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  He stopped himself and his voice was so harsh and shaken that it came out barely above a whisper. "I would not choose to die—now. I am Vulcan enough to have no choice."

  "You are more than Vulcan. You are Spock. You have a choice. And I have one. I have made it."

  "You made your choice in the clearing."

  "That was a choice I had made long ago—before I knew how much you were Spock."

  She moved toward him slowly, deliberately, letting her eyes tell him that she had no pity for him and no mercy. She knew it would have been easier for him in many ways to be allowed to crawl off and die in the dignity of his own custom, even if it meant the agony of pon farr.

  "I will not permit you the luxury of dying, Spock," she said aloud, moving almost to touch him with her body. She could feel the heat of his.

  He raised a hand as if to strike her. "I do not require or accept any charity!"

  She lifted her head. "I do not give any."

  He locked her arms behind her and pulled her against him, and for a moment he thought he would break her with his strength. She did not break, nor flinch. He started to break away from her and found that he could not, would not.

  Spock of Vulcan felt the world dissolve in flame.

  Chapter 11

  McCoy left Chapel to watch Kirk and went to the bio-comps. Kirk was, technically, holding his own. But there was some look about him which McCoy did not like, as if he were the battlefield of some conflict of forces.

  McCoy had tried to rouse him and could not.

  McCoy wanted Spock—possibly the Vulcan should even try the mind-meld, although God knew what effect that would have now.

  What worried McCoy was that the Vulcan wasn't in Sickbay. As a rule you couldn't move him out with a tractor beam—short of some life-or-death crisis.

  And maybe that was what it was.

  The bio-comps would have nothing on this for Vulcans which McCoy did not already know.

  McCoy set a scan for all known medical, biological and related information on Zarans.

  ZARAN NATIVE SPECIES. ORIGINAL CULTURE NOW OBSCURED BY TERRAN-HUMAN INFILTRATION AND CONQUEST FROM LONG-JUMP SHIP ESCAPING COLLAPSE OF OLD EARTH TOTALITARIAN EMPIRES.

  NATIVE ZARAN CULTURE BELIEVED ONLY EXAMPLE OF HUNTING CULTURE RAISED TO HIGH LEVEL. EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS PLANET, UNSUITED TO AGRICULTURE BUT WITH PLENTIFUL GAME AND EXCEPTIONALLY HAZARDOUS PREDATORS, DEVELOPED A STRONG, HIGHLY ADAPTABLE SPECIES ATTUNED TO THE HUNT AS SCIENCE, ART, AND BASIS OF SOCIAL ORDER AND MATING CUSTOM.

  AS IN SOME FELINES—E.G., ANDORIAN GRAYTH, TERRAN LIONS, ETC.—THE FEMALES ARE THE PRIMARY HUNTRESSES.

  ZARAN FEMALES APPEAR TO HAVE CERTAIN EMPATHIC AND PSIONIC POWERS USED IN THE HUNT, IN HEALING, AND IN MATING. CERTAIN ZARAN FEMALES, WHEN BONDED TO A LIFE-MATE MALE, APPEAR CAPABLE OF JOINING A HUNTING BAND INTO ONE PSIONIC UNITY.

  ONE HEREDITARY STRAIN OF SUCH FEMALES APPEARED TO BE DEVELOPING THE CAPACITY TO JOIN LARGER AND LARGER UNITS, FOR LONGER PERIODS. THE LAST OF THIS LINE, ZOLANTHA, FIRST WELCOMED, THEN LED THE RESISTANCE AGAINST THE HUMAN FORCE WHICH CALLED ITSELF THE TOTALITY. HER FATE REMAINS UNKNOWN. IT IS RUMORED THAT SHE HAD A FEMALE CHILD, PERHAPS BY A HUMAN FATHER. IT IS NOT KNOWN WHETHER SUCH A HYBRID WOULD BE VIABLE. . . .

