Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  Inside the chamber, the atmosphere felt hot and charged, as though the air had become electrified. Spock crossed to a bulkhead-mounted display and examined the injector configuration shown there. As he saw that one of the intake manifolds had automatically shut down, he became peripherally aware of Mr. Scott and Dr. McCoy yelling for him to vacate the chamber. He ignored them as he did the danger of his surroundings, instead reaching for the manual override and throwing it to a full open position. He checked the readout again and saw the manifold begin to function.

  “Engine room,” he heard Admiral Kirk call over the intercom. “What’s happening?”

  Spock sped to an adjacent control panel, located the switch for the injector assembly, and touched a button to unlock it. A tingling suffused his exposed flesh and then shifted to a throbbing pressure, as though the cytoplasm in the cells of his skin had begun to boil from within. As with the cries of Dr. McCoy and Mr. Scott, he ignored the sensation.

  Crossing to the injector assembly in the center of the chamber, Spock pulled off its large protective cap. Jets of pressurized gas shot upward, obscuring the opening of the assembly. With time running out, Spock reached inside, his hands at least minimally protected by the engineering gloves. He searched for the injector with his fingers, found it, and took hold. He struggled to reset it in its cradle but did not have enough leverage. For a moment, he staggered back, then pushed himself forward again, over the assembly this time, his face now fully in the stream of escaping gas. His flesh felt like it was melting.

  His hand came loose again, sending him backward a step, and again he battled his way forward, back to the assembly. He reached in again, wrapped his hand around the injector, and tried to heave it back into place.

  It seemed frozen, moving not even slightly.

  Keenly aware of the seconds passing and knowing that he would also have to reseat the assembly’s protective cap before the injector would function again, Spock concentrated as much as he ever had. With every thought focused on his hand, he willed every scrap of strength he possessed into fighting this one piece of machinery.

  Twenty seconds.

  In his grip, the injector shifted, moving less than a centimeter. Spock pushed himself, and the component all at once shunted back into place. He bent down for the cap and lifted it with difficulty, his strength seeming to vanish. He set it atop the assembly, then pushed it back into place.

  Ten seconds.

  Spock fell backward, his back slamming against the control panel in the bulkhead. He barely felt the impact, the sense of his flesh catching fire overpowering the rest of his physical awareness of self. He tried to open his eyes and realized that they already were open; he could no longer see.

  Did it work? he wanted to know, and then, at his elbow, there came a familiar vibration, somehow making itself known through the pain. The Enterprise at warp.

  As he leaned heavily on the bulkhead, Spock turned toward the hard surface, then pushed himself away from it, trying to stand up straight. He immediately lost his balance, lurching to his left and collapsing to the deck. He reached down and attempted again to push himself up, but all his strength had gone.

  It didn’t matter. As he let his upper body fall forward into the bulkhead, he knew that he had served the needs of the many. It is logical, he thought.

  Then Spock waited to die.

  The dusk had claimed its prize, the Vulcan sun swallowed by the horizon. Atop the circular, flattened peak that rose alongside Mount Seleya and connected to it via a stone bridge, the misty air, thin and cool to begin with, had now grown colder still. The fires burning on bronze plates, mounted on two pairs of widely spaced pedestals along the central walkway, provided no warmth. A chill shook McCoy as he listened to the Vulcan high priestess, T’Lar, in preparation for the fal-tor-pan, the re-fusion, ask who the keeper of Spock’s katra was.

  “I am,” he answered, and then he identified himself in a way similar to how the high priestess had just distinguished Sarek. “McCoy, Leonard H., son of David.” He felt loss and remorse at the mention of his father, but pushed the emotions away, knowing that he needed to stay present in the moment, if not for his own sake, then for Spock’s.

