“Actually, you were gone a longer time, Doctor,” Uhura clarified. “After you leaped through the portal, it quickly became clear that you’d changed the past, and therefore our present. But it took some time to confirm that, and for the captain to decide on a course of action.”
“Uhura’s right,” Scotty said. “Once the captain and Mister Spock jumped through the portal, that was when they came back right away, and you followed immediately after them.”
McCoy tried to grasp all that he’d been told since transporting back up to the ship, tried to comprehend the reality of what had happened to him, but even with his memories of Edith Keeler and the 21st Street Mission, he had difficulty doing so. The idea that he’d traveled into the past and changed Earth’s history, and thus had rendered the Enterprise nonexistent, seemed virtually unimaginable. And yet the members of the landing party had experienced it, and Jim and Spock had gone back in time themselves in order to rescue him and to undo the damage he’d done.
“Doctor, how long did it seem to you that you were in the past?” Uhura asked.
“Days,” McCoy said. Pictures of where he’d stayed, in the back room of the soup kitchen, played across his mind: the dull walls, with black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs hanging on them; the single window that fronted on the brick facing of a neighboring building; the sagging, musty cot in which he’d convalesced; the timeworn desk and filing cabinets. Behind those images followed another, hazy and indistinct, more like a half-remembered delusion than a recollection of something real. A dark tunnel, perhaps, or…but no, he couldn’t make it out.
“You were in the past for days?” Scotty asked, obviously dubious.
“Yes,” McCoy said. “Three days, maybe four. I’m not certain because of the cordrazine. I might have been there even longer.”
An expression of surprise crossed Uhura’s face, and Scotty sputtered out what McCoy assumed to be some sort of Scottish exclamation. “How much of it do you remember?” the engineer wanted to know.
“Some of it,” McCoy said. He thought now of the meals that Keeler had brought to him in the back room and of the cycles of diffuse sunlight that had illuminated the brick wall outside the window each day. “Most of it, I think. Only the beginning, when I first arrived there, is a blur.”
“What was it like?” Uhura asked, her voice dropping in volume, as though she spoke with a measure of awe. “Being in the past? Being on Earth three hundred years ago?”
“It felt surreal,” McCoy said, and then thought better of his response. “No, not surreal. It felt unreal. Not like a strange dream, but like a realistic hallucination or mirage. Everything looked and sounded and smelled and tasted authentic, but I still couldn’t believe that I was in that place, in that time. I almost expected somebody to appear from behind a curtain and reveal it all to be an elaborate re-creation.”
“And Captain Kirk and Mister Spock?” Scotty asked. “Did you see them while you were in the past?”
“Only at the end of my time there,” McCoy said, remembering how thrilled he’d felt when he’d opened the front door of the mission and seen Jim and Spock standing there. “But almost as soon as we found each other, probably not more than a minute later, we were back on the planet with you.” McCoy recalled how dizzying the sequence had been, traveling so quickly from 1930 New York, to the Guardian’s world, and then back to the Enterprise.
“Speaking of the captain, did either of you notice the look on his face when he came back through the portal?” Uhura asked. “Or the way he acted in the transporter room after we beamed up?”
McCoy had noticed. On the way to sickbay, Spock had confirmed what the doctor already knew—that Jim had purposely prevented him from saving Edith Keeler. The captain’s action had preserved history, but had obviously affected him deeply.
“Aye, that I did,” Scotty said. “He seemed upset to me. In that brief moment after he and Mister Spock reappeared, and before the doctor did, I thought that they must have failed to accomplish the mission.”
“I thought so too,” Uhura said. “I was shocked when you emerged from the portal, Doctor, and even more so when the Enterprise contacted me on my communicator.”
“Something must’ve happened in the past,” Scotty speculated.
