McCoy carried an armload of slates around his desk and over to the closet in the side wall. The door did not slide open at his approach, though, and he had to jockey his shoulder to the control in the wall beside it. Once it opened, he saw a couple of his new uniforms hanging inside, and a set of shelves on one side, all of them filled with the containers he’d brought with him from the Enterprise. Frustrated and not wanting to keep his new colleague waiting, he dropped to his knees and let the slates fall onto the closet floor. He quickly closed the door and moved back to the desk, where he stacked all of the books to one side, in two relatively neat piles. Everything else, he simply swept from the desktop and into an open drawer. At last, he sat down in his chair and opened the intercom channel once more.
“Tulugaq,” he said, “send in—” He realized that he didn’t even know the name of the person about to step through his door. “—the next team member,” he finished. Bad enough that he hadn’t organized his office before meeting here with the personnel that Starfleet Command and Starfleet Medical had assigned to his research project, but he hadn’t even reviewed their qualifications and experience. In a sense, it didn’t matter; since he remained in Starfleet—and with their resources, it only made sense that he do so—Command and Medical had made the decisions on which biologists and physicists to allocate to his project.
The door to his office slid open and Tulugaq appeared there. He had traditional Inuit features: straight, jet-black hair; wide cheekbones and a wide nose, slightly flattened at the bridge; and dark, almond-shaped eyes. “Doctor Barrows,” Tulugaq announced, and then withdrew, allowing the visitor to enter.
McCoy stepped out from behind his desk and over toward the door, his hand extended in greeting. “Doctor Barr—” he began, but then stopped when she walked into his office. He felt momentarily bewildered, as though somebody was playing a joke on him that he didn’t quite understand.
“Ows,” she said as the door closed behind her. “Barr-ows. Barrows.” She took his hand and held it, a gleam of amusement in her eyes. “I think you’ve probably heard the name before.”
McCoy realized that his jaw had dropped, and he made a conscious effort to close his mouth. He hadn’t seen her in at least a dozen years, and he found that he had no idea how he should act. Back on the Enterprise, during the five-year mission, they’d shared a short romance, but in the end, he’d treated her badly. She’d transferred off the ship, and he hadn’t seen her or spoken to her since.
Now, she stood before him confidently, without any apparent anger or resentment, seemingly without an agenda of any kind. She had cropped her red hair short, which had the effect of accentuating her high cheekbones. The new Starfleet uniform—black slacks and the asymmetrical crimson tunic—flattered her figure, and the color brought out the green of her eyes. Gone was her coltish gait, replaced by a far more poised bearing. She had to be in her mid-forties now, and she wore the additional years well.
“Doctor?” she said. “Doctor McCoy?”
“Tonia,” he finally forced himself to say, and then recognizing his presumption, corrected himself: “Doctor Barrows.” But then he realized what he’d just said, how she’d been introduced, and he asked, “Doctor Barrows?”
“Of philosophy,” she said. “I carry a Ph.D. in subatomic physics from the Guelph-Waterloo Institute.” During the time they’d been together, Tonia had expressed an interest in science. Toward the end of her tenure aboard the Enterprise, she’d moved to the physics lab, and when she’d left, she’d been assigned to the Gödel, a science vessel, but still—
“That’s a long way from recording the captain’s log entries and serving his meals,” McCoy noted. The high trajectory of her career path impressed him.
Tonia let go of his hand and tapped the gray strap wrapped around her left cuff. There, her rank insignia—two enclosed gold bars—denoted her as a commander. “And this is a long way from yeoman,” she said.
McCoy glanced down at his own pair of gold bars and joked, “Good thing I have seniority.” Tonia smiled at the jest. Stepping over in front of his desk, he held a chair out for her. “Why don’t you have a seat?” he said. She did, and McCoy moved back behind his desk and sat down as well.
“You’ve got quite a view here,” Tonia said, peering over his shoulder.
McCoy looked back through the window out at San Francisco Bay, where he could see Alcatraz Children’s Park and numerous boats already out on the water this morning. “Yes, it’s nice,” he agreed, but pointed up to the right-hand corner of the glass, where a slab of metal ran across it on the outside of the building. “But I’m new here, so they stuck me in the office partially covered by the caduceus.” A five-story rendering of the medical symbol hung on the facing of Starfleet Medical Center.
“Hey, I arrived here yesterday to find that I’ve been assigned to an office two stories below ground,” Tonia said. “So don’t you complain about your slightly obstructed view.”
“Duly noted,” McCoy said. “So where did you come in from?”
Tonia looked at him questioningly. “I gathered from your reaction when I walked in here that you didn’t realize that I was the Tonia Barrows you once knew,” she said, “but now I’m guessing that you haven’t even reviewed any part of my service record or academic qualifications.”
McCoy felt immediately abashed. “To be honest, no I haven’t,” he said. “I should have, but I had an important personal matter to tend to yesterday.” He’d been thinking of his time with Jim, of course, but as soon as he mentioned a “personal” matter, he wished he hadn’t. To her credit, Tonia didn’t react in any way other than professionally.
“I understand,” she said. “I actually served on the Sakar for the past two years. A science ship.”
