He slid a stylus from his waist, tossed it across the corridor. It clattered loudly in the quiet. Both guards were immediately alert. Hands on side-arms, they moved to investigate the source of the noise.
An unexpected bonus—Spock hadn't expected both of them leave their station. The unbarred portal to McCoy lay open.
But the guards hadn't looked incompetent. Therefore, they weren't. Therefore, there was something unseen here to be wary of. Slipping noiselessly across the hallway and into the chamber beyond, he quickly discovered what. A quick block knocked the hand weapon from the third guard waiting at the far wall. But a pillarlike arm closed around Spock's waist, lifting him high, squeezing, impairing his breathing.
With no time to experiment on an intractable subject, Spock reached around and back as massive arm muscles tightened. Finding the spot he wanted, he moved his fingers a certain way . . .
The guard collapsed with satisfying speed. When he crumpled to the parquet floor, the sound was loud enough to awaken the drowsing McCoy.
He rolled over on his bunk and stared. As soon as he recognized Spock he was on his feet and over by the inner wall of the cell.
"Spock—what in the world—"
Spock ignored the questions as he glanced back at the open doorway. Apparently the two guards outside were still searching for the source of the clattering. The little control box slid clear of the guard's hip. Spock studied it, touched the remembered sequence of switches.
"Input later, Doctor—no time now. And keep your voice down."
The first glowing nimbus that enclosed McCoy vanished. Another touch and the inner force-field disappeared. McCoy was trying to talk and awaken at the same time. The resulting combination of questions and accusations was understandably garbled.
"Have you and Jim gone out of your minds, Spock?" he finished confusedly. "Why—this is a jail break."
"If you'll just step out of the force-field area and come with me, Doctor . . ."
McCoy took a step—backward. "Spock, I can't. It's illegal. You saw the warrant. I've got to stand trial. I want to stand trial." His face was agonized. "I have to find out if—"
"You will stand trial and you will find out, Doctor," Spock insisted, impatiently looking from the recalcitrant physician to the still vacant doorway. "After you've found an antidote for the plague which is about to kill everyone aboard the Enterprise."
McCoy started. "Plague . . .?"
"We found a survivor, too, on Dramia II. A potential witness in your behalf. I do not know whether the disease lay dormant in him until he came aboard, or what. That is what you must discover. Humans are as susceptible to the disease as Draymians. Nearly everyone aboard is seriously ill."
"Spock—you don't tell me the important things first."
"You never ask me the important things first, Doctor."
McCoy moved quickly clear of the force-field boundary, outside the final bar to the ship's transporter beam.
"You realize, Doctor, the Draymians could still acquit you. But if you return aboard, you will be exposed to the disease. You could die, too."
Fully awake now, McCoy brushed hair from his eyes and glanced at him. "I'm aware of that—who's the doctor here? What surprises me is that you'd even think of mentioning it."
"I apologize, Doctor, but," Spock stared at the door, "I have been operating under stress lately." Out came the communicator. "We are clear of the force cell, Captain, beam us aboard."
A startled, angry voice sounded. Not from the communicator but from the doorway. The other two guards had returned. It took barely a second for them to take in the new alien, the fact that the prisoner stood alongside him instead of behind a glowing shield, and their unconscious companion of the floor.
A pair of tiny, explosive shells passed right through the place where McCoy and Spock had stood second-fractions before. They made a mess of the far wall.
IV
McCoy was mentally reviewing everything they knew about the Dramia II plague even as reintegration was being completed in the transporter alcove aboard ship. Scientific speculation vanished as soon as he saw Kirk, his skin now turned a bilious green, slumped over the transporter console.
"Jim!"
Kirk looked up, grinned weakly. "Hello, Bones. Welcome back." He collapsed before McCoy could set foot outside the alcove.
Kneeling next to Kirk, McCoy rolled him over and studied the weakened form as if the cause of the plague might suddenly advertise itself visibly—a movement under the skin, or glowing germs spelling out the formula for an effective serum.
