The Wrath of Khan Page 3

  "Jim—?"

  "Thank you, Spock, very much," Kirk said, cutting Spock off and ignoring the question in his voice. "I mean it. Look, I know you have to get back to the Enterprise. I'll see you tomorrow."

  And with that, he was gone.

  Spock picked up the bit of textured wrapping paper and refolded it into its original shape, around empty air.

  He wondered if he would ever begin to understand human beings.

  Chapter 2

  Duty Log: Stardate 8130.4: MOST SECRET

  Log Entry by Commander Pavel Chekov, Duty Officer. U.S.S. Reliant on orbital approach to Alpha Ceti VI, continuing our search for a planet to serve as a test site for the Genesis experiment. This will be the sixteenth world we have visited; so far, our attempts to fulfill all the requirements for the test site have met with failure.

  Reliant—better known to its crew, not necessarily fondly, as "this old bucket"—plowed through space toward Alpha Ceti and its twenty small, uninhabited, undistinguished, unexplored planets. Pavel Chekov, on duty on the elderly ship's bridge, finished his log report and ordered the computer to seal it.

  "Log complete, Captain," he said.

  "Thank you, Mr. Chekov." Clark Terrell leaned back in the captain's seat. "Is the probe data for Alpha Ceti on-line?"

  "Aye, sir." Chekov keyed the data to the viewscreen so that Captain Terrell could display it if he chose. For now, the screen showed Alpha Ceti VI. The planet spun slowly before them, its surface smudged blurrily in shades of sickly yellow. Nitrogen and sulfur oxides dominated its atmosphere, and the sand that covered it had been ground and blasted from its crust by eons of corrosive, high-velocity winds.

  Alpha Ceti VI was a place where one would not expect to find life. If the crew of Reliant were lucky, this time their expectations would be met.

  And about time, too, Chekov thought. We need a little luck.

  At the beginning of this voyage, Chekov had expected it to be boring, but short and easy. How difficult could it be to find a planet with no life? Now, several months later, he felt as if he were trapped in a journey that was boring, unending, and impossible. Lifeless planets abounded, but lifeless worlds of the right size, orbiting the proper sort of star, within the star's biosphere, in a star system otherwise uninhabited: such planets were not so easy to discover. They had inspected fifteen promisingly barren worlds, but each in its turn had somehow violated the experimental conditions' strict parameters.

  Chekov was bored. The whole crew was bored.

  At first the ship had traveled to worlds at least superficially documented by previous research teams, but Reliant now had begun to go farther afield, to places seldom if ever visited by crewed Federation craft. The computer search Chekov had done on the Alpha Ceti system turned up no official records except the ancient survey of an automated probe. He had been mildly surprised to find so little data, then mildly surprised again to have thought he had ever heard of the system. Alpha Ceti VI had come up on the list of Genesis candidates for exactly the same reason no one had bothered to visit it after the probe report of sixty years before: it was monumentally uninteresting.

  Terrell displayed the probe data as a corner overlay on the viewscreen, and added a companion block of the information they had collected on the way in.

  "I see what you mean about the discrepancies, Pavel," he said. He considered the screen and stroked the short black hair of his curly beard.

  The probe data showed twenty planets: fourteen small, rocky inner ones, three gas giants, three outer eccentrics. But what Reliant saw on approach was nineteen planets, only thirteen of them inner ones.

  "I've been working on that, Captain," Chekov said, "and there are two possibilities. Alpha Ceti was surveyed by one of the earliest probes: their data wasn't always completely reliable, and some of the archival preservation has been pretty sloppy. It's also possible that the system's gone through some alteration since the probe's visit."

  "Doesn't sound too likely."

  "Well, no, sir." Sixty years was an infinitesimal distance in the past, astronomically speaking; the chances of any noticeable change occurring since then were very small. "Probe error is a fairly common occurrence, Captain."

  Terrell glanced back and grinned. "You mean maybe we think we're headed for a ball of rock, and we'll find a garden spot instead?"

