SOMETHING MISSING

by

Sheila Clark

Of necessity, a subspace letter was always kept short. With so many essential businesses and administrative matters occupying the time of the communications systems of the various planets in the Federation, air time was expensive - prohibitively expensive for most - and even the comparatively wealthy could only afford to send such a letter at most once a year. Most people kept in touch with relatives and friends on other planets by means of space letters - sometimes written communications, more often taped, sent by means of whatever spaceship happened to be travelling in the correct direction. These letters frequently took a year or more to reach their destinations, and often several, sent over a period of some months, would arrive together, having met up somewhere en route while waiting for a change of ship to take them on towards their delivery point. Even Starships, the elite of Starfleet, were called upon to act as postal carriers from time to time.

Sometimes complaints were made to Council Members about the lengthy delays suffered by letters and an enquiry was made, but the findings were always the same; because of the distances involved, because of the paucity of personnel at some of the more remote colonies and research bases, it was totally unfeasible to run a regular mail service except between member planets and some of the longest established, and therefore most heavily populated, colonies. It was regrettable that most colonists should receive their mail a year and more after it was sent, but it was unrealistic to expect better service while so many of Starfleet's resources were tied up with showing a strong front to both the Klingons and the Romulans. Of course, if they preferred a fast mail service under Klingon rule...

It was therefore a reason for considerable pleasure when, among all the rest of the mail that caught up with the Enterprise one day, McCoy received a packet of three tapes from his daughter Joanna.

Each tape was dated on the outside - standard procedure because of the tendency for tapes to be delayed and then delivered in batches. Eagerly, he slotted the first one - dated some two years previously - into the viewer. Joanna's face, alight with happiness, shimmered into view.

"Hi, Dad. By the time you get this, I'll be a married woman. Yes, I've finally found a man I love, respect and trust; a man into whose hands I know, without any doubt, I can place my future happiness. He's Jiri Revisec, a first generation colonist here on Doranna; his parents came here direct from Earth as soon as the experimental phase was over and full settlement implemented. He's a doctor at the main hospital complex here, which of course is how I met him, although he went to Earth to train. He's as dedicated as you are, Dad, and I know you'll like him when you eventually meet him. I hope your ship is assigned into this quadrant real soon..." The tape went on with general small talk for a few minutes, but most of it washed over McCoy's head. Jo - married. He only hoped that she would not be as disillusioned in her marriage as her mother had been. But no - she was a nurse and knew the score; she knew that her fiance - her husband - was totally dedicated to his work; she had, after all, commented on how dedicated he was.

McCoy turned to the next tape.

"Dad, I'm pregnant!" She looked, if anything, even happier. "Jiri and I wanted children, but we didn't dare hope that I'd get pregnant so soon. I've been properly tested, of course, because there is a 10% occurrence of birth abnormalities here - something to do with the different radiation from the sun - but I'm one of the lucky 90%. I asked them not to tell me the sex of my baby, though Jiri knows. It's hard for him to keep it a secret from me, especially since he can't understand why I should want to wait until it's born to find out, but he humours me because he loves me..." She went on with details of her life and hopes for the future.

Well, McCoy wouldn't have to wait nine months to find out, or have to hide his knowledge for that period either, for the tape was dated eighteen months previously. The third tape was dated seven months later.

"Dad, you're a grandfather! You've got a beautiful little grandson. We're calling him Leonard, after you." She looked a little tired, and McCoy realised that she'd taped the letter within a very short time of giving birth. Her face shimmered away and was replaced by a man's.

"Dr. McCoy, this is Jiri Revisec. Jo wanted to let you know immediately, although we realise you won't get this tape for some time, but I would only let her give you the news, and promised to finish the letter for her. It was a difficult labour and she is still exhausted; should she insist on having another child, it will have to be born by Caesarean section - but you can be sure that I will not permit her to endanger herself. We wanted several children, but I would prefer to have only one rather than risk her health and safety. I love your daughter very much, Doctor, even although my work does not permit me to devote the time to her that I would wish; but as a nurse herself, and a doctor's daughter, she understands that, has always understood. It is my hope to keep her as happy as she is at present, as happy as she has made me.

"I realise that your duty ties you at the moment, but I look forward to meeting you one day. You have a home here any time you care to claim it."

McCoy sat back as Revisec's face faded, aware of a confused mixture of emotions. He was glad that his daughter was happy, had a good husband; was as proud of his year-old grandson as if he had personally produced him, but he was also aware of a certain depression that Len Junior would grow up not knowing him.

It wasn't impossible, of course, that the Enterprise would one day be sent to Doranna - they were already in the general area - but the planet was in a region of Federation space where regular patrols were unnecessary. Doranna itself was visited only by supply freighters, because it was well away from both the Klingon and Romulan boundaries. There was relatively unexplored space flanking the area, but the handful of scoutships sent into it had found nothing but developing cultures, some technically advanced enough to be experimenting with the beginnings of spaceflight, and which would be contacted officially in the not-too-distant future; some still in the early stages of technology; some existing in a stone age; and a couple showing only the beginnings of sapient life. None of the planets discovered were advanced enough to be of any danger, however remote, to a Federation planet, even an undefended colony. Starfleet could not waste its resources, already stretched fairly thin by its two hostile neighbours, on a region that was considered to be totally safe.

McCoy poured himself a small brandy and raised the glass in the general direction of Doranna.

"Glad to see you, Jim."

Commodore Ericcson, Commander of Starbase 6, handed Kirk an unofficial but not quite illegal drink, before he continued. "I know you've got an assigned break here - three weeks, all crewmembers to get two weeks R & R, and the ship to get a general overhaul... but frankly, I have a problem on my hands and you might just be able to help me out."

"Well, I'm due you a favour," Kirk commented as he savoured the brandy. "Hmmm - this is a good brand - I don't think I recognise it..." He looked queryingly at Ericcson.

The Base Commander grinned. "No, and you're not likely to either. It's a special brand that the Saurians keep for themselves. I don't say none of it is ever sold off-planet, but not much is. A lot of planets export their best products, and the natives have to make do with second best - but not the Saurians. They keep their best brandy for home consumption. I first tasted it several years ago - you remember the trouble we had with Orion raiders before we convinced them that we were stronger than they were and fully intended to protect our colonies and member planets? I was second in command of the Hood at the time, and she was assigned to protect the area around Saurius. A pirate sneaked in one time, grabbed a couple of dozen prisoners, and ran for it. We caught up with it, of course - the Orion raiders could only manage warp six in those days - and rescued the Saurians. One of them was the son of one of the richest men on the planet, and he gave us enough of that vintage to let everyone on board have a measure. I've dreamed about it ever since... Well, when I got my promotion to here, I had a word with a trader who owed me, and he managed to get me a couple of bottles. I keep it for the friends that I know will appreciate it."

"Well, Sven, if you could get a bottle for me, I'd really be due you a favour - half a dozen, in fact." Kirk was only half joking.

"I'll see what I can do," Ericcson replied lightly.

Kirk took another appreciative sip. "Ahhh... Well, Sven - what can I do for you?"

Ericcson frowned slightly. "It's not for me, exactly," he replied. "It's one of the colonies on the edge of explored space. Been settled for a good thirty years now; a nucleus of original settlers, a good few who have moved in since it was proved, plenty of young adults who were born there and, this last five to ten years, a good crop of second generation births. Ideal planet- fertile, several native plants that crop well and provide both a staple in the food supply and a growing export crop, one plant that provides an excellent substitute for quinine - which is still the indicated medication for certain fevers - and an animal that was so easily domesticated that the colonists still can't believe their luck, and which provides a fine wool that is in such high demand that it's a luxury item, even on its planet of origin - rivalling - no, even more in demand than the finest silk ever was. Mouflette wool alone has made the colony self-supporting - the other things just add a bit of cream to the jam."

"Self-supporting after only thirty years? That's pretty good going. Anything less than fifty is usually considered better than average, isn't it?"

Ericcson nodded. "Some of the mining colonies have a higher annual income, but even the richest of them cost so much to establish that they take years to pay back the loans they needed to get started. An agricultural planet, on the other hand, starts off owing very little, so they're profitable faster. Oh, there are still a few things that Doranna must import," he admitted, "as well as some luxury items they import from choice. But they can afford to. Their income from the wool and from quinare more than balances the books, even without the other crops they export."

"So what's gone wrong?" Kirk asked.

"This last few months they've had a number of unexplained disappearances. No - more than unexplained - totally baffling, even impossible, disappearances."

"Disappearances?" Kirk frowned. "But the planet would be thoroughly surveyed, checked out for potentially dangerous life forms before it was cleared for colonisation - even exploratory parties shouldn't run into anything too hard to handle even in the first years, let alone after thirty."

Ericcson grunted. "It's not as easy as that, Jim. The disappearances haven't been exploratory parties; they've all been children."

"Children?"

Ericcson nodded. "Children. Mostly toddlers, but a couple of babies have vanished too. Now some of the toddlers might just have wandered off, got lost in the scrub surrounding the settlements, but not all of them and certainly not the babies. They must have been taken, but nobody knows just how..."

Kirk's frown deepened. "Infanticide? One of the colonists gone insane but still managing to hide it?"

"I'd like to think that," Ericcson said gloomily. "No, I mean it; it would give the planetary authorities somewhere positive to start. As it is, they're screaming for help - at a complete loss."

"But why? How can you be so certain that - "

Ericcson gave a hopeless shrug. "I know. There have been a lot of theories over the centuries, but nobody's quite sure what causes insanity. However, it's a rare beast in a new colony. Everyone is too busy building - a home, a job, success for the colony... There may be pressure, but it's not the sort that causes even nervous breakdowns. All potential colonists are well-screened before they leave their home planets, too. Any whiff of a nervous disorder for three generations back and they can kiss goodbye to their chances of getting off-world. They're out of the colonisation programme - O-U-T, out, faster'n they can be shoved out the door. Jim, the colonists on Doranna - on any colony like Doranna - are so well-balanced that they're... they're abnormal!"

Kirk grunted, accepting Ericcson's assessment. "And wild animals couldn't get babies."

"There aren't any big carnivores on Doranna anyway."

"None at all?" Kirk was slightly sceptical. It didn't seem possible to him that any planet could exist without some large life forms.

"Oh, possibly in the sea, but none on land - none big enough to carry away a Human baby, anyway. Doranna seems to have missed out on whatever caused giganticism on a lot of other planets. The biggest carnivore discovered comes in about the size of a fox; the biggest herbivore is about the height of an undersized Shetland pony and is lighter built. That's partly why mouflette wool is so expensive. The mouflette may look like a sheep, but it's about the size of a guinea-pig. That's on the continent we settled. On the other one - there are only two, and a lot of islands of varying sizes - there are some ape-like creatures between three and four foot tall. Those apes are the only other creatures of importance on Doranna. The initial survey indicated an early level of intelligence and a minimal culture - say about the level anthropologists reckon for homo habilis or homo erectus - which is why we left that continent alone. It'll take a million years before they're intelligent enough to have a civilisation as opposed to a culture. They seem to be predominantly vegetarian, though they will take carrion, and there's no sign anyway that they're cannibalistic even if they lived on the continent we settled."

"Which you're sure they don't."

"Which the survey team was sure they didn't. They don't have boats, their culture isn't that sophisticated yet, but even if they did they're thousands of years away from coping with the sort of long-distance voyage that getting to the other continent would entail. There's a couple of thousand miles of sea separating the two at their closest point."

Kirk grunted. "And the planetary authorities want help."

"They're desperate for it. Jim - I could put a crew aboard the Enterprise to carry out the overhaul - they could do it as easily in orbit around Doranna as here. I know your crew is due leave, and Doranna hasn't the facilities that we have... but..."

"But a Starship has equipment that would make a search relatively easy? Sven, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but how long is it since those kids vanished? Why didn't you send in a Starship right away, as soon as they called for help?"

"I didn't have one. Yours is the first ship to come here this year that hasn't been on a basic pick-up-stores-then-head-off-again - urgently - visit. How long? The first ones, five to six months, the most recent - I got the report yesterday. That makes it three days ago."

