Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  “But it is for you?” he said.

  “It is,” Edith said. “I decided to start this place, to run it, and I choose to be here every day.”

  “So do I,” Leonard said.

  “That’s true,” she said. “Not because you sought to be here, though, but because circumstances left you here.” Edith stood up to face Leonard, his chair still between them. “You’ve done good work here,” she said, “but this isn’t what you wanted for your life.”

  “We don’t always get what we want,” Leonard said with such a heavy sadness that Edith could not fathom what ills must have taken place in his life. She’d seen so many men beaten down by drink, by poverty, by a federal government concentrated more on the needs of business than of the country’s citizens, that on a daily basis, as a matter of her own emotional survival, she had become inured to the pain around her. She still cared as much as ever, of course, but in order to assist the visitors to the mission, she had to divorce herself emotionally from their plight. And yet the sorrow she distinguished in Leonard right now nearly moved her to tears.

  “Leonard,” she said, and she moved forward and placed her hand on top of his where it rested on the back of the chair between them. “I realize that you are the sort of man who does choose to help people. I have no doubt that, wherever you go from here, you’ll be driven to keep doing that. Perhaps you’ll even be a doctor again. But I also know it’s time for you to move on.”

  “Move on where?” Leonard asked. “I truly have nowhere to go.”

  “Why don’t you go home?” Edith asked.

  “I would love to,” he said, “if only I knew how to get there.”

  “Why not just hop a train and go?” she suggested.

  “Go?” Leonard asked. “Go where?”

  “Home,” Edith said. “To Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta,” he repeated, as though sampling the possibility for the first time.

  “It might be just the place to start,” Edith said.

  Leonard stared at her for a long time, but seemed not to see her. She imagined him picturing the skyline of Atlanta, not nearly as large or impressive as that of New York, but still with its share of tall buildings. Edith had never been to Atlanta, but she had read about it, had seen pictures in newspapers and magazines. Though she could not tell what Leonard visualized right now, she hoped that it included blue skies and peach trees.

  “Maybe that would be a good place to start over,” he said at last. “I’ll think about it.” He circled around the chair and moved in close to her, opening his arms. They embraced, and he thanked her for what she’d said just now, and for her friendship.

  Edith didn’t know whether Leonard would heed her advice and leave the mission, but she thought that he might. Whatever ghosts still haunted him from his past, he needed to put them to rest, and the best way for him to do that began with leaving the place that in one form or another had provided him with a refuge for the past two years. If Leonard did leave, Edith knew that she would miss him. But she also knew that tonight, maybe, just maybe, she had saved his life a second time.

  McCoy stood in a line of nondescript men at the 21st Street Mission, waiting his turn to step up to the counter and claim a bowl of soup. He felt out of place and anxious, as though he did not belong there and risked a great deal simply by his presence. He looked around and saw that the tables and chairs in the main room of the mission had gone; so too had the walls, though the floor continued on for as far as he could see. Curious how the story above could remain in place, he lifted his gaze upward and saw not bare bulbs hanging down from a dingy ceiling, but a cold expanse of stars.

  I’m dreaming, he thought, and he realized that it didn’t matter.

  “We’re on Earth,” said the man directly in front of him. “At least I think the constellations look right.”

  McCoy peered down from the sky and recognized the figure from the time of his arrival in the past, the shabby little man who’d stolen his phaser and accidentally dematerialized himself. Dematerialized himself, changed history, and destroyed the future. “What are you doing here?” McCoy asked him.

  “You’re right, fella,” the little man said, looking down at his ragged, untidy clothing. The others in line wore well-kept, finely tailored suits, as did McCoy himself. “I don’t belong here,” the little man said, and he slipped from the line and scuttled away. McCoy turned and watched as he quickly faded into darkness.

  “McCoy?” a voice asked, and he looked back to see that he’d advanced to the head of the line. On the other side of the counter, in the mission’s kitchen, an older woman McCoy did not recognize peered down at a bundle of papers.

  “Yes,” he said tentatively. “I’m McCoy.”

