Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  “Yeah,” she said, though she didn’t really feel all right. She didn’t know what she felt. “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Tell Phil I’m sorry about tonight,” he said, and she realized that he no longer intended to come for supper at their house. “I’ll try to come by and see you two tomorrow.” He got into the car and started it up.

  Lynn watched as Leonard pulled the car off the road and turned it in a wide arc, heading it back toward town. As a new blur of dust rose across the road, she looked at Billy and Bo, at Justin and Henry, at Jordy. They too watched Leonard drive away. Although she felt certain that the boys’ anger hadn’t entirely dissipated, she saw that their bravado certainly had.

  Bo looked at his hand, stained with blood and now visibly swelling. “Come on,” he said to the others. “I gotta get home and clean myself up.” Slowly, all five of them picked themselves up and headed for the Bartells’ truck and the Fusters’ car. They mumbled to each other, and the Palmer boys got into the car with Billy, and Bo and Jordy walked back to the truck. Billy turned the car around and followed Bo’s truck back down Church Street, away from town and toward their homes.

  Nobody said a word to Lynn.

  After patching up the rest of the man’s scrapes and cuts, McCoy took a second pass over his forearm, bringing the lamp over for a better look. “I just want to check this one more time,” he said. “Just to make sure.” He felt along his ulna, above, below, and through the area where the tire iron had struck him. McCoy had combated the swelling with ice once they’d gotten back here to the office, but the flesh had still grown a little puffy there. “No, I don’t think it’s broken,” he concluded, partially from what he felt, but also from the man’s reaction to the pressure he’d applied to the area. “You can put your shirt back on now.”

  The man—he’d introduced himself in the car as Benny—hopped down from the examination table and reached for the chair beside it, over the back of which he’d draped his shirt. As he picked it up and started to put it back on, McCoy noticed the dirt and dried blood on it. “Here,” he said, reaching for it. “Why don’t you let me soak that for a bit and then wash it? I can give you one of my shirts in the meantime.”

  Benny looked at him through the lenses of his eyeglasses, as though still attempting to gauge the sincerity of McCoy’s actions. “All right,” he said at last. He slipped his arm from the shirt and handed it to McCoy.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. McCoy walked out of the examining room, down the hall, and then turned right into the kitchen, which sat at the back of the house. There, under the glow of a lamp, he took a pail and dipped it into a tub of water he’d filled this morning, poured some Oxydol detergent into the pail, then sunk the shirt in after it. He found one of his own shirts—the largest one he owned—in his bedroom and brought it back to Benny. “Here you go,” he said. “This might be a little small on you, but it’s big on me, so it shouldn’t be too bad.”

  “Thank you,” Benny said, taking the denim shirt and putting it on. “For everything.”

  “I’m just glad I came along when I did,” McCoy said. “What happened out there?”

  “The same thing that always happens,” Benny said, his voice world-weary.

  McCoy shook his head, still having a difficult time dealing with what he’d witnessed. “Come on,” he said, waving Benny out of the examining room. “Why don’t I get us something to eat?” Together, they headed for the kitchen.

  When they got there, Benny said, “Maybe just something to drink right now.” He’d carried his sack with him, McCoy saw, and he put it down on the floor just inside the door.

  “You sure?” McCoy asked. He peered out the back window into the darkness and figured that it had to be past seven o’clock by now. “It’s past suppertime already.”

  “Thanks,” Benny said. “But I don’t really have much of an appetite.” He spoke in a strangely exact way, with something of a staccato delivery to his words.

  “I can understand that,” McCoy said. “How about I put on some tea?”

  Benny peered at him in a considering way. “Are you sure you want me in your house?” he asked. “What if those boys decide to come over here once they realize that a middle-aged country doctor and a middle-aged colored man are no real match for the five of them?”

