The Fire and the Rose Read online

  “Now,” Spock said beside her, and Uhura operated her tricorder to stop it from copying any more data. Utilizing the images that he had earlier recorded—which fortunately had appeared within the portal at a far slower rate than the historical information the Guardian had broadcast—Spock had been able to isolate the period of time into which McCoy had traveled, essentially narrowing it down to sometime in the twentieth century. They had then asked the Guardian to replay both the Earth timeline that McCoy had changed as well as the unaltered timeline. When it had, they had recorded both sets of information onto Spock’s tricorder and onto Uhura’s. Theoretically, the devices now contained a record of the action McCoy had taken that had modified the flow of history on Earth. They simply had no effective means of finding it.

  Uhura keyed a sequence of commands into her tricorder to verify the storage of both downloads. “All set here, Mister Spock,” she said when she’d finished.

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Spock said. He then turned and looked toward the rest of the landing party. “Captain,” he said. “We’re ready.”

  Kirk walked over to join Spock and Uhura. “There’s nothing else that needs to be done?” he asked. “Nothing else that can be done?”

  “No, sir,” Spock said. Uhura shook her head. She too had put a great deal of thought into their predicament, and though she held little hope for the success of the strategy that the captain and first officer had formulated, neither had she been able to determine any other possible solutions.

  “Very well, then,” the captain said. “Guardian, will you show us the timeline of Earth’s history again? The timeline that McCoy changed?”

  Within the portal, the mist and images it had been displaying for Spock and Uhura faded. “Behold,” the Guardian said a moment later, and once more, the mist appeared, and then the images.

  While Spock monitored the Guardian with his tricorder, Captain Kirk turned and paced away, past Uhura and then past the others, obviously anxious for events to play out. Uhura joined Scotty, Galloway, and Bates as they too waited. Finally, the captain strode past them and back to where Spock stood before the Guardian.

  “I was recording images at the time McCoy left,” Spock reminded the captain. “A rather barbaric period in your American history. I believe I can approximate just when to jump, perhaps within a month of the correct time… a week if we’re fortunate.”

  “Make sure we arrive before McCoy got there,” Kirk said. “It’s vital we stop him before he does whatever it was that changed all history.” He then addressed the time portal. “Guardian, if we are successful…”

  “Then you will be returned,” the Guardian said. “It will be as though none of you had gone.”

  On her own tricorder, Uhura followed the flow of data coming from the portal. The amount still staggered her, and she showed the display to Scotty, who peered at it soberly. A moment later, Kirk walked over and faced them.

  “Captain, it seems impossible,” Uhura said. “Even if you’re able to find the right date—”

  “Then even finding McCoy’d be a miracle,” Scotty interjected.

  “There is no alternative,” Spock said. Uhura knew he was right.

  “Scotty,” Kirk said, peering into the engineer’s eyes, “when you think you’ve waited long enough…” The captain looked at all of them then. “Each of you will have to try it. Even if you fail, at least you’ll be alive in some past world somewhere.”

  “Aye,” Scotty said.

  “Seconds now, sir,” Spock reported. “Stand by.”

  “Good luck, gentlemen,” Scotty said. Uhura could hear in his voice the difficulty he had in saying good-bye.

  “Happiness at least, sir,” Uhura offered. She wanted to say more, but really, what more could she say? The captain turned and rejoined Spock. Not knowing whether it would help or not, Uhura continued recording the output from the Guardian.

  Spock studied his own tricorder. “And… now,” he said, and he and the captain took one step and bounded through the portal. Within the Guardian, the mist and images faded again. When they had gone, so too had Captain Kirk and Mister Spock.

  Uhura glanced up at Scotty. “How long do we wait?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  Neither did she.

  They ran.

  Behind them, Spock heard the sound of a whistle following them. Obviously some of the people who had witnessed him render the policeman unconscious had found a second officer to give chase. Beside him, Captain Kirk carried the clothes they had stolen.

  They rounded a corner and sprinted past a line of men waiting outside a building. As they passed an alley, the captain stopped. “Steps down,” he said, and Spock saw where a staircase appeared to descend along the side of the brick structure. “Come on,” Kirk said, and he led the way into the alley and down the stairs.

  At the foot of the steps, they came to a door. With the captain’s arms filled with clothes, Spock reached past him and pushed. The door opened and they hurried through it.

  Inside, they both waited a moment, listening for the sounds of pursuit, but Spock heard nothing. They appeared to be in a darkened storage room, the dim illumination the result of daylight entering through a pair of small windows at the top of the back wall. Spock saw crates, furniture, stacks of paper, all festooned with cobwebs. The place smelled of dust and disuse.

  On the other side of the door, a wooden stairway ascended to the floor above. Captain Kirk hurried over to it and peered upward, obviously waiting to see if anybody had heard them and would be coming down to investigate. Spock joined him there, listening himself, but hearing no activity on the steps.