"And another two days till we could get there. Sven, do you know the odds on any of those kids being alive?"

"Poor. I know. But if there was another one? The disappearance rate averages out at about two a week - "

"As high as that?" Kirk asked, startled. "I thought you were talking about - oh, ten to a dozen, spread over the time. Which would be bad enough, but not as bad as that."

"If you were there when the next one went missing, you could search right away. The authorities reckon that all they need is to find one, just one, preferably old enough to explain why he wandered off, how he wandered off, to work out what has been happening."

"What about the parents?" Kirk asked. "What have they been doing?"

Ericcson answered obliquely. "Kids on Doranna have had a pretty easy-going life style up till now. School, of course, and chores to do around the house, but evenings and weekends, plenty of countryside to play in, to explore... They worked the system of teaching the older kids responsibility by leaving them to watch over the younger ones, and until six months ago it worked - same as it worked over a lot of Earth centuries ago, same as it still works in rural areas. And as well as teaching the older kids responsibility, it left the parents free to get on with their work. Since the second kid vanished, though, the parents have always tried to make sure that there was always an adult around."

"The second one? Why wait till then?"

"The first could have been an accident."

"How come?"

Ericcson was silent for a moment, then - "There are several settlements on Doranna. The kids at the largest one had been out in the woods, playing hide and seek. At first, when nobody could find young Davie, they just thought that he'd found a really good hiding place, unusual though that seemed for a four-year-old - apparently the older kids usually pretend they can't see the younger ones at first, to keep them interested, stop them from becoming disheartened by being caught too easily. Then there's a couple of years when they're about eight or nine when they're caught as they're found or catch as they see, then they're old enough to join the 'conspiracy' - just as soon as their parents think they're old enough to be given full charge of their younger brothers or sisters. But I'm getting off the point. Eventually, after everyone else had either been caught or had got 'home', they tired of looking for him and called to him, telling him that he'd won and to come out. When he didn't, the oldest girl told half a dozen of the oldest to keep looking while she took the other young ones home and reported what had happened.

"There were a dozen men, mostly with dogs, including the boy's father with a mutt that was devoted to the child, searching within an hour of his disappearance. Nothing - not a trace."

Kirk looked thoughtful, his mind going back to childhood days, to memories of playing in the woods near one of the many homes he had known before his father died and his mother returned to her own childhood haunts, taking her sons to a flat, featureless farming area that both had hated, but where the family farm provided them with a home. Their maternal grandfather had been more than pleased to see his only daughter return to roost and on his death two years later she had inherited the place, the only one of his children to care for the land as he did, even although she had left it for several years to accompany her husband in his wandering throughout the galaxy. The money that Kirk senior had left - a reasonable amount, for he had been the sole heir of his parents, and he had never been spendthrift - his widow had kept in trust for her sons; knowing, even in the first days of her bereavement, that neither would ever settle to life on Earth. Sam's share had partly gone to pay for his training as a research biologist, but Kirk's half of his father's estate was still intact; his choice of career had seen to that. Sometimes Kirk wondered what would happen to the farm when his mother died; perhaps one of Sam's three sons would be interested in inheriting it.

Pulling his mind back from his memories, Kirk asked, "Could the kid have fallen into a swamp?"

"They thought of that," Ericcson replied. "There was no swampy ground nearby - and then, of course, while they were still trying to work out what had happened, the second child went missing - just four days later."

"What happened that time?"

"Colinda Walsh - age three. Same settlement." Kirk noticed that once again Ericcson knew the name without referring to any report, and realised that the station commander had been going over and over the reports since they started coming in. "Her house has a big garden - " Kirk noticed the use of the present tense, as if Ericcson was refusing to admit that the child might be dead - "and after Pete Davie disappeared, her mother wouldn't let her go out with the other kids. They were welcome to play in the garden, but Colinda was not to go out of it. Mrs. Walsh is an incomer to Doranna, brought up herself in a tradition of 'it's the parents' - for that read mother's - 'duty to care for and bring up her own children'. Authority might be passed to grandmother, or in rare instances an aunt, but to nobody else. She belongs to a religion that decrees that a woman's place is the kitchen, and that she has no right pretending to be able to do anything other than run a house - no right even pretending that a woman has brains at all, come to that. Her husband has given up trying to persuade her to change her attitude, and to be honest I think that her subservience to him has tickled his vanity even though he would hotly deny it, but he had insisted, up till then, that Colinda be given the freedom that her mother never had.

"Anyway, when this happened and Mrs. Walsh - well, 'put her foot down' is probably too strong a description, but insisted that she didn't want her daughter running into possible danger and wanted her to stay in the garden where it was known to be safe, her father, probably somewhat worried too in face of the mystery of what had happened, agreed. Possibly he was glad that his wife was prepared to handle the extra work having her daughter underfoot would entail.

"The day Colinda vanished, the other kids had gone off to watch the regular supply ship arrive - it's an old one, one of the design that can actually land an a planet, and Colinda was quite upset at not being allowed to go too, but her mother was adamant.

"Mrs. Walsh had twisted an ankle the day before, and had orders to rest it, so she sat outside the door watching Colinda playing." He gave a helpless gesture. "The child was playing with a ball, bouncing it off the wall and catching it - well, trying to catch it; she was too young for her co-ordination to have developed properly. She missed a catch, the ball bounced away and rolled into a shrubbery. Colinda went after it. When she didn't come back out right away, her mother assumed that she was having difficulty finding it, but when a minute had passed, Mrs. Walsh called to her, and there was no answer. She'd gone too."

Kirk's frown deepened. "How thick a shrubbery?"

"Thick enough for Mrs. Walsh to lose sight of the child, but open enough for anyone, even an adult, to walk through it, between the bushes, without any difficulty."

"No indication that the child could have been transported away?"

"That was considered as a possibility, and dismissed. Later events did seem to prove otherwise, too. And after all, who would want to beam away such young children?"

"I wouldn't put it past the Klingons. Catch Terran children young enough, train 'em their way, and send them back, young adults, as spies... Simpler, though longer-term, than trying to send in surgically altered Klingons." Kirk was silent for a moment, then went on. "What about the others?"

"Well, after Colinda, there was a minor panic. Parents, even the parents of the older kids, the ones just on the point of leaving school, who would normally have been given a great deal of responsibility, decided that they preferred not to let their children out of their sight.

"It didn't make any difference. The third one was also the oldest who actually vanished - a five-year-old. He'd been told to wait at school till his mother came for him, but she was delayed. He was an independent child who'd been used to going home on his own, along with two slightly older boys who lived fairly near, and he rather resented being returned, as he put it, 'to babyhood', so he started off home with them as usual. Emil was last seen by the two of them where their roads separated, beginning to run down his road before they went on themselves. His mother just missed him at school and returned home, but he wasn't there. Either he never arrived home, or he did but left again with his schoolbag, before she arrived.

"As you might guess, that really did it. No matter what happens, there are always those who are half inclined to shrug and say 'It won't happen again'; even those ones started to worry at that point. Supervision of the kids doubled overnight.

"The next disappearance was in one of the other settlements. The parents there had been told about the disappearances, of course, and were watching their kids, but not quite as hard - they were being careful but they weren't scared - then. Not until four kids vanished - together. Their mothers had had a baby-sitting rota worked out, but they'd all been letting the kids play in the gardens while they got on with the housework, got the dinner ready, that sort of thing. The mother in charge that day was in the kitchen, glancing out of the open window every few minutes, but able to hear the kids yelling to each other. There was a sudden silence, and she looked out - and they'd gone. She was ex-Starfleet, and would have recognised a transporter hum if she'd heard it. She was insistent that there was no noise; one instant the kids were yelling, the next there was total silence.

"That put the cat among the pigeons in all the settlements. The parents started keeping the kids in under their feet... Two days later the first baby vanished - from a bedroom with a dog in it. The dog started to bark, and when Mrs. N'Goma went to check, the cot was empty. The window was still closed and latched.

"A week later, two kiddies, twins, went missing from a third settlement. Again, all possible precautions had been observed; the parents had them in a sort of 'playpen' in the garden that their father had fenced off so that they could play out of doors. It was even roofed over with wire mesh, and entered from the house by means of a french window, and their mother was in the room it opened out of. She saw nothing; again, she became aware of silence, and looked out to find them gone.

"That's been the tale since, Jim - kids vanishing when you'd have said it was physically impossible. All the settlements have had losses now - the last was three days ago, as I said. One of the doctors had been called to a difficult labour, and took his wife, a trained nurse, to assist. They took their son, who was about a year old, and put him in the next door bedroom with the older child of the house, a girl aged two - and both children vanished.

"The Dorannans are desperate, Jim. There has to be an explanation, but they're at a complete loss to find one."

Kirk scowled. "My crew needs a rest, God knows... but I'm sure they'd all volunteer to search if I asked them. So I won't bother asking first. Yes, we'll go, Sven."

"And that's the situation," Kirk finished, looking round the circle of his senior officers.

"But who would want to kidnap such young children?" Someone was bound to ask the obvious question. This time it was Chekov, his voice a mixture of anger and curiosity.

As Kirk repeated his Klingon theory he became aware that McCoy was looking more and more strained. "Bones?" he asked.

Instantly, everyone swung round to look towards the surgeon. He was clearly on the point of breaking down.

"Bones, what's wrong?"

McCoy made an obvious attempt to pull himself together. "My daughter lives on Doranna. She's married to a doctor... and they have a son who'll be about a year old now." Despite his best efforts, his voice shook.

"It might not be your grandson," Kirk said slowly, aware even as he spoke of the futility of offering false hope.

"Jim, Doranna's not all that heavily inhabited yet." McCoy's flat comment said clearly that he too recognised Kirk's words for the meaningless attempt to delay facing the truth that they were. "I don't see who else it could be. Oh, God, Jo must be off her head with worry!"

Kirk reached a sympathetic hand to McCoy's shoulder. "We'll be there in two days, Bones, and you can get time off to stay with your daughter, of course." He looked round the others. "I'll be beaming down as soon as we arrive to consult with Governor Laski. Spock, I'll leave you to take charge of the initial scan. Look for readings in the rough ground around the settlements."

"Yes, Captain."

"Spock..." Kirk glanced towards McCoy. "You're probably looking for bodies..."

McCoy paled slightly more, if that were possible, but he showed no further reaction. Spock, too, was looking towards McCoy, a touch of concern just discernable in his eyes as he repeated, "Yes, sir."

"At the same time, keep a watch an the settlements as far as possible - Doranna's settlements are all on the same continent. There's a species of apeman on the other one, so it's been left alone. It should be relatively easy to cover them all.

"Specifically, watch out for any movement outside the settled areas... and that includes farmers seeing to their crops and stock. I want to know if a mouse as much as blinks!"

"Of course," Spock replied evenly.

Kirk looked round again. "Does anyone have any suggestions?"

There was an uneasy silence. Kirk suspected that some of his officers might indeed have suspicions of one sort of another, but that none of them was sure enough of his theory to voice it. At least none of them was questioning his decision to go to Doranna - though he would have been most surprised if any of them had. Now that Commander Wood was dead there was nobody in the crew who was likely to make petty objections to an extra, unscheduled mission like this, even though it did mean the loss of a much-needed shore leave. "Dismissed."

As usual, Spock delayed until the others had left. It still gave Kirk a warm feeling of... yes, satisfaction... that the Vulcan should do this; he suspected it always would do so. Wood, Spock's deceased predecessor as First Officer, had never thought to offer his Captain this sort of support. It was quietly unobtrusive; if there was a problem, it gave Kirk the opportunity to comment on it; if there was no problem, it offered the Captain the opportunity of a few moments of quiet, undemanding relaxation in the middle of a busy day. Only someone on whom the strain of command pressed unrelentingly day after day could appreciate how helpful such a break could be; even more restful, in some ways, than his off-duty hours, many of which were filled with the demands of paperwork - a chore which seemed endless, repetitive and frequently unnecessary. He sometimes promised himself that if he should ever be promoted to the dizzy heights of Starfleet Command he would try to do something to ease the strain of the repetitive paperwork.

