Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

Spock hesitated a moment, then nodded. “You are right,” he said. It was difficult for him to admit he had bungled, or at the very least neglected, his first duty to ship and crew; he would be well within his authority to reprimand Chapel for speaking out of place. But she was right. “Yes, you are right. I will not delay any longer.”

She nodded quickly, with no satisfaction, and left him alone, vanishing into the shadowy depths of rooms of machines and medicines and knowledge that were, right now, of very little use.

Behind Spock, McCoy moaned. Spock returned to the cubicle, for if the ethanol had made the doctor ill he would need help. Spock waved the light to a slightly higher level.

McCoy flung his arm across his eyes. “Turn it down,” he muttered, his words so slurred Spock could barely comprehend them.

The light level made no difference to Spock; he could see in illumination that looked like total darkness to a human being. He complied with McCoy’s request.

“Doctor, can you hear me?”

McCoy’s answer was totally incomprehensible.

“Dr. McCoy, I must return to my duties.”

“I had a dream,” McCoy said, each word utterly clear.

Spock straightened. The doctor could be left alone.

McCoy pushed himself abruptly up in the dimness.

“Spock—I dreamed about time.”

“Go back to sleep, Doctor. You will be all right in the morning.”

McCoy chuckled cynically. “You think so, do you?” He rubbed his face with both hands. The lines had deepened since the day before, and his eyes were red and puffy. He peered up at Spock as if the Vulcan were standing in full illumination.

“I know what we have to do,” he said.

“Yes,” Spock said. “I must tell the rest of the crew of the Enterprise what has occurred.”

“No!”

“It must be done, Doctor.”

“Time, Spock, time. We’ve done it before—we can do it again.”

Spock did not reply. He knew what McCoy was about to say. He had thought of the possibility himself and rejected it out of hand. It was unethical and amoral; and, if certain hypotheses were correct, it was, ultimately, so destructive as to be impossible.

“We’ve got to rig up the engines to whiplash us back in time. We can go back. We can go back and save Jim’s life”

“No, Dr. McCoy. We cannot.”

“For god’s sake, Spock! You know it’s possible!”

Spock wondered what logic would penetrate McCoy’s highly emotional state. Perhaps none, but he would have to try to make him understand.

“Yes. It would be possible to go back in time. It might even be possible to prevent what happened. But the stress of our actions would distort space-time itself.”

McCoy shook his head, as if flinging away Spock’s words without even trying to understand them. “We’d save Jim’s life.”

“We would do more damage than we would repair.”

“We’ve done it before! We did it to help other people—why can’t we do it to help a friend?”

“Dr. McCoy ... the other times we were forced to interfere with the flow of events—and we did not always help other people—we did it to return the continuum to its line of maximum probability. Not to divert it.”

“So what?”

“We did it to prevent the future’s being changed. This time, if we change the past, we change the future

as well.”

“But that was the future that had already occurred. We were living in it. For us now the future hasn’t happened yet.”

“That is what the people whose lives we affected in the past would have said to us.”

“You’re saying that the future is irrevocably set—that nothing we do makes any difference because it can’t make a difference.”

“I am saying no such thing. I am saying there are tracks of maximum probability that cannot be stopped and restarted again at will. To do so would cause a discontinuity—a kind of singularity, if you like, no different in effect and in destructive potential from the singularity we orbited only a few days ago. It could drag us to our destruction. Is that what you wish for the future?”

“Right now I don’t care about the future! We’re living in the present. What difference does it make if something we do now changes it, or something we do a few hours ago?” McCoy frowned, trying, failing, to sort out his verb tenses.

“It makes a difference. That is implicit in every theory put forth about the workings of time, from the Vulcan extrapolations of a millennium ago to the extensions of general relativity in Earth’s twenty-first century all the way through even to Dr. Mordreaux’s last published work.”

McCoy stared at him. “Mordreaux! You’re citing his work to prove we can’t undo the crime he committed!”

“In effect, that is true.”

McCoy lurched to his feet. “To hell with you. You’re not the only one on this ship who knows about the whiplash effect. I’m going to find Scotty and—”

Spock halted him with one hand on his shoulder, and McCoy felt a chill down his spine as Spock pressed gently on the nerve at the junction of his neck and shoulder.

“I do not wish to incapacitate you, Dr. McCoy. In your condition it would endanger you. But I will if I am forced to.”

“You can’t keep me unconscious or locked up forever—”

“No. I cannot.”

“So how do you think you’re going to stop me?”

“I will confine you to quarters tonight if necessary. I cannot overemphasize the danger of what you are contemplating.”

“And after tonight?”

“I hope that in the morning you will be more receptive to reasoning.”

“Don’t count on it.” “Dr. McCoy, I forbid you to pursue this course of action.”

McCoy spun around and turned on Spock in a fury.

“And you think you can command me, now, do you? Because you’re the captain? You’ll never be the captain of this ship!” His voice was a whiskey-hoarse shout, and only anger kept him from collapse.

Spock took a step backward, then recovered his poise.

“Dr. McCoy, I ask you to give me your word as a Starfleet officer that tonight you will not carry out the action you have threatened.” Spock left his own threat unspoken.

McCoy glared at him, then relaxed suddenly and shrugged. “Sure. I won’t do anything tonight. I give you my word. What do I care?” He laughed, a sound like tortured steel. “I have all the time in the world!” He turned around and wandered out into sick bay. “What happened to my bottle?”

Lieutenant Uhura sat at her station on the bridge, ready to scream.

LieutenantUhura, she told herself. Remember that. Keep remembering that.

She knew perfectly well that she would neither scream nor find something to throw at Pavel Chekov, though she wished she could do both. As the strain of the last few hours increased, the excitable Russian distracted himself by alternating incomprehensible mutters in his native language with whistles so tuneless that he must not even be aware of what he was doing. Uhura had perfect pitch; Chekov whistled flat. To Uhura the sound was like the constant scratching of fingernails down blackboards.

Uhura knew, too, that her irritation over Chekov’s nervous habits was her own attempt to stop worrying about the captain. Dr. McCoy had issued no bulletin on his condition since immediately after surgery, and that was hours ago. She did not know whether to treat the silence as a hopeful sign, or a sinister one.

It was not so much that Chekov whistled half a phrase of a tune over and over again, or even that he whistled it in the wrong key for the mood of the piece, but that the longer he continued, the flatter his notes became.

Spock had not returned, and Uhura had heard nothing of him over the ship’s communicator circuits since he left the bridge. Nor had she heard anything of Mandala Flynn. She must be in sick bay, for Beranardi al Auriga was coordinating the search for an accomplice of the attacker.