“The Sakar?” McCoy asked. He’d never heard of the vessel before, but he had heard of the great Vulcan scientist by the same name. “Is that a Vulcan ship?” he asked.
“It had a crew of two hundred and fifteen,” Tonia said, “and two hundred and nine of them were Vulcan.”
“And who were the other five brave souls besides you?” McCoy asked.
“Two Andorians, a Coridan, a Phylosian, and a Horta,” she said.
“That must’ve been quite an experience,” McCoy said. While he’d encountered a large number of alien beings during his life and career, he’d almost always lived among a majority of humans.
Tonia shrugged. “For one thing,” she said, “it certainly prevented me from having much of a social life.”
McCoy winced. Had that been a veiled reference to the time he and Tonia had spent together socially—romantically—when they’d both been aboard the Enterprise? His guilt for the way he’d treated her resurfaced, and he questioned whether it would be possible for them to work together professionally. Tonia must’ve sensed his discomfort, because she addressed it.
“I was just joking,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “I mean, I wasn’t—I didn’t socialize all that much aboard the Sakar—but I wasn’t making some elliptical comment about our romance.” She leaned back, looked up at the ceiling, and sighed heavily. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to address this.”
McCoy didn’t really want to talk about it either. “Maybe we don’t have to,” he suggested. “Maybe it would just be easier not to work together.”
Tonia peered across the desk at him. “That’s not what I meant,” she said quietly. “I just meant that, thirteen years after the fact, it seemed a little silly to me that this would even come up.” Now she leaned forward in her chair again, placing her hands flat on his desk. “I’ll admit that when Starfleet assigned me to this project and I saw that you would be heading it, it brought back some memories. Mostly good ones, though; I long ago dealt with whatever negative emotions I’d felt back then.”
McCoy smiled awkwardly. “‘Negative emotions,’” he said. “You sound a little bit like a Vulcan.”
Tonia lifted her hands from the desk, palms up. “A hazard of my pos
ting, I suppose,” she said, then drew more serious again. “When I saw your name, Doctor—Leonard—it did cause me to think back to our time together on the Enterprise. But that was so long ago, it shouldn’t have any impact on our lives now—especially not on our professional lives.”
“I agree,” McCoy said, trying to gauge her sincerity and finding only his own emotions suspect. Tonia might have faced the pain he’d caused her, but he discovered, to his great embarrassment, that he’d never really dealt with his own bad behavior.
“I’ve reviewed the research that you and Mister Spock did,” Tonia went on. “I’ve looked at your discovery of chronometric particles and I’m fascinated by it. I want to be a part of the search for the subatomic carrier of temporal data. This is my field, and I’d hate to miss out on this opportunity for any reason, but particularly because you and I happened to be involved more than a decade ago. That seems more than a little foolish to me.”
“To me too,” McCoy agreed.
“Great,” Tonia said with a nod, and she sat back in her chair. “So tell me about this project,” she said, “and I’ll tell you why I’m the right scientist for the job.”
Thirty-Six
1941
“Leonard,” Lynn called as she walked down the church steps. “Leonard.” She pulled at Phil’s hand, hurrying him along behind her. Around them, the rest of the townsfolk emerged into the December sunlight. Nearly noon on this Sunday, the temperature had warmed up nicely, already reaching into the sixties. Across the street, on the western edge of the commons, Leonard stopped and looked back. Lynn waved at him, and he raised his hand in what seemed like a halfhearted response, but at least he waited for her and Phil to catch up to him.
“Morning,” Lynn said as they got to the other side of Church Street. Past Leonard, she saw the heaps of dirt running down the lengths of Carolina Street and Mill Road, where the trenches had been dug for the new water mains. The Rural Electrification Administration and the Rural Electrification Act that followed had brought power to Hayden two years ago, and now indoor plumbing would finally come with it.
“Morning,” Leonard said, though with less than what Lynn considered his normal enthusiasm. “How’re you two doing?”
“Fine, fine,” she said. “We were just wondering what you were doing for Christmas this year.” She peered over at Phil, trying to include him in her statement. Truthfully, though, they’d argued about whether or not to ask Leonard to spend the holidays with them. After sharing Christmas Eve with them during each of his first five years in Hayden, he hadn’t done so for the past four—ever since his dustup with Phil about the colored man that Bo Bartell and Billy Fuster and the others had beaten up. Though it had been a little while before Phil and Leonard had spoken again after their argument, they had stayed friends. When they’d begun spending time together again, the uneasiness of both men—and of Lynn herself—had been plain enough, but over time, their relationship had improved. Still, even four, almost five, years after the incident, there remained a distance between Phil and Leonard that hadn’t been there before then.
“Uh, well, really I don’t have any plans,” Leonard said, his manner noncommittal. “I guess I was just gonna…I don’t know…I guess I was just gonna stay home.”
“Christmas is only two and a half weeks away,” Lynn said, undeterred, “so I suppose if you were gonna make plans, you’d’ve made them already.”
“I suppose so,” Leonard said, glancing back over his shoulder as though looking for somebody.
