Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (72 page)

“Oh, I think so, eventually,” Sulu said, trying not to sound too certain. He drew the conversation back to the Huey. “I was hoping I’d find a pilot when I saw this helicopter. Mind if I ask a few questions?”

“Fire away.”

They chatted about the copter for a while. The pilot glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to make a delivery,” he said. “Want to come along?”

“I’d like nothing better.”

The chopper lifted off in an incredible clatter of noise. Sulu watched the pilot work, itching to take over. The young man glanced at him. “If anybody asks,” he said, “you never flew this thing.”

“If anybody asks,” Sulu said, “I’ve never even been
in
this thing.”

The young pilot grinned and turned over the controls.

All day Javy tried to talk about what he and Ben had seen in Golden Gate Park, and all day Ben tried to act as if they had seen nothing. He froze up every time Javy mentioned the shooting star or the wind or the lights or the ramp.

When they got off that afternoon, Javy still felt hyper. He had been awake since three and working since four. He usually went home, dove into the shower, slept for a couple of hours, got up, and stared at half-finished pages in his typewriter for a while. Today, all that changed.

He got into his battered gold Mustang and turned on the radio, but it only worked on alternate Fridays and leap days that fell on Wednesday. He tried to pick out news reports through the static and jumps of a traveling short circuit, but heard nothing about the lights.

He needed a shower. This would look different after he got some sleep. Ben was probably right all along.

But instead of going home, he drove down Van Ness, then turned onto Fell, back to the park. He pulled his car up beside the garbage cans, which he had not finished emptying. He tried to smile at the thought of trying to explain why to their supervisor.

The truck had left a patch of rubber on the street where Ben floored it. It was not easy to lay rubber with a garbage truck.

Javy stayed in his car and looked toward the place where he thought he had seen…what? In the mist and the dark, perhaps he had not seen anything. Some people out for a stroll, their flashlights glinting off the fog? In daylight, he could not even be sure where he thought he saw what he thought he saw. Whatever it was, nothing remained of it. He decided to watch for a while anyway, just for interest’s sake. He settled back in the driver’s seat.

Within a few minutes, he had fallen fast asleep.

Scott followed Doctor Nichols through the plant, wondering how on earth the people in this time had ever managed to achieve anything, much less the beginnings of space exploration. With their incredibly primitive methods, he could just see his way to doing what he needed to do with their materials. He wanted to get away to someplace quiet and think for a bit. Twentieth-century factories were unbelievably noisy.

As the tour progressed, Doctor McCoy drew Doctor Nichols out. The engineer’s sharp and ambitious intelligence chafed within the bureaucracy of management.

“I’ve put in for a transfer back to research,” Nichols said. “Upper management never understands when you want to go back to what you’re best at doing.”

“Aye,” Scott said, recalling all the times Starfleet had tried to promote him out of engineering. “ ’Tis true.”

“Especially if you’re working for a plastics company and your first love is metallurgy. I’ve got some ideas about metallic crystalline structure—” He stopped. “But of course you’re interested in acrylic production, Professor Scott.”

“Professor Scott—’tis too formal. Call me Montgomery, if ye would.”

“Certainly,” Nichols said. “If you’ll return the courtesy. My name’s Mark.”

“Verra well, Mark. Not Marcus? Ye are Marcus Nichols?” He grabbed Nichols’s hand and pumped it. “I’m verra glad to meet ye! The work ye’ve done, the inventions—”

Behind Nichols, McCoy waved his hands in warning. Scott realized what he had said. He stopped abruptly.

“My inventions?” Nichols said, startled. “Professor Scott, I only hold two patents, and if you’ve heard of either in Edinburgh, I’m surprised, to say the least.”

“But—er—well—”

“You must have him confused with another Marcus Nichols,” McCoy said quickly. “That’s the only logical—” He stopped as abruptly as Scott.

“But—I mean, aye, that must be it.” Scott subsided, face flaming with embarrassment.

“I see,” Nichols said.

Nichols led Scott and McCoy into a glass-walled observation cubicle. Its door swung shut, cutting the sound to nearly nothing.

“So much for the tour of our humble plant.” Nichols leaned one hip on the back of a leather-covered couch and gave Scott a long, searching appraisal. “I must say, Professor, your memory for names may not be terrific, but your knowledge of engineering is most impressive.”

“Why, back home,” McCoy said, “we call him the miracle worker.”

“Indeed…” Nichols gestured toward the bar at the back of the cubicle. “May I offer you gentlemen anything?”

McCoy and Scott exchanged a glance.

