The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. Mcintyre Неизвестный Автор

  Spock struggled to regain control of his body, but Mree’s understanding of the aggressive move was thorough, and she had incapacitated him just short of unconsciousness. He could not help but admire her for mastering the technique: humans who tried it usually either failed to produce any effect at all, or used it so aggressively that it proved fatal. Only an unusually proficient student could produce immobility with consciousness.

  Dr. Mordreaux hesitated. Spock could see him at the edge of his vision, but he could neither turn his head nor speak.

  “All right,” Mordreaux said abruptly.

  They filed into the laboratory. Spock struggled unsuccessfully to regain some feeling, some power of movement.

  A wash of rainbow light, a dazzle of ultraviolet energy, told him he had failed again. They were fleeing, to some place he would never find, and he could come back again and again and again, earlier and earlier, further fragmenting the very substance of the universe as he attempted futilely to repair the damage being done. But he would always fail, he knew it now, something would always happen to cause him to fail. Entropy would always win.

  As it must.

  He cried out in despair.

  Fighting the hopelessness that washed over him, somehow he flung himself over onto his chest. Every nerve and muscle in his body shrieked as he reached to drag himself along the floor like the crippled creature he was, like the first primordial amphibian struggling for breath on the shores of a vanishing lake, knowing instinctively in the most primitive interconnections of his brain that he would probably die, if he continued, that he would surely die, if he stayed, that his only chance was to keep going, to try.

  Hunter wandered into sick bay, wishing she were almost anywhere else in the universe. She stopped in the doorway of McCoy’s office.

  “Leonard,” she said, “Mr. Spock’s twelve hours are nearly up.”

  “I know,” McCoy said miserably. “Hunter, he told me he had an outer limit of fourteen hours—”

  “Oh, gods,” Hunter said, exasperated. “Leonard—”

  “Wait—” McCoy looked up. “Did you hear—it’s the sensors!” He jumped up and ran past her into the main sick bay.

  In the critical care unit the signals had fallen to zero, but not because the toxin had finally overwhelmed Ian Braithewaite’s life. Hunter took one look at the empty bed and ran out into the corridor. She caught a glimpse of Ian disappearing around the corner.

  “He’s trying to get to the transporter!” McCoy said.

  Hunter raced after Ian. He was still very weak and she narrowed the gap between them, but he stumbled into the lift. Hunter launched herself toward him and crashed against the closed doors, an instant too late.

  “Damn!” She waited seething; McCoy caught up to her as the lift returned. They piled inside, and as soon as it stopped again Hunter rushed out and after the prosecutor. He had already reached the transporter room, already opened the console: he stared down at the bioelectronic construct that bulged up out of the module like a glimmering malignant growth.

  “Don’t, Ian! Gods, don’t!”

  “It’s the only way,” he whispered.

  Supporting himself on his elbows in the doorway of the laboratory, Spock whispered, “Dr.

  Mordreaux...”

  The small group of time-travelers parted, turning to look at him, all of them startled to hear his voice.

  And all of them were there.

  Spock could not force his eyes to focus properly: he thought he was seeing double. But then the second Dr. Mordreaux stumbled off the transporter platform and fell, as Spock had, and the first Dr.

  Mordreaux, the one who belonged in this time, this place, knelt beside him and turned him over. The older professor groaned.

  Using the doorjamb for support, Spock dragged himself to his feet. Mree looked from one Mordreaux to the other, then back at Spock.

  “Sir—” Spock said.

  “Nothing changed,” Mordreaux said. “Nothing . . . changed ...” His voice was like sand on stone, skittering, dry, ephemeral. “I waited, but the chaos ...”

  Spock forced himself across the few meters of space between him and the professor, and fell to his knees. The present Dr. Mordreaux stared down at himself.

  “They are determined to go, sir,” Spock said. “I tried to show them what would happen—”

  Mordreaux’s hand clamped around his wrist. “I don’t want to die like this,” he said. He looked back at himself. “Believe him. Please believe him.” He sighed, and his eyes closed, his hand fell limp beside him, and the life flowed slowly from his body.

