STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  “Captain,” said Spock in his most formal tone, “I am glad to see you.”

  “Glad!” burst out McCoy, swinging back from the doorway at the sound of the voices. “Glad! Is that all you have to say, you rabbit-eared, fish-blooded ...” Between his own joy and rage he could scarcely splutter.

  Spock said quietly, “It is the literal truth, Doctor. I am glad, for I had despaired of your coming.” He rose to his feet, and moved past Kirk toward the door where McCoy stood, his walk marred by the telltale catch of his limp.

  McCoy’s voice softened. “You big fake.”

  Spock merely raised an eyebrow at him. The gesture was a thoroughly Vulcan one, at odds with this strangely human Spock in Levi’s and boots, the sleeves of his plaid shirt pushed up over the faded longhandles he wore underneath.

  Turning back to Kirk, Spock said, “I presume that, since you have found me, you know what has happened?”

  It was all the reunion, Kirk reflected with an inward wry grin, that they were going to get; for all the emotion Spock showed about it they might have spent the time since they parted in the Wonder Bar indulging in a little shore leave on separate planets, Spock undoubtedly with his nose in a technical manual. But that was Spock—and Kirk’s wrists bore the red marks of that first, convulsive grasp. He said, “About the Klingon attempt to tamper with time-lines? The assassination of Aaron Stemple?”

  Spock nodded.

  “Were you able to prevent it?”

  The Vulcan paused, then said, “Not entirely.” He limped to where McCoy stood beside the half-opened door to the cabin’s inner room. “It is up to you, Doctor, to do that.” He pushed open the door and led the way in.

  McCoy hurried past Spock as he turned up the lamp, Kirk at his heels. The unconscious man on the bed was breathing in slow, painful gasps, his sunken face the dead-white that marks internal bleeding. Gently McCoy removed one of the bandages over his face; standing behind him, Kirk heard him whisper “Good God!” at the sight of the characteristically savage wounds of a Klingon disrupter. Looking back toward the doorway, Kirk saw something he had rarely seen: Spock leaned against the doorjamb from sheer exhaustion.

  The first officer straightened wearily up as Kirk took a step back toward him. “Stemple?” asked Kirk softly, pitching his voice for the Vulcan’s hearing alone.

  Spock nodded tiredly.

  From beside the bed McCoy exclaimed, “My God, Spock, how long have you been keeping him alive?”

  “Three days, four days.” Spock’s voice was a trifle unsteady. “I do not have your medical knowledge, but I thought that if he could be kept alive long enough for the lesions in the lungs to heal ...”

  Kneeling by the bed, McCoy passed a feinberger quickly over Stemple’s chest. “You could never have done it,” he said. “The damage is too extensive. We’ll have to get him up to the ship. How you got him to last this long ...” He looked up, his brows drawn together. “You must have been giving him massive transfusions.” Even as he spoke his hands were busy with hypo and medikit.

  “Everyone has been very helpful,” said Spock. “The Bolt brothers, Captain Clancey, Lottie ... he has blood in his veins from every compatible donor in Seattle. I did not know if it would work. I could only try, and hope.”

  The names were half-familiar to Kirk—property holders in the records, numbers on Trae’s charts. It occurred to him that Spock must know all these people very well, for he had clearly been in the town quite some time. Spock must be at the end of his endurance, he thought, to admit dependence on a townful of frontier humans—to admit to the weakness of not knowing what to do.

  “Hope—for what?”

  Eyes shut with weariness, Spock only shook his head. He had expected to fail in the end; had known that he would fail. And having failed, he would be forever stranded in this place, with the knowledge that he had been unable to prevent whatever evils would now come to pass. Not knowing what else to do, Kirk reached out and laid a hand briefly on the Vulcan’s bony shoulder.

  From the outer door of the cabin came a quick flurry of knocks. A woman’s voice said, “Ishmael?”

