STAR TREK: TOS #2 - The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  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 i
n 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 have you 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 c
ourse 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.