The Entropy Effect

5

Dr. McCoy awoke with the worst hangover he had ever had in his life. He should have taken something for it last night, but he had been too drunk, too distracted—and he preserved the anachronistic morality that one should pay for one’s excesses. But when he arose, he had to flee immediately into the washroom; sickness took him till his stomach was empty, his eyes were running, and his throat was sore from the taste of bile. Giving up the attempt to discipline himself, he took an anti-nausea pill and two aspirin, and drank a glass of isotonic solution that would help him rehydrate. The taste was so vile that he nearly got sick again.

McCoy sighed, and washed his face. His eyes were redrimmed and bloodshot; he looked like he still was crying.

Maybe I’ll get to be an old alky lying in a back street on some godforsaken out-of-the-way frontier planet, he thought. All I need is a three-day growth of beard—

At that point he noticed, to his disgust, that the brand of beard repressor he used had worn off: he had not kept track of the reapplication schedule. While the whiskers had not yet grown so long that they made him look even more dissolute, the stubble was scratchy and irritating.

He tramped from the cubicle where he had slept—be accurate, he thought: where he had lain unconscious—back to his own quarters. Failing to keep his gaze averted, he saw that the quarantine unit was empty, the machines shut down and pushed back against the wall. Someone—Spock, perhaps, or more likely Christine Chapel—had kept their wits about them, last night, far better than he. Jim’s body had been taken to the stasis room.

McCoy washed, shaved, applied more whisker repressor, and put on clean clothes. He was embarrassed about the way he had acted since Jim’s death—no, since well before, since refusing to believe the evidence of his machines as well as his own medical training and experience. The moment Uhura relayed the horrible information about the spiderweb, McCoy had known he could not save Jim, but some overwhelming impulse had forced him to try to pull off a superhuman feat. Had his motivation been love, or merely stubbornness and pride? No matter now; he had failed.

He was ashamed, as well, of the way he had treated Spock. The worst thing was that even if he apologized—which he intended to do—he would never be sure Spock understood how sorry he was, any more than he would ever know if he had caused him any distress in the first place.

Their conversation was vivid in his mind. He would almost have preferred a memory blackout. As it was he recalled last night with the surreal clarity of a dream.

What he had insisted that they do was absurd. In the daytime, sober, with the first shock of grief and incomprehension fading to a dull throb of loss and sorrow, McCoy knew his idea was impossible. He had seen it in a dream because it was a dream.

Spock knew it. His excuses, his explanations, were all so much technological claptrap, a disguise for the real reason he refused to do anything. He knew, deep in his gut, what McCoy now understood: that playing with fate was wrong. Perhaps he actually had been less affected by Jim’s death than McCoy—perhaps his unemotional acceptance of circumstance permitted him to see more clearly. But what it came down to was that death was not an unnatural state; it could be delayed, but never denied; they could not go back, like children telling a story, and fix things so it was all all right, so everyone lived happily ever after, ever after.

McCoy sighed again. He had work to do that he had neglected for too long, but as soon as he was finished he would go find Spock and admit that the Vulcan had been right.

A knock on the door woke Sulu. He lay staring upward for several seconds, wondering where he was. Not on the Enterprise —

Now he remembered. He glanced across the cabin; Ilya’s bunk was rumpled and empty.

The door opened silently and light from the corridor spilled in through the narrow crack.

Mr. Sulu?

He pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking. He could see nothing but shadows beyond the strip of light.

“Yes ...? What...? Who is it?” He felt so tired and groggy that his head spun.

“It’s Hunter. I have to talk to you.” Her voice sounded rough and strained.

Sulu pushed the screen back against the wall, where it obediently dimmed to black. He fumbled for the light switch, and raised the illumination of the cabin as he pulled his blankets a little farther up his chest.

“Yes, ma’am? Come in.”

She walked slowly, reluctantly, to the foot of his bunk. Her hair hung down, unbraided.

“I just got a subspace transmission,” she said. “From the Enterprise . It’s... extremely bad news.” She passed her hand across her eyes, as if she could wipe away pain. Sulu found himself clenching his fist so hard that Mandala’s ring dug into his hand.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

She sat down on the end of the bed. “There’s no easy way to tell you this. Jim Kirk has been murdered.”

Stunned, he listened to her tell him what had happened, though the words were little more than random sounds. Captain Kirk, dead? It was not possible. A whirl of images engulfed him, of the kindnesses James Kirk had shown him, of all the captain had taught him, of the several times Kirk had saved his life.

I would have been there, Sulu thought. I would have been on the bridge when it happened, I might have been able to do something. I might have been able to stop it.

“I’m the highest ranking Starfleet officer in the sector,” Hunter said. Her voice nearly failed her; she stopped, took a deep breath, and put herself under control again. “It’s my duty to investigate Jim Kirk and Mandala Flynn’s deaths. I’m going to—”

Sulu raised his head, unbelieving, cold grief slowly swelling over him.

“Mandala?” he whispered. “Mandala is dead?”

Captain Hunter’s voice trailed off. Sulu stared at her, shaking deep down, his face gray with the second, even more devastating shock.

“Oh, gods,” Hunter said. “Oh, gods, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize ...”

“You couldn’t know,” Sulu said. “Hardly anybody knew.” He gazed down at his hands, which could do nothing, now. The ruby ring seemed dull as stone. Now, he was helpless. “We only just figured it out ourselves.” If he had been there, he might have done something. “It wasn’t your fault.” But maybe it was mine, he thought. Maybe it was mine.

“I’m leaving for the Enterprise in an hour,” Captain Hunter said. “I’ve got a two-seat courier. The other place is yours if you want it.” She got up quickly and left. Afterwards, Sulu never knew whether she went

away because she was going to cry, or because he was.

Max Arrunja unlocked Dr. Mordreaux’s cabin for Mr. Spock, with no more comment than bare civility required; the second member of the doubled guard simply stood by the doorway and stared straight ahead. Spock did not try to talk to her, or require her to speak to him. The security division had lost a respected commander, one with far more direct effect on their lives than Captain Kirk had had, someone who had replaced an unsatisfactory superior not with mere competence but with leadership that earned admiration. To a certain extent they blamed Spock for her death, and he had very little evidence that they were wrong.

He knocked on the door, and took the muttered reply as permission to enter. In the dimness beyond, the professor lay curled on his bunk, hunched up under a blanket.

