“Good luck, Kirk,” Sarek said. “To you, and to all who go with you.”
The shoring struts on the window failed. The glass imploded, spraying cold sharp shards. Cries of fear and freezing needles of sleet and wind formed Sarek’s last perception.
Five
The sun blazed across the viewscreen. The Bounty plunged toward it. The light grew so intense that the screen blacked it out, creating an artificial eclipse. Tongues of glowing gas, the corona, stretched in a halo around the sun’s edge.
“No response from Earth,” Uhura said. “The solar wind is too intense. We’ve lost contact.”
“Maybe it’s just as well.”
The artificial gravity of the Bounty wavered. The acceleration of impulse engines on full punished the ship. The solar storms stretched and grasped for the Bounty as it sped toward a fiery perihelion just above the surface of the star.
“Ready to engage computer, Admiral,” Spock said.
“What’s our target in time?” Jim asked.
“The late twentieth century.”
“Surely you can be more specific.”
“Not with this equipment. I have had to program some of the variables from memory.”
“Just how many variables are you talking about?”
“Availability of fuel components, change in mass of the vessel as it moves through a time continuum at relativistic speeds, and the probable location of humpback whales. In this case, the Pacific basin.”
“You’ve programmed that from memory?”
“I have,” Spock said.
Beside him, McCoy looked at the ceiling in supplication. “ ‘Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.’ ”
“Hamlet,” Spock said. “Act one, scene four.”
“Mister Spock,” Jim said with some asperity, “none of us has doubts about your memory. Engage computer. Prepare for warp speed.”
Sulu collected the Bounty for transition. “Ready, sir.”
“Shields, Mister Chekov.”
“Shields up, Admiral.”
“May fortune favor the foolish,” Jim said softly.
“Virgil,” Spock said. “The Aeneid. But the quote—”
“Never mind, Spock!” Jim exclaimed. “Engage computers! Mister Sulu, warp speed!”
The warp engines impelled the ship forward. The light of the sun’s corona shimmered. The Bounty plunged through successive bands of spectral color as the frequency of the light increased through yellow, to intense blue-white, to a penetrating actinic violet.
“Warp two,” Sulu said.
The Bounty shuddered within the drag and twist of warp drive, within the magnetic field and the gravity of the sun.
“Warp three…”
“Steady as she goes,” Jim said.
“Warp five…warp seven…”
A tentacle of the corona reached out and entwined the Bounty, squeezing it mercilessly.
“I don’t think she’ll hold together, sir!” Scott’s voice on the speaker sounded faint and tinny. The ship struggled for its life.
“No choice now, Scotty,” Jim said.
“Sir, heat shields at maximum!”
“Warp nine,” Sulu said. “Nine point two…nine point three…”
“Mister Sulu, we need breakaway speed!”
“Hang on, sir…nine point seven…point eight…breakaway threshold…”
“Steady,” Jim said. “Steady…”
A mass of data swept over the viewing area. It would be close, all too close, too close to the sun and too close to the speed, with no margin left.
“Now, Mister Sulu!”
The heat of the sun overrode the shields. A tendril of acceleration insinuated itself through the gravity.
The Bounty blasted out of its own dimensions of space and plunged into time.
Jim remembered…
Glimpses of his past returned to him at random. He saw the Enterprise exploding out of space and burning in the atmosphere of Genesis. He saw David Marcus lying dead among the ruins of his dreams. He saw Spock as a youth—on Genesis, Spock had aged. But Jim’s memory crept backward and the aging reversed. The Vulcan’s living body grew younger. As the images flowed faster and faster, Jim watched all his friends become younger and younger. Spock had changed least, in the time that Jim had known him, for the life of a Vulcan spanned more time than any human’s. McCoy lost the lines that years in space had drawn in his face, till he looked as he had when James T. Kirk, lieutenant’s stripes fresh on his sleeves, first met him. Jim remembered Mister Scott, who had been doubtful at first of a brash young captain’s ability to command the finest ship in Starfleet. He remembered Carol Marcus, as she had been when he returned her to Earth, as she had been when they parted so many years before, as she was when they first met.