  "Bozhe moi!" Chekov said. "My God, I hope not. No, sir, our new scans confirm the originals on the planet itself. Rock, sand, corrosive atmosphere."

  "Three cheers for the corrosive atmosphere," Mr. Beach said, and everybody on the bridge laughed.

  "I agree one hundred percent, Mr. Beach," Terrell said. "Take us in."

  Several hours later, on orbital approach, Chekov watched the viewscreen intently, willing the ugly little planet to be the one they were looking for. He had had enough of this trip. There was too little work and too much time with nothing to do. It encouraged paranoia and depression, which he had been feeling with distressing intensity on this leg of their voyage. On occasion, he even wondered if his being assigned here were due to something worse than bad luck. Could it be punishment for some inadvertent mistake, or the unspoken dislike of some superior officer—?

  He kept telling himself the idea was foolish and, worse, one that could become self-fulfilling if he let it take him over and sour him.

  Besides, if he were being punished it only made sense to assume others in the crew were, too. Yet a crew of troublemakers produced disaffection and disillusion: the ship was free of such problems. Or anyway it had been until they pulled this intolerable assignment.

  Besides, Captain Terrell had an excellent reputation: he was not the sort of officer generally condemned to command a bunch of dead-enders. He was soft-spoken and easygoing; if the days stretching into weeks stretching into months of fruitless search troubled him, he did not show the stress. He was no James Kirk, but …

  Maybe that's what's wrong, Chekov thought. I've been thinking about the old days on the Enterprise too much lately and comparing them to what I'm doing now. And what I'm doing now simply does not compare.

  But, then—what would?

  "Standard orbit, Mr. Beach," Captain Terrell said.

  "Standard orbit, sir," the helm officer replied.

  "What do we have on the surface scan?"

  "No change, Captain."

  Chekov got a signal on his screen that he wished he could pretend he had not noticed.

  "Except …"

  "Oh, no," somebody groaned.

  Every crew member on the bridge turned to stare at Chekov with one degree or another of disbelief, irritation, or animosity. On the other side of the upper bridge, the communications officer muttered a horrible curse.

  Chekov glanced down at Terrell. The captain hunched his shoulders, then forced himself to relax. "Don't tell me you've got something," he said. He rose and came up the stairs to look at Chekov's data.

  It is getting to him, Chekov thought. Even him.

  "It's only a minor energy flux," Chekov said, trying to blunt the impact of his finding. "It doesn't necessarily mean there's biological activity down there."

  "I've heard that line before," Terrell said. "What are the chances that the scanner's out of adjustment?"

  "I just checked it out, sir," Chekov said. "Twice." He immediately wished he had not added the last.

  "Maybe it's pre-biotic," Beach said.

  Terrell chuckled. "Come on, Stoney. That's something we've been through before, too. Of all the things Marcus won't go for, tampering with pre-biotics is probably top of the list."

  "Maybe it's pre-pre-biotic," Beach said wryly.

  This time nobody laughed.

  "All right, get Dr. Marcus on the horn. At least we can suggest transplantation. Again."

  Chekov shook his head. "You know what she'll say."

  On the Regulus I Laboratory Space Station, Dr. Carol Marcus listened, frowning, as Captain Terrell relayed the information Reliant had collected so far.

  "Y
ou know my feelings about disturbing a pre-biotic system," she said. "I won't be a party to it. The long range—"

  "Dr. Marcus, the long range you're talking about is millions of years!"

  "Captain, we were pre-biotic millions of years ago. Where would we be if somebody had come along when Earth was a volcanic hell-pit, and said, 'Well, this will never amount to anything, let's mess around with it'?"

  "Probably we wouldn't care," Terrell said.

  Carol Marcus grinned. "You have it exactly. Please don't waste your time trying to change my mind about this, it simply isn't a matter for debate."

  She watched his reaction; he was less than happy with her answer.

  "Captain, the project won't be ready for the next stage of the test for at least three months. There's no pressure on you to find a place for it instantaneously—" She stopped; the unflappable Clark Terrell looked like he was about to start tearing out his very curly, handsomely graying black hair. "Wrong thing to say, huh?"

