by Diane Carey
“George’ll explain it to you. Congratulations. April out.” He waved a hand over the console as though he’d just worked a card trick, and said, “There you are.”
George folded his arms and frowned. “You know, you could be a little more formal about things like that.”
“Formal? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Formal. Protocol. The captain of a ship shouldn’t be on a first-name basis with humanity,” George said. “Discipline, Robert.”
April tossed it off. “Oh, discipline! Everyone here wants the same thing, George.” A hail from the bridge interrupted them, and April eyed George as he answered it. “April here.”
“Sanawey, sir. Dr. Broumell’s looking for you.”
“Pipe me through to him.”
“Aye, sir.”
Brownell’s voice came almost immediately. “August? Where are you?”
“I’m still in engineering, doctor,” April answered, a grin curling his lips.
“Get out of there. You make my techs nervous.”
“Do I detect a lilt of success, doctor?”
“Tell that redheaded intruder he got lucky.”
“It’s working, then? The hatches will hold?”
“Bet it’s the first time a ship this size ever got jump-started.”
April closed his eyes for a moment of relief and breathed, “Wonderful. Wonderful, doctor! How long before we’re under way?”
[71] “I’m an old man. I move slow. Two hours, including safety checks.”
“I think we can all manage to give you that time. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yeah. Don’t bother me.”
“Oh, I’m very good at that, doctor. Best of luck.”
“You’re bothering me.”
With a little laugh, the captain nodded as though the intercom could see him. “All right, April out.”
George pointed at the intercom. “He’s really in Starfleet?”
“He’s really in Starfleet,” April confirmed, folding his arms and leaning against the engineering console. “In fact, he’s an admiral. Would you believe it?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Admiral of Engineering and Computer Sciences. One of the very few to have such a rank in two separate areas of expertise.”
“He’s a fart.”
“But isn’t he a delightful one?”
“He’s not senior commanding staff around here. He shouldn’t treat you like that.”
“I don’t care how he treats me as long as the ship goes. Well, George, you have two hours. What are you going to do with it—besides sit back and be proud of yourself?”
His quarters were spartan and austere, like most of the half-finished interior of the ship. Eventually parts of the walls of structural beams would be painted blue or red or gold or some color to denote specific decks, and to make the crew feel less like they were living inside a giant beaker. But for now, “drab” was the operative word. There weren’t even any cabin numbers painted on the doors yet; he’d had to count rooms down from the turbo-lift to find his quarters, and he hoped he wasn’t sitting in somebody else’s bedroom, using somebody else’s computer terminal and somebody else’s notepaper.
“With my luck, it’s probably Brownell’s cabin,” he muttered as he tapped up another section of information on the screen and scanned it. When the door buzzer sounded, he grumbled and said, “Yeah, come.”
The door slid open and Drake strode in, immediately snapping to attention. “Security Chief Me reporting for duty, sah.”
George didn’t look up. “At least I know I’m in the right cabin.”
“I hear congratulations are in order,” Drake said, moving closer.
[72] “Congratulations,” George muttered, lost in the screen before him.
“Not to me, silly man. To you.”
Now he did look up. “What for? Oh—that wasn’t anything.”
Drake sprawled out on Starfleet’s idea of a bed and propped himself up on an elbow. “Not on board half a day before you save the ship. Pretty good score, I would call it.”
“I didn’t do anything so great. They made me mad, that’s all. Their little bubble was about to burst and they were ready to cry about it instead of snowplowing their way out. Engineers are used to taking their time. They can’t think under pressure. I just made them think harder.” He clicked off the computer and leaned back as though the effort had exhausted him.
“Snowplowing, do you say? What’s that?”
“What are you? An apprentice alien? Even in Trinidad, they must’ve heard of snow.”
“Heard of it, of course. But I don’t understand—”
“When it snows, you have to get out and plow it back before it gets too packed and heavy. Snowplowing. Plow through a problem before it becomes a bigger problem.”
Drake laughed and said, “Heavy! George, I have seen pictures of this stuff. It’s all light and feathery and all you have to do is floof it out of your way with a little brush of your hand. Plowing, indeed. Such stories you tell.”
With a threatening stare, George told him, “I know where you’re spending your next winter leave, you can bet. I’ve got a nice long walkway at home that I’m going to introduce you to. You’ll have a different use for that shovel you sling.”
“What’s that I see?” Drake pushed himself up and pointed at the notepad on George’s lap. “Another letter? You just sent one this morning, and already something else is on your mind?”
George looked self-consciously down at the notepad with the scribbled letter and drew a blank on a reasonable response that wouldn’t give him away. He knew if he looked up, if he let Drake get a good fix on his eyes and the pain within them, that his shields would drop. There would be no drawing them back up in time.
“Why are you unhappy, George?”
George hid a wince. Too late. He stared at his reflection in the blank computer screen.