  “McCoy, son of David,” the elderly T’Lar said, “since thou art human, we cannot expect thee to understand fully what Sarek has requested.” McCoy saw Spock’s father listening along with the other Vulcan attendants and the rest of the Enterprise’s officers—Jim, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and Saavik—as the high priestess spoke. Dressed in red vestments and a sleeveless surplice, she stood on a large, raised platform at the edge of the peak. A brace of tall spires rose behind her and surrounded a sculpture of a curving Vulcan symbol. Two other elders, stoic and motionless, held ornamental staffs upright at the rear of the platform, and two groups of women clad in gauzy white gowns formed lines down along the steps. Spock, his body reconstituted by the genesis wave and recovered by his friends, lay on one of a pair of pallets on either side of T’Lar. “Spock’s body lives,” the priestess said. “With your approval, we shall use our powers to return to his body that which you possess. But, McCoy, you must now be warned: the danger to thyself is as grave as the danger to Spock. You must make the choice.”

  McCoy didn’t have to think about his decision. “I choose the danger,” he said. In the days following Spock’s apparent death, McCoy had been tormented by nightmares very different than those to which he had long become accustomed. He had believed that he might be losing his mind—as had Starfleet Command—until Sarek had visited Jim and the two had determined what Spock had done. It seemed impossible that McCoy essentially carried both his mind and Spock’s in his head, but it also provided an explanation, however incredible, for the way he felt. Even without the possibility of “re-fusing” Spock’s mind to his body, McCoy would have wanted to purge himself of the foreign presence within his brain, no matter the danger to himself. “Hell of a time to ask,” he said quietly to Jim.

  Sarek motioned him forward. After glancing at Jim, McCoy walked toward the platform, where a pair of women met him at the base of the steps and escorted him upward, then past the high priestess. He lay down on the second pallet, faceup, and then several of the women pushed it forward, positioning it beside T’Lar, on the opposite side of her from Spock’s supine form.

  McCoy suddenly felt fear, as well as the urge to leap up off the pallet and flee. Instead, he took a deep breath and waited. Standing beside the head of his pallet, T’Lar spoke in Vulcan to those assembled: “Ben…vahl…nahvoon.” Her husky voice echoed in the twilight, and one of the attendants below the platform struck a gong.

  Slowly, T’Lar raised her left hand and placed it on McCoy’s forehead. At once, he sensed a kinetic energy forming about him…and through him. He could no longer keep his eyes open, and as his lids shut, he became aware of another presence reaching out to him…searching past his mind…and then through it. McCoy resisted, not wanting to oppose the high priestess, but from an involuntary reaction of self-preservation. Through T’Lar’s connection with him, she bade him to lower his defenses, not for her, but for Spock.

  McCoy focused his thoughts and then let them go. The dual nature of his mind…his minds…their minds…crippled him. He could no longer think, and he could no longer let go. His psyche drifted, and with it, Spock’s. And then he sensed—

  A tangle of images and sounds, tastes and scents and textures, of which he could not make the slightest sense. He felt lost…and yet not alone…alive…and yet unformed. He floated through the void, vulnerable and ready, a canvas upon which the universe could throw its infinitude of colors, an ether through which the universe could hurl its bounty of notes. He was nothing, waiting to be everything…or anything.

  And then remembrance broke like a wave on the shores of time, bringing forth from the deep a clarity of perception. Darkness rose in the void, distinguishable from it. And then orange flickers of flame broke through the night, casting uneasy shadows on stone walls. A face, unrec
ognizable, loomed up, exotic, dark, with high cheekbones and delicate, pointed ears. Clamor followed, sputtering wails, deafening within his head, and without, echoing against the cave walls.

  Cave walls? A face? Flame?

  This, then, was not memory, not mere memory, but knowledge too, interpretation layered upon simple perception. Recording events by awareness alone, and later translating that into something meaningful. Today’s knowledge filling in the outlines of yesterday’s uninformed recall.

  So cold. Even the fires in the close quarters of the cave could not match the confining heat of the amniotic fluid. Cold flesh borne up by cold hands, lifting, lifting. Height bringing the instinctive fear of falling as he was carried through the stale air. The understanding of gravity would come later, but with or without hindsight and decipherment, the dread of gravity came now.

  Sounds not his own made themselves known: Buh-buh, buh buh. Nonsense, noises only, recorded and recalled without understanding. But now, in retrospection: “Sarek, your son.”