“Doctor Nichols,” Scott said tentatively, “I might have something to offer
you.
”

Nichols raised an eyebrow at this turn of the conversation. “Yes?”

“I notice ye are still working with polymers,” Scott said.

“Still?” Nichols frowned, mystified. “This is a plastics company. What else would I be working with?”

“Ah, what else indeed? Let me put it another way. How thick would ye need to make a sheet of your acrylic”—Scott hesitated a moment, converting meters to feet, wishing the twentieth century had finished getting around to the change—“sixty feet by ten feet, if ye wished it to withstand the pressure o’ 18,000 cubic feet o’ water?”

“That’s easy,” Nichols said. “Six inches. We carry stuff that big in stock.”

“Aye,” Scott said. “I noticed. Now suppose—just suppose—I could show ye a way to manufacture a wall that would do the same job but was only an inch thick. Would that be worth something to ye?”

“Are you joking?” Nichols folded his arms. His body language revealed skepticism, suspicion—and interest.

“He never jokes,” McCoy said. “Perhaps the professor could use your computer?”

“Please,” Nichols said, gesturing toward it.

Scott sat before the machine. “Computer.”

The computer did not reply. McCoy grabbed the control box he had seen Nichols using earlier and shoved it into Scott’s hand. Scott thanked him with a nod and spoke into it.

“Computer.”

No reply.

“Just use the keyboard,” Nichols said, “if you prefer it to the mouse.”

“The keyboard,” Scott said. “ ’Tis quaint.”

He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. Fast and two-fingered, he started to type.

Information filled the screen. Scott condensed each formula into a few words as he worked. After half an hour, he pressed a final key.

“And if ye treat it by this method, ye change the crystalline structure so ’twill transmit light in the visible range.”

A three-dimensional crystalline structure formed on the computer screen. Scott sat back, satisfied.

“Transparent aluminum?” Nichols said with disbelief.

“That’s the ticket, laddie.”

“But it would take years just to figure out the dynamics of this matrix!”

“And when you do,” McCoy said, “you’ll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

Nichols’s attention remained centered on the screen, which fascinated him far more than dreams of avarice.

“So,” Scott said, “is it worth something? Or shall I just punch ‘clear’?” He extended one finger toward the keyboard.

“No!” Nichols exclaimed. “No.” He stared at the screen, frowning, uncomfortable. “What did you have in mind?”

“A moment alone, please,” McCoy said.

Scott started to object.

“Please,” McCoy said again.

Unwillingly, Nichols left them alone.

“Scotty,” McCoy said, “if we give him the formula, we’ll be altering the future!”

“How d’ye know he didn’t invent the process?” Scott said.

“But—”

“Doctor McCoy, do ye no’ understand? He
did
invent it! Have ye ne’er heard his name?”

“I’m a doctor, not a historian,” McCoy growled. He had gone into this masquerade willingly, but now he found himself possessed with the need to make as few changes in the past as he could. The intensity of Jim Kirk’s argument for their actions warred with another, alien impulse.

“ ’Tisna necessary to be a historian to know o’ Marcus Nichols! Why, ’twould be as if I never heard o’…er…”

“Pasteur?”

“Who?”

“Yalow? Arneghe?”

“Nay, well, ne’er mind, the point is, Nichols
did
invent transparent aluminum! And that was only the beginnin’ o’ his achievements. ’Tis all right that we gi’ the formula to him—perhaps ’tis essential!”

McCoy looked at him with his head cocked in a familiar and yet very un-McCoyish way.

“Then, Scotty, does that mean we succeed? We get the whales and get back to our own time and—”

“Nay, Doctor. It means we gi’ him the formula—or he recalls enough o’ what I’ve already shown him to reproduce the effect. What happens back in our time…’tis up to us.”

McCoy nodded. He squared his shoulders and opened the door, beckoning Nichols into the transparent cubicle again. The scientist had been standing with his back to the windows, nervously giving his uninvited guests their privacy.

“Now, Doctor Nichols—Mark—” Scott said.

“Just a moment.” He paused and took a deep breath. “You know what it is you’re offering me.”

“Aye,” Scott said. “That I do.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why what?”

“Why are you offering it to me?”

“Because we need something ye have.”

“Such as what? My first-born child? My soul?”

Scott chuckled. “Nay. Acrylic sheets, large ones. Acrylic epoxy. The loan o’ transportation.”

“What you’re asking for is worth a couple of thousand dollars at most. What you’re offering in return is worth—if it’s true—a whole lot more. As well as recognition, respect…”

“But, you see, Mark,” McCoy said, “we don’t have a couple of thousand dollars. And we need the acrylic sheets. Desperately.”

