“Are you all right, Professor?”
After a bit, he nodded. “As well as can be expected, considering that the universe keeps proving to me how much easier it is to create chaos than order.”
“One can prove easily enough that chaos is the primary result of all that has occurred.”
Mordreaux looked up at him. “Ah. You’ve seen the connection between your work and mine. We aren’t fighting me, we really are fighting chaos. Entropy.”
“I believed at first that I had made some error in my observations,” Spock said.
“No, they were all too accurate. Ever since I started to use the time-changer, the increase of entropy really has been accelerating.”
“I found the destructive potential difficult to accept.”
“Yes. I find it so, too. For a million years human beings have done their best to discover the ultimate weapon. It was left to me to invent the one that really can destroy our universe.”
He ran his hands through his hair, a habit that had not altered through all the years.
“It’s getting very bad by my time, Mr. Spock. The universe is simply ... running down. Well. You can imagine.”
“Indeed.”
The false moon vanished behind a painted hillside on the far wall, and streaks of incandescent scarlet sunlight streamed out of the wall behind them.
“Why did you let it go so far, professor? Or have you been attempting to change things back for a long time?”
“A long time, yes. But I couldn’t even begin until I recreated my work. The virus program was very efficient, Mr. Spock. All my papers dissolved away. One could search memory bank and library and seldom even find a reference to my name.”
“You could have contacted me. You must know of my respect for your work. You must have known I would keep copies safe.”
Mordreaux reached out to pat Spock’s hand, and the Vulcan did not flinch from his touch. All the emotions he received from his old teacher were of sympathy and appreciation, and to his shame Spock felt himself in serious need of the unwanted feelings.
“Ah, my friend, but you did not survive the accusations made against you. You were sent to rehabilitation, though the authorities must have known what that would mean for you. I’m sure they did know you would resist their efforts to reprogram your mind. ...”
Spock nodded. Many humans had been sent to rehabilitation and come out obedient, complacent, but living; only a few Vulcans had ever received such a sentence, and all of them had died. Knowing he was that much closer to Vulcan than human gave Spock a peculiar sort of comfort.
“What about Dr. McCoy? And Captain Hunter?”
“Starfleet forced Hunter to accept a dishonorable discharge. She divorced her family to protect the children from shame, and she joined the free commandoes. She was killed on the border a few months later. One of her officers committed suicide in protest at the treatment Hunter received—”
“Mr. Sulu!” Despite himself, Spock was surprised. Sulu had never seemed the type to go quite as far as hara-kiri.
“Sulu ... ? No, the name was Russian. I forget exactly what it was. I think Mr. Sulu entered the free commandoes as well.” Dr. Mordreaux shrugged. “Little difference, only a slower method of suicide. As for Dr. McCoy ...” The professor shook his head. “I tried to keep track of him. But after they released him he disappeared. Even before they began the sentence he had lost heart. He was convicted of murdering Jim Kirk, you see.”
“Yet you came out with your mind intact, that is clear.”
“They had second thoughts about me,” he said. “They realized how valuable I could be, doing exactly what I was convicted of.”
“How did you escape?”
“After I went mad I was of very little use to them, and they stopped watching me quite so carefully. It took me some time to bring myself back to sanity ... thence here.”
“I cannot understand why your other self murdered Captain Kirk. You said—on the bridge, yesterday, tomorrow—that he had destroyed you. But all he had done was respond to the orders you sent yourself.”
“I know. But in the time-track in which he didn’t die, he defended your proposal—that I was too valuable to destroy—all too well. After I went mad, I thought it would have been better if I had been sent through rehabilitation. I would have been docile and happy and no one would have persecuted me. So I decided to go back and prevent him from saving me.”
“How many time-tracks are there?”
“They multiply, Mr. Spock, like lemmings. The main track split several ways when I sent my friends back in time; it split again, after my trial, when a particularly murderous future version of me came back and started a campaign of revenge—”
“The defense counsel? And the judge?”
Dr. Mordreaux nodded. “And Ian Braithewaite, but he came last.”
The imitation sun had risen high enough to cast shadows, and their silhouetted images stretched far down the hillside.
“Another track just split off, when I sent that message. There’s the one in which you finish your observations and the change is traced back to me and I’m persecuted for it, and the one in which I prevent your finishing, and realize the entropy effect myself in several years.” He glanced quizzically at Spock. “You see how complicated it gets.”
“And they all evolve from your first use of the time-changer.”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
“What happened when you tried to alter those events?”
“I’ve tried once so far. I went back to persuade myself not to demonstrate time-travel. I stayed only a moment. Because I saw one of my friends kill me—another me, I mean, one from my future, or another time-track ... I’ve been afraid to try again. I know I must, eventually, but ...”
“Your chances of altering events from so far in the future are negligible.”
“I have to try.”
“I am not so far removed.”
“You’d go back again—and try to stop me?”
“I promised you not to interfere with your friends.” Spock looked away. “My oath seems ... a trivial matter, compared to what will occur if I do not break it.”
“I doubt your oath is ever trivial to you, Mr. Spock,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “May I release you from your promise?”
