Strangers From the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

the human condition until we outgrew it, Hitler or no. That one-man-as-catalyst theory is a lot of horse hockey!”
    Kirk shrugged. “I don’t know that for sure. Sometimes it seems so much hinges on little things. One small incident, one misspoken word, one tiny misinterpreted gesture and the whole structure collapses. When I think of how much power we have, and how little common sense, I get the shakes.”
    “Which is exactly why you’ll love this book, Jim,” McCoy promised. “It deals with an incident none of us knew about until now. Our first real contact with alien life, the one the textbooks never told us about, and how we almost botched it so completely we might never have tried it again. Might have curled up in our little isolationist nest and pulled the covers over our heads and let history and the Federation pass us by.”
    “I don’t buy that, Bones,” Jim Kirk said, moving about the room winding those of his antique clocks that needed winding, a nightly ritual. “Sounds like a pretty big fish story to me.”
    “Not if you consider the era we’re talking about,” McCoy argued. “Earth was less than fifty years away from Khan’s war, had just begun to consider itself a united world, and it had its growing pains. People still living who’d lost family and friends in that war and could never be reconciled, some cities still in ruins, a lot of grievances and old vendettas still festering. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either the best or the worst time for a bunch of aliens to come dropping in out of the sky.”
    “By the time Amity found that Vulcan ship adrift off Neptune all that was over,” Kirk said, resetting a particularly recalcitrant grandfather clock, half listening. “We’d already been to Alpha Centauri—”
    “You haven’t been listening to a damn word I’ve said, have you?” McCoy said disgustedly. “This happened a full twenty years before that.”
    Kirk restarted the grandfather’s pendulum, closed the glass fronting, and frowned.
    “What?”
    “This Vulcan ship fell to Earth while the Centauri mission was still three years from its destination. We’re talking sublight, remember? The crew heading for Centauri had no idea they’d find an advanced civilization, had no idea what they’d find. This was the Dark Ages of interstellar travel, and here’s an interesting point: mankind had been sending and listening for radio messages from other worlds since the 1970s. We were actively seeking contact, but only on our terms. We had to be the aggressors. It was okay for us to go outside our system and find ‘them’—whoever ‘they’ were— out there , but God forbid ‘they’ presume to set foot on our soil without knocking first. Worse, not only did they look funny and talk funny, but they had all these spooky habits like reading minds and suppressing their emotions and living practically forever from our standpoint, and being stronger and smarter and having warp drive…”
    Kirk sat slowly, fiddled with the fireplace poker, watched the flames.
    “Zefram Cochrane is credited with the breakthrough in warp drive,” he said adamantly, as if it were set in stone somewhere.
    “As far as human technology was concerned,” McCoy corrected him. “The Vulcans already had it.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    “Is it? They were out in space centuries before we were. You’ve heard Spock’s lecture on ethnocentricity, on how just because we haven’t discovered something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist? How many superior species have we discovered since? That’s the whole crux of the problem, Jim, the whole thrust of the book. It was the timing that was wrong. The Amity story makes good copy. Brave Earthmen rescuing injured aliens from their damaged ship and all that. But you of all people should know that human history is seldom that neat. By the time of the Amity incident we were receptive to alien contact. Twenty years earlier Vulcans or anybody else were just