“Please, Uhura,” Janice said again. “Please don’t tell.”
Uhura replied with great reluctance. “All right. I promise. My word means something to me. I don’t break it.”
“Thank you, Uhura.”
“I still think—at least consider talking to the Rights Commission,” Uhura said. Before Janice could react with fear again, Uhura changed the subject. “Now let’s get you fixed up and back to the bridge. The sooner you forget about this morning, the better.”
[145] “I have to ... to go back to my cabin. I left my things on my bunk. Roswind will be there, I guess.”
“Forget about your roommate. You move into the yeoman’s cabin. Wash your face. Put on a fresh uniform. I’ll get your things for you.”
“Oh, Uhura, would you?”
“Leave it to me,” Uhura said.
On the bridge, Jim sat stiff and angry, his arms folded across his chest. Blast Rand anyway, she had wrecked his good mood. Everyone pretended they had noticed neither Rand’s embarrassment nor Uhura’s anger. No doubt they all thought he had been too hard on Rand.
They could think what they liked. He could be as easygoing as anyone, but if people took advantage, things would have to change. He loathed having anyone play on his sympathy, especially with tears.
The lift returned. Lindy bounded out. Jim wondered why Janice Rand could not take her or Uhura as a model; and how had Rand managed to persuade the synthesizer to give her a uniform in the wrong size, anyway? That took real talent.
“Hi, Jim, I brought—”
An unbelievable noise drowned out Lindy’s voice. A horde of tiny animals rushed past her, yapping and whining and barking, tumbling over and around each other as they invaded the bridge and nosed into every nook and cranny. At first Jim thought they were alien creatures, then he had a moment’s awful fantasy that the Enterprise had become infested with rats, and finally he recognized dogs. Twenty or thirty miniature pastel-colored, frizzy-furred, sweater-clad, ribbon-bedecked dogs.
But dogs. If he stretched the definition to include poodles.
“Fifi! Toto! Cece! Come! Sit! Stay!”
An enormous person stood just outside the lift, calling orders in a great deep voice.
Completely ignoring him, a tide of poodles rose around Jim’s feet. The tiny creatures snarled and yipped at each other and snapped at Jim’s boots. One buried its teeth in his bloused right pants leg, then shook its head and growled and jerked at the fabric.
[146] “Let go—go on now—ow! Damn!” He snatched his hand away. The little monster had tried to bite him! His finger smarted all around the red teeth marks.
“Pay no attention, he means nothing by it.” Lindy’s companion picked up the offending animal. “Fifi, evil puppy! You know you mustn’t bite!”
Jim stood up.
“Get ... these ... animals—” Jim refused to dignify them with the word “dogs”—“off my bridge!”
“Don’t worry, captain, they won’t hurt anything. They’ve never been on a starship before. They’re just excited.” Fifi, a pink miniature poodle wearing a spangled blue sweater, nearly vanished in the massive hand.
“Jim,” Lindy said, “this is my friend Newland Yanagi-machi Rift. You missed meeting him at dinner last night.”
The poodles clustered around Jim, Lindy, and Rift, barking and whining and jumping and getting poodle hair and glitter on Jim’s uniform pants. He was surrounded by a whirlpool of pastel fur, spangles, sharp little white teeth, beady brown eyes. He could stomp them into homogeneity, but they would make a lousy rug. His alternative was to pretend they did not exist.
“How do you do, captain,” Rift said.
Jim looked at Lindy, who was trying not to laugh.
“And what do you do with the vaudeville company, Mr. Rift?” Jim asked. It was hard to talk through clenched teeth. “Do you sing?”
“Why, no, captain. Philomela is the singer in the family. I work with my puppies. They never cease to amaze me—I hope you have a chance to see us perform.” He put Fifi on the deck. “Fifi, sit! Stay!”
Fifi scampered between Sulu and Cheung and vanished beneath the navigation console.
Sulu dived under the console. “Hey, come out of there.”
