The Entropy Effect

4

Leonard McCoy, M.D.

The name plate on his desk had been knocked half around; Leonard McCoy stared at it as blindly as it stared back at him, mocking him with the very letters of his degree. The brass and plastic were worth as much as his competence. He poured whiskey into his emptied glass: good straight Kentucky bourbon, none of this bizarre alien stuff everyone else on the ship found god knows where and drank and compared hangover stories about. Amazing how many different supposedly intelligent species chose a downright poison, ethanol, as their recreational drug of choice; amazing how many different sorts of biological systems reacted in similar ways to it. He had even seen Spock drunk once, though the Vulcan refused to discuss the occasion. Never mind. Spock was no more fun drunk than sober.

His glass was empty again. He thought he had just filled it. No matter. He filled it again. The things people would drink, even that weird brandy that was Jim’s favorite—

He made a small sound of pain and grief deep in his throat. The bourbon was supposed to make him forget, not force him to remember. But now he did remember what had happened, what he had seen and heard and felt, the memory of the silky gray sheen over Jim Kirk’s open eyes .. .

He could hear the faint tones and harmonies of the life-support system in the intensive care quarantine unit outside his office. Unwillingly, he got unsteadily to his feet and went to look at the life-systems

displays.

The growth of the mechanical web had arrested itself; the molecular fibrils no longer writhed farther and farther into Jim’s brain. McCoy had repaired the severed artery and the punctured lung; he had even induced regeneration in the surgical wound so it would heal without a scar.

Yet the scanners gave an utterly misleading pattern. They showed strong breathing, but it was the respirator that forced the movement of air through Jim’s lungs; his body made no motion of its own accord. Jim’s heartbeat remained regular, but the absence of any signal in the parallel screen showed that the heart contracted because of the nature of the muscle itself, not in response to any nerve impulse. The nerves were destroyed. Even the sino-atrial node and the atrio-ventricular node had been infiltrated and crushed.

Blood chemistry appeared normal: it was an induced normalcy, readings completely level, never changing. pH and electrolytes, blood sugar and heme-carrier were all being stabilized by an extraordinarily sensitive piece of equipment. In a normal, healthy, living human being, the readings would be all over the scale, reacting to everything from breathing patterns and hunger to mood, observation, and fantasy.

McCoy tried to keep his gaze averted from the EEG. As long as he did not look at it he could continue to fool himself. His glass was still in his hand, half-full. He drained it and felt the flow of hope, the sudden certainty that if he looked this time, he would find some proof that Jim’s brain had survived and that he would live and recover.

He turned toward the last and most important screen.

All the brain-wave lines were flat, dead flat they had said in medical school, with the self-protective cynicism of young people not yet accustomed to death. Alpha, beta, delta, theta, and all the minor waves through to omega: every pattern that might indicate life showed that Jim Kirk was dead.

The web had completed itself and stopped forming of its own accord. Nothing McCoy or anyone else could do would have stopped it. That was how it was designed. Spiderweb was prohibited on every world in the Federation. No government, however belligerent, manufactured it. Aside from the disgust with which even allies would regard an entity that used it, the weapon could be as dangerous to those who carried it as to its intended victims.

Yet any half-educated moron could construct the stuff in a basement lab. It appeared during the rare outbreaks of terrorism that flared even in the Federation. Spiderweb was nothing but a terrorist weapon: it killed surely and certainly, and it caused a slow and ugly death.

Is any death prettier? McCoy wondered. Is death by phaser any less certain? It’s death all the same, whether you flash out of existence or slowly dissolve into the universal entropy despite all the resources of modern medicine.

The threads branched out exponentially along axons and dendrites, climbing up the spinal cord and into the brain. The neurophilic metallo-organic molecules concentrated in the cerebrum, and had such a particular affinity for the optic nerve that as they invaded and destroyed the retina they continued growing all around the eye, over the white and the iris, locking the eyelids open.

Jim Kirk stared upward, his dead eyes silk-gray.

McCoy went into his office and poured another drink. Tears running hot down his face, he slumped into his chair, and sat clutching his glass as if the coolness could give him some comfort over blind, screaming grief.

