“Freeze!” the leader shouted.
Pavel looked at him curiously. “Precisely what does this mean,” he said, “freeze?”
Pavel tried to pretend he did not care about his communicator, while at the same time he tried to stay within reach of it and hoped desperately that they would not take it away to disassemble it. If he could get ten seconds with the communicator in his hands, he might still escape. But if his captors opened it improperly, it would self-destruct.
Unfortunately, the guards did not look like the type to give him the chance to grab his equipment.
He felt foolish. Not only did they have his communicator, but they had his phaser. They even had his identification, because he had neglected to leave it safely on board the Bounty. To make matters worse, he had worn his phaser underneath his jacket, out of reach while the guards covered him with weapons—primitive weapons, perhaps, but powerful at close range. Now he was trapped.
A uniformed interrogator asked him again who he was and who he worked for.
“I am Pavel Chekov,” he said. “The rest I cannot tell you.”
The interrogator swore softly under his breath. A dark-haired man in civilian dress entered the room. He wore dark spectacles that hid his eyes. The interrogator joined him.
“If the FBI knew this was going to happen,” he said angrily, “why didn’t you warn us?”
“We didn’t know! It’s a coincidence! The report came from a nut. He spies on his neighbors and anybody else he can think of and then calls my office and tries to tell me about them. It’s embarrassing.”
“But he knew—”
“It’s a coincidence!” the FBI agent said again. “Watch.” Looking disgusted, he approached Pavel. “We caught your friend,” he said.
Pavel started. “But—that is impossible!”
The FBI agent turned pale under his tan. “Your black South African friend.”
“She is not from south of Africa,” Pavel said. “Bantu Nation is—” He stopped. “You did not catch her. You are fooling me.”
“Then you weren’t alone.” The FBI agent looked stunned.
“Yes I was,” Pavel said.
The agent left him alone with the guards.
Humiliated by having given his captors evidence of Uhura’s existence, Pavel wished the interrogators would chop off his head, or shoot him, or whatever they did to prisoners in the twentieth century.
Would serve me right for stupidity, he thought. If twentieth-century people shoot me, then Admiral Kirk will not have to be concerned with me. He can rescue whales, take Bounty back home, and stop probe.
He imagined Starfleet’s memorial service for Pavel Chekov, fallen hero who had helped save Earth. Admiral Kirk delivered his eulogy. He took some comfort from his fantasy.
His communicator beeped. He snatched at it. One of the guards grabbed him and pushed him back. The interrogator and the FBI agent hurried across the room.
“Let’s get rid of that thing,” the interrogator said. “It might be a bomb.”
“It’s not a bomb,” said the FBI agent, the man who had fooled him.
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “It just isn’t. It doesn’t look like a bomb. You develop a feel for these things.”
“Uh-huh. Like you develop a feel for loony informants who invent Russian agents and black South African spies.”
The agent blushed. “Look, if it were a bomb, our terrorist here would either be sweating, or he’d be threatening us with it.”
Pavel wished he had thought of that, but it was too late now.
“Maybe.”
“Shall I prove it?” He reached for the communicator.
“No. Leave it alone. I’ve got somebody from demolition and somebody from electronics coming down to check it out.”
“Suit yourself.”
Pavel knew that somehow he had to get himself and his equipment out of there before anybody had a chance to inspect it and destroy it. Even his I.D. was causing a good bit of comment.
“Can I see that again?” The FBI agent picked up Chekov’s I.D., inspected it, and glanced up again.
“Starfleet?” he said. “United Federation of Planets?”
“I am Lieutenant Commander Pavel Andrei’ich Chekov, Starfleet, United Federation of Planets,” Pavel said.
“Yes,” the dark-haired agent said sarcastically. “And my name is Bond. All right, Commander, you want to tell us anything?”
“Like what?” Pavel said.
“Like who you really are and what you’re doing here and what this stuff is.” He gestured to the phaser and the communicator, lying useless on the table just out of Chekov’s reach.
