Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Sure,” the man said slowly. “Alameda. That’s up north. Take BART—there’s the station over there—toward Berkeley and all the way to the end of the line. Then catch a bus to Sacramento. You can’t miss it.”

  “Spasiba,” Chekov said. “Thank you.”

  Harry watched the Russian biker in the leather suit and the black woman in the paramilitary uniform head toward the BART station. He scowled after them. Then he smiled with one corner of his mouth. He entered the same phone booth they had left, picked up the receiver, wiped the mouthpiece with his pocket handkerchief, and dialed a number from memory.

  It took quick thinking to divert a couple of trained spies like that. He had never expected anything like this to happen to him, right out on the street. He never expected to have this kind of chance.

  “FBI.”

  “This is Gamma,” Harry said. He recognized the agent’s voice. He had talked to him before. He did not know his name, so he called him Bond. Bond never sounded very sympathetic when Harry called, but he always listened and he always claimed to have taken down the information. Harry suspected Bond never did anything with it, though, because the TV and the newspapers never announced the apprehension of any of the spies Harry detected. Someday Gamma would show Bond what he was worth to the government. Maybe this was the time.

  Harry assumed the brief pause on the FBI’s end of the line was for Bond to turn on a tape recorder.

  “What do you want now?”

  “I just talked to two spies.”

  “Spies. Right.”

  Harry explained what had happened. “What else could they be but commie spies? They asked for directions to Alameda but I sent them to Sacramento instead. You ought to be able to catch them up at the bus station at the end of the BART line.”

  “Okay. Thanks much.”

  “You aren’t going to do anything, are you?” Harry said angrily.

  “I can’t release information about investigations over the phone,” Bond said. “You know that.”

  “But—he was a Russian, I tell you. And that woman with him, I bet she was from—from South Africa. Aren’t you guys always saying the Russkies are trying to take over Africa?”

  Bond did not reply for so long that Harry wondered if he had to change the tape in the recorder.

  “A black South African spy,” Bond said.

  About time I got through to him, Harry thought. “Yeah. Had to’ve been.”

  “Right. Uh, thanks very much.” The line went dead.

  Harry replaced the receiver. Finally he had Bond listening to him. The FBI man must have hung up fast so he could get a squad of agents out after the saboteurs.

  The spies had spent a lot of time in and around this phone booth. Maybe another spy had left something for them to pick up. Or maybe they had left something to be collected! That would be something to show to Bond, all right. He searched on top of the phone, around the shelves, above the door, even inside the coin return. City grime covered everything with a thin, dusty film. It made him want to wash his hands. He found a quarter, but nothing in the way of secret documents. Maybe he was looking for a microdot. The trouble was that he had no idea what a microdot looked like. He inspected the quarter carefully but found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Then he recalled another sneaky thing the government had found out the Russians did. They covered doorknobs and telephones and money and whatever they could get their hands on with poison dust that glowed, or emitted radiation, or something.

  He dropped the quarter, kicked it into the corner of the phone booth, and bolted outside.

  Suddenly fearful of being spied on himself, Harry glanced suspiciously around. They left the quarter as bait, and marked it, so the spies must have fingered him as an enemy. He rubbed his contaminated hands down the sides of his trousers. He would have to find a place to wash. But he was too smart to let them trick him into leading them right to his home. He would follow the first pair of spies instead. That would fool the ones following him, all right, if he led them to their cohorts and let them run into each other. Maybe Bond and his group could scoop them all up at once.

  He headed for the BART station.

  Sliding smoothly underground in the Bay Area Rapid Transit train, Uhura read the advertisements on the walls of the car. She hoped they would tell her something about the culture she was trying to hide inside, but they were all written in a sort of advertising shorthand, almost a code, in which a few words meant a great deal to a member of the community, but very little to a stranger. She turned her attention to the schematic map of the transit routes.

  “Pavel,” she said. “That fellow sent us off in the wrong direction.”

  “What? How is this possible?” He jumped up and looked at the map.

  Uhura traced the route the man on the street had indicated. “I don’t know where Sacramento is,” she said, “but if we go through Berkeley and then turn east, in the first place we’ll be headed away from the sea, not toward it. At least I don’t remember that there’s been a sea in that direction for a lot longer in the past than we’ve come. In the second place, Berkeley is north of us, and we want to go to Alameda, which is south.” She touched the city on the map.

  “You’re right,” Pavel said.

  “We’ll have to get off on the other side of the bay and transfer,” she said. “I wonder how much it will cost? This is getting expensive.”

  “I wonder why he told us wrong thing,” Pavel said.

  Uhura shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s from out of town, too, and just didn’t want to seem ignorant.”

  “That must be explanation.”

  At the first station on the other side of the bay, they got off, waited, and boarded a train going south. Uhura sat down gratefully, glad to be headed in the right direction without an unnecessary digression. She looked out the window. Another train, heading north, stopped beside them.

  “Pavel—look!”

  The man who had sent them in the wrong direction sat in the northbound car. Someone sat down next to him. He shifted closer to the window and looked away. His gaze locked with Uhura’s. As her train pulled out going south, and his train pulled out going north, he jumped up and stared after her with an expression of shock and anger.