Before McCoy could decide whether to reveal what had taken place on that centuries-old nighttime street, a voice interrupted. “Something did happen.” McCoy peered over to see Spock standing in the doorway. “The captain and I successfully restored the timeline.” He delivered the statement with such authority and finality that it invited no further comment or question. McCoy found the first officer’s reticence on the subject noteworthy.
Spock turned to Uhura. “Lieutenant,” he said, “Doctor Sanchez will see you now.”
“Yes, Mister Spock,” Uhura said. She hopped down from the biobed, crossed in front of the first officer, and left the room. Spock turned toward the door, but before he could depart, Scotty asked a question.
“Mister Spock,” he said, “what did happen down there, in the past?”
Spock did not answer right away, and McCoy thought that he must have been formulating a response. But then he said, “I will be on the bridge,” and exited the room.
McCoy looked over at Scotty, and then back to where Spock had been standing. The first officer had seemed even more stoic than usual. The fact that Jim had willfully prevented McCoy from saving Keeler’s life in order to maintain the timeline had been shocking, but it had explained realistically and morally the events through which they’d all lived. Clearly Jim would not have taken the actions he had otherwise. And yet it seemed perfectly clear that Spock was, for some reason, protecting the captain.
Is that how they restored the past? McCoy wondered. By allowing Edith Keeler to die? McCoy did not want to believe that. And yet it seemed perfectly clear that Spock was, for some reason, protecting the captain.
“I guess Mister Spock put an end to that,” Scotty said, shrugging.
“I guess so,” McCoy agreed absently, but wondered if, for Jim, this was just the beginning.
Four
1930
Her left hand resting on the railing, Edith stood on the bottom flight of the wooden staircase, mesmerized by what she saw. Before her stretched the basement of the 21st Street Mission—a basement now almost unrecognizable to her. Where dirt and disorder had been the norm just yesterday, she now beheld a clean, open space. The empty barrels and crates previously strewn about had been cleared away, stacked neatly in one corner. The old furniture that had found its way down here during the past couple of years had been buffed and, in some cases, repaired. A pair of tables, one larger, one smaller, had been pushed up against the wall, with chairs positioned around them in an unlikely sitting area. Two aged chests of drawers sat beside the steps, tucked neatly into the low space beneath the upper flight of stairs. The piles of rags, newspapers, and other rubbish that had once adorned every surface had now vanished, as had the layers of dust. Gone too were the milky white cobwebs that had festooned the place, and the floor had been swept spotless. Even the permanent fixtures—the squat furnace, the coal chute, the floor-to-ceiling structural columns, the water pipes—appeared as though they’d been scrubbed and polished.
“Doctor McCoy, your are an uncommon workman,” she said, appreciative of his efforts. Even with the scarcity of jobs these days, never had any man she’d hired at the mission put forth such an exemplary effort. “This basement is cleaner now than it’s ever been.”
“Then I can continue working here?” McCoy asked. He stood in the center of his handiwork, gazing up at her.
“Yes, I think you’ve earned your keep,” she allowed, descending the last couple of steps to stand across from him. She’d come down here to invite him upstairs for the evening meal, but instead told him, “I think you might even have earned yourself a change of clothes too.” She watched him peer down at himself, his arms spread wide. Swaths of dirt and dust discolored his attire from head
to toe. His hands looked almost as black as the coal stored next to the furnace, and though he wouldn’t be able to see it, a dark smudge arced across his cheek.
“I suppose I am a little dirty,” he observed.
“A little,” Edith said dryly. She’d already laundered McCoy’s clothes once, while he’d been recuperating up in her office. She could do so again, but now that he’d recovered from whatever binge had deposited him in the mission, she thought that he should have more than just the shirt and pants in which he’d arrived here. Not only was his outfit filthy, but it also looked very peculiar, almost like a Hallowe’en costume. “We have some old clothes in a closet upstairs, if you’d like to see them.”
