Captain James T. Kirk angled his horns menacingly and bluffed out a devil-horned Helvan who tried to bar his way. Without pause he ducked past and around a corner, out of sight of the horned crowd that had become a mob.

He scaled up over a fence and flattened into a handy alcove while the pursuit pounded past. For a long moment he had not thought he would make his rendezvous with Spock and the landing party. Dr. McCoy's elegant semisurgical makeup jobs on the horn implants were supposed to make Helvan safe for Kirk's democracy. They had not.

He wore the short horns of a Helvan male in a dormant phase, not the deadly spiked horns of a Helvan male in falat. The fact that the short horns would strike any Human as devilish was neither here nor there-let alone how they looked on Spock, who had the ears for it....

The Helvan sky shaded from lavender to great flaming clouds of red-gold, which seemed always caught by some sunrise or sunset of the double sun. The Helvan culture was little beyond Stone Age, but much of the city was built of great crystal sheets and columns from some natural quarry. The effect was mirrored red-gold splendor, as easily a scene out of tomorrow as a vision of hell.

Kirk reached to use his communicator. Somehow in this atmosphere of revolution the Helvans had spotted him for a danger. Worse, what was now happening to Spock, Bones, and the landing party?

It suddenly occurred to him to wonder why he had ever divided his forces in this dangerous situation. Then he looked up-and his stomach knotted.

Spock waited for the rendezvous with almost Human impatience. He did not say worry. Yet his brief question to Kirk as to the wisdom of separate missions in the street-mob Helvan atmosphere of impending revolution had been brushed aside with uncharacteristic brusqueness. True, time was limited. The disappearances on many planets, including especially this one, were increasing alarmingly.

Once Spock might have pressed the argument further.

The 2.8 years he had spent with the Vulcan Masters, attempting to expunge his Human half, had not wholly been erased by his return to the Enterprise.

Nonetheless, Spock should have insisted on the foolhardiness of separation.

Kirk was 4.5 minutes late. McCoy was overdue. Chekov appeared to be in some rather vague state. Uhura was missing. And Spock was far from the total logic of Konlinahr....

Kirk backed against the wall. The beings who had come out of nowhere were not Helvan. They were not of any known species.

And they struck Admiral, Acting Captain, James T. Kirk, possibly the most experienced commander in the galaxy in dealing with unknowns, as gut-level terrifying.

They were not large-perhaps a head shorter than he was. They had conical noses on mouthless heads that had a vaguely mechanical look. Yet he sensed that they were beings, not robots. How he knew it, he did not know. But he knew also that there was some sense of utter callousness about them, as if they had no empathy or fellow-feeling for a living being.

He shook off terror and tried a standard nonverbal greeting.

One no-mouth raised an appendage and sent a shimmer like heatwaves toward him.

It seared his nerves. He didn't fall, but he couldn't move.

They came to him and one inspected him. Hard finger-tentacles probed into his ears, mouth, then felt him over like prime beef or breeding stock, adding rage and disgust to his terror.

Somehow he sensed that this was all familiar, as if he had even seen pictures of these ... things.

He knew that the disappearances he had been sent to investigate had come to investigate him.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred who disappeared did not return. And those who did ....

Spock!

Kirk knew that he had called Spock mentally only after he had done it. Spock was a touch telepath. But Kirk had reached him mentally once or twice-the last time over the light-years from Earth to Vulcan, to haul Spock out of his self-imposed Vulcan exile.

[See note in Star Trek-The Motion Picture, A Novel, by Gene Roddenberry (New York): Pocket Books, 1979).]

One of the mouthless things touched Kirk's forehead and the world exploded.

Dr. McCoy bolted forward and caught Spock as the Vulcan suddenly sagged. Uhura caught his tricorder as it fell. They had arrived from separate directions only a moment before the Vulcan's eyes went blank. Chekov came to help take Spock's weight as McCoy went for his medical scanner.

But the Vulcan straightened away from both of them. "That will not be necessary, Doctor. I am undamaged."

"The hell you say," McCoy muttered, running the scanner anyway. "What do you call that performance?"

"It was Jim," Spock said. "A distress call. Then ... nothing."

The Vulcan's eyes narrowed against pain. "Doctor, the Captain may be dead."

"May be!" McCoy said. Perhaps only McCoy knew the full truth of times when he and Spock had believed Kirk to be dead. "Then ... he may not be?"

Spock was already consulting his tricorder. "Doctor, I get ... no sense of his continued existence." He looked up. "And no identi-loc reading. If he were injured, the Helvans would possibly take him to the Helvan hospital you inspected today, Doctor. How bad was it?"

McCoy stared at him. "Hospital? I inspected no hospital."

Chekov and Uhura looked at him strangely. "Doctor,"Uhura said, "we saw you go into the hospital."

Suddenly something swept through McCoy, a strange feeling of horror and disgust, nameless and terrifying. Abruptly he began to be aware of physical symptoms, pain.

He checked his chronometer. It was much later than he had thought.

"Mr. Chekov," McCoy said, "what happened on your weapons inspection of the Helvan Summer Palace?"

He saw the blank look he knew had been on his own face come to Chekov, then to the beautiful dark features of Uhura as she tried to place her afternoon.

"Memory lapses," McCoy said. "We all have them."

"Fascinating," the Vulcan said. "Possibly even illuminating. I calculate we have moments only before major street violence erupts. We must find the Captain."

He strode off with Vulcan swiftness and the Humans struggled after him.