Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  At one time in her life, it had surprised Edith that men who could not secure employment, and who could not keep homes, could still manage to procure alcohol for themselves, particularly in this time of Prohibition. But as a young woman, she had come to the painful understanding that a weakness for liquor—or any vulnerability of the spirit—could impart a drive that overwhelmed not only the best of intentions, but even the instinct for self-preservation.

  Edith didn’t know with certainty how Rik had finally managed to climb on the water cart and stay there, but she believed that he had at least in part replaced it in his life with music. On a number of evenings during the past months, he had ladled out soup to the men who’d come seeking a meal, and then he’d entertained them. Rik would pluck at his tatty banjo and sing, striving to serve the hungry, the indigent, the homeless, what he called “food for the soul.” He even once in a while would coax a tune from the decrepit upright piano that stood on a raised platform along the left-hand wall.

  Now, Edith saw Rik turn his head sharply in her direction, and she suspected that McCoy had just described to him what had transpired outside. Rik quickly set down the pot and the towel he’d been holding, then ducked down below the counter and out of sight. He stood up and returned to view a few seconds later, an old red tin in one hand. Edith recognized it as the first-aid kit she kept for emergencies—and which she’d used three days ago to treat McCoy when he’d first arrived at the mission. Among other minor injuries, the backs of his hands had been badly abraded, and she’d washed them out and applied to them a healing salve.

  McCoy accepted the first-aid kit from Rik and carried it back out into the main room. Taking a seat beside Edith again, McCoy placed the tin on the table. Covered with more dents and scratches than printing—Good Samaritan First Aid Kit, it read in white block letters—the container measured perhaps ten inches square and a third as deep. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” McCoy said, lifting off the lid and placing it to one side. He examined the contents of the kit, then selected cotton wadding, gauze pads, cloth tape, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a jar of the same salve that Edith had employed on him. “These’ll do nicely,” he said.

  Edith looked on in silence as McCoy ministered to her wounds. He spoke to her while cleaning the blood and dirt from her forearms and hands, but said nothing of particular import; she suspected that he offered his words as a means of distracting her from the periodic sting of the antiseptic. He spent the most time and effort working over the gash in her wrist, dressing it with the salve and gauze once he’d rinsed it fully. Although the entire undertaking required only a few minutes and no real medical expertise, Edith observed the practiced confidence with which McCoy appeared to work.

  “You’re quite good at this, aren’t you?” she remarked, finally starting to feel more like herself.

  “Well,” McCoy said, a broad smile blossoming on his face, “I am a doctor.”

  “Of course,” Edith said, hoping that her words and tone masked the doubts she fostered about McCoy’s alleged medical training. When he’d first appeared at the mission, he’d hardly cut the figure of a physician. He’d tottered in, exhausted and barely able to stand, supporting himself by holding on to the gunmetal gray railing that led men past the serving area. Scarlet blotches had dappled a pallid, sickly complexion. Edith had witnessed enough men similarly ravaged to know that McCoy looked less like somebody who prescribed drugs and more like somebody addicted to them.

  Still, after sleeping on a cot in her office for nearly an entire day, he’d introduced himself as the senior medical officer aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Circumstances readily seemed to contradict him, and his clothing—boots, black trousers, and a strange sky blue pullover—hardly resembled a navy uniform. But despite the apparent absurdity of McCoy’s claim, Edith had chosen to address him as Doctor. Until now, though, as he expertly tended to her injuries, she’d given no real credence to the possibility that he might genuinely be a physician.

  “That’s all right,” McCoy said, still smiling. “I know you don’t believe that I’m a doctor.” He settled the tape, the gauze pads, and the jar of salve back in the first-aid kit, but used the cotton and hydrogen peroxide to begin cleaning out the scrapes on his own hands.

  “As I recall,” she responded, feeling a grin play across her own lips, “you claimed the other day not to believe at all in me.”

  “I guess that’s true,” McCoy admitted with a chuckle. “Perhaps we were both wrong.”

  “Perhaps.” McCoy continued working over the nicks in his hands, and Edith offered to help him.

  “Thank you, but I’m just about done,” he said. “It looks like I escaped from our little accident in better shape than you did.” As if to illustrate his point, he held up one hand, dabbed at it briefly, then replaced the unused cotton and the bottle of antiseptic back in the tin.

  “ ‘Physician, heal thyself’?” she said.

  “Not in my case,” McCoy said. He retrieved the lid and replaced it on the first-aid kit, metal clinking against metal. “You were mostly responsible these past couple of days for helping me heal.”

  Heat rose in Edith’s cheeks, and she knew that her face had flushed. She glanced down at her hands, embarrassed. She didn’t feel comfortable accepting gratitude for her good works, believing that as a member of humanity, she had a responsibility to her fellow man to do what she could to help those in need. Earlier this evening, McCoy had told Edith that her decision to look after him when he’d stumbled into the mission might have saved his life. She replied to him now with something she’d told him then. “You just looked like you could use a friend.” Before McCoy could respond, she slid her chair away from the table and stood up. “What I could use right now,” she said, “is a good night’s sleep.” She reached down and picked up her cloak and hat.

