Star Trek - Blish, James - 01 Page 12

  "Good; so ordered. How about equipment-phasers and so on?"

  "Keep one phaser here for emergencies if you're prepared to jettison it before we go back," McCoy said. "Everything else, out."

  "Right. Next?"

  "Medical analysis has got as far as I can take it," McCoy said. "From here on out, it's going to be strictly statistical-and though the idea was mine, I'm afraid Mr. Spock is going to have to direct it. Statistics make me gibber."

  Kirk grinned. "Very well, Mr. Spock, take over."

  "Yes sir. First of all, we've got to find those purchase orders. Which means another search of the file cabinets."

  The problem was simple to pose: Invent a disease.

  The accounting records turned up, relatively promptly, and in great detail. McCoy's assumption had been right that far: the bureaucratic mind evidently underwent no substantial change simply by having been removed more than a dozen light-years from the planet where it had evolved. Everything the laboratory had ever had to call for had at least three pieces of paper that went along with it.

  McCoy was able to sort these into rough categories of significance, on a scale of ten (from 0 = obvious nonsense to 10 = obviously crucial), and the bio-comp coded every-thing graded "five" or above so that it could be fed to the orbiting Enterprise's computer with the least possible loss of time. The coding was very fast; but as-signing relative weights to the items to be coded was a matter for human judgment, and despite his disclaimers, McCoy was the only man present who could do it with any confidence in well more than half of the instances. Spock could tell, within a given run of samples, what appeared to be statistically significant, but only McCoy could then guess whether the associations were medical, financial, or just make-work.

  It took two days, working around the clock. By the morning of the third day, however, Spock was able to say:

  "These cards now hold everything the bio-comp can do for us." He turned to Miri, who had returned the day before, with no explanations, but without the slight-est change in her manner, and as willing to work as ever. "Miri, if you'll just stack them and put them back in that hopper, we'll rank them for the Enterprise, and then we can read-and-feed to Farrell. I must confess, I still don't see the faintest trace of a pattern in them."

  "I do," McCoy said surprisingly. "Clearly the active agent can't be a pure virus, because it'd be cleaned out of the body between injection and puberty if it didn't reproduce; and true viruses can't reproduce without invading a body cell, which this thing is forbidden to do for some ten or twelve years, depending on the sex of the host. This has to be something more like some of the rickettsiae, with some enyzmatic mechanisms intact so it can feed and reproduce from material it can absorb from the body fluids, outside the cells. When the hormones of puberty hit it, it sheds that part of its organization and becomes a true virus. Ergo, the jettisoned mechanism has to be steroid-soluble. And only the sexual steroids can be involved. All these conditions close in on it pretty implacably, step by step."

  "Close enough to put a name to it?" Kirk demanded tensely.

  "By no means," McCoy said. "I don't even know if I'm on the right track; this whole scholium is intuitive on my part. But it makes sense. I think something very like that will emerge when the ship's computer processes all these codes. Anybody care to bet?"

  "We've already bet our lives, like it or not," Kirk said. "But we ought to have the answer in an hour now. Mr. Spock, call Farrell."

  Spock nodded and went out into the anteroom, now kept sealed off from the rest of the lab. He was back in a moment. Though his face was almost incapable of showing emotion, something in his look brought Kirk to his feet in a rush.

  "What's the matter?"

  "The communicators are gone, Captain. There's nothing in those uniforms but empty pockets."

  Janice gasped. Kirk turned to Miri, feeling his brows knotting together. The girl shrank a little from him, but returned his look defiantly all the same.

  "What do you know about this, Miri?"

  "The onlies took them, I guess," she said. "They like to steal things. It's a foolie."

  "Where did they take them?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know. That's a foolie, too. When you take something, you go someplace else."

  He was on her in two strides, grasping her by the shoulders. "This is not a foolie. It's a disaster. We have to have those communicators-otherwise we'll never lick this disease."

  She giggled suddenly. "Then you won't have to go," she said.

  "No, we'll die. Now cut it out. Tell us where they are."

  The girl drew herself up in an imitation of adult dignity. Considering that she had never seen an adult after the disaster until less than a week ago, it was a rather creditable imitation.

  "Please, Captain, you're hurting me," she said haught-ily. "What's the matter with you? How could I possibly know?"

  Unfortunately, the impersonation broke at the end into another giggle-which, however, did Kirk no good as far as the issue at hand was concerned. "What is this, blackmail?" Kirk said, beyond anger now. He could feel nothing but the total urgency of the loss. "It's your life that's at stake too, Miri."

  "Oh no," Miri said sweetly. "Mr. Spock said that I'd live five or six weeks longer than you will. Maybe some of you'll die ahead of some others. I'll still be here." She flounced in her rags toward the door. Under any other circumstances she might have been funny, perhaps even charming. At the last moment she turned, trailing a languid hand through the air. "Of course I don't know what makes you think I know anything about this. But maybe if you're very nice to me, I could ask my friends some questions. In the meantime, Captain, farewell."

  There was an explosion of pent breaths as her foot-steps dwindled.