Kirk only lay there.
"Help me get him to Sick Bay, Spock."
Together they wrestled the captain down to McCoy's lab, placed him alongside the other two who had first been stricken—Kolti and Demos.
The two Draymians and one human lay with a ghastly motionlessness. This was a quiet, efficient disease. There were no flailing arms, no hysterical gasps for air, no hallucinations and no screams of pain—Only the peculiarly horrible pigmentation change . . . to be followed by death.
Occasionally Kirk, still under the waning influence of the stimulant overdose, would awaken and mutter something half-coherent. McCoy didn't waste time listening to him.
Instead, he studied his friend as dispassionately as possible. Only by removing himself to a peak of empirical distraction would his mind stay clear enough to hunt for a solution.
He was aware that he had already been massively exposed to infection. Right up until the onset of the disease he should feel fine. First his ability to work and then his life would go in rapid succession.
It shouldn't be so hard. He should have been able to find a solution. But he hadn't. Couldn't.
McCoy pounded on the console of the medical computer as if it were personally responsible for the steadily approaching disaster. Every time he seemed to be coming close, the white letters, the same damning white letters, would suddenly flash on the annex screen . . .
NO CROSS-CORRELATION—PROPOSAL INEFFECTIVE
. . . and he'd have to start all over again. Doctor? Who said he was a doctor? He had fooled everyone long enough.
Bitterly, he mused that if the Draymians had been right all along, he was going to be executed by the plague he'd initiated. Not that he minded being subjected to such impersonal justice.
But he minded very much that all his friends might be taken along with him—victims of a more mature incompetence.
He looked over to where Spock was sitting. Calm, seemingly relaxed, the first officer studied another annex linked to the medical computer. They wouldn't find an antidote in there—of that McCoy had grown certain. But it probably helped relieve Spock's feeling of helplessness.
Besides, there was always the miniscule chance there might be something in the records that could lead to a hint of the relative of a clue.
Give him one straw . . .
"Anything at all, Spock?"
"Negative, Doctor."
McCoy studied his own readout, rubbed at his forehead. "The problem is that these violent pigmentation shifts don't link up with any known, or even with any rumored disease."
Doesn't link up, doesn't add up, no correlation, no correlation—but the pigmentation changes were the major symptom, weren't they? Well, weren't they?
Idly, he voiced a peripheral thought. "Spock, we know Vulcans are immune to this plague. That doesn't mean they couldn't be carriers."
"No, Doctor. It does not."
"Yet you still beamed down after me."
Spock didn't look up from his annex screen. "Given the Draymian's intransigence where your release was concerned, I felt justified in taking a calculated risk."
McCoy, then, was not the only one in this room whose conscience had reason to burn.
Something basic was wrong with their approach. Surely the Draymians had already exhausted this line of research. A first-year medical student, now, with a mind unencumbered by years of precedent, might have seen a solution instantly. But he, w
ith a lifetime of statistics and experience crammed into his cranium, could not see through the muck of acquired knowledge. Was he even capable of having an original idea anymore?
Where was the freshness of youth when it was so desperately required?
He looked again at Demos, Kolti, Kirk. Their color had shifted to pink. Soon it would be bright red and then it wouldn't matter what brilliant insights, what revelations he would be privileged to glimpse.
"Work harder, Spock. They're entering the terminal stage."
"A useless admonition, Doctor."
It was. Spock was already driving himself as hard as he could. If he displayed no sign of it, it was because not an iota of energy was wasted in visible muscle tension or in nervous breathing.
McCoy even tried a tight-beam transmission in hopes of contacting Alco III, the nearest Federation world with advanced medical facilities. That failed him, too.
"Spock . . . Spock!" he yelled, trying to break the first officer from his transfixed study of the computer annex. "I'm trying to get through to Alco. Maybe it's too far, but . . ." he squinted at the viewscreen, "I shouldn't be getting the kind of scrambled readings I am."