  Seven

  Changing paper money into a metallic form suitable for use on the bus took more time and more powers of persuasion than obtaining the paper money in the first place. Admiral Kirk walked angrily out of the first two establishments in which they sought help. The first proprietor pointed to a hand-lettered sign stuck to his counter with adhesive strips of transparent plastic: “No change.” The second proprietor snarled, “What am I, a bank?” He did not react sympathetically when Spock tried to explain about their lost luggage. He muttered something about foreigners and invited Spock and Kirk to depart.

  “My disguise appears to be successful,” Spock said when they were once more out on the street.

  “Too damned successful,” Kirk said.

  “Admiral,” Spock said, “my understanding is that the amounts of money we possess are not too small to permit us onto the bus, but too large.”

  “Very astute, Mister Spock.”

  “In that case, we must purchase something that costs less than the difference between one piece of paper money and the amount of metallic money we must give to the bus.”

  “Astute again.”

  “It is simple logic.”

  “So simple I even figured that one out for myself. I’ve been trying to avoid buying something nonessential. But I don’t see any alternative.” Scowling, he strode into a third shop. Spock followed. Kirk plucked a small foil-wrapped disk from a bowl on the counter. “I’ll have one of these,” he said, and handed the clerk a bill.

  She pressed keys on a machine that emitted buzzes and a small slip of paper. She handed Kirk a handful of change and a handful of bills. She put the disk into a plastic bag, folded the slip of paper over the bag’s top, and fastened it all securel
y with a small device that inserted a small piece of wire. This was a ceremonial ritual with which Spock was not familiar. The clerk handed Kirk the bag. “Anything else for you today?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Kirk said. “I’d like some more of these.” He showed her the metallic money and offered her another bill.

  “Look, mister, I’m sorry. The boss really gets on my case if I give people bus change—that is what you need, isn’t it?—and run out of quarters halfway through the afternoon. If it was up to me—”

  “Never mind,” Kirk said through clenched teeth. “I’ll have two of these.” He picked up another disk, went through the process all over again, and stalked out of the store. “Here, Spock,” he said when they were once more on the street. “Have a mint.”

  Spock disassembled the package, unwrapped the foil, and sniffed the wafer inside. Kirk ripped open the bag he carried and ate his wafer quickly; Spock put his wafer in his mouth and allowed it to melt as he analyzed the outer and inner tastes.

  A bus stopped; they entered; they paid. Once they had prepared themselves, the task became simple.

  As is true of so many other endeavors, Spock thought.

  They sat in the only remaining seat. A young person sat in the seat in front of them, feet stretched across the second seat, attention centered on a large, rectangular, noise-producing machine.

  “Admiral,” Spock said, “I believe this confection you have given me contains sucrose.”

  “What?” Kirk said.

  Spock wondered why he spoke so loudly. “Sucrose,” he said again, showing Kirk the foil wrapper.

  “I can’t hear you!” Kirk shouted, and Spock realized the admiral was having trouble sorting voices from the sounds produced by the noise-making machine. The admiral leaned toward the next seat. “Excuse me,” he said. He received no response. “Excuse me! Can you please stop that sound?”

  The young person glanced up, blinked, raised one fisted hand with the middle finger extended, then pushed the machine aside and stood.

  “Want to try to make me?” The young person leaned over the back of his seat toward Admiral Kirk.

  “That could be arranged,” the admiral said.

  The young human punched him. But the admiral blocked the blow. The young man’s fist smacked against Kirk’s palm.

  Before the altercation could escalate, Spock placed his fingers at the junction of the neck and shoulder of the young person. He applied slight pressure. The young person sagged, unconscious. Spock settled him securely in the corner of the seat, inspected the controls of the noise-box, and pressed the control marked “on/off.” The noise ceased.

  Suddenly the other riders on the bus began to applaud. Spock realized, to his surprise, that they were applauding him.

  “Domo arigato gozaimashita!” someone shouted at him. Spock had no idea what that meant. Feeling conspicuous, he sat down again. Admiral Kirk settled beside him. To Spock’s relief, the applause subsided and the attention of the other riders returned to their own concerns. He could only assume that the audience had enjoyed the minor spectacle.

  “As you observed,” Spock said, “a primitive culture.”

  “Yes,” Kirk said rather too loudly in the absence of the noise. He lowered his voice abruptly. “Yes.”

  “Admiral, may I ask you a question?”

  “Spock, dammit, don’t call me Admiral!” Kirk whispered. “Can’t you remember? You used to call me Jim.”

  Having been told the same thing by several people whose word he trusted, Spock believed this to be true; but another truth was that he did not actually remember it. He said nothing. He felt rather strange. He tried to shake off the effects of the sucrose and the other active chemicals in the mint.

  “What’s your question?” Kirk said.

  “Your use of language has altered since our arrival. It is currently laced with—shall I say—more colorful images: ‘double dumb ass on you,’ and so forth.”

  “You mean profanity. That’s simply the way they talk here.” He shrugged.

  “Nobody pays any attention to you if you don’t swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.”

  “For example?”

