Kirk and Spock's search quickly yielded a crucial discovery.
During a visit to a renowned marine research institute in San Francisco as "interested sponsors," they met Dr. Gillian Taylor, who was in charge of researching cetacean behavior.
As she led them on a tour of the institute's facilities, Dr. Taylor pointed to two gracefully swimming humpback whales in a massive tank, her voice filled with both pride and concern.
"These are George and Grace," she introduced, "the treasures of our institute, and key to helping us understand humpback whale language and social structure. But..."
She sighed, her gaze drifting into the distance, "Their kind in the ocean are facing the threat of extinction; whaling ships are still active. We have limited funding and limited protection capabilities.
In fact, we are preparing to transport them to the open sea next week for a trial release. This is for their protection, but the outlook... no one knows."
This news stirred Kirk and Spock.
The target was right before them, and about to be released into the vast ocean; once they entered the open sea, finding and capturing them again would be incredibly difficult.
The timing had to be precisely before the release.
However, directly proposing to "borrow" these two whales to take back to the future would obviously be considered preposterous or insane.
Kirk tried to communicate with Dr. Taylor in a more veiled way, hinting at a possible "safe haven," but Dr. Taylor was deeply skeptical.
Just as negotiations reached an impasse, Kirk decided to take a risk.
He requested Dr. Taylor to go to a "safe place" for a more in-depth discussion.
In a secluded warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area, Osiris' massive dark red mechanical body deactivated its optical camouflage, appearing before a stunned Dr. Taylor.
"Dr. Taylor," Osiris' synthesized voice spoke steadily, his very appearance being the most powerful evidence, "Captain Kirk's words are true. We are from the future. Earth in the future will face a devastating crisis caused by the extinction of humpback whales.
George and Grace are the only solution. We need to bring them back to our time to respond to an alien probe that is destroying Earth."
Facing this scene beyond comprehension and the logically rigorous statement, Dr. Taylor's scientific mind, after the initial shock, began to be forced to accept this incredible reality.
She loved these whales and knew deeply that if Kirk's words were true, then this concerned not only the fate of the whales but also the future of the entire Earth.
After an intense internal struggle and repeatedly confirming the sincerity of Kirk and his team, as well as the far-advanced technology displayed by Osiris, Dr. Taylor ultimately chose to believe.
She agreed to use her authority and expertise at the institute to assist Kirk's team in secretly transferring George and Grace before the scheduled release operation began.
A closely linked action plan then took shape.
Scott and McCoy were responsible for urgently constructing specialized transport containers on the Enterprise within a limited time, capable of simulating a marine environment, sustaining the whales' lives, and withstanding the pressures of time travel.
Once the containers were completed, they needed to be secretly transported to a hidden and easily accessible sea area or dock near the institute.
Next came the most critical and dangerous part—transferring the whales.
This required Dr. Taylor to make meticulous arrangements within the institute, using its lifting equipment, transport tanks, and professional animal care techniques to safely transfer George and Grace from the institute's tanks into the specialized containers during the dead of night or at an opportune moment of cover.
The entire process had to be precise and swift; any accident or delay could attract unnecessary attention, leading to the plan's exposure.
However, even if the whales were successfully loaded into the containers, how to silently transport the massive combination of these two behemoths and their containers to the Enterprise, hidden dozens of kilometers away in a valley, remained a thorny problem.
Directly using the Enterprise's tractor beam was the most straightforward solution, but performing such large-scale energy operations in this era, even with cloaking technology, carried the risk of detection.
They had to consider alternative options, such as finding large transport vehicles or utilizing waterways for parts of the journey, which undoubtedly increased the plan's complexity and uncertainty.
Once the whales and containers were safely in the Enterprise's hangar or a modified large cargo bay, they had to immediately return to the 23rd century.
The Enterprise had to take off immediately, rushing towards the sun again, repeating that extremely dangerous gravity assist maneuver to precisely return to the moment they left, using the natural songs of the humpback whales to respond to the harbinger of destruction hovering above Earth.
The entire plan, from container construction to the final return, was like walking on a knife's edge, fraught with technical risks, the possibility of exposure, and the threat of unpredictable spacetime paradoxes.
But in the face of the sole and urgent goal of saving Earth, Kirk and his crew, along with their new ally Dr. Taylor, had no choice but to push this seemingly impossible mission step by step towards execution under immense pressure.
—
Scott encountered a practical problem when he began constructing the transport containers.
After successive fierce battles with the Klingons at Genesis, although the Enterprise had undergone emergency repairs by the Vulcans, the ship's reserves of engineering materials, especially special composite materials suitable for building large sealed containers, had been depleted.
Facing this predicament, Scott had to turn his attention to the local industries of this era.
He and McCoy, with a touch of helplessness and adventure, found a chemical plant materials laboratory that seemed to have considerable technical capabilities.
To obtain sufficiently strong and transparent materials to build containers that could allow observation of the whales' condition and withstand spacetime pressures, Scott had to offer some "sincerity."
When communicating with the laboratory head, Scott cautiously revealed the structural formula and key process flow for a material called "transparent aluminum," which was routine in the 23rd century but considered a miracle in the 20th century.
He tried to explain using terms engineers of this era could understand, but concepts like oriented crystal growth and energy field-assisted bonding still left the engineers present wide-eyed and skeptical.
In this process, the chasm of time inevitably became apparent.
McCoy complained incessantly about the "primitive" chemical reagent smells and rudimentary safety measures in the laboratory, calling it "worse than a Klingon sickbay."
And Scott, while trying to use this era's computer-aided design software, was incredibly frustrated by its slow processing speed and extremely unfriendly interface, several times muttering curses in Scottish slang.
Despite the communication being filled with amusing misunderstandings and Scott's suppressed discomfort with "primitive" technology, the feasibility and immense value of the advanced technical data they brought ultimately persuaded the laboratory head.
After tense verification experiments confirmed that the miraculous material formula indeed led to groundbreaking products, the other party agreed to produce the large quantity of transparent aluminum they needed, in a sense, as a "technical exchange."
The material problem was finally solved.
Scott and McCoy immediately transported these "antique" but suitable materials back to the Enterprise's temporary Workshop, working through the night.
Leveraging 23rd century engineering technology and meticulous attention to detail, they successfully created a huge, sturdy, and transparent specialized aquatic container, large enough to accommodate George and Grace and provide them with the life support needed to traverse hundreds of years of spacetime.
The first major obstacle of the plan was overcome, with a few scares but ultimately without major incident.