This time, it was obvious that Spock had something on his mind. "Captain, do you really think the Klingons are responsible?"

The Human sighed. "It fits," he said gloomily. "I can't think of any way to leave a locked room - or even an unlocked one with someone outside it - unseen, except by transporter... and I can't think of anyone except an enemy who would want to steal children. Orion slavers come to mind too, except for the age of the children - it's older folk the Orions usually go for, captives old enough to be sold as workers, not infants; I would expect them to go for the ten to fifteen age group if they were kidnapping children; even as old as the early twenties if they simply wanted men for sale as labourers."

Spock nodded. "Neither can I see the Orions daring to raid a Federation planet, even a colony as far from the centre of government as this one is. Surely they know from experience that retribution would be swift - and painful."

"Provided their crimes were proved," Kirk finished. "It's a pity that Doranna hasn't bothered with better facilities; as things stand, the Dorannans depend on visiting ships contacting them to announce their presence. It does make the possibility of a kidnapping vessel rather higher than it would be on most other planets. Which could also explain why so many children were taken from the one colony," he added thoughtfully. He sighed. "It's a few years since the Orions were last knocked down to size; some of the young ones, the ones too young to remember their last clash with the Federation, could well be getting restless and wanting to show their mettle. You can't change a planet's culture overnight, Spock, especially when you've no diplomatic contact, let alone the opportunity to let them see another system in operation."

"Nor when that planet has a natural slave race living on it," Spock said wryly.

Kirk thought of the green Orion slaves, and nodded. A species distantly related to the dominant race, they had only rudimentary intelligence and would have died out long since had they not been domesticated, rather as dogs or horses had been. The females were remarkably beautiful and highly sexed, probably as a result of careful breeding, but were not cross-fertile with their masters. The males were handsome, strong and willing workers.

"Though it always has seemed strange," Kirk commented, "that with a whole race of slaves on-planet, the Orions should take the risk, run the dangers, of stealing slaves from other planets. It's not as if there's a general market for slaves."

"In the Federation," Spock finished.

Kirk looked at him. "Are you suggesting that the Orions could have been selling their victims to the Klingons?"

"How much do we really know about the customs on most Klingon worlds? The Klingons might even have employed the Orions to kidnap these children - taking advantage of the wish of the young Orion males to prove themselves." He hesitated, then went on. "However, Jim, to kidnap children one or two at a time over several months, a vessel would have to remain in orbit. Whatever one might think of the habits and morals of both the Klingons and the Orions, they are not stupid; and for a kidnapping vessel to remain long in orbit over a victim planet, even one as apparently unprotected as this, would be stupidity."

Kirk sighed. "I know." He passed a tired hand over his face. "I've been telling myself that - but offhand, I simply can't think of anything else to account for the disappearances."

"There is absolutely no chance of a native animal being responsible?"

"You checked the survey report, Spock. Ericcson was right. The biggest carnivore is sizes with a fox, too small to consider anything larger than a rabbit as possible food. There isn't even a record of it taking carrion. And anyway, how could a fox get into a locked room where a dog was on guard?"

"Unlikely, I admit. Yet there must be a logical reason for the disappearances."

"Can you think of one?"

Spock frowned slightly. "When I was at the Vulcan Science Academy..." he began, then, uncharacteristically, he hesitated.

"Go on," Kirk encouraged, once he was sure that the Vulcan, for once, had spoken without thinking first and was feeling diffident about continuing.

"It was purely theoretical," Spock protested. "A theory without a scrap of logical proof. The surprising thing was that any scientist, even one as inexperienced as - No, I will not name him. He was ridiculed enough at the time for being so foolish as to formulate a theory then look for proof of it. He had nothing except several old legends from various worlds on which to base his suggestion." He fell silent again, his thoughts obviously elsewhere.

"You wouldn't be referring to yourself, by any chance?" Kirk asked gently, and knew instantly, from the expression in his friend's eyes, that he was right.

"It was foolishness," Spock repeated, clearly regretting that he had even mentioned it. "It could have destroyed my career."

"But it didn't - Chief Scientist," Kirk said softly. "Perhaps the ridicule was not because of the theory itself, but only because you couldn't prove it."

"I had not thought of that," Spock said.

Kirk looked at him expectantly. "Well, come on - give!"

The Vulcan hesitated for a moment longer, then began, at first diffidently then with increasing confidence as he sensed Kirk's genuine interest.

"Many worlds have stories of unexplained disappearances. Your own Earth has the region called the 'Bermuda Triangle', where there are many tales of both ships and aircraft disappearing without trace. Books were written, both in support of something mysterious happening - there were even claims that the Bermuda Triangle was only one of several such regions on Earth - and also in opposition, claiming that in fact there was nothing mysterious in the region, and that there were no more disappearances in that area than in any other region of the sea. On Vulcan, too - nobody knows what happened to the people who lived in the Uretthon Valley. They were a pastoral people who are credited with first domesticating the thoral and the an'chak. The Uretthon Valley was difficult of access; easily defended; although peace-loving in an era when the Warrior cult flourished, the Uretthon were not foolish enough to neglect posting guards at the passes through the mountains. They traded with other tribes who wanted an'chak wool and tamed thoral for their chiefs to ride, and were probably the most wealthy of all Vulcan tribes. Then one day - a party travelling to trade with them found the valley deserted. The thoral herds, the an'chak flocks, were still grazing peacefully, but the people had all gone. There weren't even bodies. No other tribe emerged as suddenly wealthy, thus betraying themselves as having overcome the Uretthon... There was simply no explanation for the way they vanished. There wasn't even a strange race suddenly appearing elsewhere at around the same time - and if they had decided to migrate, why did they not take the thoral and the an'chak, the source of their wealth? There are similar stories from Andor, Teller, Catulla..."

"So you began to look for a common answer?"

"Yes. The answer I reached was... possibly unorthodox, but when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable..."

"Sherlock Holmes." Kirk identified the quotation easily. "And real life solutions can easily be more bizarre than anything one could imagine. Truth is stranger than fiction - anyone in Starfleet knows that. We've seen things that would be laughed at as totally ludicrous if they appeared in a book or a movie. What conclusion did you come to?"

"The possibility of a parallel universe or another dimension co-existing with this one, normally divided by a barrier, with disappearances happening if the barrier was breached, the victims... sliding... into the other universe or dimension. Of course, the weakness of the theory was that there should have been mysterious appearances as well, people slipping through to here from there. I was unable to provide these."

"I'm not sure there haven't been," Kirk said slowly. "Something I remember reading, once... something about two green-skinned children suddenly appearing - oh, centuries ago." He pushed the errant lock of hair back from his forehead. "The trouble is, as you said, finding proof of such a theory... and in this case, there's an additional drawback."

"The youth of the victims."

"Yes. Given a doorway into another dimension, I'd expect everyone in a given area to vanish - not just children younger than five." He sighed again. "In any situation, the simplest solution is the one to be preferred... "

"Only in this case - there is no 'simplest solution'," Spock finished.

Laski welcomed Kirk with open arms.

The Governor of Doranna was a man of indeterminate age; although his hair was grey, Kirk decided that it was prematurely so and that he was probably around forty. He looked tired and strained, and there was a slight air of worried waiting in his attitude. A quick mental calculation gave Kirk a possible reason; if as Ericcson said the disappearances had been averaging out at two a week, it was about time for another, and Laski must be even more aware of that than Kirk was - and Laski was not merely a visitor come to see if he could help, but ultimately responsible for the members of the colony. It was his people, his people's children, who had been disappearing, and Kirk could well sympathise; he knew what his reaction would have been to the situation.

"Have there been any further developments?" Kirk asked anxiously.

Laski shook his head. "No more disappearances, but everyone is terribly nervous," he said.

"I'm not surprised. From what Sven Ericcson told me, there doesn't appear to be any defence."

"None," Laski said gloomily.

"Sven gave me a very full report," Kirk went on, "but I'd like to hear it again from you. You might add something - some detail - that he either forgot or didn't know about. Meanwhile, my Science Officer is organising a thorough sensor scan of the area around all the settlements. If anything happens and it's not spotted on the sensors, someone in the science department will be looking for a new job."

Laski half smiled. "All they would see would be a reading suddenly disappear, Captain," he said wearily.

There was nothing in his tale that Ericcson had not already told Kirk apart from a few minor details. The dogs, for example, had never been able to find any sort of trail; they had simply milled around, apart from the one that had been in the room with the N'Goma infant and the one that had belonged to Pete Davie, the first child to disappear. Both had reacted with wild barking and raised hackles when they were taken to the areas where other children had disappeared, but nobody had been able to decide why.

"As if they scented something?" Kirk asked.

Laski looked slightly doubtful. "What would there be to scent?" he asked. "And if they did scent something, why didn't the other dogs react the same way? The children just vanished. There weren't any strangers around - everyone on Doranna knows everyone else, anyway. The youngest kids might not know everyone, but the older ones certainly do. Someone who didn't belong to the settlements would have been noticed. And besides, people here have to work - we may be self-supporting, but we still can't take it for granted; nobody has time to waste. The adults all have work to do, and they get on with it. The time of day Pete Davie vanished, the adults would all be busy - were all busy, with plenty of witnesses to prove it, too." He shook his head wearily. "That was the first thing we did, believe me - checked to make sure everyone was accounted for. Just in case someone had gone crazy."

"Sven said that was a practical impossibility."

"It is. But we checked it anyway. Everyone was accounted for." He looked at Kirk with the utter weariness of a man who has been finding life too much of a strain but has no idea what to do to ease things, and for the sake of morale cannot - dare not - let the people he works beside realise it. "Oh, God - what are we going to do?" His shoulders slumped helplessly as he dropped his pretence of calm, unworried efficiency, relaxing in the undemanding company of the fellow commander for whom no pretence of infallibility was needed.

Kirk looked sympathetically at him, understanding only too well the hopelessness that he must be feeling; the nagging sense of responsibility that made him accept these disappearances as his fault, accept that there must be something that he could do, should be able to do, to discover what had happened to the missing children. It was a headache that all leaders knew; it came with the job.

"There has to be an answer," he said, repeating the meaningless reassurance that for Laski had become trite. He hesitated. Should he mention the 'other dimension' theory that Spock had so reluctantly shared with him? No, he decided; Spock had clearly been uncomfortable with the memory of the 'foolishness' of his younger days. It was a measure of his trust in Kirk that he had explained his initial comment; the Captain was quite sure that anyone else would have been palmed off with a casual, 'It's not important', in the unlikely event of Spock's having been careless enough to make that comment in the presence of anyone else. It was only with Kirk that he totally relaxed the guard that he normally placed on his tongue - he might half relax it in McCoy's presence, but never in front of anyone else. It would be unfair to repeat to a third party something that the Vulcan would certainly not want made common knowledge for no better reason than to provide a 'reason' for a mystery.

Instead, he turned the conversation slightly. "This is maybe a silly question, Governor, but has anything else been disappearing?"

Laski looked at him, startled. "Odd that you should mention it. Some of the farmers have been reporting an unexplained drop in the numbers of mouflette in their herds. Not that any of them can possibly know exactly how many of the little beasts they have - you can't do a head count on a flock of identically-coloured guinea pigs; even when they're gathered for shearing dozens manage to dodge the dogs. Most of these are picked up later, in ones and twos, but there are always a few that the farmer might keep on seeing, long-haired and standing out among the cropped mass, but can never catch. This last few months, though, several of the farmers have been saying that there seem to be fewer beasts in the fields. Some might have escaped - they may have been domesticated quite easily, but they go wild again just as easily. Some might have been taken by a tod or a big hawk - there are always a few go that way each year. They're relatively long-lived, and breed quite slowly - one kit per year is the norm - and the naturalists think that there must be some sort of natural check on the numbers that we haven't found yet, for although a few are eaten, the mouflette doesn't seem to be part of the staple diet of any of the native hunting beasts. Tods and hawks don't form any sort of threat to the herds, yet even in the wild they're in no danger of over-running the land. But the farmers reckon there are more missing than can be accounted for by natural causes. If disease had hit the herds, they'd expect to find the bodies." He shrugged. "It'll reduce this year's crop of wool slightly, but the books will balance - less wool, higher prices. I'm not worried about that."

