"So, how're you feeling?"
"I'm fine. When do I get outta here?"
Lee shook her head in sympathy. As a fellow pilot, she knew exactly how Max felt, but there was no use rushing things. "In another two days," she said. "The doc wants to keep you under observation for now."
Max groaned. "This just isn't fair," she complained. "I'm stuck in an infirmary bed while you guys are off doing planetary surveys." She folded her arms above her blanket, making no effort to hide her dissatisfaction.
"Well, don't be jealous, Max. The planet we're heading for promises to be spectacularly dull. You won't miss much."
"Still, I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me."
"Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, eh? Is that it?"
"Yeah."
"Well, you busted up your fighter pretty good. It's gonna take two more weeks before it's all back in one piece again. Be glad it's only gonna take two days to fix you!" Carter's facial expression took on decidedly serious overtones. "If Major Tarik hadn't gone out and scraped you off the surface of the Ba'ku planet, we wouldn't even be having this conversation."
That statement seemed to take some of the steam out of Max's protestations. Lee lightened up and gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Relax. It could be worse, you know."
"How's that?" asked Max dourly.
Carter turned and walked toward the exit. Just before reaching the door, she turned and delivered the punchline. "You could've been assigned to go with Garek and Kimmie!"
"All ready, campers?" said Carter to her crewmates.
A chorus of assents answered, and thus bolstered, Carter launched the runabout Hudson toward their assigned destination, the planet Jo Schmidt had earlier dubbed "Pompey".
As the shuttle left the Arizona-A, Kassia's heart jumped into her throat as memories of her Away Mission to the Ba'ku world entered her mind. But taking a deep breath, she pushed them aside as best as she could, focusing on the fact that this was a different mission, and one she was more prepared for.
The Hudson's crew consisted of Carter at the helm, Kassia manning the science console, Murphy taking good care of the engines, and Sam Beckett rounding out the team as recon specialist and science backup -- a competent bunch if Carter ever saw one.
The trip to Pompey would take a few hours, so Carter decided to use the time wisely. She was supposed to train Kassia in the operation of standard field equipment, so while Murphy was in the back tinkering and Sam was sitting at the rear of the cockpit munching on a sandwich, she and Kassia had some quiet time to study.
Carter was impressed by how quickly Kassia picked up new skills. She only had to be shown once how to do something before trying it herself, and usually succeeding. By the end of their session, they'd fully explored the various operating modes of the tricorder, and had started on the basics of the science station on the runabout.
"This is great!" replied Kassia with excitement, as she mastered each new task. She found it fascinating and it totally took up her attention, leaving her no time for idle thoughts.
"You know," said Carter, "I'm a little jealous."
"Of me?" asked Kassia incredulously.
"I wish I learned stuff this quick back when I was at the Academy!" laughed Carter, and Kassia joined her. But their newfound camaraderie was rudely interrupted by an insistent beeping from Carter's console. She turned to see what it was, and a second later reported, "We're approaching Pompey."
Eager to test out her new skills, Kassia began playing her fingers across the controls of the runabout's sensors and reciting her interpretation of the data as it came in:
"Planet is class-M. Gravity is 98% of normal, atmosphere is a little heavy with inert gasses, and surface radiation is extremely low -- all well within safety limits. A strong magnetic field indicates a large iron core and accounts for the low surface rad count. No evidence of tectonic activity for at least the last 250,000,000 years. Minimal surface water...."
Kassia frowned slightly at the next set of data, but figured it out in short order. "There's an unusually low amount of nucleogenic particles in the atmosphere." She turned to Lee and commented, "If anyone lived here, they probably wouldn't have a word for 'rain'," then turned back to her console and continued. "Average global temperature 54 degrees Fahrenheit with a deviation of only 15 degrees due to the planet's slight axial tilt and an almost circular orbit."
"Oh my God this place is boring!" exclaimed Carter. "We'll be done here in fifteen minutes at this rate."
"Well...." said Kassia hesitantly.
"You found something?" asked Carter hopefully.
"I'm not sure," answered Kassia. She was playing the sensor controls, trying to coax more information out of them, but the expression on her face just kept getting more and more confused. Finally, she threw up her hands in exasperation and said, "I give up! Take a look at this, Lee, and tell me what you see."
"Okay," said Carter. She switched her helm controls over to the science configuration and studied the data that had Kassia so puzzled. But that same look of puzzlement quickly took up residence on her face too. She turned to Kassia and asked, "So, you up for an away mission?"
Kassia tried hiding her initial response of fear, and nodded her assent. She was bound to have to go on an Away Mission eventually and now was as good a time as any, she thought. "Lets do it!"
