STAR TREK: The Original Series - Garth of Izar Read online

  The proposed mission was definitely necessary, Kirk thought, and he did not doubt the ability of his crew and himself to control Garth should he prove troublesome—although if an officer of José Mendez’s experience was this certain of Garth, then Garth’s stability could be trusted. Kirk would be able to serve with an officer he had revered in his youth, and if Garth succeeded, his honor would be restored.

  But he did not care for the idea of having the man in command of the Enterprise, even if only in part. He thought of his recurring dream about the captain and wondered if that was the Garth he was soon to meet, or if he would instead glimpse the madman behind the rational mask.

  Kirk felt shame at the thought.

  “He’s aware of what he did when he was afflicted,” Mendez said, “including what happened on Elba II, since he’s seen the records, but he apparently has no personal memory of those actions, only of his earlier deeds and his time among the Antosians. The man you see will be the Garth you read about at the Academy.”

  “I have just one question left,” Kirk said. “Does he still have the power to change his shape?”

  “He hasn’t used it,” Mendez replied. [26] “Maintaining another shape requires a fair amount of energy, Garth claims, even for Antosians—a different shape can’t be held indefinitely. You saw Cory’s report—he hasn’t seen Garth in any shape but his own since his successful course of treatment began, and he was under constant observation at the asylum until his release. Since arriving at Starfleet headquarters, he’s rarely been alone, and he’s always been himself. It’s possible that his cure has suppressed his morphing ability.”

  “Or that he simply doesn’t choose to use it,” McCoy said, “in order to show that you can trust him.”

  “And maybe he’s just waiting for the opportunity to change shape later on, for his own purposes.” Kirk made the statement reluctantly, but it needed to be said. “The fact is that you don’t know for sure.”

  “No,” Admiral Mendez admitted, “we don’t.”

  Alone with Spock in the briefing room, Kirk concluded his account of the meeting with José Mendez. “You’ve read all the reports now,” he finished. “What do you think, Spock? Was Garth insane?”

  Spock sat back and raised an eyebrow. “He was so diagnosed. We witnessed his behavior on Elba II. But perhaps you are asking a different question, namely whether or not his actions and state of mind were somehow misinterpreted by observers.”

  “What I’m asking is if he still might be insane.”

  “I am always surprised by human suspicion,” Spock said after a moment. “It is so transcendent of [27] the facts, so unconcerned with being wrong at the moment.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “In another age,” Spock said, “the fate of Captain Garth might have been deemed a tragedy, with so much intelligence, nobility, and grace brought so low.”

  “But today,” Kirk said with a small smile, “the tragedy can have a happy ending, peace be to Shakespeare. The tragedians of past centuries might have been disturbed by our progress in these matters. It would certainly have deprived them of dramatic possibilities.”

  Spock nodded. “Indeed, they would have found our cure for Captain Garth’s illness implausible, even though I would still say to them that the human beings of our time carry around enough remaining flaws for tragedies to be possible.”

  “But only rarely the tragedy of mental illness,” Kirk said.

  “There are still tragic circumstances, Captain, created by errors in judgment, where the flaw of character is not delusional in nature, but is lived as if it were a virtue.”

  “In which the villain of the piece is convinced that he is the hero,” Kirk added, “and is not deluded or mentally ill, but is certain that he’s right.”

  “And might have been right, or at least successful in his aims, right or wrong.” Spock steepled his fingers. “It is possible to argue that Captain Garth was never insane, that he truly believed in his ambitions.”

  [28] “Even that he believed that he was on a mission for the Antosians during his incarceration on Elba II,” Kirk said.

  “The problem of sanity,” Spock continued, “as I have described it on occasion, divides into separate questions. A conqueror or political figure may perhaps not be deemed insane, aside from the empirically verifiable question of whether or not he has a physiological disorder that can cause insanity, if his ambitions are possible and can be achieved—in other words, if what is in his mind adheres to external reality. This is aside from the morality of his ambitions, since possible achievements may be moral, immoral, or amoral, desirable or undesirable, apart from the sanity of one who sees them as possible. Delusion, then, is always a lack of sanity in some sense, as distinct from ignorance, but even an apparent megalomania may not be insanity if served by an intellect capable of making its dreams a reality.”