Kirk grunted. "Any correlation between the start of the mouflette disappearances and the children's disappearances?"

Laski scowled. "The first of the mouflette disappearances was commented on about a month after Pete Davie went."

"But they could have been going before that?"

"Well, yes. The herds were semi-neglected around that time - folk were out searching for the youngsters, often when they really should have been tending their fields. There could have been mouflette disappearing too; and nobody would notice because the herds were being left to get on with the job of turning grass into wool."

"And nobody has seen the possibility of a link between the children and the mouflette?"

"Captain, they may have begun to disappear at around the same time, but what link could there possibly be? Human children and admittedly intelligent but tiny animals that are kept for their wool?"

"Intelligent?"

"Intelligent enough for some of them to be able to avoid, and keep on avoiding, the annual shearing," Laski said dryly.

Kirk grinned an acceptance of the comment, privately deciding that this man had a sense of humour that matched Spock's. "O.K, I'll concede the brains. I agree that there's no obvious connection between the herds and the children apart from the disappearances, but I'm not so sure that we shouldn't be looking for one. I'll have a word with my science officer, get him to extend the range of our scans."

"What do you think you could be looking for, then?"

"God knows." Kirk, too, was willing to show his vulnerability in the company of his fellow commander, in spite of his sympathetic wish to ease the Governor's tension. "It could be something as simple - and I admit unlikely - as a cattle - I mean, a mouflette rustler also stealing children to be brought up as slaves working on his hidden mouflette farm."

Laski grinned tiredly. "Were you brought up on a diet of old - and bad - Westerns?"

"Well, I guess all kids brought up on Earth see their share of those, though I always preferred space opera myself." Kirk stood. "I'll pass this additional bit of information on to Mr. Spock, see what he makes of it. He's a hard-headed Vulcan, so you can guarantee he'll keep me from being carried away by any theories gleaned from old movies."

On consideration, Kirk changed his mind about going straight back to the Enterprise when he left Governor Laski. He called the ship and told Spock about the disappearance of the mouflette, then went to the hospital.

There, he asked for the doctor whose child had disappeared. There was a brief delay before a tall, thin-faced man in hospital whites appeared.

"Captain Kirk?"

Looking at him, Kirk decided on a direct approach. "Doctor. I'm here at the request of Commodore Ericcson of Starbase 6, to see if I can find anything to indicate where the missing children disappeared to. I understand that your child is one of the ones missing. I don't want to rub salt in the wound, so to speak, but so far I got one scrap of information from Governor Laski that wasn't in the report Ericcson gave me. I wondered if you could go over the events leading up to your son's disappearance for me, just in case there's something new that I don't know - something that might give me an extra clue."

Revisec looked steadily at him for a moment. "Captain, I trust you are not intending to ask my wife the same question?"

Kirk shook his head. "If I want to know anything more from your wife, Doctor, I'll get her father to ask her."

"Her father? Dr. McCoy?"

"My Chief Medical Officer. I imagine he's with her now. He beamed down the same time as I did."

"It'll do her good to see him. She's very depressed."

"I can imagine," Kirk said sympathetically.

"Are you planning on seeing any of the other parents?"

"Possibly. I'm willing to take advice on which parents would react adversely to being questioned again. I came to you because as far as I can make out, you're pretty well the only father who has been around when a child disappeared; it's mostly the mothers who've been nearby, and I realise that they're more likely to be upset by being asked about it again. Yet going over and over what happened is the only way to get all the facts. First time round you get the main details; with repetition, sometimes you get extra little clues. What I have are the main facts. I need more."

Revisec nodded. "I understand." He rubbed his hands over his face, massaging his forehead with his fingers; the gesture of a man tired beyond the power of mere sleep to rest. "Shall we go to my office? If we stay out here I could be called for at any time; in my office, I can give instructions not to be interrupted unless it's a real emergency."

Once in his office, Revisec gave the necessary order to his secretary, then turned his attention back to Kirk.

"How much do you know about Len's disappearance?" he asked.

"Assume I don't know anything," Kirk said. "Tell me as much as you can remember - anything, anything at all, about what you thought, how you felt. Anything."

"Right." The doctor paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "The one thing this hospital lacks is a good obstetrics department - most of the women here prefer to have their children at home. We tend to agree that it's a good idea; on the whole, women are more relaxed in their own homes, and relaxation is important in childbirth. Most of the women have produced their children with no trouble at all; there are only a few who need more than minimal help. Len - my son - is one of the few who were born in hospital.

"Mrs. Chang had difficulty with her first child, and we knew that she would always have difficulty. We wanted her to come into hospital for her second delivery, but she refused; her child was going to be born at home, where the first thing he saw would be the surroundings that would be his, not the sterile environment of the hospital. We tried to persuade her; Jo pointed out that Len had been born in hospital with no ill effects; Dr. Aarons - the senior doctor here - tried to point out that should we finally decide that she must have surgical intervention, it could be terribly dangerous moving her; but she absolutely refused to change her mind.

"Normally the hospital sends a nurse as midwife when we're told labour has begun; with Mrs. Chang, Jo and I both went. We couldn't get a babysitter - young Chang decided to start fighting his way into the world during the night, and we didn't want to disturb anyone - so we took Len with us.

"We put Len into the nursery with Rhona Chang. He was sleepy, and settled down quickly; young Rhona didn't even waken. We left both the nursery door and the door of Mrs. Chang's room open so that we would hear if the children woke - all the windows in the house were closed, and the outer door - there's only one - was fastened shut. Lee Chang stayed in the room with us - he was quite worried. Indeed, if he'd had his way, his wife would have been in hospital. But she wouldn't listen even to him.

"As it happened, the baby arrived with less trouble than we'd feared, but we were fully occupied with the birth for some hours. It was about dawn before we were cleaned up and Jo went through to the other room for Len - and the two children were gone."

"And you'd heard nothing?"

"Not a thing."

"Did you check the room?"

"Yes, although there didn't seem to be much point. The window was still closed and clearly hadn't been opened." He hesitated. "The only odd thing..."

"Yes?"

"An unusual smell - sort of damp earthy. It faded very quickly - I noticed it when I went into the room; five minutes later, after Lee and I had checked the rest of the house to see if there was anywhere an intruder could have got in, it had faded - when I went back into the room I couldn't smell anything."

"Did anyone else notice it?"

"Nobody mentioned it, and I didn't like to in case the Changs felt insulted - the inference would have been that their house was damp, at the very least."

Kirk grunted. "Smell... Governor Laski said that a couple of the dogs go crazy any time they're taken to where a child has disappeared - as if there was something they could scent that was affecting them. But of course, dogs can't tell us what's bothering them."

"None of the other parents has mentioned smelling anything."

"Most of the disappearances have been in daylight, haven't they? When many of the children have been playing outside."

"Well, yes - Len and Rhona are the only ones that vanished during the night."

"You said it was dawn. Maybe they had only just vanished - with daylight coming in. If the smell faded quickly... How quickly were the other children missed?"

"Some of them, very quickly."

"How many of these were indoors?"

"Oh. Not many, come to think of it. The N'Goma baby was one... "

"Out of doors, would an earthy smell be noticed? It would blend with the natural scents of the countryside."

"Yes, it would, wouldn't it." Revisec looked thoughtful.

"Indoors, a child could have been gone for half an hour before being missed. I think we'll have to check with some of the other parents, see if any of them did notice a smell they haven't thought to mention. Thank you, Doctor - I realise this can't have been easy for you. Rest assured, we'll do everything possible to recover the children... or at least find out what took them," he finished soberly, realising that Revisec was too intelligent to accept a glib assurance that all would be well.

"I'm sure you will, Captain." He glanced at the big clock on the wall. "I go off duty in five minutes; would you care to accompany me home?"

Kirk hesitated. "I think it might be better if I didn't, Doctor, thank you. You said yourself, your wife isn't feeling on top of the world; having to be polite to a stranger might be good therapy, but on the other hand, the last thing she must want right now is to meet a stranger. I've given Bones - Dr. McCoy - discretion to stay planetside for as long as we're here; I hope that having him around will be enough to cheer her up a little. He's a very matter-of-fact, down-to-earth man; he should certainly manage to keep her from brooding."

"I suspect that part of Jo's depression was caused by wondering how to tell her father that Len had disappeared. Now that he knows, I would hope that she can start thinking more positively again."

"I hope so too," Kirk said sincerely.

He left the hospital with the doctor, watched as he walked briskly down the street and then, as Revisec turned the corner out of sight, Kirk contacted the Enterprise.

"Kirk here. Ready to beam up."

As soon as he rematerialised, he went in search of Spock. The Science Officer was, as Kirk had suspected, bent over a sensor. The Captain paused for a moment watching him, appreciating the dedication and unfaltering attention with which the Vulcan was approaching his task - monotonous and so far unrewarding though it was.

"Spock."

The Vulcan straightened, turning to face the Human. "I regret, Captain, I have been unable to discover anything useful as yet." To Kirk's ear, attuned as it was to the subtle nuances of his friend's voice, Spock sounded slightly depressed.

"It's early days yet. Have you done anything about checking up on the numbers of mouflette?"

"Yes - that was easily checked. The report appears to be accurate; the mouflette are grazed in large fields bounded by fine-meshed netting which extends some distance under the ground - the mouflette is a shallow burrower. The farmers appear to keep some five hundred of the creatures in each field. In some fields there are only approximately two to three hundred. The conclusion is that roughly half of the mouflette in these fields have either escaped, been released, succumbed to some disease - though why only half of the occupants of the field would be affected is a question to which there is no logical answer - been attacked by a predator... or simply vanished. There is no indication of a break in the fencing or burrows under it, there are no carcases either in the fields or nearby, there is no sign of 'wild' mouflette anywhere nearby although there are signs that some do live wild in the territory not yet occupied by the colony - I would say the colonists have been most efficient about catching the wild mouflette and domesticating them.

"I do not totally discount predator attack, even although you were assured that the mouflette are not extensively eaten by wild carnivores, but it seems unlikely that this would account for the number missing - and in addition, I would expect there to be some indication of inedible remains."

"Which leaves us with 'unexplained disappearance' as the most probable answer?"

"Yes, Captain."

Kirk sighed. "Children... small woolly animals. What connection could there possibly be?"

Spock shook his head. "No obvious connection."

"And you can add this to the equation - a damp, earthy smell, fading quickly - at least to the point where Human noses can't distinguish it. A possibility that dogs can, however."

"A smell?"

"I spoke to McCoy's son-in-law. He mentioned an earthy smell, fading within five minutes of its detection, in the room the children disappeared from. Governor Laski said that two of the dogs reacted with wild barking in the areas where any of the children vanished. One of these dogs was in the room with one of the children at the time of disappearance, and the other was the pet of the first child to go missing, and was taken on the search as soon as the disappearance was reported."

"You think they are detecting, and recognising, a scent that to them is significant?"

"I think it probable."

"Dr. Revisec did not recognise the smell?"

Trust Spock to have discovered the name of Bones' son-in-law, Kirk thought. "No."

"Manark sand-bats look like crystals when they are at rest. Such a creature might very well have an 'earthy' smell," Spock offered.

"True. But if such a creature lived here, I would have expected it to have made an appearance before now."

"Such a creature could have an extended larval stage during which they could be indistinguishable from rock crystal," Spock offered.

"Agreed - but it still doesn't explain how anything managed to get into a totally sealed room and out again, taking with it the occupant of that room." Kirk sighed again. "We're talking round and round in circles, Spock. Whatever we think of comes right back to that one inescapable fact - some of those children were magicked out of sealed rooms."

"We have not considered magic, Jim."

"I know that stage magicians do seem to make people disappear and reappear elsewhere, Spock, but there's a simple enough explanation if you happen to study stage 'magic' - it's illusion, pure and simple."