“Professor Mordreaux?”

A pause. “What do you want, Mr. Spock?”

“I told you, sir, that I would return when you had had time to recover from the effects of the drugs you were given on Aleph Prime.”

“I’m not sure drugs are such a bad idea just now.”

“Dr. Mordreaux, there is no time for self-pity. I must know what happened, both here and at the station.”

“I did it,” Mordreaux said. He sat up slowly and turned toward the Vulcan, waving the lights to a higher level.

Spock sat down facing him, waiting for him to continue. The science officer did not trust himself to speak; he realized he had been hoping for a denial he could believe, and some other explanation than that the teacher he had respected most in his lifelong quest for knowledge had murdered Jim Kirk.

“I must have, I think,” Mordreaux said. “I wonder what caused me to do it?”

A ray of hope, there. “Professor, if you were in a fugue state—”

“I didn’t do it now , Mr. Spock. They haven’t driven me crazy yet. And despite that joke of a trial, I’ve never murdered anyone.”

“Sir, you have just said you committed the crime.”

Mordreaux looked at him, then laughed. His laugh contained some of the life it had had before, but it held self-deprecation as well.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I assumed you kept up with my papers, even the last ones. They were too outrageous even for you, I suppose.”

“On the contrary, Dr. Mordreaux, my information terminal is programmed to flag your name. I have found your work most fascinating.” He shook his head. “You never should have left the Makropyrios; your research would have withstood its critics.”

Dr. Mordreaux chuckled. “It already has withstood its critics. It’s made believers of them, the few who know. They believe so hard, they’re suppressing the work. They’re suppressing me, for that matter.”

Spock stared at him, the meaning coming slowly clear. Dr. Mordreaux had said twice that he worked to fulfill his friends’ dreams; he said he must have murdered Captain Kirk, but he did not do it now . . .

“You cannot mean you have put your theoretical work on temporal physics into practical use!” Despite himself, the Vulcan was shocked.

“Of course I did. Why not?”

“Ethical considerations, not to mention the danger. The paradoxes—”

“Theoretical proofs weren’t enough—I had to demonstrate the principles. I could keep on publishing papers all my life, but the Journal wouldn’t take them anymore, and without its imprimatur, my monographs got no more attention than those of some self-serving pseudoscientist. I might as well have joined an offworld branch of the Flat Earth Society.”

“You would have been better to do so,” Spock said. “At least there, the danger is only to your own sanity.”

“I don’t understand your objections,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “No one was hurt. The friends I made on Aleph Prime begged me for the practical applications.”

“So you complied. You sent them back in time, and that is why you were convicted of unethical experimentation.”

Dr. Mordreaux shrugged. “Yes. I’d been working on displacement, just to prove it was possible. I’m a little tired of being laughed at. But my friends didn’t laugh at me. On the contrary, they were intrigued. Several of them even helped me, one in particular who realized that my transmission beam was essentially a retooled transporter—and retooled a transporter for me. That speeded up my work by a year or more.”

“Dr. Mordreaux, there is a qualitative difference between a small demonstration with inanimate objects, and sending human beings to other times to stay!”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s more spectacular. But I think I would have got in the same amount of trouble whether I’d worked with people or not.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because the people were my friends, and they were very persuasive. Mr. Spock—isn’t there some other time and place you’d like to live, that you think would be better than now?”

“No, Professor.”

“Tell the truth!”

“Dr. Mordreaux, as you are aware, I am a hybrid. The techniques for intercrossing highly-evolved species of different evolutionary origin were only perfected a few years before my birth. I would not even

exist in an earlier time.”

“Don’t split Vulcan hairs with me, you know what I mean. Never mind. The present may seem Utopian to you, but I assure you that virtually any human being who learns to trust you enough to discuss their hopes and dreams will reveal a deeply-rooted desire to live in some other time, a conviction that they somehow are out of place, and belong somewhere they are unable to reach.”

“Very romantic,” Spock said drily, recalling Mr. Sulu’s fascination for a long-extinct culture of Earth that would, if he appeared in it, more likely than not consider him a heathen freak, and in which he would have the statistical choice of dying of blood poisoning from a sword cut received in a duel, or of the Black Plague.

“The people I sent back were the first people to believe in me for a long, long time, Mr. Spock. I could hardly tell them I had the one thing in the universe they wanted, then refuse to give it to them.”

“You must go back and retrieve them.”

“Absolutely not!”

“I respect your loyalty to your friends, Professor, but your future—essentially your life—is at stake. If they are in fact your friends, they would not abandon you to a punishment that they could stop.”

“Maybe not,” Dr. Mordreaux replied, “on the other hand, you’re putting even friendship to a fairly severe test with that statement. Besides, bringing them back still wouldn’t do me any good. I wasn’t tried for doing experiments on intelligent subjects, not really, though that was what I was convicted of. My demonstration threw someone into a panic, someone high up in the Federation: the authorities would still find some way or other to silence me.”

“But the other factors—”

“I did take historical changes into consideration, of course. But my friends went so far back that the danger is minimal.”

“How far?” The equations did show that one’s ability to alter events in the past was inversely proportional to the square of the distance in time one traveled.

“I won’t answer that, I won’t give you any clues to finding them. But their chances of making any significant change approach zero, beyond the seventh decimal place.”

“But sir, if you brought your friends back to their own time, you would prevent yourself from coming to the attention of the authorities, and none of this would happen.”

Dr. Mordreaux laughed again. “Nowjou ’re talking about changing events in the past. You’re not talking about retrieving my friends, you’re talking about going back and preventing their leaving in the first place. What happened to your high ethical principles?”

“Professor, the contradiction you are trying to point out is completely specious.”

“I won’t bring them back. That’s all they ever asked of me, not to bring them back!”

Spock could see that Dr. Mordreaux would lose his temper soon if the conversation continued in the

same direction, so, for the moment, he stopped attempting to persuade him to change the course of his own actions.

“The past aside,” Spock said, “your assumption is that a future version of you was the murderer of Captain Kirk.”

“I don’t know why I’d do it, but that’s the only explanation I can think of. It troubles me that I could change so much. I was under the impression that rehabilitation made one completely non-violent. But, yes, I don’t see any other explanation. Unless of course you think I turned into a fog and slipped out of this cell through molecular interstices.”