  “And the case of Garth?” Kirk asked.

  “Captain Garth was demonstrably insane before he received his treatments. He may be rational now, if not necessarily ethical. What does he propose to do on Antos IV to allay the Federation’s suspicions of that people?”

  “From what he proposes, he plans to talk to them and bring back assurances of their peaceful intentions, as well as assuring them that the Federation has no designs on their world. After that, presumably [29] there would be a treaty and some sort of arrangement for diplomatic representatives. And if the treaty were violated—”

  “There is not a shred of evidence,” Spock said, “that the Antosians have ever had any ambitions beyond their own planet, or ever will. There has never been any such evidence. It is that mismatch between our experience with the Antosians and Garth’s previous attempt at aggression against them that supported the diagnosis of insanity, a diagnosis confirmed by the evidence of structural and organic changes in his brain.”

  Kirk leaned back in his chair. Garth’s medical records showed no sign of such changes now, no sign of any of the neurological alterations that had accompanied his insanity and contributed to it. That could have been an indication that he no longer possessed his shape-changing talents, but it was impossible to be sure.

  “It is possible,” Spock went on, “that Garth’s instability was caused by his acquisition of the power of cellular metamorphosis that saved his life after his accident.”

  His first officer, Kirk thought as he listened, was apparently thinking along lines similar to his own.

  “It is also possible,” Spock continued, “that something of this instability lingers, and may express itself in certain resentments against the Antosians—suitably rationalized, of course. He may be projecting his own doubts about himself onto the Antosians, [30] building them up into a menace, plausibly a minor threat now but growing larger later on. And by calling attention to that danger now, Garth’s most secret self may imagine that he could become the savior of the Federation. The argument from pure possibility has no end, Captain. It may be both true and false, as revealed by time, even if the argument is given by a madman. One is reminded of your ancient Rome, which concluded that it could not tolerate two Romes on the shores of the Mediterranean basin, and so destroyed its rival, Carthage. But it took three wars for the Romans to do it.”

  “But was Garth insane when we first encountered him?” Kirk asked.

  “If we mark insanity by the unrealistic dreams of conquest that he held at the asylum, then yes, he was insane. Garth might have acquired one starship to achieve his aims, though even that was unlikely, but he had no fleet, and no followers other than a few deranged fellow inmates. We might have concluded that he was merely mistaken in his aims, dangerous but not insane, had it not been for the detectable malfunctions in his physiology.”

  Kirk frowned. “But you were saying that his mad ambitions might have been completely sane.”

  “In other circumstances, yes.”

  “But what is he now, Spock? What is he now?”

  “That is what we must learn,” Spock said
. “I see that you share some of the fears of Garth expressed by others.”

  [31] “I have to go by the evidence,” Kirk said, “and everything we have indicates that Garth is well and able to return to duty. Admiral Mendez has enough faith in that evidence to send Garth on an important mission, and that’s reassuring. But I can’t forget that he killed two of his own officers and caused the death of a woman as mad as himself. He might have killed us, too.”

  “That was when he was insane,” Spock said, “when his affliction was forcing him to behave reprehensibly as surely as if his mind were being controlled by some powerful outside force. It would not be logical to assign blame to him for those deeds.” He paused. “It troubles me now that so many in Starfleet Command and the Federation’s diplomatic corps seem to share Garth’s worries about the Antosians.”

  Kirk sighed. “I must share them, mustn’t I? We can’t risk doing nothing.”

  “That is the practical conclusion, Captain, but it may be wrong.”

  “And consider this,” Kirk said. “Perhaps Garth knows that nothing will come of this mission, that no real danger exists, and he is merely undertaking a politically harmless mission in order to restore and build our trust in him.”

