dock toward one of the metal huts.

  “How can you be sure?” Kirk asked.

  “Do you feel anything from your bracelet?”

  Kirk considered the question. For almost the first time in days his arm felt normal. “No,” he said. “But the Joy Machine may be subtle enough to disguise its influence.”

  “There’s another reason. Besides the fact that we carry on our subversive activities free from interference, the Joy Machine took over the communication satellites. We think that’s the way it provides services to citizens outside Timshel City, and spies upon them, too.”

  “And their orbits are all equatorial,” Kirk said.

  “Nearly so.”

  “But what’s to keep the Joy Machine from launching one, or diverting one, into a polar orbit?”

  “Nothing, perhaps,” Linda said, “but its energies have been devoted to spreading joy, and its technical capacities may be limited now that everybody, including the scientists and the engineers, have been drafted into manual labor.”

  Linda was reaching for the door and Kirk could imagine the warmth that lay behind it, but he also knew that there might not be another occasion to ask questions free from the presence of others. He put his hand on hers and felt a curious sensation run up his arm, almost like the pleasure stimulus the Joy [110] Machine had provided once. But this was his right arm. He shook his head to clear it. “What happens when that glacier decides to move?” he asked, nodding his head at the mountainside of ice behind the huts.

  She allowed his hand to remain on hers. “It hasn’t moved in ten million years,” she said. “That’s what our scientists tell us, and some things you have to accept on faith.”

  “Like creating a revolution?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You should understand that.”

  “I understand it, all right,” Kirk said. “What I haven’t been able to figure out, however, is how you knew I would be at Marouk’s villa in time to get there from here and abduct me when you did.”

  “That’s easy,” Linda said. “Marouk told us you would be coming.”

  “Told you?” Kirk exclaimed.

  “Well, not me,” Linda said. “He thought I was dead in an airplane crash, and we allowed him to think that because, next to De Kreef and Marouk, I was the one who knew the Joy Machine best. But he broadcast a message in code to the rebel group; we have been waiting offshore for the better part of a week.”

  “And you trusted him?” Kirk asked, and then realized that he had trusted Marouk.

  “He has kept in touch with the rebels by radio, perhaps protected from the Joy Machine by the immunity he was so proud of. What he has told us so far has been reliable.”

  “It can’t have been of much use to you,” Kirk said, “or of much damage to the Joy Machine.”

  But he was thinking: What kind of devious game was Marouk playing?

  [subspace carrier wave transmission]

 

  >human want interrogate<

 

  >desires interrogate<

  Chapter Eight

  Revolution in a Bottle

  WHEN LINDA OPENED the door to the metal hut, Kirk stepped into another world—from the icy cold of the arctic to the warm, cozy camaraderie of people sheltered from the extremes of climate and united by a common purpose. A barrel-like stove in the middle of the room, connected to the roof by a fat metal pipe, emitted heat and the crackling of burning fossil fuel. Against the left wall of the rectangular room were arranged the elements of a communal kitchen: a six-burner stove, two food slots, three large refrigerators, shelves stocked with goods in boxes and cans and tableware, an ultrasound dishwasher, and assorted gadgets at whose purpose Kirk could only guess.

  The right side of the room was walled off into small rooms, perhaps offices or, more likely, rest rooms connected to deep and heated septic systems. Kirk considered the prospect of going into the arctic night to use an outhouse and hoped they were rest rooms.

  In the center of the room, on the far side of the blazing stove, were two neat rows of dining tables equipped with attached benches, a total of six tables [113] in all with spaces for thirty-six diners, twelve more if chairs were pulled up to the ends. On this side of the stove were frame and canvas sofas and chairs, all arranged neatly facing the stove, and two square tables with a straight chair on each
side. In the room, standing now to greet visitors announced by the blast of cold air from outside, was a group of men and women dressed in the warm, rough clothing of people on the far fringes of the known world, for whom fashion meant protection first and comfort second.

  There were perhaps thirty of them. Kirk’s first impression was a montage of forms and faces. They were all adults of ages Kirk estimated to range between twenty-five and sixty. The majority of them were men; Kirk counted six women, although in the bulky clothing it was difficult to be certain until they spoke. Many of the men were bearded against the cold; exposed skin, including women’s faces and hands, had been roughened by the weather. The ratio of men to women, however, suggested an arrangement that would endure only as long as a joint purpose was paramount.

  By the next day Kirk would know many of them by name and specialty and temperament, including the dozen or so who were busy at tasks that kept them away from the gathering in the commons, but for now the scene was one of greetings and introductions and names that, try as he would, flew past Kirk before he could grab them and stuff them into memory. His greatest accomplishment, however, was hiding the sinking feeling in his stomach when he considered the size of the group gathered here at the top of their world and the enormity of the challenge they faced.

  One man’s face stood out in the crowd: large, longhaired, blond, bearded, blue-eyed—like a Viking explorer out of Earth’s early history. He was one of the older men, although gray strands were almost invisible, and he stepped forward to greet Linda and the newcomer. “Linda,” he said, taking her hand and [114] then folding her into a bear-like hug. “You return, mission accomplished.” Then he held her away from him and turned to Kirk. “And this must be the famous; Captain Kirk.”

  “This is Dr. Arne Johannsen,” Linda said to Kirk. “Arne is the chairman of our action committee. Before the Revolution he was the xenobiologist in charge of wampus research.”