  “Leonard H. McCoy?” the woman asked. She had curly white hair and wore eyeglasses.

  “Yes,” he said again.

  The old woman shuffled through the documents in front of her. “You want to go home, and you want to renew your medical license, is that correct?” she asked.

  “It is,” McCoy said, his spirit buoyed by the possibility of returning home to practice medicine again.

  The woman continued searching through the papers, which multiplied before her, filling the counter. “Do we have your qualifications?” she wanted to know.

  “I am chief medical officer aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise,” he said. “I have board certification from Starfleet Medical and the United Earth College of Surgeons. I attended medical school at the University of Mississippi—”

  “When?” the old woman demanded, glaring up at him. Stacks of papers overflowed the counter and fell onto the floor. “When did all of this happen?”

  He had graduated from the School of Medicine at Ole Miss in 2253, had become board certified by the UECS after years of internship and residency, had joined Starfleet still later, but he didn’t want to reveal any of that. Not here, not now. “It was a long time ago,” he prevaricated, citing his subjective experiences, rather than objective dates.

  The old woman continued hunting through the masses of paper all around her, until at last she removed one sheet from the stacks and studied it. “Leonard H. McCoy,” she read. “Graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine in—” She abruptly stopped speaking and looked up at him. “This is three hundred years in the future!” she cried, turning the certificate around and displaying it to him.

  McCoy could only gape at her in silence, lost for a response. To his dismay, the old woman returned to pawing through the whirlpool of documents now spinning about her. She pulled out another piece of paper and read it. “Leonard H. McCoy, college diploma,” she said, again holding it up for him to see. “Three hundred years from now.” Then she extracted another, and exclaimed, “Acceptance into Starfleet, three hundred years from now.” She found another sheet, and another, and another. “Commendation into the Starfleet Legion of Honor, Award of Valor from Starfleet Surgeons, Citation by Captain James T. Kirk for Distinguished Service.” Paper began to rain down on the woman, and she plucked one after another from the air, identifying them: “Birth certificate, marriage license, divorce decree.” She looked up at him, her horrified glare an unqualified accusation, which she then once more put into words: “All three centuries in the future!”

  “I…I’m sorry,” McCoy said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “To kill us all!” she raved. She suddenly brought her hands together, crushing the document she held into a twisted ball. Then she cocked her arm back and hurled it at him.

  McCoy flinched as the balled-up piece of paper struck him in the front of his right shoulder, which flared in pain. He glanced down to see a patch of blood spreading across not his suit jacket, but his blue Starfleet uniform shirt. He gazed at the old woman in shock and saw her compacting another sheet. “Don’t,” he said. “Please.” But she brought her arm back again and fired the misshapen paper sphere at him. It flew toward his face, but he raised his arm and deflected it. His wrist burned with pain, and wh
en he examined it, he saw blood seeping from a newly opened wound.

  “Murderer!” the old woman screeched at him. “Assassin!” She pressed more documents into projectiles, casting them all at him. Each struck him with great force, blasting holes in his flesh.

  “Stop it!” McCoy yelled, holding his hands and arms up before him in defense.

  “Shields up,” a voice ordered from somewhere behind him, and McCoy looked around to see Jim standing beside the captain’s chair on the Enterprise bridge. “Arm photon torpedoes,” he said.

  “Photon torpedoes locked on,” reported Lieutenant DePaul at the navigator’s station.

  McCoy whirled around to see the main viewscreen. On it, the old woman stood behind the counter in the mission. She’d stopped heaving paper missiles and now stood there motionless. Tears streamed from beneath her eyeglasses and down her face, leaving behind watery trails. “No, don’t,” McCoy said. He turned and ran to the front edge of the combined helm and navigation console, leaned on it, and looked over at the captain. “Jim,” he told his friend, “they’re all innocent down there. They didn’t do anything. It was all my fault.”

  But Captain Kirk didn’t even seem to hear him. Instead, Jim addressed the helm officer. “Mister Sulu,” he said, “fire photon torpedoes.”

