The Entropy Effect

“I came to warn you, Dr. Mordreaux,” Spock said. His voice sounded weak and he could not halt the shaking of his knees and hands. He straightened up, forcing away the pain, confronting it directly. Several of the people from the sitting room crowded in at the doorway: Dr. Mordreaux’s friends, the people whose dreams had sent him on a fatal course. Spock had hoped to arrive when Dr. Mordreaux was alone.

“Come sit down,” the professor said. “You look like death.”

Even for Spock there came a point where he had to admit his limits. He limped into the adjacent room and took the chair Dr. Mordreaux offered.

The people in the doorway moved aside for him, and stood together in a suspicious circle: six adults, four children.

“What does he want, Georges?”

“Well, Perim, I don’t know yet.” He motioned for everyone to sit.

“Are you a Vulcan?” one of the children asked.

“This is Mr. Spock,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “He was one of my very best students when I was a physics teacher, and now he works on a starship. At least I believe he does now —but he may have begun to do something else by the time he comes to us from.”

“No,” Spock said. “I still serve on the Enterprise .”

One of the younger people, no more than student age himself, handed Spock a glass of water. He sipped from it.

“That’s about enough of old times and afternoon tea,” said Perim. He took the hand of the child who had spoken and drew her away from Spock and Mordreaux. “What’s he doing here? It’s a damned inconvenient time to visit. Unless he’s come to stop us.”

“Is that why you’re here, Mr. Spock?”

“Yes, sir, it is.” He glanced from one face to another, wondering which person had reacted—would react—with such fear and violence when the future Dr. Mordreaux attempted what Spock was about to try now. The group of time-travelers drew together, and Spock felt their rising anger and apprehension.

“Sir,” Spock said, “within a month, you will be accused of murdering all these people. The charge will be proven against you, as will the charge of unethical experimentation upon intelligent beings. Your work will not be vindicated; it will not even be classified and controlled. It will be suppressed. It engenders such apprehension among judicial and executive officials that they will see no other way to restrain what you have created. You will be sentenced to rehabilitation. The Enterprise is assigned to transport you. During the voyage, you cause the deaths of the commander of security and of Captain James T. Kirk.”

“That’s preposterous!”

“It is true. You must not continue this experiment. It leads only to disaster.”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the time-travelers. “You’re saying we shouldn’t go. You want us to stay here.”

“You must.”

“We can leave a record of our plans so Georges won’t get into trouble—we’ve all agreed to try out his theories.”

“Agreed, hell,” said a middle-aged woman perched on the back of a couch. “We talked him into letting us do it.”

“Several of you do leave records,” Spock said. “They are used as evidence of his persuasive abilities.

Of his power over you, if you wish.”

Dr. Mordreaux flung himself into a chair. “I thought I had taken enough precautions to avoid that difficulty,” he said. “But certainly I can take other measures.”

“They will not be sufficient,” Spock said. “Or, rather, perhaps they would be, but you must not carry out this plan. Your fate, the fate of these few people—that is relatively trivial compared to the wider

implications of the work. The displacement of your friends permanently into the wrong continuum creates a strain that space-time cannot withstand.”

“Good lord,” Perim said. “You sound like you’re talking about the end of the universe.”

“In time, that is what it amounts to.”

“In time that’s what everything amounts to!” said the middle-aged woman.

“Not in less than one hundred Earth-standard years.”

Silence.

“What a load of crap,” the woman said sharply. “Listen, Mr. Spock, whoever you are, wherever, whenever, you’ve come from, I don’t care how terrific a physics student you used to be, I’ve been through those equations myself and I don’t see any opportunity at all for the creation of torsion in the continuum.”

“You have erred. The error was inevitable, but you have erred nonetheless.”

“Georges, dammit—” She turned toward Mordreaux.

“It’s true, Mr. Spock. I worried that the transfer might cause some distortion. But it just doesn’t happen. Nothing in the equations shows it.”

“You have erred,” Spock repeated. “Your plans distort reality to such an extent that the increase of entropy accelerates. The effect is not large at first, of course—but within twenty years larger stars have begun to nova. Precarious ecosystems have begun to fail.”

“Prove it,” said Perim.

Spock glanced toward the computer terminal in the corner of the room. “I will show you the derivation,” he said.