Star Trek - Blish, James - 02 Page 5

  "Captain, I do not know what Dr. McCoy has in mind, but I think it may be useless by now; I have some new information. I find I made an error in my computations."

  "This," McCoy said drily, "could be a historic occa-sion."

  Spock ignored the surgeon. "I find that we must return Captain Christopher to Earth after all."

  "You said I made no relative contributions." Christo-pher said sourly.

  "I was speaking of cultural contributions. I have now checked the genetic contributions, which was a serious over-sight. In running a cross-check on that factor, I discovered that your son, Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher, headed... will head the first successful Earth-Titan probe, which is certainly significant. If Captain Christopher is not returned, there won't be any Colonel Christopher to go to the Saturnian satellites, since the boy does not yet exist."

  The grin on Christopher's face made him look remark-ably like a Halloween pumpkin. "A boy," he said, to no-body in particular. "I'm going to have a son."

  "And we," McCoy said, "have a headache."

  "No," Kirk said. "We have an obligation. Two obliga-tions, mutually antagonistic."

  "It is possible that we can satisfy both of them at once," Spock said.

  "How? Out with it, man!"

  "I have the data you ordered the computer to work out, and there is now no question but that the only reason we are here at all is because we had a head-on collision with a black star. To get back home, we are going to have to contrive something similar."

  "Do you know of any black stars around here? And how will that solve our problem with Captain Christopher?"

  "There is a black star quite nearby, in fact, Captain, but we cannot use it because it is well out of transporter range of Earth. That would prevent our returning Captain Christopher. But Engineering Officer Scott thinks we may be able to use our own sun. It will, he says, be a rough ride, but will also offer us certain advantages. Briefly, if we make a close hyperbolic passage around the sun at warp eight..."

  "Not with my ship," Kirk said coldly.

  "Please, Captain, hear me out. We need the velocity because we must compensate for the Sun's relatively weak gravitational field. And I spoke of advantages. What will happen, if nothing goes wrong, is that we will retreat further into time as we reach the head of the hy-perbola..."

  "Just what we need," McCoy said.

  "Shut up, Bones, I want to hear this."

  "... and as we mount the other leg of the curve, there will be a slingshot effect that will hurl us forward in time again. If this is most precisely calculated, we will pass within transporter range of the Earth within two or three minutes before the time when we arrived here the first time, before we first appeared in the sky. At that moment, we reinject Captain Christopher into his plane- which will not have been destroyed yet-and the whole chain of consequences will fall apart. Essentially, it will never have happened at all."

  "Are you sure of that?"

  Spock raised his eyebrows. "No, sir, of course I am not sure of it. Mr. Scott and I think it may work. The computer concurs. Certainty is not an attainable goal in a problem like this."

  "True enough," Kirk agreed. "But I don't see that it solves our problem with Captain Christopher at all. It gets him back home, but with his memories intact-and that's what we have to avoid at all costs. I would rather destroy the Enterprise than the future."

  There was a brief silence. Both Spock and McCoy knew well what such a decision had cost him. Then Spock said gently, "Captain, Mr. Scott and I see no such necessity. Bear in mind that Captain Christopher will arrive home before he was taken aboard our ship. He will have nothing to remember-because none of it will ever have happened."

  Kirk turned to the pilot from the past. "Does that satis-fy you?"

  "Do I have a choice?" Christopher said. "Well, I won't quibble. It gets me home-and obviously I can't do my duty if I can't remember what it is. Only..."

  "Only what?"

  "Well, I never thought I'd make it into space. I was in line for the space program, but I didn't qualify."

  "Take a good look around, Captain," Kirk said quietly. "You made it here ahead of all of them. We were not the first. You were."

  "Yes, I know that," Christopher said, staring down at his clenched fists. "And I've seen the future too. An immense gift. I... I'll be very sorry to forget it."

  "How old are you?" McCoy said abruptly.

  "Eh? I'm thirty."

  "Then, Captain Christopher," McCoy said, "in perhaps sixty more years, or a few more, you will forget things many times more important to you than this-your wife, your children, and indeed the very fact that you ever exist-ed at all. You will forget every single thing you ever loved, and what is worse, you will not even care."

  "Is that," Christopher said angrily, "supposed to be consoling? If that's a sample of the philosophy of the fu-ture, I can do without it."

  "I am not counseling despair," McCoy said, very gen-tly. "I am only trying to remind you that regardless of our achievements, we all at last go down into the dark. I am a doctor and I have seen a great deal of death. It doesn't discourage me. On the contrary, I'm trying to call to your attention the things that are much more valuable to you than the fact that you've seen men from the future and a bucketful of gadgetry. You will have those still, though you forget us. We are trying to give them back to you, those sixty-plus years you might otherwise have wast-ed in a future you could never understand. The fact that you will have to forget this encounter in the process seems to me to be a very small fee."

