“Yes, of course,” Edith said, but even as she agreed with the detective, she debated with herself how much she should say. While she had serious doubts about McCoy’s immediate past, she also recognized that, during his time at the mission, he’d acted as a model citizen. In addition to possibly saving her life, he’d worked every day but Sundays since his recovery, either in the soup kitchen or at a couple of other places where Edith had gotten him employment. The efforts he’d put forth, no matter the job, had been exemplary. His overall demeanor had been pleasant and helpful. Still, she remained concerned about his secretiveness, which she was not sure could truly be attributed to the amnesia he purported to be suffering.
“This man,” Edith told Wright, “this Leonard McCoy, is staying and working at the mission. He says that he can’t remember anything about his life but for his name and that he’s a physician.” She described McCoy’s appearance for Wright, as well as the slight but unmistakable drawl of his speech. She paused and took a breath, again deciding what more to reveal to the detective. She had to admit that, despite what might be McCoy’s evasiveness, she genuinely liked him. At the same time, if he’d done something wrong, whether he recalled doing so or not, she knew that she needed to find that out.
Edith leaned forward again, and her chair once more tilted onto its short leg. She looked at Detective Wright with a steady gaze, and told him everything she knew about Leonard McCoy. She also told him of all the concerns she had about the doctor.
“All right, ma’am,” the detective said. “Let me see what I can find out.” He pushed back in his chair and stood up to an imposing height. “This could take some time,” he said. The bundle of papers now in one hand, Wright crossed the busy room, over to a long row of wooden filing cabinets along the right-hand wall. Edith watched him open several drawers, pulling out quite a few files and poring over their contents. When he’d finished, he walked over to another desk and spoke with an officer there, then disappeared through a door in the far wall.
Almost an hour after he’d left her sitting alone, Detective Wright returned to his desk, and told her everything he’d learned about Dr. Leonard McCoy. It took no time at all.
He strode through the night at a brisk pace, despite how long he’d already been out walking. His Starfleet boots—though he now possessed several articles of contemporary clothing, he hadn’t yet been able to replace his footwear—his boots clocked noisily along the wooden planks of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway. The venerable structure, nearly fifty years old already in 1930, would survive into McCoy’s time, although he knew that a portion of the eastern tower would have to be rebuilt in the twenty-second century after the Caledonia disaster.
A breeze had picked up and now blew cold over the East River. McCoy pulled his navy blue pea coat close about him, flipping the collar up around his neck. He had once before in his life walked the Brooklyn Bridge, though in distinctly warmer conditions. He and Jocelyn had spent part of their honeymoon in New York City, during the summer months, and they had decided to watch the sunset from the landmark. McCoy could not now recall whether they’d actually succeeded in doing so, though he dimly remembered that an argument had sent them back to their hotel at some point during the evening. Certainly the seeds of their eventual divorce had already been sown by then—had in fact been present almost from the very beginning of their turbulent relationship.
Tucking the unpleasant memories away, McCoy stopped walking just past the western tower, having no designs on crossing even half of the one-and-three-quarter-kilometer extent. He took hold of the nearby railing with a gloved hand and peered upward. Two paired sets of suspensions cables reached down in spiderweb-like configurations to support the bridge’s dual spans. The elevated pedestrian walkway stretched above and between the two automobile roadways and train tracks, with nothing below it but the river.
Although it had flurried earlier today, the sky had partially cleared as night had fallen. Clusters of stars now shined here and there, visible through broken fields of low, knobby clouds. McCoy picked out those systems to which he’d journeyed: Rigel, Altair, Dramia, and others. He’d never really felt a sense of wanderlust, joining Starfleet less as a way of traveling the galaxy, and more as a means of getting away from his life on Earth. Right now, though, he longed to return to the Enterprise, and he wondered how long it would be before he once more had the opportunity to roam the stars.
