alcohol-fogged consciousness insisted that as long as he believed Jim might recover, the possibility was as good as real.
“I was in his mind until the moment before his death,” Spock said. “Doctor, I felt him dying. Do you know how the web functions? Its tendrils coil along nerve fibers. When they tighten they sever the connections between brain cells. They cut the cells themselves.”
“I’ve studied military medicine, Spock. More than you. Even more than you.”
“The captain’s cerebrum has been crushed. There is no hope of recovery.”
“Spock—”
“The body that remains is a shell. It is no more alive than any anencephalic clone, waiting for its owner to butcher it for parts.”
McCoy flung himself around, swinging his first in a clumsy roundhouse punch.
“Damn you, Spock! Damn you, damn you—”
Spock grabbed his hand easily. McCoy kept on trying to hit him, flailing ineffectually against the science officer’s restraining strength.
“Dr. McCoy, you know that I am right.”
McCoy slumped, defeated.
“You cannot hold him any longer. You did your best to save him, but from the moment he was wounded he could not be saved. This failure holds no shame for you, unless you prolong a travesty of life. Let him go, doctor, I beg you. Let him go.”
The Vulcan spoke with penetrating intensity. McCoy looked up at him, and Spock pulled away, struggling to hide the powerful feelings of grief and despair that had come perilously close to overwhelming him.
“Yes, Mr. Spock,” McCoy said, “you are right.”
He opened the door of the quarantine chamber. Air sighed past him into the negative-pressure room, and he went inside. Spock followed. McCoy examined the EEG one last time, but he knew better than to hope for any change. The signal remained flat and colorless; all the tracings sounded the same dull tone.
McCoy brushed a lock of hair from Jim’s forehead. He could hardly bear to look at his friend’s face anymore, because of the eyes.
Precisely, deliberately, he went to work. Once he had made up his mind, his hands moved surely, unaffected by the liquor he had drunk. He withdrew the needles from Jim’s arm. The chemistry signals started changing their harmonies immediately. The oxygen tones fell, carbon dioxide rose; nothing filtered out the products of metabolic activity. The signal deteriorated from perfect harmony to minor chords, then to complete discord. McCoy removed the connections that would have restarted Jim’s heart when inevitably it failed. Finally, his teeth clenched hard, McCoy disconnected the respirator.
Jim Kirk’s heart kept on beating, because the heart will keep on beating even if it is cut out of the chest; the muscle will contract rhythmically till the individual cells fall out of sync, the heart slips into fibrillation, and the cells die one by one.
But the breathing reflex requires a nerve impulse. When McCoy turned off the respirator, Jim’s body never even tried to draw another breath. After the final, involuntary exhalation there was no struggle at all, and that, far more than the evidence of the machines, the persuasion of Spock, or his own intellectual certainty, finally convinced McCoy that every spark or whisper of his friend was dead.
All the life-signs stabilized at zero, and the tones faded to silence.
The doctor pulled a sheet over Jim’s face, over the dead gray eyes.
McCoy broke down. Sobs racked him and he staggered, suddenly aware ofjust how much he had drunk. He nearly fell, but Spock caught him, and supported him in the nearest thing to an embrace that the Vulcan could endure.
“Oh, god, Spock, how could this happen?”
McCoy sank gratefully into darkness.
Spock caught McCoy as he fell, and lifted him easily. Loss and regret pulled at Spock so strongly that he could not deny their existence; all he could do was keep them from showing outwardly. That did not lessen his private shame. His face set, he carried McCoy to one of the cubicles and eased him onto a bunk. He removed McCoy’s boots and loosened the fastenings of his sweat-stained uniform shirt, covered him with a blanket, and lowered the lights. Then, recalling the single, humiliating, inadvertent time he himself had become inebriated, Spock decided to stay until he was certain the doctor had not ingested enough ethanol to endanger his life. Spock sat in a chair near McCoy’s bed and rested his forehead against his hand.
Spock was as oblivious as McCoy to the fact that they had been watched. Across from the quarantine unit, in a half-curtained cubicle, Ian Braithewaite observed everything that happened. He was heavily sedated; he had a hairline fracture of the skull and a severe concussion, from the fall he had taken on the bridge; his head ached fiercely and his vision doubled and redoubled.
At first he did not realize what was happening, and then he thought it must be hallucination or dream. When he realized, with disbelief, that he was observing reality, he tried to struggle up, but the sensors fed more sedative into his system. As the life support displays over Captain Kirk’s body went out, one by one, Ian felt himself losing consciousness. He tried to cry out, he tried to make Spock and McCoy stop, but he could not move. He could only watch helplessly, as Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy argued and then waited for Jim Kirk to die.
Ian fell back into oblivion, believing he would never awaken, but knowing what he had seen.
Spock roused himself abruptly. He had nearly fallen asleep. If he slept now he would be difficult to awaken for several days at least. How long he could hold off the increasing need he was uncertain, but he had no choice. Too many duties lay before him to permit him to rest.
But why had he been kept from dozing? He glanced at McCoy, but the doctor slept soundly, in no distress.
In the dimmed space of the main sick bay, the light from the quarantine unit was partially blocked; it was this shadow falling across him that had aroused Spock’s attention.
Jenniver Aristeides, the security officer who had been taken ill at Dr. Mordreaux’s cabin, gazed through the glass, at the quiet machines, the silent sensors, and the captain’s covered body. Her reflection glimmered as two tears fell from her silver eyes down her steel-gray cheeks, and her fingers clenched on the window-ledge.
Christine Chapel hurried across the room.
“Ensign Aristeides, you shouldn’t be up.”
“The captain is dead,” Aristeides said softly.
Chapel hesitated. “I know,” she said. “I know. Please go back to bed, you’ve been extremely ill.”
“I cannot stay. I am needed.”
Chapel moved in front of Aristeides, blocking her way to the corridor. Aristeides waited patiently, her immense hands hanging loose at her, sides, no aggression in her anywhere. The contrast between the two women was so marked that an observer unfamiliar with their backgrounds would have difficulty believing they belonged to the same species. Nurse Chapel was a tall, strong, elegant woman, but next to Aristeides’ granite solidity she seemed as delicate as the translucent wind-riders that lived above Vulcan’s high deserts, too frail ever to touch the ground.
Spock rose and approached Aristeides quietly. She was the only human being on board the Enterprise who was a match for Spock in terms of strength. She was more than a match. He and Chapel together would not be able to stop the security officer if she chose to pass them.
“Ensign,” he said, “when you are here you must obey the orders of the medical personnel.”
“I am recovered,” she said. “I have duties.”
“Dr. McCoy took you off duty for at least a week,” Chapel said. She glanced beyond Aristeides, to Spock, with relief, and gratitude for at least the moral support: she must be as aware as he that Aristeides could do as she chose. Spock wondered if he could use the nerve-pinch on her, if his hand could span her massive trapezius muscle, if the nerve itself were close enough to the surface to be accessible.
“I should have said honor,” Aristeides said. “I have some honor left.”
“There is no question of your honor,” Spock said.
Aristeides did not answer.
“What made her ill?” Spock asked Chapel. “Is she in danger of a relapse?”
Chapel blinked, and passed her hand across her eyes, seeking back in her memory over hours that seemed
