by Jean Lorrah
The room-to-room intercom buzzed. Korsal, who had found Therian’s graph as accurate as he had expected, flipped the switch. “Korsal here.”
Rita Esposito’s image appeared on the screen. “Bad news, I’m afraid.”
Therian left his work to stand beside Korsal. “More victims?”
“No end,” she replied. “But also, John Treadwell just died, and Keski has gone into systemic failure and is on total life support.”
“Has anyone yet recovered from the new strain?” Therian asked.
Esposito glanced away from the screen. She was a floor nurse here at the hospital; Korsal was sure she was getting regular reports from her friends on the staff. Then she looked back at them and replied, “A few cases are now listed as critical but stable. But no one has come off the critical list.”
“Thank you for letting us know,” said Korsal. “Has anyone else on the council … ?”
She shook her head. “The next six hours are crucial. God help us all.”
The screen blanked. Therian turned away, his antennae so wilted they almost disappeared into his fluffy white hair.
“All your figures are accurate,” Korsal said in an effort to encourage him.
“But meaningless!” Therian replied. “Why can’t I find the pattern?”
“There has to be one,” Korsal said. As an engineer he believed in patterns. “We just haven’t found the key factor yet.”
Therian made a small hissing sound that was the Andorian equivalent of a sigh. “Let me see what happens when I add family data to the equations.”
Korsal watched as Therian programmed in his instructions, and the computer computed. It was slow today; monitoring dozens of people on life support, keeping records on the largest number of patients the hospital had ever held, it actually had a perceptible lag between entry or request, and the time items appeared on the screen.
Finally the results began to appear. Family size was not significant, nor ages of family members. No area of the city produced more cases per capita except for the hospital complex—
“Compute according to occupation,” Therian instructed.
Korsal studied the figures coming up on the screen. Nothing new; the largest percentage of victims were doctors and nurses, exposed to patients despite all antiseptic procedures. The next largest number were students and teachers—the perfectly ordinary course of any epidemic on any planet.
“Now compute only for victims of Strains B and C,” Therian told the machine.
The figures told Korsal nothing. There were fewer students and teachers because the schools had been closed; otherwise, there seemed little difference in the figures.
Therian pulled at one of his antennae—an act that hurt the sensitive organ, indicating the degree of frustration the Andorian was experiencing. “Take every individual factor in the data files on victims,” he instructed the computer, “and compute for it separately.”
“Memory drain,” the computer announced. “Programming overload. Time factor for completing program under current conditions is three hours, fourteen-point-seven-three minutes.”
Korsal estimated that such a program would normally run in minutes, not hours; the hospital computer was badly overloaded.
“Let me get a terminal patch to the engineering lab computer,” he suggested.
“Go ahead,” said Therian, “but I’m going to start this program running anyway; it could easily take three hours to get set up on your lab computer.”
That was true. However, Korsal called and got one of his colleagues to start the process of patching through to his terminal, then turned to watch what Therian was doing.
The program was running, but so slowly that each line could be seen coming onto the screen and crawling upward to disappear off the top. Therian studied them as they passed, and Korsal did not interrupt his concentration.
Soon he had his connection to the lab computer and began entering the changes necessary to adapt the hospital computer terminal to work with it.
“Great Mother Andor!”
Korsal was jolted out of his concentration by Therian’s exclamation.
He turned to see the Andorian staring intently at the lines crawling by on his computer screen, his antennae raised up almost straight out of his head. “It’s the children!” Therian gasped. Then, almost a sob, “Oh, Great Mother—it’s the children!”
“What children?” Korsal demanded, crossing to where he could read the screen.
Therian turned on him, teeth bared. “No!” he cried. “You traitor—twice you have desecrated the purity of species as the Great Mother made us! No more! No more!”
“Therian—it’s the plague,” Korsal said softly, backing away from the Andorian’s fury. He held his hands up, palms open, hoping Therian would recognize that he was not attacking. “You’re ill, Therian. Let me call—”
“Laskodor!” Therian raged. “Seducer of the Daughter! Destroyer of the Children!”
The room was monitored for sound level—Korsal didn’t have to shout for assistance; Therian’s shouts already had orderlies on the way. He could hear their running steps in the hallway, but Therian was leaping for his throat!
The Andorian had far less strength than a Klingon, but the rage of madness gave extra power to Therian’s slender body. Trying not to injure him, Korsal pushed him away, but the thin arms snaked out to grasp his throat.
Korsal fought, bending Therian’s fingers back—but Andorian joints bent naturally that way! He would black out in a moment! Where were those orderlies?!
Getting his elbows under Therian’s arms, Korsal broke the Andorian’s hold, flinging him backward against two orderlies in contamination gear charging in at the door.
Therian bounced off them, shrieked wordlessly, and lunged for Korsal again.
The Klingon caught him by the arms and started to turn him toward the orderlies when the Andorian went limp. “He’s passed out,” he said, lifting the light form and laying it down on Therian’s bed. “Better get a gurney.”
One of the orderlies left, but the other switched on the life-function display over the bed. None of the indicators moved, except the one for body temperature. It rose, but then began to drift slowly downward.
