The Entropy Effect

“Botany. It wouldn’t be quite the same as plowing rock with a four-hitch of ponies. But it’s the closest I can get without going home.” She paused. “I don’t want to go home.”

Spock nodded. He understood.

Once the crisis had passed, he would initiate her transfer himself. He closed the door behind him and left the friends alone.

5

Dr. McCoy awoke with the worst hangover he had ever had in his life. He should have taken something for it last night, but he had been too drunk, too distracted—and he preserved the anachronistic morality that one should pay for one’s excesses. But when he arose, he had to flee immediately into the washroom; sickness took him till his stomach was empty, his eyes were running, and his throat was sore from the taste of bile. Giving up the attempt to discipline himself, he took an anti-nausea pill and two aspirin, and drank a glass of isotonic solution that would help him rehydrate. The taste was so vile that he nearly got sick again.

McCoy sighed, and washed his face. His eyes were redrimmed and bloodshot; he looked like he still was crying.

Maybe I’ll get to be an old alky lying in a back street on some godforsaken out-of-the-way frontier planet, he thought. All I need is a three-day growth of beard—

At that point he noticed, to his disgust, that the brand of beard repressor he used had worn off: he had not kept track of the reapplication schedule. While the whiskers had not yet grown so long that they made him look even more dissolute, the stubble was scratchy and irritating.

He tramped from the cubicle where he had slept—be accurate, he thought: where he had lain unconscious—back to his own quarters. Failing to keep his gaze averted, he saw that the quarantine unit was empty, the machines shut down and pushed back against the wall. Someone—Spock, perhaps, or more likely Christine Chapel—had kept their wits about them, last night, far better than he. Jim’s body had been taken to the stasis room.

McCoy washed, shaved, applied more whisker repressor, and put on clean clothes. He was embarrassed about the way he had acted since Jim’s death—no, since well before, since refusing to believe the evidence of his machines as well as his own medical training and experience. The moment Uhura relayed the horrible information about the spiderweb, McCoy had known he could not save Jim, but some overwhelming impulse had forced him to try to pull off a superhuman feat. Had his motivation been love, or merely stubbornness and pride? No matter now; he had failed.

He was ashamed, as well, of the way he had treated Spock. The worst thing was that even if he apologized—which he intended to do—he would never be sure Spock understood how sorry he was, any more than he would ever know if he had caused him any distress in the first place.

Their conversation was vivid in his mind. He would almost have preferred a memory blackout. As it was he recalled last night with the surreal clarity of a dream.

What he had insisted that they do was absurd. In the daytime, sober, with the first shock of grief and incomprehension fading to a dull throb of loss and sorrow, McCoy knew his idea was impossible. He had seen it in a dream because it was a dream.

Spock knew it. His excuses, his explanations, were all so much technological claptrap, a disguise for the real reason he refused to do anything. He knew, deep in his gut, what McCoy now understood: that playing with fate was wrong. Perhaps he actually had been less affected by Jim’s death than McCoy—perhaps his unemotional acceptance of circumstance permitted him to see more clearly. But what it came down to was that death was not an unnatural state; it could be delayed, but never denied; they could not go back, like children telling a story, and fix things so it was all all right, so everyone lived happily ever after, ever after.

McCoy sighed again. He had work to do that he had neglected for too long, but as soon as he was finished he would go find Spock and admit that the Vulcan had been right.

A knock on the door woke Sulu. He lay staring upward for several seconds, wondering where he was. Not on the Enterprise —

Now he remembered. He glanced across the cabin; Ilya’s bunk was rumpled and empty.

The door opened silently and light from the corridor spilled in through the narrow crack.

Mr. Sulu?

He pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking. He could see nothing but shadows beyond the strip of light.

“Yes ...? What...? Who is it?” He felt so tired and groggy that his head spun.

“It’s Hunter. I have to talk to you.” Her voice sounded rough and strained.

Sulu pushed the screen back against the wall, where it obediently dimmed to black. He fumbled for the light switch, and raised the illumination of the cabin as he pulled his blankets a little farther up his chest.

“Yes, ma’am? Come in.”

She walked slowly, reluctantly, to the foot of his bunk. Her hair hung down, unbraided.