“Dr. McCoy—”

McCoy jerked himself upright, startled by Spock’s silent appearance in the doorway of his office. Bourbon sloshed out of his glass and onto his hand, chilling his skin as the alcohol evaporated. Defiantly, he tossed back the last finger of liquor and set the glass down hard.

“What d’you want, Spock?”

Spock looked at him impassively. “I believe you must realize why I have come.”

“No, I don’t. You’ll have to tell me.”

Spock left the office and stood, arms folded, before the quarantine unit. After a moment the doctor rose unwillingly and followed him.

“Dr. McCoy, the captain is dead.”

“That’s not what my machines say,” McCoy said sarcastically, and had a sudden flash of memory, of Jim Kirk laughing, asking, Bones, since when did you put any trust in machines?

“That is precisely what your machines say.”

McCoy’s shoulders slumped. “Spock, life is more than electrical signals. Maybe, somehow—”

“His brain is dead, Dr. McCoy.”

McCoy stiffened, unwilling to agree with what Spock was saying, however true he knew it to be. Somehow his alcohol-fogged consciousness insisted that as long as he believed Jim might recover, the possibility was as good as real.

“I was in his mind until the moment before his death,” Spock said. “Doctor, I felt him dying. Do you know how the web functions? Its tendrils coil along nerve fibers. When they tighten they sever the connections between brain cells. They cut the cells themselves.”

“I’ve studied military medicine, Spock. More than you. Even more than you.”

“The captain’s cerebrum has been crushed. There is no hope of recovery.”

“Spock—”

“The body that remains is a shell. It is no more alive than any anencephalic clone, waiting for its owner to butcher it for parts.”

McCoy flung himself around, swinging his first in a clumsy roundhouse punch.

“Damn you, Spock! Damn you, damn you—”

Spock grabbed his hand easily. McCoy kept on trying to hit him, flailing ineffectually against the science officer’s restraining strength.

“Dr. McCoy, you know that I am right.”

McCoy slumped, defeated.

“You cannot hold him any longer. You did your best to save him, but from the moment he was wounded he could not be saved. This failure holds no shame for you, unless you prolong a travesty of life. Let him go, doctor, I beg you. Let him go.”

The Vulcan spoke with penetrating intensity. McCoy looked up at him, and Spock pulled away, struggling to hide the powerful feelings of grief and despair that had come perilously close to overwhelming him.

“Yes, Mr. Spock,” McCoy said, “you are right.”

He opened the door of the quarantine chamber. Air sighed past him into the negative-pressure room, and he went inside. Spock followed. McCoy examined the EEG one last time, but he knew better than to hope for any change. The signal remained flat and colorless; all the tracings sounded the same dull tone.

McCoy brushed a lock of hair from Jim’s forehead. He could hardly bear to look at his friend’s face anymore, because of the eyes.

Precisely, deliberately, he went to work. Once he had made up his mind, his hands moved surely, unaffected by the liquor he had drunk. He withdrew the needles from Jim’s arm. The chemistry signals started changing their harmonies immediately. The oxygen tones fell, carbon dioxide rose; nothing filtered out the products of metabolic activity. The signal deteriorated from perfect harmony to minor chords, then to complete discord. McCoy removed the connections that would have restarted Jim’s heart when inevitably it failed. Finally, his teeth clenched hard, McCoy disconnected the respirator.

Jim Kirk’s heart kept on beating, because the heart will keep on beating even if it is cut out of the chest; the muscle will contract rhythmically till the individual cells fall out of sync, the heart slips into fibrillation, and the cells die one by one.

But the breathing reflex requires a nerve impulse. When McCoy turned off the respirator, Jim’s body never even tried to draw another breath. After the final, involuntary exhalation there was no struggle at all, and that, far more than the evidence of the machines, the persuasion of Spock, or his own intellectual certainty, finally convinced McCoy that every spark or whisper of his friend was dead.

All the life-signs stabilized at zero, and the tones faded to silence.

The doctor pulled a sheet over Jim’s face, over the dead gray eyes.

McCoy broke down. Sobs racked him and he staggered, suddenly aware ofjust how much he had drunk. He nearly fell, but Spock caught him, and supported him in the nearest thing to an embrace that the Vulcan could endure.

“Oh, god, Spock, how could this happen?”

McCoy sank gratefully into darkness.

