“What happened, Professor? I find the accusations against you unlikely at best.”
Mordreaux lay down on the bed again, curling up in fetal position, crying and laughing the strange harsh laugh, both at the same time.
“Go away,” he said. “Go away and leave me alone, I’ve told you before I only wanted to help people, I only did what they wanted.”
“Professor,” Spock said, “I have come here to try to help you. Please cooperate with me.”
“You want to betray me, like everybody else, you want to betray me, and you want me to betray my friends. I won’t, I tell you! Go away!”
The door slid open and the attendant hurried in. “The doctor’s on the way,” he said. “You’ll have to leave. I told you he wouldn’t be coherent.” He shooed Spock out of the room.
Spock did not protest, for he could do nothing more here. He left the hospital, carefully considering what the professor had said. It contained little enough information, but what was that about betraying his friends? Could it possibly be true that he had done research on intelligent subjects, and that they had been hurt, or even died? In his madness, could the professor be denying, in his own mind, events that had actually happened? What could he mean, he had only intended to help people?
Spock had no answers. He would have to wait until Dr. Mordreaux came on board the Enterprise ; he would have to hope the professor became more rational before it was too late.
The science officer drew out his communicator, then changed his mind about returning to the ship immediately. No logical reason demanded that this trip to Aleph Prime be completely wasted. He put his communicator away again and headed toward another part of the station.
As Jim Kirk prepared to call the Enterprise , the paging signal went off so unexpectedly that he nearly dropped his communicator.
“Good timing,” he said to Hunter with a grin. “And they’ve let me alone all afternoon, I’ll give them that.”
Hunter tensed automatically. Aerfen did not call her, when she was off the ship, except in a serious emergency: virtually everyone in her crew was capable of taking over when she was not there. She had made sure of that, for Aerfen ’s assignments left it exposed to the possibility of stunning casualties at any time. Hunter was always, on some level, aware of that fact, and, by extension, of her own mortality. For the good of her ship, she could not afford to be indispensable. She was secure enough in her ability to command to give all her people more responsibility than was strictly essential, or even strictly allowed. The last time Starfleet called her on the carpet, it was for teaching a new ensign, with talent but without the proper formal training credentials, how to pilot Aerfen in warp drive.
As a result, Hunter’s communicator seldom signalled for her when she was planetside; hearing Jim’s go off she unconsciously assumed the call was an emergency. He might need help: her reflexes prepared her for action.
“Kirk here,” he said.
Hunter remembered the first time they had met.
He was so spit-and-polish, she thought, and I—I practically still had dust between my toes.
They had regarded each other with equal disdain.
“Captain,” said a voice from Jim’s communicator, “I have some equipment for the Enterprise , but your signature is required before I may beam it on board.”
“What kind of equipment, Mr. Spock?”
“Bioelectronic, sir.”
“What for?”
“To incorporate into the apparatus for the singularity observations.”
“Oh,” Kirk said. “All right. Where are you?”
“At the crystal growth station in the zero-g section of Aleph Prime.”
“You really need me there right now, Spock?”
“It is quite important, Captain.”
Jim glanced at Hunter and grimaced. She shrugged, with understanding, and let herself relax again. No emergency.
“All right, Mr. Spock. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.” He closed his communicator. “I’m sorry,” he said to Hunter. “Spock worked so hard on those blasted observations, just to have them jerked out from under him. The least I can do is humor him if he wants to put in more equipment.”
“I understand,” she said. “There’s no problem.”
“This shouldn’t take me too long ...”
“Jim, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll go on up to Aerfen and take care of a couple of things, then beam directly over to the Enterprise .”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll see you there in a little while.”
She gave him directions for getting to where he was going—Aleph’s volumetric spherical grid pattern was not nearly as straightforward as it sounded; besides, she knew a good shortcut—and watched him walk away across the field.
Hunter took out her communicator. “Hunter to Aerfen . Please beam me up, Ilya.”
Waiting for the beam to track her, Hunter thought back over the afternoon. She was glad to see Jim Kirk again, though, as always, a bit surprised that their friendship endured despite their differences, differences that had been obvious from the moment of their acquaintance in the same first-year platoon at the Academy. Jim Kirk was a star student, fitting in with that cosmopolitan home-world flair; Hunter was in trouble even before she arrived, a colonist with proud, prickly, defensive arrogance, who went by a single name and refused to record any other.
Their commander, a senior-class student (whose name mutated instantly from Friendly, which was ridiculous, to Frenzy, which made a certain amount of sense), took exception to her family’s tradition of names, and, even more, to the feather Hunter always wore in her hair. By freedom of religion she was entitled to it, but he ordered her to remove it. She refused; he charged her with being out of uniform and with showing contempt for a superior officer.
She had been tempted to plead guilty to the second accusation.
Lawyers were not a custom among Hunter’s people, and she did not intend to involve anyone else in her difficulties with the hierarchy. But the court-martial would not convene without a defense counsel. To Hunter’s disgust, James T. Kirk volunteered.
Hunter had him firmly typed as the same sort of self-satisfied prig as the platoon commander; he upheld her judgment of him with the first words he spoke.
“I think you’re making a big mistake,” he said. “I think probably if you apologize to Frenzy he’ll cancel the trial.”
“Apologize! For what?”
He glanced at her braid of black hair, at the small blacktipped scarlet feather bound to its end. “Look,” he said, “if Frenzy adds lying to the charges, you’ll be finished.”
“Lying!” she shouted. She leapt out of her chair and faced him off across the table, pressing her hands flat on the surface so she would not clench them into fists.
“No one,” she said softly, “no one, in the entire world, in my entire life, has ever accused me of lying, and right now I need one good reason, very quick, not to throw you through the wall.”
He reached toward the feather. She pulled away, flinging her head back so the braid flipped over her shoulder.
“Don’t touch that!”
“I know you don’t believe I’m on your side,” he said. “But I am. I really am. I did some reading last night and I know what the feather is supposed to mean. It’s the last in a long series of tests that only a few people ever complete. I’m not saying you didn’t do it—but that feather isn’t the real thing. However important it is, it would be better to go without till you can get another real one, because if the board finds out you’ve made all this fuss over something that has in itself no intrinsic meaning, they’ll throw the book at you.”
Hunter frowned at him. “Wherever did you get the idea that it isn’t real?”
He pulled a text out of his briefcase, slid it into a reader, and keyed up a page. “There,” he said, pointing to a picture of a phoenix eagle gliding in the wind, so beautiful Hunter had to fight off a wave of homesickness. Jim Kirk’s