  “No!” McCoy called out, but too late. Sulu worked the controls on his panel, and the mechanical rush of a torpedo launch filled the bridge. McCoy turned back to the main viewer in time to see the image flare red, the mission rocked by an explosion. Flames erupted all around the old woman, and she screamed in agony.

  Behind McCoy, Sulu continued to fire. Again and again, the rush of the torpedo discharge sounded. On the viewscreen, the weapons found their mark, setting the volumes of paper ablaze. The old woman shrieked.

  And still Sulu worked his controls. Firing and firing and firing. Again and again and again. The rhythmic sound repeated incessantly, until McCoy thought he could bear it no longer, and finally the terrible cadence drove him to—

  Wake up, he thought, and his eyelids opened in murky light. The repetitive beat of the photon torpedoes persisted from his dream, but transformed into something else now, something real, though McCoy could not immediately place the sound or his surroundings. A dusty, earthy smell seeped into his awareness, and his throat felt parched.

  He lay on his side, his head atop a soft object, but the rest of his body on an uncompromisingly rigid surface. As he pushed himself up, his aching muscles punished him for the effort. His head, he saw, had been cushioned by a duffel bag—a cylindrical, sea green carryall that Edith had given him for his travels. Beneath his hands, dry wisps bit into his skin.

  He gazed around, trying to make sense of the shadows, and saw a corner not far from him, a pair of dark walls meeting the floor. Carefully, he pulled himself across the short distance and leaned up against the closer of the two vertical surfaces. It felt hard against his back, with no give to it at all.

  Where am I? he thought, even as the cyclical clack emanating from below brought it all back to him. “The train,” he said in a thin, whispery voice still muted from sleep. Disoriented after waking from such a vivid dream, he tilted his head back and waited for the nagging haze to leave him completely.

  As he sat there, his body rocked back and forth in time with the movement of the boxcar that carried him. In the dimness, other sounds reached him: the wood-on-wood grind of the doors as they shifted in their tracks; the dull thud of the latches that kept those doors closed; the heavy, metallic ring of the couplers that bound the train cars together. Above it all, though, came the relentless throbbing of the wheels moving along the steel rails—a throbbing which, in the terrible fantasy of his slumber, had morphed into the recurring launch of photon torpedoes.

  McCoy attempted to recall his dream—his nightmare—and found that the evanescent images had already begun to fade. He remembered his desire to go back home and be a doctor, and Jim aboard the Enterprise ordering the weapons strike, and the old woman…but no, her face had gone from his mind. Still, the horror he’d felt remained—though it now mixed with relief that the woman behind the counter had not been Edith.

  Despite everything that had happened during the past two years, Edith Keeler had imparted to his time on Earth a warmth, grace, and kindness that had eased his burden beyond measure. It had been difficult last week to say good-bye to her. He’d promised that he would write, that he would let her know where he settled, but he did not intend to honor that pledge. As much as he respected and cared for Edith, he wanted to fade into the past as best he could, unacknowledged and unremembered. Although his desire for anonymity could not prevent the damage he’d already done, he conceived to do no more harm.

  Beneath McCoy, the floor of the boxcar inclined upward, while at the same time, he perceived a decrease in the speed of the train. As it obviously climbed a grade, the pounding pulse of its motion slowed as well and quieted. The wheels whined intermittently against the rails, and in the distance, McCoy heard the low moan of the engine’s whistle. The car bucked once, then a second time, as the long, heavy train fought against gravity.

  Meanwhile, McCoy thought, I’m bucking as I fight against time. Except that he’d ceased actively fighting, hadn’t he? A couple of months ago, Edith had suggested—more than that, had really demanded—that he leave the mission and get on with his life. She hadn’t known his true circumstances, of course, and never would, but still she couldn’t have been more right. Though he’d continued to spend most of his money on placing classified ads in newspapers throughout the world, by that point he had in his heart given up hope that he would ever be rescued and understood that he would spend the rest of his life in this time.

