The zombie threw Sir John’s card back at him. “You’re old,” she mumbled. “Not optimum.” Sir John didn’t meet her gaze. He looked down at the floor of the compartment. His lips involuntarily trembled out of the mercenary’s line of sight.
The trooper leaned forward, her radiation armor scraping against the edge of the window. She stared at Cochrane, then at the status screen. “Yank, huh?”
“That’s right,” Cochrane said.
“Passport?”
Cochrane nodded at the fistgun. “It’s encoded on the card.”
The trooper looked back at her status screen with a disbelieving expression. She tapped a control, blearily strained to focus on the screen, then snorted again. She pointed her fistgun at Cochrane. The preignition light on the lower plasma barrel glowed ready. “You wait here. Go anywhere, an’ you’ll be contained.”
The trooper pushed herself back from the car, then lurched away, heavy boots scraping the old asphalt street.
“Contained?” Cochrane asked.
Sir John frowned. “The movement’s polite term for murder. As in containing the spread of contagion.” He tapped his cane against the privacy shield between the driver and the passenger compartment. “Not optimum,” he hissed. “Bloody monsters.”
The shield cleared. The chauffeur, a distractingly attractive young woman in a traditional black uniform, looked back at Sir John.
“What’s the holdup?” the old astronomer asked.
“They appear to be running your guest’s card through an uplink,” the chauffeur replied lightly, as if commenting on the weather.
“I see.” Sir John slumped heavily back in his section of the passenger bench. Cochrane heard the adjustment motors in the upholstery change their support characteristics to account for his change in position.
“To be candid, Mr. Cochrane, it doesn’t look good. Not by a long shot.”
Cochrane inhaled slowly. In his all-too-brief forty-eight years, he had already had a life no other human before him could have imagined. He had walked the lands of alien worlds so distant that Earth’s sun was only a twinkling point of light. He had seen healthy, happy babies born beneath alien suns, their very existence a promise for a future without limits. He had glimpsed the stars at superluminal velocities through some trick of physics that even he could not yet fully explain. Perhaps that was enough for any one person. Perhaps he had reached the end. He put his finger on the door control.
“I should go,” he told Sir John. If he ran, the zombies would use their fistguns on him. He doubted he would feel a thing. “You can say I lied to you. The network will be safe.”
“Monica!” Sir John said quickly. “Override!”
Cochrane heard the door lock click beside him. He pressed the control, but nothing happened. “Sir John, I appreciate all you’ve done for me. But your network is worth more than my life.”
The astronomer gazed at Cochrane, then gave him a wink. Once again Cochrane thought how impossible it was to tell what an English person ever really felt. There was no hint in Sir John that he thought he might be facing death, or optimal interrogation, within minutes.
“This isn’t the end of the ride, young fellow.” He sat up straighter and squared his shoulders. “You forget you’re dealing with a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.”
“With respect, sir. That’s not quite the same as dealing with an agent of UN Intelligence.” Two of those dedicated professionals had met with Cochrane between sessions on the moon. They had strongly suggested he avoid traveling to Earth, and had sought his advice about whom to contact in order to make arrangements for the transfer of provisional New United Nations headquarters to Alpha Centauri. Cochrane had not taken that as an encouraging sign. Nor, however, had he listened to their warnings.
Sir John leaned forward. “I shall take your comment as a challenge, sir.” He tapped on the privacy shield. “Plan B, if you please, Monica. Drive on.”
“Done,” the chauffeur replied.
An instant later, Cochrane felt himself slammed down into the passenger bench as the Rolls seemed to explode beneath him. His first thought was that an imploder had hit the car. But a moment later he saw city lights and the fires of Buckingham Palace through the window beside him as the limousine banked sharply, leaving the checkpoint far behind.
“Inertial control!” Sir John boomed out delightedly, tapping his cane on the floor. “I still say it’s impossible, but, by God, it’s exceedingly useful.”