From behind him, Drake sat up on the bed. “Don’t say a word. I’ll tell you why.” His accent, that strange mixture of West Indies French, [73] Creole, and educated English, seemed to give his analysis a cutting stability. “Captain made you feel your career is something less than noble. He made you think that perhaps the military aspects of the Federation are holding us back, and here you are contributing to them. You are suddenly a military man among philosophers. Actually, we both are, but the difference is that I don’t take it personally, and you do. But that’s all right, because I never take anything personally and you always take everything personally, thus all is well there.”
George watched his reflection in the computer screen grow sallow. It stopped blinking; perhaps it even stopped breathing for a moment as the truth behind Drake’s words drew the life from it. George felt his jaw grow stiff as he watched his face inside the screen and listened.
“You feel wounded,” Drake went on, his tone suddenly less frivolous. “Captain made you think the niche you have dug for yourself may be a grave. When he talked about the stars and the ship and exploring, he made you feel dirty.” Drake pointed at the letter in George’s lap. “You wonder if you’ve wasted yourself, and you think your family has paid the price. You’ve given up the best things in a more normal life-style in order to help protect our space, and now Captain shows you there’s something more to go for. The Federation moves forward, and Geordie Kirk doesn’t. You’ve gotten neither ‘best.’ If you can’t be a Robert April, you wonder if you might not at least be a better daddy.”
George felt the weight of things that had no substance. Words. Thick as steel blocks, they dropped one by one on the deck, each with a ringing jar.
George parted his lips and whispered, “You’re a son of a bitch.”
The notepad slid off his leg and flopped facedown on the carpet. Even the letter wanted nothing to do with him. Even it knew he was being less than honest with himself—about space duty, and about the home front as well. Neither “best.”
“George,” Drake b
egan slowly, “Captain never meant harm, eh?”
He swiveled around in his chair, at least enough to glance at Drake before lowering his eyes again, still touched with shame. “Oh, I know that. April would cut his tongue out before he’d deliberately hurt anybody’s self-esteem. He just ... accidentally made me quit fooling myself about where my life is going.”
“Even accidentally, the stinger goes in.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s doing me a favor. Maybe that’s why he really [74] brought me along. Maybe the only thing I’m really here for is so Robert can help me shake a life out of my existence.”
“George,” Drake scolded, “saving the ship and the lives of all those people out in space isn’t enough to suggest something else to you?”
“I told you, I didn’t save the ship. And those people are still out there.”
“You are a professional underestimater, Geordie.”
“All right, that’s enough.” George scooped up the notepad, pulled off the letter, folded it, and stuffed it into an envelope. Immediately he sealed it and got to his feet. “Come with me. I’ve got some things I want you to start on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Sickbay.”
“Are we sick?”
Sickbay was hard to find. The whole deck was only pretending to be habitable, and between the empty rooms and endless unmarked doors, the two men made several wrong turns before they found Sarah Poole and a handful of techs moving diagnostic beds into place and hooking them up to the readout screens. Dr. Poole looked more attractive under these lights than she had under the lights in the runabout, though she still had a countryish plainness and the pale cheeks of someone who hadn’t been under good sunlight for a while. And the disposition of someone who missed it.
“You gentlemen need something?” she demanded on first glimpse of them.
Drake stopped short, turned around, and started to leave, but George hooked his elbow and dragged him back in. “Can you teach Lieutenant Reed to use a mediscanner?”
“I suppose it’s critical.”
“It might be,” George retaliated.
“Depends,” she said, “Does Lieutenant Reed have the brains for it?”
“Depends. Does the teacher have the brains to make it clear without resorting to Latin?”
Dr. Poole glared at him, then accepted the inevitable and pawed through a transport crate. “All right,” she sighed, pulling out a case of hand-sized mediscanners. “What is it you want him to scan for?”
“General metabolic rate,” George said. “Heart, perspiration, things like that.”
[75] “Oh,” she said with a caustic nod. “You want him to look for lies.”
George stepped to her. “Is it going to be that obvious?”
Her unadorned green eyes suddenly sparkled with satisfaction at his concern, and she looked straight at him while she adjusted one of the units. “That’s his problem, not mine.” She turned away from him before he could respond. “All right, Reed. Come here.”
With a subservient bow, Drake stepped to her.
Dr. Poole ran her finger down the side of the small instrument, pointing out gradients of readings. “This is the norm range. It’s not going to read the same for everybody, but humans have certain physiological common denominators. If the lights flow to the right, it’s high. Low is to the left. Here’s heart, here’s blood pressure, here’s respiratory function, here’s brain wave activity, here’s nerve activity in the extremities, and the slash on the bottom is muscle control.”
“What are the numbers on this side?” Drake asked.
“Those are too complicated for a ten-second medical degree. Ignore them and just watch the lights.” She wagged the instrument in his face. “This is set for humans. If Captain April has pulled any surprises on me and hired aliens that he didn’t bother to tell me about, which wouldn’t be the slightest surprise, it’s not going to work on them properly and you’ll get a red signal in this space right here. You’ll have to come back for an instrument with a different setting.”
“Madame, I shall nominate you for sainthood.”