Spock looked over at him, spoke with doleful assurance. "That is hardly surprising, Doctor. Undoubtedly one of the numerous auroral disturbances is now placed between Draymia and Alco. Even a tight beam could not penetrate such a vast disturbance."
He was on his own. He had lost precious minutes hoping for the aid of a distant angel. McCoy finally shut off the annex and simply sat back, to think. Behind him, Kirk was mumbling. He had overheard their last conversation and even his subconscious was attuned to the beauties of the universe he loved so well.
"Local phenomenon . . . auroral excitation, lovely, lovely . . . change colors, shift hues, magnificent . . .
"Aesculapius!" McCoy yelled.
"No need to shout, Doctor," Spock said imperturbably. "You have found something?"
"The auroras . . ."
"Are a dead-end, Doctor. They are of a peculiar nature, but radiation levels are far from lethal—far from being even slightly dangerous."
McCoy rose from his seat and stretched. "One day, Spock, I'll sit down and correlate the relationship of the auroral radiation to its effect on the melanin in human—and Draymian—skin. But not now."
Spock looked thoughtful for a long minute, then became almost excited. "The pigmentation changes are not a symptom of the disease. They are a separate effect caused by the auroral radiation."
McCoy nodded vigorously. "Feed the same data we've been using into the med computer, without making any mention of epidermal tone shift. See if we get a result this time."
Spock didn't hesitate. Changing the input program required only a minute. There was a brief pause . . . and then words and figures started pouring back at them.
"Fast," was all McCoy said.
"I believe this is what you need, Doctor," Spock observed, studying the steadily maturing formula.
McCoy sat down, realized he was shaking slightly. "The color change in the skin had nothing whatsoever to do with the plague. We reported them as a symptom . . . no wonder the computer couldn't correlate it with the rest of our information.
"It's giving us an antidote . . . and as to the cause of the disease," he sighed, "it's the aurora, too."
"But, Doctor," Spock began uncertainly, "you just said it was a separate effect."
"It is, but the radiation is also the key to the plague. It just doesn't have any link with the color changes. There must be a virus, a bacterium, which is stimulated by the auroral radiation. Naturally, since the aurora is stimulating both, it would appear the color shift is a result of the disease—when in fact, they have no medical connection." He paused.
"Nineteen years ago Dramia II must have been passing through another of the strong auroral belts. I can't be sure . . . I wasn't in astronomy. But I'll bet a check of the expedition's records will confirm it. I do seem to remember a colorful night sky, though. I was too busy to admire local color most of the time." His voice dropped.
"Death's rainbow—it brought on the original plague, just as this aurora has brought it on again. We weren't affected until a carrier of the dormant microbe—Kolti—was brought aboard. I think a check of old records on Draymia itself might show legends of people changing color . . . and returning to normal when the auroras passed on."
His voice dropped to a whisper. Spock didn't press for clarification—the relief that had appeared in McCoy's voice was a private thing, not to be interrupted or shared. It was a relief that could not be judged on any general human scale . . . only on the personal one of Dr. Leonard McCoy.
"I had nothing to do with the plague, then." He blinked and walked over to stand behind Spock, peering over his shoulder at the screen.
"There's our virus, just as you suspected, Doctor." Spock worked the instrumentation and a new flow of information appeared. "And there is the declaration I most feared."
Under the microphoto of the virus itself had appeared the words, "NO KNOWN ANTIDOTE."
Spock tried to keep his voice as comforting as possible. "I suspected that if there were a cure, the Draymians would have found it. With nineteen years in which to research, even theoretically, they must have hit upon the same aurora-plague connection we've just reached."
"Every disease caused by a living agent has an antidote, Spock. Every . . ." He stopped, his voice sharpening. "Think, Spock."