“They’re overexcited by the change in environment,” Rift said fondly. “On stage, they’re hardly the same dogs.”
“Are those things housebroken?” Jim said.
“Of course, captain.”
Rift was an amazing specimen of humanity. Aside from being two meters tall and about half that wide, he had bright blue eyes with an epicanthic fold over the eyelid, skin a few [147] shades more golden than Sulu’s, and curly flaming-scarlet hair. Why did the hairstyle, a complex topknot arrangement, look so strange, yet seem so familiar? Jim finally identified it as the traditional way of binding the hair of Sumo wrestlers, a fashion that had never been designed to restrain hair the texture of Rift’s.
The traditional sport flourished in Japan now as it had for a millennium. Jim wondered what Rift’s connection with it might be. Perhaps he actually was a Sumo wrestler. Just because Jim had never heard of a redhaired Sumo wrestler did not mean none existed.
“Pardon me a moment, captain.”
Rift went to help Sulu and Cheung extricate Fifi from the underpinnings of the console.
“There’s some question, though,” Lindy said so only Jim could hear, “about whether the puppies are starship-broken.” At Jim’s expression, she barely managed to keep herself from laughing.
Newland Rift returned with the errant Fifi cradled in his enormous hand.
“Bad puppy,” he said. “Say you’re sorry.” He held the pink poodle up to Jim’s face. It growled, baring teeth easily the size of wheat grains. “Fifi!”
“Mr. Rift,” Jim said, “get these animals off my bridge.”
Rift looked both hurt and offended. “All right, captain, if that’s the way you feel about it.” He whistled and called to the poodles, who responded with another paroxysm of scampering and barking. But as Rift left the bridge, they formed a bouncing, furry swarm and followed him, the last little puffed tail vanishing just as the lift doors closed.
Lindy gave up trying to keep a straight face.
Jim heard muffled giggles all around him. “Doesn’t anybody have any work to do?” he snapped.
Spock glanced up. “Yes, captain. But if something requires attention—?”
“Never mind, Commander Spock! Did you have business on the bridge, Ms. Lukarian?” Jim said coldly as she laughed.
“I came to introduce you to Newland.”
“You’ve accomplished that.”
“And I came to give Janice the first-off-the-press poster.” [148] She stifled giggles and unrolled her paper. “She did a terrific job. You’ve got a treasure, Jim. Even if she can’t juggle. Think Starfleet would come after me if I shanghaied one of its people?”
Jim restrained himself from telling her that she could have Yeoman Janice Rand right now. He looked at the poster. “It is eye-catching,” he admitted.
“Janice designed it practically from scratch,” Lindy said. “I brought one for you, too, but the first one is for her. Where is she?”
“She ... er ... she had some work on another deck. She’ll be back.” He felt a good deal less certain than he sounded.
“Okay, I’ll wait. And I have one more small favor to ask. It’s Athene, Jim. The deck’s too hard—”
What am I, Jim thought, captain of an interstellar ark? If I have to worry about one more animal ...
Yeoman Rand returned. She had changed her uniform and combed her hair; she looked fragile and unhappy, but she had retreated from the brink of tears. Without a word she took her station.
“Speak to my yeoman about any problems you have with your company, Ms. Lukarian,” Jim said. “Or your pets. Now, I do have work to do—even if nobody else does.”
Lindy smiled at him and jumped up all the stairs at once to join Yeoman Rand. Jim wondered if s
he ever just walked anywhere. And he wondered what he could do to get her to smile at him again.
“Captain, excuse me.” Yeoman Rand spoke almost too softly for him to hear her.
“Whatever Ms. Lukarian needs, within reason, please take care of it.”
“I will, sir. But you asked me to arrange your schedule, too. Computer has it now, if you want to review it to give me any changes.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding about Dr. McCoy. He expects you in ten minutes. Shall I call him and cancel for you?”
“No, yeoman, never mind.”