“Does the phrase ‘too good to be true’ mean anything to you?”

McCoy clapped his hand over his eyes. “What a time to run into an honest man!”

Nichols glanced at the tantalizing computer screen. “What you’ve shown me looks real,” he said. “It’s just a beginning, but it feels right. It feels like an answer—and I’ve been trying just to ask the question for the last two years. On the other hand, scientists smarter than me have been taken in by perpetual motion machines and heaven knows what—all kinds of absurd devices. How do I know—”

“Ye think we’re tryin’ to trick ye!” Scott exclaimed, astonished.

“The possibility did occur to me,” Nichols said mildly. “You could be snowing me with fake formulae. You could be trying to plant some other company’s research on me in order to embarrass my company with a charge of industrial espionage.”

“I hadna thought o’ that,” Scott said, downcast.

Nichols glanced at McCoy with a wry grin. “Academics,” he said.

“What can we do to persuade you we’re legitimate?” McCoy said.

“Are you?”

“Er…in a way. In that we’re not trying to cheat you or defraud you. Or embarrass your company.”

“But if this is real, you could sell it—”

“Do ye no’ understand?” Scott cried. “We have no time!”

Nichols hitched one hip on his desk, deliberately turning his back to the information on the computer screen.

“Ordinarily, if you wanted to sell something like this—no, let me finish—you’d take it to a company and license it in return for a royalty.”

“But ’tisna royalties we need. ’Tis—”

“Mark,” McCoy said, “we don’t have time for this. We’re going to make this trade with someone. It ought to be you. Don’t ask me to explain why. If it is you, I think we can be sure it will be well used. If it’ll make you feel better to assign the royalties to your favorite charity, or your Aunt Matilda, go ahead. But we’re pretty desperate. If we have to go elsewhere, to find someone with fewer scruples, we will.”

Nichols drew one knee up, folded his hands around it, and gazed at them both. Then he turned to the computer, carefully saved Scott’s work, and moused a purchase order up on the screen. Beneath “Bill to” he typed “Marcus Nichols.”

“Tell me what you need,” he said.

Gillian’s Land Rover wound through Golden Gate Park along Kennedy Drive.

“Are you sure you won’t come with us, Mister Spock?” Gillian said. “We don’t have to have Italian food. I’ll take us to a place where you can get a hamburger if you want.”

“What is a hamburger?” Spock said.

“A hamburger? It’s, you know, ground-up beef. On a bun. With a little lettuce, maybe some tomatoes.”

“Beef,” Spock said. “This is meat?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds pretty good, Spock,” Kirk said.

Spock looked green.
Uh-oh,
Gillian thought,
a vegetarian.
She had never seen anyone actually turn green before. Maybe it was a trick of the light on his sallow complexion. But he sure looked green.

“I shall prefer not to accompany you,” Spock said.

“Okay.”

Spock looked at Kirk. “I thought that among my acquaintances only Saavik eats raw meat,” he said. “But, of course, she was raised a Romulan.”

“It isn’t raw!” Gillian exclaimed. “They cook it! Raw hamburger, bleah.”

“I don’t think we should discuss Saavik, Mister Spock,” Kirk said. “And I hate to disillusion you, but I enjoy a bit of steak tartare on occasion myself.”

Mister Spock looked at Kirk askance. Gillian wondered why he reacted like that to the idea of raw meat, considering what sushi is made out of. She considered offering to change their plans and go to a Japanese restaurant instead. Then she wondered what country or city people called Romulans lived in. Maybe Mister Spock’s friend Saavik came from a country where the people called themselves something that had nothing to do with the country’s name, like Belgium and Walloons. Or maybe Mister Spock did not speak English as well as he seemed to, and he really meant his friend who liked raw meat was Roman. But who ever heard of steak tartare Romano, and what kind of a Japanese name was Spock anyhow?

But if he
is
Japanese, or from anyplace in Asia,
Gillian thought,
suddenly suspicious—

“How do I know you two aren’t procurers for the Asian black market in whale meat?” she said angrily.

“What black market?” Kirk said.

“Human beings
consume
whale meat? The flesh of another sentient creature?” Mister Spock sounded appalled. His reaction surprised Gillian. Up until now he had seemed rather cold and unemotional.

“You two pretend to know so much about whales—then you pretend not to know anything—”

“I did not pretend to know that human beings
ate
whales,” Spock said.

“Gillian,” Kirk said, “if we were black market procurers, wouldn’t it be awfully inefficient to come to California to steal two whales, when we could go out in the ocean and hunt them?”