  Spock! Born of Amanda, born of Sarek, now, in this unforgotten moment. The joy of parenthood, the logic of procreation. Except: Buh buh-buh.

  Sarek, in the first moments after the birth of his son: “So human.”

  In the depths of wherever he had fallen, McCoy’s heart broke.

  And broke again as he emerged into the world himself. He could not possibly remember this…could he? Had it been implanted in an inaccessible portion of his memory, somehow now released? Or did he look back and draw himself a picture of what he’d pieced together over the years, of what he’d learned, of what he’d imagined?

  At first, he did not recognize his mother, her features distorted by pain. He saw her in sweeps of vision only as he was raised up, but he kept the image of her in his mind. Later, he would see—had seen—holos of her, and now he evoked those likenesses of her, replacing her twisted aspect with one of tranquility: her soft, rounded face, her rosy complexion beneath dark, coppery hair, and in those captured moments, always—always—smiling.

  But not then. Then, perspiration coated her face and matted her hair. A sound not very human leaped from between her teeth, clenched in a rictus of obvious agony. Her hands clutched and clawed desperately at the red sheets, fighting to deliver, fighting whatever had gone wrong, fighting herself. Her red gown—

  Red? Red gown, red sheets? Red everywhere. On her, on him, on the bed, on the floor. Not by design, but by—

  Blood.

  And below her screams, he heard a rattle deep within himself. He could not breathe, though he tried, his lungs aching, his eyes wide in a natural panic. Meconium aspiration, he guessed now, looking back, with knowledge that would not come for years. But the diagnosis didn’t matter, hadn’t mattered; he would survive—had survived—but his mother—

  His mother had not.

  What had it been? Disseminated intravascular coagulopathy, leading to insufficient perfusion of vital organs? Had she suffered some undetected infection, or had her uterus failed to contract? Had he been born suddenly, unexpectedly?

  His father had never told him, had never spoken of that day, though it remained ever present anyway. The holos McCoy had eventually seen had been hidden away by his father, and McCoy hadn’t been sure they even existed until he’d searched for them in his teens and had finally found the portraits of the mother he had never known. He hadn’t remembered seeing his mother on the day he’d been born—did he really remember that now?—but though it had been hard, he’d liked seeing her in the holos, seeing her safe and in no danger—

  “The ship…out of danger?” Spock asked. Spock’s memory, but fractured, seen through McCoy’s eyes, and also sensed, like the memory of a dream, through some tenuous connection with his dying self.

  “Yes,” Admiral Kirk said.

  Spock saw his own mottled skin, the flesh sagging from his face, and somewhere far away felt the echo of the pain, of the searing of his cells. “Don’t grieve, Admiral,” he said, his voice low and harsh, the words rasping in his injured throat. He had already wounded the admiral—Jim—and did not wish to do so again, though that seemed unavoidable. “It is logical,” he avowed. “The needs of the many outweigh…” He watched himself wince, and in a distant corner of telepathic linkage, felt the throbbing ache.

  “The needs of the few,” Jim said.

  Spock nodded. “Or the one,” he added. “I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution?”

  “Spock…” Jim said, the depth of his anguish plain.

  Spock slid down the transparent bulkhead of the containment chamber, and on the other side, Jim followed him down. “I…I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” Removing one glove, lifting his hand to place it flat against the clear partition, fingers splayed in the traditional Vulcan salutation. “Live long and prosper,” he said, as he did neither. He slumped, and saw—

  Death coming for him in the distance. An armored knight on horseback, charging across the glade. “These things cannot be real,” he’d told Tonia. “Hallucinations can’t harm us.” He faced his imaginary attacker, stood his ground as the unreal knight galloped toward him with lance held at the ready. He felt certain of his action, did not believe he would be harmed, until—

  The weapon entered his chest. He cried out, astonished, as he fell backward, the pain of the steel entering his body like nothing he’d ever felt. He saw his own blood gush from the wound, splattering the brown leather jacket of his attacker. The man pulled the weapon free, his eyes wide open in their hatred, his face a mask of frightened zealotry. He brought the weapon down again, slicing between McCoy’s ribs and into his heart. He heard a woman scream, and knew that he was dying—

