“I’m sure you did your best, Lieutenant,” Jim said.
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” McCoy said. “If Spock obeyed orders, the Enterprise is long since gone. If Spock couldn’t obey, the ship’s finished.”
“So are we, it looks like,” David said.
Carol stood up. “Jim,” she said, “I don’t understand. Why did this happen? Who’s responsible for it? Who is Khan?”
“It’s a long story, Carol.”
“We’ve got plenty of time,” David said angrily.
“You and your daddy,” Dr. McCoy said, “can catch each other up on things.”
“Maybe he is my biological father,” David said. “But he sure as hell is not my ‘daddy.’ Jedda’s dead because of him—”
“Because of you, boy!” McCoy snapped. “Because you tried to rush a phaser set on kill. And it isn’t one dead, it’s two, in case you’ve lost count.”
[165] “It’s more than that, Doctor,” Carol said. “In case you’ve lost count. Most of them were our friends. Jim, I think you owe us at least the courtesy of an explanation.”
He looked up, and she could see that he felt as hurt and confused as she did. “I’ll trade you,” he said.
Carol closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re right. Jim, Dr. McCoy ... we may be down here for a while—”
“We may be down here forever,” McCoy said sourly.
“—so can we please call a truce?” Carol asked.
“I just watched an old friend commit suicide!” McCoy said. “I stood by and I let him do it!” He turned away. “You’ll have to forgive—” anger and grief cut through the sarcasm; his voice broke, “—my bad humor. ...”
“Believe me, Doctor, please, I know how you feel.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
When he had composed himself, he returned to the group. They sat in a small circle, and Jim tried to explain.
Carol wished he could give her some reason to hope, but when Jim finished, the implications of Genesis in the hands of Khan Singh left her only despair.
“Is there anything to eat down here?” Jim said suddenly. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starved.”
“How can you think of food at a time like this?” McCoy said.
“What I think is that our first order of business is survival.”
“There’s plenty of food in the Genesis cave,” Carol said absently. She shook her head in surprise at herself—she should have led them all there long ago, instead of staying in these cold and ugly chambers. Everything that had happened had affected her far more than she was willing to admit: the clarity of her thought, and her [166] ability to trust. ... She got up. “There’s enough to last a lifetime, if it comes to that.”
“We thought this was Genesis!” McCoy said.
Carol looked around her at the dark, rough caves piled messily with equipment and records and personal gear. The series of caves had taken the Starfleet corps of engineers ten months in spacesuits to tunnel out: the second stage of Genesis had taken a single day. Carol laughed, but stopped abruptly when she heard her own hysteria.
“This? No, this isn’t Genesis. David—will you show Dr. McCoy and Lieutenant Saavik our idea of food?”
“Mother—there’s a lunatic out there with the torpedo, and you want me to give a guided tour?”
“Yes.”
“But we’ve got to—We can’t just do nothing!”
“Yes, we can,” Jim said. He casually removed a bit of equipment from his belt pouch and unfolded it. It was not until he fitted its lenses in front of his eyes that Carol recognized a pair of reading glasses. One of her professors in graduate school had worn the same things—apparently, as far as Carol had ever been able to tell, to enhance his reputation as an eccentric. Jim Kirk wearing glasses?
He looked at his chronometer, took the glasses off again, and put them away.
“Is there really some food down here?” he said.
David scowled.
“David, please,” Carol said.
He glared at Kirk. “Keep the underlings busy, huh?” He shrugged. “What the hell.” He gestured abruptly to Saavik and McCoy. “Come on.”
Saavik hesitated. “Admiral—?”
“As your teacher Mr. Spock is fond of saying: No event is devoid of possibilities.”
McCoy followed David out of the cavern. Saavik stood gazing at the floor in thought, then abruptly turned and left with them.
[167] Pavel Chekov lay sleeping or unconscious on a pile of blankets.
Jim and Carol were alone.
Carol sat on her heels beside him.
“David’s right, isn’t he? It’s just to keep us busy.”
He raised his head. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Carol Marcus had had twenty years to think about how to answer that question, and she had never decided what the answer should be.
“Jim ... why didn’t you ask?”
He frowned. “What?”
“You’ve known for a long time that I have a son. You know his age, or you could have found out without any trouble. And,” she added with an attempt at humor, “I don’t believe they take you into the Starfleet Academy unless you can count.” The humor fell flat. She did not feel very much like laughing now, anyway. The possibility that Jim Kirk might ask her about David had always existed in her mind; it was one of those possibilities that in the strange and inexplicable way of the human psyche Carol had both dreaded and, on a level she was aware of but never would have admitted to anyone but herself, wished for.
But it had never happened.
“Carol ... I don’t know if you can believe this. I guess there’s no reason why you should. But it never even occurred to me that David might be ours. I didn’t even know you’d had a child till I got back with the Enterprise. And after that I had, I don’t know, some trouble putting any kind of life back together. It was like coming to an alien world that was just similar enough to the one I remembered that every time I ran into something that had changed, I was surprised, and disoriented. ...”
Carol took his hand, cradled his palm, and stroked the backs of his fingers.
