Spock Must Die sttos(n-1

by Джеймс Блиш

  “Hmm. Yes — personally it would be highly unpleasant. Your pardon, Mr. Spock. I just hadn’t had enough time to ponder that aspect of it.”

  “I quite understand. But there is a second derivative. It would be positively dangerous to the ship. I am not speaking now of the confusion which it would produce, though that would be bad enough in itself, but of the effect upon the efficiency of the first officer. While I shall learn to endure the situation if you so order — even should I wind up as a yeoman — whichever of us remains first officer would be operating under continual personal stress about which he could do nothing at all. Suppose, for instance, it occurs to him that the demoted Spock is conspiring to replace him? Or consider, Captain, the position in which you would find yourself, should the demoted Spock suddenly charge that he is one you retained as first officer, and that the other man has slipped into his place unobserved? Such an exchange, or a series of them, might well evolve simply from a sense of duty on the part of each man.”

  Kirk whistled. “Now that would demoralize everybody, including me, even under peacetime conditions. You’re right, I don’t see how we dare risk it. But what would you suggest we do instead?”

  “You have no choice, Captain. You must destroy one of us.”

  Kirk stared at him for a long minute. At last he said, “Even if it turns out to be you?”

  “Even,” Spock Two said levelly, “if it is I.”

  There was an even longer silence, while Kirk thought about the emotional consequences to himself of such a course. It did not make pleasant thinking. But what were the alternatives? The case Spock Two had offered seemed airtight.

  “I may in fact do that,” Kirk said finally. “But only if we can work out some foolproof way of determining which of you is the original. In the meantime, please, go directly to the bridge, remain there for ten minutes precisely, and then retire to your quarters until further notice.”

  His expression shuttered, Spock Two nodded once and left. The moment the door closed behind him, Kirk opened the intercom and called Spock’s quarters. “Kirk calling Mr. Spock One.”

  “Here, Captain.”

  “Please report directly to my quarters at once.”

  When Spock One entered, Kirk realized with a shock just how grave the identity problem actually was. Had Spock Two, after closing the door, simply walked down the corridor until he was out of sight from Kirk’s quarters, then turned around and come back at a leisurely pace and announced himself as Spock One, there would have been no immediate way for Kirk to have known that it had happened. And, now that Kirk came to think of it…

  “Sit down, Mr. Spock. Kirk to the bridge!”

  “Uhura here, Captain.”

  “Is Mr. Spock there?”

  Spock One raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

  “No, Captain, it’s not his watch. As a matter of fact he did drop in for about five minutes, but he just left. You might try his quarters — or shall I page him for you?”

  “No thanks, Lieutenant, nothing urgent. Kirk out.”

  One minor crisis averted — or had it been? He had told Spock Two to stay on the bridge for ten minutes, but Uhura said he had left after five. No, that probably meant nothing; people who are busy seldom notice how long spectators are around, and almost never know, or care, how long ago they left. Scratch that — but there would be hundreds of other such cruxes. Uhura, for instance, like almost all the rest of the crew, did not even know yet what had happened in the Transporter room.

  “Mr. Spock, beginning now, I want you to wear some identifying mark, and see to it that it’s unique and never leaves your person.”

  “Then you had better invent it, Captain. Anything that I might choose might also occur to the replicate. And perhaps it should also be unobtrusive, at least for the time being.”

  That made sense; Spock One did not want to confuse the more than four hundred and thirty members of the crew with two First Officers until such confusion could no longer be avoided. Neither did Kirk, though he was painfully aware that concealing the problem might equally well compound it.

  Kirk drew off his class ring and passed it over. “Use that — and give me your own Command Academy ring. Your, uh, counterpart also has one, of course, but it won’t pass for mine on close inspection. There are no others on this vessel, that I’m sure.”

  “No, Captain, no other officer on the Enterprise ever even stood for Command, as the computer will verify.”

  “I’ll check it. And again, you’re not to regard this exchange as a sign of preference from me — that issue is far from settled. The exchange is for my convenience only.”

  “I quite understand, Captain. A logical precaution.”

  Kirk winced. They both were Spock, right down to characteristic turns of phrase and nuances of attitude.

  “Good. Now let’s get down to the hard rock. I’ve been talking to Spock Two, and we’ve made a certain amount of progress — though not in a direction I like very much. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’d come to very much the same conclusions he did — but on the other hand, the two of you were disagreeing earlier on, so I’d prefer to rehearse what we said. Briefly, it went like this…”

  Spock One listened to the Captain’s account with complete expressionlessness and immobility; but when he was asked for his opinion, Kirk got the next of his many shocks of the day.

  “May I suggest, Captain,” Spock One said, “that it is illogical to expect me to view this line of argument with c-complete equanimity? To begin with, you and I are friends — a fact I have never intentionally exploited in any duty situation, but a fact of long standing nevertheless. To find that you would agree to kill any Spock cannot but distort my judgment.”

  Kirk, too, listened immobile and without expression, but had he been a cat, his ears would have swiveled straight forward on his head. The hesitations in Spock One’s speech were extremely faint indeed, but, for Spock, they were utterly unprecedented; to Kirk the effect was as startling as though his first officer had been positively stuttering with indignation.