  “To what end?” Spock asked. “Other than of course to regain the trust of Starfleet.”

  “Perhaps against the day when he is in command of a starship again, perhaps a fleet.”

  [32] “But will he not be in command of the Enterprise?”

  “He’ll be in charge of the mission. Strictly speaking, I’ll be reporting to him, but only as it relates to the mission objectives.”

  “I see.” Spock looked thoughtful for a moment. “But if we reason thus, then is it not possible that Captain Garth is playing a game of deep cover, and that somehow he will be in command despite all our safeguards—that he is, in fact, already in command?”

  Kirk shook his head. “We’re being a bit paranoid ourselves. Pretty soon I’ll start wondering if McCoy and I were actually talking to Admiral Mendez. I’ll start thinking that the admiral wasn’t really there, that his image was an illusion. After all, we’ve had that experience with José Mendez before, when the Talosians were able to make us believe he was aboard my ship when he wasn’t.”

  “That particular stratagem,” Spock said, “is beyond Garth’s abilities. I had the help of the Talosians then, who created that illusion, while Captain Garth has no such resource. It would not have been possible for him to take on the admiral’s form and confer with you and Dr. McCoy without detection by Starfleet Command, and his call clearly came from Starfleet headquarters.”

  Kirk smiled. “You’re right. The reports are thoroughly convincing, and I saw how Garth was beginning to recover even before we left the asylum.” He [33] had not seen the mad Lord Garth then, only a man grasping at sanity and apparently free of his demons. “There’s no reason to think Captain Garth has anything in mind except for his stated purpose.” Kirk sighed. “I guess this mission will just have to run its course.”

  “It would seem so, Captain.”

  Chapter Three

  CAPTAIN FATIMA BAKSH, commanding officer of the U.S.S. Gell-Mann, was a dark-eyed woman with a direct, piercing gaze that was evident even on the viewscreen on the desk of Kirk’s quarters. “Captain Garth is prepared for his departure,” she said, “and we will be aboard the Enterprise in two hours. I will be piloting the shuttlecraft myself.”

  “I look forward to meeting you both,” Kirk said to the image on the small screen above his desk. He had gone to his quarters to put on his formal uniform; he wanted Garth to have a proper reception, but had decided to keep the protocol to a minimum. How Garth responded to that might indicate whether he was dealing with a man who simply wanted to proceed with his mission or who still retained a little of the irrational pride of “Lord Garth.”

  [35] “I will not be staying,” Captain Baksh said, “since the Gell-mann is due at Starbase 9 tomorrow.”

  Kirk studied the woman. She had not betrayed any emotion during their brief discussion of the arrangements for Garth’s arrival, but he had glanced at her record earlier. As a lieutenant, she had been one of the officers serving with Garth during his mission to Antos IV, and one of those on the bridge who had disabled Garth and then seized control of his ship. That she had been assigned to ferry Garth to the Enterprise was probably not a coincidence; Mendez would be testing them both, to see how they reacted.

  “How is Captain Garth getting along?” Kirk asked, trying to keep his tone casual.

  Captain Baksh narrowed her eyes. “He appears to be doing well. I have not seen that much of him—I have my duties, and he has been absorbed in reading a great many volumes on history and diplomacy. We’ve played a few games of chess. He always checkmates me.” She let out her breath. “I know what you are asking, Captain Kirk. You want to know if I have glimpsed any signs of the madman I saw on the bridge of the Heisenberg.”

  “I didn’t want to put it quite that bluntly.” Kirk was, however, grateful that she had done so.

  “I haven’t seen that man,” Baksh said, “only the Captain Garth he was before his accident, the officer I admired and hoped to emulate. By all outward signs, he is completely recovered.”

  [36] “That’s good to hear,” Kirk said.