  "Doctor, we've spent a long time looking for a place that would fit your requirements. I'd match my crew against any in Starfleet. They're good people. But if I put them through three more months of this, I'll have a mutiny on my hands. They can take boredom—but what they've got is paralysis!"

  "I see," Marcus said.

  "Look, suppose what our readings show is the end of an evolutionary line rather than the beginning? What if some microbes here are about to go extinct? Just barely hanging on. Would you approve transplantation then?"

  "I can't do that," she said. She chewed absently on her thumbnail but stopped abruptly. You're a little old to still be chewing your nails, Carol, she thought. You ought at least to have cut it out when you turned forty.

  Maybe when I hit fifty, she replied to herself.

  "Don't you leave any room for compromise?" Terrell asked angrily.

  "Wait, Captain," she said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. It isn't that I wouldn't give you a go-ahead. It's that finding a species endangered by its own environment is a fairly common occurrence. There are established channels for deciding whether to transplant, and established places to take the species to."

  "A microbial zoo, eh?"

  "Not just microbes, but that's the idea."

  "What kind of time-frame are we talking about?" Terrell asked cautiously.

  "Do you mean how long will you have to wait before the endangered species subcommittee gives an approval?"

  "That's what I said."

  "They're used to acting quickly—if they don't it's often too late. They need documentation, though. Why don't you go down and have a look?"

  "We're on our way!"

  "I don't want to give you false hopes," Marcus said quickly. "If you find so much as a pre-biotic spherule, a pseudo-membranous configuration, even a viroid aggregate, the show's off. On the other hand, if you have discovered an evolutionary line in need of preservation, not only will you have found a Genesis site, you'll probably get a commendation."

  "I'll settle for the Genesis site," Terrell said.

  His image faded.

  Carol Marcus sighed. She wished she were on board Reliant to keep an eye on what they were doing. But her work on Genesis was at too delicate a point; she had to stay with it. Clark Terrell had given her no reason to distrust him. But he was obviously less than thrilled about having been assigned to do fetch-and-carry work for her laboratory. He was philosophically indifferent to her requirements for the Genesis site, while she was ethically committed to them. She could imagine how Reliant's crew referred to her and the other scientists in the lab: a bunch of ivory-tower eggheads, test-tube jugglers, fantasy-world dreamers.

  She sighed again.

  "Mother, why do you let them pull that stuff on you?"

  "Hello, David," she said. "I didn't hear you come in."

  Her son joined her by the communications console.

  "They're lazy," he said.

  "They're bored. And if they've found something that really does need to be transplanted …"

  "Come on, mother, it's the military mentality. 'Never put off tomorrow what you can put off today.' If life is beginning to evolve there—"

  "I know, I know," Carol said. "I'm the one who wrote the specs—remember?"

  "Hey, mother, take it easy. It's going to work."

  "That's the trouble, I think. It is going to work, and I'm a little frightened of what will happen when it does."

  "What will happen is, you'll be remembered along with Newton, Einstein, Surak—"

  "More likely Darwin, and I'll probably get as much posthumous flak, too."

  "Listen, they might not even wait till you're dead to start with the flak."

  "Thanks a lot!" Carol said with mock outrage. "I don't know what I can hope for from other people, I can't even get any respect from my own offspring."

  "That's me, an ingrate all the way." He gave her a quick hug. "Want to team up for bridge after dinner?"

  "Maybe. . . ." She was still preoccupied by her conversation with Terrell.

  "Yeah," David said. "Every time we have to deal with Starfleet, I get nervous too."

  "There's so much risk. . . ." Carol said softly.

  "Every discovery worth making has had the potential to be perverted into a dreadful weapon."

  "My goodness, that sounds familiar," Carol said.

  David grinned. "It ought to, it's what you've been telling me for twenty years." Serious again, he said, "We just have to make damned certain that the military doesn't take Genesis away from you. There're some who'll try, that's for sure. That overgrown boy scout you used to hang out with—"

  "Listen, kiddo," Carol said, "Jim Kirk was a lot of things … but he was never a boy scout." Her son was the last person she wanted to talk about Jim Kirk with. She gestured toward the file David was carrying. "Last night's batch?"

