The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (8 page)

There is only one military institution left in the Federation: Starfleet. Though its “brand” is one of exploration, diplomacy, and civilization, the security of the Federation and its citizens is still an important part of its charter, and to look after it requires a military chain of command. So the one not-so-secret secret of its academy is that it makes sure its graduates can be soldiers when they need to be. And that starts on Induction Day.

New cadets sign in, are handed a big empty red bag, and from that moment on they enter a maze of abuse. You’re sent on an organized scavenger hunt to acquire your needed equipment in different buildings. And around every corner there’s an angry upperclassman telling you
you’re a stupid plebe who’s walking too slow; you shouldn’t be running, why aren’t you at attention, why are you standing there, get moving you stupid plebe, put your bag down when I’m talking to you, who told you to drop your bag, look at me when I’m talking to you, why are you looking at me, don’t you look at me!

The bag gets heavier and heavier; you’ve got to carry it everywhere, and you very quickly have no idea where you’re going or where you’re supposed to be going, and that’s the point. If you get through the day, it’s because you finally realize you have no choice but to not think, just
do
, usually whatever the last thing the nearest upperclassman said. It’s arduous, humiliating, and stressful, and more than a few cadets don’t make it ’til sundown. I did, though just barely. I’d never been yelled at like this before, and it was only the beginning.

The first eight weeks of your first year are called “plebe summer,” and they are designed to drive out those men and women who can’t handle the physical and psychological stress. The survivors learn discipline and skills they need not only to get along at the academy, but more importantly in Starfleet. It is the one thing that separates it from the rest of the Federation: cadets, crewmen, and officers know the importance of following orders, because it saves lives.

At around noon, by which time I’d learned, among other things, to march in formation carrying a 50-pound bag, I was assigned to a company, the Second Cadet Corps, a barracks, and reported to my room. My section commander (there were eight of us in the section) was a cadet captain named Ben Finney. A few years older, big and fit, he commanded my attention immediately. He ordered me, two other humans, and an Andorian to stand at attention and hold our bags until further orders. We stood two on each side in front of our bunk beds for about an hour. My arms were shaking from the strain. I was looking straight ahead into the pale green eyes of the blue-skinned cadet. I’d never met an Andorian; I had dozens of questions for him, but one of the lessons I’d learned from that first day was not to speak until spoken to by an upperclassman.

“Drop your bags!” It was Finney, who finally came into our room. We dumped our bags on the floor, and before I could stop myself, I let out a “whew.” Bad mistake. Finney went right up to me.

“You tired, plebe?”

“No sir!”

“Glad to hear it! Pick up your bag; you can hold on to it for a little while longer. The rest of you, unpack. I want this room shipshape.” And with that, he left. While my roommates tried to navigate around me, I stood holding the bag. About an hour later, the roommates were now relaxing on their beds while I stood there, sweat pouring from me, my arms shaking.

“Atten-shun!” It was one of my roommates, who saw another upperclassman come into the room. He was a cadet lieutenant named Sean Finnegan—a big, blond, smiling Irishman.

“What’s been going on in here, boyos?” I hadn’t really heard an Irish accent as pronounced as this one, and felt it had to be somewhat affected. He looked at my three roommates. “You boyos should be getting down to lunch.” They left, and he then turned to look at me.

“And what might you be doing?”

“Lieutenant sir, I’ve been ordered to hold my bag, sir!”

“What’s your name, Cadet?”

“Lieutenant sir, Cadet James T. Kirk, sir!”

“Oh, well, Jimmy Boy,” he said, pronouncing boy “bahy,” “if you don’t get unpacked, you’re gonna miss chow. See you down there.”

“Lieutenant sir, yes sir.” I put the bag down, and Finnegan sauntered out, whistling “Danny Boy.” I unpacked and made it down to lunch just in time. As I sat at the table, Finney looked up at me, stupefied.

“Kirk! You stupid plebe, what the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

“Sir, I was ordered to lunch, sir!”

“Who ordered you?” Finney said, and he was bellowing. The whole room was quiet.

“Sir, Cadet Lieutenant Finney—” I said.

“There is no Cadet Lieutenant Finney!”

“Sir, sorry, sir, I meant Cadet Lieutenant Finnegan, sir.” It wasn’t the last time I would mix up their unfortunately similar names. Finnegan stood up.

“I gave no such order,” Finnegan said. “I think the day has been too much for the boy.”

I went over it in my head. He was right; Finnegan had not ordered me to put the bag down. I had read into it.

“What do you have to say to that?” Finney said.

“Sir, I was mistaken, sir!” I was also starving, but Finney sent me back up to my room and told me to repack my bag and hold it until he got there. I followed the order, and about 15 minutes later, my roommates returned from lunch, followed by Finney. My roommates stood tall as Finney inspected my living space to make sure that I’d put everything back in the bag. I felt like passing out, but held on. He smiled.

“Drop the bag, plebe.” I slowly lowered the bag to the ground, then returned to attention. “Stow your gear,” he said, and then left. As I started to put my gear away, I saw Finnegan standing in the doorway, smiling.

It was not a good start for me.

For the next two months we were put through a punishing regime of physical training: running with heavy packs, obstacle courses, battle simulations, survival training. The skills I had developed in my boyhood, considered primitive and unnecessary in our society, came in handy during this period: my mountain-climbing experience, my years camping with my father, and my knowledge of the Old West. Still, it was never easy, and there were always surprises.