  "Well," McCoy said, "one can tell that they had tele-vision on this planet during part of Miri's lifetime, at least."

  The grim joke broke part of the tension.

  "What can we do without the ship?" Kirk demanded. "Mr. Spock?"

  "Very little, Captain. The bio-comp's totally inadequate for this kind of job. It takes hours, where the ship's com-puter takes seconds, and it hasn't the analytical capa-city."

  "The human brain was around long before there were computers. Bones, what about your hunch?"

  "I'll ride it, of course," McCoy said wearily. "But time is the one commodity the computer could have saved us, and the one thing we haven't got. When I think of that big lumbering ship up there, with everything we need on board it, orbiting around and around like so much inert metal-"

  "And complaining just wastes more time," Kirk snarled. McCoy stared at him in surprise. "I'm sorry, Bones. I guess it's starting to get me; too."

  "I was complaining," McCoy said. "The apology is mine. Well then, the human brain it will have to be. It worked for Pasteur... but he was a good bit smarter than me. Mr. Spock, take those cards away from that dumb cat and let's restack them. I'll want to try a DNA analysis first. If that makes any sort of reasonable pat-tern, enough to set up a plausible species, we'll chew through them again and see if we can select out a clone."

  "I'm not following you," Spock admitted.

  "I'll feed you the codes, there's no time for explana-tions. Pull everything coded LTS-426 first. Then we'll ask the cat to sort those for uncoded common factors. There probably won't be any, but it's the most promising beginning I can think of."

  "Right."

  Kirk felt even more out of it than Mr. Spock; he had neither the medical nor the statistical background to understand what was going on. He simply stood by, and did what little donkey-work there was to do.

  The hours wore away into another day. Despite the stim-pills McCoy doled out, everyone seemed to be moving very slowly, as if underwater. It was like a night-mare of flight.

  Somewhere during that day, Miri turned up, to watch with what she probably imagined was an expression of aloof amusement. Everyone ignored her. The expression gradually faded into a frown; finally, she began to tap her foot.

 
; "Stop that," Kirk said without even turning to look at her, "or I'll break your infant neck."

  The tapping stopped. McCoy said: "Once more into the cat, Mr. Spock. We are now pulling all T's that are functions of D-2. If there are more than three, we're sunk."

  The bio-comp hummed and chuttered over the twenty-two cards Spock had fed it. It threw out just one. McCoy leaned back in his hard-backed straight chair with a whoosh of satisfaction.

  "Is that it?" Kirk asked.

  "By no means, Jim. That's probably the virus in-volved. Just probably, no more."

  "It's only barely significant," Spock said. "If this were a test on a new product survey or something of that sort, I'd throw it out without a second thought. But as matters stand-"

  "As matters stand, we next have to synthesize the virus," McCoy said, "and then make a killed-virus vaccine from it. No, no, that won't work at all, what's the matter with me? Not a vaccine. An antitoxoid. Much harder. Jim, wake those security guards-a lot of good they did us in the pinch! We are going to need a lot of bottles washed in the next forty-eight hours."

  Kirk wiped his forehead. "Bones, I'm feeling outright lousy, and I'm sure you are too. Officially we've got the forty-eight hours left-but are we going to be functioning sensibly after the next twenty-four?"

  "We either fish or cut bait," McCoy said calmly. "All hands on their feet. The cookery class is hereby called to order."

  "It's a shame," Spock said, "that viruses aren't as easy to mix as metaphors."

  At this point Kirk knew that he was on the thin edge of hysteria. Somehow he had the firm impression that Mr. Spock had just made a joke. Next he would be beginning to believe that there really was such a thing as a portable computer with a cat's brain in it. "Somebody hand me a bottle to wash," he said, "before I go to sleep on my feet."

  By the end of twenty hours, Janice Rand was raving and had to be strapped down and given a colossal tran-quilizer dose before she would stop fighting. One of the guards followed her down an hour later. Both were nearly solid masses of blue marks; evidently, the madness grew as the individual splotches coalesced into larger masses and proceeded toward covering the whole skin surface.

  Miri disappeared at intervals, but she managed to be on the scene for both these collapses. Perhaps she was trying to look knowing, or superior, or amused; Kirk could not tell. The fact of the matter was that he no longer had to work to ignore Miri, he was so exhausted that the small chores allotted him by his First Officer and his ship's surgeon took up the whole foreground of his attention, and left room for no background at all.

  Somewhere in there, McCoy's voice said: "Every-thing under the SPF hood now. At the next stage we've got a live one. Kirk, when I take the lid off the Petri dish, in goes the two cc's of formalin. Don't miss."

  "I won't."

  Somehow, he didn't. Next, after a long blank, he was looking at a rubber-capped ampule filled with clear liquid, into which McCoy's hands were inserting the needle of a spray hypo. Tunnel vision; nothing more than that: the ampule, the hypo, the hands.

  "That's either the antitoxoid," McCoy's voice was saying from an infinite distance, "or it isn't. For all I know it may be pure poison. Only the computer could tell us which for sure."

  "Janice first," Kirk heard himself rasp. "Then the guard. They're the closest to terminal."