“The security officer guarding you was poisoned. Due to her metabolism she was not fatally susceptible to the toxin. But she was obviously meant to die. If she had, it would be assumed you had escaped, then returned. You were meant to be blamed for the captain’s death.”

“Why would I frame myself?” Dr. Mordreaux said, speaking more to himself than to Spock.

“The more basic question is why you would want to murder Captain Kirk.”

Dr. Mordreaux shook his head. “I never met him before yesterday, so it must be something that happens in the future.”

“Captain Kirk is dead, Dr. Mordreaux. He will not affect anyone’s future.”

“Something he did in a future in which he wasn’t killed ...” The professor’s voice trailed off.

“I have had empirical experience with time travel,” Spock said. “This ship has been involved in several incidents that could have disrupted the future of our civilization at the very least—and there is evidence that the potential damage is far more basic. In each previous case we were able to prevent the disruption. Professor, this is another such incident. I believe we must repair the damage to the continuum, or suffer the consequences.”

Mordreaux gazed at him in silence for some time.

“You want to prevent my future self from killing Jim Kirk.”

“That would be the effect, yes. But—” Spock stopped. Perhaps it was better, for the moment, that Dr. Mordreaux believe Spock’s motives to be essentially selfish.

“I can’t say I like the idea of myself—even a self that doesn’t exist yet—killing anyone, Mr. Spock.” “Then we must work together to gain our ends.”

Dr. Mordreaux laughed suddenly. “Mr. Spock—do you realize that this conversation in itself might be enough to change my actions in the future? Maybe ...”

They stared at each other for several seconds.

Nothing changed.

Spock’s memories were unaltered; the captain was still dead.

Dr. Mordreaux shrugged. “Well, it was just a thought.” He looked at Spock with sudden suspicion. “I want a promise from you before I agree to help.”

“What sort of promise?”

“You mustn’t try to prevent my friends’ going back or staying back.”

Spock considered the offer for some moments. Would repairing this break in the time-stream without dealing with the other be sufficient? Or would it simply be unfinished effort, ultimately futile? He doubted he would be able to reconcile his analysis of the effects with Dr. Mordreaux’s. In the upper levels of any branch of science, however precise, there was room for doubt, conflict, and contradictory philosophies; obviously, Dr. Mordreaux disagreed that time displacement had a lasting, damaging effect.

But Spock believed that it did, and he had to try to stop the damage.

“I will offer you a compromise, Professor.”

“Such as?”

“I reserve the right to try to convince you that your actions must be undone, if only to rescue you from the fate to which you have been condemned.”

“You want me to deliberately suppress my own work!”

“I would hope you might persuade yourself to use it more responsibly.”

“If I use it at all I’ll find myself right back on my way to a rehab colony! It isn’t what I do with it that’s frightening, it’s that it exists at all. Its potential as a weapon is almost unimaginable. I have the choice of this fate, and vindication of my work with a few people, or living out my life as a discredited fool in the minds of everyone. You see which I’ve chosen! Do you accept my conditions or shall we forget the whole thing?”

Spock took a deep breath: he was offering his honor against very high stakes. “I will comply with your wishes.”

“There are damned few beings in the universe that I’d trust this far, you know. Especially now.”

“I value your trust, sir,” Spock said, quite sincerely.

Dr. Mordreaux nodded.

Spock spent another half hour in the V.I.P. cabin while the professor described the general workings of the time-changing unit. As Spock began to understand just how simple the device really was in principle, he grew more and more intrigued with it, and with the fact that no one had ever discovered it before, if only by pure chance.

Then again, perhaps someone had—and simply used it with far more secrecy.

Ian Braithewaite entered the engine room of the Enterprise . He had been born on Aleph Prime; he had

never been anywhere else. He raced sail-ships as a hobby: he could match techniques with anyone from Aleph, tacking between magnetic field and solar wind or running free before an ion storm toward interstellar space. But the racers he handled, the swiftest, frailest, most dangerous and exhilarating ones, lacked any engine at all. Nothing he had ever experienced compared with the Enterprise .

Only the impulse engines were running—imagine how it would feel with warp drive on full force! The power vibrated at a frequency far too low to hear, but he felt it. It pounded up and through his legs, into his body, all the way to the tips of his fingers. It lent itself to his determination. He did not intend to let such a ship fall into the hands of traitors.

“Are ye lost?”

Montgomery Scott had seen more than one sleepless night recently, and the stress of the previous day overlaid even his exhaustion. Here was someone, Ian felt certain, who had been loyal to his captain.

“I need to talk to you, Mr. Scott.”

“Abou’ what?” Scott asked.

“This is a magnificent ship!” Ian said abruptly, unable to contain his admiration any longer.

“Aye,” Scott said listlessly. “That it is.”

“Mr. Scott—”

“Sir... it’s been a bad time. Technically you should no’ be here—I’m no’ one to stand on silly rules, but right now I canna show you around.”

“Mr. Scott, I’m not so insensitive that I’d ask for a grand tour after what’s happened. It’s about what’s happened that I must talk to you.”

Scott frowned. Finally, he said, “Come wi’ me, we can talk in my office.”

Mr. Scott came very close to telling Ian Braithewaite that if not for him none of this would have happened at all. But the prosecutor sounded so serious, so unsettlingly intense, that Scott decided he should acquiesce, if only to find out—for a change—what was going on. For he had tried to sort out the last twenty-four hours and failed utterly; the only explanations he could think of came to conclusions he could neither accept nor believe.

The engineer’s office, barely a cubicle, had room for a couple of chairs and a computer terminal and that was about all. Scott transferred a thick untidy stack of readout flimsies from the extra chair to the floor so Braithewaite could sit down, and turned the second chair away from the keyboard so he could sit down himself.

“It’s no’ usually so messy,” he said apologetically.

“That’s of no account,” Braithewaite said. “Mr. Scott—I’m trained as an investigator and I’m determined to apprehend the people who killed James Kirk.”

“’People’!” Scott said. “But the ship was searched. They found no one who could have helped Dr. Mordreaux—no accomplice.”

“They found no one on the ship who wasn’t on the crew.”

Scott stared at him coldly. “You’re saying one of us helped murder the captain. Is this to mean I’m under suspicion?”