A few days ago, McCoy had begun taking these long nighttime walks. His physical condition had steadily improved during his time at the mission, and after about ten days, he’d felt completely recovered from his bout with cordrazine. He’d started his nightly strolls simply to unwind after ten- and twelve-hour days of manual labor, but his thoughts invariably drifted to Jim and Spock.
Where are they? McCoy asked himself now, as he’d done so many times already. He remained convinced that the captain would stop at nothing to rescue him, not only for McCoy’s sake, but in order to prevent the alteration of history. To that end, McCoy made sure always to pay close attention to his surroundings, vigilant for the appearance somewhere of his friends. He also puzzled over the possibility of finding on his own a method of getting himself back to his proper time. If only I knew how I got here.
McCoy dropped his gaze from the sky and down to the wooden walkway upon which he stood. Between the slats, he could see the whitecaps of the choppy water fifty meters below. The wind carried a susurrant sound that could have been that of the water, or simply that of the wind itself.
The walkway suddenly began to rumble, and McCoy peered toward Brooklyn in time to see a train appear as it arched across the bridge’s highest point. The subway lines ran across the river beside the automobile roadways, below and on either side of the pedestrian thoroughfare. As he watched the train pass, he pulled a glove from one hand and reached into his coat pocket. He found a small cache of coins there and thought that he should probably pull out a nickel, walk back to the Manhattan side of the bridge, and take the subway up toward Twenty-first Street. He’d been out walking for hours now, and he felt cold and tired.
McCoy replaced his glove on his hand and started back across the bridge. It surprised him that he’d been in the past now for as long as he had. He didn’t pretend to understand anything at all about time travel, but a particular aspect of his situation gnawed at him. He believed that Jim would take whatever action necessary to bring him back to his proper time, presumably utilizing the same method that had brought McCoy here in the first place. If for some reason that proved impossible, though, McCoy knew that there existed other means of traveling into the past. Almost a year ago, the Enterprise crew had needed to cold-start the warp engines as the ship had spiraled down to the planet Psi 2000; the experimental process had worked, but had sent them into a time warp, and three days back in time. And just a couple of months ago, pulling away from a high-gravity black star had caused a slingshot effect that had sent the Enterprise hurtling three hundred years into the past, where they had encountered Captain Christopher. So several methods of time travel did exist.
But whatever the means the captain employed to journey backward in time in order to retrieve him, wouldn’t he go to the earliest point at which he could do so? McCoy had arrived in Earth’s past in 1930. In any rescue attempt, wouldn’t Jim travel to 1930 as well, and not to 1931 or ’35 or ’40?
Unless he doesn’t know I’ve gone back in time, McCoy thought. If that was true, then he stood no chance of being recovered. But as McCoy watched the lights of the subway train recede into Manhattan, he realized another possibility: perhaps Jim knew that he’d gone back in time, but didn’t know precisely to when or to where. If the captain didn’t know whether McCoy had ended up in 1930 or 1066 or 1000 BCE, or in New York City or Hastings or Rome, then how could Jim possibly locate him?
All at once, McCoy understood an even simpler formulation of his predicament. Even if the captain knew to travel to New York in 1930, how would he go about finding McCoy in a city of sever
al million human beings? Landing parties, clad in period clothing, scouring the city? How long would that take, and would there even be a guarantee of success? McCoy had chosen to stay at the 21st Street Mission because he’d assumed that he’d arrived in the past somewhere near there, but he didn’t know that with certainty.
McCoy strengthened his pace, feeling renewed vigor. Finally, he’d found a general course of action to take. He didn’t yet know how he would do so, but he had to find a way to send up a flare to Jim—a flare that would cross the centuries.
Seven
2267
Captain James T. Kirk led the landing party—Spock, Mr. Scott, Yoeman Zahra, and a security guard, Crewman Tiroli—across the pedestrian plaza, traversing the brickwork amid tall buildings and large marble statuary. Several of the abstract sculptures had been damaged, he saw, and one of them had been toppled from its base, crashing to the ground and crumbling into gray-white chunks and shards of polished stone. Spock had reported such indiscriminate destruction throughout the life-sciences building that housed the laboratory of Kirk’s brother, Sam, and which the landing party had searched from top to bottom after Kirk had earlier transported back up to the ship. They’d also spied indications that something had penetrated the structure at a number of points, but had yet to locate the “horrible things” of which Aurelan had spoken.