  "I override you, Captain," McCoy's voice said. "I am the only experimental animal in this party."

  The needle jerked out of the rubber cap. Somehow, Kirk managed to reach out and grasp McCoy's only visible wrist. The movement hurt; his joints ached abominably, and so did his head.

  "Wait a minute," he said. "One minute more won't make any difference."

  He swivelled his ringing skull until Miri came into view down the optical tunnel. She seemed to be all fuzzed out at the edges. Kirk walked toward her, planting his feet with extraordinary care on the slowly tilting floor.

  "Miri," he said. "Listen to me. You've got to listen to me."

  She turned her head away. He reached out and grab-bed her by the chin, much more roughly than he had wanted to, and forced her to look at him. He was dimly aware that he was anything but pretty-bearded, covered with sweat and dirt, eyes rimmed and netted with red, mouth working with the effort to say words that would not come out straight.

  "We've... only got a few hours left. Us, and all of you... you, and your friends. And... we may be wrong. After that, no grups, and no onlies... no one... forever and ever. Give me back just one of those... machines, those communicators. Do you want the blood of a whole world on your hands? Think, Miri-think for once in your life!"

  Her eyes darted away. She was looking toward Janice. He forced her to look back at him. "Now, Miri. Now. Now."

  She drew a long, shuddering breath. "I'll-try to get you one," she said. Then she twisted out of his grasp and vanished.

  "We can't wait any longer," McCoy's voice said calmly. "Even if we had the computer's verdict, we couldn't do anything with it. We have to go ahead."

  "I will bet you a year's pay," Spock said, "that the antitoxoid is fatal in itself."

  In a haze of pain, Kirk could see McCoy grinning tightly, like a skull. "You're on," he said. "The disease certainly is. But if I lose, Mr. Spock, how will you collect?"

  He raised his hand.

  "Stop!" Kirk croaked. He was too late-even suppos-ing that McCoy in this last extremity would have obeyed his captain. This was McCoy's world, his universe of discourse. The hypo hissed against the surgeon's bared, blue-suffused arm.

  Calmly, McCoy laid the injector down on the table, and sat down. "Done," he said. "I don't feel a thing." His eyes rolled upward in their sockets, and he took a firm hold on the edge of the table. "You see... gentlemen... it's all perfectly..."

  His head fell forward.

  "Help me carry him," Kirk said, in a dead voice. To-gether, he and Spock carried the surgeon to the nearest cot. McCoy's face, except for the botches, was waxlike; he looked peaceful for the first time in days. Kirk sat down on the edge of the cot beside him and tried his pulse. It was wild and erratic, but still there.

  "I... don't see how the antitoxoid could have hit him that fast," Spock said. His own voice sounded like a whisper from beyond the grave.

  "He could only have passed out. I'm about ready, myself. Damn the man's stubbornness."

  "Knowledge," Spock said remotely, "has its privileges."

  This meant nothing to Kirk. Spock was full of these gnomic utterances; presumably they were Vulcanian. There was a peculiar hubbub in Kirk's ears, as though the visual fuzziness was about to be counterpointed by an aural one.

  Spock said, "I seem to be on the verge myself-closer than I thought. The hallucinations have begun."

  Wearily, Kirk looked around. Then he goggled. If Spock was having a hallucination, so was Kirk. He wondered if it was the same one.

  A procession of children was coming into the room, led by Miri. They were of all sizes and shapes, from toddlers up to about the age of twelve. They looked as though they had been living in a department store. Some of the older boys wore tuxedos; some were in military uniforms; some in scaled-down starmen's clothes; some in very loud and mismatched sports clothes. The girls were a somewhat better matched lot, since almost all of them were wearing some form of party dress, several of them trailing opera cloaks and loaded with jewelry. Dom-inating them all was a tall, red-headed boy-or no, that wasn't his own hair, it was a wig, long at the back and sides and with bangs, from which the price-tag still dan-gled. Behind him hopped a fat little boy who was carrying, on a velvet throw-pillow, what appeared to be a crown.

  It was like some mad vision of the Children's Crusade. But what was maddest about it was that the children were loaded with equipment-the landing party's equip-ment. There were the three communicators-Janice and the security guards hadn't carried any; there were the two missing tricorders-McCoy had kept his in the lab; and the red-wigged boy even had a phaser slung at his hip. It was a measure of how exhausted the
y had all been, even back then, that they hadn't realized one of the deadly objects was missing. Kirk wondered whether the boy had tried it, and if so, whether he had hurt anybody with it.

  The boy saw him looking at it, and somehow divined his thought.

  "I used it on Louise," he said gravely. "I had to. She went grup all at once, while we were playing school. She was-only a little older than me."

  He unbuckled the weapon and held it out: Numbly, Kirk took it. The other children moved to the long table and solemnly began to pile the rest of the equipment on it. Miri came tentatively to Kirk.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "It was wrong and I shouldn't have. I had a hard time, trying to make Jahn understand that it wasn't a foolie any more." She looked sideways at the waxy figure of McCoy. "Is it too late?"