“He’s dead,” said the orderly, his voice muffled by his suit.
“He can’t be!” Korsal exclaimed. “Call for life support! No, I will—you resuscitate him!”
“Sir,” the orderly said, “he was Andorian. He cannot be resuscitated.”
Korsal had never known whether that was a fact of Andorian biology or one of their religious tenets. Either way, there was nothing he could do; Therian was gone.
He sat dejectedly on his own bed as the orderlies removed the body.
Gone. And his knowledge with him.
Or had it been only the madness?
Korsal stared at Therian’s computer screen, where the lines of data still crawled obediently upward and disappeared. Whatever the epidemiologist saw had long since scrolled by, and Korsal had no way of determining which lines to call back.
Was it just the madness that made Therian think he had found the answer? Or to his statistician’s mind had the screen actually given a clue to the mutation of the plague—a clue that somehow involved the children of Nisus?
Chapter Six
Sorel’s patients were right on time. Physically, both T’Kar and T’Pina were in perfect health.
“Are you certain it is wise to return to Nisus now?” Sorel asked the two women. “You have no family there—”
“It is home,” T’Kar replied serenely. Had he allowed himself such an emotion, Sorel could have envied her serenity. T’Kar had returned to Vulcan two months ago, to return her husband’s katra to his ancestors, as was the Vulcan way.
“Nisus is the only home I can remember,” T’Pina added. “Now that I have completed my education, I am eager to begin working.”
“But you will expose yourselves needlessly to a deadly disease,” Sorel reminded them
. “Surely the epidemic will be under control by the time the next transport is available.”
“I am a nurse,” T’Kar replied. “Nurses are desperately needed. You have not refused Nisus’ call for aid, Healer.”
“So that information is already public,” he commented.
“Sorn told me,” replied T’Pina. “He also wished to persuade me not to go home.”
“Sorn would wish T’Pina not to return to Nisus at all,” said her mother, “but his family has not contacted me.”
Sorel caught the unspoken warning to the younger woman. He did not know Sorn, but he gathered that the young man must come from one of the Vulcan families who took great care about what families they married into.
T’Kar and her husband came from Ancient Families—those who could trace their ancestry back to original followers of the philosopher Surak.
Their daughter, however, was adopted.
T’Pina had been one of twenty-four children who were the only survivors of an attack on Vulcan Colony Five. No one lived on Vulcan Colony Five today, for Vulcan had other colony worlds farther from the Romulan Neutral Zone.
It was assumed Romulans had destroyed the colony, which had been there just a few years and was only seven hundred strong, but there was no way to prove it. So far was the colony from the regular space lanes that their call for help had reached Starfleet more than a day after the attack. By the time a starship got there, nothing was left but devastation, and twenty-four children under the age of three.
All adults and older children were dead, all buildings destroyed, and all records along with them. The other children were identified by retinal scans, but one infant girl was only days old, her birth as yet unrecorded. None of the other children could tell who her parents were, and so no one knew what Vulcan family she belonged to.
T’Kar and Sevel did not care. Having no children of their own, they joyfully adopted the little girl and took her with them to Nisus. She grew up bright and healthy, earning her own place on Nisus by placing first in her class at the Vulcan Academy of Sciences.
All of that was in T’Pina’s medical records. What the records did not show was the young woman’s serenity, so much like her mother’s. There might be no blood kinship between them, but the bonds between mother and daughter were stronger than those between many “natural” parents and children.
Sorel found judgment according to bloodlines rather than accomplishment incomprehensible. Few Vulcans were unable to rejoice in people’s differences, as Surak taught. Unfortunately, those few could do great damage. He remembered Sendet actually attempting to disrupt the bonding between Daniel and T’Mir, and recalled for the first time that the young man was aboard the Enterprise. He hoped Captain Kirk was transporting Sendet and all his kind in the brig!
Suppressing that unworthy thought, Sorel returned to the subject of Nisus. “Daniel and I have been requested—but we have experience at treating not only Vulcans and Humans, but many other intelligent species here at the Academy.”
“Our friends are on Nisus,” said T’Kar. “We cannot stay here when every hand is needed to care for the sick—even to keep the power plant and the fields attended!”
T’Pina added, “Healer, Nisus’ self-sufficiency could be destroyed. Or the colony could die—for the want of one pair of willing hands.”
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” Sorel said without thinking.
T’Kar looked at him curiously, but T’Pina nodded. “For want of the shoe, the horse was lost. It is an Earth saying, Mother. I learned it from some Humans here at the Academy.”
“And I learned it from Daniel Corrigan,” said Sorel. “The point is the ultimate consequences of apparently trivial events: eventually the kingdom is lost because of a nail—a small, nearly worthless item. But people are not small or worthless, T’Pina.”
“Exactly why we must not let any more be lost.”
“I agree,” added T’Kar. “Healer, logic does not apply. There is no way to know whether our return to Nisus will mean enough help to conquer the plague, or our own deaths. We understand that the disease is increasingly contagious, but Nisus is taking stringent precautions to prevent its spread. To save our home and our friends, we will accept the risk.”