Lynn waited for Phil to speak up, and when he didn’t, she gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “Len, we’d like to invite you to come over to our house on Christmas Eve,” he said. “You know, after church services.”
“Um, yeah, sure,” Leonard said, but he didn’t seem particularly interested in their invitation. “That’d be fine.”
“You can even come over before church,” Lynn said suddenly, though she hadn’t planned to do so. “I’ll make us all a nice supper.” She wanted very much to change the lukewarm attitude Leonard seemed to have toward them this morning. She already felt saddened by the distance that had come between him and Phil, and she had to admit that she felt a distance between herself and Leonard as well, even though he’d treated her just the same as he always had. But Lynn also understood something that troubled her, something that she held buried deep in her heart, and that she didn’t think Leonard knew, that she didn’t want him to know: even though she’d tried to stop Bo and Billy from hurting the colored man, even though she thought that they hadn’t acted in a Christian way that day, she’d also known why they’d done what they’d done. Coloreds just weren’t as good as white people; they were shiftless and deceitful, slow and dull-witted.
At least that’s what she had been taught. But even in the little time she’d seen the colored man—Benny, she amended—he hadn’t really seemed to be any of those things. And truth be told, she had known white folks who had been all of those things and worse. She remembered what Leonard had said in their kitchen the next day, about how there were more differences among all the white people in Hayden than between Phil and Benny. He hadn’t meant the comment as an insult; he’d meant it for real. And something about that had made Lynn try to put herself in Benny’s place. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said, “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” She understood the reverse of that too, that you shouldn’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.
“Supper, yeah, that’d be nice,” Leonard said. He continued gazing about, peering at all the folks leaving church, though not in his normal, friendly way. Lynn suddenly realized that whatever distracted him right now, it had nothing to do with her and Phil.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“Huh?” Leonard said, and finally he looked at her for more than just a second or two. “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry, it’s just that…you know, there’s a radio program I wanted to listen to that’s coming on soon.”
“Oh,” Lynn said. She could understand that. In her opinion, one of the best aspects of electricity coming to Hayden was radio. She loved listening to The Adventures of the Thin Man, The Glenn Miller Show, The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show, and so many others. “What is it you gonna listen to?” Lynn asked.
“Oh, uh, just a news program about, uh, what’s going on in Europe,” Leonard said. His hesitation seemed uncharacteristic, but she knew that a lot of folks felt terribly troubled by the goings-on overseas, including Leonard. Lynn didn’t read the newspapers much, but Phil sometimes did, and he’d told her about Italy and Germany invading so many other countries, and how the United States might eventually have to get involved.
“Well, we don’t want to keep you, then,” Lynn said. “But we’re real glad you’ll be spending Christmas Eve with us.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Leonard said. Unexpectedly, he leaned forward and kissed Lynn on the cheek, then reached over and shook Phil’s hand. “I’ll see y’all later,” he said, and he turned and headed across the commons toward his house. Lynn watched him go, then looked over at Phil.
“Did that seem strange?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Phil said, and Lynn realized that he hadn’t been paying much attention to the conversation. “Did you say you needed to get something over at Robinson’s?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said, “we need some soap.”
“Okay,” Phil said, and they started over toward the general store.
As they walked, Lynn looked across the commons at Leonard, hurrying toward his house. Something was wrong, she realized, though she didn’t know just what. But she suddenly grew very concerned for Leonard.
Three days before the new year, McCoy stayed away from church. He’d attended each of the last three Sundays, though, specifically so that he could be among the friends he’d made here in Hayden when they learned the shocking news of Japan’s surprise attack on the United States naval air station
in Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i.
But the attack had never come.
Now, McCoy sat in his living room, listening anxiously to the radio he’d purchased last year at Robinson’s General Store. For the last three weeks, he’d waited day and night for news of the attack, to no avail. Over the past months, reports of the war in Europe had become more and more numerous, and even the farm, home, and women’s shows had begun devoting segments to discussing defense-related issues. Polls revealed Americans’ anxieties about the world situation, with upwards of forty percent of the population believing that Germany could pose a threat to the country in the future. Many commentators thought—and some even hoped—that events would lead inexorably toward the United States’ entry into the war. As far as McCoy knew, it had been in such a set of circumstances—with the U.S. on the verge of becoming a direct combatant—that Japan had launched its forces against Pearl Harbor.
And still no attack came.
As the Andrews Sisters belted out their hit song “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” ahead of the morning news program, McCoy wondered if he might’ve misremembered the date: 7 December 1941. Could he possibly have gotten the year wrong? Had Japan bombed Hawai’i in 1942?
No, McCoy thought, rising from the sofa and pacing across the room. I know the date. He’d learned it in school and had known it for most of his life. Not only did he feel sure of the day, but other incidents convinced him that the time had come. Just a few months ago, Japan had signed a pact with Germany and Italy, and since then, had staged invasions of Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and throughout the islands of the Dutch East Indies. McCoy had never studied World War II in enough depth to know the timeline of events or the details of battles fought, but he seemed to recall—and it only made sense—that Japan’s expansion throughout the Pacific had coincided with its surprise attack on the United States.
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