“What—? No, on the contrary! I’m here because it looks to me like you’re one of the few people on the ship I can trust absolutely.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Scott... like you, I saw Mr. Spock where he was not supposed to be. I saw him where he could not be.”

“I dinna understand.”

“Somehow, he was on Aleph Prime, before the Enterprise arrived. Don’t ask me how, but he was. I saw him. He denies it.”

“But that’s—”

“Impossible? As it was impossible yesterday for him to be in the transporter room and on the bridge at the same time?”

“Surely—ye dinna think Mr. Spock is involved in the captain’s death!”

“I think something extremely peculiar is going on. You encountered it, and so did I. If Captain Kirk had paid attention to you yesterday, it’s possible he’d still be alive. Mr. Scott, I don’t pretend to understand what’s happened, not yet. All I’ve got is suppositions, which I don’t want to throw around. Without proof, they’re slander, for one thing, but more important, suspicion’s hard to take back once you’ve cast it.”

“Aye, that’s true,” Scott said, impressed despite himself, for he had been unable to talk over his worries with anyone—even in the hopes that they would show him some simple, undeniable reason why he was wrong—for just that reason. “And hard to take it out of one’s own mind ...” He stopped, not wanting to say any more, wishing he had not said as much.

The trailed-off phrase tantalized Ian, but it was too soon to follow it up directly. He asked a question that seemed to change the subject but actually did not.

“Mr. Scott, did Mr. Spock ever offer any explanation for his being in the transporter room? Any reason at all?”

“Ye heard all he ha’ said to me on the subject. And right after that, Captain Kirk...”

“Yes, of course.” Ian rubbed his temples: the headache had never really gone away, and now it had begun to intensify.

“Are ye all right? Do ye need some water?”

“Yes, please.” Braithewaite blinked to try to dispel the double vision. He closed his eyes tight for a

moment; that was better. He wondered what the early symptoms of hypermorphic botulism were. Scott handed him a glass of water and he drank it gratefully.

“Ye dinna look at all well,” Scott said.

“I’m not feeling too well, but I’m upset and I’m angry and that’s making it worse. Mr. Scott, could a person be beamed from some spot on the Enterprise to some other spot?”

“Well... one could beam from one place, to the transporter room, then to another place. Ye’d have to materialize on the platform in between. ‘Twould be a most lazy and energy-intensive thing to do. Verra wasteful”

“But it could be done.”

“Aye.”

“Mr. Scott, suppose someone beamed Dr. Mordreaux out of his cell to the transporter ...”

The engineer did not alter his expression as Ian spoke, but involuntarily he turned dead white.

‘The possibility does exist,” Ian said.

“Well...”

“Your objections are—?”

“The cabin was shielded, alarms were set. If someone tried it, we’d know. And it shouldna be possible to push a transporter beam through the energy-field.”

“The shields must have been put in place around the cabin specifically for this trip. They might not be completely secure. Or perhaps the beam was boosted, and the alarms turned off.”

“That would be a verra complicated business.”

“But it could be done?”

“Perhaps. But only by a few people.”

Ian waited.

“I could ha’ done it.”

“Only you?”

“Mr. Spock...”

Braithewaite started to speak, but Scott was shaking his head.

“Nae,” Scott said. “This is all wrong. It isna possible.”

Braithewaite rubbed his knuckles in frustration. It had seemed so workable: beam Mordreaux out of his

cell, then beam him to the empty turbo lift waiting at the bridge; he would get out, fire at the captain, and enter the lift again. His accomplice would beam him back to the transporter room, thence to his cell. But unless Scott were covering for someone—and Ian did not believe he was—his expertise would have to be a guide away from a tempting but inaccurate path.

“Nay,” Scott said. “That isna quite what happened.” He paused, and drew a deep breath. “The shields are designed to scramble any transporter beam, it’s no’ possible to power through them whatever the strength.” He looked at Ian, resignation and betrayal in his expression. “Someone who knows the security systems of this ship verra well, who knows how they all interrelate, cut the alarm webs and the shields for an instant, and then, before either could reform—they take a few seconds—that was when the beaming could be done. It could be done several times, and no one would be likely to notice.”

“Who would be able to arrange it?”

“The captain could ha’ done it, or the security commander. I could ha’ done it.”

“The security commander. That’s interesting.” Ian had been told Flynn was ambitious, but she was poorly educated and she was stateless as well; it did not seem to him that she had much chance of advancing any farther. His suspicions intensified. “Anyone else, Mr. Scott?”

“Or... Mr. Spock.” Scott said the last reluctantly, all too aware of what that meant in terms of his altercation with the science officer.

“Someone else could ha’ learned, somehow,” he said abruptly.

“But you saw Mr. Spock in the transporter room only a few minutes before the attack. And he denied being there.”

“Aye,” Scott said miserably. “I canna believe it... I couldna believe it if I hadna seen Mr. Spock wi’ my verra own eyes, and talked wi’ him.” As always under severe stress, his accent grew stronger. “I canna believe it. There must be another explanation. There must be.”

Ian Braithewaite gazed down at his long-fingered hands. Not quite enough: better to get more evidence, more witnesses.

“Mr. Scott, we’d best not speak of this to anyone else, for the time being. It’s all circumstantial, and of course you’re right. There could be another explanation. It could be some dreadful accident.” He stood ^up.

“Ye dinna believe that, do ye?”

“I wish I did.” He clapped Scott gently on the shoulder and started away.

“Mr. Braithewaite,” Scott said, a little too loudly.

Braithewaite turned back.

“There is another explanation, ye know.”

“Please tell me.”

“I’m making it all up, about Mr. Spock. To protect myself and divert suspicion to him.”

Braithewaite looked at him for several seconds. “Mr. Scott, I hope that if I’m ever in an uncomfortable position, I have a friend around who’s half as loyal as you.”

In the records office, Dr. McCoy requested from the computer the wills of James T. Kirk and Mandala Flynn.

Flynn’s will was a cold, impersonal document, written, not even audio-taped, and stored in the ship’s memory in facsimile. It said no more than to use whatever pay she might have accrued for a wake—McCoy managed to smile a little, at that, for his own will reserved a small portion of his estate for the same purpose—and to bury her on a world, it did not matter which one, so long as it was living.