  I-Chaya dying, more quickly now, released from the slow agony that the le-matya’s poisoned claws had inflicted on him—

  McCoy’s father dying, more quickly now, released from the slow agony that the disease had inflicted on him—

  The photon-torpedo shell, containing a corpse, ready to be fired into space as the mourners looked on in the torpedo room aboard the Enterprise—

  The wooden casket, containing a corpse, ready to buried in the ground as the mourners looked on in the cemetery in the small town—

  The Vulcan children taunting Spock because of their revulsion for emotion, and because of Spock’s human heritage—

  McCoy’s father sending him out into the cotton fields because of David McCoy’s dislike for technology, and because of Leonard’s reliance on it—

  Spock kissing Leila—

  McCoy kissing Jocelyn—

  Spock studying at the Vulcan Science Academy—

  McCoy studying at the University of Mississippi School of Medicine—

  Spock firing his phaser at the silicon creature—

  McCoy firing his phaser at the salt-dependent creature—

  Spock leaping through the Guardian of Forever—

  McCoy leaping through the Guardian of Forever—

  Spock falling—

  McCoy falling—

  And Spock clinging to life—

  And McCoy clinging to life—

  And Spock—

  And McCoy—

  Awoke. The whirlwind of thoughts and emotions, recollections and perceptions, seemed to have lasted lifetimes—his own and Spock’s. And yet he knew that even as time had sped past in his mind—in their minds—it had stood still in the real world. A second had passed, perhaps two.

  But when McCoy opened his eyes, the fading Vulcan evening had gone, and so too had the night that followed. Dawn rose around him, the yellow-red glow of the sky a harbinger of the new day. Above him, T’Lar peered down, and he marveled that the old woman had stood there through the night, connecting him to Spock.

  He and T’Lar regarded each other, and McCoy nodded. She nodded back, then raised her arms, clearly entreating him to rise. For a moment, he didn’t think he could, didn’t believe that his mind possessed the capacity to initiate voluntary muscle mo
vement. But then his back came up off the pallet and he lifted himself into a sitting position. Across from him, past T’Lar, Spock had already stood up, and attendants worked to attire him in a hooded white robe.

  McCoy felt a touch at his arm, and he looked to his right to see Sarek standing there. “Is he…?” McCoy said, his lips dry, his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth. He discovered that he didn’t need to finish the question; he already knew about Spock. Sarek responded anyway.

  “Only time will answer,” he said quietly.

  McCoy knew him to be wrong, knew that Spock’s presence had left him, and he had no doubt that it had been returned to its proper place. He had somehow perceived the transfer as it had happened. It might take time, he thought, but Spock would be Spock.

  Behind Sarek, four red-robed attendants carried a palanquin forward. They lowered it so that T’Lar could take her seat, then lifted the antiquated conveyance and bore her from the platform. Sarek gestured forward, and McCoy walked side by side with him down the steps.

  McCoy’s friends waited there. Jim stepped forward, and McCoy stopped before him. “I’m all right, Jim,” he declared. He wanted to say more, but couldn’t. They would see. They would all see.

  McCoy joined his friends and waited for Spock.

  Forty-Four

  1948

  A blast of sweltering air struck Lynn as she pushed through the revolving door and out into the night. At once, she felt the tracks of her tears drying on her skin. She reached up to her face anyway, wiping below her eyes. Emotionally drained, she breathed in deeply, then exhaled slowly.

  Stepping off to the side, away from the door, Lynn waited. This late in the year, into autumn, the temperature should have leveled off in the sixties, but today had reached twenty degrees higher than that. Right now, even with the sun down, it didn’t feel much cooler than it had this afternoon.

  Leonard emerged from inside through the revolving door, glanced around until he spotted her, then walked over. He appeared stricken, she saw, his features pale and set in a serious expression. “Are you all right?” he asked.