  Christopher stared at McCoy as though he had never seen him before. After a long pause, he said, "I was wrong. Even if I did remember, I would do nothing to destroy a future that... that has even one such man in it. And I see that underneath all your efficiency and gadg-etry, you're all like that. I am proud to be one of your ancestors. Captain Kirk, I concur in anything you de-cide."

  "Your bravery helped to make us whatever we are," Kirk said. "Posts, everybody."

  "And besides," Spock added, "it is quite possible that we won't make it at all."

  "Now there," McCoy said, "is a philosophy I can do without."

  Kirk said evenly, "We will take the chance that we have. If you'll join me on the bridge, Captain Christopher, we will at least give you a bumpy last ride for your money."

  Christopher grinned. "That's the kind I like."

  It was indeed a bumpy ride. Warp Eight was an accel-eration called upon only in the most extreme of emergen-cies-although this surely classified as one-and could not be sustained for long without serious damage to the Enterprise. It was decidedly unsettling to hear the whole monstrous fabric of the ship, which ordinarily seemed as solid as a planet, creaking and straining around them as the pressure was applied, and to hear the engines- usually quite quiet-howling below decks.

  For Kirk, it was almost more unsettling to watch the planets begin to both revolve and rotate in the wrong direction in the navigation tank, as the combined acceler-ation and gravitational energies were translated into motion backwards in time. Perhaps fortunately for his sanity, he did not have to watch long, however, for the close approach to the sun eventually made it necessary to close off all outside sensors. They were flying blind. Then the swing was completed, and the sensors could be opened again-and now the planets were moving in their proper directions, but rather decidedly too fast, as the Enterprise shot up the time curve. In the Transporter Room, Captain Christopher waited tensely, in full flight dress.

  "Passing 1968," Spock said from his post. "January 1969... March... May... July... the pace is picking up very rapidly... November..."

  Kirk gripped the arms of his chair. This was going to have to be the most split-second of all Transporter shots. No human operator could hope to bring it off; the actual shift would be under the control of the computer.

  "June... August... December... into 1970 now-" Suddenly, and only for an instant, the lights dimmed. It was over so quickly that it could almost have been an
illusion.

  "Transporter Room! Did you-?" But there was no time to complete the question. The lights dimmed again, all the stars in the heavens seemed to be scrambling for new places, and there was a huge wrench in what seemed to be the whole fabric of the universe.

  At last the stars were stable-and the instruments showed the Enterprise to be doing no more than Warp One. The gigantic thrust had all been drained off into time.

  "Well, Mr. Spock?"

  "We made it, sir," Spock said quietly.

  "Transporter Room, did you get a picture of the shot?"

  "Yes, sir. Here it is."

  The still picture glowed on an auxiliary screen. Kirk studied it. It showed Captain Christopher in the cockpit of his undestroyed airplane. He looked quite unharmed, though perhaps a bit dazed.

  "And so we have revised Omar," Mr. Spock said.

  "Omar?" Kirk said. "Which part?"

  "The verse about the moving finger, sir. The poet says that once it writes, it moves on, and we have no power to unwrite a line of it. But it would appear, sir, that we have."

  "No," Kirk said, "I don't think that's the case. History has not been changed-and it's quite possible that we would have been unable to do anything else than what we in fact did. That's a question for the philosophers. But as of now, Mr. Spock, I think Omar's laurels are still in place."

  ERRAND OF MERCY

  (Gene L Coon)

  The Klingon scout ship must have known that it was no match whatsoever for the Enterprise-after all, the Klingons were experts in such matters. But it fired on the En-terprise anyhow as Kirk's ship approached Organia.

  The Federation ship's phasers promptly blew the scout into very small flinders, but the attack was a measure of the Klingons' determination to bar the Federation from using Organia as a base. Organia was of no intrinsic value to either side-largely farmland, worked by a people with neither any skill at, nor interest in, fighting-but strategi-cally it was the only Class M planet in the disputed zone, over which negotiations had already broken down. It was, Kirk thought, another Armenia, another Belgium-the weak innocents who always turn out to be located on a natural invasion route.

  And the scout ship had had plenty of time to get off a message before opening fire. It had to be assumed that a Klingon fleet was now on the way, if there hadn't been one on the way already. That left very little time for negotiat-ing with the Organians.

  Leaving Sulu in charge of the Enterprise-with strict orders to cut and run if any Klingon fleet showed up- Kirk and Spock beamed down. The street in which they arrived might have been that of any English village of the thirteenth century: thatched roofs, a few people wearing rude homespun, a brace of oxen pulling a crude wagon. In the distance, something that looked like a ruined castle or fortress, old and decayed, but massive, glowered over the village-an odd construction for a culture that was supposed to have no history of warfare. As for the pas-sersby, they paid no attention to the two starship officers, as if they were used to seeing men beaming down every day. That too seemed rather unlikely.