"I realise that. But it is a documented fact that some people - and no one planet holds a monopoly of them - can apparently cause impossible things to 'happen' - with no trickery being involved."

Kirk pushed his hair back from his forehead. "Spock? You? Believing in something as illogical as magic?"

"When such ability has been demonstrated, it is illogical to deny its existence."

"Spock, most of these 'magic' tricks are like the stage ones - illusion. The 'magician' is a clever psychologist; a skilled con man whose stock in trade is making people believe what he wants them to believe... and I wouldn't have expected a Vulcan to be taken in by it." He looked at the Vulcan thoughtfully. "No - come to think of it, it's perfectly logical that you would be. You're so honest yourselves that you expect everyone else to be. As a race, you're so literal-minded at times that it hurts."

"I am aware that Vulcans do not have the penchant for statements with double meanings that Humans so delight in," Spock agreed. "And we have never understood why anyone should claim something that is not true. Therefore we believe that those people who claim to be able to perform magic are indeed possessed of ESP ability of some sort. Is it so surprising? We possess certain ESP ability ourselves - we are telepathic. It is therefore perfectly logical to us that other races have other abilities... including that which is termed 'magic'. After all, to some races, telepathy is undoubtedly considered as 'magic'."

Kirk looked at his friend, a touch of surprise in his expression. It had simply never occurred to him that the logical Vulcans could possibly consider magic logical - since most Humans, known though they were as one of the Galaxy's most superstitious races, nowadays considered magic as a totally impossible, totally imaginary ability, the result of gullibility, self-hypnosis or possibly even of drugs. Yet now that he came to think about it, it was logical that a race possessed of one type of ESP ability should consider 'magic' as another type of ESP ability.

Added to that, they had on occasion encountered races that possessed ESP ability and that ability did at times resemble magic. He recalled the being who called himself Apollo - a member of a long-lived race which had once visited Earth and been regarded as gods because of the things they could do. He and his crew had escaped that time only because Apollo could not abide ridicule. There were still times when Kirk felt slightly guilty at the way in which he had manipulated the self-styled 'god', but it had been the only way to save his ship; and in a sense he had released Apollo from an almost intolerable situation, by forcing him to terminate his wait for 'Man to come out to the stars... and return to herding goats' in a pastoral existence that he had long outgrown. The other 'gods' had known that they had become redundant, and left, returning to wherever they had come from; only Apollo had remained, refusing to admit the truth - the truth that Kirk had finally forced him to see.

Just where had Apollo and the other 'gods' come from, Kirk sometimes wondered. They certainly appeared to have possessed the ability to transport themselves through space without providing themselves with an artificial environment, if the way Apollo had finally disappeared was any indication. Of course, it was always possible that, congenital exhibitionist that he was, he had simply chosen to vanish in that fashion, to reappear elsewhere on the planet and construct whatever kind of vessel he needed for his journey.

Yes, Apollo's abilities could well be classed as 'magic', and had probably been so regarded by the simple peasants of the ancient culture of Greece - although the educated nobility had possibly been more cynical; it was usually, though not inevitably, the uneducated masses who were the devout followers of the 'gods', even when education was the monopoly of the religious orders.

Kirk became aware that his First Officer was watching him, respecting his abstraction but clearly puzzled by it. He smiled slightly.

"You're right, of course," he admitted ruefully. "Humans do tend to be very materialistic. It's very easy to pass off as impossible or even totally imaginary something we don't understand, and to claim that only superstitious primitives who don't understand the mechanics of nature could possibly believe that someone has caused - oh, an earthquake, a gale, a drought - by means of magic. But Humans don't, for the most part, have any marked ESP ability, and stage 'magic' is always illusion, sleight of hand... so educated Humans automatically assume that any magic performed by witch doctors, in which the primitive tribes believe implicitly, is also illusion." He sighed wearily. "Magic. The only difficulty about that as a theory is, who or what is performing that magic?"

Slowly, Spock nodded. "Yes," he admitted, his face totally expressionless, his voice stiffly formal. "Since there is no sapient race on Doranna... I apologise, Captain; as with my earlier theory at the Science Academy, I spoke before thinking."

"Hey, don't get all upset on me!" Kirk exclaimed. "It's a First Officer's duty to make suggestions, to give his Captain the pertinent facts, to offer help when the Captain is totally flabbergasted by an impossible situation - even if the suggestions you make do seem at first to be equally incredible. It's amazing how much an apparently unlikely suggestion can get the old brain cells ticking over. Now you've just swung my thinking right away from a standard path onto a side track; I don't know where it's going yet, but I intend to be open-minded enough to consider everything I see on that track - and that's thanks to you." He grinned reassuringly at his friend. "Your predecessor was very little help to me that way - his thinking was ultra conservative." His expression changed ludicrously until it was slightly rueful. "Silly, isn't it - the illogical Human giving me nothing but useless generalisations, and the logical Vulcan providing me with all sorts of way-out theories calculated to make me take a good, fresh look at things."

Spock looked steadily at him, as if trying to decide whether or not Kirk was merely trying to cheer him up with a well-meant and - he conceded wryly to himself - necessary 'white lie'. The Captain's reassuring smile widened, the Human fully understanding his Vulcan's uncertainty. Kirk had no intention of ever endangering his friendship with the Vulcan by even implying that he thought any of his suggestions ridiculous, even though he knew that he would sometimes have to argue with one of them. Memory of the scorn Spock had admitted enduring following the announcement of his unproved theory was bound to have left him feeling insecure with regard to putting forward a suggestion for which he did not have any positive evidence.

Spock's face relaxed slightly into his half smile as he accepted Kirk's comment as the truth that it was. Kirk's smile widened even more, though when he considered the situation on the planet he felt far from smiling.

"Now," he said. "Any more ideas? Even really way-out ones?"

Spock looked thoughtful. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. "The sensors have detected nothing unusual around any of the settlements or around the mouflette fields. Everything we have found fits the information we were given. But what about the other continent?"

"What about the other continent?" Kirk asked. "It was deliberately left alone because of a pre-sapient hominid race living on it."

"Were you given any other information about it?"

Kirk shook his head. "No, nothing, but I assume that the range of wild life is similar to that of this one.

"In other words, we were given insufficient data about the planet."

"Do you think we really need to know anything about the other continent?" Kirk asked.

"Perhaps not - on the other hand, since the colonists are faced with an insoluble problem, surely it is sensible to extend the field of search to the remainder of the planet."

"Spock, I'm not trying to be awkward, and the last thing I want to do is make you think that I'm denigrating your suggestions, but we're talking about children vanishing, not adults. How could such young children get more than a very short distance from home unless someone else took them?"

Spock looked at him without speaking, an eyebrow lifting quizzically, and he cut off the rest of what he had intended to say, suddenly and almost stupidly pleased that Spock had the confidence in him to react with an implication that he was making a silly comment, and with the almost simultaneous realisation of what his Science Officer was thinking.

"Spock - do you think that our postulated Klingons might be basing themselves on the other continent?"

"I think it... possible. Since the Federation has chosen to ignore that continent under the requirements of the Prime Directive, the colonists have had nothing whatsoever to do with it, have they?

"Was it ever totally scanned once the initial survey determined that a pre-sapient creature lived there? Was any study even made of that creature? It would be a perfect place for a race as careless of the rights of other species as the Klingons appear to be to set up a base. I suggest that we at least scan the other continent as well as checking the ground around the settlements on this one."

"Go ahead," Kirk agreed promptly. He considered the idea highly unlikely, but it was no more unlikely than his own suggestion of the Klingons sitting in orbit beaming up children. And he had to all intents promised Spock that he would consider any suggestion, no matter how unlikely, with an open mind - 'I intend to be open-minded enough to consider anything...' He had a possibly unworthy suspicion that Spock had the idea of using this situation as an excuse to make a study of the hominid and its habits - at least as far as could be determined from standard orbit; and if that was what was in Spock's mind, Kirk had no objections at all, knowing as he did that the Vulcan would never skimp his duties to pursue a private investigation.

He turned away from the Science station and moved to the command chair. He sank into it, staring unseeingly at the viewscreen; in his mind, a picture of Dr. Revisec, hanging on to his self-control with grim tenacity and determined that nobody would do or say anything that would further upset his wife; a picture of McCoy, his friend, worried about his daughter, worried about the grandson he had never seen.

"Captain!" There was a sharp note in Spock's voice that Kirk had never yet heard the Vulcan use. It pulled him back instantly from his depressed thoughts; he swung round.

"Yes, Mr. Spock?"

"Something... The sensors will have it recorded and we can study it in more detail in a moment - but there was a... I can only describe it as a flicker in the sensor reading. For a brief moment, a foreign reading appeared, mixed with a Human reading - then it vanished again, and the Human reading with it."

Kirk stared at him for a moment as he digested the report. "Lt. Uhura, contact Governor Laski."

There was a brief pause before Uhura glanced round. "Governor Laski is on channel one, sir."

"On screen, Lieutenant... Governor, we've just detected what we think may be another disappearance, but we do have a sensor report on it that my Science Officer is already studying in depth."

"Another one?" Laski asked wearily. "Where?"

Kirk glanced over at the Vulcan. "The smallest settlement," Spock told him, and returned his attention to the readout. Kirk passed on the information. Laski pressed a button on his desk; his secretary entered.

"Contact Riverside; see if there's any word of a disappearance."

"Do you think there might be, sir?" She sounded worried.

"The Enterprise reports one."

The woman went out briskly, but there was a strained look on her face; Laski looked after her sympathetically, and when the door closed, he said quietly, "Maura comes from Riverside. It's small enough for almost everyone to be related to everyone else."

Kirk nodded, understanding. Spock straightened. "There's no doubt, Captain. A new signal - something never before recorded - appeared for a moment at the settlement; and as it flickered away, a Human reading went with it. Unfortunately, I have been unable to detect where it went."

"Never before recorded - you're quite sure of that, Mr. Spock?"

"Yes, Captain. It has no resemblance to the readings of any known race."

"Spock, start checking that other continent now. I know the creatures there were described as pre-sapient, but as I remember the little anthropology I ever knew, some species - Man is thought to be among them - appear to have possessed ESP in their pre-civilised days, but lost the ability as their civilisation developed. Could those pre-sapients somehow he responsible for this?"

Spock flicked several switches, and bent over the viewer again. "Scanning the other continent now, Captain... Have you any idea how widespread these creatures are?"

Kirk shook his head. "No. The survey teams left it alone, remember?"

Spock grunted. "On Earth, early Man - homo habilis, homo erectus - was confined to a relatively small part of the planet, as I recall." He gave the impression of speaking to himself. "Parts of Africa, parts of China... On Vulcan, signs of early vulcanoids - r'azja drav!ra - were limited to the area now covered by the Sas-a-Shar Desert... We've found traces of their 'culture' at one or two places, but only one or two... This race could be like that - sparse; I can't find any immediate sign of permanent habitation. On the other hand, I can find no sign of 'settlement' by any race of our acquaintance. Captain, I suggest we risk beaming a small party down, once I do detect some trace of a hominid species. We may find something on the surface that is indistinguishable from space."

Kirk frowned slightly. He was not averse to bending the Prime Directive slightly if he felt the occasion called for it; but he was not yet convinced that this occasion did call for it. Surely the natives of the other continent would leave some indications of their presence if they had any sort of culture; and if they didn't, their development was likely to be at a very vulnerable stage.

Governor Laski coughed slightly, discreetly drawing Kirk's attention back to the viewscreen. "Sorry, Governor; at the moment we're clutching at straws. We've initiated a search of the other continent to see if it holds any answers, but - "

He broke off as the door opened; the secretary entered, her face white and tears evidently not far away.

"There was one?" Laski said tightly.

She nodded. "My sister's daughter. Two years old. Governor - April was a very quiet child - almost too quiet. She was terribly shy. She would never have gone off willingly with a complete stranger - she'd have screamed and yelled... But she didn't! She just... went away, as if she knew whoever took her, as if she was perfectly content to go, without making any sort of fuss at all."

