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knew the rules of the game or even the nature of the other players, didn't seem to phase them. They could all be killed— he could be killed—in an instant, and it didn't concern them in the slightest!
    Crandall shuddered, remembering the barely suppressed glee he had sensed beneath the chief engineer's seemingly matter-of-fact tone as he had explained their situation over the intercom.
    And suddenly he wondered—could the disappearance of the gate be a sham? Could it still be there? Could it be that they—Kirk and the rest of his wildeyed adventurers on the bridge—simply didn't want to return to the Federation yet? Could they have cooked up this terrifying story to justify themselves in his eyes? And in the eyes of the crew, at least some of whom must have more sense?
    Or could the gate itself be a hoax? All he had seen for himself was the viewscreen with its mass of stars, and that could certainly have been faked by anyone on the bridge, particularly that treacherous Vulcan. Beyond that, he had only Kirk's word for what had happened. The fact that the officers backed up their captain meant nothing.
    For a moment, hope surged through Crandall, but it faded almost as quickly as it had come. He could not bring himself to believe that even they could be so totally irresponsible.
    Pulling in a deep breath, he slowly pushed himself to his feet. His legs were again steady, he found, at least steady enough to get him around without falling. He moved deliberately to the door, wondering if he would be allowed back on the bridge yet.
    And wondering what good it would do him if he were.

    Once it was confirmed that the Enterprise had indeed suffered no damage as a result of the cylinder's destruction, detailed observations of the sector of space in which the Enterprise found itself quickly got underway. First, the visual impression of the extreme density of the stellar population was confirmed. With stars generally separated by less than one light-year, the entire Federation would have fit into less than fifty cubic parsecs. There was also a certain uniformity that had not been encountered in any previously known sector of space. There were virtually no extremely old or extremely young stars. The majority were also class G, not vastly different from Sol, and all were prime candidates, statistically speaking, for having families of planets.
    There were no solidly based theories about how such a cluster, which appeared to extend several hundred parsecs in all directions, could have come about. What generated the most discussion during those first hours, however, was Ensign Chekov's suggestion that there might be a link between the cluster and the gates, or at least between the cluster and the gravitational turbulence associated with many of the gates. Assuming even a moderately dense mass of primordial nebular material, the gravitational turbulence of the gates would be more than enough to trigger the formation of far more stars than would come into existence otherwise.
    Chekov's idea, however, raised more questions than it answered. For one thing, the gates would have to have been in existence billions of years ago, when these stars were formed, which meant that if they were indeed artificial as Spock had suggested, their creators were almost certainly long gone and hence would be of little help to the Enterprise . For another thing, despite the fact that the Enterprise had been deposited here by a gate, there was no evidence now either of that gate or of any of the lesser, "malfunctioning" gates. All of those apparently were back in the Milky Way galaxy, in a sector where star population was, if anything, sparser than average. There was also the rather obvious paradox that if the gravitational turbulence had indeed triggered the formation of the stars, the stars would have formed around the gates, which, if still functioning, would have bled off the infalling matter, thereby preventing the formation of the stars the