Another moment passed, and any sense of accelerationvanished as the inertial compensators caught up with thefields propelling the car. The fanjets, which had been designed to make a one-tonne vehicle hover a meter off the ground, were now being used to control a car with an inertially adjusted mass of no more than ten kilos. The city flew by.
“We’ll never make it past the coastal defenses,” Cochrane said, marveling at the abrupt change in their situation. However, the rest of Europe might as well be light-years away. Even with inertial damping, he doubted the Rolls had enough fuel to reach North America. The Rolls was a sleek-looking vehicle, but its aerodynamics were designed for surface travel, not atmospheric flight.
“Give us credit for having half a brain between us,” Sir John said. “We brought you to Earth under the Optimum’s nose and we’ll bloody well see to it that you get back where you belong.”
Cochrane judged their progress by watching the city pass by below. Whole grids of London were blacked out, small fires from the riots flickering like stars in oceans of darkness. For all their vaunted efficiency, the Optimum couldn’t even keep the country’s fusion reactors on-line. Then, it seemed to Cochrane, after less than a minute’s flight time, the limousine began to descend into one of those pits of blackness.
“What, exactly, is Plan B?” Cochrane asked, beginning, in spite of himself and their situation, to feel the stirrings of excitement as the whistle of air around the Rolls diminished. The car had leveled out and was now dropping straight down. What seemed to be a large curved wall, unlit, blocked out the lights in the next powered grid, about a kilometer distant. Cochrane felt as if they were descending into an enormous well.
“Controlled panic,” Sir John said briskly. “Since we can’t get you out by regular means, we shall resort to something a bit more, shall we say, unorthodox.”
The inertial field around the car winked out as it came within a meter of the ground. Cochrane rocked once, then felt the limo bounce as the wheels made contact.
Sir John checked his watch, a golden Piaget from which a small pattern of red bars was holographically projected. It was an astronomer’s watch, at least half a century old, from a time when stargazers worked in the dark, actually peering through telescopes with their own eyes, instead of letting computers reconstruct images. The pale red bars would not interfere with any observer’s night vision.
“Just about now,” Sir John said, “those drug-addled zombies will have gotten word to their commanders about our escape. But when they check for air traffic, we won’t be there.” Sir John gestured with his cane. “Well, get out, young fellow, we’re here.”
Cochrane pressed the Open control and this time the door swung up without being overridden by the chauffeur. The oppressive humid heat of London in June enveloped him and made it difficult to breathe. Humidity, thankfully, was not a problem on Centauri B II, where most water came from underground reservoirs and there was only a single ocean, the Welcoming Sea, which was no more than ten percent of the planet’s surface. Cochrane thought wistfully of the cool, dry air of his home.
“And where, exactly, is ’here’?” Cochrane asked as he looked around. They were ringed by a tall circular structure. Looking up at the dull orange glow of the low clouds reflecting the fires and street-lights of London, he could see that they had entered the structure through a large, irregular hole in its roof, at least a hundred meters overhead. But with the limo’s running lights extinguished, there was not enough illumination to see what kind of a struc
ture it was.
“As I recall from an interview you once gave to the Times,” Sir John said as he walked around the Rolls to join Cochrane, “you’ve been here several times before. As a child, I believe.”
The chauffeur stepped out of the limo, being careful to keep the interior lights switched off. Cochrane looked around again, his eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light. It came back to him in a flash of recognition.
“Battersea Stadium,” he said with a long-forgotten sense of wonder. He heard his mother’s voice complete the timeworn phrase, “Home of the London Kings.”
“Nail on the head,” Sir John said approvingly. “Ghastly game though. Can’t say I’m sorry to see it go.”
Cochrane peered into the darkness, wishing he could see more. Back in the thirties, his mother had brought him here to watch baseball games. Sitting in these stands, eating roasted peanuts and battered fish and cold greasy chips, and staring at the men and women in white who were running around in incomprehensible patterns on the artificial grass were some of his earliest memories. Knowing what had happened to baseball, he guessed the stadium had been shut down for years, even before the Optimum had imposed restrictions on public events.