  "Want to bet?" McCoy muttered. Before he could go on, there was a crash against his door, and he turned to see Mr. Dobius stagger through it.

  The giant Tanian moved like a puppet controlled by two masters—lurching one way and then another. Finally he stopped, paralyzed—and dropped as if poleaxed.

  McCoy was in time to catch the seven-foot Tanian as he collapsed. It was something of an embarrassment of riches. McCoy finally got him lowered into a chair and was able to swear quietly over a new wrench to his injured shoulder while he ran a scanner over the Tanian.

  There was no apparent injury or sickness, but there was some peculiar mental pattern. The Tenian was something of an anomaly in any case. The bifurcated head actually housed what amounted to two brains, each of which could, at need, control the body.

  McCoy played a hunch and put a brain scan on the analyzer. It showed an odd pattern in the right brain half, and something different but equally odd in the left. Then McCoy ran a test pattern he had taken himself on Gailbraith's One.

  McCoy swore then, less quietly.

  The right brain pattern matched Gailbraith's One.

  "McCoy to Bridge," he said into the intercom. "Mr. Spock to Sickbay."

  Uhura's voice came back. "Mr. Spock hasn't been to the Bridge since you returned from the planet, Doctor. May I help you?"

  I doubt it, McCoy thought. I'm going to need a lot more help than that.

  "No, thank you, Uhura," he said. "I'll find him."

  But it was some time before he could be sure that the Tanian was in no immediate danger—and that nothing could rouse him.

  He called Dr. M'Benga and an orderly to take Dobius to a treatment room, and he headed for Spock's quarters, feeling the urgency of needing to report this to the Vulcan.

  But he had somehow sensed it would have been a worse mistake to have Uhura locate Spock at that moment …

  Chapter 12

  Spock watched Sola emerge from the lounge fresher. The fabricators had provided clothing to replace the coppery bodysuit.

  She had programmed a simple close-fitting coverall, almost absurdly demure, zipped to the throat and plain enough for a nunnery—except that the fabric was meant to be felt with the fingertips, and any abbot would have admitted her at his peril. . . .

  Spock found that he took some satisfaction in every privacy the outfit afforded, and every inch which would remain—the phrase came unbidden—for his eyes only.

  Perhaps she saw the look. She came and stood close to him, not touching him, her eyes reading him as if to see whether she had bought life, or merely time.

  He was not certain. Somewhere he felt his need to possess her threatening to close down on his heart again. But for the moment he could breathe.

  "I shall be in Sickbay," he said.

  She shook her head. "It is for me to go."

  "Better if he does not see you now. When he is strong enough, I will answer for what I permitted myself. Now he is fighting for more than his life."

  "His love?" she asked.

  "Wasn't that what you counted on to save him?" Spock heard the harshness in his voice and knew that it was for himself. "Wasn't that what you promised him?"

  She lifted her head and met his eyes. "Spock, that is a promise I will still keep, if he will let me."

  Spock looked at her in simple astonishment. Whatever he had expected, it was not that. "How?" he asked.

  She reached out to touch him. "Spock, I do not know how I will walk out of this door now. But I will, and you will let me."

  "Will I?"

  She smiled ruefully. "Right now I wish you would not. But I knew that risk. Spock, could you value him less because you have known me?"

  "No."

  "Then could I value him less?"

  After a moment he said, "No."

  "I do not know where it will lead, Spock, but I will not pretend that either of you does not exist."

  He felt again the stirring of something which was not logic. "Go, then. You should have locked me away. If you were going to go to him, by what right do you bring him this?"

  Her eyes flared. "What right did I need? Should I have brought him your dead body?"

  "If that was your only reason …" he began harshly. Then his own sense of justice stopped him. "If that was your reason, it was sufficient. My life is yours. Do not concern yourself with it or me again. Go."

  "Stubborn Vulcan," she said. "I would have done it for that. Are you too blind to see that I did not? Or that I cannot move to go?"