Aurelan, Kirk thought. He saw in his mind the image of his sister-in-law arching her back and crying out in agony, until she suddenly fell in silence onto the biobed, her life stolen from her. When the Enterprise had first arrived here at Deneva, sensor scans had revealed the expected number of human inhabitants on the planet, but had showed almost all of them indoors and curiously quiescent, as though in hiding. When Kirk had taken the first landing party down to the surface, he’d guided them immediately to his brother’s lab. They’d found Aurelan hysterical, her husband dead, and her son, Peter, unconscious. Kirk had accompanied his sister-in-law and nephew up to the Enterprise sickbay so that McCoy and his medical staff could examine and attempt to treat them. Right now, Peter remained unconscious, but still alive; his mother had not been so fortunate.
Before Aurelan had died, though, she’d struggled to speak with Kirk, fighting through terrible, as-yet-unexplained pain to get her words out. She’d talked of “things” brought to Deneva by visitors from Ingraham B, things that had taken control of the Denevan population and forced them to begin building ships. Sensors had so far detected no harmful life-forms on the planet, but Kirk intended to find out what had killed his brother and sister-in-law, and what obviously still threatened Peter and the rest of the colonists.
As he and the other Enterprise personnel marched through the plaza, trying to locate the source of a peculiar buzzing sound, Kirk still had trouble accepting that Sam and Aurelan were gone. Before today, he hadn’t seen them in almost two years, since they and their three sons had visited him in the days before he’d first taken command of the Enterprise. He felt grateful that two of his nephews resided not on Deneva, but on the Canopus planet, but he wondered how he could possibly tell Alexander and Julius that their parents had been killed. And if Peter died as well—
Enough, Kirk rebuked himself. He would have time later to cope with the losses he’d suffered. Right now, he had a duty to make sense of the desperate situation on Deneva, and to resolve it. Though Doctor McCoy could not determine the cause of Aurelan’s condition or death, a cause clearly had to exist. If she could expire so quickly, then so too could any or all of the colonists. Already, ship’s sensors indicated that several hundred humans on the planet had died since the Enterprise had assumed orbit. More than a million lives remained not only at risk, but at immediate risk.
Ahead of Kirk and the landing party stood a ten-story edifice of white stone and glass. As the Enterprise crew drew nearer, the buzzing they’d been tracking grew louder. Spock and the others had first heard the odd drone only a few minutes ago, when they’d completed their recon of the life-sciences building and had emerged back into the daylight. Just before they’d set out to search for the source of the unfamiliar sound, Kirk had rejoined them from the ship.
Now, they approached what appeared to be a side entrance to an office building. The single door there hung at an angle, the upper two-thirds of the glass in its misshapen frame shattered. Kirk reached for the handle, but as he attempted to pull the door open, it wedged against the jamb. He stepped back and considered the situation, and then in a moment mixed of necessity and grief, he kicked forward, shattering the remaining glass. He waited a few seconds, listening, but perceived no change in the buzzing coming from within.
Kirk glanced back at the crew, making eye contact with each of them, then proceeded forward through the broken door. He held his boxy, type-one phaser at the ready, the weapon set to force three, to kill. He’d already instructed the members of the landing party that they would take no chances in defending themselves; if they encountered any of the things about which Aurelan had warned, they would give it no quarter.
Inside, the bright sunshine gave way to a dim, unlighted interior. Kirk peered upward through the shadows and saw the lighting panels in the ceiling casting no illumination. Ship’s sensors had shown sporadic power outages throughout the city, and this building might have been one of those left dark.
