McCoy gazed up a wide set of concrete stairs that led to the front door. A light shined from within an arch atop the entry and another from within a second-floor window. Even meagerly illuminated, the structure looked old and weathered. At the base of the stairs, refuse flowed from a number of dented metal cans, one of which had toppled onto its side.
“Will you be able to find your way back to the mission?” Keeler asked. Before they’d left the soup kitchen, she’d entrusted him with a set of keys to the place, so that he could let himself back in and spend the night there.
“I will,” McCoy said.
“Good night then, Doctor,” Keeler said, and she climbed the steps. McCoy watched her go, but felt the need to say something more to her, to ease the burdens she obviously bore as a matter of course. He called after her as she reached the front door.
“Miss Keeler.” He started up the stairs, his knees creaking as he did so. A residual effect of his cordrazine overdose had been pain in his joints, which hadn’t yet completely diminished.
At the top of the steps, McCoy peered at Keeler. “Things will get better,” he tried to assure her. “The world won’t always be like this.” To his surprise, Keeler smiled widely.
“Oh, I absolutely agree,” she said. “The days and years are unquestionably worth living for.” Delighted but puzzled by her enthusiastic response, McCoy cocked his head slightly and offered her a quizzical expression. “Someday soon,” she said, “man will find a way to harness incredible energies—maybe even the atom—energies that will ultimately hurl us to other worlds.” McCoy stared at her, startled by her sophisticated, forward-thinking outlook. “And the men who reach out into space will also find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world, and to cure their diseases. They’ll find a way to give each man hope and a common future. And those are the days worth living for.”
McCoy returned her smile now, unable to resist either her passion for the future or her keen intuition about it.
“Are you mocking me, Doctor?” she asked.
“No, not at all,” McCoy said at once. “I’m just marveling at how right you are.”
“Really?” she said, giving him a questioning look. “Do we share a like vision?”
“I think we do,” McCoy said. “Humanity will learn to tap into the power of the atom, and eventually use that knowledge and ability to unite all the world in peace and prosperity. Even before that time, we’ll send automated spacecraft out into the solar system, and beyond. People will not only travel to the moon, but live there. And on Mars too, and Ganymede and Titan—” McCoy abruptly closed his mouth.
“Ganymede and Titan?” Keeler asked. Her voice held a note of skepticism, as though she believed that he might be ridiculing her after all. But her eyes gleamed with obvious curiosity. “Those aren’t planets.”
“No,” McCoy said. “They’re moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn.” It had been his mention of Titan that had caused him to stop speaking. The man to head the first successful Earth-Saturn probe had been—or would be—Colonel Sean Christopher. Several months prior to McCoy’s cordrazine overdose, the Enterprise had accidentally been thrown into the past, during which time the man who would ultimately be Colonel Christopher’s father, United States Air Force Captain John Christopher, had been transported aboard. Although a means had finally been found to safely return Captain Christopher to Earth, Spock had initially cautioned against doing so, concerned that such an action could result in the changing of history. McCoy realized now that he must confront the same possibility: if he altered what happened here in Earth’s past, that could change the future. The Enterprise, and Starfleet, and even the Federation itself, might never come into existence.
“I’ve never considered the moons around other worlds,” Keeler said, clearly intrigued by a concept new to her. She glanced upward, and McCoy did as well, but heavy cloud cover blanketed the sky, concealing the stars from view. “But I imagine that if we choose to go to our own moon, we would choose to go to others as well.”
“It’s just a wild thought,” McCoy said, trying to undermine the surety with which he’d spoken. Anxious about what he’d said to Keeler, he recast the flavor of his words. “I do agree that humanity will aspire to greater things than it does now, that the people of the world will come together to concentrate on the common good,” he said. “I think you’re right to believe that the days ahead are worth living for.”
Keeler quickly reached down and took hold of one of McCoy’s hands. “I knew there must have been a good reason I took to you so quickly,” she said. With a chaste squeeze of his hand, she bade him good night once more, then headed inside.
McCoy watched her go, then turned and started down the steps. When he reached the sidewalk, he stopped for a moment and peered up at the sky again. That the overcast hid the stars seemed an apt metaphor for McCoy’s own situation. Although he knew that the three centuries between now and his own time existed—or would exist, if he didn’t alter the timeline—he could not see those years. But while he possessed no real understanding of temporal mechanics, he felt confident that his conversation with Keeler had done no damage. Still, until he could figure out a way to return to where he belonged, or until Jim and Spock could come retrieve him, he would have to be more careful.
With no where else to go and nothing else to do, he began back to the 21st Street Mission.
Three
2267
As she stepped into the turbolift, Ensign Tonia Barrows anxiously spun a finger through the wavy tresses of her shoulder-length red hair. The doors closed behind her with a familiar chirp, and she reached with her free hand for one of the lift’s activation controls. She wrapped her fingers around the short wand and triggered it with a twist. “Sickbay,” she said. The car lurched almost imperceptibly as it eased into a horizontal glide toward the center of the Enterprise’s primary hull.