“Thank you,” McCoy said, and Edith led the way up to the mission’s back hall. Behind a door across from her office, she showed him two crates filled with secondhand garments. “These have all been washed,” she said. “You’re welcome to anything you like.” Edith had culled the articles of clothing from various sources, though most had simply been left here by some of the men who’d passed through the soup kitchen. They’d warmed up with a meal, then stumbled out having forgotten their hat, or gloves, or jacket, or even an entire bindle of their belongings.
McCoy pawed through the clothes, holding some items up to examine them. He eventually selected a pair of tan trousers and a brown tartan shirt. He draped them over one arm and carried them out of the closet. “I guess I’ll change in here,” he said, pointing toward the office. Edith nodded, but then had another thought.
“You know, Doctor, you don’t have to continue staying here,” she said. “You’ll have a little bit of money in a couple of days, and there’s a vacant room where I live for two dollars a week.” Edith had occasionally helped dispossessed men find places to bed down, but she had never suggested that any of them take a room in the building where she herself resided. But even though Dr. McCoy had come to the mission as so many others had, in poor shape, clearly suffering from an excess of drink or some other venomous substance, he hadn’t behaved as other visitors to the soup kitchen had. Articulate and soft-spoken, he’d worked today without complaint or supervision and had impressed her with the results. He also seemed to look to the future in the same way that she did, and he treated her with a gentle kindness and respect. All of that and more engendered a sense of trust in her. She’d only known him a few days, but already she felt a sisterly affection for him. She’d never had a brother—or much of a family at all, for that matter—and so she welcomed the unfamiliar feelings.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” McCoy said, “I’d rather remain in the mission for right now.”
“It’s not that I mind, Doctor,” Edith said, “but don’t you think you’d be more comfortable in a room of your own?”
“Probably,” McCoy said, “but…” His words trailed into silence, leaving his thought unfinished and his desire to sleep in the office unexplained.
“But?” Edith said, encouraging him to go on.
McCoy glanced down at the clothes slung across his arm, rearranged them to no apparent purpose, then looked back up at her. “But I don’t think I’m going to be here for very much longer,” he finally said.
“Oh,” Edith said, surprised. “You have a home then, or a place you’re going to?”
“Something like that,” McCoy said vaguely.
The equivocation immediately troubled Edith. “I see,” she said as she considered how best to respond. She’d run the mission long enough, had observed and interacted with enough of the men who’d passed through here, to discern when one of them sought to avoid her scrutiny. She hadn’t expected such evasions from McCoy, and she wondered what he intended to hide from her. Is he trying to keep ahead of the law? she speculated. Or just planning to go back to the booze? She took herself to task for having trusted the doctor so quickly.
“You may stay here until the end of the week,” Edith said, feeling foolish for her misplaced faith in McCoy, but unwilling to renege on her word. “But this isn’t a hotel. After that, you’ll have to find another place to stay.” She didn’t wait for the doctor’s reaction, but turned on her heel and strode down the hall.
McCoy watched Keeler pace away from him and realized that he’d offended her with his obvious secrecy. He clearly couldn’t tell her the facts of his circumstances, and not just because he needed to prevent himself from impacting history. As insightful about the years ahead as Keeler might be, she would never believe that he hailed from the future. Beyond the obvious absurdity of the idea to her—in truth, even McCoy could barely warrant it—he had not exactly distinguished himself as a traveler of any kind when he’d arrived here. Even if he explained the details of his overdose aboard the Enterprise, she would never be able to credit any of his story. In the end, not only would she distrust him, she would judge him mentally ill and possibly even dangerous.
“Miss Keeler,” he called after her, just as she reached the corner of the corridor, where it turned to the right and led the short distance to the mission’s main room. She stopped, put a hand up on the beige plaster of the wall, and looked back at him. He could read her suspicion of him on her face and thought he could identify another emotion as well: disappointment. “Miss Keeler, I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve been so much help to me, I have no reason to hide anything from you.” He felt a twinge of regret for the lie, but accepted that he had no real choice.
