Crucible: Kirk

by David R. George III

  Outside, the ground crunched beneath his boots. The air seemed still and stale, the surroundings inert. Kirk corrected his earlier appraisal: this place did not feel haunted; it felt abandoned.

  Activating the tricorder, Kirk scanned the immediate area. The readouts reflected the crash here of a Klingon starship: specific types and levels of radioactivity, certain metallic fragments atop and within the soil, the residue of materials unique to the construction techniques of the Klingon Imperial Fleet. He also detected, deep underground, rock strata of wildly varying ages: one hundred years, one thousand, one million. But while the latter readings indicated the presence at one time of the Guardian, they showed no sign of it being here now.

  Maybe the Guardian was destroyed, Kirk thought. Or perhaps, prior to the impact, it had taken itself backward in time billions of years, spending its existence in an eternal loop. It had claimed to be its own beginning and its own ending, and perhaps that was what it had meant.

  Kirk raised his eyes and peered along the rim of the crater above him. “Guardian!” he called. His voice seemed shallow in the empty place, and it generated no echo.

  He waited for a few moments, then called again. He received no response, nor had he really expected any. Finally, he turned and headed back to the shuttle.

  Seated at the front console, Kirk gazed out at the vacant crater. If the Guardian did not do what his future self had asked, if it did not save itself from being destroyed by Korax’s ship by moving itself forward in time to now, then what would he do? Or maybe I’m too late, Kirk thought. Maybe the Guardian had already appeared during the weeks it had taken him to reach this planet, and then taken itself away again.

  Whatever the case, if the Guardian did not appear, Kirk would have to choose another course. His future self had charged him with two responsibilities: work with Picard to stop Soran in 2371, and avoid changing history between now and then. If Kirk could not utilize the Guardian to reach Veridian Three at that time, then he would have to find another clandestine means of reaching the future.

  Of course, you can always just live another seventy-eight years, he told himself. But he knew that he would need to live those decades in complete seclusion. In the years between 2293 and 2371, the universe had believed him dead, and in order to avoid altering the timeline, that would have to continue to be the case. Kirk did not relish the thought of living completely alone for all of that time, but even if he attempted to do so, and even if he managed to keep himself hidden away, he could not guarantee that he would even live to the year 2371. And at one hundred thirty-eight, just how much help will I be in physically trying to stop a madman?

  No, much as he hated the idea, he needed the Guardian.

  Kirk worked the sensor controls, programming to scan continuously for any indications of temporal displacement—and to be safe, for life signs. Then he stood up and moved to the rear compartment, where he opened the emergency survival cache. From it, he took a ration pack and a pouch of water.

  Back in the front of the shuttle, he began to eat. It troubled him to have so little control of whatever would come next. The course his life would take from here, as well as the fate of the hundreds of millions on Veridian IV, might depend on the Guardian of Forever.

  That thought did not fill him with confidence.

  On his thirteenth day at the bottom of the crater, Kirk woke with the gray dawn, just as he had on the previous dozen days. He rose from his bedroll and immediately checked the sensors. They read clear, and the log confirmed what the lack of any alarms through the night had already told him: there had been no sign of the Guardian.

  Kirk walked back into the rear compartment, into the refresher. Afterward, he ate his morning rations and drank the allotment of water he allowed himself. When he’d finished, he grabbed up his tricorder and phaser and went outside.

  The days here had passed slowly and without variation. The overcast skies brightened and darkened, but other than that, they never changed. The impact crater caused by Korax’s vessel stood as silent and unmoving testament to the destruction that could be wrought by distrust, but it too remained the same.

  It seemed appropriate to Kirk that he had ended up here again. The sacrifice that this place had demanded of him had never left him. He had never expected to return here. After he and Spock had traveled back to Earth in 1930 to retrieve Bones and restore history, he had wanted nothing more than to put as much distance as he could between himself and the Guardian, between his life without Edith and his life with her.