Spock caught McCoy as he fell, and lifted him easily. Loss and regret pulled at Spock so strongly that he could not deny their existence; all he could do was keep them from showing outwardly. That did not lessen his private shame. His face set, he carried McCoy to one of the cubicles and eased him onto a bunk. He removed McCoy’s boots and loosened the fastenings of his sweat-stained uniform shirt, covered him with a blanket, and lowered the lights. Then, recalling the single, humiliating, inadvertent time he himself had become inebriated, Spock decided to stay until he was certain the doctor had not ingested enough ethanol to endanger his life. Spock sat in a chair near McCoy’s bed and rested his forehead against his hand.

Spock was as oblivious as McCoy to the fact that they had been watched. Across from the quarantine unit, in a half-curtained cubicle, Ian Braithewaite observed everything that happened. He was heavily sedated; he had a hairline fracture of the skull and a severe concussion, from the fall he had taken on the bridge; his head ached fiercely and his vision doubled and redoubled.

At first he did not realize what was happening, and then he thought it must be hallucination or dream. When he realized, with disbelief, that he was observing reality, he tried to struggle up, but the sensors fed more sedative into his system. As the life support displays over Captain Kirk’s body went out, one by one, Ian felt himself losing consciousness. He tried to cry out, he tried to make Spock and McCoy stop, but he could not move. He could only watch helplessly, as Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy argued and then waited for Jim Kirk to die.

Ian fell back into oblivion, believing he would never awaken, but knowing what he had seen.

Spock roused himself abruptly. He had nearly fallen asleep. If he slept now he would be difficult to awaken for several days at least. How long he could hold off the increasing need he was uncertain, but he had no choice. Too many duties lay before him to permit him to rest.

But why had he been kept from dozing? He glanced at McCoy, but the doctor slept soundly, in no distress.

In the dimmed space of the main sick bay, the light from the quarantine unit was partially blocked; it was this shadow falling across him that had aroused Spock’s attention.

Jenniver Aristeides, the security officer who had been taken ill at Dr. Mordreaux’s cabin, gazed through the glass, at the quiet machines, the silent sensors, and the captain’s covered body. Her reflection glimmered as two tears fell from her silver eyes down her steel-gray cheeks, and her fingers clenched on the window-ledge.

Christine Chapel hurried across the room.

“Ensign Aristeides, you shouldn’t be up.”

“The captain is dead,” Aristeides said softly.

Chapel hesitated. “I know,” she said. “I know. Please go back to bed, you’ve been extremely ill.”

“I cannot stay. I am needed.”

Chapel moved in front of Aristeides, blocking her way to the corridor. Aristeides waited patiently, her immense hands hanging loose at her, sides, no aggression in her anywhere. The contrast between the two women was so marked that an observer unfamiliar with their backgrounds would have difficulty believing they belonged to the same species. Nurse Chapel was a tall, strong, elegant woman, but next to Aristeides’ granite solidity she seemed as delicate as the translucent wind-riders that lived above Vulcan’s high deserts, too frail ever to touch the ground.

Spock rose and approached Aristeides quietly. She was the only human being on board the Enterprise who was a match for Spock in terms of strength. She was more than a match. He and Chapel together would not be able to stop the security officer if she chose to pass them.

“Ensign,” he said, “when you are here you must obey the orders of the medical personnel.”

“I am recovered,” she said. “I have duties.”

“Dr. McCoy took you off duty for at least a week,” Chapel said. She glanced beyond Aristeides, to Spock, with relief, and gratitude for at least the moral support: she must be as aware as he that Aristeides could do as she chose. Spock wondered if he could use the nerve-pinch on her, if his hand could span her massive trapezius muscle, if the nerve itself were close enough to the surface to be accessible.

“I should have said honor,” Aristeides said. “I have some honor left.”

“There is no question of your honor,” Spock said.

Aristeides did not answer.

“What made her ill?” Spock asked Chapel. “Is she in danger of a relapse?”

Chapel blinked, and passed her hand across her eyes, seeking back in her memory over hours that seemed like days.

“Hypermorphic botulism,” she said.

“Most unusual.” Spock, like Kirk, had assumed Ian Braithewaite’s two colleagues had been felled by infection from a common source on Aleph Prime, but how could Aristeides contract it as well? Neither Aleph Prime nor the Enterprise had had a general outbreak of food poisoning. On the contrary, the only point of similarity between the victims was their connection with Dr. Mordreaux.