“My name is Pavel Andrei’ich Chekov,” he said again. “I am lieutenant commander in Starfleet, United Federation of Planets. Service number 656-5827B.”
The interrogator sighed. “Let’s take it from the top.”
“The top of what?” Pavel asked curiously.
“Name?”
“My name?”
“No,” the interrogator said. The sarcasm had returned to his tone. “My name.”
“Your name is Bond,” Pavel said.
“My name is not Bond!”
“Then I do not know your name,” Pavel said, confused.
“You play games with me, and you’re through!”
“I am?” Pavel said, surprised. “May I go now?”
With a scowl of exasperation, the agent who had claimed to be named Bond, then denied it, turned his back on Pavel and joined the interrogator.
“What do you think?”
Pavel edged toward the table on which his phaser lay.
The interrogator glared poisonously at Pavel, who pretended he had never moved.
“I think he’s a Russian.”
“No kidding. He’s a Russian, all right, but I think he’s…developmentally disabled.”
“We’d better call Washington.”
“Washington?” the agent said. “I don’t think there’s any need to call Washington. I don’t know how this guy got onto your boat—”
“Ship. It’s a ship. And there’s nothing wrong with the security on the Enterprise.”
“—but he’s no more a spy than—”
The guards were distracted by the argument. Pavel lunged and grabbed his phaser.
“Don’t move!” he shouted.
Everyone turned toward him, startled.
“Freeze!” Pavel said, hoping they would respond better to their own language.
Bond took one step forward. “Okay,” he said. “Make nice and give us the raygun.”
“I warn you,” Pavel said. “If you don’t lie on floor, I will have to stun you.”
“Go ahead.” The agent sounded tired. “Stun me.”
“I’m very sorry, but—” He fired the phaser.
The phaser gurgled and died.
“It must be radiation…” Pavel murmured.
Before they could draw their primitive weapons, he grabbed his communicator and I.D., bolted for the door, flung it open, and fled.
“Sound the alarm,” the agent yelled. “But don’t hurt the crazy bastard.”
Pavel ran. A patrol clattered after him. He dodged around a corner and kept running. Voices and footsteps closed in on him. He flung open a hatch and dogged it shut. Another hatch opened into darkness below; a ladder led upward. He swarmed up the ladder. If he could just elude them long enough to communicate with Mister Scott, if he could just stand still long enough for the transporter to lock onto him—
Booted feet clanged on the metal rungs below and behind him. He ran again. He burst out onto the hangar deck. Ranks of sleek jets filled the cavernous space. Even if he could steal a plane, he had no experience with antique aircraft. On the other side of the deck, misty moonlight stretched in a long rectangle. He fled toward it, ducking beneath backswept wings, around awkward landing wheels.
He plunged into the open air and down the gangway. Footsteps clattered behind him; f
ootsteps clattered ahead. He stopped short. A second patrol ran toward him from shore. He was trapped.
A streak of dark water stretched between the dock and the ship. If he could dive in and swim under the pier—
He grabbed the rail. He started to vault, then tried to stop short when he saw what lay below. His boot caught on the decking. He stumbled, bounced into the rail, tumbled over it, flung out his hands to catch himself. The phaser and communicator arced out and splashed into the sea. The wind caught his I.D. and fluttered and spun it away. His fingertips slipped on the wire cable. He cried out.
He fell.
The FBI agent shouldered his way through the shore patrol. They all stood at the edge of the gangway, looking downward, stunned.
“Oh, damn! Get an ambulance!”
The crazy Russian lay sprawled on a barge moored below the gangway. Blood pooled on the deck around his head.
He did not move.
Frightened and frustrated, Uhura hovered at Scott’s elbow while he worked frantically over the transporter console.
“His communicator’s gone dead,” Scott said. “I canna locate him.”
“You’ve got to find him,” Uhura said.
