all-Baslama himself. This brig was absolutely
secure."
Up to this time Emma and McCoy had been standing
silently nearby; when Emma spoke, Kirk and
Tomson turned quickly to look at her. "If the
pirates
could get through the protective shield on
Aritani, why
should it be impossible for one of them to get past a
small force field?"
"A good question," said Kirk. "But we didn't
find
anything resembling a shield neutralizer on
their
ship."
Tomson took the question as an insult to her
professional
competence. "The prisoner didn't have any
type of device on him when we put him in the
brig,
ma'am. My people are very thorough when it comes to
searching prisoners." Tall and pale,
she stared coldly
down at small, dark Emma; McCoy thought
they
looked for all the worlds like two exact
opposites.
Emma persisted. "But you just said there weren't
any other fingerprints on the phaser except the
guard's
and the prisoner's."
"I don't have to explain to you how easy it is to
avoid getting fingerprints on something, do I,
ma'am?" Tomson's tone was less than
charitable.
Emma almost seemed to enjoy Tomson's
disgruntlement.
"Maybe the prisoner did escape, and planted
the phaser to throw us off."
Tomson's cheeks slowly turned pink. "First
off,
MINDSHADOW
Ensign all-Baslama swears that he was fired
at from the
corridor, not from the brig. Secondly, we've
already
searched this ship, and there aren't any Romulans
aboard. Thirdly, the prisoner didn't leave
via the
transporter or a hijacked shuttlecraft.
Would you like
to suggest just how he managed to get off this ship?"
Emma raised an eyebrow but remained silent.
One of the security men walked over and displayed
a tricorder reading to Tomson. "That confirms
it," she
said, pleased. "Someone was recently vaporized in
this room. Unless you're missing any crewmen,
Captain,
we'll assume it was the prisoner." She smiled
coldly down at Emma. "I'm afraid your
Romulan
didn't escape, ma'am."
"My Romulan?" Emma muttered so that only
McCoy
could hear. "I didn't realize I owned one."
"I'm aware that suicide is a favorite
pastime of
captured Romulans," McCoy said aloud,
"but who on
this ship would attack a security guard
to bring the
prisoner a suicide weapon?"
"Maybe not to bring a suicide weapon,"
Tomson
answered.
"Murder," Kirk said softly.
Tomson nodded. "It's the only good explanation
I
can come up with to fit the facts. Of course,
I'll know
more when I get the results of all the tests."
"But who---" Kirk began, and stopped
abruptly.
McCoy finished for him. "Who on this ship would
have a-motive?"
Tomson looked down at him grimly. "Are you
forgetting,
Doctor, how many of the crew have suffered
at the hands of the pirates? They all have a
motive."
More than enough, Kirk thought, remembering Ensign
Lanz. "I'll be in my quarters," he told
Tomson.
"Notify me when you get the results."
"Come on," said Uhura, "see if you
can play
along." She had just finished singing a song from the
heartland of Africa. Her forehead glistened with
perspiration,
and she thoughtlessly ran the back of her
hand across it. Spock was sorry that he had not
properly adjusted the temperature in his cabin
to accommodate
her; he had thought it should be tolerable
for humans, since it felt chilly to him.
"Come on," she urged, and Spock joined in with his
harp, the instrument blending with Uhura's voice in
an
eerily beautiful harmony.
Uhura nodded, smiling, and Spock nodded
back.
His physical injuries were now almost
unnoticeable
except for a slight limp. At Saenz's
urging, he had
moved back into his quarters. His Speech had
improved
as well, although at times he found himself at a
humiliating loss for a word, a situation that caused
great awkwardness for himself and his visitor.
Even
worse was his almost total loss of recent
memory; he
was unable to converse about anything save the
present and the far-distant past. Kirk, who had
at first
come the most often, now visited him hardly at
all, for
there was little else on Kirk's mind these days besides
Aritani, a word which held no significance for
Spock.
Dr. Saenz, on the other hand, came to see him
almost every day, and her visits did not trouble him
much, but they always left him with a vague sense of
uneasiness and he could never recall the sessions
clearly afterwards. Even so, her controlled thoughts
were a relief after being bombarded with the emotions
of the others.