Slowly but steadily, Kirk conducted the landing party through several corridors, pursuing the source of the buzzing. Their path took them along the perimeter of the ground floor, and daylight filtered in here and there through the curtained glass partitions of outer offices that they passed. As they progressed through the gauzy atmosphere, the drone they’d followed here clarified into a collection of individual hums, like the noises of single bees in the group voice of a hive. Kirk’s skin felt alive with movement, a visceral reaction to the insectlike sounds.
Up ahead, the right-side wall of the corridor ended. Kirk cautiously made his way past that point, and saw a short stairway descending into a common. On the lower level, beside the steps, a square of low, white concrete benches bordered a small reflecting pool. An avant-garde sculpture twisted up out of the water in one corner. Bushes and a few undersized trees ornamented the periphery of the area in green. A pair of corridors, parallel to the first, led out of the common in either direction, and a rectangular arch in the far wall opened onto a small grassy area. The walkway upon which they stood continued forward past the stairway, edged by a railing, and as Kirk headed down the steps, he pointed Crewman Tiroli in that direction.
The buzzing resonated in the enclosed space, echoes making it seem as though the sounds came from everywhere at once, rendering it impossible to ascertain from which direction they truly originated. Kirk padded down into the common, Spock, Scotty, and Zahra following behind him. They spread out in the small space, their eyes searching all about for whatever made the many hums.
Kirk turned around to his left, gazing at the walls of the place, but then he heard behind him a different sound: not a buzz, but a wet squeak, like suction being released. He whirled toward the noise and spotted something clinging to the underside of the archway…actually, three things. They looked like nothing he’d ever seen: flat, irregular shapes, perhaps a meter around and a few centimeters through, thickest in the center, with no visible organs or structures. The uneven bodies trembled with tiny movements, and their surfaces rose and fell intermittently, as though from erratic respiration.
“Spock,” Kirk called. The first officer stepped up beside him at once, and the captain heard Scotty and Zahra join them as well. Kirk studied the creatures, his phaser aimed at the one in the middle.
Without warning, the creature on the left dropped from the arch and swooped toward the landing party. Kirk ducked, and it passed just over his head. “Form a ring,” he ordered, wanting the Enterprise crew to position themselves with their backs to each other so that they could protect the group from attack. Tiroli remained alone on the upper walkway, but he would have an advantage from the higher position.
As Spock, Scotty, and Zahra maneuvered around, the creature dived at them again. This time, Kirk heard a rush of air as it darted past. It flew quickly but awkwardly; that it could fly at all seemed a mystery, considering its unwieldy body and that it not only did not have wings, but possessed no appendages of any sort.
The creature swept back around, and another of its kind slipped from the arch and joined it. One arced downward, and then the other. Kirk bent low again and then saw the first creature climb almost to the ceiling, where it alighted at the top of the wall. The second creature plunged by once more and then it too took a position high up on another wall. Amid the constant buzzing, Kirk saw an opportunity in the moment of sudden stillness.
“Fire,” he said, and he took aim on the creature nearest to him, which still clung to the bottom of the archway. He depressed the firing pad, and red energy leaped from his weapon. Behind him, the whine of other phasers joined his, the shrill sound momentarily overwhelming the insectile noise all around.
Seconds elapsed, and Kirk continued firing, the intense red beam striking the creature directly at its center. Finally, he eased his thumb from the trigger. The rest of the crew stopped firing as well. The creature fell from the arch onto the grass below it, its formerly hidden side now up, showing smooth and flat.
Kirk peered around for the other creatures that had attacked. Though they no longer perched atop the walls, neither had they fallen onto the floor below. They’d evidently taken cover in the corridors extending away from the common. The buzzing, Kirk noted, had diminished in volume.
Looking back toward the grassy area, Kirk saw several other creatures fly away, having apparently been hidden from view on the other side of the arch. Sensing a lull in the danger, he moved quickly over to the one fallen creature, the rest of the landing party coming with him. Kirk squatted down just before the grass, but kept alert for another assault. Next to him, Spock worked his tricorder.
Crucible: McCoy Page 7