  For the first time he saw her falter.

  He pulled her to him then, and for a long moment she allowed herself to rest against his strength. Then she straightened. "Send me to him, Spock. I have no power to go." Then she shook her head. "That is no
t true, either, Spock. I do. And I will."

  She started to turn. He stopped her with a touch. "Go as you were in the moment you saw him. My weakness cannot be an argument against his strength."

  "No," she said, "but your strength can."

  She looked at him as if the sight would have to last her forever. Then she turned and did not look back.

  "Sola," he said as she reached the door. He had not used the name, not any name.

  She turned and saw that he had merely wanted to say it. Her tawny eyes laughed then, and he saw that some effort had dropped away from her.

  "Spock," she said, and went out.

  He stayed for a moment attempting to recapture the disciplines of Vulcan, without entire success. He was not certain whether he was guilty of treason, or of loyalty. But he lived, and he knew that the man who was fighting his solitary battle in Sickbay would not be left to fight it alone.

  Then with the return of clarity Spock realized that something had been nagging at him somewhere below the level of logic, on that level which the Human would have called intuition.

  Was it not exceedingly convenient that they had arrived at the mathematical center of nowhere to find a Free Agent of the Federation—and the one woman in the galaxy who could have been expected to have this effect on Captain James T. Kirk? Not to mention on—But perhaps that effect on Spock had not been expected.

  Was there someone who could have predicted from the record at least the first effect? Someone who could have arranged their rendezvous with the inevitable? Someone who could have arranged to have the Enterprise come here?

  There were at least two logical answers to that. He liked neither of them.

  Spock stepped to the intercom. "Spock to Bridge. Check the status of the isolation-locks confining Ambassador Gailbraith and party."

  Uhura's voice came back. "Mr. Spock, I was about to trace you. Doctor McCoy called urgently but left no message. Sir, we are running computer checks which indicate that warning sensors have been shut off throughout the ship—including some to the isolation-locks. We can no longer verify that the Ambassador's party has been isolated."

  "Post guards," Spock said immediately.

  "I have, sir. But, sir—those locks could not have been opened, nor the sensors disconnected—from the inside."

  "Precisely," Spock said. "Condition Seven. Assume that one or more Enterprise personnel are, or may be, under alien mental control."

  "Sir, Condition Seven requires me to assume even that you are, or may be."

  "That is correct. Proceed on that assumption. Spock out."

  In fact, Condition Seven required him to assume the same of Uhura and all others, and not to discount the possibility that he himself was affected without his knowledge.

  In fact, he might have been one of two prime targets, and the one most closely exposed …

  Gailbraith was one possible answer to who might have predicted and arranged. There was, in logic, a possible answer which Spock liked still less: Sola Thane.

  Spock was already moving out the door on the run.

  Chapter 13

  Kirk was alone in some far place. But it was a place where aloneness did not exist. He had only to stop fighting, let go, and he would not have to be locked back into his single skull, his stubbornly solitary body. It would be a relief. And it would clear the way for something else which he knew he had to stand aside and allow. He knew nothing very clearly, but he knew that there was some time-bomb ticking away for the Vulcan, and that Sola held some answer to that. He would have given anything if she did not. Except the one thing it would cost: Spock's life.

  He struggled toward consciousness, aware of some desperate urgency to reach them. But he was dragged back down toward the Oneness. There was an illusion of safety there, a presence which had saved him once—and let him go … gray eyes and an ironic mouth and a quality of certainty which had warned him that he would find what he needed—on the planet where he had found her … And how would the gray eyes have known that? Kirk was struggling for some vague memory of that gray-eyed presence. It had held him in its power, saved him from something, and—temporarily—let him go. But the compelling invitation was still there.