  As Spock looked about, further examining their surroundings, the captain set down the armful of clothes they had purloined. “You were actually enjoying my predicament back there,” he said, no doubt referring to his own outlandish effort to explain away Spock’s pointed ears, which the police officer had clearly noticed. Kirk had claimed Spock to be of Chinese ancestry, and that as a child, he’d gotten his head caught in a mechanical rice picker. “At times,” Kirk went on, “you seem quite human.”

  “Captain,” Spock said, trying to match his friend’s obvious attempt to lighten the seriousness of their circumstances, “I hardly believe that insults are within your prerogative as my commanding officer.”

  “Sorry,” Kirk said.

  Together, they picked through the pile of clothes. The captain selected a pair of gray denim pants and a red and black plaid shirt, while Spock took blue denim pants and a gray denim shirt. They each would have coats as well, a brown one for Kirk and a black one for Spock, and a dark cap would also allow the Vulcan to hide the tips of his ears from a population who would not make first contact with an extraterrestrial species for at least another century.

  As they began removing their Starfleet uniforms, Spock considered their situation. They had arrived back in time on historical Earth just a few minutes ago, and yet already they had stolen clothes for themselves and rendered a police officer unconscious. Either one of those events might already have altered the timeline that they had ostensibly come here to repair. In actuality, just their being seen by scores of individuals might lead to changes in history. Indeed, if the flow of time turned out to be a chaotic system, sensitively dependent on initial conditions, then the simple fact of their presence on Earth now, interacting with the environment, might well result in a temporal disruption. In such a case, they would have no chance of accomplishing their mission. They would therefore have to proceed under the assumption that time constituted a more robust natural system, in which it would take greater events to alter history.

  “Should we hide our uniforms somewhere?” Kirk asked, holding up his gold shirt. “Or get rid of them?”

  “I believe it would be safer,” Spock said, “to have as little trace as possible of our future existence in this time period.”

  “Right,” Kirk said. He peered around, then mov
ed to a large iron structure in the far corner of the room. Spock watched as he held his hands out to it, then opened a small door in its side. “There’s fire in here,” he said. “We can burn our uniforms.”

  Once they had both removed their shirts and pants—they would keep their boots, they decided—the captain incinerated them. “It is against regulations to destroy Starfleet property,” Spock noted as Kirk returned to continue dressing. “Technically, our uniforms did belong to Starfleet.”

  “Yes, well, technically, the Federation Starfleet won’t even be established for hundreds of years,” Kirk said. “So it’s not possible for us to violate regulations that haven’t been written yet.”

  “Logical,” Spock said.

  As the captain pulled on his shirt, he said, “Have you checked the tricorder to see if it still works? Who knows what traveling through the Guardian might have done to it.”

  “I haven’t,” Spock said as he finished buttoning the front of his own shirt. He reached for the device, which he’d set down beside the pile of clothes. He quickly activated it and ran a basic diagnostic, confirming its operation. “The tricorder is functioning,” he told the captain.

  “Well, that’s good, but…” He stopped and sighed, then said, “Time we face the unpleasant facts.”

  As Spock shut down the tricorder, he said, “First, I believe we have about a week before McCoy arrives.” He set the tricorder back down and began buttoning his cuffs. “But we can’t be certain.”

  “Arrives where?” Kirk asked. “Honolulu, Boise, San Diego? Why not Outer Mongolia for that matter?”

  “There is a theory,” Spock said as he began to tuck his shirt into his pants. “There could be some logic to the belief that time is fluid, like a river, with currents, eddies, backwash.”

  “And the same currents that swept McCoy to a certain time and place might sweep us there too,” the captain said. He paced across the room.

  “Unless that is true, Captain,” Spock said, “we have no hope.” He retrieved his tricorder once more and walked over to join Kirk. “Frustrating,” he said. “Locked in here is the exact place and moment of his arrival, even the images of what he did. If only I could tie this tricorder into the ship’s computers for just a few moments.”

  “Couldn’t you build some form of computer aid here?” Kirk asked.

  “In this zinc-plated, vacuum-tubed culture?” Spock said, incredulous. Although Spock did not know with precision the time to which he and the captain had come, he knew that they had arrived sometime during the first half of Earth’s twentieth century, well before the advent of digital computers.

  “Yes, well it would pose an extremely complex problem in logic, Mister Spock,” Kirk said. Spock raised an eyebrow at the captain’s obvious attempt to offer him a challenge. “Excuse me,” Kirk went on as he turned away. “I sometimes expect too much of you.”

  Spock felt himself react to the captain’s comment even as he began to consider how he might utilize the primitive tools and equipment available in this era to develop a means of improving the tricorder’s search capabilities. Of course, they would either have to steal or find a means of purchasing what he would need. If they-

  The lights hanging from the ceiling suddenly went on, and a woman’s voice called down from the top of the stairs. “Who’s there?”

  The captain made no move to leave, and as Spock heard footsteps descending the stairs, he remembered that he needed to hide his Vulcan nature. He quickly moved back across the room to where he’d left the cap. He exchanged his tricorder for it, then slipped the black wool across the top of this head and down around the tips of his ears.

  “Excuse us, miss,” he heard the captain say behind him as the footsteps stopped halfway down the lower flight of steps. “We didn’t mean to trespass. It’s cold outside.”