“I am recovered,” Aristeides said. “I cannot stay here. At least let me go to my quarters.”

Spock raised a questioning eyebrow at Chapel. “Is there a medical objection to that?”

“It isn’t a good idea.”

“Please,” Aristeides whispered. “I beg of you.”

A look of pity softened Chapel’s expression. She reached out to touch the metal and plastic band on Jenniver’s left wrist, but the security officer flinched back as if—as if Chapel might strike her? That made no sense. Perhaps she simply did not like to be touched.

“Jenniver,” Chapel said, “will you promise not to take off your sensor? That way if you’re in any distress we’ll know to come help you.”

“If I require help, the sensor will signal.”

That was not a question, Spock thought. She made a statement: she has implied no promise.

“Yes, it will. I suppose it would be all right to stay in your own room,” Chapel said. “You need rest more than anything else right now.”

Jenniver Aristeides inclined her head in gratitude, and Christine Chapel stood aside so she could leave. The security officer trudged away down the corridor and around a corner, out of sight.

Chapel watched her go, then came a few steps back into sick bay and stopped. “I hope that was the right thing to do.”

Spock wanted to check on Dr. McCoy again, but as he turned, Chapel reached out and brushed his sleeve with her fingertips. Spock faced her again, expecting an outburst of some emotional type, which he would refuse to understand.

“Mr. Spock,” she said, with quiet composure, “someonemust tell the crew what has happened. It isn’t fair to make them find out through rumor, or the way Jenniver did. The way I did. You’re in command now. If you can’t—if you prefer not to do it you must ask someone else to.”

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.

Uhura shivered. Spiderweb was little more than a rumor to her; she was from Earth, where there had been no terrorism in decades. She knew what spiderweb was supposed to do; still, she assumed the reports were exaggerated. Captain Kirk and Mandala Flynn were both down in sick bay, perhaps seriously hurt, but they would recover. Uhura was certain of it. After all, Mandala had walked out of here under her own power, so she could hardly be critically wounded.

Pavel hit a particularly off-key note and Uhura glared down at him in annoyance.

The turbo lift doors opened. Pavel stopped whistling.

Mr. Spock walked onto the bridge, and Uhura knew immediately, with an overwhelming wave of despair, that everything had gone terribly wrong.

Without a word, Spock stepped down to the lower level of the bridge. He stopped for a moment, and then he sat in the captain’s seat.

Uhura clenched her long fingers. She had an irrational urge to leap up and run from her post, to a place where she would not have to hear what Mr. Spock was about to say.

But Spock had opened the emergency paging circuits: when he spoke, everyone on the Enterprise would hear him. There was nowhere to run. Pavel had turned around: he too sensed disaster and his face had paled to a sickly shade.

The silence and the tension increased.

Spock closed his hooded eyes, opened them again, and gazed straight ahead.

“This is Commander Spock.”

He hardly ever refers to himself by his rank, Uhura thought, only by his position, science officer, first officer—

“It is my duty to tell you that a few minutes ago, James T. Kirk, captain of the U.S.S.Enterprise , died. He was injured beyond hope. He did not regain consciousness after he was taken from the bridge. He experienced no further pain.”

Uhura withdrew as far as she could into her own mind, letting the words slide over her consciousness and skid across the slick shiny surface she put up to protect her from the hurt. The realization would have to sink in slowly; for now, she could not accept it.

“In attempting to defend the captain, Commander of Security Mandala Flynn was mortally wounded.

She died in the performance of her duty.

“The suspect in the murders is in custody. No concrete evidence of an accomplice has been discovered.”

Spock paused, as if searching for some unfamiliar word of comfort to offer to the crew. He failed to find any. He shut off the circuits; the switch made a decisive snap.

“The captain—is dead?” Pavel Chekov spoke in a low and unbelieving tone.

“Yes, Mr. Chekov.”

“But—what will we do?”

“We will proceed with our mission,” Spock said. “Lieutenant Uhura—”

She looked at him blankly, and replied, finally, as if she had to travel a very long distance just to hear him. “Yes, Mr. Spock?”