“Stop it, Jim. I’m sorry, dammit, I don’t know if I’d even have told you the truth if you had asked. I swore I’d never tell either of you.”
[168] “I don’t understand why.”
“How can you say that? Isn’t it obvious? We weren’t together, and there was no way we were ever going to be! I never had any illusions about it, and to give you your due you never tried to give me any. You have your world, and I have mine. I wanted David in my world.” She let go of Jim’s hand. She had always admired his hands: they were square and strong. “If he’d decided to go chasing through the universe on his own, I’d have accepted it. But I couldn’t have stood having you come along when he was fourteen and say, ‘Well, now that you’ve got him to the age of reason, it’s time for him to come along with his father.’ His father—someone he’d never known except as a stranger staying overnight? Jim, that was the only possibility, and that’s too late to start being a father! Besides, fourteen-year-olds have no business on a starship, anyway.”
He stood up, walked away from her, and pressed his hands and forehead against the wall as if he were trying to soak up the coolness and calmness of the very stone.
“You don’t need to tell me that,” he said. His shoulders were slumped, and she thought he was about to cry. She wanted to hold him; yet she did not want to see him cry.
“David’s a lot like you, you know,” she said, trying to lighten her own mood as much as Jim’s. “There wasn’t much I could do about that. He’s stubborn, and unpredictable—Of course, he’s smarter—that goes without saying. ...” She stopped; this attempt at humor was falling even flatter than the other.
“Dammit,” she said, “does it matter? We’re never going to get out of here.”
> Jim did not respond. He knelt down beside Pavel and felt his pulse. He avoided Carol’s gaze.
“Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said gently.
He sounded remote and sad; Carol tried to feel angry at him, but could not.
“There’s a man who hasn’t seen me for fifteen years [169] who thinks he’s killed me,” Jim said. “You show me a son who’d be glad to finish the job. Our son. My life that could have been, but wasn’t. Carol, I feel old, and worn out, and confused.”
She went to him and stretched out her hand. “Let me show you something. Something that will make you feel young, as young as a new world.”
He glanced at Chekov. Carol was not a medical doctor, but she knew enough about human physiology to be able to see that the young commander was sleeping peacefully.
“He’ll be all right,” she said. “Come on. Come with me.”
He took her hand.
She led him toward Genesis.
Unwillingly Jim followed Carol deeper into the caverns. The overhead light-plates ended, and they proceeded into darkness. Carol slid her free hand along the cave wall to guide them. Jim soon realized that it was not as completely dark as it should have been, underground and without artificial illumination. He could see Carol. The reflected light glinted off her hair.
The light grew brighter. With the sensitivity of someone who spent most of his time in artificial light and beneath alien stars, who valued what little he saw of sunlight, Jim knew, without question, that the glow ahead of him was that of a star very like the Sun.
He glanced at Carol. She smiled, but gave no word of explanation.
Without meaning to, Jim began to walk faster. As the light intensified, as its quality grew clearer and purer, he found himself running.
He plunged from the mouth of the cave and stopped. Carol joined him on the edge of a promontory.
Jim Kirk gasped.
His eyes were still dark-adapted: the light dazzled him. The warm breeze ruffled his hair, and he smelled fresh earth, flowers, a forest. A rivulet tumbled down [170] the cliff just next to him, casting a rainbow mist across his face.
A forest stretched into the distance, filling the shell of the lifeless planetoid that had been Regulus I. It was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, a storybook forest from children’s tales. The gnarled trees showed immense age and mystery. The grass in the meadow at the foot of the cliff was as smooth and soft as green velvet, sprinkled with wildflowers of delicate blue and violent orange. Where the shadow of the forest began, Jim half expected to glimpse a flash of white, a unicorn fleeing his gaze.
He looked at Carol, who leaned against the cliff next to the tunnel entrance, her arms folded. She smiled.
“You did this in a day?” Jim said.
“The matrix forms in a day. The life forms take a little longer. Not much, though.” She grinned. “Now do you believe I can cook?”
He gazed out, fascinated at her world. “How far does it go?”
“All the way around,” she said. “The rotation of the planet gives us some radial acceleration to act in place of gravity, to probably forty-five degrees above and below the equator. I expect things get a little strange out at the poles.” She pointed past the sun. “A stress field keeps the star in place. It’s an extreme variable; twelve hours out of twenty-four, it dims down to give some night. Makes a very pretty moon.”
“Is it all ... this beautiful?”
“I don’t know, Jim. I haven’t exactly had a chance to explore it, and it’s a prototype, after all. Things always happen that you don’t expect. Besides, the whole team worked on the design.” Her tone grew very sad. “Vance drew the map; his section had a note at the far border, way up north, that said ‘here be dragons.’ Nobody ever knew if he was kidding or not. Or—[171] maybe Del did.” Carol’s voice caught; Jim almost could not hear her. “Vance said, once, that it wasn’t worth making something up that was so pretty and safe it was insipid.”
She started to cry. Jim took her in his arms and just held her.