Pretending to be busy, he brought the schedule up on his notepad and glanced through it.
[149] At least Rand had done as he asked this time. The appointments stretched over the next three months. He thought it important at least to meet everyone on board.
He stood up, “I’ll be in sick bay for the next half-hour,” he said to no one in particular.
No one answered.
The chaos on the bridge appeared to have passed for the moment, but Mr. Spock sensed that the experience he had just endured was not unique. When Captain Pike commanded the Enterprise, such chaos never occurred.
He opened a file in computer and began to compose his request for transfer to some other ship. Any other ship.
When Uhura arrived at Janice Rand’s old cabin, the crew member who had admitted her glanced up with disinterest, then noticed Uhura’s officer’s stripes and jumped to her feet.
“Lieutenant!” she said. “Um—” She was very tall and extremely beautiful, and Uhura could understand why Janice felt overwhelmed by her.
“You are—?” Uhura said, deciding to let her stand and sweat.
“Uh, Roswind, ma’am.”
“Roswind, I believe Yeoman Rand left some of her belongings behind when she moved.”
“Uh, yes, ma’am. They’re right over there.”
“Thank you.” She collected the possessions, thinking, Well, Roswind, you’re not such a bully when you’re outranked, are you?
“How is Janice doing, ma’am?”
“Captain Kirk is obviously impressed with her,” Uhura said, reflecting that, from one point of view, the claim was no stretch of the truth. “Oh, by the way, Roswind, do you have any allergies? Hay fever, particularly?”
“No, ma’am, not that I know of. Not hay fever.”
“Excellent.” Taking her own good time, she rearranged Janice’s belongings and tied them up in a scarf. She regarded the parcel critically, picked it up, and started for the door.
“Uh, ma’am?”
“Yes, Roswind?”
[150] “Why, ma’am?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you want to know if I had any allergies, ma’am?”
“Because of your new roommate.”
“I don’t understand, ma’am.”
“Some human beings react adversely to her species, but the reaction correlates almost a hundred percent with hay fever. So you mustn’t worry.”
“What species is she, ma’am?”
“Why? You aren’t—” Uhura lowered her voice. “You aren’t xenophobic, are you?”
Since xenophobia could get one dishonorably discharged from Starfleet, Roswind reacted most satisfactorily.
“No, ma’am, of course not! I get along with everybody! I was just—curious.”
“I see. I’m sure you’ll get along with her, too. Her people are intelligent and soft-spoken. Just one thing.”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“Their planet rotates about every sixty hours, so their circadian rhythm is different from ours. She’ll stay awake longer than you do, and sleep longer, too. Her people are known to react badly if they’re awakened, so you’ll want to be cautious.”
“What do you mean, ‘badly,’ ma’am? You mean she’ll jump up and hit you?”
“No, no, she’d never hurt you. Her people are quite timid. But shock might put her into hibernation. If that happens, she’ll sleep for weeks. That wouldn’t do her career any good.”
“Oh,” Roswind said. “I see. I’m sure we won’t have any trouble, ma’am.”
“Good. Well, Roswind, thank you for your help.” She started for the door again.
“Lieutenant?”
“What is it, Roswind?”
“What does my new roommate look like, ma’am? Just so I’ll recognize her, I mean.”
“You won’t have any trouble recognizing her,” Uhura said. “She’s green.”
* * *
[151] Jim strode into McCoy’s office.
“How do you do, Dr. McCoy. I’m James T. Kirk, your captain. How nice to meet you, and what a surprise. Are you having any difficulties? All your supplies in order? What do you think of the ship?”
“How do you do, captain,” McCoy said. “Everything’s fine, just fine,” McCoy tossed him a coverall.
“What’s this?”
“Examination coverall.”
“I know that—”
“Transparent to diagnostic signals—”
“I know that, too—”
“And you’ve got a free half-hour—”
Jim frowned. “This is a setup, isn’t it? Between you and Yeoman Rand.”
