The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. Mcintyre Неизвестный Автор

  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 t
hat 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.”

&nbs
p; “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.”