The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. Mcintyre Неизвестный Автор

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

  displays.

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

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

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

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

  He turned toward the last and most important screen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Dr. McCoy—”

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

  “What d’you want, Spock?”

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

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

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

  “Dr. McCoy, the captain is dead.”

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

  “That is precisely what your machines say.”

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

  “His brain is dead, Dr. McCoy.”

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

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

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

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

  “Spock—”

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

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

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

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

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

  McCoy slumped, defeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  McCoy sank gratefully into darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Christine Chapel hurried across the room.

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

  “The captain is dead,” Aristeides said softly.

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

  “I cannot stay. I am needed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Aristeides did not answer.

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

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

  “Hypermorphic botulism,” she said.

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

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

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

  “It isn’t a good idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Spock hesitated a moment, then nodded. “You are right,” he said. It was difficult for him to admit he had bungled, or at the very least neglected, his first duty to ship and crew; he would be well within his authority to reprimand Chapel for speaking out of place. But she was right. “Yes, you are right. I will not delay any longer.”

  She nodded quickly, with no satisfaction, and left him alone, vanishing into the shadowy depths of rooms of machines and medicines and knowledge that were, right now, of very little use.

  Behind Spock, McCoy moaned. Spock returned to the cubicle, for if the ethanol had made the doctor ill he would need help. Spock waved the light to a slightly higher level.

  McCoy flung his arm across his eyes. “Turn it down,” he muttered, his words so slurred Spock could barely
comprehend them.

  The light level made no difference to Spock; he could see in illumination that looked like total darkness to a human being. He complied with McCoy’s request.

  “Doctor, can you hear me?”

  McCoy’s answer was totally incomprehensible.

  “Dr. McCoy, I must return to my duties.”

  “I had a dream,” McCoy said, each word utterly clear.

  Spock straightened. The doctor could be left alone.

  McCoy pushed himself abruptly up in the dimness.

  “Spock—I dreamed about time.”

  “Go back to sleep, Doctor. You will be all right in the morning.”

  McCoy chuckled cynically. “You think so, do you?” He rubbed his face with both hands. The lines had deepened since the day before, and his eyes were red and puffy. He peered up at Spock as if the Vulcan were standing in full illumination.

  “I know what we have to do,” he said.

  “Yes,” Spock said. “I must tell the rest of the crew of the Enterprise what has occurred.”

  “No!”

  “It must be done, Doctor.”

  “Time, Spock, time. We’ve done it before—we can do it again.”

  Spock did not reply. He knew what McCoy was about to say. He had thought of the possibility himself and rejected it out of hand. It was unethical and amoral; and, if certain hypotheses were correct, it was, ultimately, so destructive as to be impossible.

  “We’ve got to rig up the engines to whiplash us back in time. We can go back. We can go back and save Jim’s life”

  “No, Dr. McCoy. We cannot.”

  “For god’s sake, Spock! You know it’s possible!”

  Spock wondered what logic would penetrate McCoy’s highly emotional state. Perhaps none, but he would have to try to make him understand.

  “Yes. It would be possible to go back in time. It might even be possible to prevent what happened. But the stress of our actions would distort space-time itself.”