  When the reception committee finally arrived, however, it was cordial enough. It consisted of three smiling, elder-ly men in fur-trimmed robes, who introduced themselves as Ayelborne, Trefayne and Claymare. Kirk and Spock were received in a small room with roughly plastered walls and no decorations, and containing only a rude table flanked by plain chairs.

  Spock lowered his tricorder. "Absolutely no energy output anywhere," he murmured to the Captain. Kirk nodded; the report only confirmed his own impression. This was not a medieval culture making progress toward mechanization, as the original reports had indicated. It was totally stagnant-a laboratory specimen of an arrest-ed culture. Most peculiar.

  "My government," he told the smiling Organians, "has informed me that the Klingons are expected to move against your planet, with the objective of making it a base of operations against our Federation. My mission, frankly, is to try to keep them from doing this."

  "What you are saying," Ayelborne said, "is that we seem to have a choice between dealing with you or your enemies." In another context the words might have seemed hostile, but Ayelborne was still smiling.

  "No, sir. With the Federation you will have a choice. You will have none with the Klingons. They are a military dictatorship, to which war is a way of life. We offer you protection."

  "Thank you," Ayelborne said. "But we do not need your protection. We have nothing anyone could want."

  "You have this planet, and its strategic location. If you don't move to prevent it, the Klingons will move in, just as surely as your sun sets. We'll help you with your de-fenses, build facilities..."

  "We have no defenses, Captain, nor are any needed," the man called Claymare said.

  "Excuse me, but you're wrong. I've seen what the Klingons do to planets like yours. They are organized into vast slave labor camps. You'll have no freedom whatsoever. Your goods will be confiscated. Hostages will be taken and killed. Your leaders will be confined. You'd be better off on a penal planet."

  "Captain," Ayelborne said, "we see that your concern is genuine, and we appreciate it. But again we assure you that there is absolutely no danger..."

  "I assure you that there is! Do you think I'm lying? Why?"

  "You did not let me finish," Ayelborne said gently. "I was going to say, there is no danger to ourselves. You and your friend are in danger, certainly. It would be best for you to return to your ship as soon as possible."

  "Gentlemen, I beg you to reconsider. We can be of im-mense help to you. In addition to the military assistance, we can send in technicians, specialists. We can show you how to feed a thousand people where you fed one before. We'll build schools and help you educate your young, teach them what we know-your public facilities seem to be almost nonexistent. We could remake your world, end disease, hunger, hardship. But we are forbidden to help you if you refuse to be helped."

  "A moving plea," Trefayne said. "But..."

  He was interrupted by the beeping of Kirk's communi-cator. "Excuse me, sir," he said. "Kirk here."

  "Captain," said Sum's voice. "A large number of Klin-gon vessels just popped out of subspace around us. I didn't get a count before they opened fire but there must be at least twenty. My screens are up now, and I can't drop them to beam you aboard."

  "You're not supposed to," Kirk said harshly. "Your orders are to run for it and contact the fleet. Come back only if you've got better odds. Mark and move!"

  He switched off and stared at the three Organians.

  "You kept insisting that there was no danger. Now... "

  "We are already aware of the Klingon fleet," Trefayne said. "There are in fact eight more such vessels now assuming orbit around our planet."

  "Can you verify that, Spock?"

  "No, sir, not at this distance," Spock said. "But it seems a logical development."

  "Ah," Trefayne added. "Several hundred armed men have just appeared near the citadel."

  Spock aimed his tricorder in that direction and nodded. "Not just hand weapons, either," he said. "I am picking up three or four pieces of heavy-duty equipment. How did he know that so quickly, I wonder?"

  "That doesn't matter now," Kirk said grimly. "What matters is that we're stranded here, right in the middle of the Klingon occupation army."

  "So it would seem, sir," Spock said. "Not a pleasant prospect."

  "Mr. Spock," Kirk said, "you have a gift for under-statement."

  The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, orig-inally of Oriental stock. They were indeed heavily armed and wore what looked like vests of mail. They moved purposefully and efficiently through the streets, posting guards as they went. The few Organians they met smiled at them and moved quietly, passively out of their way.

  To compound Kirk's bafflement, the uncooperative Organian council-if that is what the three men were-had provided him and Spock with Organian clothing and offered to conceal them, an offer entailing colossal risks. Then, rummaging through the discarded uniforms,
Kirk demand-ed suddenly: "Where are our weapons?"

  "We took them, Captain," Ayelborne said. "We cannot permit violence here. Claymare, remove the uniforms. No, we will have to protect you ourselves. Mr. Spock presents the chief problem. He will have to pose as a Vulcan trader-perhaps here to deal in kevas and tril-lium."

  "They're aware that Vulcan is a member of the Feder-ation," Kirk said.

  "But harmless to the Klingons. You, Captain, might well be an Organian citizen, if..."

  He got no further. The door flew open, and two Klin-gon soldiers burst in, gesturing with handguns for everyone to back up. They were followed by a third Klingon, an erect, proud man, who did not need his command-er's insignia to show who he was.