  The present Dr. Mordreaux sat back on his heels.

  “My god,” Mree whispered. “My god, look.”

  The future Dr. Mordreaux faded gradually to dust, and the dust dissolved toward nothingness. As it collapsed into subatomic particles, Spock snatched up the time-changer, reset it, and flung it into the dust. Attuned to the molecules that had formed Dr. Mordreaux’s body, it pulled them with it as it quivered and vanished back to its own time. Spock wondered why he had bothered to make the repair in space-time, since it appeared that he would fail to prevent the more serious damage that was about to occur.

  He stood up slowly, aching with fatigue. “Do you believe me now?” His fa9ade of control and emotionlessness began to crack. “He knew he would die if he came back this far again. He knew it! He feared it. By his time, the changes you have caused have become so intolerable that he deliberately chose death, to try to stop you!”

  “What about us?” Perim cried. “That’s years in the future! Our hopes—”

  “And the hopes of your children?” Spock glanced at the curious little girl who had asked if he were a Vulcan—he realized that no one had adequately answered her question—and she gazed solemnly at him, as if she understood everything that had happened. Perhaps she did, better than he or anyone else. “Far in the future, when your child is grown, and the universe is nothing but chaos—what then? You will go back, you will be safe.” He looked at each member of the group, adults and children alike. “Your children will take the consequences.”

  The present Dr. Mordreaux rose. “Mr. Spock ...”

  His voice shook. “Perhaps—”

  “Georges!” Perim took one step forward, his fists clenched. “You can’t—”

  Mree clasped his arm, gently, it seemed, but he stopped and fell silent.

  “I think we’re going to have to find other hopes,” she said.

  “No!”

  “Perim,” Mree said, “Spock is right. We’ve been selfish—we knew that all along, but now we know what the results of our selfishness will be.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Mordreaux said. He looked around at his friends, Mree and Perim and the others who had watched, unbelieving.

  The young student who had given Spock water had tears streaming down his face. “It would have been—” He could not finish.

  “My friends, I’m sorry,” Mordreaux said. He went to the transporter and began to disconnect the additions. Perim and one of the others tried to stop him, but Mree and the other three adults prevented them from interfering. Mordreaux finished the dismantling, then, tears running down his face, too, he hugged each of the other people. “I can never make this up to you,” he said when he got to Perim. “I know it.”

  Perim pulled back from the embrace. “You’re right,” he said, his tone nearer a growl than any human sound. “You can’t.” He picked up his child, and fled.

  Ian Braithewaite stabbed at the control button on the time-changer. Hunter and McCoy reached him at the same time, but too late: they pulled him away from the transporter control as the strained warp engines rumbled into operation, so out of sync that the Enterprise itself shuddered. The light spilling across the transporter started its rainbow flux, red-orange-yellow—McCoy groaned in grief and despair.

  —green-blue-violet—

  The ship went dark; the beam faded, and McCoy found himself lying sprawled on the floor. When he o
pened his eyes the lighting was perfectly normal, and he was all alone. He pushed himself to his feet; he was as stiff as if he had been lying there for hours. Something terrible had happened, but it was like a dream that he grasped for as it slipped through his fingers. Something had happened: but he did not know what.

  “What am I doin’ here?” he muttered. He looked around the empty room one last time, shrugged, and returned to sick bay.

  In the sitting room, after the others had left, Dr. Mordreaux looked ruefully at Spock, then at Mree. “I suppose I’d better not publish my last paper,” he said.

  Despite all that had happened, Spock felt more than a twinge of guilt and unease at the idea of suppressing knowledge. Again he wished for a society as settled as that on Vulcan.

  “I guess not,” Mree said. “I sure won’t mention it. Damn. The idea was great while it lasted.”

  “Might any of the others try to force one of you to rebuild the time changer?” Spock asked.