"Where was she?" Kirk asked. He was aware of sounding brutally unsympathetic, but he had to have more information. If any sort of pattern could be detected...

"In a garden with a good high fence round it. There wasn't even a gate - it had to be entered from the house. And it wasn't. But there was an odd thing - my sister had some pet mouflette that lived in the garden - and they've gone too."

"No chance they could have burrowed out?" Kirk asked.

"No - my brother-in-law is a mouflette farmer, and they know all about making the fences deep enough. Anyway, these were young ones Maeve and Fingal had hand-reared, and they were almost too tame - they were more likely to try to sneak into the kitchen than dig their way out of the garden."

"Children and mouflette..." Kirk muttered. "Dammit, what connection can there possibly be?"

On consideration, Kirk decided to limit the proposed landing party to six. Spock, of course; and he himself - if there was to be any difficulty with Starfleet over their breach of the Prime Directive, he wanted to be able to state exactly what had been done, and why. He thought long over the choice of personnel to make up the other four who would complete the landing party, debating with himself what qualities would be most needed by them, finally deciding on two of the ship's biologists, Verris and Thekar; Dr. Maris, a member of McCoy's staff who had trained at Starfleet's central hospital where cases that posed problems for the doctors on their home planets, or Starfleet personnel injured beyond the capability of their ships' facilities to handle, provided considerable experience of alien life forms; and - to satisfy the book - Shacter, a security guard who, from the early days of Spock's presence aboard the Enterprise, had appointed himself as the Vulcan's personal guard. Neither Kirk nor Spock himself had ever known just exactly why Shacter had developed this interest in the Vulcan, although Kirk suspected that it might have something to do with an incident that Spock had eventually mentioned to him, months after its occurrence. On one of Spock's early duties as acting Science Officer after the unmourned loss of the Tellarite Science Officer Vaz he had found Shacter asleep on duty. It had been a perfectly safe planet, with security represented only because it was an unknown planet and Spock was still a civilian; Spock had simply wakened the man and taken matters no further, satisfied that Shacter understood that he had been warned and that a repetition of the offence would not be excused. Kirk realised, as he knew Spock did not, that Shacter probably appreciated being given a second chance like that, and that his devotion to Spock was the result.

Whether his guess was accurate or not, Kirk knew that Shacter was the best choice for a guard on this particular mission. His attachment to Spock had ensured that he frequently swapped duties to make sure he accompanied a landing party when Spock was part of it, with the result that his understanding of scientific matters was somewhat higher than that of most of his fellows. This landing party was one where the more knowledge its members had, the better it would be.

He considered his chosen group, and frowned slightly. He would have preferred McCoy to Dr. Maris, he knew, in spite of the range of her knowledge... but he doubted that he could justify dragging the doctor away from his daughter. Jo Revisec needed her father right now; her importance to the colony was such that McCoy's prime duty lay in encouraging her back to an acceptance of life, rather than the marginal chance that he could contribute his knowledge to a probably fruitless search of the other continent for a hominid race so sparse that it had not yet shown up on the ship's sensors.

No - he must leave McCoy at the settlement.

Activating the intercom, he called his chosen group to a briefing.

Kirk looked round his selected landing party almost apologetically. "First of all, gentlemen, ladies, you must understand that what I plan to do constitutes a direct breach of the Prime Directive," he started. "You've all been on the Enterprise long enough to know that there are times when we've had to bend the Prime Directive a little, usually because the culture has not been the developing, healthy organism that Starfleet has believed it to be, or because we ourselves have discovered that an apparently primitive culture has already been interfered with or is actually the remains of a once-advanced civilisation.

"That is not the case here.

"The situation here on Doranna is unusual. This is a planet with a developing intelligence - however, because the planet is well-suited for development by the Federation, and because the hominids who live on only one of the two continents are so primitive in their development that it will take probably a million years for them to attain anything resembling a culture as we understand the word, the Federation has a colony co-existing on the planet with the hominids - who should not know of the existence of that colony - and under strict instructions not to visit the hominid's continent.

"Note I say should not know. You all know that children have been disappearing from the settlements on Doranna - the last one, earlier today. Mr. Spock."

Spock looked round the small group. "Our scanners picked up the disappearance. An unidentifiable reading appeared momentarily then disappeared again, and a Human reading disappeared with it. Captain Kirk confirmed with Governor Laski that a child had indeed vanished - from a garden entered only by means of a door from the house. This agrees with the facts we have on several of the disappearances - many of the children disappeared in a manner suggestive of the use of some form of teleportation."

He glanced at Kirk, who continued. "Mr. Spock reminded me that some races possess unusual talents. Primitive races frequently have abilities that apparently atrophy as the race develops a 'civilisation'. I have therefore decided to act on the assumption - for which I have no proof - that the hominids here have the ability to teleport themselves - and possibly objects near to them as well - over a considerable distance.

"Mr. Spock has been unable to detect large concentrations of the hominids on the other continent; the population density appears to be quite sparse. We don't have any records of the initial survey either - so we just don't know how widespread they are supposed to be, whether they live in small communities - say family groups - or are solitary, coming together only to mate and with the young remaining with their mothers only until they reach a degree of independence. They may even be nomadic. We are therefore planning to beam down to an area where we think, from the readings, that we will find some.

"You have all been selected because of your particular skills in biology or medicine. Mr. Shacter, because this is an unexplored area, we need a security guard, and I know that you have picked up some knowledge of science. However, should any of you feel strongly about this breach of the Prime Directive, you can, without prejudice, refuse to accompany this landing party."

"You think that the hominids can teleport, even over the distances involved, and have kidnapped the missing children, sir?" Maris asked, a note of what might be termed disbelief in her voice.

"We are considering it as a possibility."

"Haven't you picked up any readings for the children, Mr. Spock?" Verris asked.

"No. Even the readings that I think indicate the presence of the hominids are not quite the same as the ones that appeared when that last child vanished... but there is a similarity. Enough to make me believe that the Captain is right - the other continent should be checked. Even if all we accomplish is to let the hominids - if they are indeed kidnapping the children - know that we are watching them, it might be sufficient to stop them from carrying off any more."

The Andorian Thekar was frowning sceptically. "Captain, you're talking about a distance of ... what? Two thousand miles? Three? More? I'm willing to consider teleportation in itself as being possible - some individuals of my own race claim to possess the ability to move objects a short way - though not more than a few inches, and it's never been done in a strictly supervised test situation."

"Do you mean it's never been tested, or that the people being tested failed under the test conditions?" Kirk asked.

"Those being tested failed. The usual excuse is that the scepticism of the judges causes the failure."

"It could be," Kirk said. "It's long been known on Earth that an apparently terminally sick person can recover because he was determined to. It's equally known that a perfectly healthy person can fall ill, even die, because he believes that he's been cursed. The power of the mind is surprisingly effective, Ms. Thekar."

Thekar nodded. "As I said, Captain, I'm willing to accept the existence of the ability to teleport. What I doubt is the ability to teleport over the distance involved."

"It is only a matter of degree, Ms. Thekar," Spock said. "I remember reading a treatise by a Ster Shevas on that very subject. From reading old documents, he theorised that the ability of Andorians to teleport was once quite considerable, but that as civilisation developed and methods of communal travel were discovered, the ability was used less and less until it was lost. Of course, his theory could not be proved, since no Andorians now live in a Stone Age."

"I've heard Shevas's theory," Thekar admitted. "But I've also seen some of the material he read when he formulated his theory, and I'm not convinced of the validity of his reasoning."

"Do you deny that an ability, if it is not used, will be lost?" Spock asked.

"No, Mr. Spock. I don't deny that, but I'm not convinced that Andorians, as a race, once used teleportation to travel around the countryside."

"Luckily we're not speaking about Andorians at the moment but about the hominids native to Doranna," Kirk interrupted. "You two can finish your discussion another time - if you think it's worth finishing, that is," he added dryly, "since neither of you can prove anything." He glanced at Spock, and winked with the eye Thekar could not see. "By then you might even have some evidence to back your position."

"Yes, Captain," Spock agreed instantly. Thekar nodded reluctantly.

Kirk looked round the five faces. "Does anyone want to stand down? No? Good. Are there any more questions?"

"Exactly what are we looking for, Captain?" Maris asked.

Kirk shrugged. "That's a good question. I wish I had an answer. Anything that might link the hominids to the children - or the mouflette that have been disappearing too. Anything that indicates that the hominids can actually teleport. Any sign that the hominids are more advanced than the surveys indicated. Even... any sign that there has been a prior disturbance to the hominid culture. Mr. Spock checked the continent for signs of settlement by Outworlders and found nothing, but it's always possible that there has been contamination by a race that has now gone. In addition, we want a record of the hominid culture, as far as possible. I'm keeping our interference to a minimum by only beaming down the one party - as yet - into an area where the readings indicate that hominids live. I hope it's enough to let us assess whether or not they could possibly be responsible for the disappearances."

The landing party materialised in a sparsely wooded area some two kilometers from a group of hominids - "At least ten individuals," Spock reported. Its members glanced round, taking in the immediate scenery, each one alert to different aspects of it. Nearby, a small herd of mouflette was grazing; from time to time one of them glanced round as if looking for danger, but they ignored the landing party as if they knew that Humans - and Vulcans and Andorians - posed no threat to them. Thekar moved slowly towards them; they ignored her. She had almost reached them before they began to move away, and even then they moved slowly. Thekar took two quick steps, bent and scooped one up; even that failed to alarm the others. The Andorian walked briskly back to Kirk with her prize.

"Quite tame," she commented as she rejoined the landing party.

"That is a characteristic of the mouflette, Lieutenant," Kirk pointed out. "Apparently they don't really have any natural enemies. They were very easily tamed by the settlers."

She touched the long wool gently. "So soft," she murmured.

Spock studied the little creature carefully, a finger stroking its head lightly. "You are right, Lieutenant, it is not afraid of us," he said. "On the other hand, it is a totally wild example of the species."

"You're sure, Spock?" Kirk asked.

"Yes, Captain. Its thoughts are surprisingly easily to sense. It has never seen anything quite like us."

Kirk grunted. "Let it go, Lieutenant," he ordered. Thekar obeyed, not without regret - Andorians were not given to sentimentality, but she would not have been averse to keeping it as a pet. It ran a few steps towards the others, then stopped and began to feed again.

Shacter came back from where he had been checking among the trees. "Everything's quiet," he said.

"Let's go, then," Kirk said. "Remember, we want to observe these hominids; once we get close to them, there's to be no talking." They moved briskly at first, Shacter a little ahead of the main group, Spock, his eyes fixed to his tricorder, close behind. The two scientists and Dr. Maris were recording busily as they went; Kirk himself kept an eye out for any danger - unlikely though that seemed - approaching from behind them. Alert for danger as he was, he still found time to notice the obvious fertility of the area; many of the trees carried fruit or nuts.

After a while, Spock said softly, "We're getting close."

Kirk nodded. For a little while they moved forward from tree to tree, checking that nothing could see them before they moved on to the next tree, but finally Spock signalled again that they were now very close to the readings he had detected.

They dropped flat and began to wriggle forward, going more slowly now, using every scrap of cover they could find. Finally, Shacter stopped, his head raised as he peered through the long grass. Spock joined him; Kirk wriggled forward towards them.

The hominids were possibly two to three feet tall, a little smaller than the reports had indicated. They were gathering round a tree, the branches of which drooped low from the weight of fruit that hung from them. As the landing party watched, the largest - big only by comparison with the others - reached up cautiously and picked itself a piece of the fruit. It ate it slowly, then, more confidently, plucked another fruit. As if this was a signal, the others also began to pick the fruit, scattering a little before they began eating.

The landing party studied the creatures carefully.

They were covered with short hair of a mottled brown that matched the colour of the tree trunks. Indeed, when one of them moved in front of the trunk, it almost seemed to vanish. Not that they moved much; they seemed content to remain stationary for lengthy periods, then moved quickly to snatch another fruit. Their faces were almost pointed, rather than primate-flattish, giving them a squirrel-like appearance which was enhanced when they crouched to eat the fruit they picked. One was nursing several infants.

