Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (73 page)

“Tell me when the whales are going to be released.”

“Why’s it so important to you? Who
are
you?” she said. “Jeez, I don’t even know the rest of your name!”

“It’s James,” he said. “Who do you think I am?”

She tried to take another swig from her beer bottle, but she had emptied it into her glass. She picked up the glass, drank, and put it down.

“Don’t tell me,” she said sarcastically. “You’re from outer space.”

Kirk blew out his breath. “No,” he said. “I really am from Iowa. I just work in outer space.”

Gillian rolled her eyes toward the ceiling in supplication. “Well, I was close. I
knew
outer space was going to come into it sooner or later.”

“All right,” he said. “The truth?”

“All right, Kirk James,” she said, “I’m all ears.”

“That’s what you think,” he said with a quick grin that she ignored. “Okay. The truth. I’m from what, on your calendar, would be the late twenty-third century. I’ve been sent back in time to bring two humpback whales with me in an attempt to repopulate the species.”

Gillian began to wish she were drinking something stronger than beer. “Hey, why didn’t you
say
so?” she said, going along with him. “Why all the coy disguises?”

“Do you want the details?”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for all the tea in China.”

“Then tell me when the whales are leaving,” Jim said.

“Jesus, you are persistent,” Gillian said. She looked down into her beer. “Okay. Your friend is right. Like he said, Gracie is pregnant. Maybe it would be better for her to stay at the Institute till the end of the year. Then we could let her loose in Baja California just before she’s ready to calve. But if the news gets out before we release her, we’ll be under tremendous pressure to keep her. And maybe we should. But I told you the reasons for freeing her. We’re going to let her go. At noon tomorrow.”

Kirk looked stunned.

“Noon?” he said. “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah. Why’s it so important to you?”

The waiter appeared and placed a large round platter on the table between Jim and Gillian.

“Who gets the bad news?” he said, offering the check to the air between them. Kirk looked up at him blankly.

Gillian took the bill. She had expected to go Dutch, but Kirk could at least offer to pay his share. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “They don’t have money in the twenty-third century.”

“Well, we
don’t,
” he said. He pushed himself to his feet. “Come on. I don’t have much time.”

He strode out, nearly running into a young man at the door.

Perplexed, Gillian watched Kirk leave. The waiter was staring after him too. Gillian wondered how much of their conversation he had heard. The waiter glanced at her with a confused frown. He could not be more confused than she was, and she had heard the whole thing.

“Uh, can we have this to go?” She gestured to the pizza.

Shaking his head, he went away to get a box, and Gillian wondered if she would ever be able to come back to the restaurant after all.

Uhura re-formed within the cool tingle of the transporter beam. She let out her breath with relief. The beam had placed her in an access corridor that led to the nuclear reactor. The reactor and all its shielding skewed the tricorder readings sufficiently that she had not been absolutely certain where she would appear. She pulled out her communicator and opened it. “I’m in,” she whispered. “Send Pavel and the collector.”

A moment later Chekov appeared beside her, carrying the photon collector. He started to speak. She gestured for silence. Her tricorder suggested the presence of one human being and a dog on the other side of the door to the access corridor, and many other people in the close to intermediate range. Many were pacing in back-and-forth patterns that suggested guard duty.

The dog’s sharp single bark startled her. The door transmitted the sound clearly.

“Oh, come on, Narc, there’s nothing in there.” On the other side of the door, the guard chuckled. “If anybody
did
stow dope in the reactor room, they deserve whatever they get back out.” His voice faded as he continued his patrol along the outer corridor. “That’s a good one. Radioactive coke. New street sensation. Snort it and your nose glows. Come
on,
Narc.”

Uhura could even hear the tapping of toenails on the deck as the dog trotted away. She wondered what in the world the security officer had been talking to his dog about.

“Let’s go,” she whispered.

As she and Pavel headed deeper into the reactor area, the tricorder’s readings grew more erratic. The only steady information it could give her concerned radiation. The shielding was less efficient than she would have liked. She and Pavel should not have to remain within the reactor’s influence long enough to be in danger. But fission reactors had caused Earth so many problems, some of which persisted even till her time, that she could not be comfortable around one.

A flashing reddish light reflected rhythmically through the corridor. Uhura rounded a bend. Above the reactor room door, a red warning light blinked on and off, on and off.

A large bright sign reading “DANGER” did not increase Uhura’s confidence one bit.

Seeking the highest radiation flux with her tricorder, she found the spot and pointed it out to Pavel. He attached the collector to the wall. The field it created would increase the tunneling coefficient of the reactor shielding, causing the radiation to leak out at an abnormally high rate. It was a sort of vacuum cleaner for high-energy photons, and it could vacuum them up through a wall.

Pavel turned the collector on. It settled; it hummed.

“How long?” Uhura whispered.

Pavel studied the collector’s readout. “Depends on amount of shielding, depends on molecular structure of reactor wall.”

Uhura hoped the patrol would not come into the reactor looking for coke, whatever that was, radioactive or not.

Gillian parked the Land Rover on a bluff above the sea. The tide was out. The rocky beach gleamed in starlight.

Gillian ate pizza and listened to Kirk James’s wild story. He had invented all sorts of details that sounded great. If they had been in a novel, she would have suspended her disbelief willingly.

The only trouble is, she thought, this is reality. He hasn’t offered me anything to check the details against. And with this baloney about not leaving anachronistic traces in the past, he has a perfect excuse.

“So, you see,” Kirk said at the end of his tale, “Spock doesn’t want to take your whales home with him. I want to take your whales home with me.”