  “A lie is a very poor way to say ‘hello,’” the woman said. “It isn’t that cold.” She spoke with an English accent.

  Kirk didn’t reply for a moment, and Spock wondered how he would handle the situation. “No,” the captain finally said. As Spock walked back over to stand behind him, Kirk added, “We were being chased by a policeman.” The admission surprised Spock, as it might easily motivate the woman to want to turn them in to the authorities. Still, in his experience, he had observed the captain to have a keen perceptiveness about people, and he trusted his judgment now.

  “Why?” the woman wanted to know. She wore a light brown, calf-length dress, mostly covered by a white apron.

  “These clothes,” the captain said, taking a slow step forward. “We stole them. We didn’t have any money.”

  The woman—approximately one and three-quarters meters tall, with short dark hair that framed her face—tilted her head slightly to the side, an expression seemingly mixed of surprise and respect crossing her soft features. She gazed at the captain, as though considering how she should react to him. At last, she looked down and pushed her fingers across the banister, then glanced about the room. “Well, um, I could do with some help around here,” she said. “Uh, doing dishes, sweeping, general cleaning.” Her voice rose on the last word, clearly identifying her statements as an offer.

  “At what rate of payment?” Spock asked. The captain peered back at him quizzically. “I need radio tubes and so forth,” Spock explained. “My hobby.”

  “Fifteen cents an hour for ten hours a day,” the woman said. “What are your names?”

  “Mine is Jim Kirk,” the captain said. “His is—” He hesitated, then simply told the truth. “—Spock.”

  The woman offered a nod at the information, but did not otherwise react to a name she must have found unusual. “I’m Edith Keeler,” she said. “Well, you can start by cleaning up down here.” She turned and started back up the stairs, but the captain called after her.

  “Excuse me, miss,” he said. “Where are we?”

  “You’re in the Twenty-first Street Mission,” Keeler said.

  A mission, Spock thought, realizing their good fortune in having chosen to conceal themselves in what turned out to be a charitable organization.

  “Do you run this place?” the captain asked.

  “Indeed, I do, Mister Kirk,” Keeler said. She then continued on up the stairs.

  The captain turned to face Spock. “Radio tubes and so on?” he said. “I approve of hobbies, Mister Spock.” He reached for a broom leaning against a nearby wall. He handed it to Spock, then reached for a second one for himself. “Do you really think you can construct something that will help us extract the information we need from the tricorder?”

  “I am not sure,” Spock said. “I have begun to give the problem some thought, and it has occurred to me that I might be able to design a mnemonic memory circuit. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not I can use the components of the day to actually construct one.”

  “How can we determine that?” Kirk asked.

  “It would help to first learn precisely what is available to us,” Spock said. “Not only will I require the equipment out of which to build such a circuit, but also the tools with which to do so.”

  “Of course,” Kirk said. “After we’ve finished here, we should scour the city, look for shops that have such items.”

  “Captain, it may be necessary for us to steal those items as well,” Spock said, uncomfortable with the idea, but well aware of the importance of their endeavors.

  “Well, we’ll have some money from our efforts here,” Kirk said, raising his broom to illustrate his point. “But we’ll do what we have to do.” Then, in a juxtaposition of action and goal that struck Spock as peculiar, the captain began to sweep. “After all,” Kirk said, “we are trying to save the future.”

  Eight

  2293

  Tremontaine did not watch Spock because she did not wish to expose her concern for him in this venue. It would be unprofessional and inappropriate for her to display her personal feelings for him during a diplomatic negotiation, as well as behavior that would un
questionably make him uneasy. She did pay attention, though, listening to what Spock said and how he said it, noting his overall comportment, and taking in his appearance when in the normal course of the talks she looked at him. Aware that she hadn’t known him all that long, and that she’d been involved with him for only a week and a half, she still believed that she could apprehend his pain.

  “There is the issue of unfettered access to all parts of the base,” said Tel Venatil Liss, the Alonis ambassador. Her translated words came through a speaker set into the center of the long table at which the Federation delegation sat. Across from Tremontaine and Spock and their two aides, a transparent wall offered a view of Liss and her chief of staff, Morat, as they floated in an adjacent, water-filled room. The conference center actually spread completely submerged along the sea floor, with a third of the structure built to sustain an atmosphere for the benefit of air-breathing dignitaries.

  Tremontaine opened her mouth to respond, but Spock did so first. “A Starfleet starbase has many purposes and many needs,” he said. “Because it will be an open port, it must be able to provide an environment and facilities suitable for a multitude of life-forms, and to defend itself against belligerent forces. Allowing anybody other than authorized base personnel unrestricted access to sections such as life support and shield control could compromise the security of the entire station.”

  Tremontaine’s jaw tightened, a failure of her usual diplomatic composure, and she rubbed at her cheek in order to cover her flash of visible emotion. She and Spock had anticipated for some time an Alonis requirement for entree to all areas of the starbase, and they’d devised an intricate argument for contending with such a problematic demand. His reply just now had been far from that mark.