“Notify Starfleet of what has happened ... and the civilian authorities. Mr. al Auriga will undoubtedly wish to take all our statements within the next few hours. We must all do our best to report accurately

what occurred.”

“Yes, sir,” Uhura said dully.

Sulu crept quietly into the minuscule cabin he shared with the senior weapons officer, Ilya Nikolaievich. The cabin was half the size of his private quarters in the Enterprise . Perhaps eventually he would find sharing a room unpleasant, but right now his excitement at being on Aerfen was impenetrable. Besides, during normal times, when they were on patrol, he and Ilya Nikolaievich would be on watch at different hours and each would have the room to himself for at least a while each day.

Sulu had not felt so good, nor so tired, in years. He had worked for eighteen hours with hardly a break, refamiliarizing himself with the weaponry carried by Aerfen and its sibling ships, weapons that depended on precision and finesse rather than brute force, as did those of the Enterprise . He was pleased with his first set of practice scores, but nowhere near satisfied, and he would not be happy till he met or exceeded the scores of the ship’s two other weapons officers. The rivalry was a friendly one, but it was rivalry nonetheless.

Ilya slept as peacefully as a child. When he was awake his square-jawed sculptured face held hints of suspicion, watchfulness, and even cruelty. He demonstrated procedures to Sulu efficiently, straightforwardly, and neutrally, showing neither resentment of his new colleague nor enthusiasm for him. Other members of the crew called him Ilyushka, but as he did not invite Sulu to use the diminutive of his name, Sulu stayed carefully with the formal first name and patronymic. Sulu knew he would have to prove himself to everyone: to Hunter, of course, and maybe particularly to Ilya Nikolaievich.

Ilya was shorter than Sulu, but similar in build: compact and well-proportioned, slender but muscular.

His heavy straight blond hair fell across his forehead, nearly to his eyebrows, and below his collar in back. He reminded Sulu of Spock, he held himself in such tight control. He was no less somber now, asleep, then he had been earlier, but the tension had gone from his face. He was a human being: the only Vulcan in him, he had put deliberately into his character.

Sulu took off his shirt, then sat down to pull off his boots. They were rather tight and as the left one slid off, his hand slipped. The boot spiralled out of his grasp. He lunged forward to catch it knowing he could not, and winced as the clatter broke the silence of the ship.

Ilya leaped from his bunk, crouching, a knife glinting in his hand. Sulu froze, leaning down with one hand still stretched out toward his boot.

“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed, feeling the blood rise to his cheeks.

Ilya straightened up, scowling, and lowered the knife.

“Never mind,” he said. “I should have warned you. I spent two years behind the lines during the Orion border skirmish.” He slipped his knife back under his pillow. “But please do not touch me when I am asleep, or come up behind me without warning. Do you understand? I react by reflex and I might hurt you.”

“I’ll remember,” Sulu said.

Ilya nodded. The high-collared thigh-length Russian tunic he wore gaped open above its loose sash, revealing a livid scar that ran down his chest and across his abdomen. Sulu could not help staring, and

Ilya noticed his gaze. He shrugged.

“A souvenir,” he said, got back into bed, and fell asleep without another word.

Sulu finished undressing and climbed into his own cramped bunk as quietly as he could. He stretched, and rubbed the back of his neck, and closed his eyes for a few moments. But he did not want to go to sleep yet. He pulled the reader away from the wall so it hung suspended over his lap. He had not even had time to program it to his voice, and besides it was bad manners to talk to a computer when someone else was trying to sleep in the same room. He used the keyboard to pull up the schematics for Aerfen .

He studied for several hours, memorizing the plans and making note of the differences between this ship and the others in the squadron.

While he read, he pushed Mandala’s ruby ring around and around on his finger, around and around. He missed her. He did not miss the Enterprise yet, and that astonished him. But, oh, he did miss Mandala Flynn. Things kept happening that he wanted to tell her about, he kept thinking, At her fencing lesson, or At my judo lesson, or When I see her later. .. and then remembering that at least for now those times, their times together, were over.

Finally, nearly twenty-four hours after he had come on board Captain Hunter’s ship, he fell deeply asleep, with the pale light of the reading screen shining in his face.