Flynn’s will was unusual, for she had bequeathed nothing and mentioned no one. Half by accident, most ship people acquired souvenirs of the places they had visited, exotic, alien artifacts to keep or to give to friends and family back home. But according to boarding records the security commander had arrived with very few possessions, and according to her personnel file she not only had no living relatives, she had no official home world, either. She had been born in deep space, in transit between two out-of-the-way star systems; neither of her parents was a native of either. They had been members of a trading vessel,Mitra , which sailed under a flag of convenience; Flynn’s mother had been evacuated as a child from a world now deserted, part of a buffer zone between Federation and Romulan space, and her father was born in an artificial colony that went bankrupt and disbanded. A few years after Flynn joined Starfleet, the trading ship and all its crew, all her family, were lost, victims of accident or treachery, and no trace of them was ever found.

One would have to go at least two generations farther back in Mandala Flynn’s genealogy to find a world that might claim her, relatives who might acknowledge her; she herself had not cared to do so.

Even if she had, her classification would have remained that of a stateless person: a citizen of nowhere, with all the attendant prejudice and suspicion offered one with no real home, and—some would say—no real loyalties either.

Most ship people preferred cremation or space burial, but given Flynn’s background McCoy did not find it so surprising that she wished to return to the earth, any earth.

McCoy let Flynn’s will fade from the screen, and steeled himself to look at Jim’s.

Like most people, Jim Kirk had recorded his will directly onto a permanent memory cell. It could be amended by codicil or destroyed, but the main text could not be altered.

Jim appeared on the screen. McCoy’s eyes stung and he blinked rapidly, for it was as if his friend were merely in the next room, speaking to him, not cold and dead.

Reading from a sheaf of papers, Jim spoke legal formalities and proofs of identity, and a straightforward distribution of his estate. He left his assets in trust for his orphaned nephew Peter, his brother’s child.

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.

McCoy kept listening, and finally he realized where the explanation was leading.

“Spock,” he said, “you’re telling me that Jim wasn’t killed by the Georges Mordreaux we have in custody on the Enterprise at all—that it was some other Georges Mordreaux. One from the future!”

“Precisely, Dr. McCoy. It is the only explanation that fits all the parameters of the incident It is what Dr. Mordreaux himself believes. Given that he had access to the information he would need to go back—come back—in time, it is also the simplest explanation.”

“Simplest!”

“Indeed.”

“Simpler than an accomplice?”

“An accomplice who appeared from nowhere, looked exactly like Dr. Mordreaux, referred to an incident that has not occurred—yet—and vanished again?”

“Someone on the ship who had some reason to hate Jim—someone who understands hologrammatic disguise ...” His voice trailed off at Spock’s look.

“Hologrammatic disguise is easily detectable,” Spock said. “It was not such a disguise.”

“An actor, then. Someone experienced in transformation—”

“Who also managed to hide long enough to change back to normal and dispose of the weapon, with everyone on board searching for someone resembling Dr. Mordreaux?”

“It’s possible,” McCoy said belligerently.

“Indeed it is. It is also possible that the Enterprise is playing host to a shape-changer.”

“That’s easier to believe than a time-travelling assassin!”

“My theory possesses one unique factor, which may persuade you to help me.”

“What?”

“If this hypothesis is correct, then these events are a serious perturbation in the time-stream. They must be put right. Captain Kirk need not die. He must not die.”

McCoy rubbed his eyes, sorting through Spock’s barrage of reasoning. It made a certain amount of absurd sense; at the very least it explained the pervasive feeling he, and Jim, and half the other people on the ship had had: that everything was going wrong, in some weird, implacable, uncontrollable way.

“All right, Spock,” he said. “What do you want me to do? I’ll help you, if I can.”

Did a flicker of relief, even of gratitude, pass over the Vulcan’s face? McCoy chose to believe so.

“Technically, I am in command of the Enterprise until Starfleet can assess the situation and assign another captain,” Spock said.

“Or promote you into the rank permanently.”

“Out of the question. I would not accept it, but in any event it will not be offered. That has no relevance to our concerns. I cannot perform the duties of captain and carry out this task as well: Dr. Mordreaux and I will have to build the hardware to take me back to yesterday. It will take some time and it would be better if we were not disturbed.”

“Why can’t we just whiplash back?”

“For the same reason that we will not attempt to calibrate the singularity and use it to travel back: because it would result in our taking the entire ship into the past, including the captain’s body; we would be forced to confront ourselves, to try to persuade ourselves—”

“Never mind,” McCoy said quickly. “What do you want me to do? Say I’ve taken you off duty on medical orders?”

“Not an unreasonable suggestion,” Spock said thoughtfully. “You may do as you think best, whether you wish to dissemble or simply refuse to answer queries at all.” “Under normal conditions you’d have to go to sleep pretty soon,” McCoy said, for he knew the schedule Spock had put himself on. “Come to think of it—how are you going to stay awake?”

“I can delay the compulsion.”

McCoy frowned. “Is that wise, Mr. Spock?” Spock so often pushed himself beyond all limits, though no doubt he would deny that he tried to prove himself more than the equal of any full Vulcan.

“It is of no account,” Spock said. “I will simply require a few minutes later on today to stabilize my metabolic state. It will not affect my work.”

“But that’s absurd! Why don’t you just go to sleep? We’ve got plenty of time!”

“But we do not. The effort required to change an event is proportional to the square of its distance in the past. The curve of a power function approaches infinity rather quickly.”

“The longer you wait, the harder it will be?”

“Precisely. In addition, we are still proceeding toward the rehabilitation colony, and if we cannot complete the hardware before I am forced to relinquish Dr. Mordreaux to the authorities it may never be completed at all.”

“Wait. I thought you believed he was wrongfully convicted. I thought you were going to try to prove him innocent.”

“Unfortunately, that is impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because even if he were innocent, which technically he is not, he is not being rehabilitated for that crime. His work is perceived as such a threat that a high-level decision has been made, somewhere in the Federation, to eliminate it.”

“That’s paranoid, Mr. Spock!”

“Their actions, or Dr. Mordreaux’s belief that this is what is happening? I doubted the proposition myself. However, the trial records are lost from the public archives. The professor’s name has been eliminated from the news indices of Aleph Prime. And, most important, his monographs are being systematically eradicated from Federation memory banks. The Aleph Prime computer infected the computer on the Enterprise with a virus program. It seeks out and destroys Dr. Mordreaux’s work; it replicates itself and transfers itself to any computer with which it has contact. It had already done its work on the Enterprise when I discovered it, and it is only because my own computer is protected, immunized, if you will, against such infection that I retain copies of the papers.”