Plebe summer was such a whirlwind that I really didn’t get much downtime with my roommates. I never became close with the two humans, Jim Corrigan and Adam Castro; the Andorian, Thelin, was the first of his kind admitted to the academy, and did not always easily fit in. We shared the similarity that we tended to separate ourselves from the group.

The last weekend of plebe summer we got our first pass. I was thrilled; it was going to be my first chance to see Ruth in months. We’d seen each other several times, but not since I’d begun at the academy. The night before, as I came into my room from having washed up, I was lost in thought; she was the first girlfriend I’d ever had, and as the stress of my first few weeks at the academy relieved somewhat, she dominated my mind. I was so distracted I hadn’t really noticed Castro, Corrigan, and Thelin’s furtive glances to one aother as I hopped up on my bed on the top bunk. There was a splash; I’d landed in something that wasn’t supposed to be there. I looked down and saw a soup bowl tipped over, my pants covered with thick, oily liquid.

“What the hell is this?” I said, totally confused, as the answer walked in.

“Atten-shun!” Finnegan said. We all leaped to our feet. In doing so, I made my situation worse as the bowl of soup followed me off the bed and spilled down my body. I now recognized the liquid as the corn chowder that had been served for lunch that day.

“Sneaking food, are we, Jimmy Boy?”

“No sir!” The congealed yellow liquid was dripping off me onto the floor.

“You know the regulations about eating in your rooms,” he said. “This is a serious infraction. Twenty demerits.”

“Yes sir!” I was furious. If a cadet got 100 demerits during his years at the academy, he was out. This man was carrying out some archaic practical joke that I couldn’t imagine had ever been funny,
ever
, and it might cost me my future.

“Something you want to say to me, Jimmy Boy?” He was standing an inch in front of me. I held his stare.

“No sir!”

“Really? ’Cause you look like you want to lay one on me.” He was right. I wanted to hit him. Which is what he wanted, because then I’d be out.

“No sir!”

“All right, then, clean up this mess, before I give you ten more demerits,” Finnegan said as he swaggered through the doorway.

“Sorry, Jim,” Castro said, handing me a towel. “We saw him come out of our room when we got back. He ordered us not to tell you what he’d done.”

“If you report him,” Thelin said, “it will be a mark on his record. If my testimony is necessary, I offer it.”

The Andorian had a sense of honor, which I appreciated, but as I glanced over at Castro and Corrigan, I could see their reluctance, and I didn’t blame them. Though I wanted to get Finnegan in trouble, I also knew what would happen if I went through channels. The story wouldn’t be that Finnegan was abusing me unnecessarily; it would be that I couldn’t take a joke.

“It’s all right,” I said, wiping the chowder off my pants. “I’ll survive.”

Fortunately, I still had my pass and got to see Ruth. She still worked at Starfleet Headquarters. She had grown up in San Francisco, where Starfleet crewmen had been omnipresent, so once out of high school, looking to carve her own path, she’d enlisted, gone through the basic training in the noncommissioned officers’ school, and became a clerk in the records department. She admitted to being a little lost in terms of her life goals, and she later told me that my confidence over what I wanted to do was part of what she found attractive. Though inside I was still very much a boy, I found her attention did a lot to assuage my insecurity.

We had seen each other a few times since we met the previous year, but I had had little experience with women, and the only physical contact we had up until that night was holding hands. We met in the Fisherman’s Wharf section of San Francisco. It was a warm fall night, and she was wearing a lovely white-and-black lace dress. I wore my uniform, and like a crewman on a mission, I had gone into the evening having made the decision that I would kiss her. The question was when.

“Do you know why they call it Fisherman’s Wharf?” she asked me as we walked along the landscaped shoreline.

“This whole area,” I said, “used to be centered around the commerce of fishing. Fishermen moored their small vessels here, and early in the morning they’d leave to catch as much fish as they could, which they’d bring back here where they could sell …” I was about to continue when I could see she was smiling at me.

“Oh,” I said, “you weren’t asking. You were going to tell me …”

“Yeah,” she said, laughing a little. “I grew up here. But you tell it well.”

I laughed a little too. I felt like an idiot, but she held my arm tightly. I stopped and picked an orange and yellow sunflower and gave it to her.

“You’re not supposed to pick the flowers,” she said.

“I know. Let’s break some rules.”

I looked at her, not at all feeling the bravado I was expressing. I pushed through my fear and kissed her. She welcomed it. Mission accomplished. She parted from me and stared into my eyes. What happened next astounded me, but I tried not to show it.

“Why don’t you take me home now?” she said, smiling.

I had to be back at the academy by 24:00, and the guard on duty logged me in at 23:57. I was giddy, confused, happy, proud of myself at the same time I was certain I had nothing to do with causing what had just happened. So I was a little lost in my head, and I didn’t notice the unusual way the door to my room was propped open. I could see the light on inside and could hear Castro and Thelin talking.

“You guys up, ’cause I got a story—” Before I could finish my sentence I was covered in ice-cold water, and a plastic bucket hit me in the head. I almost couldn’t breathe the water was so frigid. I now saw Finnegan was in there talking to my roommates.

“Welcome home, Jimmy Boy,” Finnegan said. “Looks like you made another mess. Twenty demerits.” He strutted out. When he was gone, Castro headed toward the dresser and got me a towel.