Commander Spock walked down the wide corridor of the ship that was, now, his. He was not an unambitious being, but his ambitions lay in other directions than commanding a ship crewed primarily by often incomprehensible human beings. McCoy was right: he was, in fact if not in name, the captain of the Enterprise . He would do the job as best he could for as long as he was forced to; he would transfer, as science officer, to another ship as soon as possible. It never entered his mind that he could stay on the Enterprise ; it did not even occur to him that staying on the Enterprise under another captain would be the most logical course of action. With the death of Jim Kirk, this part of Spock’s life as well had come to an end, and he saw no point in struggling to prolong it.

He tried to make out what had happened, and how, but failed completely. Every reasonable train of thought ended in paradox or impossibility. No evidence whatever of an accomplice had been found, nor did it appear possible that one could have gained access to the ship and subsequently escaped. In contradiction to this, Mordreaux could not have escaped from his cabin unassisted, yet apparently he had done so. The medical records on Jenniver Aristeides were peculiar. She had been so seriously ill that Spock rejected the possibility that she had freed Mordreaux, then taken poison to cover her guilt. But she could have been a conspirator who was betrayed. It seemed within the limits of possibility, if not probability.

The gun had not been found. Nor had it been disposed of: no anomalous amounts of any unusual element had been found in analyses of the recycling systems.

Had the mysterious accomplice, or even Dr. Mordreaux, somehow managed to get to an airlock before all exits from the ship were put under guard? The gun could then have been sucked away into space, and lost. Or perhaps it had been beamed off the Enterprise to no destination, so its subatomic particles were now spread irretrievably over a huge volume of space. That was beginning to look like the only possible conclusion. Yet Mordreaux himself had had no time to perform such a task: Spock could not even work out time enough for him to have done what he was seen to have done.

Spock was slowly coming to the reluctant conclusion that a crew member had arranged and perhaps

even performed the so far motiveless crime.

But could he trust his conclusions? He had the evidence of his own observations to prove Mordreaux committed the murder; but he had the evidence of his own observations and what should have been reasonable conclusions to make him believe Mordreaux was not a violent man: and that conclusion, too, appeared false.

Spock hoped Mordreaux had by now recovered. He needed to talk to the professor; he needed to know his perception of the events. Spock strode toward the V.I.P. stateroom.

What had happened on the Enterprise bore certain discomforting similarities to what Spock had discovered to be implicit in his observations of the naked singularity. The analysis had seemed to indicate that entropy was increasing far faster than it should; that, in fact, the very rate of increase was growing. Spock found the results extremely difficult to believe, so much so that if he had ever permitted himself to feel either relief or anger he would have been more relieved than enraged when the new orders halted his mission. He needed time to go over his observational apparatus again, to determine if the results were merely an artifact.

The events on the Enterprise had that same disquieting aura of wrongness, of occurrences that should not, indeed could not, happen the way they appeared to.

Just as he could make no final determination on the entropy results without more data, he could not understand the events of the past hours without more information. Spock would observe, question, and investigate before he tried to draw more conclusions. Any other plan would be futile.

He would know what happened, and why; he would understand the cause.

The Vulcan language contained no word that corresponded to “coincidence.”

“Mr. Spock!”

Spock faced the cry. Snnanagfashtalli bounded down the corridor toward him, on all fours. Furred crew members were not expected to wear uniforms standard-issue for humanoids; Snarl wore a soft leather harness that carried Enterprise insignia, communicator, phaser attachment. She came to a silent, smooth halt, muscles rippling beneath maroon and scarlet spots. Her long thin fingers knuckled up in running form, and when she flexed her hands the claws extended.

“Please follow. There is great cause for apprehension.” Spock raised one eyebrow. Snarl spoke in fluent Vulcan, with barely a trace of accent, and none of the lisp that flawed her standard English. Vulcan sibilants were pronounced much differently.

“What is the matter?” He, too, spoke in Vulcan.

“Friend Jenniver. The illness has ... unsettled her mind. Disarray is in her, and around her, and she sees only one path to her honor.”

Spock saw no reason at all to believe Snarl did not understand exactly what that phrase meant.

Snarl switched to English. “She is in despair, Mr. Spock.” That could not be expressed in Vulcan, except by recourse to archaic words. “She wishes only to die.”

“Take me to her,” Spock said. “Quickly.”