Jim’s mother smiled and shook her head, bemused by some exploit, and as he watched she too grew younger, though she seemed hardly to change whether the years passed forward or backward.
Jim recalled Uhura the evening he met her, singing an Irish folk song and playing a small harp; he recalled Sulu, a youth just out of the Academy, beating him soundly in a fencing match; he recalled meeting Chekov, an ensign on duty during low watch, when late at night Jim haunted the bridge of his new ship. He saw his nephew, Peter Kirk, change from a young man at peace with himself and his past to a young boy, grief-stricken after the loss of both his parents.
And among those clear images drifted memories fainter and more ghostly. Jim saw his sister-in-law, Aurelan, dying in shock as the parasitic creatures of Deneva took over her mind. He saw his older brother, Sam, already dead of the same awful infestation. And yet he also saw them on their way to Deneva, in happier times, and he saw Sam as a youth, laughing, challenging him to a race across the fields of the Iowa farm; as a boy, climbing to their tree house; and as a child, looking down at him, one of the first memories Jim Kirk could recall. He saw his friend Gary Mitchell, mad with power, dying in a rock slide on an alien planet, and at the same time he saw him as an ambitious lieutenant, and as a wild midshipman their first year at the Academy. Jim heard echoes of their discussions: what they would do, where they would go, and all that they would achieve.
And Jim caught a quick, vague glimpse of his father, George Samuel Kirk, a remote and solitary man, who seemed alone even when he was with his family.
Finally he saw nothing but a long and featureless gray time.
A tremendous noise roused him from his fugue. The ship had survived its plunge through solar winds. Heat penetrated from the Bounty’s seared skin and pooled in the control chamber. Sweat trickled down Jim’s back. The instruments showed all systems within the limits of normalcy. Everyone else on the bridge—even Spock—gazed dreamily into nothingness. The temperature began to fall as the ship radiated energy back into space.
“Mister Sulu,” Jim said. He received no reply. “Mister Sulu!” Sulu glanced around, startled from his own reverie. “Aye, sir?” Jim watched as they all drew themselves back from their reveries to now…but when was now?
“What is our condition?”
Sulu glanced at his control panel. “Braking thrusters have fired, sir.”
“Picture, please.”
A blue and white globe rotated lazily, its clouds parting here and there to reveal familiar continents.
“Earth,” Jim said softly. “But when?” At least they had outdistanced the probe, for the probe’s impenetrable, roiling cloud cover no longer enclosed the planet. “Spock?”
“Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.”
“Well done, Mister Spock.”
“Admiral!” Uhura exclaimed. “I’m picking up whale songs on long-range sensors!” She patched the signal into the speakers. The eerie cries and moans and whistles filled the control chamber.
“Home in on the strongest signal,” Jim said. “Mister Sulu, descend from orbit.”
“Admiral, if I may,” Spock said. “We are und
oubtedly already visible to the tracking devices of this time.”
“Quite right, Spock. Mister Chekov, engage cloaking device.”
Chekov complied. The Bounty remained visible inside itself, yet it lost a certain substantiality. Jim had a brief impression of riding toward a phantom planet in a phantom ship. Perhaps McCoy should have named the Klingon fighter Flying Dutchman.
The Bounty swept down out of space, drawing its wings into their sleek and streamlined atmospheric configuration. The ship bit into the air, slowing as it used friction and drag to help its braking.
The leading edges of its wings glowed with heat. Ionized molecules of gas rippled from the heat shields over the bow. The Bounty passed into night. The ship rode a fiery wave toward Earth, a brilliant shooting star in the dawn sky.
“We’ve crossed the terminator into night,” Sulu said.
“Homing in on the west coast of North America,” Spock said.
“The individual whale song is getting stronger. This is strange, Admiral. The song is coming from San Francisco—”
“From the city?” Jim said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Unless they’re stranded in the bay,” Sulu said. “Or—held captive?”
“It’s the only one I can pick up,” Uhura said. “And it’s being broadcast. But there’s no way to tell if it’s live or from a recording.”