“I know that, lass.”
Minutes passed without any trace of Chekov.
“I’m going up to the bridge,” Uhura said. “I’ll try to—”
Admiral Kirk strode into the transporter room. “What’s holding things up?” He spoke in this clipped, impatient tone only under conditions of the greatest stress.
“I ha’…lost Commander Chekov,” Scott said.
“You’ve lost him!”
“You’ve got to send me back!” Uhura said. “I’ll find him, and—”
“Absolutely not!” Admiral Kirk said.
“But, sir—”
“It’s out of the question. If he’s been taken prisoner, you’d be walking straight into the same trap. And if he’s all right, he’ll contact us or he’ll make his way back on his own.”
“I’m responsible—”
“We’re all responsible, Uhura! But he voted to take the risk with the rest of us. I need you here, Commander.” He inspected the photon collector. “This is it?”
“Aye, sir,” Scott said, still fiddling with the transporter controls.
“Then get it in place! Uhura, Scotty, I understand your concern for Chekov. But I’ve got to have full power in the ship, and I’ve got to have it soon!” He rose and put one hand on Scott’s shoulder. “Scotty, I’ll stay here and keep trying to reach Pavel. Go on now.”
“Aye, sir.” Scott picked up the photon collector. Shoulders slumped, despondent, he left the transporter room.
“Uhura,” the admiral said, “you listen in on official communications. If he was captured, you may be able to find him that way. But I’ll bet he turns up knocking on the hatch within the hour.”
“I hope so, sir.” Uhura hurried to the control chamber.
She set the computer to monitoring the cacophony of this world’s radio transmissions. It would signal when it detected key words. She scanned the frequencies by ear, listening for a few seconds at each channel. Uhura missed the computer on the Enterprise. She could have asked it to relay anything unusual to her; she could have explained to it what she meant by unusual. But the computer on the Bounty considered everything about the Federation of Planets to be unusual. The centuries-long time jump added to the problem.
Time passed.
“Any luck?”
Uhura started. Admiral Kirk stood beside her.
“Nothing,” she said. “I should never have left him.”
“Uhura, you did what was necessary. You got the collector back. It wouldn’t do any of us any good if you were both lost.” He tried to smile. “Keep trying. You’ll find him.”
The admiral sank into the command chair.
At the power chamber, Scott made a minuscule adjustment of the photon collector as it transferred energy to the dilithium crystals. With Spock’s help, Scott had managed to improve the cross-channeling rate. He hoped it was enough. Scott glanced through the observation window. He shook his head. He still could see no difference in the crystals, though both his instruments and Mister Spock claimed they had begun to recrystallize. That was, by a long way, the least that he had hoped for.
The intercom came on. “Mister Scott,” Admiral Kirk said, “you promised me an estimate on the dilithium crystals.”
Scott rose wearily to reply. “It’s going slow, sir, verra slow. It’ll be well into tomorrow.”
“Not good enough, Scotty! You’ve got to do better!”
Now I’m expected to speed up quantum reactions, Scott thought. Perhaps I’ll be wanted next to alter the value of Planck’s constant. Or the speed of light itself.
“I’ll try, sir. Scott out.” He squatted down beside Spock again. “Well now, he’s got himself in a bit of a snit, don’t he.”
“He is a man of deep feelings,” Spock said thoughtfully.
“So what else is new?” Grimly, Scott buried himself in the cross-channeling connector.
In the control room, Jim Kirk rubbed his face with both hands. Behind him, the voices Uhura monitored buzzed and jumped. For the first time since leaving Vulcan, Jim had nothing to do. Nothing to do but wait.
And that was the hardest thing of all.
Eleven
Long past midnight, Gillian Taylor drove back toward Sausalito. She had a Springsteen tape playing on the tape deck, too loud as usual. More than twelve hours ago, she had left the Institute early to go home and stare at the ceiling. So much for that.