McCoy slowly began to understand how frightening the implications of Mordreaux’s theories were. Anyone who could put them to use could change the time-stream: history itself. Even now they might all be changing, being changed, without their consent or even their knowledge. He shivered.

“No argument I or anyone else could make would prevent the authorities from sending Dr. Mordreaux through rehabilitation,” Spock said.

McCoy folded his arms across his chest. “I have no reason to feel any sympathy at all for this man, Spock, but it does sound to me like he’s being thrown to the wolves.”

“Thrown to—? Oh... I recall the reference. On the contrary, doctor. There are several ways to prevent his being imprisoned, but he will not accept my help. He prefers that a very small number of people appreciate the validity of his work. The alternative is for his theories to remain discredited, and that, he cannot accept.”

“You’re going to let them ‘rehabilitate’ him?”

“I have no choice. I have given my word not to try to undo his past actions, however self-destructive they may be.”

“Mr. Spock—”

“Dr. McCoy, I cannot take the time to argue with you now. I do not disagree with your position, but for now we must be satisfied with Dr. Mordreaux’s help in saving Captain Kirk. Do you wish a formal assignment of captain’s duties?”

“Don’t see that it’s necessary,” McCoy said.

Spock nodded and started away.

“Spock—wait”

The Vulcan turned back.

“Why the secrecy, my covering for you and all that? Let’s just announce what happened and what we plan to do, and we’ll have every member of the crew on our side.”

“That is quite possibly the worst course of action you could imagine.”

“You aren’t making any sense.”

“This work is perceived as threatening, not only to the Federation but to the history of the universe itself. If we are detected using it—by, for example, Ian Braithewaite—we would undoubtedly find ourselves court-martialed and on our way to the same rehabilitation colony that awaits Dr. Mordreaux.”

“Oh.”

Spock addressed McCoy gravely. “Dr. McCoy, what we are attempting to do is not without its perils, and a rehabilitation colony is not the greatest of the possible dangers. I may fail. I could conceivably make things worse. Would you prefer that I proceed without your involvement?”

McCoy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, Mr. Spock, I can’t stand on the sidelines even if it means taking the chance of going down with you. I’ll help you as much as I can.”

“That is a mixed image at best, Dr. McCoy, but I appreciate your intent.”

Spock felt sleep creeping up over him, fogging his perceptions and distorting his vision. It was too early,

too early: he should have had at least until this evening before the need grew compelling. The past twenty-four hours had put him under so much stress that he had been forced to divert attention from controlling his sleep patterns to controlling emotions that under normal circumstances were so thoroughly repressed as to be essentially nonexistent.

He hurried toward his own quarters instead of Dr. Mordreaux’s, hoping he had not left making the changes until too late.

The warmth in his cabin, closer to Vulcan normal temperatures, surrounded him, and the whole texture of the light changed. He closed the door and stood for a moment, making the transition from the human world to his own.

But he had no more time to wait. He lay down on a long, polished slab of Vulcan granite, a meditation stone, one of the very few luxuries he permitted himself. He closed his eyes, and relaxed slowly. He could not relax as completely as he would have liked: if he did he would fall immediately asleep. Yet if he remained tense he would not be able to control his body enough to give himself the few more days, the few more hours, that he needed.

There was no help for it. He had to take the chance. The ironic thing was that the level of concentration he required was so deep that he could not pay attention to staying awake.

Gradually he grew aware of every bone, every organ, every muscle and sinew in his body. He breathed deeply, forcing cells to degrade the molecules that were the products of fatigue. He went deep into his own mind to restrain a biological response already compressed to the danger point. He had to struggle with himself; he required every bit of determination left in him. But when he progressed back through the layers of his mind, he was rewarded by renewed clarity of intellect.

For now, he had succeeded.

Dr. McCoy stepped off the turbo lift onto the bridge. He was about to toss a cheery greeting toward Uhura, but one glance at the strain and grief in her beautiful, elegant face, at her eyes red-rimmed from tears, reminded him that as far as everyone else was concerned, they had lost a respected officer or a friend. Already McCoy had begun to think of Jim as just gone away for a short vacation; McCoy’s own despair had vanished. But it was essential that he conceal his hope. Spock’s assessment was no doubt accurate: if they fell under suspicion they would be stopped.

Near Uhura, he paused. She took his outstretched hand, and he squeezed her fingers gently, comfortingly. He wanted to pull her to her feet and swing her around and hug her and tell her everything would be all right soon; he wanted to tell everyone on the bridge, on the ship, that it was all a mistake, all, practically, a joke.

“Dr. McCoy ...”

“Uhura...”

“Are you all right?”

“So far,” he said, feeling brutal, feeling dishonest. “And you?”

“So far.” She smiled, a little shakily.

McCoy started toward the lower level of the bridge.

“Dr. McCoy?”

“Yes?”

“Doctor, communications on the ship are... muddled. I don’t mean the machinery.” She gestured toward her station. “I mean people talking to each other. Rumors. Suspicions. I suppose Mr. Spock can’t tell us, if we all are under suspicion. But if we’re not, just a few words from him—”

“Suspicion! Uhura, what are you talking about?”

“I’ve gone through tough security interviews—you know my clearance level—but I’ve never been through an interrogation anything like the one this morning.”

McCoy frowned, very surprised. “I’d’ve thought Barry al Auriga would have more tact.” Mandala Flynn had gone through al Auriga’s files with McCoy and recommended him for promotion to her second in command soon after she came on board. One of the reasons she had chosen him over several other officers of comparable seniority was that his psychological profile, and his service record, indicated that he behaved gently and gracefully under pressure.

“I don’t mean Barry. He’s taken my statement, of course. It’s Ian Braithewaite. Dr. McCoy, the rumor is that the prisoner couldn’t have got out of his cell by himself so there must be a conspiracy. That’s what Mr. Braithewaite’s looking for, anyway. He as much as accused Mandala of being involved. I felt like scratching his eyes out when he said that.”