The Hudson had landed at the bottom of a small rocky canyon. The walls were steep, rust-colored rock, and there wasn't a living thing to be seen. The four officers stepped cautiously from the ship and onto the gravely soil. Carter and Murphy had phasers drawn just in case, and Kassia and Sam were busy with their tricorders.
A few seconds of scanning, and Kassia had pinpointed their destination. "That way," she said, pointing up the canyon. "About a hundred yards."
Carter took the lead, and the intrepid crew sallied forth. There was no stir in the air, so the only sound was the crunching of their boots on the rocks, and although the sun was high overhead, their air was decidedly chilly. This planet's sun was slightly redder that Earth's sun, so it cast a bloody tinge on everything.
At last, they arrived at the spot. It was a wide crevice in the floor of the canyon, cutting diagonally across it. From end to end it was as wide as the canyon -- about a mile -- and it was about twenty feet across to the far side. The crevice was an interesting geological feature, but it was the stuff inside the crevice that had confounded the Hudson's sensors.
Filling the crevice almost to the brim was green goo.
As the four officers came up to the edge of the crevice, Sam pinched her nose and said, "Pee-yoo!"
Carter agreed whole-heartedly with that assessment, but decided not to comment. Instead, she ordered, "Let's just stick to the facts. Kassia. Is this what you scanned from orbit?"
Kassia was holding her tricorder out in front of her waving it back and forth over the goo. "Yes," she answered, and judging from the expression on her face, it was still producing impossible scan results. Sam, having quickly recovered from her olfactory overload, was scanning the substance too, both with her tricorder and with her cybernetic implants.
Kassia reported, "I'm getting the same readings again. The tricorder simply cannot analyze this substance. It has some of the characteristics of a lifeform, but doesn't register as such. I'm also reading weird electrochemical properties, static kinetic energy and interphasic folding."
"And it reeks," added Sam from the background.
"Concentrate, Sam," remonstrated Carter. "Are your implants picking up anything more?"
Sam walked to the edge of the crevice and hunched down. She turned her cybernetic devices to the problem, but after a few moments, shook her head in the negative. She stood back up and turned to face Carter. "It's unreadable all across the spectrum, Lee."
Carter pondered. She holstered her phaser and took a step closer to the edge and looked down into the goo. It was semi-translucent. Denser globules about the size of grapefruits and colored slightly darker seemed to drift sluggishly throughout the more transparent mass of viscous fluid. It might just be her eyes playing tricks on her, but she thought she could see tiny electrical sparks flash between the globules every few seconds.
Whenever two globules touched each other, they merged into a single larger globule, and sometimes, the larger globules would split apart into several smaller ones which would then drift apart. Was there a pattern to the motion? What did the electrical discharges signify? Carter suddenly had a wild thought.
"Could this substance be alive?" she asked her crew.
Kassia and Sam looked at each other, then back at Carter and shrugged. "I don't see how," said Kassia. "With readings like this," she indicated her tricorder, "there's no way it's alive. And I'm not sensing anything either . . ."
"Oh," said Carter, disappointment showing on her face. A discovery like that would actually have made their trip worthwhile. "All right. What is it then?"
Kassia and Sam looked at each other again, then back at Carter and once again shrugged. Kassia ventured, "It looks like jelly."
Sam ventured, "It's smelly."
Carter looked pained. "That's all you can come up with? Smelly jelly?" Kassia and Sam smiled sheepishly. When no better explanation was forthcoming, Carter had no choice but to acquiesce. She said, "Well, all right then. 'Smelly Jelly' it is. Lets get a sample and get back to the ship.
As the four officers walked away from the crevice back to their waiting ship, the mass of the Smelly Jelly stirred soupily. A single thick extension about a foot and a half in diameter extruded from the pool and rose until it swayed unevenly above the rest of its mass.
At the top of the column, a section partially pinched itself off, forming a round knob atop a thin neck. In the round knob, the ever-present dense globules floated around and arranged themselves into what looked suspiciously like a humanoid face. Then, one from each side of the main column, a pair of thin extrusions sprouted and stretched until they were about two and a half feet long. All together, it looked like a bowling pin with arms.
The Smelly Jelly seemed to watch the humans go. It lifted its arm, and slowly waved bye-bye.
As they boarded the shuttle to leave, something tickled at Kassia's mind and she stopped before entering. She turned back around and looked over the planet surface around her. There was nothing there . . . and just a quickly the sensation was gone. With a shrugged, she climbed aboard the Hudson, ready to return to the Arizona-A.