She would rather be with the whales. She envied the people fifteen or twenty years ago who had lived with dolphins in half-flooded houses in order to do research on human-cetacean communication. But no funding existed anymore for that sort of esoteric, Aquarian-age work. Sometimes Gillian felt like she had been born fifteen years too late.
Or maybe, she thought, three hundred years too early.
Then she laughed at herself for taking Kirk’s story seriously, even for a second.
She stopped at an intersection. The red light reflected into the Rover. Springsteen was singing “Dancing in the Dark.” Gillian turned it up even louder and glanced at her own reflection in the rearview mirror as he got to the line about wanting to change his clothes, his hair, his face.
Yeah, she thought. Sing it to me, Bruce.
She wished she could change herself so she could stay with the whales. She allowed herself a wild fantasy of diving into the cold Alaska water with George and Gracie, to help them adapt to their new life, never to be seen again.
No kidding, Gillian, she thought. Never to be seen again, indeed; you’d die of hypothermia in half an hour. Besides, you know less about whale society than Gracie and George do, even if they did get separated from it as calves. You know as much about them as anybody in the world. But it isn’t enough.
And if Mister Spock knew what he was talking about—which she tried to convince herself she did not believe for a minute—and humpbacks were soon to become extinct, human beings would never know much about the whales.
Her vision blurred. She angrily swiped her forearm across her eyes. The smear of tears glistened beneath the fine, sun-bleached hairs on her arm, changing from red to green with the traffic light. She put the Rover in gear and drove on.
If I could go with them, she thought. Or if I could protect them. If I could tell them, before they leave, to turn and swim away every time they hear the engine of a boat, or the propeller of a plane, or even a human voice.
That was what frightened her most. The two humpbacks had known only friendship from human beings. Unlike wild humpbacks, they might swim right up to a boat. They had no way of distinguishing between relatively benign whale-watchers and the cannon-armed harpoon ships of black market whale hunters.
And yet she felt glad that Gracie and George would experience freedom. She tried to reassure herself about their safety. Public opinion and consumer
boycotts and just plain economics continued to push toward the end of all whaling. If Gracie and George could survive for a couple of years, they might be safe for the rest of their lives.
She slowed as she approached the turnoff to her house. She ought to go home. She would need to be rested in the morning if she wanted to withstand the stress of moving the whales, and dealing with the reporters that Briggs planned to let in on the story, and most of all saying good-bye.
Instead, she stayed on the main road that led to the Institute.
What the hell, Gillian thought. So I’ll be tired tomorrow. I don’t care what Bob Briggs thinks about my feelings for the whales. I’m going to sit on the deck by the tank and wait for sunrise. I’ll talk to George and Gracie. And watch them and listen to them. I’ll get the boom-box out of my office and let Willie Nelson sing “Blue Skies” to them. It will be the last time, but that’s all right. Because whatever happens, they’ll be free. And maybe George will sing again.
Gillian parked the Rover, entered the dark museum, and clattered up the spiral staircase to the deck around the tank. She peered into the darkness. The whales ought to be dozing. Every few minutes they would surface, blow gently, and breathe. But she could not find them.
Maybe they caught a case of nerves from me and everybody else. Maybe they don’t feel like sleeping any more than I do.
“Hey, you guys!”
She did not hear the blow and huff of their breathing.
Frightened, Gillian clattered down the spiral stairs to the viewing window. Surely nothing could have happened to them. Not now. Not with their freedom in sight. She pressed her hands against the cold glass, shading her eyes to peer into the tank, afraid she might see one whale dead or injured on the floor of the tank, the other nuzzling the body in grief and confusion and trying to help.
She heard footsteps. She turned.
Bob Briggs stood in the entrance to the viewing area.
“They left last night,” he said softly.
Gillian stared at him with complete incomprehension.
“We didn’t want a mob scene with the press,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been good for them. Besides, I thought it would be easier on you this way.”
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