"I have been, Doctor. It took me a moment to make the . . . correlation. Do you remember our witness . . . Kolti? You treated him nineteen years ago for saurian virus."
"The individual . . . there were so many. Maybe . . . yes, I think I do. It was a strange case to find on Dramia II. As I recall, he was one of their off-world representatives. Contracted it from someone in the Federation. Sure, I remember him now! We had a helluva time digging out the right serum for that . . . we'd expected to have to treat only local infections. Wait a minute." McCoy's face lit up like one of engineer Scott's control reactors.
"You say he's the witness, the survivor you found?"
"Correct, Doctor. He survived the plague and all aftereffects. Apparently, however, inoculation against saurian virus does not last nineteen years."
"No. No, it doesn't. He needs a booster. In fact, everyone on board ought to have a similar injection. If the key is saurian antibodies, recovery from the plague after administration should be as rapid as debilitation was."
"Let us hope so, Doctor," Spock remarked with a glance at the nearby beds. Kolti, Kirk and Demos were beginning to turn a dark crimson. "We have very little time."
McCoy was already moving toward the refrigerated locker where preprepared serums were stored.
"I'd like to run some tests on this first, Spock, but as you say, we haven't time." He grimaced. "Any side effects can't be worse than death."
"A queerly logical statement, Doctor." Spock understood the principles of irony.
McCoy hurriedly filled a mass injector, then a second, with three-quarters of the available serum. Then he programmed the organic fabrication computer to prepare the necessary remainder. It would be ready long before he and Spock had finished applying the first doses.
The infirmary was soon filled with hisses from the hypo sprays as they moved from bed to bed, pallet to cot, administering the antidote. Nor had McCoy neglected himself—if for some reason the serum proved ineffective, he wanted to be the first to know.
There was a buzz from the intercom set next to the computer keyboard. McCoy looked up uncertainly. "I thought you said everyone else aboard was incapacitated, Spock."
"They are, Doctor," he replied, heading for the acknowledge switch, "but the main computer itself is also immune to the plague."
McCoy muttered something about "Vulcans and machines" which Spock didn't hear and continued inoculating the prone crew members scattered through the room. Spock returned a moment later.
"You will be interested to know, Doctor, that we are
leaving the last streamer of the aurora which caused this trouble and blocked your communications attempt. Also, I ran a check on the composition of Draymian and Dramian atmospheres. I don't think we'll unearth any historical records of mass color changes on Draymia. The composition differs slightly but significantly . . . enough to block out the melanin-affecting radiation of the auroras."
McCoy moved to the next body. "So Draymia's always been plague-immune. No wonder the outburst on Dramia II terrified them so. They'd no experience with even the color shifts."
He made the inoculation, noticed that the indicator light on the side of the sprayer had come on.
"Empty . . . the synthesizer should be finished with the big batch I ordered up. Be right back, Spock." The first officer nodded, continued work with his own spray as McCoy started back toward the far end of the infirmary and the medical lab.
On the way he saw that Kirk, Demos and Kolti were running the color change backward. Red, to pink, then green and blue and finally their normal healthy color again. The speed of the change was fast enough to be visible to the naked eye—hopefully physical recovery would be equally rapid.
It was. When McCoy returned with a second empty hypo, Kirk had already opened his eyes. Seconds later Kolti and Demos followed suit. Nearby, a transporter specialist was snuffling like a pig in clover as he, too, started to come around.
Kirk looked at the ceiling, then rolled his head sideways. He looked tired, but had already regained enough strength to smile and nod at McCoy.
A strange disease—he would spend considerable time analyzing it. Studying with rather more detachment than he had been permitted up to now.
It would make a paper suitable for submission to the Starfleet Medical Journal—was that a tear at the corner of one eye? He wiped it away before any of his patients could notice—too much close work in too brief a time, that was all.
"You did it, Bones," Kirk mumbled softly.
Star Trek - Log 6 Page 6
