search, Mr. Spock. I think you’d better come out of here till I can spare another guard.”
“You need not be concerned about my safety.”
“Mr. Spock—”
“If necessary I will make that an order, Mr. al Auriga.”
The security officer glared at him a moment, then, abruptly, shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He left Spock alone with Dr. Mordreaux.
“I do find it difficult to believe you murdered my captain,” Spock said. “However, I have the evidence of my own eyes.”
“It wasn’t me,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “It must have been—an impostor. Someone trying to frame me.”
“Dr. Mordreaux, what point would there be to anyone’s trying to contrive evidence against you? You are already sentenced to a rehabilitation colony. There is no more severe penalty.”
“Only death,” Mordreaux said, and began to giggle. “There’s nothing left but death, and that’s what they have planned for me.” From hysterical laughter he dissolved into tears, and collapsed crying on his bunk.
“Dr. Mordreaux!” Spock said. He grabbed Mordreaux’s shirt front and dragged him to his feet.
Spock’s other hand clenched into a fist.
Mordreaux sobbed into his hands. “I can’t help it, I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”
Spock unclenched his fingers, shocked by his own actions. He had come within a nerve-impulse of striking the professor.
“Dr. Mordreaux, I cannot stay here any longer right now. Please try to calm yourself.”
“It isn’t me,” Mordreaux said. through tears. “It isn’t me, it’s the drugs, please don’t drug me anymore.”
“No,” Spock said. “No more drugs.” He gazed down at the man he had respected for so long, now shuddering and sobbing and out of control. “I will come back when I can.”
He left Mordreaux behind in his cabin and relocked the door securely behind him. Neon reactivated the power shields.
4
Leonard McCoy, M.D.
The name plate on his desk had been knocked half around; Leonard McCoy stared at it as blindly as it stared back at him, mocking him with the very letters of his degree. The brass and plastic were worth as much as his competence. He poured whiskey into his emptied glass: good straight Kentucky bourbon, none of this bizarre alien stuff everyone else on the ship found god knows where and drank and compared hangover stories about. Amazing how many different supposedly intelligent species chose a downright poison, ethanol, as their recreational drug of choice; amazing how many different sorts of biological systems reacted in similar ways to it. He had even seen Spock drunk once, though the Vulcan refused to discuss the occasion. Never mind. Spock was no more fun drunk than sober.
His glass was empty again. He thought he had just filled it. No matter. He filled it again. The things people would drink, even that weird brandy that was Jim’s favorite—
He made a small sound of pain and grief deep in his throat. The bourbon was supposed to make him forget, not force him to remember. But now he did remember what had happened, what he had seen and heard and felt, the memory of the silky gray sheen over Jim Kirk’s open eyes .. .
He could hear the faint tones and harmonies of the life-support system in the intensive care quarantine unit outside his office. Unwillingly, he got unsteadily to his feet and went to look at the life-systems
displays.
The growth of the mechanical web had arrested itself; the molecular fibrils no longer writhed farther and farther into Jim’s brain. McCoy had repaired the severed artery and the punctured lung; he had even induced regeneration in the surgical wound so it would heal without a scar.
Yet the scanners gave an utterly misleading pattern. They showed strong breathing, but it was the respirator that forced the movement of air through Jim’s lungs; his body made no motion of its own accord. Jim’s heartbeat remained regular, but the absence of any signal in the parallel screen showed that the heart contracted because of the nature of the muscle itself, not in response to any nerve impulse. The nerves were destroyed. Even the sino- atrial node and the atrio-ventricular node had been infiltrated and crushed.
Blood chemistry appeared normal: it was an induced normalcy, readings completely level, never changing. pH and electrolytes, blood sugar and heme-carrier were all being stabilized by an extraordinarily sensitive piece of equipment. In a normal, healthy, living human being, the readings would be all over the scale, reacting to everything from breathing patterns and hunger to mood, observation, and fantasy.
McCoy tried to keep his gaze averted from the EEG. As long as he did not look at it he could continue to fool himself. His glass was still in his hand, half-full. He drained it and felt the flow of hope, the sudden certainty that if he looked this time, he would find some proof that Jim’s brain had survived and that he would live and recover.
He turned toward the last and most important screen.
All the brain-wave lines were flat, dead flat they had said in medical school, with the self-protective cynicism of young people not yet accustomed to death. Alpha, beta, delta, theta, and all the minor waves through to omega: every pattern that might indicate life showed that Jim Kirk was dead.
The web had completed itself and stopped forming of its own accord. Nothing McCoy or anyone else could do would have stopped it. That was how it was designed. Spiderweb was prohibited on every world in the Federation. No government, however belligerent, manufactured it. Aside from the disgust with which even allies would regard an entity that used it, the weapon could be as dangerous to those who carried it as to its intended victims.
Yet any half-educated moron could construct the stuff in a basement lab. It appeared during the rare outbreaks of terrorism that flared even in the Federation. Spiderweb was nothing but a terrorist weapon: it killed surely and certainly, and it caused a slow and ugly death.
Is any death prettier? McCoy wondered. Is death by phaser any less certain? It’s death all the same, whether you flash out of existence or slowly dissolve into the universal entropy despite all the resources of modern medicine.
The threads branched out exponentially along axons and dendrites, climbing up the spinal cord and into the brain. The neurophilic metallo-organic molecules concentrated in the cerebrum, and had such a particular affinity for the optic nerve that as they invaded and destroyed the retina they continued growing all around the eye, over the white and the iris, locking the eyelids open.
Jim Kirk stared upward, his dead eyes silk-gray.
McCoy went into his office and poured another drink. Tears running hot down his face, he slumped into his chair, and sat clutching his glass as if the coolness could give him some comfort over blind, screaming grief.
“Dr. McCoy—”
McCoy jerked himself upright, startled by Spock’s silent appearance in the doorway of his office. Bourbon sloshed out of his glass and onto his hand, chilling his skin as the alcohol evaporated. Defiantly, he tossed back the last finger of liquor and set the glass down hard.
“What d’you want, Spock?”
Spock looked at him impassively. “I believe you must realize why I have come.”
“No, I don’t. You’ll have to tell me.”
Spock left the office and stood, arms folded, before the quarantine unit. After a moment the doctor rose unwillingly and followed him.
“Dr. McCoy, the captain is dead.”
“That’s not what my machines say,” McCoy said sarcastically, and had a sudden flash of memory, of Jim Kirk laughing, asking, Bones, since when did you put any trust in machines?
“That is precisely what your machines say.”
McCoy’s shoulders slumped. “Spock, life is more than electrical signals. Maybe, somehow—”
“His brain is dead, Dr. McCoy.”
McCoy stiffened, unwilling to agree with what Spock was saying, however true he knew it to be. Somehow his
