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

 

THE CREW OF THE ENTERPRISE CHASE BUTTERFLIES

 

Name: Star Trek: The New Voyages – Story 7 “The Winged Dreamers”

Author: Jennifer Guttridge, with an introduction by DeForest Kelley  

Publication Date: 3/1976

Publisher: Bantam Books

Page Number: 37

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 Langely        Lieutenant Kyle         Nurse Christine Chapel          Ensign Pavel Chekov      Crewman Caros Durban                 unnamed security guards      

Starships and/or Starbases: USS Enterprise NCC-1701, unnamed shuttlecraft

Planets: unnamed planet

My Spoiler filled summary and review: The Enterprise is exploring a strange new world. It is a M-Class planet, right in its star’s goldilocks zone. Yet, no intelligent life has developed on the planet.  As they walk along the planet’s surface this little fact has the trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy confused. In a short while Kirk and McCoy head back to the ship via the transporter, Spock stays behind to supervise things on the surface.

Just exploring the planet!

                At this point members of the crew start to hallucinate.  Their dreams seem to be manifesting in reality.  Forty of them suddenly stop reporting in and go missing.  When Captain Kirk becomes aware of this on the Enterprise, he orders all crew members currently on the planet to get back to the ship and cancels all shore parties.  Things go from bad to worse.  A crewman dies and McCoy can’t tell what it was that killed him.  Mr. Spock finds the missing members of the crew, but they flat out refuse to return to the ship and they don’t think Spock should be allowed to go back either.

Dreams becoming real

                Kirk and McCoy try to transport back down to the surface but massive power failures have caused the ship’s transporters to go offline.  This forces the two officers to use the shuttlecraft, which doesn’t bother McCoy because he hates the transporter anyway.  When they get to the planet and they find Spock unconscious but McCoy is able to revive him.  At this point both the Captain and the Doctor start to hallucinate.  Only Spock seems to be immune, but they don’t know how long that will last for.  So, it is decided that the best they could do would be to get on the shuttlecraft, get off this planet, and get back on to the ship.  This works although Kirk almost ruins everything trying to take the helm controls away from Spock when he hallucinates that the Enterprise is on fire.

On fire! Maybe not!

                They manage to get on the ship but find the power of illusions hasn’t been stopped. At one point Kirk is given the illusion that they have already won and all the missing have been returned before Spock brings him to reality.  They determine that there is a native species that is a collective consciousness and that they were simply caught in the middle of it.  At first, they thought this may have been an aquatic species but they determine it was actually this planet’s version of butterflies.  They negotiate with the butterfly collective.  This insures peace and the return of the missing crew.  The adventure is over.

 Additional thoughts: This was an interesting little story.  If the episodes “Shore Leave” and "This Side of Paradise” had a baby this story is it what probably look like.  Like the former, the crew on shore leave are on an apparently empty planet and all of a sudden their dreams start coming to life.  Like the later, the crew gets addicted to the planet and munity in order to stay.

                Now I was a little taken back at the beginning when Kirk and Spock were confused about no intelligent life on the planet. Now I remember the old saying that if the life of the Earth put onto a 24-hour clock then all of human history would be in the final two minutes to midnight.  So how do Kirk and Spock don’t know they have shown up on this planet three minutes to midnight? 

Fun times! But this time its butterflies!

                Of course we learn that there is life here just not the kind we would expect to run into.  This could have been one of those great Star Trek moments like “The Devil in the Dark.”  Where we come to know and respect life radically different from our own and be able to see similarities as well as differences.  However, the whole thing is ruined by Spock and McCoy speculating what life form on the planet would be best to evolve in order to get or the smart butterflies.

                I thought it was very ironic that shortly Captain Kirk is given the illusion that he has already unexpectedly won and his crew returns, a paragraph later he really does unexpectedly win and has his crew return.  It was almost as if the writer got board with her own story and just wanted to end it now. It was not a clean stop however.        

Should it be canon: Yes, I don’t see any problem with this story becoming part the official voyages of the USS Enterprise.  The story has flaws but so don’t many episodes.

Cover Art: What I said in the review of the first story: 

“The cover is beautiful.  You have the Enterprise flying in all its glory in the bottom center of the image.  Behind it looks like a space station built on an asteroid.  Flying above in the opposite direction is an unknown starship whose design I don’t recognize.”  

Final Grade: Final Grade 3 of 5