Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

“With all due respect, Captain,” Spock said, “we do not believe that you are ‘fine.’”

  “Yes, I’ve gathered that, Mister Spock,” Jim said, his expression going cold. McCoy had seen such a look on the captain’s face often enough, usually as a sign of his steely resolve, but sometimes accompanying a rigid stubbornness. Now, Jim turned his aspect from Spock back to McCoy. Pointing toward the slate McCoy still held, he asked, “Is this a medical opinion, Doctor? Do my test results provide justification for you to consider me unfit or incapacitated?”

  “What?” McCoy said. He looked down at the slate in his hands and quickly thrust it back onto the desk. “No. This isn’t about your ability to command the Enterprise. It’s about—”

  “In that case, Doctor,” Jim said, raising his voice, “I’ll return to my duties.” He spun on his heel and started for the door, and McCoy understood that he and Spock had not only not helped the captain, they had exacerbated the situation, putting distance between Jim and his two closest friends. He shot up out of his chair.

  “Jim,” he said, at the same time that Spock took a step forward and also called after him.

  “Captain,” the first officer said. Jim stopped. “Doctor McCoy and I are not approaching you on an official level. The conversation we wish to have with you is not for the record.”

  McCoy crossed the room and faced the captain. “Jim,” he said, “we’re your friends. We only want to help you.”

  Jim seemed to study McCoy’s face, and then he nodded with slow, small movements. “Maybe I don’t want to be helped right now,” he said.

  “And maybe that’s why you need our help,” McCoy told him.

  Jim laughed quietly. “I’m not entirely sure I understand that logic, Bones,” he said. “Do you, Spock?”

  The first officer walked over to join McCoy and the captain. “This is not about logic,” he said. The doctor felt his eyebrows lift in surprise, but he stifled his urge to comment on Spock’s statement. “This is about emotion,” he continued. “Your emotion, Captain.”

  “Spock, what I’m feeling…losing my brother and Aurelan…” He shrugged. “It’s difficult. But considering the circumstances, I really think I’m doing all right.”

  “That’s just it, Jim,” McCoy said. “You shouldn’t be doing all right. You should be in pain and having to cope with this. Instead, we see you ignoring it, not dealing with everything that’s happened.”

  “Bones,” Jim said, and then he breathed in deeply. “I am in pain, and I am dealing with it.”

  “I’m sorry to disagree with you, Jim,” McCoy said, “but I don’t think you are. As Spock pointed out to me, you’re walking around this ship like nothing at all happened.”

  “What should I do, Bones?” Jim asked. “I have a job to do, a duty to perform. I’m responsible for the lives of more than four hundred crew, and for a while there, as you mentioned to me at the time, I was also responsible for the lives of more than a million people on Deneva. I didn’t have time to lock myself in my quarters and feel sorry for myself.”

  “Nobody’s saying you should have,” McCoy said. “But the crisis has passed, and before we find ourselves in the middle of the next one, you need to begin to work through your grief. Not just for the crew’s sake, or because failing to do so could impact your ability to command, but for your own sake.”

  Jim shook his head. “I am working through my grief.”

  “I don’t think you are, Jim,” Spock said. “Since we’ve been talking, you have twice mentioned the deaths of the people for whom you would now mourn. But you have not mentioned the death of Edith Keeler.”

  Jim’s head snapped up to look directly at Spock. “Miss Keeler,” he said, as though about to pronounce some fact about the woman, but then his voice faded into silence. Jim moved between Spock and McCoy and walked slowly to the far side of the room. “Edith…” he said under his breath, still facing away, the name almost impossible to hear.

  “Jim,” McCoy said gently, “you need to deal with all of this. Your pain may never fully go away, but if you face it, if you understand it, you can learn to live with it.”

  Without turning around, Jim said, “I already am living with it.”

  “But not in a healthy way,” Spock said, his voice low and, though McCoy knew he would never admit it, filled with compassion.

  Now Jim looked around at them from across the room. “There’s nothing healthy about loss,” he said. He did not speak confrontationally, but as though searching for answers.

  “No,” McCoy agreed, “but there are healthy ways to cope with the pain it causes. You may never be able to eradicate that pain, but you can lessen it and prevent it from defining your life.” In McCoy’s mind, he saw the image of his father, lying in bed wasted and in agony, begging for the release of death. And in the next moment, McCoy saw the old photograph of his mother, the posed portrait of a beautiful woman he had never met. His own pain ran at him, but he stepped neatly aside and then quickly spoke again to Jim. “If you don’t deal with this now,” he said, “your pain will stay strong. You may learn to ignore it, but it will always be there, and someday, it’ll devour you.”

  Again, an uncomfortable stillness arose, surrounding the three men, but holding them away from one another. McCoy looked at Jim and then at Spock, and he suddenly felt helpless. But then Jim said, “What are you suggesting?”

  “Temporary relief from your responsibilities,” Spock said at once.

  “And counseling,” McCoy added.

  “A medical leave of absence?” Jim said.

  “It doesn’t have to be a medical leave,” McCoy said quickly. “It can simply be a personal leave.”

  “Starfleet regulations provide for this remedy in circumstances such as these,” Spock said.