McCoy scowled. “I never heard such a load of tripe. Besides, Ian Braithewaite hasn’t got any jurisdiction on the Enterprise . Even if he did, it wouldn’t give him the right to browbeat you—or slander someone who can’t defend herself anymore.” Braithewaite was far from unique in believing that a stateless person was a security risk, almost by definition. McCoy sighed. “Uhura, page Mr Braithewaite, would you? Hunt him up and tell him to get to the bridge, on the double.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

He slid into Jim Kirk’s seat and spent the next few minutes gazing at the viewscreen, paying little attention to the spectacular starfield. He wondered what would happen when Spock carried out his plans. Would anyone have any memory of what had really occurred, or would the events simply vanish from their perception? If so, what did that do to the beings who were here, now?

Will we vanish, too? he wondered.

The more he thought about it, the more he became entrapped in the paradoxes and confused by them.

The lift doors swept open and Ian Braithewaite came onto the bridge, his manic energy confined by the belligerent hunch of his shoulders. He descended the steps in one stride and faced McCoy.

“I assume you’d like to talk to me,” McCoy said. “Since you’ve been so aggressive about talking to the rest of the crew.”

“I’d rather talk to the new captain, but he’s avoiding me.”

“Look here, son,” McCoy said, not feeling nearly as much the kindly old doctor as he made out, “you’re the one who vanished out of sick bay without my say-so. You’ve got a bad concussion—you ought to be in bed.”

“Don’t try to change the subject!”

“What exactly is the subject? From what I hear you’ve got some bees that need chasing’ out of your bonnet.”

Braithewaite’s expression was for all the world like Spock’s when he did not comprehend some colorful human metaphor.

“What’s a bee? For that matter, what’s a bonnet?”

“Oh, never mind. Deliver me from people who’ve never walked on the surface of a planet. Braithewaite, what the devil do you mean harassing the crew? We’ve all gone through a hell of a lot in the last day, thanks to you and your damned prisoner. We’ve lost someone we admired very much and I won’t have you putting anyone under any more strain.”

“I don’t see that you have anything to say about it. The crime occurred in my jurisdiction and I’m investigating it.”

“You don’t have any jurisdiction over a Starfleet vessel.”

“Oh, you’re an expert in system law as well as a doctor, are you? I’m impressed.”

“Mr. Braithewaite, what’s with you? Everyone saw your prisoner murder the captain, and unless you’ve let Mordreaux loose yourself he’s safely in custody.”

“I don’t intend to discuss what I know with you.”

“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?” You young twerp, McCoy added, coming within a hairsbreadth of saying it aloud.

“Where’s Mr. Spock—or should I say, ‘Captain’ Spock?”

“I think he’d object in the strongest possible terms if you called him that to his face. He and Jim were real close for a long time, and while he’d rather have his nails pulled out than admit it, Jim’s death hit him hard.”

“Really? I suppose he’s off somewhere prostrate with grief.”

“Look here, I don’t understand your belligerence at all. What’s the matter with you? If you have something to say, say it—don’t keep flying off the handle at everything I say to you.”

“I want to talk to the commanding officer.”

“I’ll have to do, then.”

“Spock has turned over command to you?”

“For the moment.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s—asleep,” McCoy said. The lie was badly prepared. He tried to explain about the singularity observations and the Vulcan ability to put off sleep, until he realized Braithewaite doubted every word.

“Even though the formal hierarchy calls for Montgomery Scott to assume command, you’ve been given the position.”

“The choice between us is up to the commanding officer,” McCoy said. Then he tried a more conciliatory tone. “Besides, Scotty’s working on the engines—he hasn’t got time to be in command, he’s too important right where he is.”

At Braithewaite’s expression, McCoy was immediately sorry he had tried to jolly the prosecutor along.

“I’ve got better things to do than trade clever lines with you,” Braithewaite said, and turned to leave.

“Ian,” McCoy said, in the softest southern drawl, the tone he found himself using only in times of deepest fury.

Braithewaite stopped, but did not turn around again.

“Ian,” McCoy said, “whether you like it or not, I’m in command here till Mr. Spock comes back on duty. And if you keep harassing the crew—if you keep harassing my people I’ll have you confined to quarters.”

Now Braithewaite did swing around, fists clenched. “You think you can do that, do you?”

McCoy smiled his kindliest old country doctor smile, but his voice was still very soft, very low.

“Try me,” he said.

Spock looked over Dr. Mordreaux’s shoulder at the schematics the professor had been re-creating for the past several hours. They flicked past, one after another, glowing on the video screen. The device possessed the simplicity of an elegant mathematical proof; it was as streamlined and deadly as a crystal knife.

“With both of us working on it we ought to be able to finish it in a couple of hours,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “How powerful is the unit, Professor?”

“You mean how far back can you go? That doesn’t depend on the changer itself, it depends on how much current you can draw. The Enterprise could probably deliver enough power to send you back about a week if you diverted the warp drive. Much farther and you’d begin stressing the systems beyond their inherent resiliency.”

“I see,” Spock said.

Dr. Mordreaux glanced up at him. “That’s farther than you need to go. Unless you lied to me about what you intend to do.”

“Vulcans do not lie, Professor. I will keep my word to you, however illogical I believe your position to be, unless you release me from my promise.”

“Good,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “Go back and save your captain, and be satisfied with that.”

Spock had no new arguments to offer Dr. Mordreaux to make him change his mind, so the science officer kept his silence.

“It’s a happy coincidence you picked up those bioelectronics on Aleph,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “Without them the changer would be about the size of a shuttlecraft and twice the mass.”

“I do not believe in coincidence,” Spock said absently, making a mental list of the other tools and materials they would need. “Any coincidence observed carefully and logically enough will prove explicable.”

“You be sure and let me know what the explanation is, when you figure it out,” the professor said.

For a concept Spock did not believe in, coincidence certainly had occurred to him frequently in the last few days. But he did not have time for careful and logical observation of the various phenomena right now. He bent over the video screen again.

The door to Dr. Mordreaux’s cabin opened behind them. Spock turned.

Ian Braithewaite glared at him from the doorway. “Asleep indeed,” he said. “I hope you’re having sweet dreams, Mr. Spock.”

“My sleeping habits are none of your affair, Mr. Braithewaite.”

“They are when they form the basis of a fabrication meant to mislead me.”