  “May I walk you home?” McCoy asked, also getting to his feet.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, “but that won’t be necessary. I promise to look both ways before crossing the street.”

  “I’m sure you will,” McCoy agreed, at the same time reaching forward and taking her cloak from her. “But I was going out for a walk anyway,” he said, “so I wouldn’t mind the company.” He held the cloak open for her.

  Edith turned and slipped her arms through the slits in her garment, surprised by the unexpected display of gallantry. Around Twenty-first Street, she rarely encountered such good manners. Coupled with McCoy’s claim to be a physician, as well as the ease and care with which he’d treated her wounds, his simple act of helping her on with her cloak now gave Edith pause. Though she remained skeptical of his professed vocation, she wondered now if her initial assessment of the man had been mistaken. Perhaps there was more to McCoy than she’d at first thought.

  Deciding that she’d like to learn more about him, Edith accepted his offer to accompany her on her way home. “I presume that you’ll still be staying here tonight?” she asked.

  “Honestly,” McCoy said, “I have no place else to go.” Some emotion seemed to flicker across his face, but Edith couldn’t quite make out what it had been.

  Yes, there is more to this man than I thought, Edith decided. I just can’t tell what it is.

  But she vowed to herself that she would figure it out.

  They walked along the avenues, primarily in darkness, but periodically passing through pools of light, the glow spilling down from street lamps that lined the sidewalks like mute sentinels against the night. The mechanical mutter of automobile engines and the metronomic clop of horses’ hooves occasionally drifted to them over the tapping of their own footsteps, but for the most part, the urban valleys of brick and window glass nestled them in comparative silence. About them, the air carried the leaden scent of moisture, though if from rains past or rains yet to come, McCoy could not tell.

  He and Keeler had scarcely spoken since leaving the mission, maintaining a comfortable quietude between them. Of the crowd that had formed on Twenty-first S
treet after the near-accident, many had dispersed by the time the pair had gone back outside. Quickly slipping unnoticed past the three or four individuals who’d remained, McCoy and Keeler had then settled into an easy pace, headed for her home. Here and there, they’d spotted other people—some strolling along, others rummaging through the shadows—but few enough disrupted the surrounding stillness.

  As McCoy walked beside Keeler, his thoughts strayed from their earlier excitement and turned instead to his own predicament. He readily grasped the seriousness of his situation, despite having only an incomplete notion of how he’d arrived in this place and time. Although he could not be sure just how many days ago it had happened, McCoy did recall being summoned to the bridge of the Enterprise so that he could treat Lieutenant Sulu after some mishap had caused the helmsman to lose consciousness and experience heart flutter. Working amid the gray smell of charred circuitry and the unmistakable tang of scorched flesh, McCoy had successfully tended to Hikaru’s condition by administering a small dose of cordrazine. Moments later, though, as McCoy had reached to replace the hypospray in his medkit, the ship had lurched unexpectedly, and he’d fallen against the hypo’s dispensing tip. The hiss of the medical instrument had sounded chillingly long and loud as a mammoth amount of the powerful drug had been injected into his body.

  Beyond that, and until he’d staggered into the 21st Street Mission, McCoy remembered little clearly. He tried now to dredge up that missing time, but those events flickered through his thoughts in a kaleidoscope of distorted, half-seen images. In his mind’s eye, he glimpsed the twisted, malevolent faces of his pursuers, unrecognizable assassins bent wholly on his extermination. Racing frantically from them, McCoy had dashed through corridors and quarters, through maintenance tubes and access tunnels. Eventually, he’d made his way to the transporter room, where in fear for his life, he’d fled the ship.

  But the killers hadn’t relented, chasing him from the Enterprise down to the planet it orbited. In snatches of seemingly vicarious sensation, McCoy evoked his attempts to evade the murderers: the icy stabs of pain as he’d tried to conceal himself along jagged, colorless rock faces; the lonely refrain of the wind as it had wailed through wrecked, alien structures; the parched, granular taste of the dirt and dust as he’d gasped for breath. The hunters had tracked him ceaselessly, until at last they’d encircled him. Just one against many, McCoy had fought them as best he could, but had been unable to prevent his capture.

  And yet somehow he’d escaped. Though he could not now recollect by what means, he had nevertheless stolen away from his would-be executioners, into the back alleys of an old city and the far reaches of time. This city, in this time: New York, on Earth, in 1930.

  As he followed Keeler around a corner onto a street lined with what appeared to be low-rise, multi-unit dwellings, McCoy felt profoundly lost—not within the ancient city, but within the larger universe. It seemed unthinkable that he might be marooned here permanently, but the possibility occurred to him. However he’d arrived where he had, when he had, he could conceive of no method by which he could reverse that unexplained process.

  Unable to make sense of it all, McCoy turned his attention back to his companion. He’d first encountered Edith Keeler when he’d wandered into the 21st Street Mission, drawn by the stiff aroma of brewing coffee and the sight of disheveled, unclean men making their way inside—men among whom he’d hoped to camouflage himself. Aching, starving, and spent, McCoy had still been openly fearful of those searching for him, and Keeler had without hesitation hidden him away in a back room.

