Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

“Might any of the others try to force one of you to rebuild the time changer?” Spock asked.

Mordreaux shrugged. “They might. Who knows? What’s ever certain? But I think that’s our problem, not yours, Mr. Spock.”

“I hope I didn’t hurt you,” Mree said. “I’m sorry.”

“Your technique is flawless,” Spock said. “I congratulate you.” “Thanks,” she said.

Mordreaux glanced toward the doorway into the laboratory, where his other self had collapsed to dust. “Will you be all right, Mr. Spock? Can you get back to your own time, without...”

“Your other self had made many more trips than I.”

“The physiologies are different.”

“I have no choice, Dr. Mordreaux. I can no more stay here than you can send your friends back to the times they would prefer to live in. I am aware of the risks.” He stood up. It was pointless to remain, pointless, and, quite possibly, dangerous. Every moment he remained increased the chances that he would inadvertently commit some act whose effects would cascade into disaster somewhere in the future. “I must go back,” he said. He picked up the time-changer. It was smooth and cool in his hands.

“Mr. Spock—”

“I must go back,” Spock repeated. “I must go back now.” His fingers tightened convulsively on the time-changer, because he wanted nothing more than to throw it as far away from him as he could, and never touch it again. He did not want to travel through time again. He was so tired, and he did not want to fight the pain anymore ...

He was afraid.

“Goodbye,” he said, and touched the controls.

He heard their voices bidding him goodbye as the changer’s power pack built up threshold energy around him, and then all sound faded as he was dragged into a drowning riptide. Ultraviolet lanced into his vision.

For all his assurances to Dr. McCoy, he was not certain within himself thathe , this time-stream’s self-aware version of himself, would continue to exist once the journey ended.

The Enterprise materialized around him: he had only a moment to be sure of that, before he slipped down into such pure agony that it was the only sensation his mind could perceive.

The rainbow light faded, and Mr. Spock was gone. Georges looked at Mree; she gazed at the transporter platform and shook her head.

“Do you suppose he’ll be all right?”

“I hope so. We’ll have to wait a few weeks until he gets home again. Then I can put in a call to the Enterprise . If he doesn’t remember what happened, I can just say hello.”

“Are you going to call him from here?”

Georges frowned. “What do you mean?”

Mree took his hand. “If Perim is angry enough, he might easily start threatening you. You could be in a lot of danger.”

Georges thought about that for a few moments, and then said quizzically, “ /could be in danger?”

Mree shrugged.

“I suppose I could put the changer together by myself,” Georges said. “But Perim knows as well as I do who actually built it.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’ve been planning to leave Aleph anyway. I don’t guess it makes that much difference whether I travel through the fourth dimension, or the normal three.”

“You think I should leave, too.”

“That’s right.”

“Run away?”

“Like a jackrabbit,” she said. She paused, and then, more seriously, she said, “Georges, what do you have here to stay for?”

“Not very much,” he admitted. The seconds stretched out as Mree and Georges looked at each other, remembering other conversations very much like this one.

“I asked you to come with me enough times before,” she said. “Shall I ask you again, or are you wishing I wouldn’t?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t have to ask me again. Wherever it is that you’re going ... do you suppose they’d have any use for a mad scientist?”

“Sure,” she said. “As long as you’re teamed up with a mad inventor.” She gestured toward the time-changer. “Think of the projects we can handle. Why, we can’t go wrong.”

They laughed together, ruefully, and hugged each other very tight for a long time.

Shouting incoherently, Jim Kirk sat up in his bunk. He clutched at his face: something was trying to get at his eyes—

The lights rose gradually in response to his motion; he was in his cabin, in his ship, he was all right. It was nothing but a nightmare.

He lay down again and rubbed his face with both hands. He was soaked with sweat. That was the most realistic dream he had had in a long time. The terrorism he had seen at the very beginning of his Starfleet career had haunted him for years, in dreams just like this one. A shadowy figure appeared, pointed a gun at him, and fired, then, as if he were two separate people, he watched himself die and felt himself die as a spiderweb slowly infiltrated his brain. The dream always ended as silver-gray death clouded his hazel eyes.

He rubbed his chest, right over the breastbone, where the bullet had entered, in this dream. “Could at

least have killed me instantly,” he said aloud, reaching very far for even bitter humor, and failing to grasp any.

The dream before the nightmare, though, that was different. It was another dream he had not had for a long time: he had dreamed of Hunter. He tried not even to think of her, most of the time. He had so nearly destroyed their friendship with his immaturity; he had certainly destroyed their intimacy.

Why don’t you grow up, Jim? he thought. Your dreams don’t just come along to entertain you, they’re there to give you good advice. You’ve been warned of your mortality, though if you’re lucky you’ll have a better death than that one. But you are mortal—and so is she. She’s in more danger than you are, more of the time: what if something happens to her and you’ve never told her how you feel, or at least that you know you were a damned fool?

He ordered the lights out again and lay in the darkness trying to get back to sleep. But he knew that in the morning he would not forget the dreams he had tonight.

In her darkened cabin, Hunter looked up from the backlighted reading screen and shivered. Had she dozed off? She did not think so. She leaned back, stretched, rubbed her temples, and returned her attention to the reader. The paper it displayed was hard going, all these years past her formal physics training, but the work was bizarre enough to interest her. She had always thought Georges Mordreaux was a little crazy, and this work confirmed her suspicions. The fourth paper in a series of five, it had a publication date two years past. Hunter could find no reference to any succeeding monograph, to paper number five.

She wondered what had happened to Mordreaux after he quit the Makropyrios in a fit of pique and bruised ego. He always signed his papers, but never added any location.

Hunter felt too restless to concentrate on physics. She turned off the reader, folded it against the wall, and went up to the cockpit to prepare Aerfen for docking with Aleph Prime.

Her crew needed replacements even worse than Aerfen needed fixing, but Starfleet had her request and had not yet deigned to answer. Every time Hunter ran into the bureaucracy, which she did more and more frequently the more responsibility she earned, she daydreamed about resigning. She could always join the free commandoes. Or just go home and stay for a while. She was not due for a sabbatical for two more years; the best she could hope for in the meantime was a few weeks home with her family, with her daughter; and a few days by herself, in the mountains, to renew her friendship with the phoenix eagle who had watched over her while she found her dream-name.

Hunter shook her head. She could get hopelessly sentimental sometimes; if she got any more maudlin she would start thinking about Jim Kirk, and that would bring on a bad case of “if onlies.”