Jenniver Aristeides gazed at a painting of her home. It hung on the wall, as if it were a window. She had done it herself, at a time when she felt miserably homesick and lonely, weak and incompetent. Painting was an accomplishment not much admired on her home world, and at times she felt contemptuous of herself for indulging in it. But the scene, a landscape, gave her some comfort. She had almost decided to paint the pasture behind her house, with the ponies out to graze after the day’s plowing. But that would have been hopelessly sentimental. And the picture would have been static; in a painting, the powerful creatures, twenty-four hands high, massing two metric tons apiece, would never prick up their ears, toss their manes, and gallop to the far fence kicking their heels like a group of foals. That was how she liked to remember them, not frozen in time. She needed a painting she could pretend might be reality.

The door to her cabin swung open. She heard it, but did not turn. Besides Jenniver, only Snnanagfashtalli could open the door, and she was glad she would to able to see her friend one last time. Not to say goodbye, though. If she said goodbye, Fashtall would try to stop her. She reached out quickly and concealed the remains of the crushed medical sensor. She had promised only that if she needed help, it would signal. It would never signal anything now, and she did not need any help for what she had to do.

“Ensign Aristeides.” The voice was not Fashtall’s; it belonged to the science officer, the first officer—the captain. “May I enter?”

Snnanagfashtalli came up behind her and rubbed her cheek against Jenniver’s temple in the greeting-to-friends. The cream and maroon fur slid smoothly across Jenniver’s short, coarse brown hair.

“If you wish,” she said. It was not an invitation; it bound her to nothing, not even, strictly, to courtesy.

She should stand, salute, make some acknowledgment at least of his presence, if not his superior rank. But she could not even summon the trivial effort required to move in earth-normal gravity. She did not want to offend Spock. On the contrary, he was one of the few people on board she truly admired.

Though Mandala Flynn had treated her kindly, not with the contempt of the previous security commander, Jenniver had feared her for the repressed violence in her, and, paradoxically, for her comparative physical fragility. As a duty, Jenniver had respected Captain Kirk, in the detached way she employed to separate herself from the majority of human-type people who looked through her, tried and failed to conceal their revulsion for her, and felt profoundly uncomfortable in her presence. Snnanagfashtalli, she felt about as she had never felt about another being in her life. Perhaps it was gratitude for friendship and consideration; perhaps it was love. But she had never experienced love, as giver or receiver, so she did not know. She could not ask Fashtall, and she knew no one else well enough to ask. If she asked and they laughed at her, the humiliation would overwhelm her.

But Spock she admired. She always felt she might turn clumsily around—though she was not, in fact, clumsy—and inadvertently crush any other human or human-type on the ship: but about Spock was a resilient strength that reassured her. She never worried about hurting him by mistake with some not-well-thought-out step. And he was the only humanlike creature on the ship who was not repelled by her form. He was indifferent to it, and that reaction was such a relief to her that she could feel comfortable in his presence.

“Do you feel well now?”

She hesitated, but answered. It did not matter what she said; he could not stop her. She hoped he would show her the courtesy of not trying.

“No.” She would not lie to a direct question. “I feel ashamed and dishonored. I have failed, just as I have always failed at everything.”

“Ensign Aristeides, do you realize that you almost died? That any other member of the crew surely would have died, too quickly to sound the alarm?”

“The result was the same. I fainted—I must have fainted, otherwise how could the prisoner have escaped? The captain and my commander are dead. I should not have become ill. My people do not contract illnesses. It would have been better if I had died.”

Fashtall growled. “I tell you again that your people expect too much of themselves.”

Jenniver patted Fashtall’s long-fingered hand, which lay curled and relaxed on her shoulder.

“They ask no more than all the others can give. Only I cannot answer.”

Spock came around and sat down facing her.

“I do not understand what you are saying.”

“Mr. Spock, the crops my people grow are so laden with heavy metals that a single bite of our bread would kill a member of any natural species we know about. We are immune to every human plague, and nearly every toxin. And the doctor tells me I contracted food poisoning ?” She laughed bitterly. “It is nothing but more evidence that I am a useless throwback, suspended somewhere between true humanity and true Changed.”

“Suicide does not appear to me to be a creative way of solving your difficulties.”

“I left my home because I was inadequate to live there. The reasons are different here, but I am still not adequate. I am half-human and the worlds hold no place for me.” She looked away. “You cannot understand.”