  Reflections of the intervening days between then and now rose with progressively greater clarity in McCoy’s mind. Keeler’s smooth, alabaster countenance dominated those scenes, materializing above him again and again as she’d sought to nurse him back to health. Indeed, her kindly ministrations had helped him recover from the cordrazine overdose—even though she’d never before heard of cordrazine, or Starfleet, or Leonard McCoy.

  “Miss Keeler,” he said now. His voice sounded small in the empty street.

  “Doctor McCoy,” she said. Even though he could not see her well in the darkness, he could tell that she’d looked over at him as they walked. He also visualized a grin on her face, given the impish tone of her response.

  “I’d like to repay the care and compassion you’ve shown me over the past few days,” he told her sincerely.

  “Oh, I think that saving my life tonight ought to be considered payment enough,” she said. “Don’t you?” Her reply came so quickly, and in such an apparently automatic way, that McCoy recognized its source as something other than mere gratitude. He did not doubt that Keeler felt honestly thankful for what he’d done on Twenty-first Street tonight, but he also perceived that she neither needed nor desired recompense of any kind for her own charitable endeavors. McCoy had known numerous such individuals throughout his life; indeed, though people became doctors and nurses and caregivers for myriad reasons, the simple impulse to help others provided for many the most compelling of all motivations. Of course, McCoy’s own reasons for going into medicine had been—

  —complicated, he finished the thought. Then, with a facility born of long repetition, he pushed the subject away. Instead, he went back to the matter of the care that Edith Keeler had given him.

  “I’d still like to show my appreciation,” he said. “You mentioned earlier that we could talk about me doing some work around the mission.”

  “My, you are persistent, Doctor,” she said. Their steps took them into the circle of light surrounding a lamppost, and McCoy glanced over to see Keeler’s striking hazel eyes regarding him. Her light blue hat covered her hair, but for where a whisk of strands peeked out alongside her cheek. “I could do with some help: washing dishes, sweeping up, that sort of thing,” she said. “In fact, the basement hasn’t been cleaned in more than a year. I suppose you could start there.”

  “All right,” McCoy said, pleased. “I’ll begin first thing in the morning.” As their strides carried them beyond the reach of the street lamp, Keeler’s face faded back into the night. The transition reminded McCoy how little he knew about this woman. “Speaking of the mission,” he said, “you told me that you run it because it’s necessary.”

  “That’s right,” Keeler confirmed.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, why?”

  “Because sometimes people need a helping hand,” she said sincerely. “As you told me yourself, Doctor, you needed one when you first showed up there.”

  “I certainly did,” McCoy agreed. “But I’m not asking why the mission is necessary. I’m asking why it’s necessary for you to run it.”

  “But it’s not just necessary for me to do what I do,” Keeler asserted. “It’s necessary for everybody to look after their fellow citizens.” She stopped walking, and when he followed suit, she placed a hand on his forearm. They stood near enough to the next lamppost that McCoy could distinguish her features in the spare light, though the dimness robbed her visage of any color. “Have you ever heard this passage by a man called John Donne? ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’”

  McCoy nodded slowly, conjuring the words from memory. “‘Any man’s death diminishes me,’” he quoted from later in the work, “‘because I am involved in mankind.’”

  Keeler said nothing for a moment, and she remained so still that she might have been holding her breath. Suddenly, it seemed to McCoy as though a great weight had descended upon both of them. The faint light shimmered in her eyes in a way that made him think tears had collected there. Before he could be sure, though, Keeler dropped her hand and began walking again.

  “That’s very good, Doctor,” she said softly as McCoy fell in beside her.

  “I’m a bit of a reader myself, and I have a friend with an interest in classic literature,” he explained, thinking of Jim Kirk. “That particular composition is one of his favorites.” Not for the first time, McCoy consi
dered the captain’s contradictory nature; Jim thoroughly appreciated Donne’s meditation on the interconnectedness of humanity, and yet he so often isolated himself in his command.

  “‘I am involved in mankind,’” Keeler repeated after a while, her voice rising back to a conversational level. “We all have a responsibility to each other. I run the mission because I’m able to help, and so I must help.”

  “That’s a laudable perspective,” McCoy averred.

  “It’s a necessary perspective,” Keeler amended. “Poverty was rampant even before the stock market panic and all the bank failures, and conditions have only gotten worse since then.”

  The stock market panic, McCoy thought, the phrase triggering an old memory, probably from one of the Earth survey courses he’d attended in school. Throughout human history, he knew, there had been numerous economic disruptions in capitalistic nations around the world, at least before the development and implementation of the Rostopovich-Batista safeguards. As he recalled now, the 1930s had been a period of fiscal turmoil in many countries, including the United States of America. This had been one of several eras branded as the Great Depression.

  “So many in want of an honest day’s work,” Keeler lamented. “So many desperate just to be able to provide food for their families and an adequate place for them to stay.” Again she stopped walking, but this time she pointed toward the narrow four-story building before which they now stood. “This is where I live,” she said.