  Kirk said carefully, “You were ready to kill me on one occasion. In fact, for a while, you thought you had.”

  It was a fearfully cruel thing to have to say; but the time for politeness seemed to be well past.

  “I recall that with no pride, Jim, I assure you,” Spock One said, with a kind of stony ruefulness nobody but a man half Vulcan and half human could even have felt, let alone expressed. “But you in turn will recall that I was amok at the time, because of the mating ceremony. Do you wish me back in that irrational state of mind? Or want me to welcome something similar in you?”

  “Of course not. Quite the opposite. What I want from you now is the best logic you’ve ever been able to bring to bear, on any situation whatsodamnever.”

  “Nothing else will serve, Captain, it seems to me. So let me further observe that my counterpart’s proposal is not conservative. There is a certain justice in his observation that our joint presence on the ship will be disturbing for both of us, but we are not likely to be disturbed about the same subjects at the same time; hence you could use both of us by asking both our opinions, and striking a balance between them.” The ghostly hesitation was gone now — had Kirk imagined it in the first place? “Furthermore, Captain, this whole question of identity is operationally meaningless. I can assure you that I know I am the original — but this knowledge is not false even if I am in fact the replicate.”

  “You’ll have to explain further, I’m afraid.” But the difficulty of the argument was in itself reassuringly Spocklike — falsely reassuring, Kirk knew with regret.

  “If I am the replicate, I have a complete, continuous set of memories which were replicated with me. As far as I can know, all these memories represent real experiences, and there is no break in continuity in them, nor in my attitudes or abilities. Therefore, both for my purposes and for yours, either of us is the original, and there is no reason to prefer one over the other. A difference which make
s no difference is no difference.”

  “McCoy’s Paradox,” Kirk said.

  “Is that one of the classic paradoxes? I am not familiar with it. I was quoting Korzybski.”

  “No, Doc invented it only two weeks ago — but abruptly it has come to life.” Kirk paused. He was not himself expert in logic, and now he was confronted by two experts, each arguing opposite sides of a life-and-death problem, and with apparently equal cogency. “Mr. Spock, I shall of course inform you when I’ve made my decision, but it’s not a matter on which I want to shoot from the hip. For the present, I want you and your counterpart to stand alternate half-day watches. That way, I get both your services continuously, I don’t have to choose between you yet, and I don’t have to flip a coin to decide which of you has to be moved out of your quarters.”

  “An ideal interim solution,” Spock One said, arising.

  For you, maybe, Kirk thought as he watched him go out. But your — brother — wants you dead.

  He sighed and touched the intercom. “Doc? Kirk here. Break out the headache pills, I’m coming to pay you a visit.”

  Chapter Four — A PROBLEM IN DETECTION

  From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4019.2:

  I have appraised the Department heads of the situation and asked for suggestions. For the time being I have not informed the rest of the crew, in the interests of morale. Since any given one of them is seldom on the bridge, I am spared having to explain away the odd spectacle of Mr. Spock on duty all ten periods of the day.

  To this decision, however, Kirk had to allow two exceptions. One was Yeoman Janice Rand, who served Kirk as a combination of executive secretary, valet and military aide, and as such was usually made privy to anything that was going on; ordinarily she needed to know, and in any event it was a lot easier to tell her how matters stood than to keep them from her. The other was Christine Chapel, McCoy’s head nurse; not only was she Doc’s surgical assistant, but she held several degrees in medical research, and hence would be closely involved in whatever attempts McCoy might invent to distinguish one Spock from another.

  Both were highly professional career woman, coequal with male crewmen of the same rank during duty hours and expected to deliver the same level of efficient performance. Neither, however, was able to suppress a certain gleam of anticipation on being told that there were now two Spocks aboard the Starship USS Enterprise.

  With Yeoman Rand, this was only normal and natural. She practiced a protective, freewheeling interest in men in general to keep herself and the Captain from becoming dangerously involved with each other. Kirk was, however, surprised to see it in Nurse Chapel. She came as close to being a professional confidant as the irascible McCoy was ever likely to find; acting both as a bond between them and a preventive against its transgressing onto the personal was the fact that she, too, was the veteran of a broken romance, and from it had apparently found a measure of contentment in a Starfleet Service.

  What was the source of the oddly overt response that women of all ages and degrees of experience seemed to feel toward Spock? Kirk had no answer, but he had two theories, switching from one to the other according to his mood. One was that it was a simple challenge-and-response situation: he may be cold and unresponsive to other women, but if I had the chance, I could get through to him! The other, more complex theory seemed more plausible to Kirk only in his moments of depression: that most white crewwomen, still the inheritors after two centuries of vestiges of the shameful racial prejudices of their largely Anglo-American forebears, saw in the Vulcan half-breed — who after all had not sprung from any Earthly colored stock — a “safe” way of breaking with those vestigial prejudices — and at the same time, perhaps, satisfying the sexual curiosity which had probably been at the bottom of them from the beginning.