  Jim appeared to consider the recommendation and then asked, “For how long?”

  “A minimum of one month,” McCoy said. “And perhaps as long as two. That’ll have to be a decision you and your therapist make, depending on your progress.”

  “A month…two months,” Jim said. “It makes me sound…lost.”

  “Not lost, Captain,” Spock said. “In pain.”

  “Jim, you need this,” McCoy said.

  “I’ve put the crew in for a ten-day shore leave at Starbase Ten,” he said. The ship had been scheduled for a shorter layover there prior to the weeks it had spent at Deneva, McCoy knew, and was now overdue for maintenance and crew transfers and replacements. “I suppose I can simply stay on leave for a while after that.”

  “I know several of the physicians stationed there, including their psychiatrist,” McCoy said. “Farraj al-Saliba. He’s a fine doctor.”

  “Well,” Jim said, “I suppose I’d better contact Starfleet Command.” He crossed the room and again passed between McCoy and Spock. At the door, he stopped and looked back at them. “Thank you,” he said, and then he continued into the corridor.

  When the doors had closed, McCoy looked up at Spock. “And I want to thank you,” McCoy told the first officer.

  “For what, Doctor?” he said, once more demonstrating a remarkable lack of perception with respect to social interaction. Several choice rejoinders occurred to McCoy, but he chose to answer seriously instead.

  “For coming to me about Jim’s situation,” he said. “I think we really helped him just now.”

  Spock replied to McCoy’s gratitude and optimism with a simple bow of his head, and then he too left. McCoy returned to his desk and to preparing his report on the health of the crew for submission to Starfleet Medical. He thought about Jim as he did so and had to admit to being surprised that he’d agreed without much argument to the leave of absence. Either he had no intention of taking leave—a possibility McCoy thought very unlikely—or he actually did understand the need for him to confront his grief.

  Ten

  1930

  Petra Zabrzeski looked up from her copy of Great Expectations when she heard somebody approaching the request desk. Despite the
hour—in the evening, well before closing—the Periodicals Room had largely emptied out. With her shelving and cataloguing chores completed for her shift, Petra had found an opportunity to indulge her joy of reading, selecting one of the hundreds of thousands of volumes in the library. But while she loved to settle in with a fine novel or anthology, doing so at work made the time seem to pass far more slowly. She much preferred the busier days, when she assisted one patron after another, until before she knew it, the time had arrived to go home.

  Like last winter, she thought. Petra had only worked at the New York Public Library for four years, but according to people who’d been here much longer—and a few had started back in 1911 when the institution had first opened—the library had experienced no more active time than the past December, January, and February. The Main Reading Room had often filled to capacity during that period, seeing upwards of eight hundred, nine hundred, and even a thousand people, quite a number of them having to stand. On one particular day at the end of 1929, patrons made requests for almost nine thousand books.

  As the middle-aged gentleman neared the counter, Petra wondered idly whether he’d been in the library on that day at the end of December. She had no notion of whether he had been or not, but she had seen him here, in the Periodicals Room, many times during the summer months. Always he asked for the latest available Sunday editions of various newspapers, both domestic and international. He spent hours combing through papers published in American cities like Baltimore and New Orleans, Boston and San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as through papers printed in other countries like Great Britain and France, Ireland and Argentina, Switzerland and Italy. Petra assumed that he must be doing research of some sort, a view reinforced by the pad of paper and pencil he always carried with him. His obvious erudition—clearly he read several languages—impressed her, though his threadbare appearance seemed to point to the impact on him of the troubled economic times. Tonight, he wore a khaki work shirt and an obviously old pair of dungarees, the latter discolored with brown patches that suggested the man’s day had been expended on manual labor, rather than on some intellectual pursuit.

  “Good evening,” the man said as he reached the requests desk. Set into a rectangular opening in the long inner wall of the Periodicals Room, the counter separated the patrons seating area from the materials-storage section. Petra looked at the man, perhaps two decades her junior, as he reached for a periodicals call form.

  “Good evening,” she replied with a smile, which the man made only a half-hearted attempt to return. She noticed that he appeared weary and not particularly happy, the expression on his rounded face dulled from perhaps wakefulness or woe. Even his normally bright blue eyes seemed to hide their light behind his flagging lids.

  The man used his own pencil to scratch out a list of newspapers he wished to read. Petra slipped a small strip of paper into Great Expectations to mark her place in the novel—the two convicts that had so frightened Pip had just been taken into custody—and tucked the book away on a shelf below the counter. She folded her hands together and waited for the man to finish.

  When he did, he slid the request card across the counter to her. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said and then he reached for another form. From his previous visits, Petra knew that after the man had done reading the first three newspapers she retrieved for him—three being the maximum number of periodicals a patron could check out at one time—he would immediately request three more.

  “I’ll have these for you in a moment, sir,” she said, and she carried the request card back into the stacks. As the man had asked, as usual, for the library’s latest Sunday editions, it did not take her long to collect the three papers he wanted to see. In no time at all, she carried to the counter yesterday’s The New York Times and last weekend’s The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and The Philadelphia Enquirer. He thanked her again and, pencil in hand, gathered the newspapers into his arms along with his pad.

