Strangers From the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t answer.
    “Time I was moving on,” he said pointedly. “Got a six A.M . consult and a morning full of office hours staring me in the face.”
    Kirk tried to block his way to the door, only half kidding.
    “Come on, Bones, tell me. What happened to the Vulcans?”
    McCoy slipped his disk copy of Strangers from the Sky out of a pocket and held it out to Kirk, tantalizing. “Why don’t you read it and find out?”
    Kirk looked at the garish little plastic disk and almost took it. Something about that era of first contacts had always made him uneasy, perhaps the very thing McCoy had been on about all night: the innate Murphy’s Law capacity of humans to botch whatever they put their hands to. He thought about an isolationist Earth, alone against a universe rife with unknowns. No Federation, no Starfleet. No half-Vulcan first officer, who was also his friend…
    Kirk handed the disk back to McCoy. “Thanks, no, Bones. Maybe some other time.”
    “Your loss!” McCoy growled, stalking past him to the door. “I’m going home to find out what does happen!”

TWO
    “Destruction before detection.”
    It was the axiom etched on every scoutcraft commander’s soul. Nevertheless, no commander could depart for what until recently had amounted to a several decades’ journey without the formality of having the words reiterated by the commanding prefect. It might be illogical to hear repeated that which one knew as first principle of one’s profession, yet it was required.
    “Destruction before detection.”
    It was the definitive distillation of the precepts of T’Kahr Savar, first to hold the office of prefect for offworld exploration upon its creation some 170.15 years ago. It could also, of course, be inferred from the philosophy of IDIC as found in the writings of Surak long before such exploration was feasible.
    “It is not given to us,” Prefect Savar had written in his declaration of intent before assuming office those many years ago, “to influence or affect in any way the normal course of events upon any world we may observe in our journeys. The sociopolitical implications of any such intervention are too grave.”
    Subsequent study of those near worlds with advanced civilizations confirmed the wisdom of Savar’s precept. It was found, for example, that the blue-skinned and antennaed inhabitants of one such world had grounded their cosmology in a complex polytheism that rendered their solar system the whole of the universe. To confront them with living proof of the existence of an alien species—pointed-eared, green-blooded, different in all respects—was to throw them into possibly irreconcilable theological turmoil.
    In another instance, the suidaen inhabitants of the 61 Cygnus system, despite their own recent history of space exploration, were a conspicuously xenophobic species, prone to violence when their beliefs, however erroneous, were challenged. To communicate with such a species would only provoke the violence Surak had sought to eradicate among his people.
    And while the inhabitants of the Sol system were highly advanced, heterogeneous, open to the new and strange, and had in fact been actively seeking communication with other intelligent life for over seventy of their years, they had only recently found peace among themselves after a series of global wars. Any threat to that tenuous peace from without was anathema.
    “It is our purpose to study these worlds, with a view toward a time when first contact is deemed practicable, without giving any evidence that we ourselves exist,” Savar had concluded in his declaration. “For that reason, any craft disabled within an inhabited system must self-destruct before its presence is discovered. Destruction before detection.”
    Destruction before detection. In the ensuing years it had never yet come to that, yet every scoutcraft was equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, and every commander was prepared at all times to activate it.
    Destruction