Okay so far?”
“Well, in a cloudy sort of way,” Kirk said.
“Good. Now, at the other end, a body is assembled which is apparently identical with the original, is alive, has consciousness, and has all the memories of the original. But it is NOT the original. That has been destroyed.”
“I canna see that it matters a whit,” Scott said. “Any more than your solipsist position does. As Mr. Spock is fond of saying, ‘A difference which makes no difference is no difference’.”
“No, not to you,” McCoy said, “because the new McCoy will look and behave in all respects like the old one. But to me? I can’t take so operational a view of the matter. I am, by definition, not the same man who went into a transporter for the first time twenty years ago. I am a construct made by a machine after the image of a dead man — and the hell of it is, not even I can know how exact the imitation is, because — well, because obviously if anything is missing I wouldn’t remember it.”
“Question,” Kirk said. “Do you feel any different?”
“Aha,” said Scott with satisfaction.
“No, Jim, I don’t, but how could I? I think I remember what I was like before, but in that I may be vastly mistaken. Psychology is my specialty, for all that you see me chiefly as a man reluctant to hand out pills. I know that there are vast areas of my mind that are inaccessible to my consciousness except under special conditions — under stress, say, or in dreams. What if part of that psychic underground has not been duplicated? How would I know?”
“You could ask Spock,” Scott suggested.
“Thanks, no. The one time I was in mind-lock with him it saved my life — it saved all of us, you’ll remember — but I didn’t find it pleasant.”
“Well, you ought to, anyhow,” Scott said, “if you’re as serious about all this. He could lock Onto one of those unconscious areas and then see if it was still there after your next transporter trip.”
“Which it almost surely would be,” Kirk added. “I don’t see why you assume the transporter to be so peculiarly selective. Why should it blot out subconscious traces instead of conscious ones?”
“Why shouldn’t it? And in point of fact, does it or doesn’t it? That’s pretty close to the question I want answered. If it were the question, I would even submit to the experiment Scotty proposes, and ask everybody else aboard to as well.”
“I,” said Kirk, “have been on starship duty somewhat longer than either of you gentlemen. And I will say without qualification that this is the weirdest rec room conversation I’ve ever gotten into. But all right, Doc, let’s bite the bullet. What is the question?”
“What would you expect from a psychologist?” McCoy said. “The question, of course, is the soul. If it exists, which I know no more than the next man. When I was first reassembled by that damnable machine, did my soul, if any, make the crossing with me — or am I just a reasonable automaton?”
“The ability to worry about the question,” Kirk said, “seems to me to be its own answer.”
“Hmmm. You may be right, Jim. In fact, you better had be. Because if you aren’t, then every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder.”
“And thot’s nae a haggle, it’s a haggis,” Scott said hotly. “Look ye, Doc, yon soul’s immortal by definition. If it exists, it canna be destroyed — “
“Captain Kirk,” said the rec room’s intercom speaker.
Kirk arose with some relief; the waters around the table had been getting pretty deep. But his relief was short-lived.
“In the rec room, Mr. Spock.”
“Will you relieve me, please, Captain? We are in need of a Command decision.”
McCoy and Scott looked up in alarm. A Command decision, out here in a totally unexplored arm of the galaxy?
“I’m on my way,” Kirk said. “What, briefly, is the problem?”
“Sir,” the first officer’s voice said, “the Klingon War has finally broken out. Organia seems already to have been destroyed, and we are cut off from the Federation.”
Chapter Two — BEHIND THE LINES
From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4011.8:
This arm of the galaxy has never been visited by human beings, nor by any of the nonhuman races known to us. Our primary mission here was to establish benchmarks for warp-drive flight, and secondarily, of course, to report anything we encountered that might be worth’ scientific investigation. But now, it would appear, we cannot report at all.
As Kirk entered the bridge, Spock arose from the command chair and moved silently to his own library- computer station. Sulu was at the helm, Lieutenant Uhura at the communications console. The viewing screen showed nothing but stars; the Enterprise was in a standard orbit around one of them — Kirk didn’t need to care which. All deceptively normal.
“All right, Mr. Spock,” Kirk said, sitting down. “The details, please.”
“Very sparse, Captain, and more seem impossible to come by,” the first officer said. “What little I have is all public knowledge — I have refrained from calling Starfleet Command for obvious reasons. There have been no ‘incidents’ with the Klingon Empire for over a year, but it now appears that they have mounted a major attack on the Federation along a very broad front — without any prior declaration, naturally. The reports Lieutenant Uhura has received state that Federation forces are holding, but I suggest that we place little confidence in that. Public announcements under such circumstances are always primarily intended to be reassuring, secondarily to mislead the enemy, and may contain only a small residuum of fact.”
“Of course,” Kirk said. “But such an outbreak was supposed to have been made impossible under the Organian Peace Treaty. We should know; we were on Organia when the treaty was imposed, and we saw the Organians immobilize both parties in what would otherwise have been a major naval engagement.”
“That is true, of course. However, Captain, not only have the Organians failed to intervene this time, but no contact whatsoever can be made with the planet. It seems virtually to have disappeared from the face of the universe. In the absence of any more data, I think we must assume it is destroyed.”
Sulu turned partially in his helmsman’s chair. “Now how is that possible?” he said. “The Organians were creatures of pure thought. They couldn’t be destroyed. And it wasn’t just one battle they stopped — they simultaneously immobilized fleets all over the galaxy.”
“The Organians themselves were thought-creatures,” Spock said, “and no doubt much of what we ‘saw’ on their planet was the result of hypnotism. But we have no real reason to suppose that the planet itself was an illusion; and if it was not, it could be destroyed. What effect that would have on the Organians, we have no idea. All we know is that they have not intervened in the present war, nor does there seem to be any way to find out what has happened to them.”
“Well,” Kirk said, “let’s see what our problem is. We’ve got the whole Klingon Empire between the Enterprise and the Federation — including all seventeen Star bases. On the other hand, the Klingons don’t know we’re here, on their blind side; we might make some capital out of that. Lieutenant Uhura, what are the chances of getting some sort of instructions from Starfleet Command without giving our presence away?”
“Practically nil, Captain,” the Bantu girl said. “Even if we send a query as a microsecond squirt, we’d have to send it repeatedly and at high gain in order to have any hope of one such pip being picked up. We’ve got the whole of Shapley Center, the heart of the galaxy, between us and home, and the stellar concentration is so high there that it makes a considerable energy bulge even in subspace. To get through all that static, we’d have to punch out the pips regularly to attract their attention — and that would attract the Klingons as well. They wouldn’t be able to read the message, but they’d be able to pinpoint out location all too easily.”
“All right,” Kirk said. “Send out such a pip irregularly; Mr. Spock, please give Lieutenant Uhura a table of random numbers from the computer that she can use as a timetable. Probably it won’t work, but we should try it. In