“I cannot say. Are you the same being I gave it to?”
“I think I must have been. So much has happened, and my memories of the time before I went mad have grown foggy. But it sounds familiar, and it’s certainly something I would have demanded of you, when I was younger and more foolish. Mr. Spock, I beg of you to let me release you from your promise. I swear to you that to the best of my knowledge, I have the right.”
“I must go back to the start of the unravelling,” Spock said, “whether you have the right to permit me to do so or not. I am grateful for your oath, and I will try to accept it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spock.” Dr. Mordreaux hesitated. “There’s something else I have to tell you, though. It wouldn’t be fair not to.”
“What is it?”
“The farther you go, the more often, the more damaging it is to your system. It isn’t only the continuum that’s thrown into disarray. You’ve noticed the effects of time-travel on your body?”
“I have experienced ... some discomfort.”
“Discomfort, hm? Well, everyone knows Vulcans are hardier than humans. Still, it is dangerous and it is cumulative. It’s only fair to tell you that, before you decide what to do.”
Spock did not even pause. “The choice is between travelling farther back in time, or returning to my own time to face dishonor, shame for my family, and death. I do not see that that is a particularly difficult decision to make.” He picked up his changer.
Mordreaux picked up his, too. “Maybe I should go with you.”
“That is both unnecessary and irrational. You would be jeopardizing your life, though your chances of accomplishing anything approach zero.”
Mordreaux rubbed his
fingers over the amber-bauble surface of his changer. “Thank you, Mr. Spock. The more often I’ve moved through time, the more frightened I’ve gotten of it. I don’t look forward to dying.”
Dr. Mordreaux led Spock to his own rooms in Aleph Prime: the rooms of the earlier Dr. Mordreaux, the one now in the hospital awaiting transfer to the Enterprise. He had lived in an older section of the space station, midway between the core park and the glimmering outer shell. Asteroids formed the substructure of the city: here the corridors resembled tunnels, the rooms, caves.
Dr. Mordreaux’s possessions lay in a shambles. Books and papers littered the floor, and the screen of the computer terminal blinked in the way self-aware machines have when their memories are ripped out or scrambled. The furniture had been overturned, and shards of crockery covered all the floors.
“It appears you objected strenuously to your arrest.”
“Maybe I’m not in the same track I thought I was,” Mordreaux said. “But I don’t remember any where I didn’t go quietly.”
He shuffled through the destruction, to the back room, the laboratory, where the disorder was less extensive. The transporter did not appear damaged. Mordreaux glanced into its workings.
“They’ve taken the changers, of course,” he said, “but the rest of it looks all right.”
He tightened a few connections while Spock worked out the coordinates he would need to use to go back before the track of maximum probability began to split into multiple disintegrating lines.
“The transporter’s set,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “How about you?”
“I am ready,” Spock replied. “What will you do, sir?”
“As soon as you leave, I’ll return to my own time. If I can.”
Spock stepped up on the transporter platform, holding his time-changer in both hands.
“Goodbye, Dr. Mordreaux.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Spock. And thank you.”
Spock replied by touching the controls of the changer. The two energy fields interacted in a rage of light, and Spock vanished.
From Spock’s viewpoint, the cavern-like back room of Dr. Mordreaux’s apartment faded out through spectral colors, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple to blazing ultra-violet as the energy increased; Spock felt himself being pulled through a void, then thrust back across the ultra-violet energy barrier, through the rainbow, into normal space. He felt himself materialize again, one molecule at a time, as the beam wrenched him back into existence.
He staggered, lost his balance completely, and crashed to the stone floor, falling hard, barely managing to curl himself around the time-changer so it was not damaged. He rolled over on his back, staring upward, momentarily blinded. He started to get up, but froze with an involuntary gasp of pure flaming agony.
Startled voices surrounded him, then shadows: he was still dazzled by the assault of ultra-violet light. He flattened his palms against the cool floor and shut his eyes tight. The pain had become too great to ignore or put aside.
He tried and failed to free any single voice from the tangle around him. He could hear and sense consternation, surprise, outrage. The Aleph Prime authorities must have followed him and Dr. Mordreaux, or kept the room under surveillance: now they had come to arrest them, more important, to stop them, and nothing would ever convince anyone that he and Dr. Mordreaux were attempting something utterly essential.
One voice threaded through the mass of noise.
“Mr. Spock? Are you all right?”
He blinked slowly several times and his vision gradually returned. The professor bent over him, frowning with concern.
“How did you get here? What are you doing here?”
Spock pushed himself upright, a lurching, graceless motion. Cramps reverberated up and down all the long muscles of his body and he felt as though the room were spinning around him. He refused to accept that perception; he forced his eyes to focus on Dr. Mordreaux, sitting on his heels beside him.
It was not the Dr. Mordreaux he had just left: it was a far younger man, a man who looked nearly the same as he had years before, when Spock knew him at the Makropyrios. In a month he would have aged ten years, after the stress of accusation, trial, and sentencing.
“May I help you up?” Mordreaux asked courteously. He extended a hand but did not touch Spock, and Spock shook his head.