“It’s a setup, but she didn’t have anything to do with it. She said you wanted to chat with everyone on board the Enterprise—”
“And you conveniently forgot to mention that you’ve known me since I was a lieutenant.”
“If you didn’t want a get-acquainted appointment with me, you should have told her.”
“She might have noticed we’ve shipped out together before.”
“Oh, I see.” McCoy nodded gravely. “Aside from learning a new job, and making sense of that mess on your desk, and spending the next week setting up your appointments, she’s supposed to memorize all the Enterprise personnel service records. Overnight.”
“No, of course not. It would have been convenient if she’d made the connection, though.” Then something McCoy had said made a connection in Jim’s mind. He swung McCoy’s comm unit around.
“Make yourself at home,” McCoy said dryly.
Jim started when he read the screen, for McCoy had been filling out a requisition form for a package of regen starter culture.
Jim tried to pretend he had not noticed the subject of the requisition. He called his own schedule from the files. He paged through it, noting its regular progression, day after day. In the last twenty-four hours or so, Rand had set up [152] several hundred appointments for him; she had put them in clusters of a few each day, and though many members of the crew worked middle or low watch and slept odd hours, and some people worked on a schedule that had nothing to do with the twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm of the human majority on the Enterprise, Rand had somehow managed to keep his early mornings clear.
“It didn’t take her a week,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t think how long it would take to arrange that complicated a schedule till you mentioned it. Somehow, she’s nearly done. She must have gone back to the bridge and worked all evening. Maybe all night.”
McCoy looked over his shoulder. “You know, Jim, you’re not supposed to work yeomen so hard they don’t have time to sleep. I think it’s against regs or something.”
“I was really rough on her this morning.” Jim tossed the exam coverall on McCoy’s desk. “I’ll see you later.” He headed for the door.
“Jim, wait. You’ve got to have your exam.” McCoy followed Jim into the corridor. “If you get it over with, you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“Who’s worried?” Jim said without slowing down, determined to put off giving McCoy a look at his knee just as long as he could.
“Why do people hate physicals?” McCoy said plaintively as the turbo-lift doors closed between them.
Shaking his head, Dr. McCoy folded up the exam coverall and stowed it on a shelf. Jim Kirk could be exasperating, but he sure was ne
ver boring. McCoy remembered back a few years when Jim was just a lieutenant. He was brash and arrogant and impatient with anyone less able than he. That included most of his superiors. McCoy had known from the day he met James Kirk that the young officer would either mature into an outstanding commander or end up in the brig for insubordination. More than once it was a close call as to which it would be.
As a lieutenant, James Kirk had been like a colt held under too tight a rein. His promotion to commander of the Lydia Sutherland both gentled and strengthened him. The [153] responsibility of leadership tempered his arrogance and his impatience.
McCoy could not help feeling an avuncular pride in Jim Kirk’s achievements.
Now, if he could just get him to take his physical ...
Uhura managed to keep from laughing in Roswind’s face, but as soon as the turbo-lift doors closed safely behind her, she dissolved into giggles.
Halfway to officers’ territory, the lift paused.
Captain Kirk joined her.
“I could use a good laugh, lieutenant,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to tell me the joke, would you?”
“No, sir,” she said, coldly, still angry at him for the way he had treated Janice. “Captain, people are sometimes under pressure that you don’t know about.”
He raised his arms as if to protect his head from a blow. For one awful moment Uhura feared he, too, would fall to his knees at her feet.
“I confess! Mea culpa!” Captain Kirk’s voice and actions seemed part mocking, yet part serious. He lowered his hands. “Dr. McCoy read me one riot act about Yeoman Rand, and I can’t say I’d blame you if you read me another. If I promise to apologize, will you spare me?”
“I think you should apologize in public,” Uhura said.
That brought him up short. He paused, considered, and nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “I bawled her out in public, so it’s only fair. Now will you forgive me?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Gladly.”
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