Jim left his name anyway. McCoy had planned to get together with Piper to discuss the ship and its crew. Perhaps somewhere in the conversation he had mentioned where he planned to go on his vacation. But unless Piper called him back almost immediately, the information would arrive too late.
Jim began to admit to himself just how worried he was. Reluctantly, he placed one last call.
The screen presented him with audio-visual patterns meant to be soothing. Electronic interference hinted at a transfer through several numbers. From New York to—? Jocelyn might be anywhere in the world, or off it.
The screen cleared and renewed itself.
“Oh,” Jocelyn said. “Jim. Hello.”
She looked very much the same as the last time he had seen her: an intense, spare woman, black hair caught in a fashionable chignon. She resembled McCoy in her disdain [82] for some modern conveniences. She did not trouble to conceal the gray in her hair.
“Hello, Jocelyn. Long time, and all that.”
“Are you calling for Leonard?” She sat at a desk in one of her offices; behind her lay the Singapore skyline. She had never spent much time in Macon even when she and McCoy were together. When Jim thought of her, he thought of her in New York, or in London.
“Yes,” he said. If she knew where McCoy was, if he was with her, then they must have changed their minds. They must be getting back together. This surprised him, but, then, McCoy had been surprising Jim for a number of years now.
“Tell him it’s no use,” Jocelyn said. “Jim, please, I don’t want to hurt him anymore, and I don’t want to be hurt anymore either.”
“Er ...” He had misunderstood her; she had asked him not if he wished to speak to McCoy, but if he was calling on behalf of him. “I know, Jocelyn, and I’m sure he doesn’t want that either.” He wondered how to end the phone call without hurting her, without making her worry about someone she could no longer love.
“What does he want?”
“What? Oh—nothing. I just called ... I was on earth, but I’m leaving soon, I just wanted to say hello and good-bye for old times’ sake.”
“Then why did you say you were calling for Leonard?”
“I didn’t—I mean, I’m sorry, I misheard you when you asked me that. Static on the frequency.”
“I see,” she said. She waited, but Jim could think of nothing more to say.
“Well, good to talk to you,” he said with forced cheerfulness. “Take care of yourself.”
“Good-bye, Jim,” Jocelyn said. Her image faded.
Jim sagged in his chair, defeated. He could think of no place else to call, no one else to ask about McCoy, nothing else to try. Besides, his hour had expired ten minutes ago.
The white-water raft crunched against the shore. Leonard McCoy dismounted from the boat’s inflated rubber side, [83] shouting with surprise and blowing out his breath as he landed up to his knees in the frigid water of the Colorado. His feet had been immersed in it for so long that they had gone numb, making him forget just how cold it was. It crept through the interstices of the legs of his wet suit. The cold was a shock, but soon his body heat warmed the water.
McCoy and the others grabbed the lines, dragged the raft onto the beach, and shed their life jackets.
Then they fell into each other’s arms, laughing and crying, energetic and exhausted, elated to have made it, sad to have reached the end of the trip.
They started to take off their wet suits. The hot gravelly sand drove the cold from their feet. They dug through the boat bag, looking for canvas shoes worn ragged in only two weeks’ time.
The archaic fastenings of McCoy’s wet suit had seemed odd at the beginning of the trip. After a day or two, they were as familiar as the sealer on his everyday clothes.
But now he fumbled at the snaps because tears blurred his vision. He had enjoyed the last few days more than he had enjoyed anything for years. Even when he knew for sure he would be late, he still enjoyed it. He had regained his ability to stop worrying about things he could not control.
He shed the wet suit like a reluctantly discarded skin, smiling at the metaphorical aspects of his actions. Under it he wore a thin shirt and a pair of rumpled, ragged Bermuda shorts. Both had been new when he set out. Neither was fit to be seen in anymore, anywhere but here.
“Jean-Paul,” he said.
The guide gave him a warm hug. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go join your ship. But don’t think you can get off so easy next time! Next time you stay and learn to pack the boat.” He grinned. “I’ll make a guide of you yet.”
