“Goodbye, Mr. Spock. And thank you.”
Spock replied by touching the controls of the changer. The two energy fields interacted in a rage of light, and Spock vanished.
From Spock’s viewpoint, the cavern-like back room of Dr. Mordreaux’s apartment faded out through spectral colors, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple to blazing ultra-violet as the energy increased; Spock felt himself being pulled through a void, then thrust back across the ultra-violet energy barrier, through the rainbow, into normal space. He felt himself materialize again, one molecule at a time, as the beam wrenched him back into existence.
He staggered, lost his balance completely, and crashed to the stone floor, falling hard, barely managing to curl himself around the time-changer so it was not damaged. He rolled over on his back, staring upward, momentarily blinded. He started to get up, but froze with an involuntary gasp of pure flaming agony.
Startled voices surrounded him, then shadows: he was still dazzled by the assault of ultra-violet light. He flattened his palms against the cool floor and shut his eyes tight. The pain had become too great to ignore or put aside.
He tried and failed to free any single voice from the tangle around him. He could hear and sense consternation, surprise, outrage. The Aleph Prime authorities must have followed him and Dr.
Mordreaux, or kept the room under surveillance: now they had come to arrest them, more important, to stop them, and nothing would ever convince anyone that he and Dr. Mordreaux were attempting something utterly essential.
One voice threaded through the mass of noise.
“Mr. Spock? Are you all right?”
He blinked slowly several times and his vision gradually returned. The professor bent over him, frowning with concern.
“How did you get here? What are you doing here?”
Spock pushed himself upright, a lurching, graceless motion. Cramps reverberated up and down all the long muscles of his body and he felt as though the room were spinning around him. He refused to accept that perception; he forced his eyes to focus on Dr. Mordreaux, sitting on his heels beside him.
It was not the Dr. Mordreaux he had just left: it was a far younger man, a man who looked nearly the same as he had years before, when Spock knew him at the Makropyrios. In a month he would have aged ten years, after the stress of accusation, trial, and sentencing.
“May I help you up?” Mordreaux asked courteously. He extended a hand but did not touch Spock, and Spock shook his head.
“No. Thank you.” He got to his feet, awkwardly but under his own power. The time-changer thumped against his side.
“Where in heaven’s name did you get that?” Mordreaux asked. “And where did you come from?”
“What’s wrong?” someone called from the other room, and one of the two people standing in the doorway turned back to answer.
“Somebody just materialized on the changer platform.”
“Well, Mr. Spock, it’s been a long time.” Dr. Mordreaux gestured toward the changer. “Longer for you than me, I think, if we count from the Makropyrios.”
“I came to warn you, Dr. Mordreaux,” Spock said. His voice sounded weak and he could not halt the shaking of his knees and hands. He straightened up, forcing away the pain, confronting it directly. Several of the people from the sitting room crowded in at the doorway: Dr. Mordreaux’s friends, the people whose dreams had sent him on a fatal course. Spock had hoped to arrive when Dr. Mordreaux was alone.
“Come sit down,” the professor said. “You look like death.”
Even for Spock there came a point where he had to admit his limits. He limped into the adjacent room and took the chair Dr. Mordreaux offered.
The people in the doorway moved aside for him, and stood together in a suspicious circle: six adults, four children.
“What does he want, Georges?”
“Well, Perim, I don’t know yet.” He motioned for everyone to sit.
“Are you a Vulcan?” one of the children asked.
“This is Mr. Spock,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “He was one of my very best students when I was a physics teacher, and now he works on a starship. At least I believe he does now —but he may have begun to do something else by the time he comes to us from.”
“No,” Spock said. “I still serve on the Enterprise .”
One of the younger people, no more than student age himself, handed Spock a glass of water. He sipped from it.
“That’s about enough of old times and afternoon tea,” said Perim. He took the hand of the child who had spoken and drew her away from Spock and Mordreaux. “What’s he doing here? It’s a damned inconvenient time to visit. Unless he’s come to stop us.”
“Is that why you’re here, Mr. Spock?”
“Yes, sir, it is.” He glanced from one face to another, wondering which person had reacted—would react— with such fear and violence when the future Dr. Mordreaux attempted what Spock was about to try now. The group of time-travelers drew together, and Spock felt their rising anger and apprehension.
“Sir,” Spock said, “within a month, you will be accused of murdering all these people. The charge will be proven against you, as will the charge of unethical experimentation upon intelligent beings. Your work will not be vindicated; it will not even be classified and controlled. It will be suppressed. It engenders such apprehension among judicial and executive officials that they will see no other way to restrain what you have created. You will be sentenced to rehabilitation. The Enterprise is assigned to transport you. During the voyage, you cause the deaths of the commander of security and of Captain James T. Kirk.”
“That’s preposterous!”
“It is true. You must not continue this experiment. It leads only to disaster.”
“Wait a minute,” said one of the time-travelers. “You’re saying we shouldn’t go. You want us to stay here.”
“You must.”
“We can leave a record of our plans so Georges won’t get into trouble—we’ve all agreed to try out his theories.”
“Agreed, hell,” said a middle-aged woman perched on the back of a couch. “We talked him into letting us do it.”
“Several of you do leave records,” Spock said. “They are used as evidence of his persuasive abilities.
Of his power over you, if you wish.”
Dr. Mordreaux flung himself into a chair. “I thought I had taken enough precautions to avoid that difficulty,” he said. “But certainly I can take other measures.”
“They will not be sufficient,” Spock said. “Or, rather, perhaps they would be, but you must not carry out this plan. Your fate, the fate of these few people—that is relatively trivial compared to the wider
implications of the work. The displacement of your friends permanently into the wrong continuum creates a strain that space-time cannot withstand.”
“Good lord,” Perim said. “You sound like you’re talking about the end of the universe.”
“In time, that is what it amounts to.”
“In time that’s what everything amounts to!” said the middle-aged woman.
“Not in less than one hundred Earth-standard years.”
Silence.
“What a load of crap,” the woman said sharply. “Listen, Mr. Spock, whoever you are, wherever, whenever, you’ve come from, I don’t care how terrific a physics student you used to be, I’ve been through those equations myself and I don’t see any opportunity at all for the creation of torsion in the continuum.”
“You have erred. The error was inevitable, but you have erred nonetheless.”
“Georges, dammit—” She turned toward Mordreaux.
“It’s true, Mr. Spock. I worried that the transfer might cause some distortion. But it just doesn’t happen.