Spock glanced at Verris and Thekar; they were busily recording the behaviour of the hominids. He turned his attention back to his own study of the creatures.

Kirk found his attention drawn to one of the infants. He frowned as he concentrated. Yes - a tail was twined around its mother's leg. He touched Spock's arm.

"That youngster has a tail," he breathed. "But I don't think the adults do."

Spock focused on the infant, nodded, then studied the others, tricorder busy.

"They don't seem to be picking any to carry away," Kirk breathed in Spock's ear a few minutes later. The Vulcan withdrew his attention from the infants and looked at him. "Too primitive a culture to think of food storage?"

"Or else a climate so equitable that they don't need to consider where tomorrow's meals will come from," Spock replied as softly.

"It's certainly warm enough," Kirk commented. "But this does seem to indicate that they're not advanced enough yet to have a culture of any kind, doesn't it."

Spock, still watching closely, nodded reluctantly.

Kirk called a standard debriefing for the landing party immediately on their return to the Enterprise, not really expecting it to be anything but a formality.

He looked round the group, a rueful smile on his face. "Does anyone have any comments to make about the hominids?" he asked. "Spock?"

"I need to study the tricorder readings before I formulate a full hypothesis," Spock said, "but it is my impression that the young of that creature are born with tails, possibly an evolutionary survival from a period when the creature lived in trees. Since the adults did not appear to have tails, it is possible that these are absorbed into the creature's body in the same manner as a frog loses the tail it had as a tadpole. Other than that - " He gave an apologetic half shrug.

Kirk looked round the others.

There was a brief silence. Finally -

"The report said the hominids used tools, didn't it?" Thekar asked.

"Yes."

"We didn't see any sign of tool using, did we?"

"No - but all they had to do was pick fruit. They might use tools if they were searching for - oh, roots, say," Kirk replied. He looked round the five faces again.

"We may find something in the record that we didn't notice while we were on the planet, Captain," Verris said, almost apologetically. Kirk nodded, knowing that that often did happen, but disinclined to think that it would happen in this case. He was feeling quite depressed; unlikely though the theory of kidnap by the hominids was, it was at least something to go on; now they were back to square one, with a mystery that had no possible solution.

"There was one other thing..." Spock said slowly.

"Yes, Mr. Spock?"

"Their fur colour. I understood that there were no large carnivores on Doranna?"

"So we've been told," Kirk agreed.

"And they were eating fruit, which would indicate a vegetarian - or at least predominantly vegetarian - diet."

"Yes."

"In that case, why do the hominids have fur that gives them protective coloration?"

Kirk stared at him. "Yes, they do, don't they," he said thoughtfully.

After a moment, when nobody else advanced any comment, he glanced at Shacter. "Your opinion of the hominids as a possibly aggressive species, Lieutenant?"

Shacter shook his head. "They seemed to have a perfectly amicable relationship with all the others inside their group. No indication of aggression. That first one seemed to be some sort of leader of the group, and none of the others challenged its position - if the species was inclined to aggressiveness, I'd expect it to regard some of the younger ones as possible rivals. It didn't seem to be bothered about them. There wasn't even any indication of possessiveness where their food was concerned - maybe it's too easily obtained to be worth fighting over."

Kirk nodded and looked round. "Does anyone have anything to add? No? But bear in mind - this was only one group. We may go down again to observe others. Dismissed."

He watched them leave, then turned to Spock who, as always, had remained behind.

"Anything to add, Spock?"

The Vulcan shook his head. "Not really, Captain. I do find it interesting that the hominids have protective coloration when all reports indicate a lack of animals that could be considered dangerous to them, but there could be a simple explanation - as simple as the recent extinction of a predator that was dangerous to them."

"I'm more concerned about whether that was the pre-sapient species that the survey thought so important. On the basis of what we've seen so far, I wouldn't report this as a hands-off, Prime Directive continent. If I was reporting on it, I'd probably suggest 'caution in interfering with the primates' - but I certainly wouldn't call the ones we've seen so far hominid. At most, I'd call them pre-hominid."

"I would tend to agree. Therefore the species we have observed is not the one the survey teams observed. As you said, this is only one group. We ought to go down again to observe others."

The landing party beamed down again the following day, this time choosing a site some fifty miles from the first one, where Spock's readings detected another group, a little bigger than the one they had already seen. The readings were not quite the same, which Spock considered probably indicated a slightly different species.

Once more, they beamed down some distance from the exact co-ordinates and walked cautiously through the trees - which were thicker than at the other landing site.

Spock was right. These creatures were totally different from the ones they had already seen. Petty squabbling, which had been completely lacking in the first group, was quite marked in this one, with its individuals keeping their distance from each other.

The group was made up of an obviously dominant male and its harem; a dozen or so females of varying ages, and two or three youngish, probably immature, males. They were gathered round a small clump of bushes, harvesting the red berries. As they watched, the big male moved to where one of the females was contentedly feeding from a large clump of berries on a low branch, baring his teeth, and she moved hastily away, leaving him in possession of the bush. She retaliated - if it could be called that - by challenging another of the females. After a brief snarling match the challenged female moved away; it was fairly clear that the 'pecking order' was already established, with the second female knowing herself to be subordinate to the other but resenting it.

One of the smaller females was unable to get near a bush - every time she approached one, another of the hominids chased her away; she seemed to be the least dominant member of the group. She had picked up a long stick and could be seen using it to dig up roots. From the fact that she was left in peace to eat them, it seemed likely that the roots were less palatable than the berries.

There was only one infant in this group, a little older than the ones they had observed with the other species. This one was old enough to wander away from its mother, but the other adults snarled when it approached them, and it soon fled back to the protection of its mother, and scrabbled in the long grass in the shade of the bush its mother was harvesting, its hand moving to its mouth from time to time as it found pickings, occasionally snatching up a berry that the female dropped. It was quite clear that even the mother was unwilling to share the crop on her bush, thick though it was, with her offspring. The youngster, it seemed, had to be content with what it could glean from the ground until her appetite was satisfied.

The younger male moved away from its bush, its attention fixed on the ground. It crouched, picking something up from the ground, and gnawed at it. A few minutes later it returned to the bush.

The landing party watched for a while, then, as the hominids began to drift away, studying the ground and from time to time picking up and eating something unidentifiable - they might almost be called 'browsers', Spock decided - Kirk called for beam-up. They would learn nothing more from these creatures.

"It's totally different from the last group," Shacter commented. "The other lot were quite peaceable; there was far more aggression shown towards each other in this lot."

Spock was looking thoughtful. His mind was clearly occupied with comparisons. "One of the obvious causes of aggression is sex. There was no obvious sign of sexual awareness inside either of the groups we have seen, but the females of the second group may have been competing - even subconsciously - for the attentions of the dominant male. It is possible that the first species has a positive rutting time, and greater aggressiveness might occur during that time."

"You know," Maris commented, "there were not enough young in either of those groups. They were both mixed-sex, mixed-age groups, but there were hardly any young!"

"Perhaps some of the young were elsewhere, hidden. Some species do hide their helpless young - " Thekar suggested.

"Very small infants might be, but what about ones old enough to walk? There wasn't any sign that any of the adults in either group were gathering fruit to carry away with them; anyway, doing that is an indication of a fairly advanced level of behaviour, even though it's only directed towards the young by their mothers; and that mother we saw today wasn't paying any attention to the needs of her child. The behaviour of the adults in the second group also seems to indicate that the species hasn't developed that kind of tolerance yet. Anyway, a rut usually happens yearly; unless Mr. Spock's suggested rut only occurs once every so many years, which isn't likely, there ought to be young arriving every year."

"There are species that breed only every two or three years," Spock said flatly.

"Yes, individuals of these species breed only every two or three years," Maris agreed. She threw him a quick glance. "The longest period I know of is fifteen years - a reptilian species that lives on Catulla. But there are some individuals of the species in heat every year; there are young born every year; there are yearlings every year; there are two-year-olds every year. Even if these creatures had a two or three year rut, I'd still expect there to be some young each year."

"But given that the young are apparently left to go hungry until the adults are fed, wouldn't a lot of them die?" Thekar suggested.

"They may be chased away from the trees with the heaviest, easiest-to-reach crop, but there's plenty of food there for them all," Verris pointed out.

"I suggest you study the tricorder readings," Kirk said. "You may find something there that we missed while we were actually watching."

A study of the readings produced no immediate additional information. It was almost impossible to distinguish the sexes inside the first group; only the one with young could positively be identified as female although one or two of the others read as pregnant. It seemed probable however that the group was predominately female. At least it was easy to sex the members of the second group.

Dr. Maris tried to estimate the ages of the members of the two groups, but it was largely guesswork as they had no way of knowing what the average lifespan of the creatures was. What she could estimate however was the comparative ages inside each group.

She decided that the big adult in the first group was in the full prime of life and would probably retain the position as 'leader' of the group for some years. The others showed a spread from very young, through a couple of pre-adolescents and several young adults to one that looked quite old. The spread in the second group seemed to be a little less - the dominant male seemed to be quite young, newly adult, and the only other male in the group was pre-adolescent; all of the females were past adolescence but none were old. Most of the females in the group were in different stages of pregnancy, which made the lack of young even more surprising.

"Captain," she finished her report. "If we assume an average life expectancy of about twenty-five to thirty, with adolescence at about ten, then the youngest hominids we saw - apart from the obvious infants - would be about eight or nine years old."

Kirk grunted. "Have you any reason to assume that particular life expectancy?" he asked.

"That's about the average for most races, from several planets, who still live in a stone age or pre-stone age culture," Maris explained. "Of course, that doesn't mean that none of them live past thirty - the low average is caused by child mortality. The ones who survive childhood - or childbirth, for the females - often live to be - oh, fifty or even more. I'm also talking about years of their own planet," she added, remembering the different lengths of year of various of the Federation planets.

Kirk frowned slightly. "What you're saying is that for the past nine or ten planetary years both these groups of hominids have lost most of their young?"

"It looks that way. The fact that the females are mostly pregnant seems to indicate that they've been breeding all right."

Kirk glanced at the Vulcan. "Mr. Spock?"

"Both groups are too small to be truly viable."

Startled, Kirk said, "Would you care to explain that?"

"The species appears to be at the 'live-off-the-land' level of development, not yet positively gathering food to be taken back to what might be termed a home base; probably not yet possessing a home base but rather remaining in one area only while food is easily obtained then moving on when it is exhausted, sleeping wherever they are when night falls. Possibly even drifting a short distance each day.

"I would expect such a group, in time, to evolve into a semi-nomadic way of life; building a primitive shelter, taking gathered food back there. Making a home - of sorts; following a route that takes them round in a circle and back over the same territory annually. By that time they would have a few simple possessions - digging sticks, grass baskets, simple spears - which the first group we observed appeared not to have. In the second group, although I noticed one individual using a stick with which to dig, she appeared only to use one that was lying there, and dropped it after she used it; in other words, she had not yet thought of keeping a good one to be used again later.

"Basically, such a group would evolve from a family; new groups being formed as the older males drive the young ones away and as these young males steal females from under the noses of the older males. The second group we observed might indeed have been formed in that way. But it has been discovered by anthropologists that the optimum number of adults within a group is around thirty, preferably composed of the members of three or four families, not just by the members of one family - although the various families may of course be related to each other."

"How would you estimate the level of intelligence of the groups we observed?"

Spock frowned slightly. "Low," he said flatly. "The first was certainly not advanced enough to be termed pre-sapient. The second... I would not like to have to make a decision based on what we observed."

"In that case - are the creatures we saw the same ones that the survey teams reported?"

"The readings were not quite the same as the one I detected at the settlement..."

"Then are we speaking about at least two hominid species, possibly even three or four, with one of them more advanced than the others?"

"It seems unlikely, Captain, even although we have seen two..." He hesitated. "Of course - Earth has more than one primate species! I had forgotten. Vulcan only has the one."

"So does Andoria," Thekar said.

Maris nodded slowly. "And although I am of Human extraction, I too had forgotten; I am from the colony on Benecia, which has no native primate species."