  Spock turned, stepping into the brighter light of the parlor as the door opened and a young woman came in. She looked cold and scared, her curly brown hair lank with dampness, her mittened hands stiff where she clutched a cloak about her. Through the narrow door Kirk watched as Spock crossed the room to her, and the captain almost fell over in astonishment when his first officer put a gentle arm around the woman’s shoulders, and drew her to him.

  “He will be all right, Biddy.”

  “Are you sure?” She lifted her face from his chest, looking anxiously up into his eyes. A plain girl, Kirk saw, verging on homely, her nose red and swollen from crying. “Sarah said ...”

  Spock touched her cheek with his fingertips, a gesture as tender and human as Kirk had ever seen his friend make. “He will be well,” he said again. “Trust me.”

  A half smile touched her long mouth. “Well, of course I trust you, Ish. But how ... ?”

  “Biddy,” said Spock, breaking into what threatened to be a spate of questions with what was evidently the skill of long practice, “there are—friends of mine—who are going to take care of Aaron, make him well. Can you wait for three days?”

  “But why ... ?”

  “Can you?”

  After a moment she nodded, trustingly, like a child, and wiped at her reddened eyes with the back of her hand. “Can I see him?”

  “No,” said Spock gently. “That will not be possible. But when you return here three days from now, you will find him well.”

  “If you say so, Ish,” she agreed worriedly. “It’s just that—will you tell me then how it happened?”

  “I fear not.” Spock disengaged her grip from his arms and closed his hands around hers. “I will not be here. I am going away.”

  She stared up at him with stricken eyes. “Oh, no!”

  Watching silently from the dimness of the doorway, Kirk reflected that there was no one in the world Spock had been born into who would speak to him that way—whom he would permit to clutch at his sleeves.

  At his elbow he heard McCoy whisper, “Who is it?”

  “He called her Biddy,” murmured Kirk in reply. “Stemple’s wife was listed as an Elizabeth, wasn’t she?”

  “But you can’t go!” she was protesting. “I mean—who’ll do the accounting at the mill? Who’ll take care of Aaron?”

  “You shall have to.”

  She lowered her head, her cheeks suddenly pink. “Of course,” she murmured. Then, “Ish—what happened to Aaron—it didn’t have anything to do with—-with that bet, did it? The one he had with Jason Bolt?”

  Spock’s voice hardened slightly. “No. That was over.”

  She faltered, “I—I know it had something to do with me—with all of us getting spoken for by the end of the year. I mean, that was the whole idea, to get everybody married. I know they had a lot at stake. ...”

  “The bet was over,” repeated Spock quietly. “Do you know what the stake was?”

  She shook her head, her cheeks coloring with shame now.

  “Bridal Veil Mountain. I believe Jason would have asked you to marry him at the dance, had Aaron not prevented him by asking you first. Aaron knew what he was doing, Biddy—but he would rather have given up all further chance to own Bridal Veil Mountain, before he would see you married to another man. I think that you should know that.”

  “Oh,” said Biddy softly. An unexpected tear slid down her sallow cheek. “Oh, dear—oh, poor Aaron. That must have been so difficult for him—I mean, he hates to pass up a chance to make money,” she added, with tactless frankness. “Oh, no wonder poor Jason looked so unhappy when I turned him down. ...”

  “You turned him down?” Spock’s eyebrow went up, and he reflected how much he—and everyone else, for that matter—had underestimated this woman.

  “Well, of course. I love Aaron. I’ve always loved Aaron. He’s comfortable
to be with, even if he is grumpy—and he’s only grumpy because everyone’s gotten so used to thinking of him as a villain that he’s too proud to change. And—well, I remembered what you said to me once, about closing the door to something important—and anyway I knew I loved Aaron. I would have waited.”

  Spock almost smiled. “But he did not know that.”

  “No,” said Biddy, with a sidelong glance that made her look almost minxish. “And he never will.”

  “Take care of him, Biddy.”

  “Now, that’s silly,” she murmured, blushing again. “You know I could never do anything else.”