“Did you wish to speak to me, Mr. Braithewaite, or are you merely checking on Dr. Mordreaux? As you can see, he is confined.”

Braithewaite came closer, squinting to see the screen better. “Locking Dr. Mordreaux up with access to the computer is like giving anyone else the front door key. What are you—”

Mordreaux hit CLEAR on the terminal’s board.

“What was that?”

“Nothing you’d be interested in,” Mordreaux said, but his bravado faltered with his voice.

“Dr. Mordreaux has offered invaluable help with the interpretation of the observations that your orders interrupted,” Spock said. “This could be his last opportunity to contribute to scientific knowledge, a fact even you should be able to appreciate.”

Braithewaite glared at him with unrelenting hostility. “I find it very difficult to be impressed with his contribution to the universal pool of knowledge.” He reached toward the terminal.

“Do not tamper with the computer on the Enterprise , Mr. Braithewaite,” Spock said.

“What!”

Spock did not acknowledge any need to repeat himself.

Braithewaite stopped, fists clenched at his sides. Then, slowly, he relaxed. He nodded, thoughtfully, and without another word he left the cabin.

Spock turned back to Dr. Mordreaux.

“He knows you lied, Mr. Spock. He doesn’t threaten—he waits till he had enough evidence, and then he goes in for the kill.” Dr. Mordreaux returned their calculations from the computer’s memory to the screen.

“I did not lie, sir.” Spock gazed at the convoluted equations twisting across the screen. “Working on the changer has given me valuable insight into the design of my observational apparatus. You have given me the aid I hoped for.”

“A technicality. If I have it was purely inadvertent. Or—another coincidence?”

“Most unusual,” Spock said, and went back to work.

Dr. McCoy started at the sound of his name, jerking upright with the sudden moment of wild alertness that prepared him for emergencies. After all these years he had not ever really got used to it.

“What is it? I’m awake!”

He looked around and realized he was still on the bridge. Everyone was looking at him, with odd expressions: he could not blame them. His face reddening, he settled back in the command seat, not quite pretending he had not fallen asleep but not inviting anyone to comment on the subject, either.

It was Chekov who had spoken to him, to bring his attention to the fact that Mr. Scott was calling the bridge.

“Yes, Scotty?” McCoy said. “Is everything all right?”

There was a short pause. “Dr. McCoy ... is that you?”

“None other.”

“I need to report to Mr. Spock on the state o’ the warp drive. Can ye tell me where he is?”

“He’s probably sound asleep by now,” McCoy said, regretting the untruth that came more easily the second time he spoke it. “I guess you’d better report to me, for the time being.”

Another pause. McCoy began to wonder if the intercom were on the fritz, too, like the engines and half the other equipment seemed to be these days.

“T’ye, Dr. McCoy?” Scott said.

“Well, yes, I’m more or less in charge till Spock comes back on duty.”

“He ha’ made ye his second in command, then.” The hurt in Scott’s voice came through very clearly. His feelings were injured: he had been bypassed, no way around that. The chief engineer had no way of knowing it was for his own protection, and McCoy could not tell him.

“Not exactly, Scotty,” McCoy said lamely, hoping to salve the bruised ego. “It’s just till everything gets sorted out. I suppose he feels you’re essential where you are.”

“Aye,” Scott said, then, coldly, “ ‘sir.’ I dinna doubt he knows what he’s doing.”

The intercom clicked off. McCoy sighed. He had managed Scott no better than he had managed Braithewaite earlier.

As Montgomery Scott turned off the intercom in his office, he slowly met Ian Braithewaite’s gaze. Scott felt stunned and betrayed.

“I’m very sorry,” Braithewaite said, quite sincerely.

“Dr. McCoy is right,” Scotty said. “I dinna have time for administration. The work’s only half done on the engines—”

“Dammit, man!” Braithewaite cried, leaping to his feet. “Either McCoy is working under duress, or he and Spock together have betrayed you and everyone else on this ship! How can you keep making excuses for them?”

“I’ve known them both for a verra long time and I’ve never had reason to distrust either of them,” Scott said. His feeling of betrayal was mixed with anger; he was not sure if the anger was directed at McCoy and Spock or at Braithewaite. Perhaps it was at all of them; perhaps it did not matter.

“It’s hard,” Braithewaite agreed, recalling one time, in particular, when he had offered his trust and found it used against him. “But Spock, at least, has exhausted his opportunities for being given the benefit of the doubt. It’s of no practical interest anymore whether Mandala Flynn was an instigator or merely a follower. McCoy may be less guilty—but there’s no way to make either of them out to be completely innocent.”

Scott said nothing; he stared at a schematic design pinned to his bulletin board.

“Is there, Mr. Scott?” Ian asked gently. “If you can tell me any other possible explanation for what’s been going on here, I’d be very grateful to hear it. I don’t like the idea that three Starfleet officers have conspired to take over a ship, to free a dangerous criminal, and to murder their captain—”

“Stop!” Scott said. “Please... dinna recite the litany again.” He paused to collect himself. “Everything ye say is true, aye . . . But I canna see the why of it. Maybe Starfleet will give Mr. Spock the Enterprise and maybe they won’t. It’s a terrible chance to take. He would ha’ got a command of his own had he wished, eventually. And why should Dr. McCoy agree to such a scheme? He canna gae any higher and still practice medicine, and he’s said any number of times he dinna want to give that up.”

Ian sighed. He did not want to let Scott in on all his suspicions, not so much because he would find them impossible to believe, or even because revealing the knowledge would put Ian in breach of his own orders, as because the information itself would endanger the engineer.

“I haven’t got absolute proof that Dr. McCoy is a willing member of the plan. I hope he isn’t—if he isn’t we still have the chance of bringing him back over to our side. I can make some assumptions, but you won’t like them any more than my suspicions. I hope what happened was that a plan to free Dr. Mordreaux got so far out of hand that nobody had any choice what to do anymore. The worst it could be... well, Mr. Spock has control of the ship right now, he has no need to wait for Starfleet to turn command over to him.”

“That’s crazy!” Scott said. “And forby, the crew wouldna stand for it!”

“That’s what I’m counting on, Mr. Scott. That’s why I confided in you in the first place.”

“Oh,” Scott said.

“I can count on you to help me?”

“Ye can count on me to try to help to find the truth,” Scott said, and that was all he would promise.