  McCoy set some wood into the cookstove and lighted it. “Oh, I think we showed ’em we can handle ourselves all right,” he said. “And they’re not going to hurt the town’s only doctor. Who’d fix Bo’s broken hand if they did?” Benny chuckled as McCoy picked up the kettle, moved it around to make sure it had water in it, then placed it on the stove. “Have a seat,” he said, motioning to the wood table that sat against the wall, a straight-backed chair on each side. McCoy crossed the kitchen and sat down with him. “So tell me, what really did happen out there?”

  Benny looked down and shook his head. “Do I need to tell you?” he said. “I think you already know.”

  “You didn’t provoke them in any way?” McCoy asked, genuinely curious.

  “Sure I did,” the man said. “By being born with this color skin. That often provokes a strong reaction.”

  Now McCoy shook his head. He’d observed some racism when he’d been in New York, but he hadn’t experienced it in the five years he’d been in Hayden. It had never occurred to him before today, though, that only Caucasians lived here. “It’s just so ludicrous,” he said. He recalled teasing Spock about the differences between humans and Vulcans, and Spock had fired right back, neither of them intending or taking offense. The notion of genuine racism between members of different species seemed foolish enough, but for members of the same species to practice such bigotry seemed like the height of idiocy.

  “It may be ludicrous,” Benny said quietly, “but it’s very popular.”

  “The world won’t always be like this,” McCoy said confidently, remembering that he’d told Edith Keeler the same thing during his first days at the 21st Street Mission.

  “It certainly doesn’t have to be,” Benny said. “But it’s hard to believe things can change with people like those boys out there.”

  “I know,” McCoy said. “And the thing is, I’ve never seen those boys act that way. As far as I knew, they were decent people. I can’t believe what I saw today.”

  “Believe it,” Benny said.

  The two sat quietly for a few minutes. When the water in the kettle boiled, McCoy got up to make tea. He brought cups and a jar of honey over to the table and sat back down. “So what do you do?” McCoy asked.

  “Recently, I’ve mostly been wandering,” Benny said.

  “A lot of people doing that these days,” McCoy said. “What kind of work do you usually do?”

  “Whatever’s honest and puts food in my stomach,” the man said.

  “A lot of people are doing that too,” McCoy said.

  “Yeah,” Benny agreed. “Let me ask you something: Why’d you do what you did out there?

  McCoy shrugged. “It was the right thing to do, that’s all.”

  “But you live here in this town,” Benny said. “Those boys aren’t going to forget what you did, and I have a feeling that their parents aren’t going to be too happy about it either. Doctor or not, you may be in for some trouble.”

  McCoy shrugged again. “Maybe,” he said. “But I have to believe that even if some people in this town are racists, most of them aren’t. I guess I’ll find out.” He thought about it for a second and then added, “Besides, you don’t do the right thing because it’s easy; you do it because it’s right.” He looked around the kitchen, and his gaze came to rest on the pail. “Oh, hey, I was gonna wash your shirt for you.”

  “You really don’t need to do that,” Benny said.

  “No, it’s fine,” McCoy said, crossing the kitchen and picking up the pail. “I’ve got a washboard right out here.” He pointed to the door that opened into a small yard behind the house. “I’ll just be a minute.” He took one of the lamps an
d went outside, where he pulled Benny’s shirt from the soapy water and ran it back and forth over the corrugated surface. When he’d finished, he rinsed it at the pump, then wrung it out and carried it back inside, where he hung it on a hook beside the door.

  In the kitchen, Benny had opened his sack and pulled out a batch of papers. He sat at the table, writing something on the top sheet with a pencil so short it looked like a toothpick in his hand. “Here, let me get you something better to write with,” McCoy said, and quickly found a new pencil in the examining room. He sharpened it and brought it out to Benny.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Sitting back down, McCoy asked, “Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing?”

  “I don’t mind,” Benny said. “I’m just making a note for a story.”

  “You’re a writer?” McCoy asked.

  “An amateur,” Benny said. “I just started.”