“No, thanks. I’ve already got all the odd jobs I need.”
“On your way, Drake,” George ordered. “And don’t forget what I told you.”
“My orders are burned indelibly on the skin of my brain,” Drake said, bowing. He skittered out into the corridor and disappeared.
George found himself alone with Sarah Poole. Suddenly he felt relieved to be around someone who didn’t know him at all, who couldn’t find the subtle hiding places inside himself like Robert, and especially like Drake, were able to.
He turned to her and bluntly said, “I get the feeling you don’t want to be here.”
“I get the same readings from you,” she said without a blink. “You really expect your friend to be able to feel out the crew without giving himself away?”
“Drake’s intuitive. More than you think.”
She nodded toward him. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
[76] She pointed at his hand. “That.”
He looked down. He’d forgotten he was still holding the envelope. “Just a letter home,” he said, careful of his tone.
Evidently not careful enough.
“Is that the place you want to be instead of here?” she asked bluntly.
“Why do you ask that?” he snapped.
“I don’t know many people who bother to actually write letters, do you?”
Had he put on transparent skin this morning or what? Somehow George managed to stifle a giveaway shake of his head.
“To your wife?” Dr. Poole added.
“No, to my sons,” he snapped back quickly, and the frustration of having his privacy so easily ruptured bubbled to the surface.
“You don’t have a wife?”
“Yes, I have a wife, doctor.”
“All right, I’m sorry. Forget I asked.”
“I will.”
“How old are your sons?”
Stiff-jawed, George took a settling breath and absorbed what seemed to be genuine interest on her part. Whether the interest was professional or personal, he couldn’t tell yet. “They’re fourteen and ten.”
“Ah ...”
“What do you mean, ‘ah’?”
She shrugged. “Oh, only that those are the ages when fathers and sons have the most in common. Just after childhood and just before adolescence. It’s not surprising that you’re feeling the distance. I assume your kids are on Earth.”
Deflecting any further analysis, George went for aggression. “Well, that’s my life in a box. What about yours? Where did Robert kidnap you from?”
“Me?” With a sigh she sat on the edge of the transport case and picked at the equipment. “I’m a veterinarian.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” George commented.
Her brows went up and she leaned forward a little to punctuate her point. “I’m not being facetious, Mr. Kirk. I’m supposed to be on assignment to a new farm colony.”
George stared at her to see when the joke would break, but it [77] didn’t. He held out a hand to stay the flow of disbelief. “Wait a minute. You’re a doctor. Robert’s doctor, right?”
“I’m his dog’s doctor, Commander.”
George stared a few more moments, then paced across the floor before turning back. “Pardon my asking,” he began hesitantly, “but why are you here?”
“Ask the captain,” she said, ready with her answer. “I’ve already done all my arguing. I told him it was crazy and that I didn’t want the assignment. But the River April only flows in one direction, as you probably know perfectly well.”
“And we’re caught in the rapids. Robert knows human nature. Nobody in his right mind would turn down a mission to save fifty-one people from deep space.”
“Speak for yourself. I’d turn it down in a minute if he’d given me a choice. I’m the wrong person for this mission. I don’t have enough training in radia
tion sickness, and I haven’t spent enough time in space to be accustomed to its eccentricities, and we don’t have any real idea of what condition we’re going to find those people in. He’d have done much better to choose a doctor with deep-space experience.”
Not to mention one who usually treats humans instead of spaniels, George thought, and only barely managed to keep from saying. We haven’t left spacedock and already we’re in trouble.
“We’ll all have to do our best,” he said. “There isn’t time for less.”
“Or more,” she added.
He pressed his lips tight and vowed not to give her more ammunition. He might be annoyed with Robert April, but he was also loyal to him, and if you worked for somebody, you should damned well work for him. He wasn’t about to spend the mission collecting grievances against April. If anything, it was his job to dilute them.
April himself defused the issue when he strolled in the main door, saw the two of them, and held out his arms in greeting. “So, getting to know each other? How very reassuring. George, I’m so surprised to see you here, but isn’t it nice? I thought you were resting up. Sarah, my dear, we’ve had a little accident with an acid burn in impulse engineering. I told them I was just passing through and would send you down. Nothing serious, but would you see to it?”
Sarah pursed her lips in disapproval, reached into the packing crate, and came up with treatment cloths and a spray bottle. “Barn calls already.” Without further comment, she glanced accusatively at Robert and strode out.
[78] April watched her go with a pleased grin and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Marvelous, isn’t she?” he said after she was gone.
“Robert, would you like to explain to me why our ship’s physician is an animal doctor?”
“Oh, she told you about that, did she?”
“In no uncertain terms.”
“Well, you see, George, she’s perfectly qualified as an M.D. A human doctor, I mean. She went back for a second degree in veterinary medicine well after she had already completed a medical degree. So she wasn’t being altogether truthful with you. It’s just that she wants to be a veterinarian and she doesn’t want to be a human doctor anymore.”
“She’s managing that all right,” George said caustically.