  As the man walked away from the counter toward one of the long, narrow tables that lined the reading area, she observed a slight hunch to his shoulders, as well as a slowness to his movements. She thought back on his first visits to the Periodicals Room, at least during her time at the library, and recalled him having a livelier, cheerier manner. Petra supposed that perhaps a long workday—or even, in this climate of increasing unemployment, no workday at all—must have contributed to the man’s melancholic aspect this evening. As she recalled the times she’d seen him previously, including his first smiling, energetic visits here, she reckoned that his life had become much more difficult recently. Of course, with more and more workers unable to find jobs, and banks failing one after another, the same could be said of many, many people.

  Still, as Petra watched the man move to the far corner of the room, put down his newspapers, and settle in to read them, she thought that he didn’t really give the impression of somebody who’d simply suffered a personal setback. Of late, she’d certainly beheld enough men down on their luck to recognize what personal desperation looked like, and this man did not have that air about him. Rather, the guise he wore hinted at something worse: he carried himself as though bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  McCoy read through another page of densely packed classified ads, his eyes tiring from the strain. He’d already hunted through five other newspapers tonight, one of them, like this one, published in a language he neither spoke nor read. After a day of strenuous physical labor—working on a road crew installing traffic lights, he’d excavated through concrete and hard earth using a pickax and shovel—he could barely prevent himself from falling asleep. Despite the lasting ache in his muscles, every so often for the past half hour, he’d felt his head nod and his eyelids droop, and he’d had to force himself to stay awake.

  Now, feeling fatigue wash over him once more, he set the newspaper down and rose to his feet. He stretched and yawned, then rubbed at his eyes, as though doing so might somehow reinvigorate them and keep them open longer. Stepping over to the window, he peered out toward Fifth Avenue. Night had draped itself about the city, the daylight growing shorter as autumn approached. But even as September dwindled, the rings of illumination that bloomed each evening around a vast population of street lamps still kept the darkness at bay.

  Just ahead and to the left, McCoy spied one of the two lion statues that reposed majestically on either side of the library’s main entrance. The doctor lingered there for several moments, in the archway that framed the wide, tall window. He stared first at the great stone beast, and then beyond it, at the automobiles and horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians flowing left and right down the boulevard.

  When he felt sufficiently roused, McCoy turned back to the long table at which he’d been sitting and reading. From the corner where he stood, the spacious Periodicals Room extended away from him. The hardwood floors, the four chandeliers, and the rich, ornately carved woods that adorned the walls and the high ceiling, affected an ambiance of warm elegance. Only a handful of people had come and gone since he’d arrived here earlier this evening, and he saw now that only three remained, scattered widely about, well outnumbered by the procession of reading lamps along the center of each table.

  McCoy took a seat once more and leaned over his open copy of Corriere della Sera. The title of the Italian daily translated, he knew, as The Evening Courier. McCoy did not read Italian, but he had perused a bilingual dictionary and a grammar reference in order to pick up enough words and phrases for his own purposes. He found the lines where he’d stopped reading—or more accurately, where he’d stopped looking—and continued on from there through the columns of classified ads. His gaze danced across entry after entry, searching for text he recognized. Specifically, he sought two names: McCoy and Kirk. Fifteen minutes later, he located them both:

  Sto cercando James T. Kirk. Contatto Leonard McCoy. Missione della Via 21, New York City. Marzo di 1930.

  McCoy had cobbled together this entreaty, as w
ell as the brief ad request he’d sent, along with cash payment, to the newspaper’s offices in Milano. The editorial staff might have approved the few lines if they’d been written in English, but he hadn’t been certain of that, nor had he wanted to draw any more attention to himself or his ad than necessary. As he did with all of the papers in which he’d purchased space, McCoy reviewed Corriere della Sera to ensure that his entry had appeared and been printed correctly. He also checked for responses to any of the ads he’d previously had published.

  In truth, McCoy expected never to come across any such replies. If through the placement of these public notices he managed to communicate the time and place of his location to Jim, he believed that the captain—or Spock, or some other Starfleet officer—would immediately retrieve him and whisk him back to his life in the twenty-third century. Whether Jim or anybody else searched for him from the future, or had already journeyed back in time and searched for him contemporaneously, McCoy doubted that they would attempt to communicate with him through periodicals, rather than simply traveling to New York and finding him at the 21st Street Mission.

  Still, he checked anyway.

  McCoy had begun these efforts five months ago, after the advice he’d received from Keeler. He’d initially procured ad space exclusively in New York City papers, but as time had passed without result, he’d expanded the placement of his announcements into the rest of New York State, and then into other domestic localities, and finally to international cities. If Jim or somebody else had already traveled back to this time and now searched for him, they might think to look for such public communications. If they conducted their quest of him from the future, then perhaps some of those newspapers in which he’d placed ads would eventually be digitized and stored on computer memory for them to find. McCoy did not know which such databases had endured into his own time, but by increasing the scope of his endeavors across the globe, he hoped that some—or at least one—of his classified ads ultimately would find its way into a long-lasting electronic archive.