Trapped Like Rats

 

Name: Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 – Story 4 “In the Maze”

Author: Jennifer Guttridge

Publication Date: 1/1978

Publisher: Bantam Books

Page Number: 28

Historian’s Note: Sometime after The Second Season of the Animated Series   

Cast of Characters:  Captain James T. Kirk         Commander Spock              Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones”              Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”        Lieutenant  Hikaru Sulu              Lieutenant Nyota Uhura          Lieutenant Wardoff          Ensign Pavel Chekov      several unnamed security crewmen    Unnamed insect-like alien

Starships and/or Starbases: USS Enterprise NCC-1701

Planets: Unnamed planet in a feudal state

My Spoiler filled summary and review: The Enterprise in sent to a primitive planet that has been labeled “off limits” by the Federation following the Prime Directive.  The reason they are here is there is a structure that would impossible for a feudal society the planet has to have built.  While doing scans Kirk loses his patience with their non-success and, over Spock’s objections, sends down a landing party.  However, they soon lose contact with that party.  Kirk then decides to lead a new landing party to find them. 

                Dressing in native garb, Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, and a number of security personnel beam down to the planet.  They come to complex and they find a door. They open it and Kirk goes in and disappears.  Spock and McCoy follow and disappear as well, but they disappeared together and end up in the same place.

                Spock and McCoy wake up in a dark corridor and as they walk down it, they find many connected hallways some of them leading to dead ends. McCoy at this point states it is like they are walking around in a maze (thus the title of the story).  Some of these places are dangerous, have different environments, and at one point Spock almost loses a foot to one of creatures in there with them. 

                Meanwhile elsewhere in the structure, Captain Kirk has found himself in a cage.  The entity keeping him prisoner is a large insect-like creature.  They seem to be some laboratory and Kirk can see the creature watching Spock and McCoy struggle on the viewer.  Kirk tries to find away out but is unable.

We can simulate anything we want.

                Then everything ends.  It turns out that this insect-like alien is a scientist who was unaware the people he was experimenting on either the Starfleet officers or native inhabitants of the planet were in fact intelligent sentient lifeforms.  It had been operating under the assumption that they were no more than lab rats.  When it sees Kirk responds emotionally to what he sees on the monitoring screen, it suddenly realizes, to its horror, that the experiments they were conducting were on people like them. The creature immediately releases all the officers and apologizes for the horrors caused and the deaths of two of the first landing party. It turns out the whole maze was in an illusion making device of the alien—like an environmental simulator seen in “The Practical Joker.” The alien is prepared to leave the planet as soon as the Enterprise does. 

We didn't want this!

Additional thoughts: Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famed science educator, once engaged in a thought experiment with the question “would aliens find us intelligent.” The idea is simple: take the difference between humans and chimpanzees.  Chimps live in the jungle and eat bugs, while humans have an international space station.  What is the smartest chimp capable of doing?  Setting up an umbrella perhaps?  Human children can do that.  Maybe an alien may look at what our smartest scientists can do and it reminds them of the capabilities of children.  Humans are just dumb animals.

                That is basically what this story uses. Aliens so far beyond humans and other humanoids that they don’t even notice the other living creatures are smart. It then combines that idea with a similar one from the classic episode “The Devil in the Dark.” The concept of not everything that maybe big and scary is necessarily bad.  This time however it is not the humans not understanding that the silicon-based Horta is intelligent, it is the bug alien that doesn’t see that in humans.  When it finally realizes what it’s doing, the alien becomes really remorseful just like the miners in the earlier mentioned episode.  It goes from being a scary monster to just another explorer.

Should it be canon: Yes, absolutely this story would be a great little addition to Star Trek canon.

Cover Art: As I stated in the first story:

The cover has the Enterprise flying in front of what appears to be a wrecked space station.  Both appear to be in orbit around a planet that you can see part of in the corner.  There is this red haze that surrounds everything.

Final Grade: Final Grade 4 of 5