A pause. “What do you want, Mr. Spock?”
“I told you, sir, that I would return when you had had time to recover from the effects of the drugs you were given on Aleph Prime.”
“I’m not sure drugs are such a bad idea just now.”
“Dr. Mordreaux, there is no time for self-pity. I must know what happened, both here and at the station.”
“I did it,” Mordreaux said. He sat up slowly and turned toward the Vulcan, waving the lights to a higher level.
Spock sat down facing him, waiting for him to continue. The science officer did not trust himself to speak; he realized he had been hoping for a denial he could believe, and some other explanation than that the teacher he had respected most in his lifelong quest for knowledge had murdered Jim Kirk.
“I must have, I think,” Mordreaux said. “I wonder what caused me to do it?”
A ray of hope, there. “Professor, if you were in a fugue state—”
“I didn’t do it now , Mr. Spock. They haven’t driven me crazy yet. And despite that joke of a trial, I’ve never murdered anyone.”
“Sir, you have just said you committed the crime.”
Mordreaux looked at him, then laughed. His laugh contained some of the life it had had before, but it held self-deprecation as well.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I assumed you kept up with my papers, even the last ones. They were too outrageous even for you, I suppose.”
“On the contrary, Dr. Mordreaux, my information terminal is programmed to flag your name. I have found your work most fascinating.” He shook his head. “You never should have left the Makropyrios; your research would have withstood its critics.”
Dr. Mordreaux chuckled. “It already has withstood its critics. It’s made believers of them, the few who know. They believe so hard, they’re suppressing the work. They’re suppressing me, for that matter.”
Spock stared at him, the meaning coming slowly clear. Dr. Mordreaux had said twice that he worked to fulfill his friends’ dreams; he said he must have murdered Captain Kirk, but he did not do it now . . .
“You cannot mean you have put your theoretical work on temporal physics into practical use!” Despite himself, the Vulcan was shocked.
“Of course I did. Why not?”
“Ethical considerations, not to mention the danger. The paradoxes—”
“Theoretical proofs weren’t enough—I had to demonstrate the principles. I could keep on publishing papers all my life, but the Journal wouldn’t take them anymore, and without its imprimatur, my monographs got no more attention than those of some self-serving pseudoscientist. I might as well have joined an offworld branch of the Flat Earth Society.”
“You would have been better to do so,” Spock said. “At least there, the danger is only to your own sanity.”
“I don’t understand your objections,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “No one was hurt. The friends I made on Aleph Prime begged me for the practical applications.”
“So you complied. You sent them back in time, and that is why you were convicted of unethical experimentation.”
Dr. Mordreaux shrugged. “Yes. I’d been working on displacement, just to prove it was possible. I’m a little tired of being laughed at. But my friends didn’t laugh at me. On the contrary, they were intrigued. Several of them even helped me, one in particular who realized that my transmission beam was essentially a retooled transporter —and retooled a transporter for me. That speeded up my work by a year or more.”
“Dr. Mordreaux, there is a qualitative difference between a small demonstration with inanimate objects, and sending human beings to other times to stay!”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s more spectacular. But I think I would have got in the same amount of trouble whether I’d worked with people or not.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because the people were my friends, and they were very persuasive. Mr. Spock—isn’t there some other time and place you’d like to live, that you think would be better than now?”
“No, Professor.”
“Tell the truth!”
“Dr. Mordreaux, as you are aware, I am a hybrid. The techniques for intercrossing highly-evolved species of different evolutionary origin were only perfected a few years before my birth. I would not even
exist in an earlier time.”
“Don’t split Vulcan hairs with me, you know what I mean. Never mind. The present may seem Utopian to you, but I assure you that virtually any human being who learns to trust you enough to discuss their hopes and dreams will reveal a deeply-rooted desire to live in some other time, a conviction that they somehow are out of place, and belong somewhere they are unable to reach.”
“Very romantic,” Spock said drily, recalling Mr. Sulu’s fascination for a long-extinct culture of Earth that would, if he appeared in it, more likely than not consider him a heathen freak, and in which he would have the statistical choice of dying of blood poisoning from a sword cut received in a duel, or of the Black Plague.
“The people I sent back were the first people to believe in me for a long, long time, Mr. Spock. I could hardly tell them I had the one thing in the universe they wanted, then refuse to give it to them.”
“You must go back and retrieve them.”
“Absolutely not!”
“I respect your loyalty to your friends, Professor, but your future—essentially your life—is at stake. If they are in fact your friends, they would not abandon you to a punishment that they could stop.”
“Maybe not,” Dr. Mordreaux replied, “on the other hand, you’re putting even friendship to a fairly severe test with that statement. Besides, bringing them back still wouldn’t do me any good. I wasn’t tried for doing experiments on intelligent subjects, not really, though that was what I was convicted of. My demonstration threw someone into a panic, someone high up in the Federation: the authorities would still find some way or other to silence me.”
“But the other factors—”
“I did take historical changes into consideration, of course. But my friends went so far back that the danger is minimal.”
“How far?” The equations did show that one’s ability to alter events in the past was inversely proportional to the square of the distance in time one traveled.
“I won’t answer that, I won’t give you any clues to finding them. But their chances of making any significant change approach zero, beyond the seventh decimal place.”
“But sir, if you brought your friends back to their own time, you would prevent yourself from coming to the attention of the authorities, and none of this would happen.”
Dr. Mordreaux laughed again. “Nowjou ’re talking about changing events in the past. You’re not talking about retrieving my friends, you’re talking about going back and preventing their leaving in the first place. What happened to your high ethical principles?”
“Professor, the contradiction you are trying to point out is completely specious.”
“I won’t bring them back. That’s all they ever asked of me, not to bring them back!”
Spock could see that Dr. Mordreaux would lose his temper soon if the conversation continued in the
same direction, so, for the moment, he stopped attempting to persuade him to change the course of his own actions.
“The past aside,” Spock said, “your assumption is that a future version of you was the murderer of Captain Kirk.”
“I don’t know why I’d do it, but that’s the only explanation I can think of. It troubles me that I could change so much. I was under the impression that rehabilitation made one completely non-violent. But, yes, I don’t see any other explanation. Unless of course you think I turned into a fog and slipped out of this cell through molecular interstices.”
“The security officer guarding you was poisoned. Due to her metabolism she was not fatally susceptible to