“How should I know? Maybe your boat sank.” She jerked her head toward Spock, “Maybe he wants to take Gracie and George away and pen them up like cattle and start a whale-breeding program back in Japan or someplace—”

“I do not intend to take George and Gracie to Japan,” Spock said. “I am not from Japan. I have never been to Japan.”

“Oh, yeah? Why are you walking around in that Samurai outfit, then? If you’re not from Japan, where are you from?”

“I am from—”

“Tibet,” Kirk said. “He’s from Tibet.”

“What?”

“He’s from Tibet,” Kirk said again. “It’s landlocked. It’s thousands of meters above sea level. What could he do with a pair of whales back in Tibet?”

“Christ on a crutch,” Gillian said.

The Land Rover approached a meadow.

“This will be fine,” Kirk said.

Gillian pulled into a parking lot. She did not spend much time in San Francisco proper; she did not like cities. She wondered if it was safe to be in this park at night. Probably not. Though dusk had barely begun to fall, only one other vehicle remained in the lot: a beat-up old muscle car with a young man sleeping in the driver’s seat. Gillian felt sorry for him. He probably had nowhere else to stay.

Kirk opened the door and let his strange friend get out.

“Are you sure you won’t change your mind?” Gillian said.

Spock cocked his head, puzzled. “Is something wrong with the one I have?”

His tone was so serious that Gillian could not decide whether to laugh or answer in the affirmative.

“Just a little joke,” Kirk said quickly. He waved to Mister Spock. “See you later, old friend.”

Gillian left the Land Rover in neutral. “Mister Spock, how did you know Gracie’s pregnant? Who told you? It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“It is no secret to Gracie,” Mister Spock said. “I will be right here,” he said to Kirk, and strolled across the meadow toward a terraced bank planted with bright rhododendrons.

“He’s just going to hang around in the bushes while we eat?” Gillian said to Kirk.

“It’s his way.” Kirk shrugged and smiled.

Gillian put the Land Rover into gear and drove away.

Javy woke with a start.

“Hey, bud, you can’t sleep here. Come on, wake up!” The cop rapped sharply on the Mustang’s roof.

“Uh, good evening, Officer.”

“I know things get tough sometimes,” the cop said. “But you’re not allowed to sleep here. I can give you the address of a couple of shelters. It’s getting late to get into either one of them, but maybe—”

“I don’t need a shelter!” Javy said. “You don’t understand, Officer. I’m…” He got out of his car, pulled out his wallet, flipped it open to flash his city I.D., and flipped it shut again. “We’ve had trouble with vandalism. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye out.” He grinned sheepishly. “I’m kind of new. I thought it’d be easy to keep awake on stakeout, you know, like on TV? But it’s boring.”

“No kidding,” the cop said.

A sparkle of light against the darkness caught Javy’s attention.

“Jeez, did you see that?”

He bolted past the cop and sprinted a few steps into the meadow. He stopped. The light and the man-shaped figure both had vanished.

“See what? There’s nobody out there, bud. Let me see that I.D. again.”

Still staring toward the vanished light, Javy pulled out his wallet. Once the cop had more than a glance at it, he realized what department Javy was really in.

“What do you think you are, detective trash class? Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, trying to sleep on taxpayers’ money, or what—”

“I start work at four a.m.!” Javy said angrily, defensively. He gestured toward his Mustang. “That look like a garbage truck to you?”

“Looks like it belongs
in
a garbage truck,” the cop said. “But I’m tired and the shift’s almost over and I can’t think of any reason to take you in, acting stupid not being against the law. But if you make me—”

“Never mind!” Javy said, annoyed at the cop for insulting him and his car as well, but mostly annoyed with himself for falling asleep and blowing his chance. “I’ll leave.”

Gillian took Kirk to her favorite pizza place. She wondered if she would have had the nerve to come here if Mister Spock had accompanied them. He was so strange—there was no telling how he would act in a restaurant. Come to think of it, she was not entirely sure how Kirk would act.

“Listen,” she said to Kirk. “I like this restaurant, and I want to be able to come back, so you behave yourself. Got it?”

“Got it,” he said.

Nevertheless she was relieved when a waiter she did not know took them to their table. She glanced over the menu, though she almost always had the same thing.

“Do you trust me?” she asked Kirk.

“Implicitly,” he said without hesitation.

“Good. A large mushroom and pepperoni with extra onions,” she said to the waiter. “And a Michelob.”

He took it down and turned to Kirk. “And you, sir?”