McCoy hesitated, then raised his hand in farewell to them all, turned, and sprinted toward the office.
The manager glanced up as he entered. “Ah,” he said. “You’re a bit late. Everyone make it?”
“Made it just fine.” If the manager could act so blasé about the possibility of losing a boat full of people, so could McCoy. “Use your comm?”
The manager nodded at the battered unit on his desk.
[84] McCoy called the Enterprise. He fumed at the delay of getting a ground-to-space frequency. Why hadn’t he brought along his communicator?
Then he thought, You didn’t bring your communicator on purpose. For one thing, it’s against the rules. For another, you can’t hear it beep and not answer it. Don’t let the universe drag you back into its modern state of hyperactivity.
He smiled to himself and waited.
“Enterprise, Lieutenant Uhura here.”
“This is Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer. What’s the plan?”
“Dr. McCoy! What are your transporter coordinates?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said.
The manager recited a set of numbers.
“Stand by to beam on board,” Lieutenant Uhura said.
The cool tingle of dislocation caught him and sucked him away.
The turbo-lift carried Jim Kirk toward the bridge. Perhaps the lift would break down, stranding him in the guts of his ship. He could imagine sitting here for the rest of the afternoon, closed off from the unwanted duty of reporting a friend AWOL, from the unwanted mission, from the civilians roaming his ship, from the admiral watching for any sign of weakness or broken nerve.
The lift stopped. Jim squared his shoulders and paced onto the bridge, too tense for pleasantries. “Lieutenant Uhura, open a channel to Starfleet Command.”
“Aye, captain,” she said. “Sir, Dr. McCoy has reported. He should be in the transporter room by now.”
Before Jim had a chance to enjoy his relief, anger and outrage overwhelmed him. Since, apparently, no one had bonked McCoy on the head and left him wandering amnesiac in a dark alley, then why had he neglected to check in? Had his easy southern style so overwhelmed his courtly southern manners that even common courtesy became too much trouble?
Jim leaned back and rested his hands on the arms of the captain’s seat. “Cancel that last order,” he said offhand, keeping his voice calm. “I’ll see Dr. McCoy on the bridge.”
[85] “Yes, captain.” She relayed the message. “He says he’ll be up as soon as he’s stopped in his cabin, sir.”
“Tell Dr. McCoy,” Jim said, “that I’ll see him on the bridge right now.”
Uhura’s side of the conversation indicated that McCoy objected to the order, but Jim could not take it back even if he wanted to. That was all he needed, for the members of his new crew to believe he ran his ship on favoritism. He gazed stonily ahead at the blank viewscreen.
When the turbo-lift doors slid open, Jim heard Uhura’s soft exclamation of surprise. Sulu glanced back, tried to suppress a grin, and returned to his position.
Jim turned.
Dressed in damp rags and an unlaced pair of antique shoes, sunburned on face and neck and arms, his bare legs pale except on his left thigh, where the skin had turned black, purple, and green around a nasty scrape, his hair uncombed and uncut, wearing two days’ growth of beard, Leonard McCoy, all innocence, said, “You wanted to see me, captain?”
Jim leaped up. “Good lord, Bones!”
Jim stopped, aware of the startled silence that had fallen over the bridge. He detected an amused glint in McCoy’s eye.
“Please come with me, Dr. McCoy. We have ship’s business to conduct. Mr. Spock, take the conn. Prepare for departure at sixteen hundred.”
Jim strode past McCoy. He expected everyone on the bridge to burst out laughing any second. Perhaps they would, as soon as the lift doors closed behind him. But somehow he thought that while they might laugh at him to his face, they would not laugh at him with Commander Spock in charge.
Commander Spock watched with detached interest as the new captain hustled the disheveled officer from the bridge.
“That was Dr. McCoy?” Lieutenant Uhura said as the lift doors closed.