  McCoy, once Kirk had broached both these notions to him — on shore leave, after several drinks — had said, “You parlor psychologists are all alike — constantly seeking for complexities and dark, hidden motives where none probably exist. Most people are simpler than that, Jim. Our Mr. Spock, much though I hate to admit it, is a thoroughly superior specimen of the male animal — brave, intelligent, prudent, loyal, highly placed in his society — you name it, he’s got it. What sensible woman wouldn’t want such a man? But women are also practical creatures, and skeptical about men. They can see that Spock’s not a whole man. That compulsive inability of his to show his emotions cripples him, and they want to try to free him of it. Little do they know what a fearful task it would be.”

  “Oh. So in part it’s the mother instinct, too?”

  McCoy made an impatient face. “There you go again, applying tags you don’t understand. I wish you’d leave the psychology to me — what’s the Service paying me for, anyhow, if you can do it? Oh well, never mind. Jim, if you’re really puzzled about this, watch the women for once! You’ll see for yourself that mothering Spock is the last thing they have in mind. No — they want to free him to be the whole, grownup, near-superman he hasn’t quite become, and make themselves good enough for that man. And as I said before, they don’t know how much they’d have to bite off before they could chew it.”

  “The Vulcan cultural background?” Kirk said.

  “Yes, for a starter. But there’s a lot more. Did you know, Jim, that if Spock weren’t half Vulcan, I’d be watching him now every day for signs of cancer?”

  “I thought that had been licked a hundred years ago.”

  “No, some kinds still show up. And men of one hundred per cent Earth stock, who have avenues for emotional discharge as inadequate as Mr. Spock’s are terribly susceptible to it in their middle years. Nobody knows why.”

  The conversation continued to branch off, leaving Kirk, as usual, with most of his questions unanswered. Nor had McCoy been half as positive about his chances for setting up suitable physiological tests to distinguish between the duplicate Spocks.

  “I don’t know how the replication happened, so I don’t know where to begin. And I was never trained in the details of Vulcanian biochemistry. I read up on it after Spock first came aboard, but most of what I know about it from experience I learned from monitoring him; and he’s a mixture, a hybrid, and hence a law Unto himself. Oh, of course I’ll try to think of something, but dammitall, this is really a problem in physics — I need Scotty for the whats, hows and whys of the accident to get even a start on it!”

  “I was afraid of that,” Kirk said.

  “There’s something else you ought to watch out for, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a psychological problem — this business of being identical twins. Even under ordinary, biological circumstances, being an identical twin is a hard row to hoe. You’re constantly having identity trouble; mothers think it’s cute to dress the kids alike, teachers have trouble keeping their records straight, friends can’t tell them apart or think it’s funny to pretend they can’t. It all usually comes to a head in puberty, which is when the who-am-I problem becomes acute for everyone, but for identical twins it’s hell. If they get through that period without becoming neurotic or worse, they’re usually all right from then on.

  “But Spock didn’t go through it, and furthermore he has been emotionally isolated almost all his life, by his own choice. Now, suddenly, he has been twinned as an adult, and it’s a situation he has had no chance to adjust to, as the natural twin has. The strain is going to be considerable.”

  Kirk spread his hands. “Help him if he’ll let you, of course, Doc, and I’ll try to take it into account myself. But it seems to me that the adjustment is almost wholly something he’ll have to arrive at by himself. And bear in mind that he has had a lifetime of training in controlling his own emotions.”

  “Not controlling them — suppressing them,” McCoy said. “The two are very different. But of course he’ll have to handle it by himself. One thing laymen never understand about psychotherapy is that no doctor has ever cured an emotional or mental upset, or ever will; the bes
t he can do is to show the patient how he might cure himself.

  “But Jim, don’t minimize this — it’s no small consideration. In my judgment, there’s likely to be a real emotional crisis, and sooner rather than later. I’ve already noticed that one of them’s gone considerably off his feed. Won’t hurt him for a while — Vulcans can fast a long time — but anorexia is almost always the first sign of an emotional upset.”

  “Thanks,” Kirk said grimly. “I’ll be on my guard. And in the meantime, let’s see if Scotty’s thought of any tests yet.”

  He left the sick bay and went to the engineering bridge.

  “Scotty, I hate to keep taxing you with the same old question, but Doc says he can’t get anywhere on setting up a test for the real Spock, or the replicate, until he has at least some sort of idea of how the duplication happened. Any clues yet?”

  Scott said miserably, “Ah dinna ken, Captain. Ah dinna oonderstahnd it at all.”

  There were blue-black isometric smudges under his eyes, and it was obvious that he had not slept at all since the start of the botched transporter experiment. Kirk stopped pressing him at once; clearly he was doing his best, and his performance wouldn’t be improved by distracting him.

  Then everybody, not just Scott, was interrupted by the call to Battle Stations.

  Kirk’s immediate assumption — that Uhura’s sensors had picked up something that might be another ship — proved to be true, but he was no sooner on the bridge than he became aware that this was only a small part of the story. For one thing, the automatic drive log on his control console showed that the Enterprise had been off warp flight for a split second before the alarm had sounded. She was now back in subspace, of course, but the trace the sensors had picked up was that of an object so small that if it had really been a Klingon ship it would have been incapable of detecting the Enterprise in subspace over the distance involved.