  “What sort of things do you like to write?” McCoy asked.

  “Science fiction, mainly,” the man said. “You know, Amazing Stories and the Wonder Stories magazines. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, John W. Campbell.”

  “I haven’t read them,” McCoy said, “but I do know a little bit about science fiction.”

  “You sounded like you might,” Benny said. “Talking about the world not always being like it is now.”

  “Is that what you write about?” McCoy asked. “A better future?”

  “Sometimes,” Benny said. “Like I said, I just really started, but I think about it a lot.”

  “I’m very curious,” McCoy said. “What do you see in Earth’s future?”

  “Equality,” Benny said at once. “Or self-destruction.”

  “That sounds about right,” McCoy agreed. “And if humanity does achieve equality, if humanity does survive, then what?”

  Over the next several hours, Benny told him. McCoy eventually made supper for the two of them, but they continued talking long after that, deep into the night. McCoy found the man even more intuitive about the future than he’d found Edith to be. Again and again, he felt compelled to comment, and once or twice, he came perilously close to revealing the truth of his own twenty-third century life.

  When finally the two retired—McCoy to the sofa in the living room, giving up his own bedroom to Benny—the time had long passed midnight. He bade his guest good night, inviting him to stay for as long as he needed or wanted. When McCoy woke up early the next morning, Benny had already gone.

  Thirty-Three

  2280

  Spock saw the numbers first. The readings measured infinitesimally small—in a sense, fundamentally small—and would therefore require a particularly exacting and thorough verification of their equipment’s calibrations. Still, after years of research, these figures appeared to provide the first quantifiable evidence of the cause of the changes in M’Benga numbers.

  “Doctor McCoy,” Spock said, “I believe we may have found an answer.” The two men sat at adjoining consoles in what nominally remained the Enterprise’s cargo bay number two. Three years into their voyage to the Aquarius Formation, though, Spock and McCoy had approached the captain about allowing them to utilize—and modify—the huge compartment for their own purposes. Because of the apparent correlation of M’Benga-number increases with time-travel events, the two scientists had devised an experiment that would allow them to measure the interaction of energy, matter, and time during nonstandard temporal movement—that is, discontinuous movement along an axis of time. In order to facilitate such movement within a controlled and readily observable environment, they had designed a warp-driven particle accelerator, along with a complex matrix of sensor devices. After assurances that neither the equipment nor the testing itself posed any danger to the ship, the captain had authorized them to proceed.

  Now, as the Enterprise headed back to Earth near the conclusion of what had turned out to be the crew’s seven-and-a-half-year mission, Spock and McCoy sat in a small, shielded booth at one end of cargo bay two’s port bulkhead. In the main body of the hold, the helical accelerator reached the entire length and almost the entire breadth of the deck, coiling back on itself both fore and aft. A targeting chamber had been installed at the far end of the arrangement, surrounded by a myriad of sensor packages.

  Spock and McCoy had just completed the thirteenth trial of their experiment. The first few runs had demonstrated the need for adjustments to their setup, and the subsequent runs had supplied only inconclusive results. This time, though, Spock spotted a set of readings that, though different than what he’d expected, might give them the information they sought.

  “What have you got?” McCoy asked, leaning over to examine the display on Spock’s station.

  “The K-thirty-one sensor cluster,” Spock said, pointing with a stylus to an array of numbers in the middle of the screen. McCoy peered at it, then raised a hand and traced along the column of identifying information beside it. He stopped at a line with one particular value.

  “What…what is that?” the doctor asked. “One-point-three-five times ten to the negative forty-three…seconds? That sounds familiar.”

  “It should,” Spock said. “It is the Planck time, the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning within our universe. It is traditionally defined as the time it would take a photon moving at the speed of light to travel one Planck length, the smallest unit of distance. In this case, we can see from our sensor readings that time within our experiment has incremented and decremented by this value, or by a multiple of this value, at several points. We can also see a corresponding energy emission for each such change.” Spock move the stylus over to another set of numbers. “We appear to have observed more than simply the theoretical definition of a quantum of time.”

