Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

Then he looked up, straight at the memory-recorder, straight into McCoy’s eyes, and grinned.

“Hello, Bones,” he said. “If you’re watching this, I’m either dead or so close to it as makes no difference to me anymore. You know I don’t believe in heroic intervention to preserve life after the brain is gone, but I’m repeating it so you’ll have a legal record of my preference for dying as gracefully as possible.”

The smile faded abruptly, and he gazed more intently at the recorder, strengthening McCoy’s eerie feeling that Jim really was just at the other end of a communications fiber.

“Leonard,” Jim said, “up till now I’ve never come right out and told you how much I value you as a friend. If I’ve gone from now till my death without telling you, I apologize. I hope you can forgive me; I hope you understand how difficult saying such things is for me.” He smiled again. “And I tease Spock about being emotionless—at least he admits that’s his ideal.

“Thank you for your friendship,” Jim Kirk said simply. He paused a moment, then finished giving the instructions required in a will. McCoy hardly heard the last few lines; he could hardly see Jim’s face. Unashamed, he let the tears run down his cheeks.

“I prefer cremation to burial in space,” Jim said. “I’m not much attracted by the idea of floating mummified by vacuum for the next few thousand millennia. I’d rather be burned, by the heat of my ship’s engines.”

“I thought he would choose fire,” Spock said as the screen faded to gray.

McCoy spun around, startled, wiping his face on his sleeve.

“How long haveyou been there?” he asked angrily, forgetting he owed Spock an apology.

“Merely a few seconds,” Spock said mildly. “I have been looking for you for a considerably longer time, Dr. McCoy. I must speak with you in absolute confidence. I have discovered something very important. I would like to resume last night’s conversation. Do you recall it?”

“Yes,” McCoy said, calming his irritation. “I have to apologize. I was wrong in the suggestions I made and I was wrong about the other things I said to you. I’m sorry, Mr. Spock.”

“No apology is necessary, Dr. McCoy.”

“Dammit, Spock!” McCoy said. “At least give me the chance to excuse myself gracefully, even if it doesn’t make any difference to you how big a fool I’ve made of myself!”

“On the contrary, Dr. McCoy. While it is true that your impulses were the result of overemotionality, it is also true that they were correct. They indicated the right course to take—indeed, they indicated a course which is absolutely essential. We must prevent Dr. Mordreaux from murdering Captain Kirk.”

McCoy searched Spock’s face for any clue to madness. His expression was as controlled as always.

But was there a certain haunted glitter in his eyes?

Perhaps Vulcans went mad the same way they did everything else, with serenity and an absolute lack of emotion. Bring Jim back to life? McCoy encountered the blank expanse of loss created in his mind by the death of his friend. It would always hurt when he brushed up against those knife-edges of despair, but the empty places beyond were filling with memories. McCoy had begun to accept Jim’s death. But completing the process would be a long and arduous task, and he did not think he could bear being dragged back and forth over the threshold of acceptance and denial by the mad plans of Mr. Spock.

That McCoy had suggested them himself to begin with made them less tolerable, not more.

“Mr. Spock, I went a little crazy last night. If I didn’t hurt you I’m glad of it, because I certainly tried.

I’m ashamed of myself because of it. I couldn’t accept having failed so completely when the person I failed was my closest friend.”

“I do not understand the connection between your emotional state of last night and the task we have to do.”

“We have no task, Spock, except to bury our dead and mourn them.”

“Dr. McCoy—”

“No! If I can admit that I went off my rocker last night then you can admit the possibility that your judgment just might be a little untrustworthy right now.”

“My judgment is unimpaired. I am unaffected by these events, which have caused you so much distress.”

McCoy did not want to fight with Spock; he did not even feel up to trying to force him to admit he cared that Jim was dead. His irritation was not great enough to overcome the tremendous lethargy he felt. He turned his back.

“Please go away, Spock,” he said. Leave me alone, he thought. Leave me alone to grieve.

He hugged himself, as if he were cold: he did feel cold; a chill had descended with the silence. Spock did not reply for so long that McCoy believed he had gone, leaving as quietly and stealthily as he had arrived. The doctor turned around.

He started violently. Spock had not moved; the Vulcan gazed patiently down at him.

“Are you willing to listen to me now, Dr. McCoy?”

McCoy sighed, realizing he would have no peace till he heard what Spock had to say. He shrugged with resignation.

Spock accepted the gesture as acquiescence.

“Dr. Mordreaux should not have killed the captain,” Spock said.

McCoy went on the defensive. “I’m well aware of that.” He had rubbed his nerves raw trying to think of things he could have done differently, any procedure that would have saved Jim’s life. He had come up with nothing. Perhaps now Spock would tell him of some obscure paper he should have read, some untranslated monograph on the emergency treatment of spiderweb .. .

“I mean no criticism, Dr. McCoy. I mean that in the normal course of probability, unaffected by anachronistic events, yesterday, James Kirk would not have died. Indeed, Dr. Mordreaux would not even have been on the bridge.”

McCoy’s scowl deepened. “What the devil are you trying to say? What do you mean, ‘anachronistic events’?”

“The drugs that were given to Dr. Mordreaux to keep him manageable and incoherent have worn off. I spoke to him this morning. I now know what he was working on, all alone on Aleph Prime. I know why his work was suppressed.”

Annoyed by the apparent change of subject, McCoy did not reply. He would sit here till Spock was finished, but he had no intention of expressing enthusiasm for a lecture on weapons research.

“He has taken his monographs on temporal displacement, the ones that caused such controversy, and attempted to bring his theories into practice. He has succeeded.”

McCoy, who had been listening halfheartedly at best, suddenly straightened up and went back over what Spock had said, sorting through the technicalities.

“Temporal displacement. Motion through time. You mean—time travel?”

“I have just said so.”

“So you intend to use his realized theories to go back to yesterday and save Jim’s life? I don’t see why your plan is any different—or any more ethical—than the one I suggested.”

“It is very little different in effect, only in means and motive. Your motive was to save the captain’s life. Mine is to stop Dr. Mordeaux.”

“Forgive me, Spock, if I fail to appreciate such subtle shades of ethics.” McCoy’s tone grew sarcastic.

“No subtlety is involved. But I have not provided you with sufficient information to understand my logic.”

McCoy set himself unwillingly for a long discourse, but as Spock related what he had learned in the past few hours, the doctor grew interested despite himself. He could not deny that Jenniver Aristeides might have been deliberately poisoned, and he could understand Spock’s reasons for deciding that Mordreaux could not have escaped from his cell in the first place, much less returned to it, despite the general chaos. McCoy was less convinced that the gun presented a mystery: however thoroughly the ship was searched, with whatever sensitive instruments, however tight the security net, someone clever enough could hide the weapon or dispose of it.