“No,” she agreed. “No, you don’t. Not if you want me to continue helping you.”
“I do,” McCoy said genuinely.
She walked back down the corridor again, until she stood just a meter or so away from him. “Then tell me, are you in trouble?” she asked earnestly. “Did you do something wrong?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said.
Keeler didn’t reply for a moment, but she held his gaze, as if trying to determine the honesty in his words. At last, in a quiet voice, she said, “When you showed up here the other day, you told me that you had to keep moving, that you couldn’t let them find you.”
McCoy recalled his hysterical fear, the sweat it had generated in his palms, the shrieks it had provoked from his lips, the flight reflex it had stimulated in his hindbrain. “Yes, I remember,” he told Keeler, though even now the faces of those who had hunted him remained hidden behind the recollection of murky perceptions. But of course, that had to have been a product of the cordrazine; McCoy was now convinced that no one had chased him but his crewmates, and only in an attempt to help him. He said none of this to Keeler, but realized that he had an opportunity to recant some of the statements he’d made to her when first he’d arrived here. “I also remember telling you that I was a medical officer aboard a ship,” he said.
“Senior medical officer,” Keeler corrected. “On the U.S.S. Enterprise.”
McCoy forced himself to snicker, hoping to imply that he found even the suggestion of him serving aboard a ship ridiculous. “I said those things, but—”
McCoy heard a door open, followed by the clatter accompanying the evening meal: the scrape of chair legs along the floor, the murmurs of voices, the ring of utensils against plates and bowls. Footsteps approached, and McCoy and Keeler both looked toward the far corner, around which Rik appeared. When he saw them, he stopped. “Miss Keeler,” he said. “We finished serving, so I wanted to know if you were gonna talk to the men.”
Keeler glanced back at McCoy for what seemed like a momentary appraisal, then told Rik, “No, not tonight. Maybe you can play your banjo for them, though.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rik said, and he headed back the way he’d come. A moment later, the door closed.
As Keeler turned back toward McCoy, he decided that he’d rather not continue their discussion standing in the hall. “Here, let’s go sit,” he said, opening the door to Keeler’s office. He stepped back to allow her to go by, then trailed her inside. Moving past her to the desk, he reversed the chair there and held it out for her. She sat down, smoothing her gray skirt beneath her as she d
id so. McCoy closed the door, tossed the contemporary shirt and pants he’d picked out onto the cot, then took a seat beside the clothes.
“Miss Keeler,” he began, “when I first came here and told you that I couldn’t let them find me, when I told you that I was the senior medical officer aboard a ship, I was delusional.” He knew that she would measure every word he said now, and so he determined to adhere as closely as he possibly could to the truth. “I really am a physician, though,” he went on. “Before I ended up here, I accidentally injected myself with a powerful drug. You saw how it affected me.”
A crease split Keeler’s brow as she studied him, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Accidentally?” she asked, her skepticism plain.
“Yes,” McCoy said, and recollecting the level of medical technology in this time, added, “I fell on top of a syringe.”
“If that’s what really happened and you’ve recovered now,” she said, “then why do you want to stay here in the mission? Why don’t you simply go home?”
McCoy consciously forced himself not to blink, not to look away, as he asserted what would be the most critical of his lies. Fortunately, even this fabrication did not stray too far from reality. “Because I don’t remember how to get home,” he said. “I recall the accident, and who I am, but not much more.”
“Yet you remembered John Donne,” Keeler countered, “and your friend who reads classic literature.”
“And how to treat your wounds,” McCoy appended to the list, reminding Keeler—perhaps not so subtly—that he might have saved her life last night. He moved on quickly, though, not dwelling on the point. “Amnesia is a problematic thing,” he said.
Keeler stood up, and for a second, he thought that she might leave, her willingness to believe him at an end. But she walked not to the door, but over to the filing cabinets beside it. “Then why not go to the police?” she asked. “Let them help you find your way home?”
Crucible: McCoy Page 5