  “More than the theoretical definition?” McCoy said. “You’re going to have to explain that.”

  “In the quantum physical interpretation of the universe,” Spock said, “energy is absorbed or emitted at the subatomic level in discrete amounts and therefore behaves in some instances like particles of matter. As an example, light absorbed or emitted by an atom can have only certain frequencies, which correspond to the discrete energies of photons, which are the quanta of light.”

  “And you’re saying that our experiment yielded observations of absorptions and emissions of actual time?” McCoy asked.

  Spock peered again at the sensor readings, his mind working to interpret what he saw. “It would appear so,” he said. “And the absorptions and emissions correspond to movement forward and backward through time.”

  “And the corresponding energy readings?” McCoy said. “Could they account for the higher M’Benga numbers? An incident of matter traveling through time increasing the release of energy from that matter?”

  Spock had already considered the notion, though he presently had no means of knowing its viability even as a working hypothesis. “Possibly,” he said.

  “That’s remarkable,” McCoy said. “And not exactly what we expected to find.”

  “No,” Spock said.

  McCoy stood from his chair. “All right. So if we have—” He stopped, something seeming to occur to him. “Wait a minute. If we’ve witnessed the absorption and emission of time quanta, what is it that’s doing the absorbing and emitting?”

  “That is an excellent question, Doctor,” Spock said. “It would seem that there must be a subatomic particle that carries temporal data, in the same way that, for example, an electron carries a negative electrical charge.”

  McCoy leaned on Spock’s panel, staring at the data on the readout. “So we’ve found the message,” he said, “but not the messenger.”

  “An inexact analogy,” Spock said, “but apt.”

  McCoy pushed back from Spock’s station and sat back down at his own. “All right,” he said. “Presumably then we can use these quanta of time—” He pointed at Spock’s display. “—these…chronometric particles…to essentially trace our way back to whatever is absorbing and emitt
ing them.”

  “Possibly,” Spock said. “If what we’ve witnessed just now is accurate, we’ll need to analyze the data and perform some new calculations in an attempt to determine at least some broad parameters for that which we seek.”

  “If this is accurate,” McCoy repeated. “With numbers this small, at the limits of existence, it may take some doing to confirm that.”

  “Indeed,” Spock said. “I suggest then that we begin doing so immediately.”

  “Agreed,” McCoy said.

  Together, the two men began verifying their equipment, their experiment, and their results.

  McCoy lay on his back in the darkness, the beat of the ship’s warp drive like an old friend singing him off to sleep. He felt tired, mentally exhausted from the day’s activities, but exhilarated at the same time. Today had proven wildly productive, with he and Spock making the most significant strides yet toward identifying the increase in the M’Benga numbers of the crew, and the corresponding readings in the older structures of the ship itself.

  Chronometric particles, McCoy thought. True quanta of time. If he and Spock had developed an accurate view of these subatomic effects, he wondered what practical uses it might provide. For one thing, even short of the identification of a fundamental particle that emitted or absorbed chronometric data, it would probably be possible to distinguish with a high degree of accuracy whether or not something or someone had traveled discontinuously through time. Except—

  Jim’s readings continued to puzzle him. He had traveled through time on quite a few occasions now, but not more so than Spock or McCoy. The doctor wondered if the chronometric effects could be combining with something else present in the captain’s body but not present within the others. Or perhaps physical events beyond time travel could trigger chronometric effects. Jim had experienced a number of unusual events in his time aboard the Enterprise, and while others in the crew had experienced some of those events, no one crewmember—not even Spock or McCoy—had experienced all of them. The captain had encountered the galactic barrier on several occasions, had been pulled into various alternate universes, had been transported through space by unusual and not completely understood means, his mind had been transferred out of his body, just to name a few of the uncommon incidents in his life.