  “Yet I keep having the feeling that he is hiding something, holding something back. It is perhaps a measure of my own weakness and intolerance that I cannot quite trust him, that I am glad he will not be in command of my starship, that I still cannot banish the memory of the man who shot two of my fellow officers and would have killed the rest of us if we hadn’t stopped him.”

  “I understand,” Kirk said, feeling the same.

  “But he was very ill then, and not responsible for that. He was a man possessed. I was standing near him when he gave his order to destroy Antos IV, and he was terrified—I saw the fear in his eyes. I have no doubt that he truly believed that we were in great danger, and have often thought since then that we might have found some way to disarm him that would not have cost the lives of two of our officers. When he fired at them, I am sure that he thought he was acting in self-defense. Still ...” Baksh paused. “I have my sense of duty, and Starfleet has pronounced him fit for service. Every crew member aboard the Gell-Mann has been under strict orders to treat Garth with respect and honor.” Her mouth twisted. “I wish you both a most successful mission, Captain.”

  “Curious,” Spock said, “that Captain Garth should still so fear transporters.”

  The shuttlecraft from the Gell-Mann had just arrived. Kirk stood with Spock and Yeoman [37] Wodehouse in the shuttlebay, waiting to greet Garth and Baksh.

  “I don’t find it curious at all,” Kirk said. “In fact, I sympathize with the man. Just think of what he went through physically. And if you consider what mastering cellular metamorphosis in order to save his life cost him in mental health, you can imagine the depth of his fear. No chance, however small, would seem worth risking such a catastrophe again.”

  “True, but the odds of another such accident are extremely remote.”

  Kirk glanced at his first officer. “Spock, no risk, however remote, may be worth it to him, given what he might lose again. A one in a trillion chance might seem too much to risk.”

  “The odds are much greater than that now, Captain.”

  “Please don’t tell me the exact number.”

  “Several trillions to one,” Spock said.

  Kirk smiled at his friend’s uncharacteristic imprecision, then turned his attention to the shuttlecraft, more apprehensive about this meeting than he had expected to be.

  Captain Baksh left the craft and descended the ramp, followed by Captain Garth. Both captains wore their formal uniforms, and Garth his decorations: three Medals of Honor, several starbursts, the Palm Leaf and the Oak Leaf, the ribbons denoting several of his successful campaigns. Kirk felt a bit reassured by the sight of the decorations, and by knowing that Starfleet was allowing Garth
to wear the medals his [38] valor had earned him. He was an impressive figure; his tall form towered over the slight figure of Captain Baksh. His graying hair was slightly shorter than it had been during his time on Elba II. Kirk noticed then that Garth was smiling slightly, as the mad Lord Garth sometimes had just before launching into one of his rants, but there was no madness in this man’s blue eyes, only a calm curiosity.

  The three in the shuttlebay stood at attention. Yeoman Wodehouse lifted a whistle to her lips and sounded a brief ceremonial note to mark the arrival of the two captains, and then Kirk stepped forward. “Welcome aboard the Enterprise, Captain Baksh,” he said. “Allow me to introduce my first officer, Mr. Spock, and my aide, Yeoman Lesley Wodehouse.”

  Captain Baksh said, “Captain Kirk, please allow me to present Captain Garth of Izar, returning to duty as a representative of the Federation to Antos IV.”

  Garth bowed his head slightly. If he was surprised by the small size of the Enterprise’s welcoming party, he gave no sign of it. “Ah, yes,” Garth said in a low, even voice, “Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. I am told that we have met before, when I was ill, but my memory is understandably vague on that point.”

  “Of course,” Kirk said. “I’m pleased to see, that you’ve recovered.”

  “Greetings, Captain Garth,” Spock said. “I look forward to serving with you.”

  “We’re holding a reception in your honor,” Kirk [39] added, “in our recreation room. Our officers and crew are looking forward to meeting you, sir.”

  “I am so sorry that I cannot join you,” Captain Baksh murmured, “but our mission to Starbase 9 cannot wait.” She glanced at Garth. “Farewell, Captain, and may your mission succeed.”