  Mordreaux shrugged. “They might. Who knows? What’s ever certain? But I think that’s our problem, not yours, Mr. Spock.”

  “I hope I didn’t hurt you,” Mree said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Your technique is flawless,” Spock said. “I congratulate you.” “Thanks,” she said.

  Mordreaux glanced toward the doorway into the laboratory, where his other self had collapsed to dust. “Will you be all right, Mr. Spock? Can you get back to your own time, without...”

  “Your other self had made many more trips than I.”

  “The physiologies are different.”

  “I have no choice, Dr. Mordreaux. I can no more stay here than you can send your friends back to the times they would prefer to live in. I am aware of the risks.” He stood up. It was pointless to remain, pointless, and, quite possibly, dangerous. Every moment he remained increased the chances that he would inadvertently commit some act whose effects would cascade into disaster somewhere in the future. “I must go back,” he said. He picked up the time-changer. It was smooth and cool in his hands.

  “Mr. Spock—”

  “I must go back,” Spock repeated. “I must go back now.” His fingers tightened convulsively on the time-changer, because he wanted nothing more than to throw it as far away from him as he could, and never touch it again. He did not want to travel through time again. He was so tired, and he did not want to fight the pain anymore ...

  He was afraid.

  “Goodbye,” he said, and touched the controls.

  He heard their voices bidding him goodbye as the changer’s power pack built up threshold energy around him, and then all sound faded as he was dragged into a drowning riptide. Ultraviolet lanced into his vision.

  For all his assurances to Dr. McCoy, he was not certain within himself thathe , this time-stream’s self-aware version of himself, would continue to exist once the journey ended.

  The Enterprise materialized around him: he had only a moment to be sure of that, before he slipped down into such pure agony that it was the only sensation his mind could perceive.

  The rainbow light faded, and Mr. Spock was gone. Georges looked at Mree; she gazed at the transporter platform and shook her head.

  “Do you suppose he’ll be all right?”

  “I hope so. We’ll have to wait a few weeks until he gets home again. Then I can put in a call to the Enterprise . If he doesn’t remember what happened, I can just say hello.”

  “Are you going to call him from here?”

  Georges frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Mree took his hand. “If Perim is angry enough, he might easily start threatening you. You could be in a lot of danger.”

  Georges thought about that for a few moments, and then said quizzically, “ /could be in danger?”

  Mree shrugged.

  “I suppose I could put the changer together by myself,” Georges said. “But Perim knows as well as I do who actually built it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I’ve been planning to leave Aleph anyway. I don’t guess it makes that much difference whether I travel through the fourth dimension, or the normal three.”

  “You think I should leave, too.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Run away?”

  “Like a jackrabbit,” she said. She paused, and then, more seriously, she said, “Georges, what do you have here to stay for?”

  “Not very much,” he admitted. The seconds stretched out as Mree and Georges looked at each other, remembering other conversations very much like this one.

  “I asked you to come with me enough times before,” she said. “Shall I ask you again, or are you wishing I wouldn’t?”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t have to ask me again. Wherever it is that you’re going ... do you suppose they’d have any use for a mad scientist?”

  “Sure,” she said. “As long as you’re teamed up with a mad inventor.” She gestured toward the time-changer. “Think of the projects we can handle. Why, we can’t go wrong.”

  They laughed together, ruefully, and hugged each other very tight for a long time.

  Shouting incoherently, Jim Kirk sat up in his bunk. He clutched at his face: something was trying to get at his eyes—

  The lights rose gradually in response to his motion; he was in his cabin, in his ship, he was all right. It was nothing but a nightmare.

  He lay down again and rubbed his face with both hands. He was soaked with sweat. That was the most realistic dream he had had in a long time. The terrorism he had seen at the very beginning of his Starfleet career had haunted him for years, in dreams just like this one. A shadowy figure appeared, pointed a gun at him, and fired, then, as if he were two separate people, he watched himself die and felt himself die as a spiderweb slowly infiltrated his brain. The dream always ended as silver-gray death clouded his hazel eyes.