  But when the Enterprise had been scheduled a couple of years later to return, Kirk had relented. He and Spock and Bones had been ordered, by virtue of their previous experience with the Guardian, to directly support the efforts of a group of Federation historians, and he had not allowed his emotions to keep him away. He had instead focused on his duties as a Starfleet officer, suppressing as best he could the memories of his own shattered dreams. Still, the Guardian had demonstrated how easily the timeline could be altered, how effortlessly lives could be torn asunder.

  The third time he’d come here, when the Enterprise had received a distress call from the Einstein research station that had once orbited here, he had not even made it down to the planet’s surface. Rather, the temporal emanations had caused a Klingon squadron to assume the worst and launch an attack. Kirk and his crew had largely—and almost miraculously—survived that encounter, while many other Starfleet and Klingon officers had not. Kirk had not even seen the Guardian during that incident, and yet something—his proximity to it, he supposed—had left him with the uncomfortable feeling of being linked to it in some way. It made no sense, but—

  The air suddenly shifted and cooled slightly, and Kirk heard a sound he could not place, but that he vaguely recognized. He looked over to the center of the crater and saw a mist hovering above the land. His heart began to race, but whether out of anticipation or dread he could not tell.

  A moment later, the mist cleared, and the irregular ring of the Guardian of Forever stood there, looking precisely as it had on the other occasions Kirk had seen it. He walked up to it at once, feeling a sense of urgency that he immediately recognized as foolhardy. Whether he traveled to Veridian Three now or a year from now, he would arrive at the same time, at the same place.

  “Guardian,” he said. “Do you know me?”

  It did not respond, which did not surprise Kirk. Before his second visit here, he had read the reports of the researchers, who noted that the Guardian did not provide answers to every question put to it. Kirk decided to ask something he had asked before and which had netted a reply.

  “Guardian,” he said, “are you machine or being?”

  Still nothing.

  Kirk opted for a different approach. “Guardian, my future self helped to rescue you from destruction.”

  “I am my own beginning, my own ending,” it said, sections of its asymmetrical loop glowing in time with its words. Its voice sounded loud and deep, even within the wide space of the crater.

  “Have you come here, to this time, from twenty-three Earth years ago?” Kirk asked, wanting to verify what he had been told.

  “I am the Guardian of Forever,” the vortex declared. “I am the union and the intersection of all moments and all places. I am what was and what will be. Through me is eternity kept.”

  “Did you travel to this time to avoid your own end when a Klingon vessel crashed onto this world?” Kirk wanted to know.

  Again, the Guardian answered only with silence.

  There’s no use waiting to see if this will work, Kirk thought. “I wish to see the past of Jean-Luc Picard, whose life once intersected with that of my future self,” he said. He could have asked to see the life of the future Kirk, but since he had himself never entered the nexus, his future self had never left it, had never joined Picard’s battle against Soran—at least, that’s what he thought. Temporal mechanics frequently failed to make sense. Still, regardless of his own involvement or lack of involvement
in fighting Soran, Picard definitely had, and so a replay of his life would reveal the time to which Kirk needed to travel.

  “Behold,” the Guardian said. “A gateway to the past, if you wish.”

  The white mist reappeared, falling from the top of the Guardian’s ring and through the wide opening at its center. Then images began to form: a baby being born, being held by his mother, crying as he was fed. Sleeping, crawling, learning to walk. Going to school, walking between rows of plants, wrestling with a larger, older boy.

  Kirk watched as the life of a man he had never met unfolded before him. The experience felt voyeuristic, like an invasion of this man’s privacy. But he continued to look on, the lives of two hundred thirty million Veridians the overriding issue.

  As the minutes passed, so too did the weeks and months and years, and eventually the decades too. Kirk saw Picard grow from an infant into a boy, from a teenager into a man, from a son into a student, from a cadet into a starship captain. He looked on in wonder as a Starfleet vessel with four warp nacelles became visible within the Guardian. Later, a larger ship appeared, and Kirk recognized its designation at once: NCC-1701-D.

