like days.
“Hypermorphic botulism,” she said.
“Most unusual.” Spock, like Kirk, had assumed Ian Braithewaite’s two colleagues had been felled by infection from a common source on Aleph Prime, but how could Aristeides contract it as well? Neither Aleph Prime nor the Enterprise had had a general outbreak of food poisoning. On the contrary, the only point of similarity between the victims was their connection with Dr. Mordreaux.
“I am recovered,” Aristeides said. “I cannot stay here. At least let me go to my quarters.”
Spock raised a questioning eyebrow at Chapel. “Is there a medical objection to that?”
“It isn’t a good idea.”
“Please,” Aristeides whispered. “I beg of you.”
A look of pity softened Chapel’s expression. She reached out to touch the metal and plastic band on Jenniver’s left wrist, but the security officer flinched back as if—as if Chapel might strike her? That made no sense. Perhaps she simply did not like to be touched.
“Jenniver,” Chapel said, “will you promise not to take off your sensor? That way if you’re in any distress we’ll know to come help you.”
“If I require help, the sensor will signal.”
That was not a question, Spock thought. She made a statement: she has implied no promise.
“Yes, it will. I suppose it would be all right to stay in your own room,” Chapel said. “You need rest more than anything else right now.”
Jenniver Aristeides inclined her head in gratitude, and Christine Chapel stood aside so she could leave. The security officer trudged away down the corridor and around a corner, out of sight.
Chapel watched her go, then came a few steps back into sick bay and stopped. “I hope that was the right thing to do.”
Spock wanted to check on Dr. McCoy again, but as he turned, Chapel reached out and brushed his sleeve with her fingertips. Spock faced her again, expecting an outburst of some emotional type, which he would refuse to understand.
“Mr. Spock,” she said, with quiet composure, “someonemust tell the crew what has happened. It isn’t fair to make them find out through rumor, or the way Jenniver did. The way I did. You’re in command now. If you can’t—if you prefer not to do it you must ask someone else to.”
Spock hesitated a moment, then nodded. “You are right,” he said. It was difficult for him to admit he had bungled, or at the very least neglected, his first duty to ship and crew; he would be well within his authority to reprimand Chapel for speaking out of place. But she was right. “Yes, you are right. I will not delay any longer.”
She nodded quickly, with no satisfaction, and left him alone, vanishing into the shadowy depths of rooms of machines and medicines and knowledge that were, right now, of very little use.
Behind Spock, McCoy moaned. Spock returned to the cubicle, for if the ethanol had made the doctor ill he would need help. Spock waved the light to a slightly higher level.
McCoy flung his arm across his eyes. “Turn it down,” he muttered, his words so slurred Spock could barely comprehend them.
The light level made no difference to Spock; he could see in illumination that looked like total darkness to a human being. He complied with McCoy’s request.
“Doctor, can you hear me?”
McCoy’s answer was totally incomprehensible.
“Dr. McCoy, I must return to my duties.”
“I had a dream,” McCoy said, each word utterly clear.
Spock straightened. The doctor could be left alone.
McCoy pushed himself abruptly up in the dimness.
“Spock—I dreamed about time.”
“Go back to sleep, Doctor. You will be all right in the morning.”
McCoy chuckled cynically. “You think so, do you?” He rubbed his face with both hands. The lines had deepened since the day before, and his eyes were red and puffy. He peered up at Spock as if the Vulcan were standing in full illumination.
“I know what we have to do,” he said.
“Yes,” Spock said. “I must tell the rest of the crew of the Enterprise what has occurred.”
“No!”
“It must be done, Doctor.”
“Time, Spock, time. We’ve done it before—we can do it again.”
Spock did not reply. He knew what McCoy was about to say. He had thought of the possibility himself and rejected it out of hand. It was unethical and amoral; and, if certain hypotheses were correct, it was, ultimately, so destructive as to be impossible.
“We’ve got to rig up the engines to whiplash us back in time. We can go back. We can go back and save Jim’s life”
“No, Dr. McCoy. We cannot.”
“For god’s sake, Spock! You know it’s possible!”
Spock wondered what logic would penetrate McCoy’s highly emotional state. Perhaps none, but he would have to try to make him understand.
“Yes. It would be possible to go back in time. It might even be possible to prevent what happened. But the stress of our actions would distort space-time itself.”
McCoy shook his head, as if flinging away Spock’s words without even trying to understand them. “We’d save Jim’s life.”
“We would do more damage than we would repair.”
“We’ve done it before! We did it to help other people—why can’t we do it to help a friend?”
“Dr. McCoy ... the other times we were forced to interfere with the flow of events—and we did not always help other people—we did it to return the continuum to its line of maximum probability. Not to divert it.”
“So what?”
“We did it to prevent the future’s being changed. This time, if we change the past, we change the future
as well.”
“But that was the future that had already occurred. We were living in it. For us now the future hasn’t happened yet.”
“That is what the people whose lives we affected in the past would have said to us.”
“You’re saying that the future is irrevocably set—that nothing we do makes any difference because it can’t make a difference.”
“I am saying no such thing. I am saying there are tracks of maximum probability that cannot be stopped and restarted again at will. To do so would cause a discontinuity—a kind of singularity, if you like, no different in effect and in destructive potential from the singularity we orbited only a few days ago. It could drag us to our destruction. Is that what you wish for the future?”
“Right now I don’t care about the future! We’re living in the present. What difference does it make if something we do now changes it, or something we do a few hours ago?” McCoy frowned, trying, failing, to sort out his verb tenses.
“It makes a difference. That is implicit in every theory put forth about the workings of time, from the Vulcan extrapolations of a millennium ago to the extensions of general relativity in Earth’s twenty-first century all the way through even to Dr. Mordreaux’s last published work.”
McCoy stared at him. “Mordreaux! You’re citing his work to prove we can’t undo the crime he committed!”
“In effect, that is true.”
McCoy lurched to his feet. “To hell with you. You’re not the only one on this ship who knows about the whiplash effect. I’m going to find Scotty and—”
Spock halted him with one hand on his shoulder, and McCoy felt a chill down his spine as Spock pressed gently on the nerve at the junction of his neck and shoulder.
“I do not wish to incapacitate you, Dr. McCoy. In your condition it would endanger you. But I will if I am
