“Maybe.”
“Damn it! Will you just tell me what the hell is going on!”
“Give Spock a little more time,” McCoy said. “Please.”
“How much more time?”
“He said he’d try to come back within twelve hours. He’s been gone almost two.”
“Do you really expect me to do nothing for twelve hours? Without a reasonable explanation? Or even an unreasonable one?”
McCoy shook his head. “If you didn’t believe me before, there’s just no chance you’d believe what I’d tell you now.”
“Leonard,” she said, “what have you got to lose?”
“Everything.”
In the uncomfortable pause, Mr. Sulu stepped forward. “Dr. McCoy,” he said, “please trust her. How can she trust you if you don’t give her a chance?”
McCoy looked up at the helm officer, buried his face in his hands with a groan, and, finally, raised his head again.
“If you turn on the thing in the transporter,” he said slowly, “you might bring Spock back. But more likely you’d kill him.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
He drew in a deep breath, let it out, laced his fingers together and pressed his palms against his closed eyes, and started to tell a story so much more preposterous than even the one Ian Braithewaite had constructed that Hunter listened, fascinated despite herself.
When he finished, Hunter and Scott and Sulu all stared at him.
“I’ve no’ heard a crazier story in my life!”Scott said.
“Scotty, you know time-travel is possible,” McCoy said.
“Aye ...” The engineer withdrew into himself.
“Either Dr. Mordreaux wasn’t as loony as I thought,” Hunter said, “oryou have gone stark staring mad.”
McCoy sighed. “I know how it sounds, especially now after I’ve spent so much time trying to mislead you. I kept hoping Spock would succeed, if I just gave him the chance.”
“And now you want me to give him the chance.”
“Hunter—you could have stopped him, before. You didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t kill Spock because you lied to me any more than I’d do it because Ian Braithewaite wanted me to.”
“Don’t kill him now. Just give him a little more time. It’s all the truth, I swear to you.”
Hunter leaned back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “I couldn’t do anything for Jim anymore, but he was Jim’s friend, and that is the real reason I didn’t stop him.”
“Hunter,” Sulu said intensely, “it’s a little time—against the chance that Mandala and the captain won’t be— wouldn’t be—killed after all. It’s a risk worth taking!”
She laughed softly. “Not if we’re wrong, it isn’t.” She shook her head, surprised at herself. “I think I’ll spend the next ten years hanging by my thumbs in a military prison for this, but Spock can have his damned twelve hours.”
Lying on the bench in the courtroom, Professor Mordreaux groaned. Spock went to his side, and, when his former teacher had fully regained consciousness, gently helped him sit up.
“Spock? Mr. Spock, what are you doing here? How...?” He glanced beyond the Vulcan to the time-changers. “Oh, no,” he said, and began to laugh.
Spock had expected as much, though he had hoped for some semblance of rationality. He would no more be able to reason with this version of Dr. Mordreaux than the last.
The professor jumped to his feet. “How long have I been unconscious? Maybe there’s still time!” He rushed toward the door but Spock caught and stopped him before he had gone three steps.
“Mr. Spock, you don’t understand! There’s no time to lose!”
“I understand perfectly, sir. If we wait a few more moments, at least one event in this time-stream will have changed, and perhaps the Enterprise will not be diverted.” “But that isn’t me! I mean I’m not him!” He made an inarticulate noise of pure frustration and drew a deep breath. He closed his eyes and opened them, and began again.
“You’re stopping the wrong person,” he said. “I’ve come here to try to stop myself—my mad self—from calling you away from the singularity. I know everything that’s happened. You’re here to keep Jim Kirk from being murdered. I’ve been chasing myself through the time-streams for... ” He stopped, and laughed again, still on the edge of hysteria. “Of course duration is meaningless. Don’t you understand, Mr. Spock? I’m trying to stop myself, to save myself—”
Spock rushed past him, out of the courtroom and across the hall. The door to the transmitter room stood wide open. Spock plunged through it, Dr. Mordreaux right behind him,
A second Dr. Mordreaux turned away from the subspace transmitter. The tape spun through the machine with a high-speed whine.
“Too late!” Dr. Mordreaux, in front of him, cried with glee.
“Too late,” Dr. Mordreaux, behind him, said softly. “Too late.”
The professor by the transmitter touched his time-changer. Spock’s hands passed through his insubstantial form, and then he was gone.
The future Dr. Mordreaux and Mr. Spock stared at the transmitter. They both knew the message could not be countermanded or overridden. That was part of its fail-safe system.
“Damn,” Mordreaux whispered. And then, “Let’s get out of here before somebody comes along. If they recognize me they’ll probably shoot me on sight.”
They retrieved the time-changers from the courtroom, left the government sector of Aleph Prime, and walked together in silence to the core park. It was deserted now, at dawn, and probably the safest place Dr. Mordreaux could be. They sat down on a bench. Mordreaux buried his face in his hands.
“Are you all right, Professor?”
After a bit, he nodded. “As well as can be expected, considering that the universe keeps proving to me how much easier it is to create chaos than order.”
“One can prove easily enough that chaos is the primary result of all that has occurred.”
Mordreaux looked up at him. “Ah. You’ve seen the connection between your work and mine. We aren’t fighting me, we really are fighting chaos. Entropy.”
“I believed at first that I had made some error in my observations,” Spock said.
“No, they were all too accurate. Ever since I started to use the time-changer, the increase of entropy really has been accelerating.”
“I found the destructive potential difficult to accept.”
“Yes. I find it so, too. For a million years human beings have done their best to discover the ultimate weapon. It was left to me to invent the one that really can destroy our universe.”
He ran his hands through his hair, a habit that had not altered through all the years.
“It’s getting very bad by my time, Mr. Spock. The universe is simply .. . running down. Well. You can imagine.”
“Indeed.”
The false moon vanished behind a painted hillside on the far wall, and streaks of incandescent scarlet sunlight streamed out of the wall behind them.
“Why did you let it go so far, professor? Or have you been attempting to change things back for a long time?”
“A long time, yes. But I couldn’t even begin until I recreated my work. The virus program was very efficient, Mr. Spock. All my papers dissolved away. One could search memory bank and library and seldom even find a reference to my name.”
“You could have contacted me. You must know of my respect for your work. You must have known I would keep copies safe.”
Mordreaux reached out to pat Spock’s hand, and the Vulcan did not flinch from his touch. All the emotions he
