The adventure began when the Enterprise was almost six months out, in the vicinity of Uranus (but somewhat above the orbital plane, because of the ship's intended destination). At that time, Captain Kirk and his crew came upon an apparently derelict freighter drifting out of the solar system. I was on duty at the time, but the first word reached earth on the voice channels. Telemetry had to wait for the completion of some previous scientific observations which had been retained until good transmission vectors had been achieved. By the time instrumentation on the freighter reached my station, two or two and a half verbal interchanges had been completed. Tension and excitement in the Land Station had been building during each of the agonizing delays inherent in light-speed communications. After all, who would have imagined any kind of craft, let alone a freighter, floating out of the orbital plane into deep space? Central Registrations in Toronto had already checked for missing and abandoned vessels (and, of course, had found nothing).
Telemetry indicated a standard-class, landable cargo carrier. No energy source was discernable in the preliminary data, and I recommended standard scanning procedures to obtain further information. I was too late. While that data was travelling from the Enterprise to our Land Station, a boarding party had been organized. It consisted of Kirk himself – Kirk was always too adventuresome to be a ship's captain – and three others. One of the others was Spock, who had already begun his career-long association with Kirk. By the time our recommendations got back to the ship, Kirk was already aboard the mystery vessel.
On board, the party found a stale but breathable atmosphere, which proved the integrity of the hull. Spock and an Engineering Technician in the party investigated the status of the ship's systems. Their report, as relayed by the Enterprise, indicated that the ship's internals were in poor condition. Its guidance and thrust control system, in particular, were reported to be unreliable at best, perhaps unsafe. That news hardly interrupted the jokes in the Land Station about the impetuous adventurers of the Enterprise. Many sections of the control systems were necessarily exposed on the outside of the craft and so particularly susceptible to radiation and micrometeorites.
What did excite the Land Officers was the report that Kirk had discovered a passenger on board: A man was living in induced hibernation in the crew quarters. (Induced hibernation had been used on long space journeys until suspended animation techniques were perfected. It would have been the expected technology for any freighter of the time; even some cruisers had not yet been converted.) Kirk's visual observations as relayed to us confirmed his personal identification of the passenger as a pirate who had been known to be operating in the Saturno-Jupiter transport lanes within the past year.
The Enterprise then formally requested instructions from the earth controllers. This was standard procedure; the space crew could not deal with the freighter and also pursue its established scientific mission. If the controllers ordered Enterprise to continue, we would have to launch another cruiser. If, on the other hand, Enterprise took charge of the derelict, the scientific projects would be delayed for at least a year. The standard procedures made good sense, but the section chief on duty in the Land Station did not seem to be impressed; "They probably just want time to find out whether it'll stand towing," he said, while the controllers conferred.
He may have been right. The controllers sent a request for the crew to evaluate the possibilities of returning with the freighter in tow as compared to the dangers to the pirate's life if the ship were left for a second cruiser. The answer, so to speak, arrived about 45 seconds later – long before the request arrived at the Enterprise. It was a recommendation to proceed with towing, and it came complete with telemetry on the conditions of the freighter and its passenger. The controller agreed within 30 minutes. ("They might as well agree," said my section chief; "the Enterprise is probably already heading in.")
The tow was not without incident, either. At first we relied on the official log reports, which were broadcast regularly on the compressed text channels. The logs provided only enough information to arouse the curiousity of every person in the Land Station, regional headquarters, Central Control, and anyone else who had access to them. About a month before the end of the journey the Enterprise and its tow were close enough to permit conversational transmissions; I and everyone else cluttered the "telephone" channels trying to fill in the details of the journey back. Most of the rest of the time we managed to spend our time passing along whatever we had learned from our friends aboard the ship.
Even before the boarding party could return to the Enterprise, the freighter's old reactors malfunctioned. Given the deteriorated condition of the control system, which prevented venting the excess energy through the thrust ports, the neutrino reactors presented the possibility of melting down the entire freighter – and perhaps the Enterprise along with it. Kirk and another crew member rushed to the engineering section where they found the Scat lever by which the entire reaction could be shut down.
The control lever had been literally padlocked into the "on" position; the primitive reactor could not be shut down. Kirk and the Technician tried to forced the lock, but it would not budge. The reaction was already approaching critical. There was no time to disassemble the control housing to bypass the control lever; the reactor shielding would be breached in seconds. All would surely have been lost had not Spock, who had apparently been in another part of the ship, arrived with his Vulcan strength and broken the corroded shackle of the lock.
The control was reset; the vessels and crew were safe. But in view of the fragility of the freighter's systems, Spock was left on board to care for the old vessel. The rest of the party returned to the Enterprise to establish the tow and to set a bearing for home.
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