STAR TREK: TOS #2 - The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  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. “Now you’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.