  With a touch she found surprisingly light for a man whose hands were so strong, he brushed the hair back from her forehead, and kissed her lightly on the brow. Hidden by the darkness, Kirk was aware of McCoy standing at his elbow, trying not to die of shock.

  Impulsively Biddy threw her arms around Spock, hugging him close. “Oh, Ish,” she said, “I’ll miss you.” Then she turned as if embarrassed by this expression of affection, for Aaron and for his nephew, and hurried through the outer door and into the night again.

  When he turned back, only Kirk stood in the shadows of the bedroom door. McCoy’s voice could be heard beyond, quietly signaling the Enterprise to beam four aboard.

  Chapter 19

  THE FIRST THING of which Stemple was aware as he surfaced slowly from the black deep of unconsciousness was Ishmael’s voice. The words made no sense, but the voice itself was clear—that dry, uninflected tone he used when discussing mathematics or logic. His “alien” voice, Stemple thought—only he had grown so used to it in the last four months that he had simply accepted it as part of Ish.

  He was saying, “Tillman’s Factor, combined with the gravitational fields of the Tau Eridani Cloud and the wandering dwarf star, would create a gravitational vector which would in turn cause a temporary time-slip if a ship of sufficient mass were accelerated through it at high warp speeds. An extremely rare phenomenon, and one that I doubt the Klingons would utilize again, even if it recurred, given the null, and possibly deleterious, results of the experiment.”

  So that was it—the content that had formed Ishmael’s speech patterns.

  Nothing, thought Stemple, that anyone would have guessed.

  It came to him then that Ish had found his memory. Another voice with a slight Southern accent said, “Hoist on their own petard.”

  “Precisely, Doctor.”

  Southern accent? thought Stemple groggily, recognizing by the sweet fog in his senses that he was heavily drugged. Quoting Shakespeare? There were no Southerners in Seattle, no one to whom Ish would speak so in any case.

  Another voice, lighter, still speaking English. A quiet voice, the voice of a friend, “We—missed you, Spock. We thought we’d lost you.”

  And Ishmael’s again, “I admit to doubts in that direction myself.”

  An impression of light, of shapes in the fog, as Stemple tried to open his eyes. Three men in a lighted doorway, shapes that slowly cleared and focused.

  Stemple knew then that Ishmael had not only found his memory—he had found his friends. This was Ishmael’s world he was in, not his own.

  No wonder, he thought hazily, that Ish had recognized nothing in the wild green beauty of the northern woods. This world was one of clean hard lines, of alien shapes and materials, of things he had never seen before and could put no name to. He remembered the fog lifting from San Francisco Bay, and Ishmael saying I can see rooms ... see inside the walls, even know the tiniest wire and microcircuit ... but it all means nothing. But it had meant something after all.

  Ishmael himself stood in the doorway, hands clasped lightly behind his back in a familiar pose. A gold emblem gleamed dully on the breast of the blue uniform he wore. His hair, cut short now as it had been when Stemple had first found him, revealed the long alien curve of his ears and the strange cant of his brows. He had become, Stemple realized, almost entirely human there toward the end. Now that was gone.

  But the men with him ...

  The men with him might have stepped off Clancey’s mailboat, any day of the week. They were as human as the Bolt brothers. The younger of the two reminded him indefinably of Jason Bolt—had that same air of command, of being king-wolf of the pack.

  It was he who spoke. “How did you escape?”

  Ish—whose true name was evidently Spock—replied, “I have no recollection at all of leaving the Klingon vessel, Captain. I remember my—interview—with the Klingon captain up to a point, but past that point I can only conjecture. Since the Klingon transport was a jury-rigged ship they had two auxiliary-systems failures while I was aboard before my capture.”

  “That would have been the gravitational stresses of going through the time warp,” said the man he had addressed as Captain. “We had a secondary-systems outage ourselves. Nothing serious—doors and lights.”

  “Indeed. I can only presume that the cell in which I was kept pending disposal had a lock which was linked to such a system. If the ship were not a proper battle cruiser they would not have had a special brig with independent door circuits. A third power failure would have enabled me to escape and make my way to the transporter room. But as I said, I do not remember anything between the Mind-Sifter, and waking up in Aaron’s cabin.”