“Do you think not?” Spock asked. “I, too, am half human.”

Jenniver laughed again. “Ah,” she said, “truly, you see no differences between us?”

He had the manners not to make things worse by answering.

“I do not doubt you have been made to feel uncomfortable at times, or that you have been the target of hatred,” Jenniver said. “But on this ship; I have seen how the others look at you, and how they look at me. I have seen that you need no friends, but if you chose to reach out, friends would be there for you. I admire your independence, but I cannot mimic it. I yearn for friends, but my own species flees from me. I would have gone mad if not for Snnanagfashtalli.” She sighed. “I did my best to perform a job for which I was not suited. I knew I would, inevitably, fail. But do you think I can endure the shame of failing because of an illness whose epidemic included only me?”

“It was no epidemic,” Spock said. “Strictly speaking it was not even an illness.”

“No use to humor me, Mr. Spock. I’m tired of that, too.”

“I suspected it when Nurse Chapel said you alone of all the crew were stricken. Despite the virulence of the toxin of hypermorphic Clostridium botulinum , you would have had to ingest a massive dose to be affected—a dose too large to be administered in any but its purified form. An analysis of the test results confirmed my suspicion.”

“What are you saying?”

“You were poisoned.”

Snnanagfashtalli growled low in her throat.

“Someone tried to kill you, very nearly succeeded, and would have succeeded with any other being on this ship, including me. I believe this same being also poisoned two citizens of Aleph Prime, in the same manner, and arranged the death of Captain Kirk. I cannot yet make assumptions about whether Commander Flynn was a planned target.”

“My gods.” Jenniver blinked slowly several times, her thick brown eyelashes brushing her cheeks. Fashtall patted her gently.

“Who has done this?” The diagonal pupils of Fashtall’s maroon eyes dilated at the prospect of the hunt. “And why?” Jenniver asked.

“I do not know,” Spock said. “I do not know the answer to either question. Dr. Mordreaux was thoroughly scanned when he came on board, and he carried nothing—certainly no gun or poison capsule.”

“I’d hardly let a prisoner give me a poison capsule, anyway,” Jenniver said. “I’m that competent, at least.”

“Indeed,” Spock said. “Ensign, when you were on duty, or shortly before, did you experience any sharp, jabbing sensation?”

“Like a dart, you mean? No, but I wouldn’t. My nervous system wasn’t designed to respond to that sort of stimulus.” Severe physical trauma was the only injury that ought to be life-threatening to one of her breed, and that was the only kind of pain she would feel.

“I see.” Spock considered what she had said, then looked her in the eyes again. “Do you remember losing consciousness?”

“No,” she said quickly, then looked away. “But I must have.”

“According to Mr. al Auriga you were found, barely conscious, braced against the door. This would seem to indicate that even if you did faint, Dr. Mordreaux would have had serious difficulty getting past you.”

“That was the idea. But obviously I was wrong. He did get out. You saw him yourself.”

“I believed that to be true. But if he could not have escaped from his cabin, some other explanation must exist.”

“I wish you’d tell me what it was.”

Spock stood up. “Do you understand now that you are not responsible for what happened? Whatever did happen, you cannot be blamed.”

Jenniver tried desperately to believe that, but it was hard, so hard ...“I should not have become ill,” she said, for that still was true.

Snnanagfashtalli snarled, a howl of frustration. “She will not hurt herself now!” she said. “If she tries I will tear out her throat”

Jenniver and Spock both looked at Snnanagfashtalli, who glared back with no awareness of irony. With a sudden feeling of release, Jenniver burst out laughing and hugged her friend.

“It’s all right. I’ll be all right now.”

Spock went to the door and opened it, then turned briefly back.

“Ensign,” he said, “please satisfy my curiosity. You did not apply for the position in security?”

“No,” she said. “I tried to transfer out. I kept getting turned down before, and I hadn’t got up the nerve to ask Commander Flynn.”

“What post did you wish?”

“Botany. It wouldn’t be quite the same as plowing rock with a four-hitch of ponies. But it’s the closest I can get without going home.” She paused. “I don’t want to go home.”

Spock nodded. He understood.

Once the crisis had passed, he would initiate her transfer himself. He closed the door behind him and left the friends alone.