“Then I will make no further attempt to dissuade you,” said Sorel, admiring their courage. “T’Par is waiting to do the final test of your psychological healing.”
T’Kar’s Eyebrows rose. “Not you, Healer?”
So—she did not know. Possibly T’Pina did; those who knew how the stasis chambers worked might deduce that only time could heal Sorel’s broken bonding.
“I bear the same wound from which you are recovering,” he said flatly. “However, my wife was taken from me unexpectedly, our bonding torn asunder. I could not return her katra to her ancestors.”
T’Kar paled visibly, but the cause was certainly sufficient. Although she had completed the mourning cycle, and Sorel was certain T’Par would find her healed, she understood as her unbonded daughter could not.
Sorel’s was a wound from which some Vulcans never recovered; sometimes he had to force himself to maintain his body from day to day, his only sense of purpose in his work. He reminded himself that T’Zan would insist that he go on, but it became harder every day. He poured all his energies into his routine at the hospital, resisting going home to the empty house they had once shared.
The mission to Nisus was welcome to Sorel. After T’Zan’s death, Leonard McCoy had suggested he leave Vulcan for a time, but he had had no reason then. He did not want T’Kar going to Nisus for the same reason he was—to feel that his life was worth something, even if he died for it.
To his shock, he saw in her eyes that T’Kar understood his motives. She had blue eyes, rare among Vulcans, hard to conceal emotions in. Sorel had been told that his own black eyes were unreadable—yet T’Kar, who hardly knew him, had discerned his feelings as easily as Daniel did. But his associate had known him for forty years and, being Human, was always alert for signs of emotion.
He saw sympathy in T’Kar’s eyes. Then she looked down, her lashes concealing the inadvertent exchange. “We understand, Healer,” she said formally, “and grieve with thee. Come, T’Pina. T’Par will be waiting.”
Chapter Seven
Just before they reached orbit around Vulcan, Captain James T. Kirk called Sendet and Satat to the Enterprise briefing room. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we disagree about a whole galaxy of things, but I believe we share one thing in common. If I give a man my word, he can count on it. Is that not also true for you?”
“It is,” Satat replied warily.
“Very well, then. I’m going to explain our emergency and ask your word that you will make no trouble while we are transporting medical personnel to Nisus.”
“Nisus?” asked Satat. “I have distant relatives there—Sern and T’Pren and their children.”
“I am sorry. There is a medical crisis on the science colony,” Kirk explained. “It’s a disease, an epidemic, spreading and mutating. No race seems to be immune to it, and some strains are deadly. The Enterprise will be transporting medical aid.”
“Of course we will not interfere, Captain,” said Satat.
“Sendet?” asked Kirk. “You should know that Sorel and Corrigan, and Corrigan’s wife T’Mir, will all be aboard.”
The young Vulcan squared his shoulders. His aristocratic features took on a look of disdain that Kirkshould even need to ask. “I cannot approve of T’Mir’s choice of husband,” he replied, “but I would never hinder a medical mission.”
“Good. Satat, please inform the others in your party.”
“Certainly—and I can speak for all of the Followers of T’Vet in this instance. We wish to maintain the ancient strengths of Vulcan, but we are not barbarians, Captain. Not only will we not interfere in any way, but if we can be of assistance, please feel free to call upon us.”
Well, thought Kirk as he left the briefing room for sickbay, that
was certainly easier than I expected!
His meeting with McCoy, though, was not nearly as satisfactory. The pockets under the doctor’s blue eyes showed that he had spent a sleepless night. Spock was with him, analyzing data on the sickbay computer.
They left the Vulcan absorbed in his task and stepped into the next room. “We just got some new information, Jim,” said McCoy. “It’s bad.”
“Another mutation?”
“Probably not—just that they’ve learned that antibodies to the first strain of the plague do not confer immunity to the third. They’ll know in a couple of days whether having had the second strain protects from the third. Right now the whole Nisus Council is in isolation.”
“What happened?”
“Everyone on the council had had one of the two earlier versions of the disease, so they felt it was safe to have a meeting. Shoulda done it by communicator.”
“And?” Kirk prompted.
“After they sent the call to Starfleet, they reconvened for other business, and the Lemnorian representative went berserk—first symptom of the most recent mutation of the plague. He’d had the first strain; now everybody on the council’s been exposed to the third. Spock is rerunning his computations with the new data. They sent us analyses of specimens from victims of the new mutation, but—”
“—but we may want to run further tests once we arrive,” came Spock’s voice from behind Kirk. The Vulcan joined them, adding, “Thus far, I have found no clues in the new data, and only time will provide more information.”
“And you two want to get down on that planet and gather data yourselves,” observed Kirk. Then, knowing both men were frustrated, even if McCoy was the only one who would admit it, he added, “You know, in a situation like this one, Bones, Spock, you are two of a kind!”
As he had hoped, his friends could not resist the bait. Spock and McCoy looked at one another, and then back at Kirk, saying in perfect unison, “Really, Captain, I see no reason for you to insult me.”