  “Oh…” Kirk considered. “The complete works of Jacqueline Susann, the novels of Harold Robbins…”

  “Ah,” Spock said. He recognized the names from a list he had scanned: the most successful authors of this time. “The giants.”

  The bus roared onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Kirk and Spock let their discussion of literature drop, for the Pacific stretched away to one side and the bay and the golden California hills stretched in the other, and the cables of the bridge soared above it all.

  Following other visitors to the Cetacean Institute, Jim stepped down from the bus, Spock close behind. The wide, white, multileveled building stretched along the shore before them. The sun warmed the pavement and the salt air sparkled. Jim laid out a few more of the precious dollars for admission. He passed through the doors, entering a huge, cool, high-ceilinged display hall. Life-sized replicas of whales hung overhead, swimming and gliding through the air above a group of visitors.

  “Good morning.” A young woman faced the group. “I’m your guide today,” she said. “I’m Doctor Gillian Taylor. You can call me Gillian. I’m assistant director of the Cetacean Institute. Please follow me, and just give a yell if you can’t hear. Okay?”

  She was twenty-five or thirty, and she had a lot of presence for someone so young. She had a good smile, too. But Jim got the impression that escorting tourists did not completely occupy her attention. He moved closer. Spock lagged at the back, but Jim supposed the Vulcan could not get himself in too much trouble. He had agreed, for the moment, to let Jim ask the questions. They both assumed Jim had a better chance of fitting in with this culture. Jim hoped they both were right.

  “The Cetacean Institute is devoted exclusively to whales,” Gillian Taylor said. “We’re trying to collect all the research that exists on cetaceans. Even if we succeed, our information will be minuscule compared to what we still have to learn—and what we think we know that’s wrong. The first common misconception is that whales are fish.”

  She passed a striking series of underwater photographs of whales. Jim wanted to inspect them more closely, but he also wanted to listen to Gillian Taylor. Gillian Taylor won out.

  “Whales aren’t fish,” she said. “They’re mammals, like us. They’re warm-blooded. They breathe air. They produce milk to nurse their young. And they’re very old mammals: eleven million years, give or take.”

  A little boy waved his hand to attract her attention. “Do whales really eat people, like in Moby Dick?”

  “Many whales, baleen whales, like George and Gracie, don’t even have teeth,” Gillian Taylor said. “They strain plankton and shrimp out of vast amounts of sea water, and that’s the limit of their hostility. Moby Dick was a sperm whale. He did have teeth, to hunt giant squid thousands of feet beneath the surface of the sea. But there are very few documented cases of attacks on people by whales. Unfortunately, their principal enemy is far more aggressive.”

  “You mean human beings,” Jim said.

  She glanced at him and nodded. “To put it bluntly. Since the dawn of time, people have ‘harvested’ whales.” She accentuated the word harvested with considerable sarcasm. “We used the bodies of these creatures for a variety of purposes—most recently for dog food and cosmetics.”

  Jim noticed that she used few cosmetics herself; the blue of her eyes was natural, unaccented, and intense.

  “Every single product whales are used for can be duplicated, naturally or synthetically, and usually more economically than by hunting whales. A hundred years ago, using hand-thrown harpoons, people did plenty of damage. But that was nothing compared to what we’ve achieved in this century.”

  She led the group to a large video screen and touched a button. Images appeared, grainy and ill defined by Jim’s standards, but affecting nonetheless. The
films in the Bounty’s computer had been grotesque. These, of a modern whale-processing operation, were gruesome. A helicopter spotted a pod of whales. Following directions from the air, a powered boat singled out the largest whale and pursued it. A cannon blasted a harpoon into the whale’s side. The harpoon itself exploded. In a moment, an immense and powerful entity changed to a bleeding, dying hulk. The hunt had been replaced by assembly-line killing and butchery.

  The harpoon boat left the whale floating and set out after another victim. The dying whale moved its flukes convulsively, erratically, as if somehow the creature could free itself, escape, and live. But it was not to be. The factory ship engulfed the whale and dismembered it into oil and bones, flesh and entrails.

  “This is humanity’s legacy,” Gillian Taylor said. “Whales have been hunted to the edge of extinction. The largest creature ever to inhabit the earth, the blue whale, is virtually gone. Even if hunting stopped right now, today, we’ve got no assurance that the population would be able to recover.”

  Gillian’s bitterness cut Jim deeply. Her intensity drew him into bearing some of the responsibility for what had happened in their past, for what was happening in her present, and for what would occur in Jim’s present, in the future.

  “Despite all attempts to ban whaling, countries and pirates continue to engage in the slaughter of these inoffensive creatures. In the case of the humpback, the species once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Today, less than seven thousand individuals still live, and the whalers take smaller and smaller victims because the whales no longer have time to reach their full growth. And since it’s hard to tell whether a whale is male or female, whalers even take females carrying unborn calves.”

  “To drive another species to extinction is not logical.”

  Gillian glared at the back of the crowd, at Spock.

  “Whoever said the human race was logical?” Anger tinged her voice, but she repressed it. “If you’ll all follow me, I’ll introduce you to the Institute’s pride and joy.”

  Gillian led the group out into the sunlight. A wide deck surrounded an enormous tank.