Gillian handed Kirk a slice of pizza. The corner drooped over his fingers. He bit a chunk from the outer edge. Cheese strings stretched from his mouth to the piece of pizza.

He’s never eaten pizza before, that’s for sure, Gillian thought. Whoever heard of somebody who doesn’t know you eat the point first? Maybe he really is from Iowa. Via Mars.

“Are you familiar with Occam’s Razor?” she said.

“Yes,” Kirk said. “It’s just as true in the twenty-third century as it is now. If two explanations are possible, the simpler is likely to be true.”

“Right. Do you know what that means in your case?”

His shoulders slumped. He put down the half-eaten piece of pizza and scrubbed at the cheese on his fingers with a shredding paper napkin.

“I’m afraid so.” He raised his head.

Gillian liked his eyes, and his intensity attracted her. The trouble was, he kept offering evidence that it was the intensity of madness.

“Let me tell you a little more,” he said.

One of her professors in graduate school preferred another theory over Occam’s Razor for sorting out competing hypotheses. “Gillie,” she always said, “if you’ve got two possibilities, go with the beautiful one, the aesthetically pleasing one.” The possibility Kirk wanted her to believe was certainly the aesthetically pleasing one. His stories were almost as good as the stories her grandfather used to tell her when she was little, before.

“Do they have Alzheimer’s disease in the twenty-third century?” she asked.

“What’s Alzheimer’s disease?” Kirk said.

“Never mind.” She started the Land Rover and headed back into Golden Gate Park. She wished she could believe in his universe. It sounded like a great place to live.

“Tell me about marine biology in the twenty-third century,” she said.

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“Why? Because you spend all your time in space?”

“No. Because when I spend time on boats, it’s for recreation.”

Gillian chuckled. “You’re good. You’re really good. Smart, too. Most people, when they try to take somebody in, they try to snow you too far and they catch themselves up. If they thought it’d help, they’d claim to
be
a marine biologist.”

“I don’t even
know
any marine biologists. My mother’s a xenobiologist, and so was my brother.”

“Was?”

“He…died,” Kirk said.

“Then there’s no immortality in your universe, either.”

“No,” he said, smiling sadly. “Not for human beings, anyway.”

“Let me tell you some more about whales,” Gillian said.

“I’d like to hear anything you’ve got to tell me,” he said. “But if you won’t help me, then I’m a little pressed for time.”

“People have had killer whales in captivity for a couple of decades,” she said. “Do you have killer whales in your world? Orcas?”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry, no. All the larger species are extinct.”

“Orcas are predators. They swim fifty miles a day, easy. They have an incredible repertoire of sounds they can make. They talk to each other. A lot. That’s what it sounds like they’re doing, anyway. But when you put them in a tank, they change. They haven’t got anywhere to go. They’re kept in a deprived environment. After a couple of years, their range of sounds shrinks. Then they become aphasic—they stop talking at all. They get apathetic. And then…they die.”

Gillian turned in at the parking lot.

“Gillian, that’s a shame. But I don’t understand—”

She turned off the engine and stared out into the darkness and the silence.

“George didn’t sing this spring.”

Kirk reached out, touched her shoulder, and gripped it gently.

“Kirk, humpback whales are meant to be wild. They migrate thousands of miles every year. They’re part of an incredibly rich, incredibly complex ecosystem. They have the whole ocean, and a thousand other species to interact with. I was up in Alaska last summer, on a research trip observing humpbacks. We were watching a pod, and a sea lion swam right in beside one of them and dived and flipped and wiggled his flippers. The whale rolled over and waved her pectoral fin in the air, and she dove and surfaced and slapped her flukes on the water—she was playing, Kirk. We had a tape deck on the boat, we were listening to some music. When we put on Emmylou Harris, one of the whales swam within twenty feet of the boat—wild humpbacks just don’t come that close—and dove underneath us and came up on the other side and put her head out of water, to listen. I swear, she liked it.” She shivered, remembering her own wonder and joy and apprehension when the whale glided beneath her, a darkness against darkness, the long white pectoral fins gleaming on either side, their reach nearly spanning the boat’s length. “I’m afraid for George and Gracie, Kirk. I’m afraid the same thing will happen to them that happens to orcas. George didn’t sing. Maybe soon they’ll both stop playing. And then…” Her voice was shaking. She fell silent and looked away.

“We’d take good care of them. They’ll be safe.”

“I want them safe! But I can keep them safe at the Institute. Till they die. It’s freedom that they need most. I like you, Kirk, God knows why. And I’d like to believe you. But, you see, if you’re going to keep them safe—imprisoned—it doesn’t matter whether they’re here at the Institute or with you…wherever. Whenever.”

“Gillian, if their well-being depends on freedom, I swear to you they’ll be free.
And
safe. There are no whale hunters in my time, and the ocean isn’t polluted. There aren’t any great whales anymore, no orcas, but there are still sea lions to play with. I’ll even play country-western music to them, if you think it would make them happy.”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. Believe me, I’m not.”

He tempted her. Oh, he tempted her. “If you could prove what you’ve told me—”

“That’s impossible.”

“I was afraid of that.” She reached over him and opened the door. “Admiral,” she said, “this has been the strangest dinner of my life. And the biggest cockamamie fish story I ever heard.”

“You did ask,” he replied. “Now, will you tell me something?”

She waited.

“George and Gracie’s transmitters,” Kirk said. “What frequencies are you using?”

She sighed. He never gave up. “Sorry,” she said. “That’s—classified.”