“Mr. Cochrane,” the chauffeur asked, “do they have baseball on Alpha Centauri?”
Cochrane looked at her closely for the first time. She was surprisingly young, glossy brown hair sleeked under her cap, expression serious. She reminded him of someone he had met long ago. But there was something about the set of her large, dark eyes, even in the gloom, that also reminded him of Sir John.
“Lacrosse, mostly,” Cochrane said as he held out his hand. “Call me Zefram, Ms….?”
She shook his hand politely. “Monica, please. Monica Burke.”
“Granddaughter,” Sir John confirmed. “A year away from graduating medical school when the bloody Optimum closed the universities.”
“There’s a wonderful medical college in Copernicus City,” Cochrane said. “I toured it when I was on the moon. Very inspiring.”
Monica Burke frowned. “Can’t get travel papers.” She took off her cap and ran her hand across her thick, coiled braids. “And besides, Grandfather and his friends need an errand girl from time to time.”
“And a doctor,” Sir John added, standing next to his granddaughter. “ ‘From time to time,’ the network has run-ins with the Optimum, and all weapons injuries must be reported to the movement’s headquarters.”
Cochrane sighed. It was like living in a war zone down here. But as Brack would say, when had it been any other way? “May I ask what we’re waiting for?”
Cochrane could hear the smile in Sir John’s voice, even if he couldn’t see it on his face. “A slightly more direct route back home.”
“An orbital transfer plane?” Cochrane said in disbelief. “ Landing here?”
Sir John put his arm around his granddaughter. The smile was still in his voice. “Not quite, but you’ve got the right idea. You just wait.”
Then, shockingly, for the first time in thirty-six years, since the playing of the final game of the last World Series before a solemn crowd of only three hundred die-hard fans, the night-lights of Battersea Stadium flared on, bathing the stained and tattered artificial playing field with harsh blue light.
Cochrane, Monica, and Sir John threw up their hands to shield their suddenly blinded eyes.
“The fools!” Sir John breathed. “They don’t need lights to land!”
Cochrane tried to scan the opening in the torn fabric of the stadium’s roof, but it was hidden in darkness by the contrast with the blazing lights that ringed the stands.
“We didn’t wire this place,” Monica said in matching alarm. She moved in front of Sir John. “Get into the car, Grandfather. We’ll have to—”
A precise line of baseball-sized explosions stitched across the field at the front of the Rolls, ripping across the gleaming black hood over the engine compartment, shattering the Flying Lady hood ornament, and continuing on to the ground on the other side. Coolant vapor vented explosively from the punctured metal. A shrill grinding noise rose sharply as the kinetic-storage flywheel tore free from its severed moorings.
Years spent in space had honed Cochrane’s reflexes to emergency situations and instantly he grabbed Monica and Sir John and shoved them behind him.
Then the stadium’s announcement system blared into life, and on three sides gigantic viewscreens flickered with the first image they had carried for decades. Despite the failure of a quarter of the pixels on the screens, the striking face of the man who looked down from them was unmistakable.
Colonel Adrik Thorsen.
“Attention on the field,” Thorsen said, his hoarse voice booming from all directions at once. “Under the provisions of the Emergency Measures Act of 2076, you are under arrest. Those who resist will be contained. Those who cooperate will be dealt with under optimal conditions.”
“Monster,” Sir John shouted, shaking with anger or fear, Cochrane could not tell which. But Cochrane agreed with the assessment, and at that moment, Cochrane saw his future clearly: he would never leave Earth again.
FIVE
U.S.S. Enterprise NCC- 1701 IN TRANSIT TO BABEL
Stardate 3850.1
Earth Standard: ≈ November 2267
For Kirk, there was no mistaking the disapproval in Spock’s tone. “Captain, there is a fine line between withholding the truth and lying. It may well be that that line has been crossed.”