  He rubbed his chest, right over the breastbone, where the bullet had entered, in this dream. “Could at

  least have killed me instantly,” he said aloud, reaching very far for even bitter humor, and failing to grasp any.

  The dream before the nightmare, though, that was different. It was another dream he had not had for a long time: he had dreamed of Hunter. He tried not even to think of her, most of the time. He had so nearly destroyed their friendship with his immaturity; he had certainly destroyed their intimacy.

  Why don’t you grow up, Jim? he thought. Your dreams don’t just come along to entertain you, they’re there to give you good advice. You’ve been warned of your mortality, though if you’re lucky you’ll have a better death than that one. But you are mortal—and so is she. She’s in more danger than you are, more of the time: what if something happens to her and you’ve never told her how you feel, or at least that you know you were a damned fool?

  He ordered the lights out again and lay in the darkness trying to get back to sleep. But he knew that in the morning he would not forget the dreams he had tonight.

  In her darkened cabin, Hunter looked up from the backlighted reading screen and shivered. Had she dozed off? She did not think so. She leaned back, stretched, rubbed her temples, and returned her attention to the reader. The paper it displayed was hard going, all these years past her formal physics training, but the work was bizarre enough to interest her. She had always thought Georges Mordreaux was a little crazy, and this work confirmed her suspicions. The fourth paper in a series of five, it had a publication date two years past. Hunter could find no reference to any succeeding monograph, to paper number five.

  She wondered what had happened to Mordreaux after he quit the Makropyrios in a fit of pique and bruised ego. He always signed his papers, but never added any location.

  Hunter felt too restless to concentrate on physics. She turned off the reader, folded it against the wall, and went up to the cockpit to prepare Aerfen for docking with Aleph Prime.

  Her crew needed replacements even worse than Aerfen needed fixing, but Starfleet had her request and had not yet deigned to answer. Every time Hunte
r ran into the bureaucracy, which she did more and more frequently the more responsibility she earned, she daydreamed about resigning. She could always join the free commandoes. Or just go home and stay for a while. She was not due for a sabbatical for two more years; the best she could hope for in the meantime was a few weeks home with her family, with her daughter; and a few days by herself, in the mountains, to renew her friendship with the phoenix eagle who had watched over her while she found her dream-name.

  Hunter shook her head. She could get hopelessly sentimental sometimes; if she got any more maudlin she would start thinking about Jim Kirk, and that would bring on a bad case of “if onlies.”

  If only he were a completely different person, Hunter thought. If only I were, too. Then it would have worked out perfectly.

  Strolling toward his office, Ian Braithewaite stopped and stuck his head into the office of Aleph Prime’s public defender.

  “Hi, Lee, how you feeling today?”

  “Better,” she said. “I must have started to get a bug, but it’s gone now.”

  “Good.”

  “Anything interesting coming up?” she asked. “I’m tired of pleading fines for drunken miners. Why don’t you turn up a good smuggling case?”

  “Don’t I wish,” he said.

  “Want to go for coffee later?”

  “Sure,” Ian said. “I’ll meet you after court.”

  He went on down the hall and to his office, to start in on his moderately heavy load of massively boring cases, day after day, always the same.

  Without a sound, without a motion, Mandala woke. She went from deep dreaming sleep to complete wakefulness in an instant. She felt cold, with the sweat of fear.

  Almost as quickly as she awakened, she remembered where she was: her own cabin, on the Enterprise , her new assignment. Not back in the patrol, not in the midst of a fire-fight. She rubbed the ache beneath the scar on her left shoulder. She must have strained the old break during a workout. She really should find time to regrow the bone. It was silly to put up with the discomfort. And this time the twinge of pain had prodded memory and brought on her nightmare.

  But it was just a nightmare. She had faced and overcome its dangers just as she had beaten other perils, real ones, and the struggle and victory had suffused her with a fierce joy.