  “No bloody wonder,” grunted the Southerner, a spare, middle-aged man in some kind of blue uniform. “You were probably running on autopilot at that point—autopilot and sheer cussedness.”

  “ ‘Cussedness,’ Doctor, is not a logical ...”

  “No,” said the doctor, “and that’s my point. Logically, there wasn’t a single way you could thwart the Klingons. Not in the shape you were in. But you were being human.”

  An eyebrow went up. “Humans are, indeed, noted for their illogical stubbornness.”

  “And without human illogical stubbornness, Mr. Spock, you would have been one dead Vulcan.”

  “But without Vulcan physical and psychic stamina, Dr. McCoy, you must admit that I would have been an equally dead human.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the captain, raising his hands. “It doesn’t matter—why—you did what you did, Spock. Only, you did succeed.”

  Ishmael—Spock—inclined his head. “Thank you, Captain.”

  After a moment the doctor added, a little truculently, “When this is all over and we’re back on the other side of the time warp, come on down to sick bay and I’ll fix that knee of yours. Do you remember how that happened?”

  “Negative, Doctor. Since Klingons traditionally go armed with bladed weapons I presume that I encountered at least one between my cell and the transport chamber.”

  Someone called from outside, “Dr. McCoy?” The doctor glanced over his shoulder, excused himself and left. Ishmael—Spock—and the captain stood in silence for a time, the relaxed silence of old friends.

  When the captain spoke his words made no sense to Stemple, unclear as they were through the dreamy fog of the drugs. “That explains it.” He was talking half to himself, and Ish lifted one of those long eyebrows at him questioningly.

  “It explains why he was so convinced of the possibility of alien interference in Earth’s affairs. Why he was so sure that extraterrestrials could pass for human. Thanks to the Klingons, he was the only person on Earth with prior experience with extraterrestrial infiltration of society.”

  “Not the only person,” said Ish consideringly. “But the only person at that time who could have been elected into the government. There were at least two others who knew—and I suspect that their support proved invaluable to him later on. The Karsids would have succeeded in their conquest of Earth simply because no one would question them until it was too late—and in such cases, ‘too late’ can be measured in months; weeks, sometimes. But in attempting to prevent that question from being asked, the Klingons planted the seeds of suspicion that was the Karsids’—and their own—undoing. Had they let well enough alone, they would have accomplished their goal. How long did it t
ake you to find out what they were doing?”

  “A little under a week. We had to extrapolate from Khlaru’s original research—and Khlaru, it appears, succeeded in defecting from the Klingon Empire on his way back to the home planet after all. We received word of it just before we left orbit.”

  The eyebrow again. “Interesting. And it appears that you emerged from the time-slip at a different point than did the Klingons.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Four months. The Klingon hunters missed him the first time through Seattle, owing largely to chance. It took them almost that long to locate him.”

  “And you were with him all that time?”

  “I was passed off as his nephew. I worked as accountant at the mill.”

  The captain nodded approvingly. “Good position. How much did you tell him?”

  There was a long silence, Ishmael lost in his own thoughts. At length he said, “Nothing. I—I did not myself know why I was there. When I came to, on Earth, I had no memory. I remembered nothing of the mission, the Klingons, this. ...” His small gesture took in the place where they were, wherever or whatever it was; that windowless, shadowy room with the faint sound of throbbing indefinably in the air. “I recalled neither my name nor my past. I only knew that I was an alien, and alone.”

  The captain was even longer silent, shocked and dismayed with the hurt of his friend. “They did that to you?”

  “I did it to myself. It was the only way to block the Mind-Sifter. At the power levels they were using I could never have withstood it for an extended period of time. My only recourse was to self-induced amnesia and catatonia.” A pause, before he went on in a neutral voice, “I think it just as well that I do not recall either the rest of the interview, or the circumstances of my escape.”