Though under strict doctor’s orders not to undertake strenuous activity, Spock was in uniform again. McCoy had hurriedly discharged him from sickbay while Kirk had met with Admiral Kabreigny. It was ship’s morning now, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had gathered in the relative privacy of the captain’s quarters. Kirk’s meeting with the admiral—confrontation, really —had not gone well, as he had just recounted for his friends. And, according to the admiral he thought, fellow conspirators.
“I would never lie to Command,” Kirk said coldly. The tension between the captain and his first officer had been slowly escalating through their discussion. They had had differences of opinion in the past, and their friendship, in part, grew from the understanding that addressing those differences often led to a new course of thought or action, becoming a learning experience for two minds dedicated to the pursuit of the best of which they were capable. But Kirk’s handling of their unexpected discovery of Zefram Cochrane was threatening to become a real division between them, offering no hope of conciliation.
For once, though, McCoy was the peacemaker. “We know you’d never lie, Jim. But what we all agreed to six months ago just doesn’t seem to apply anymore.”
Kirk made a fist and went to pound the bookshelf beside his desk. But he stopped the action at the last instant so that he gently tapped it instead, barely disturbing the antique books and statuary arranged on it. This was not the time to lose control, no matter how badly the wearing off of the tri-ox compound was affecting him. He felt as if he needed to sleep for a week, but he was the only one still standing in the room and he was determined to keep it that way. These men were his friends, but at times like these, his command of this ship must always take precedence.
“I gave Cochrane my word that I wouldn’t tell anyone we had found him,” Kirk stated flatly. “And I won’t.”
McCoy was getting tired of the argument. “But you already did, Jim. Your personal log. You set it all out there … finding Cochrane … what happened to the commissioner … everything.”
“That log is for the historians,” Kirk said. “It’s sealed in the Starfleet Archives. Not to be opened for a century.” It had seemed such an elegant solution at the time, Kirk remembered. Even Spock had approved, if reluctantly.
Under Starfleet regulations, log officers were required to record all details of activities relating to their duties. But Kirk had argued to McCoy and Spock that their meeting with Cochrane did not fall under those standing orders.
Clearly, their miss
ion of stardate 3219 had been to transport Commissioner Hedford to the Enterprise, treat her for Sakuro’s disease, then return her to Epsilon Canaris III. Clearly, they had failed in their mission, but through no fault of their own. Kirk’s report to Command had described the conditions that had led to that failure, without falsehood.
Kirk had reported that while en route to the Enterprise, the shuttlecraft carrying himself, Spock, McCoy, and Hedford had encountered an unknown energy field that affected guidance controls and resulted in a forced landing on a planetoid in the Gamma Canaris region. By the time the Enterprise had located the missing shuttle, Nancy Hedford had succumbed to her affliction. In the interim, the energy field had dissipated, so there was no reason to think that any other vessel in the area would ever run afoul of that particular navigational hazard again. It was the truth and nothing but the truth. Just not all of the truth.
Kirk had placed his name on the report without misgivings. McCoy had signed a death certificate for the commissioner in good conscience, not because her body had died, but because Nancy Hedford no longer existed in the strict sense of the word. At least, not as she used to exist.
With his duty to Starfleet discharged, Kirk had then turned himself to fulfilling his duty to history in a way that Starfleet officially encouraged.
Starship captains had a way of being on hand when history was made, and some aspects of important events were best left unreported for a time. History might record that a peace treaty was signed on a particular date at a particular place, but for the participants, it was best if some years passed before the starship captain in attendance made public any personal observations about those people involved. Let the moment of glory be celebrated before details about a diplomat’s marital problems, or a general’s predilection for Antarean brandy, became public knowledge.
To insure discretion, but to encourage the preservation of historical facts, Starfleet maintained a system of sealed, personal logs. Officers were free to record their unique, non-duty-related observations and opinions, then deposit those records in the Starfleet Archives on Earth’s moon with a note indicating how long they should remain sealed—a century was usual if only because humans were so long-lived these days.
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