Especially those of Christine Chapel; her
visits were
most distressing. She came to give him
physical therapy
for his left arm and leg and to encourage him to
speak. The physical contact between them during the
therapy session was almost unbearable for
Spock, a
MIN-DO DSHADOW
touch-telepath. Her emotions were violent and
disconcerting;
the overwhelming one was pity for him, which
shamed him. Her pathetic struggle to hide her
emotional
attachment for him made Spock in turn feel
pity
for her. It also reminded him pointedly of his own
pathetic efforts to deal with his own surging emotions:
frustration, anger, self-pity.
Ironically, it was his human side that now
struggled
to control his emotions, guarding them until his
Vulcan
control could be restored; but it was a tenuous
control,
one which could break easily at the first critical
moment.
The only visitor he did not dread was
Uhura, for he
did not have to speak and be reminded of the words
and incidents he could not remember;
instead, he
could let the music flow from him and forget for a
moment that things were not as they had always been.
"That was great, Spock," Uhura said. The beads
of
sweat on her brow had become small rivulets
and she
tried again to inconspicuously w
ipe them away.
Spock
laid his harp aside and walked stiffly to the
temperature
control. He'd lowered it already to a temperature
he thought a human should find comfortable, but his
memory was not reliable these days; he turned it
down
another ten degrees.
Uhura sighed gratefully. "Bless you."
At the same time as her sigh, Spock heard a
shuffling
sound outside the door to his cabin.
"What's wrong?" Uhura asked. "I didn't
hear anything.
Come on, let me teach you another song."
The sound of Leonard McCoy emitting a
monstrous
sneeze just outside the door was unmistakable.
Spock rose.
"Someone just passing by," Uhura said quickly, her
soft brown eyes wide.
If someone had told Spock that his expression was
one of affectionate exasperation, he would have denied
it. "Uhura," he said disapprovingly. He could
never seem to remember her rank.
She giggled. "Oh, what the hell," she said, and
went
to open the door.
"Surprise," the crowd in the doorway chorused
weakly.
"Not much of a surprise," Uhura said.
"Really,
Doctor."
,I think I may be coming down with something,"
McCoy ShUffled. "They can transport a
man's molecules
across space, but they can't prevent the common
cold." Standing beside him was the captain, Dr.
Saenz, M'Benga, and Christine Chapel.
Spock regarded them with curiosity as they
trooped
into his cabin. The conflicting thoughts were
reeling;
he couldn't sort them out to interpret the reason for
the mass visit. They stood nervously around the
captain,
who was holding a small square object in his
hand.
He smiled at Spock. "I have a little something for
you from Star Fleet Command, Mr. Spock." He
held
out the small dark box and opened it.
Neatly arranged within the box, the shiny silver
medallion hung from a dark blue ribbon.
Spock held it
up to the light; it was inscribed on the back with his
name and the date of his injury in Vulcan script;
on the
front was the Federation logo, the Roman letters
UFP enclosed in a shield.
He did not remember what the captain said to him
afterwards; nor did he remember thanking the
captain
or watching everyone leave. But after they were gone,
Spock sat in the traditional posture before the
stone
meditation statue in his room. He could
remember the
posture, and the purpose and symbolism of the
small
stone statue with the throbbing flame in its belly, for
MINDSHADOW
his earlier memories, especially those of
Vulcan, had
not been lost--if anything, they had become
stronger.
Yet he was unable to summon the discipline of
meditation;
a part of him was gone, a part without which he
could not function as Spock.
He drew the silver medal from the box--the Award
of Valor, the Federation's highest decoration for the
wounded--comand turned it over in his hand. The date
meant nothing to him; he could not even vaguely
remember the incident for which he had been
decorated.
His hand closed over the medal.
For a long time, he sat before the statue, his eyes
wide and unseeing, and in his mind one word pulsed
like the flame: Remember.
Kirk was back on the bridge when Tomson
called
with the report from forensics.
She sounded quite pleased with herself. "I think
you'll find this interesting, Captain. Ensign
all-Basla-ma's
phaser was fired twice--once on stun and once
to
kill."
"That's what you expected, isn't it?
Also-Baslama
was stunned, then the prisoner--"
"Remember, sir, all-Baslama was not stunned
with
his own phaser. He was wearing it at the time he was
stunned."