“That was Dr. McCoy,” Spock said. “The new chief medical officer.” All morning, Spock had been aware of Captain Kirk’s surreptitious efforts to locate the doctor. He had thought to offer his assistance, which he believed would [86] be considerable, but refrained from doing so precisely because of Kirk’s apparent wish that no one notice what he was doing. Perhaps the captain desired privacy because he expected to find Dr. McCoy in just such a disreputable state. But if that were true, why insist on his presence on the bridge? Spock wondered if he would ever begin to understand the motives of human beings.
“I hope he’s all right,” Uhura said. “He looked like he’d been in an accident.”
An accident that occurred some time ago, by the appearance of his injury, Spock thought.
“One may also hope,” the Vulcan said, “that he takes better care of his patients than he does of himself.”
In the turbo-lift, Jim glared at McCoy with a mixture of relief and anger.
“Bones, what happened to you?”
“Nothing.” McCoy glanced at himself as if noting for the first time how he was dressed. “Why? Don’t you like the newest fashion?”
“It’s—” Jim looked McCoy up and down. “Not quite—how shall I put it—the thing on a starship.”
“You didn’t give me a chance to change. I did try, you know.” He reached down and took off one ragged shoe. A handful of sand slid from it and scattered onto the deck. He took off his other shoe and brushed the rest of the sand from his bare feet. “How’s Mitch?”
“He’s ... still in regen. They say he’s getting better.”
“And Carol?”
“I guess she’s fine.”
“You guess?”
“Things didn’t work out!” Jim said angrily. “Let’s forget it.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to talk about Carol Marcus!”
McCoy frowned. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m all right! Why do people keep asking me if I’m all right? Bones, where the hell were you? What did you do to your leg? I was about to send out the hounds. You were supposed to report two days ago!”
“I know. And I missed your party.” He ran his fingers through his tangled hair, pushing it back. The sun had [87] burned his hair to coppery streaks and drawn a network of fine white lines in the deep tan around his eyes.
“Where were you? I nearly had to report you missing!”
“Relax, Jim, I’m here, aren’t I? I was on vacation. At your insistence, as I recall.”
“I know that.”
“I went on a river trip. Once we reached the border, I got here so fast I didn’t even help fold the boat.”
“Fold the boat?”
“Sure. It’s rubber; you need to rinse it off and deflate it and fold it up when you’re done with it.”
“You rode down a river in a rubber boat?”
“That’s the idea.”
“The sun must have gotten to you.”
“I went to the Grand Canyon,” McCoy said. His enthusiasm spilled over and obliterated the sparring. “White-water rafting. Have you ever tried it?”
“No.”
“It’s unbelievable. It’s magnificent. We’re traipsing off to the far corners of the universe, while there are incredible places on our own planet that we haven’t even seen. Jim, it’s something you’ve got to experience!”
“That’s what you said about mint juleps,” Jim said. “What did you do to your leg? And none of this explains why you didn’t let me know you were going to be late. You could have saved me having to give a lot of evasive answers.”
“The canyon’s a historical preservation area. Comm units are forbidden, even primitives like radios and wrist phones.”
“That’s barbaric,” Jim said. “You paid for this?”
“I paid extra for it!” McCoy said. “You can’t just go on a trip like this. You have to buy extra insurance and swear on your grandma’s motorcycle that you won’t sue the rafting company if you fall in and drown.”
“I don’t see the attraction,” Jim said.
“It was just about the most fun I ever had in my life. Jim, you’re too dependent on all this high-tech stuff.”
“We’d be in big trouble without all this high-tech stuff. If you’d had high-tech stuff your leg wouldn’t look like that.” Just looking at the bruise made Jim’s knee ache.
McCoy shrugged cheerfully. “We flipped the boat. I got in [88] the way of a rock. We lost some of the equipment—thought we’d lost a couple of people, but we found them again. That’s why I was late.” He smiled fondly at the memory. “And some of the food got ruined, so we’ve been on short rations the last couple of days.”