“No. Thank you.” He got to his feet, awkwardly but under his own power. The time-changer thumped against his side.
“Where in heaven’s name did you get that?” Mordreaux asked. “And where did you come from?”
“What’s wrong?” someone called from the other room, and one of the two people standing in the doorway turned back to answer.
“Somebody just materialized on the changer platform.”
“Well, Mr. Spock, it’s been a long time.” Dr. Mordreaux gestured toward the changer. “Longer for you than me, I think, if we count from the Makropyrios.”
“I came to warn you, Dr. Mordreaux,” Spock said. His voice sounded weak and he could not halt the shaking of his knees and hands. He straightened up, forcing away the pain, confronting it directly. Several of the people from the sitting room crowded in at the doorway: Dr. Mordreaux’s friends, the people whose dreams had sent him on a fatal course. Spock had hoped to arrive when Dr. Mordreaux was alone.
“Come sit down,” the professor said. “You look like death.”
Even for Spock there came a point where he had to admit his limits. He limped into the adjacent room and took the chair Dr. Mordreaux offered.
The people in the doorway moved aside for him, and stood together in a suspicious circle: six adults, four children.
“What does he want, Georges?”
“Well, Perim, I don’t know yet.” He motioned for everyone to sit.
“Are you a Vulcan?” one of the children asked.
“This is Mr. Spock,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “He was one of my very best students when I was a physics teacher, and now he works on a starship. At least I believe he does now—but he may have begun to do something else by the time he comes to us from.”
“No,” Spock said. “I still serve on the Enterprise.”
One of the younger people, no more than student age himself, handed Spock a glass of water. He sipped from it.
“That’s about enough of old times and afternoon tea,” said Perim.
He took the hand of the child who had spoken and drew her away from Spock and Mordreaux. “What’s he doing here? It’s a damned inconvenient time to visit. Unless he’s come to stop us.”
“Is that why you’re here, Mr. Spock?”
“Yes, sir, it is.” He glanced from one face to another, wondering which person had reacted—would react—with such fear and violence when the future Dr. Mordreaux attempted what Spock was about to try now. The group of time-travelers drew together, and Spock felt their rising anger and apprehension.
“Sir,” Spock said, “within a month, you will be accused of murdering all these people. The charge will be proven against you, as will the charge of unethical experimentation upon intelligent beings. Your work will not be vindicated; it will not even be classified and controlled. It will be suppressed. It engenders such apprehension among judicial and executive officials that they will see no other way to restrain what you have created. You will be sentenced to rehabilitation. The Enterprise is assigned to transport you. During the voyage, you cause the deaths of the commander of security and of Captain James T. Kirk.”
“That’s preposterous!”
“It is true. You must not continue this experiment. It leads only to disaster.”
“Wait a minute,” said one of the time-travelers. “You’re saying we shouldn’t go. You want us to stay here.”
“You must.”
“We can leave a record of our plans so Georges won’t get into trouble—we’ve all agreed to try out his theories.”
“Agreed, hell,” said a middle-aged woman perched on the back of a couch. “We talked him into letting us do it.�
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“Several of you do leave records,” Spock said. “They are used as evidence of his persuasive abilities. Of his power over you, if you wish.”
Dr. Mordreaux flung himself into a chair. “I thought I had taken enough precautions to avoid that difficulty,” he said. “But certainly I can take other measures.”
“They will not be sufficient,” Spock said. “Or, rather, perhaps they would be, but you must not carry out this plan. Your fate, the fate of these few people—that is relatively trivial compared to the wider implications of the work. The displacement of your friends permanently into the wrong continuum creates a strain that space-time cannot withstand.”
“Good lord,” Perim said. “You sound like you’re talking about the end of the universe.”
“In time, that is what it amounts to.”
“In time that’s what everything amounts to!” said the middle-aged woman.
“Not in less than one hundred Earth-standard years.”
Silence.
“What a load of crap,” the woman said sharply. “Listen, Mr. Spock, whoever you are, wherever, whenever, you’ve come from, I don’t care how terrific a physics student you used to be, I’ve been through those equations myself and I don’t see any opportunity at all for the creation of torsion in the continuum.”
“You have erred. The error was inevitable, but you have erred nonetheless.”
“Georges, dammit—” She turned toward Mordreaux.
“It’s true, Mr. Spock. I worried that the transfer might cause some distortion. But it just doesn’t happen. Nothing in the equations shows it.”
“You have erred,” Spock repeated. “Your plans distort reality to such an extent that the increase of entropy accelerates. The effect is not large at first, of course—but within twenty years larger stars have begun to nova. Precarious ecosystems have begun to fail.”
“Prove it,” said Perim.
Spock glanced toward the computer terminal in the corner of the room. “I will show you the derivation,” he said.
He worked at the keyboard for half an hour. The children played games in another corner. After a few minutes most of the other adults drew back, unable to follow the progression of a proof far out of any of their specialties, but the middle-aged woman, Mree, and Dr. Mordreaux watched carefully. Perim, the young girl’s father, loomed, arms crossed over his chest, at Spock’s left shoulder.
STAR TREK: TOS #2 - The Entropy Effect Page 22