Recognizing her nervous mannerism, Barrows dropped her hand from her hair and stood motionless in the lift, enveloped in the high-pitched hum of its operation. Her heart hammered away in her chest and had since she’d been contacted a few minutes ago by Christine. The nurse had notified Barrows directly from sickbay that the landing party had found Leonard and brought him back to the ship. According to Christine, his condition had improved markedly, and though he felt weary and lightheaded, he displayed none of the frenzied paranoia that the bridge crew had reported after his unintentional injection of cordrazine.
Alone in the lift, Barrows took in a deep breath, held it for a couple of seconds, then exhaled slowly and loudly, allowing her cheeks to swell as she did so. Despite learning that Leonard had returned to the ship, and that he’d more or less recovered from his overdose, the stress of the last few hours had yet to leave her. She’d been on edge even before what had happened to Leonard, ever since the Enterprise had begun periodically quaking, the ship wracked intermittently by an unexplained force. Almost a week ago, long-range sensors had detected some unusual readings, and the captain had chosen to seek out their source in an attempt to investigate their nature. The crew had eventually traced the readings to an uncharted planet, class-M but uninhabited. As the Enterprise had neared the mysterious world earlier today, the ship had been buffeted sporadically as it navigated through areas of turbulence, which had continued even after they’d assumed orbit. Not long after that, an alert had gone out ship-wide, with an announcement about Leonard’s accident on the bridge and orders to security that he should be located, subdued, and taken to sickbay.
The whine accompanying the progress of the turbolift faded as the car slowed, then resumed as the lift accelerated upward. Barrows felt an ache in her hand, and she realized that she’d clenched her fingers around the turbolift’s control wand. She relaxed her grip and tried to calm down, tried to reinforce to herself that the danger to Leonard had passed.
She’d been off duty and in her quarters during the security alert. Even though the crew had been told that the drug accidentally administered to Leona
rd had rendered him manic, wildly suspicious, and unable to recognize acquaintances, she’d thought that he still might come to her, perhaps seeking a safe haven. After all, they’d been seeing each other, albeit casually, for almost five months now.
Casually, Barrows thought, chuckling to herself—chuckling at herself. She and Leonard hadn’t ever really discussed their relationship, nor had she examined it too closely, but the time they’d so far spent together had been fun and full and ardent. If she hadn’t previously admitted to herself just how much she cared for him, the depth and character of her concern during this incident now made her emotions impossible to ignore. On the other hand, Leonard’s feelings for her had seemed clear enough all along, which was why she’d believed that, even in his drugged paranoia, he might show up at her quarters, appealing to her for refuge.
But he hadn’t come to her. Instead, he’d eluded security and bolted the ship. Knowing that the captain and first officer had immediately taken a landing party after him hadn’t eased Barrows’s apprehensions much. In addition to the physiological effects Leonard would endure from the cordrazine, it had remained to be seen what dangers he would confront on the unexplored planet below—a planet from which waves of an unidentified force had emanated and shaken a starship at a considerable remove.
But now he’s back on the Enterprise, she reminded herself. Christine said he’s doing well. Still, Barrows knew that until she actually saw Leonard, nothing would calm her distress.
The turbolift slowed again and this time came to a complete stop. Barrows unwound her fingers from around the lift control as the doors swept open, revealing an empty section of corridor. She hesitated for a moment, took in another deep breath, then headed for sickbay.
As soon as Barrows entered the medical center, she saw Christine. The nurse sat at a desk directly ahead, making notes with a stylus on a data slate. To the right, a pair of security guards occupied two biobeds. Low, steady cadences beat softly in the room, the rhythms of the guards’ hearts audibly monitored by the medical scanners. Christine had told Barrows that the members of the landing party were being examined by the medical staff as a matter of routine, though none showed any ill effects from having transported down to the planet.
Christine turned from the desk as the doors closed behind Barrows. “Oh good, you’re here,” the nurse said, setting the slate down and walking over. “I know he’ll be so happy to see you.” Since Barrows had become involved with the ship’s chief medical officer, she’d consequently encountered his head nurse a great deal. After a while, the two women had formed their own friendship, and if Barrows had come to understand anything in that time about Christine Chapel, it was her unrepentant romanticism. Amazingly, discovering less than a year ago that her fiancé had perished during an archeological expedition hadn’t dimmed that aspect of her personality.
Christine briefly took hold of Barrows’s forearm, giving a quick tug toward the doorway that led into the inner medical compartment. Barrows could hear a male voice within, the accent divulging the identity of the speaker as the Enterprise’s chief engineer. “No time at all,” said Lieutenant Commander Scott. “’Twas like the three of you went through a door, then just a moment later, came right back through.”
“Excuse me,” Christine said, stopping just beyond the threshold. “Doctor McCoy, you have a visitor.”
Barrows followed the cue and stepped past the nurse. Inside the medical compartment, she saw Lieutenant Uhura perched atop the near biobed, and Engineer Scott sitting on the edge of the one beside it. In a corner along the far bulkhead, on a third diagnostic pallet, lay Leonard. Propped up on his left side and facing the other two officers, he looked as though he’d been in conversation with them. He appeared tired, as Christine had warned, but other than that, he seemed hale.