“Why didn’t you have something beamed—” Jim stopped. McCoy had told him the canyon was a historical preservation area and he knew parks of that designation forbade transporter beams. Yet the transporter was so much a part of the background in his life that he could hardly imagine not being able to call one out of the sky. The transporter was less likely to fail when he needed it than, say, the air supply.
The lift stopped in officers’ territory. McCoy got out. “It was a great vacation, Jim.”
“It doesn’t sound great to me. It sounds like you need a vacation to recover from your vacation. I wish you’d left word—” The lift doors tried to close. Jim put his hand in the way of the sensor.
“I didn’t want to be tracked down!” McCoy said, an edge in his voice. His dark tan made his kindly eyes deep and intense. The fine white squint lines disappeared when he narrowed his gaze. “I didn’t want to be able to call for help and get it. I wanted to see if I could do something for myself for a while, without a safety net. Can you understand that, Jim?”
Taken aback, Jim hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do understand that. I’m sorry I jumped down your throat. I was worried. It made me mad.”
“Apology accepted. Do I have time to bathe and change before I have to get to work?”
“No, but I think you’d better bathe and change anyway. And do something about that stubble.”
“I was thinking of growing a beard.”
McCoy was pulling his leg. Jim grinned. “There’s no rule against silliness, even in Starfleet.”
“Please use the turbo-lift in a courteous fashion,” the computer said. “Please free the lift doors.”
“I wish they’d make a rule against talking elevators.”
“See you later.”
[89] Already walking down the corridor, McCoy raised his hand in acknowledgment, then abruptly turned back.
“Jim—”
Jim shoved his hand between the lift doors again. They sighed open. A warning signal made a couple of abortive buzzes. Its next noise would be an ear-splitting shriek.
“Just how far did you go in trying to track me down?”
Jim took his hand away from the sensor just as the alarm began in earnest.
“You don’t want to know,” he said, and let the doors close between them.
Sulu flexed his hands nervously. He imagined all the things that could go wrong during his first try at piloting a constellation-class starship. Running the Enterprise into Spa
cedock’s doors would no doubt get him a transfer, but he doubted it would get him the transfer he desired. More likely it would give him a transfer to a scow hauling ore to be made into alloys to repair the damage he had done to the dock and the ship.
He could make a mistake of a much lower magnitude and still make a fool of himself. On the other hand, considering some of the things he had already seen on this ship, Sulu decided he would have to foul up fairly seriously for anyone even to notice. He smiled, remembering the captain’s reaction to the appearance of the chief medical officer.
I almost wish James Kirk had been on board when I arrived with my saber, Sulu thought. I probably could have gotten my transfer without even asking.
The ambient noise of information from computer and crewmates flowed around him like a gentle tide. The captain ordered the moorings cleared. Sulu felt a change in the lie of the ship. By no sense he could name, he knew the Enterprise floated free. It surprised him that one could feel the freedom in a ship this size, for it would certainly handle like an antimatter-powered barrel, a huge wallowing mass with enormous engines to wrestle it from place to place.
Time to take it in hand. He touched the controls.
The ship shuddered to starboard and dipped like a wounded bird.
[90] “Mr. Sulu!” the captain shouted.
Sulu wrenched the Enterprise to port, overcompensated, and had to drag the ship out of the threat of spin and tumble. The ship quivered in his hands, as delicate as a solar-powered sailboat. He gulped.
The intercom burst into activity as every department in the ship demanded to know what had happened.
“Mr. Spock! Take the helm.”
“My attention is fully occupied, sir,” Spock said.
“I can get us out of Spacedock, captain!” Sulu said. His face turned scarlet with humiliation.
“I’m sure you can, Mr. Sulu. What I’m not sure of is that there’ll be anything left of Spacedock after you do.”
Sulu protested, but Engineering, demanding most insistently of all to know what had happened, distracted Captain Kirk. Mr. Scott objected to the abuse of his steering engines at least as adamantly as if he himself had been injured. Kirk had his hands full trying to put in a question or a word of reassurance.
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