Chapter 8
In the storage bay of Reliant, Khan Singh completed his inspection of the massive Genesis torpedo. He had tapped its instruction program; though the mechanism itself was complex, both the underlying theoretical basis and the device’s operation were absurdly simple.
He patted the sleek flank of the great machine. When he tired of ruling over worlds that existed, he would create new worlds to his own design.
Joachim came into the storage bay and stopped some distance from him.
“Impulse power is restored, my lord,” he said.
“Thank you, Joachim. Now we are more than a match for the poor Enterprise.”
“Yes, my lord.” His tone revealed nothing: no enthusiasm, no glory, not even any fear. Simply nothing.
Khan frowned.
“Joachim, have you slept?”
Joachim flinched, as if Khan had struck him.
“I cannot sleep, my lord.”
“What do you mean?”
Joachim suddenly shivered and turned away.
“I cannot sleep, my lord.”
Khan watched his aide for a moment, shrugged, and strode out of the storage bay. Joachim followed more slowly.
On the bridge, Khan ordered the ship out of orbit. He had calculated carefully to put Regulus I between [173] Reliant and the relative position the Enterprise must keep until it regained power. Foolish of Mr. Spock to transmit the ship’s vulnerability to any who could hear.
Regulus I’s terminator slid past beneath them, and they probed into the actinic light of Regulus.
“Short-range sensors.”
Joachim obeyed. Khan brought the display to the forward viewscreen and frowned. There was Spacelab, broached and empty. Enterprise should have been drifting dead nearby in a matching orbit.
It was nowhere to be found.
“Long-range sensors.”
And still nothing. Khan stood up, his fists clenched.
“Where are they?”
In the Genesis cave, Saavik accompanied Dr. McCoy back into the rock caverns. Pavel Chekov had to be moved to where he could be made more comfortable. David Marcus came along to help. They improvised a litter and carried Chekov out of the caverns.
They made the climb down the cliff with some difficulty, but arrived safely in the meadow below. Dr. McCoy made a bed for his patient, who slept so soundly he barely seemed to breathe.
David Marcus lay down in the grass.
“I knew it would work,” he said. “If only ...” He flung his arm across his eyes.
Saavik watched him curiously, if somewhat surreptitiously. David Marcus, it seemed, dealt with grief a good deal better than she did. In addition, despite his original denial, David had assimilated being introduced to his father with considerable grace.
Saavik doubted she would be able to say the same of herself. It would be an unimaginably dreadful event if anyone ever identified the Vulcan family to which one of her parents had belonged. If that ever happened, if they were somehow forced to acknowledge her, the only way either she or they could survive a meeting [174] with honor and mind intact would be for her to kneel before them and beg their forgiveness for her very existence.
And if she ever encountered the Romulan who had caused her to be born ... Saavik knew well the depths of violence of which she was capable. If she ever met that creature, she would give herself to the madness willingly.
David kept going over and over what had happened on Spacelab. Somehow he should have been able to do something; he should have known, despite Del’s reassurance, that his friends were in a lot more trouble than they could handle.
He was afraid he was about to go crazy.
He decided to pick some fruit from the cornucopia tree in the center of the meadow. He was not the least bit hungry, but at least that would give him something to do.
When he stood up, he felt Saavik’s gaze. He turned around and looked at her; she was staring so hard, or so lost in
thought, that she hardly realized he had noticed what she was doing.
“What are you looking at?” he said belligerently.
She started and blinked. “The admiral’s son,” she said with matter-of-fact directness.
“Don’t you believe it!”
“I do believe it,” she said.
Unfortunately so do I, David thought. If his mother had only been trying to keep Jim Kirk alive, she would hardly have kept up the deception after the fight. It was far too easy to prove parentage beyond any doubt with a simple antigen-scan. If McCoy couldn’t do it with the equipment in his medical pouch, then David could probably jury-rig an analyzer himself from the stuff they’d brought down from Spacelab. It was just because the proof was so easy that he did not see any point to doing the test. It would merely assure him of what he would rather not have known.
[175] He shrugged it off. What difference did it make who his biological father was? Neither the man he had thought it was, who had died before he was born, nor the man his mother said it was, had ever had any part in his life. David could see no reason why that should change.
“What are you looking at?” Lieutenant Saavik said.
David, in his turn, had been staring without realizing it. He had always been fascinated by Vulcans. In fact, the one time he had met Jim Kirk, when he was a kid, he had been much more interested in talking to Kirk’s friend Mr. Spock. David assumed it was the same Mr. Spock whom Saavik had earlier been trying to contact. If David had to be civil to a member of Starfleet, he would a whole lot rather it be a science officer than a starship captain.
Funny he had not noticed before how beautiful Saavik was. Beautiful and exotic. She did not seem as cold as most Vulcans, either.
“I—” He stopped. He felt confused. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
Saavik turned away.
Damn, David thought, I insulted her or hurt her feelings or something. He tried to reopen the conversation.
“I bet I know who I’m looking at,” he said. “Mr. Spock’s daughter, right?”
She spun toward him, her fists clenched at her sides. He flinched back. He thought she was going to belt him. But she straightened up and gradually relaxed her hands.
STAR TREK: TOS #7 - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Page 16