“Is it possible…” Jim said. “Is it possible that they’re already extinct in this time?”
“They are not yet extinct,” Spock said.
“Then why can’t Uhura find more than one?” Jim snapped.
“Because,” Spock said evenly, “this is the wrong time of year for humpbacks to sing.”
“Then why—”
“I do not know, Admiral. Information on great whales is severely limited in our time. Much has been lost, and much was never learned. May I suggest that we begin by discovering the origin of these signals?”
“Admiral!” Scott’s voice overrode the song of the whale on the speakers. “Ye and Mister Spock—I need ye in the engine room.”
Jim rose immediately. “Continue approach,” he said, and headed out of the control chamber. Spock followed at a more dignified pace.
When Spock entered the engine subroom beside the power chamber, he understood the trouble before Scott spoke. The glow of dilithium crystals should have provided a brilliant illumination. Instead, the transparent power chamber radiated only the dimmest of multicolored light from the planes and angles of the crystalline mass. The dilithium now consisted of a crystal lattice changing into a quasicrystalline form. The crystals were diseased. As Spock watched, the plague spread. It was as if diamonds were decomposing into graphite or coal. For the Bounty’s purposes, the dilithium crystal was essential, the dilithium quasicrystal utterly useless.
“They’re givin’ out,” Scott said. “Decrystallizin’. Ye can practically see ’em changin’ before ye. After a point, the crystal is so compromised that ye canna pull any energy from it at all.”
“How soon before that happens, Mister Scott?” Kirk said. “Give me a round figure.”
Scott considered. “Twenty-four hours, give or take, stayin’ cloaked. After that, Admiral, we’ll be visible, or dead in the water. More likely both. We willna have enou’ power to break back out of Earth’s gravity. I willna even mention gettin’ back home.”
Kirk glared at the crystals. Spock wondered if he thought that the force of his anger could make them shift their energy states in an impossible spontaneous transformation.
“I can’t believe we’ve come this far, only to be stopped,” Kirk said. “I won’t believe we’ll be stopped.” He chewed thoughtfully on his thumbnail. “Scotty, can’t you recrystallize the dilithium?”
“Nay,” Scott said. “I mean, aye, Admiral, ’tis theoretically possible, but even in our time we wouldna do it. ’Tis far easier, never mind cheaper, to go and mine new dilithium. The recrystallization equipment, ’twould be too dangerous to leave lyin’ abou’.”
“There is a twentieth-century possibility,” Spock said. During his brief study of his mother’s species’ history and culture, he had been particularly intrigued by the human drive, one might almost say instinct, to leave extremely dangerous equipment “lyin’ abou’.”
“Explain,” Kirk said.
“If memory serves,” Spock said, “human beings carried on a dubious flirtation with nuclear fission reactors, both for energy production and for the creation of weapons of war. This in spite of toxic side effects, the release of noxious elements such as plutonium, and the creation of dangerous wastes that still exist on Earth. The fusion era allowed these reactors to be replaced. But at this time, some should remain in operation.”
“Assuming that’s true, how do we get around the toxic side effects?”
“We could build a device to collect the high-energy photons safely; we could then inject the photons into the dilithium chamber, causing crystalline restructure. Theoretically.”
“Where would we find these reactors? Theoretically?”
Spock considered. “The twentieth-century humans placed their land-based reactors variously in remote areas of low population, or on fault lines. Naval vessels also used nuclear power. Given our destination, I believe this latter possibility offers the most promise.”
Thinking over what Spock had said, Jim headed back to the control chamber.
At the helm, Sulu looked out across twentieth-century Earth. He kept the Bounty hovering above San Francisco. The city avalanched in light down the hillsides that ringed its shore. The lights ended abruptly at the bay, as if the wall of skyscrapers caught them and flung them upward.
“Is still beautiful city,” Chekov said. “Or was, and will be.”
“Yes,” Sulu said. “I’ve always wished I had more time to get to know it. I was born there.”
“I thought you were born on Ganjitsu,” Chekov said.