"So it's possible that the first group we saw were more akin to - say, gorillas - rather than a species developing active reasoning intelligence? And the second group maybe more like - oh, say chimpanzees, which have been observed to use tools?"

"It is possibly inaccurate to deny gorillas the possession of reasoning intelligence, Captain, but in essence you are correct. We need to discover the whereabouts of a species with more... flexibility of behaviour," Spock agreed.

"And sensor readings don't help."

"No," Spock admitted. "Yet a species developing active intelligence should be gathered in relatively large groups - as I said, groups of thirty at least. So far I have found no signs of groups that large."

"All right. Then we check out smaller groups; any concentration of hominids might be a sub-group of a larger... shall we say 'tribe'?"

"Yes, sir," Spock agreed.

"We'll stick with the same landing party," Kirk added. He looked round the table. "Unless any of you have objections at this stage?"

None of them produced any objection.

A careful scan revealed a wooded area some hundred miles from their first landing site that had what could only be called a scattered concentration of hominids.

"The readings aren't quite the same as the hominids we already saw," Spock said as Kirk joined him at the science station. "They're not exactly the same as the readings I detected when the child April disappeared either, but of course with her Human readings in such close proximity I can't be entirely certain I have an exact record of the reading."

Kirk thought about it for a moment. "Spock, I think we'll go down prepared to stay for a few days. We can construct a simple shelter for ourselves, and if the hominids have no natural enemies and are as trusting as the mouflette, it might be possible to get a good close study of them. Of course, we'll have to be careful not to demonstrate any great level of technology - we'll have to live very simply. In fact, and if we can remain unobserved we should." He rubbed the back of his neck. "What worries me - really worries me - is the lack of Human readings. We're carefully formulating a theory for which we have only the faintest suggestion of possibility, but the one thing that would give us some solid proof - Human readings - is totally missing."

"Detecting a single reading - or even a dozen readings scattered over a possibly wide area - is not easy, Captain," Spock reminded him. "That is partly why we're having such difficulty in picking up readings of the hominids; they're scattered." He did not add his own growing fear that if the hominids had been able to kidnap the children, it was for food.

Kirk glanced round the almost-empty bridge; Sulu, at the helm, on duty only because someone had to be there in case of instrument failure, was openly reading, glancing automatically at the viewscreen and his console at intervals too regular to be anything other than assessed by some predetermined method - he had probably programmed the reader to flash him a signal at set times. An ensign at the Engineering console, too junior to dare imitate the senior helmsman, smothered a yawn as he watched the unchanging readouts. The only other person on the bridge was Uhura, who was lying on the floor underneath her console, a panel open and her hands busy somewhere out of sight. None of them was paying any attention to their senior officers.

Many of the crew, of course, were down on the planet, most of them wandering around the areas where children had disappeared, tricorders busy. The only departments on the ship that were almost fully staffed were Engineering, where Scott's men were assisting Svenson's, and Science, where the scanners and sensors were in full operation round the clock, searching the planet for any sign of the missing children. It wasn't impossible that one of the crew on the planet might discover something, but Kirk privately considered it unlikely; the parents had had every incentive to search thoroughly, and if they had discovered nothing... As for the sensor scan, if Spock couldn't detect anything positive, Kirk doubted that anyone else would.

"I'll go and get things organised," he said with forced cheerfulness. He was already beginning to fear that for once he would fail in something he had set out to do - and it would be impossible to escape from the memory of the failure, for McCoy's very presence on the ship would be an ever-present reminder.

He turned away, almost tripping over Uhura's legs, and strode into the turbolift.

He found Maris and Thekar together in Sickbay, carefully studying yet again the readout of their observations of the group of primates on the second continent, so intent on it that they remained oblivious of his entry.

"Find anything new?" he asked.

Both women jumped. "Oh - Captain!" Maris exclaimed. "No, I'm afraid not. We've confirmed our conclusions about the groups we saw, but that's all. And we think that you were right, and that these are this world's equivalent of gorillas and chimpanzees. If there is a pre-sapient race living here we haven't found it yet."

"There's no 'if' about it, Doctor," Kirk said. "The initial survey was quite emphatic that there was - though I don't know how they reached that conclusion unless their readings were more detailed than we've been able to come up with so far."

Both women looked startled. "But we have the most advanced equipment of any Starfleet vessels," Thekar began.

"You don't mean the reports could be wrong?" Maris asked in shocked disbelief.

"If so I doubt it would be deliberate," Kirk replied thoughtfully. "The survey team could have been reporting what they thought they saw because it was what they wanted to see. They don't seem to have investigated deeply once they decided there was a pre-intelligent species here, just recommended that this continent be left alone."

Thekar frowned slightly. "I suppose it is possible to assume that a primate species is pre-sapient, just the same way as we all forgot that it doesn't have to be."

"Except that Mr. Spock's findings do seem to indicate the presence of at least one other species of hominid apart from the ones we found." Kirk sighed. "Maybe we just beamed down in the wrong place. Maybe if we'd beamed down someplace else we'd have seen more evidence of intelligence. Well, we're going to try somewhere else just as soon as we can get everything organised." He looked from one to the other. "I plan to stay down there for a few days this time. I don't intend to take tents - we can build brush shelters. But I do want us to have a degree of comfort - so I want you to get fabrication to produce some thermal blankets, made up to look natural, and get enough emergency ration kits together to do our party of six for ...say a week."

"Yes, Captain."

The territory in which they materialised this time was even more heavily wooded than the previous landing site. Indeed, it was almost a forest. The ground, however, appeared to be just as fertile, the climate as equitable; various of the trees carried ripe fruit or nuts, some carried unripe fruit, while others were still in flower. Spock swung his tricorder round slowly. "Hominids, Captain. I estimate... thirty to forty individuals scattered over an area of perhaps five acres." He spoke softly. "The nearest are perhaps five hundred yards from us."

"Thirty to forty? That's just over the number you estimated for optimum for a group of food-gathering nomads, isn't it?" Kirk kept his voice quiet too.

"Yes... and they could belong to the same group; split up while they collect food. They may or may not take it back to a home base - we'll need to investigate a little more to find that out. There are no more hominid readings within... twenty miles. That lends credence to my belief that these are the members of one group. I can detect traces of similar hominid readings to the north, west and south of here - at distances of twenty to twenty-five miles."

"How do the readings compare with the other group we saw?"

"Indications of intelligent behaviour..." He looked up, shaking his head. "From the readings I would hesitate to announce that I consider these creatures to possess a high intelligence, but they are certainly not - I believe 'dumb animals' would probably be the best description. They are definitely more advanced than the other groups we have seen."

Kirk looked round again, and pointed. "Over there - under that tree. The ground is relatively clear of undergrowth, the tree will give us basic shelter, and there's running water just a few steps away." He licked a finger and held it up. "The wind - as much as there is of it - is coming from that direction. So if we can build a windbreak over there, we should have a relatively comfortable camp." He glanced back at the Vulcan. "Any indication that the hominids have a... a base camp?"

"The readings are too scattered," Spock replied carefully. "If there is a base camp, we will need to wait until they return to it. However, there are indications of heat approximately a mile in that direction." He pointed. "There could be a base there, possibly with a fire."

They set to work and before long they had a serviceable windbreak built, its top meeting the lower, drooping branches of the tree. The whole provided a natural, tent-like shelter.

Shacter walked briskly to the rocky little stream and collected some water in a simulated hide 'bucket' that had been carefully manufactured to a style that was known to be one of the simplest and earliest that any stone age culture could achieve, placing it under a little waterfall until it filled. He carried it back to the camp, where Maris had just finished laying out the simulated wool thermal blankets.

Kirk nodded his thanks to the security guard and turned his attention back to Spock. "Think we can get close to any of the hominids?" he asked.

"We can try," Spock replied. He set off, treading carefully, with Kirk close behind him and the others following, watchful. Shacter's hand was close to his phaser - not that he really expected any trouble, but he was taking his duty very seriously. If these creatures were the ones responsible for the disappearance of the children, they must be considered a danger to all Humans on the planet.

The hominids were collecting food.

The first group that the landing party reached was made up of three females and a toddler whose sex was not at first apparent. They were more sparsely furred than the other hominids they had seen; the fur seemed to grow thickest on their heads while their faces and the upper parts of their bodies were more lightly furred. The fur was brownish in colour. The other hominids they had seen had been uniform in colour; here, each one was a slightly different shade from the other three. One showed traces of grey around her head. They stood a little under four feet in height.

The adults wore what could only be called skirts that looked as if they were made of mouflette wool. The toddler was completely naked. Two were carrying baskets that appeared to be made of stiff reeds. The greying one was collecting fruit, which she put carefully into the basket fastened to her waist; another, who looked a little younger, was gathering nuts which she tossed with practised ease over her shoulder into the basket slung across her back. The third - who looked quite young - was digging with a long stick, and with the enthusiastic but unskilled assistance of the toddler was putting the roots that she was unearthing into a third basket that lay on the ground beside her. It was when she moved a few yards and the child scrambled to its feet and staggered after her that the landing party saw that the youngster was a boy.

Kirk glanced at Maris. "Ages?" he breathed as Spock carefully recorded the workers.

Maris watched them consideringly. "The one who is digging is possibly ten or eleven. The one gathering nuts is probably in her mid to late twenties - the one going grey might be touching forty. Possibly it's a family group - grandmother, mother and children. Or - depending on how young they mature - the baby is the son of the youngest female, making a four-generation group."

Kirk nodded, frowning slightly as he watched the hominids. The older ones were oddly alert, glancing round from time to time; not totally absorbed in what they were doing, as he would have expected. Only the toddler was concentrating completely on his task.

The baskets were filling rapidly. Finally, with the baskets full, the youngest female took one and the oldest one the other two, lifting them easily onto their heads to carry them away, the toddler clinging to the girl's skirt. The other adult took the digging sticks, glanced round carefully, then followed the others, her attitude one of a strange alertness.

"Now what is she afraid of?" Kirk asked softly as she disappeared among the trees.

"Wood spirits," Maris muttered.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Wood spirits. Dryads."

Kirk looked at her thoughtfully. "No, I don't think so, Nurse. She was holding those digging sticks as if she could make them double as spears. You don't fight spirits with spears."

"She may have heard our voices," Spock suggested. "Creatures at that level of development frequently have very sharp hearing, and - "

"You're missing the point, Spock," Kirk commented. "She was afraid of something she thought she could fight with a spear. The other hominids had protective coloration. I'm asking myself why."

"Oh. You think that there is an animal here that is dangerous to the hominids?"

"I'm beginning to think it possible."

"Just how thorough was the survey here, Captain?" Spock asked.

"Thorough enough to detect the presence of intelligent hominids - and you know how hard we had to look to find them, even knowing they were here."

"Yet the survey did not discover any creature large enough to pose a threat to the hominids - and the mouflette do not appear to be concerned about anything."

"A creature doesn't have to be large to be a threat, Spock. I know that on most planets we tend to think of small predators going after smallish prey, but that isn't a hard and fast rule. Don't you have any species of small creature on Vulcan that everyone knows is dangerous? Like poisonous snakes, or piranhas?"

"Well, yes... but that does not explain the confidence of the mouflette. They are clearly unafraid, and I would expect them to show caution if they were preyed on by anything."

"I'd say too dumb to be frightened, except that Laski reckoned they were quite intelligent. Anyway, he also said that they aren't a staple on anything's diet."

"But that something acts as a stabilising force on their numbers."

Kirk scowled, staring in the direction taken by the four native Dorannans. Strange how his concept of them had gone from 'hominid' to 'Dorannan' with the simple discovery that these ones possessed simple tools.

"Puzzles," he said, his mind clearly elsewhere. "This world holds nothing but puzzles."

Spock watched him for some moments, respecting his abstraction, realising that he was probably thinking over everything that he had been told about the planet. Then - "Do you want to follow the hominids, Captain?" he asked.

"I'm... not sure. There's still the Prime Directive to consider... I don't want to stretch it too far. I thi