  Then abruptly he was caught by another rip-tide, another call to a different Oneness—this one a totality so strange that he recoiled, knowing that it was utterly alien to him, and utterly dangerous. It reached for him with a power which was unanswerable. It was a call of Sirens, Sirens not of body but of mind, Sirens of the Unknown—And he had always been the Ulysses who would have had himself lashed to the mast to be able to hear the Sirens' call …

  But he was lashed to no safety now, and the Sirens of Totality were claiming him …

  Kirk seemed to feel someone take his hand. He seized that someone's hand as a life-line, crushing it, but it did not crush. He pulled himself back, knowing that he had come very close to both death and Oneness.

  For a long time he merely looked at it and held to the hand. Finally, he said, "That is the second time you wouldn't let me go. I was very annoyed."

  She smiled. "I do not apologize. Where would you have gone—this time?"

  He shook his head. "There was some—dream, possibly. Two forces of Oneness fought over me, and one of them was—Totality. It could not be fought. A Siren Song of the mind, sung exactly for me. Sola—someone has planned this, somehow."

  She frowned. "The same thought has been coming to me. But how? And—who? Someone might have learned that I would have to come here. Someone might have arranged for you to come. But who could know what the effect of our meeting would be? I have not spoken your name, aloud, for years."

  He smiled. "Maybe—to a sufficiently astute mind—it was written all over us. Just in our records. For the same reason that I knew yours, and you mine."

  "Spock—also knew."

  "I wonder if anyone counted on that?" He pulled her down to sit beside him. "Sola, tell me now. Was there any way in which you arranged this?"

  She sat very straight. "When I saw the Enterprise, I sent a Free Agent code signal requesting it be ordered to turn back."

  "Turn back—when you knew who we were, and you needed help?"

  "I did not think your starship, nor you, would survive untaken. The Enterprise is much too dangerous a weapon to give the Totality. And to give them you would be still more dangerous."

  "One man?"

  "You are known to the galaxy as the Starship Captain who is the symbol and the reality of what takes us to the stars. You are the last man who would choose a Oneness. But if they could claim you—what would it do for their cause?

  Kirk shook his head. "Am I the last amoeba? Sola, how do we know that Gailbraith is not right—that we are defending our little, limited lives against the great multicelled experiment in evolution? It was that first little multicelled blob which finally climbed out on land, and up to stars."

  "That is the question which sent me back to Zaran," she said.

  "To do what?" he asked. "What I never understood is how you could give up your starship."

  "You risked yours—your command, your career—once to take Spock to Vulcan against a direct Starfleet order. I know Vulcan well enough to guess that it was for his life …"

  He shrugged. "Then you would know there was no question. It is not the same as giving up the stars for an abstract cause. To free your people?"

  "That, and more. I saw that the galaxy would have to deal with Oneness and that Zaran would become the focal point. I believe the Totality has found a way to use the native powers of females of my species to force unity on the missing ships. It may be nearing the solution of how to force it on the galaxy. If it could also unite with other forms of Oneness, such as Gailbraith's—or capture you … or both … it would take the galaxy."

  Kirk started to sit up, found that he couldn't. "I have to warn Spock. In the dream—I remembered that Gailbraith warned me … to expect you. If he is behind this, if he brought us together—" He caught her hand. "What po
wers of females of your species, Sola?"

  "When we bond with a life-mate," she said, "it is a psionic joining. Out of it the female can create a wider psionic unity. Once it was only of the tribe for a hunt. Now certain females might be made to unite a planet, perhaps even a galaxy."

  "You?" he asked.

  "Unknown," she said in a tone which reminded him of Spock. "But the Totality believes I am at the head of the list. Perhaps even that I will possess a new level of power."

  He looked at the meeting of their hands. "Then it would be to their advantage—to bring you a life-mate."

  "It has been tried. Various males were 'planted' on me. Without success. Until n—"

  He put up a hand and stopped her from saying it. But the hand touched her lips, then her face, then slipped into the tawny hair to pull her down to him. "If that was their plan," he murmured, "make the most of it."

  He felt her smile against his mouth.