  Finally, he saw Picard materialize in a rocky wilderness. He looked just as Kirk’s future self had described him, as did the man Picard subsequently fought: Soran. The Enterprise captain failed, though, and a missile launched from the planet’s surface and traveled into the star it orbited. Above, the unmistakable form of the energy ribbon twisted through the air, and when the Veridian star collapsed, the ribbon shifted downward, skimming along close to the ground. Electric bolts shot from it across its length, and roiling clouds followed behind it as it advanced. It passed over Picard and Soran, surrounding them with jags of energy and a billowing haze.

  And then the images within the Guardian ceased. The mist continued flowing through its opening, but where Kirk had been watching scenes from Picard’s life, he now saw a shadowy emptiness. The nexus, he thought. Picard had been pulled into it and had continued to live, but he no longer did so within this universe. He asked the Guardian for confirmation of this, but it did not answer.

  “Guardian, I wish you to stop,” he said. The shadows within the time vortex faded and the mists receded. He would ask the Guardian to show Picard’s past again. This time, Kirk would join him to fight Soran.

  But not yet, Kirk thought. Before he stepped through the Guardian in an effort to save more than two hundred million Veridians, he decided to do something for himself. Alone on this world, and now alone in a life that all his friends believed had ended aboard the Enterprise-B, he would take one last look at the people he had loved.

  “Guardian,” he said, “I want to see the past of my father.”

  “Behold,” the Guardian said. “A gateway to the past, if you wish.” Again, mist drifted down through the time vortex. Within the white vapor, images appeared.

  And then Jim Kirk watched his father being born.

  The day had passed too quickly. In some sense, Kirk had spent it with the people who had meant the most to him in his life, seeing them from birth to death in a way that should have been impossible. He had watched scenes that had made him laugh aloud, a lonely sound quickly lost within the expanse of the crater. He had cried too, both from joy and from sadness at the images passing before him. Mostly, though, he had simply looked on quietly, stilly.

  After seeing his father’s past, he had asked to see his mother’s. Then he’d watched the life of his older brother, Sam, and then that of Sam’s wife, Aurelan. He’d watched his grandfather’s life, his uncle’s, his nephews’, his son’s. He’d watched Spock and Bones and Gary Mitchell, Miramanee and Antonia. Throughout each of them, he’d often seen himself moving through these lives not his own, affecting them. For those who’d survived him, he viewed scenes unknown to him: Spock holding an infant, Bones getting married, Antonia finding love again. It had been both easy and difficult, but in the end, something he’d been pleased that he’d done.

  “Guardian,” he said at last, almost ready to have the life of Jean-Luc Picard replayed so that he could step into it. But before he did that, he thought to ask to see the past of one other person. He didn’t know whether or not he’d be able to watch, but he wanted to try. “Guardian,” he said again. “I wish to see the life of Edith Keeler, whose life once intersected my own, through you.”

  “Behold,” the Guardian said.

  TERMINUS

  Crucible

  As Jim Kirk swept the floor of the 21st Street Mission, he stole glances across the room and into the kitchen. Along with one of the former vagrants who often worked at the mission, Edith washed the dishes from the night’s last meal. Even now, after another long and tiring day laboring to help the downtrodden, she looked beautiful. Kirk had never met anybody with her spirit. A woman of vision and compassion, she saw a future she could not possibly know and that should have been impossible for her even to imagine, a future in which all of humanity would work together for the common good. Far removed from those distant hopes, though, Edith did what she could in her own present to move society in that direction, helping the less fortunate because she felt a responsibility to the civilization of which she was a part. Kirk could not have loved her more.