“I was raised on Ganjitsu. And a lot of other places. I never lived here more than a couple of months at a time, but I was born in San Francisco.”
“It doesn’t look all that different,” McCoy said.
Jim returned to the control chamber, and overheard McCoy’s comment.
“Let’s hope it isn’t, Bones,” he said.
But it did look different to Jim. He traced out the city, trying to figure out why the scene made him uneasy. Unfamiliar tentacles of light reached across the water: bridges. In his time, the Golden Gate Bridge remained as a historical landmark. But the other bridges no longer existed. The lights must be the head-lamps of ground cars, each moving a single person. Jim located the dark rectangle of undeveloped land that cut across the eastern half of the city.
“Mister Sulu,” he said, “set us down in Golden Gate Park.”
“Aye, sir. Descending.”
As the Bounty slipped through the darkness, Jim discussed the problems they had to solve with his shipmates.
“We’ll have to divide into teams,” he said. “Commanders Chekov and Uhura, you draw the uranium problem.”
“Yes, sir,” Chekov said. Uhura glanced up from the comm board long enough to nod.
“Doctor McCoy, you, Mister Scott, and Commander Sulu will build us a whale tank.”
McCoy scowled. “Oh, joy,” he said, almost under his breath.
“Captain Spock and I,” Jim said, “will attempt to trace the whale song to its source.”
“I’ll have bearing and distance for you, sir,” Uhura said.
“Right. Thanks.” Jim gathered them together with his gaze. “Now, look. I want you all to be very careful. This is terra incognita. Many customs will doubtless take us by surprise. And it’s a historical fact that these people have not yet met an extraterrestrial.”
For a second no one understood what he meant. They lived in a culture that included thousands of different species of sentient beings. To think that they would meet people for whom a nonhuman person would be an oddity startled and shocked them all.
Spock, who often felt himself an alien even among his own people, did not find Admiral Kirk’s comment surprising. He considered the problem for a moment.
When he had in the past been compelled to pass for human among primitive humans, his complexion had aroused little comment and no suspicion. His eyebrows had engendered comment, but only of a rather pernicious kind that could easily be ignored. Of the several structural differences between Vulcans and humans, only one had caused him any difficulty: his ears.
He opened his robe, untied the sash of the underrobe, and retied the sash as a headband. The band served to disguise his eyebrows, but, more important, it covered the pointed tips of his ears.
“I believe,” he said, “that I may now pass among twentieth-century North Americans as a member of a foreign, but not extraterrestrial, country.”
James Kirk gave a sharp nod of approval. “This is an extremely primitive and paranoid culture. Mister Chekov, please issue a phaser and communicator to each team. We’ll maintain radio silence except in extreme emergencies.” Jim glanced around to see that everyone understood the dangers they faced. Given the fears of the people of the late twentieth century, perhaps it would be better if his people did not look official. “Scotty, Uhura, better get rid of your uniform insignia.”
They nodded their understanding and complied.
“Any questions?” Kirk said.
No one spoke.
“All right. Let’s do our job and get out of here. Our own world is waiting.”
Monday mornings were always worst as far as garbage was concerned. His heavy gloves scraping on the asphalt, Javy scooped up the loose trash and pitched it into the park garbage can. He and Ben were only supposed to empty the cans, but Javy hated seeing Golden Gate Park trashed after every weekend, so sometimes he broke the rules.
Belching diesel fumes into the foggy, salt-tinged air, the truck backed toward him. Javy hoisted the can onto his shoulder and pitched the contents into the garbage crusher. His first few weeks on the job, he had thought of a different metaphor for the machine every day, but there existed only a limited number of variations on grinding teeth or gnashing jaws. His favorite literary image contained a comparison of the garbage-crushing mechanism to a junkyard machine smashing abandoned cars into scrap. Minor garbage and major garbage. He had not quite got it worked out yet. So what else was new? He tried comparing the unfinished metaphor to the persistently intractable novel he was trying to write in the same way he compared the garbage crusher and the car crusher. Minor unfinished business and major unfinished business. Maybe he should try putting the manuscript into the garbage crusher.
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 55