Kirk frowned over the menu. Gillian had the distinct impression that he had never heard of pizza before. Where was this guy from, anyway? Mars?

“Make it two,” Kirk said.

“Big appetite,” the waiter said.

“He means two beers,” Gillian said.

The waiter nodded, took the menus, and left. Gillian toyed with her water glass, making patterns of damp circles with its base and drawing clear streaks in the condensation on its sides. She glanced at Kirk just as Kirk looked at her, and they saw that they were both doing the same thing.

“So,” Kirk said. “How did a nice girl like you get to be a cetacean biologist?”

The slightly condescending comment jolted her. She hoped Kirk meant the lines as a joke. She shrugged unhappily. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“You’re upset about losing the whales,” he said.

“You’re very perceptive.” She tried to keep the sarcasm down. Just what she needed, Bob Briggs all over again, telling her she shouldn’t think about them as if they were human, or even as if they were intelligent. They were animals. Just animals.

And if the whale hunters got to them, they would be dead animals, carcasses, raw meat…

“How will you move them, exactly?”

“Haven’t you done your homework? It’s been in all the papers. There’s a 747 fitted out to carry them. We’ll fly them to Alaska and release them there.”

“And that’s the last you’ll see of them?”

“See, yes,” Gillian said. “But we’ll tag them with radio transmitters so we can keep track of them.”

The ice in Kirk’s water glass rattled.

His hand’s trembling!
Gillian thought.
What’s he so damned nervous about?

He drew back before he exploded the glass in his grip. “I could take those whales where they wouldn’t be hunted.”

Gillian started to laugh. “You? Kirk, you can’t even get from Sausalito to San Francisco without a lift.”

The waiter reappeared. He put plates and glasses and two bottles of beer in front of them.

“Thanks,” Gillian said. She picked up the bottle, raised it in a quick salute, and took a deep swig. “Cheers.”

“If you have such a low opinion of me,” Kirk said grimly, “how come we’re having dinner?”

“I told you,” Gillian said, “I’m a sucker for hard-luck cases. Besides, I want to know why you travel around with that ditzy guy who knows that Gracie is pregnant…and calls you Admiral.”

Kirk remained silent, but Gillian was aware of his gaze. She took another swig of her beer and set the bottle down hard.

“Where could you take them?” she said.

“Hmm?”

“My whales! What are you trying to do? Buy them for some marine sideshow where you’d make them jump through hoops—”

“Not at all,” he said. “That wouldn’t make sense, would it? If I were going to do that, I might as well leave them at the Cetacean Institute.”

“The Cetacean Institute isn’t a sideshow!”

“Of course not,” he said quickly. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“Then where could you take them where they’d be safe?”

“It isn’t so much a matter of a place,” Kirk said, “as of a time.”

Gillian shook her head. “Sorry. The time would have to be right now.”

“What do you mean,
now?
”

Gillian poured beer into her glass. “Gracie’s a very young whale. This is her first calf. Whales probably learn about raising baby whales from other whales, like primates learn from primates. If she has her calf here, she won’t know what to do. She won’t know how to take care of it. But if we let her loose in Alaska, she’ll have time to be with other whales. She’ll have time to learn parenting. I think. I hope. No humpback born in captivity has ever survived. Did you know that?” She sighed. “The problem is, they won’t be a whole lot safer at sea. Because of people who shoot them because they think they eat big fish. Because of the degradation of their environment. Because of the hunting.” Her voice grew shaky. “So that, as they say, is that.” She cut off her words and dashed the tears from her eyes with her sleeve. “Damn.”

Gillian heard a faint beep. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Jim said.

The beep repeated.

“A pocket pager? What are you, a doctor?”

At the third beep, Kirk pulled the pager out and flipped it open angrily.

“What is it?” he snapped. “I thought I told you never to call me—”

“Sorry, Admiral,” the beeper said. “I just thought ye’d like to know, we’re beaming them in now.”

“Oh,” Kirk said. “I see.” He half-turned from Gillian and spoke in a whisper. Gillian could still hear him. “Scotty, tell them, phasers on stun. And good luck. Kirk out.” He closed the beeper and put it away.

Gillian stared at him.

“My concierge,” Kirk said. “I just can’t get it programmed not to call me at the most inconvenient times.” He stopped, smiling apologetically.

“I’ve had it with that disingenuous grin, Kirk,” Gillian said. “You
program
your concierge? I’ll bet he loves that. And if this is the most inconvenient time anybody ever called you, I don’t know whether to envy you or feel sorry for you. Now. You want to try it from the top?”