  Ahead of him, Spock lifted the last of the chairs from the floor and placed them upside down on the end of the table. He then walked over to the raised platform at the side of the room, to where Kirk had left the dustpan and wastebasket. As the Vulcan did so—the points of his ears as always covered by the black knit cap he wore—Kirk saw him look over at Edith.

  Kirk knew that his friend did not approve of his relationship with the social worker. They had traveled to Earth in 1930 to find McCoy, the victim of an accidental cordrazine overdose and an equally accidental trip back through time. The doctor had changed history in a way that had allowed Nazi Germany and its fascist allies to win World War II, completely altering the future. Kirk and Spock had come back after McCoy, to a time before he’d arrived in the past, and though they had yet to find him, they had learned just how he had impacted the timeline: he had prevented Edith from dying in a traffic accident. Now they had to stop him from doing so.

  That knowledge wounded Kirk deeply. He had fallen in love with Edith weeks ago—almost as soon as he’d met her—but he knew what he must do. He could not follow his heart, for then, as Spock had told him, millions would die who had not died before.

  I should just stay away from Edith, Kirk told himself as Spock walked over to him with the cleaning implements. He’d had the same thought over and over again, even before he’d found out that Edith would soon die—that she had to die. For no matter what McCoy had done to alter the past, once Kirk and Spock had prevented him from doing so, they would presumably return to their own time in the twenty-third century. Whether Edith survived or not, Kirk would be forced to leave her. Falling in love and continuing to spend time with her therefore made little sense. But then, love often carried its own meaning, its own reason for being. Better to have loved and lost, Kirk thought, quoting Tennyson.

  He reached the corner of the mission’s main room and finished sweeping. When Spock came over with the dustpan and wastebasket, they worked together silently to gather up and discard the dirt and refuse Kirk had collected. They finished in short order and Spock went to put away all of the cleaning tools. As he did so, Kirk gathered up their coats, as well as Edith’s cloak. When Spock returned and reached for his, Kirk said, “I’m going to wait for Edith.” Because of her importance to the timeline, Kirk and Spock had agreed that at least one of them should keep her under surveillance at all times. Apart from all of that, though, Kirk recognized the simple truth that he wanted to be with Edith.

  “Of course,” Spock said. It seemed obvious to Kirk that Spock also saw his desire to spend time with her.

  “Has McKenna gotten those components you needed yet?” Kirk asked, seeking to change the subject, but also curious about Spock’s efforts to restore the mnemonic memory circu
it he had created, a computer aid that had helped him determine McCoy’s role in modifying the past. A watchmaker, Mr. McKenna had at one time also done radio repair work, and in addition to allowing Spock to use some of his fine tools, he’d been able to help him secure various pieces of equipment. Recently, after a particularly demanding search via the mnemonic memory circuit had overloaded it, Spock had ordered vacuum tubes and a transformer from the watchmaker.

  “He has,” Spock said. “He told me that I could stop by his apartment tonight to pick them up, which is what I intended to do.”

  “Very good,” Kirk said. “The more information we have, the better.” Though Kirk believed that, he also didn’t know whether it would help him to know precisely when Edith would die. Bad enough that he knew she would not live much longer, but to be able to count down the time he had left with her might be too much for him to bear.

  Thinking of Edith, Kirk looked over to where she continued working in the kitchen. She saw him and smiled, then said, “We’ll be done in just a few minutes.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, Miss Keeler,” said the man washing dishes with her. “I can finish up here. You can go.”

  “Are you certain?” Edith asked.

  “Sure, I don’t mind,” the man said. “You go on.”

  “Thank you,” Edith said. As she patted the man on the arm in an obvious gesture of appreciation, Kirk felt a smile bloom on his face, grateful for any extra time he could have with her. He watched her dry her hands on a rag, then bend down behind the counter. A moment later, she came through the kitchen’s swinging doors holding her pale blue hat and her handbag. She wore a simple outfit of a black skirt and a white blouse, modestly covering the lovely body that Kirk had come to know so well.