Tension drained from Barrows as freely as water pouring from a tap. Whatever fears had troubled her, they now vanished as she regarded Leonard. Her heart rate still galloped along, though, no longer from worry, but from elation.
“Why, lassie,” Mr. Scott offered affably. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“The blue uniform suits you, Ensign,” Lieutenant Uhura added, obviously making reference to Barrows’s recent changes in both position and rank. Though she’d been assigned to the Enterprise as a yeoman, Barrows had since developed an interest in the physical sciences. She’d requested a transfer of duties, and just two weeks ago, coincident with her promotion to ensign, Captain Kirk and Commander Spock had approved her move from the engineering and services division to sciences—and as a result, from a red uniform to a blue one. Assigned to the physics lab as an assistant to Lieutenant Commander Homeyer, she’d also as a matter of practicality traded in her skirts for pants.
“Thank you,” Barrows said, acknowledging both Mr. Scott and Lieutenant Uhura with glances in their directions. Then she looked back at Leonard. She felt the urge to rush forward and take him in her arms, but though they’d made no secret of their relationship, neither had they flaunted their affections in front of the crew. Mindful of the other two officers present, she settled for simply saying his name: “Leonard.”
“Hello, Tonia,” he said. “I’m all right.”
“We’ll let Doctor Sanchez determine that when your test results come back from the lab,” Christine chided him.
“I think I’m capable of evaluating my own health, Nurse,” Leonard said irascibly, but with a glint of mischief in his eye.
“You’re not a physician when you’re lying in that biobed,” Christine retorted. “You’re a patient, Mister McCoy.” The nurse didn’t wait for a response, but turned crisply and marched out of the room. Barrows looked over at Mr. Scott and Lieutenant Uhura again and saw both enjoying the playful exchange.
“I don’t know where she learned her bedside manner,” Leonard grumbled, fulfilling his self-appointed role as ship’s curmudgeon, as though nothing at all had happened to him.
“No,” Uhura said, with clearly exaggerated sincerity, “I can’t imagine where your head nurse could’ve picked up such an approach with patients.”
Barrows couldn’t help but laugh. It felt eminently satisfying, like closure after all the events and concerns of the day. She walked over to stand beside Leonard’s biobed as he dropped down onto his back. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” she said, beaming down at him. She raised her hand and tenderly rubbed his upper arm.
“Well, I’m pretty tired,” he said, “and off and on I feel faint.”
Barrows nodded. “Nurse Chapel told me,” she said, “but I just wanted to see you.” Again, she yearned to wrap her arms around him and hold him close, but instead she leaned down and spoke quietly to him, so that only he would hear. “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. Other then declaring outright that she loved him, she couldn’t have revealed the extent of her feelings any more plainly.
Leonard looked at her for a long moment, his face expressionless. Barrows stood up abruptly, reacting as though she’d been struck. She hadn’t planned to proclaim her love for Leonard—she’d only just confessed it to herself—but now that she had, his wooden response stunned her—stunned, and hurt her.
But then Leonard reached across his body and patted her hand where it sat atop his arm. “You don’t have to worry anymore, Tonia,” he assured her. “I’m all right.” He pushed a wan smile onto his face, and even that small gesture helped her sudden heartache to subside.
Barrows took his hand in both of hers. His skin felt icy and dry. “You’re cold,” she said.
“It was cold down in—” Leonard started, but then he stopped and began again. “It was cold down on the planet.” He paused, then added, “Plus I might still be feeling the aftereffects of the cordrazine.”
“Should I tell Nurse Chapel?” Barrows asked.
“No, she and Doctor Sanchez have been taking good care of me,” Leonard said. “But really, I’m very tired. I should rest now.”
On her way back across the medical compartment, Barrows nodded to Scott and Uhura. She passed through the entryway, and then without looking around for Christine, stalked through the outer doors and into the corridor. Barrows then headed for her quarters, her concerns for Leonard allayed, replaced by an entirely new set of uncertainties.
McCoy watched Tonia leave, touched that she’d come to call on him. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable with her earnest show of concern for him, but in light of how long they’d been keeping company with each other, he supposed he could understand it. A sweet, caring woman, Tonia must have been worried about him not only after she’d learned of the cordrazine mishap, but also when she’d heard that he’d taken flight from the ship.
“Ach,” Scotty said, “she’s a fine lass, that one.”
“And she certainly has eyes for you, Doctor,” Uhura said.
McCoy nodded slowly. “Yes, she’s a lovely young woman,” he said, his tone noncommittal in spite of his agreement. He felt awkward talking about Tonia and certainly didn’t want the subject to turn toward his relationship with her.
Rolling up onto his left side again, McCoy steered the conversation back to where it had been before Chapel had entered the room. “Scotty, you were saying that, on the planet, we were only gone a short time?” They’d interrupted their discussion not only because Tonia had come to visit him, but also because Spock had advised them not to speak with anybody outside the landing party about their experiences with the Guardian of Forever.
“Aye,” Scotty attested. “Vanished one moment, then back the next.”
Crucible: McCoy Page 4