  In some ways, the certainty of that realization had set him free. If, barring illness or injury, he experienced a normal lifespan, he could expect to live another sixty, seventy, eighty years. Despite his guilt for having changed history, he recognized that he had done so not only unintentionally, but unknowingly, his disruption of the timeline the culmination of an improbable sequence of accidents. Now, he had been left with the choice of either surviving here in the past for the remainder of his days, or living those days.

  In the end, thanks to Edith’s intuitive suggestion, McCoy had looked southward, to Atlanta. He had been born and raised within the city, and even through his travels on Earth and in space, he’d thought of the place as home. He’d waited until the spring had matured and the weather had grown warmer, and then at Grand Central Terminal he’d purchased a ticket and boarded a passenger train bound for Philadelphia. Edith had accompanied him to the station, telling him that she felt sad to see him go and that she would miss him, but also giving voice to her delight that he had chosen to make the most of his life. She’d exacted a vow from him to keep in touch with her, and another that he would stay safe. He hadn’t told her that he had little money to pay for his travel beyond Pennsylvania, though he’d still planned to make his way to Atlanta.

  Feeling better now after his dream, his head cleared, McCoy got to his feet, steadying himself against the wall. He stretched and inhaled deeply, then regretted doing so as he began coughing, having breathed in motes of hay. He’d been fortunate to find on this longest leg of his journey a boxcar emptied of cargo, but vestiges of the fodder that must have been loaded aboard at some point still remained. In the scant illumination, McCoy peered down at himself, and saw his clothing littered with the desiccated, yellowish fibers. He patted down his clothing, brushing away as much of the detritus as he could.

  Carefully, with one hand tracing along the wall of the car just in case the train made any sudden movements, McCoy ambled over to one of the wide doors on either side of the center of the compartment. Here and there along the way, light peeked in through narrow gaps between the upright slats that formed the walls. Through a wider opening between the wall and the edge of the door, McCoy saw the green of the countryside by which the train passed. Pushing his fingers through the opening, he
unhitched the latch. Then, setting his feet to maintain his balance, he took hold of the crossbar and heaved the door sliding to the right. It scraped open, and he squinted against the brightness of the morning.

  When his eyes had adjusted, he beheld a lovely vista. The train clung to the side of a gently rising hill and overlooked a wide, verdant valley. Trees and other foliage filled the slope below, a dawn mist hanging among the leaves like an earthbound cloud. Farther into the dale, rich grasslands ranged left and right, split by a sinuous, glistening stream.

  “Hey, buddy, ya mind?” The loud, gruff voice startled McCoy, and he turned swiftly toward its source, toward the far end of the boxcar. The light from outside penetrated only so far in that direction, but he could make out the shape of two legs on the floor, extending out from the darkness. Obviously somebody else had stolen onto the train during the night, after McCoy had.

  “Sorry,” McCoy said, raising his voice to be heard. “I didn’t realize anybody else had gotten on.” He reached for the door and pulled it almost all of the way closed, leaving a slender band of light shining across the middle of the compartment. Bedimmed again, the far end of the car became even more difficult to see. McCoy sensed movement, though, and an instant later a large man lurched into view ahead of him. He fought the urge to shy away from the imposing figure.

  “Where ya headin?” the man asked. He talked slowly and sloppily, and even several steps away, McCoy could smell the sour tang of alcohol on his breath.

  “Atlanta,” McCoy said, uncomfortable divulging any information about himself, but not wanting to take too long to answer. Though barely visible, the man projected an air of menace, and McCoy knew that he would have to take care. In the weeks leading up to his departure from New York, he had spoken with a few of the men who’d passed through the mission from other places, gleaning from them the particulars of how they moved freely about the country. Many had shared with him the practice of “freight hopping,” which he’d ultimately decided to employ himself. Among the many hazards they’d cited in surreptitiously riding the rails—including the railroad police, who they called “bulls,” and boarding and disembarking moving trains—they had emphasized the dangers posed by some fellow travelers, low, angry men with no regard for any but themselves.