  "Yeah, fresh out of the machine." He opened the file of X-ray micrographs, and they set to work.

  Jim Kirk pulled the reading light closer, shifted uncomfortably on his living room couch, held the book Spock had given him closer to his eyes, held it at arm's length. No matter what he did, his eyes refused to focus on the small print.

  I'm just tired, he thought.

  It was true, he was tired. But that was not the reason he could not read his book.

  He closed it carefully, set it on the table beside him, and lay back on the couch. He could see the pictures on the far wall of the room quite clearly, even down to the finest lines on the erotic Kvern black-and-white that was one of his proudest possessions. He had owned the small drawing for a long time; it used to hang in his cabin back on the Enterprise.

  A few of his antiques were alien artifacts, collected offworld, but in truth he preferred work from his own culture, particularly England's Victorian era. He wondered if Spock knew that, or if the Dickens first edition were a lucky guess.

  Spock, making a lucky guess? He would be horrified. Jim grinned.

  Only in the last ten years or so had the beauty of antiques overcome his reluctance to gather too many possessions, to be weighed down by things. It was a long time since he had been able to pick up and leave with one small suitcase and no glance back. Sometimes he wished he could return to those days, but it was impossible. He was an admiral. He had too many other responsibilities.

  The doorbell chimed.

  Jim started and sat up. It was rather late for visitors.

  "Come," he said. The apartment's sensors responded to his voice. Leonard McCoy came in, with a smile and an armful of packages.

  "Why, Doctor," Jim said, surprised. "What errant transporter beamed you to my doorstep?"

  McCoy struck a pose. "'Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis,'" he said.

  "How's that again?"

  "Well, that's the original. What people usually say these days is 'Beware Romulans bearing gifts.' Not quite the same, but it seemed appropriate, considering—" he rummaged around in one of the packages and drew out a bottle full of
electric-blue liquid, "—this. Happy birthday." He handed Jim the chunky, asymmetric bottle.

  "Romulan ale—? Bones, this stuff is so illegal—"

  "I only use it for medicinal purposes. Don't be a prig."

  Jim squinted at the label. "Twenty-two … eighty-three?"

  "It takes the stuff a while to ferment. Give it here."

  Jim handed it back, opened the glass-paneled doors of the cherry-wood Victorian secretary where he kept his dishes, and took out a couple of beer mugs. McCoy poured them both full.

  "Is it my imagination, or is it smoking?"

  McCoy laughed. "Considering the brew, quite possibly both." He clinked his glass against Jim's. "Cheers." He took a deep swallow.

  Jim sipped cautiously. It was a long time since he had drunk Romulan ale, but not so long that he had forgotten what a kick it packed.

  Its electric hue was appropriate; he felt the jolt of the first taste, as if the active ingredient skipped the digestive system completely and headed straight for the brain.

  "Wow," he said. He drank again, more deeply, savoring both the taste and the effect.

  "Now open this one." McCoy handed him a package which, rather than being stuffed into a brown paper bag, was gilt-wrapped.

  Jim took the package, turned it over in his hand, and shook it.

  "I'm almost afraid to. What is it?" He took another swallow of the ale, a real swallow this time, and fumbled at the shiny silver tissue. Strange: he had not had any trouble opening Spock's present this afternoon. A tremendously funny idea struck him. "Is it a tribble?" He started to laugh. "Or maybe some contraband Klingon—"

  "It's another antique for your collection," McCoy said. "Your health!" He lifted his glass and drank again.

  "Come on, Bones, what is it?" He got one end of the package free.

  "Nope, you gotta open it."

  Though his hands were beginning to feel like he was wearing gloves, Jim could feel a hard, spidery shape. He gave up trying to get the wrapping off in one piece and tore it away. "I know what it is, it's—" He squinted at the gold and glass construction, glanced at McCoy, and looked down at his present again. "Well, it's … charming."