"Of course. So it means---"
"It means that all-Baslama was stunned with someone
else's phaser, of course; then that person took
all-Baslama's
phaser and stunned the prisoner with it,
then put the prisoner's fingerprints on it, then-
--"
"Then murdered him." It was not what Kirk had
hoped to hear. "A very good attempt to make it
look
like suicide. Now what?"
"I'm afraid we're going to have to start an
investigation
of our own personnel, sir. I suggest we start
with
those who were wounded down on the planet surface.
Do you have any idea who might have had a
particularly strong motive for killing the
Romulan?"
"No," Kirk lied.
"Well, sir, I'm afraid that leaves me with the
very
unpleasant task of finding out which of our crewmen
is
a murderer."
It was Christine Chapel who found Spock
unconscious
on his bed; his wrists had been slashed with the
ceremonial dagger taken from his wall.
Emma and McCoy hovered over Spock in
sick bay,
but there was nothing more they could do except wait
for Spock's body to heal itself. Slender green
tubing
ran from the crook in Spock's right
elbow to a packet
above his bed; to one side lay Spock's harp--
McCoy
could not remember who had thought to bring it in all
the confusion.
Emma spoke barely above a whisper. "He
seemed
to be doing so well. I should have noticed the warning
symptoms."
"No one can believe it." McCoy's eyes were
fixed
on the life monitor. Spock, as always, would
survive.
That Vulcan had the toughest hide... "I just
don't
understand what prompted him to do it."
"We shouldn't have left him alone in his quarters.
It's my fault. I've seen enough of these cases
to know
better. Rational one moment, psychotic the
next. I
should have insisted he be under constant watch."
McCoy looked at her tenderly. "I thought you
were
a psychologist, Doctor. Are you
really going to try to
take all the blame?"
She smiled at him, a small, unhappy
smile.
"Maybe instead of trying to figure out what we
did
wrong," McCoy said, "we should try to figure
out
what to do right."
MINDSHADOW
"Okay." She straightened and squared her
shoulders.
"Let's put him on that neurotransmitter and
see
if it helps."
"Sounds like a step in the right direction. What's
the
name of the medication?"
"Neodopazine."
His eyebrows flew upwards. "Neodopazine?
That's
very experimental stuff."
"I know. I was one of the first to work with it. I've
used it very successfully with the violent."
"It's never been tested on Vulcans,
has it?"
Emma gazed back down at Spock; the
Vulcan's
breathing was slow and regular. Her voice sounded
very far away.
"Would you prefer Spock try to kill himself again?"
"Of course not, Emma, but I want to know what
other alternatives we have."
"We can send him away. To a star base
hospital if they'd take him--comif he becomes
more violent, to Ebla Two."
Ebla II was a maximum security
sanitorium for the
violently insane. McCoy closed his eyes
briefly and
shuddered.
"Let's start the medication, then."
McCoy had not expected to sleep well that
night,
but the last thing he had counted on was a call from
sick bay rousing him from deep slumber. Spock
had
torn the transfusion tubes from his arms. The
medic
had replaced them at once, noting that
they had not
been out long, and gone about his rounds. Now they
were out again. Did McCoy want the patient
restrained?
Reluctantly, McCoy ordered the
restraints. But he
could not return to sleep after that, and. when the
Vulcan finally awoke, McCoy was watching
by his
bedside as he had been for the past several hours.
The
confusion in Spock's eyes cleared gradually as
he
came to realize where he was, and turned
to irritation
at the sight of the tube in his arm and the restraint.
"Spock?" McCoy spoke gently. "Do you
remember
what happened?"
Spock frowned.
"Nurse Chapel found you in your quarters.
Spock
.. it seems you tried to kill yourself."
Spock tried to sit up, but the restraints held
him
back. "No," he said. "That's impossible."
It was the answer McCoy most wanted to hear; it
was the answer he wanted desperately to believe.
"Then suppose you tell me what happened."
"I don't remember," Spock said
vehemently. "But
it was not I... it was someone else."
"I want to believe, Spock, God knows,
but--"
"Then believe," said Spock, with such conviction
and so much like the old Spock that McCoy
believed.
He leaned over to loosen the Vulcan's
restraints out
of pity. "But who would try to kill you, Spock?"
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