Chapter one — mccoy without bones

James Blish

Spock Must Die

 

Author’s Note

 

Unlike the preceding three STAR TREK books, this one is not a set of adaptations of scripts which have already been shown on television, but an original novel built around the characters and background of the TV series conceived by Gene Roddenberry. I am grateful to the many fans of the show who asked me to tackle such a project, and to Bantam Books and Paramount Television for agreeing to it.

And who knows — it might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969, and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lease on life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.

I for one refuse to believe that an enterprise so well conceived, so scrupulously produced, and so widely loved can stay boneyarded for long.

And I have 1,898 letters from people who don’t believe it either.

JAMES BLISH

Marlow, Bucks, England.

 

Chapter Seven — THE ATTACK

 

 

From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4181.6:

Apparently six Klingon battlecraft locked onto us during our second pass at Organia — or whatever it is where Organia ought to be. If they were in the vicinity during our first pass, which I think almost certain, only the briefness of our breakout can have saved us from being detected then. It is also possible, of course, that we would not have been detected the second time had it not been for our own automatic phaser fire, depending upon whether the Klingon force was a garrison or an ambush. If it was the latter, the proximity setting on the phasers did us a favor, for our hits must have disabled two of them; only four are following on warp drive. With another enemy I would expect someone to stay behind as a reserve, out of ordinary tactical common sense, but no Klingon would avoid a fight unless physically pinned down in one way or another.

Most battles in space are either over almost the instant they begin — as had evidently been the case with the two surprised Klingon vessels — or became very protracted affairs, because of the immense distances involved. (The first sentence of Starfleet Academy’s Fundamentals of Naval Engagement reads: “The chief obstacle facing a Starship Captain who wishes to join battle is that battle is almost impossible to join.”)

This one showed every sign of going on forever. None of the four surviving Klingon ships was as large as their quarry, whose phasers outranged theirs sufficiently to keep them at a respectful distance, while her deflectors easily swept aside the occasional Klingon torpedo. In short, a standoff.

Kirk knew from experience, however, that the standoff could not be a stalemate; the blasts of code being emitted steadily on subspace radio by the small Klingon vessels — three of them seemed to be corvettes, the other was perhaps as large as a cruiser — were obviously urgent calls for more high-powered help. Nor was there any further reason for the Enterprise to preserve radio silence.

“Inform Starfleet Command of our whereabouts,” he told Lieutenant Uhura. “Include a description of the Organian situation and a hologram of your best plate of the body in Organia’s orbit. Tell them we’re under attack and ask for orders. Second, as a separate message, send them Spock Two’s conclusions on current Klingon strategy. Third, route a flash Urgent straight through to the Scientific Advisory Board describing our superfluity of Spocks and exactly how it happened — with hard, full particulars from Mr. Scott — and ask them for analysis and advice…- By the way, how old is our most recent code?”

“Just a year old, Captain.”

“The Klingons will have broken that six ways from Sunday by now. Well, you’ll have to use it — but put the clear in Swahili and ask to get the answers the same way. That ought to give the Klingons pause.”

“It will indeed,” Uhura said, grinning. “But even modem Swahili lacks some of Scotty’s technical terms, Captain. There are Indo-European borrowings in every Earthly language — and the Klingons may be able to infer the rest of the message using them as contexts.”

“Blast and damn. Leaving the technicalities out will throw us right back on our own resources, and I can’t say we’ve done too well with those.”

“There’s an alternative, Captain, though it’s risky; we can translate the clear into Eurish.”

“What’s that? I never heard of it.”

“It’s the synthetic language James Joyce invented for his last novel, over two hundred years ago. It contains forty or fifty other languages, including slang in all of them. Nobody but an Earthman could possibly make sense of it, and there are only a few hundred of them who are fluent in it. There’s the risk; it may take Starfleet Command some time to run down an expert in it — if they even recognize it for what it is.”

Being a communications officer, Kirk realized anew, involved a good many fields of knowledge besides subspace radio. “Can it handle scientific terms?”

“Indeed it can. You know the elementary particle called the quark; well, that’s a Eurish word. Joyce himself predicted nuclear fission in the novel I mentioned. I can’t quote it precisely, but roughly it goes, ‘The abniliilisation of the etym expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules.’ There’s more, but I can’t recall it — it has been a long time since I last read the book.”

“That’s more than enough,” Kirk said hastily. “Go ahead — just as long as you’re sure you can read the answer.”

“Nobody’s ever dead sure of what Eurish means,” Uhura said. “But I can probably read more of it than the Klingons could. To them, it’ll be pure gibberish.”

And they won’t be alone, Kirk thought. Nevertheless, he could forget about it for the time being. That still left the problem of the Klingon ships on the tail of the Enterprise.

Sowing a mine field in the ship’s wake would be useless; the enemy craft doubtless had deflectors, and in any event the mines, being too small to carry their own warp generators, would simply fall out into normal space and become a hazard to peacetime navigation. But wait a minute…

“Mr. Spock, check me on something. When we put out a deflector beam when we’re on warp drive, the warp field flows along the beam to the limit of the surface area of the field. Then, theoretically, the field fails and we’re back in normal space. All right so far?”

“Yes, Captain, a simple inverse-square-law effect.”

“And contrariwise,” Kirk said, “using a tractor beam on warp drive pulls the field in around the beam, which gives us a little extra velocity but dangerously biases our heading.” Spock Two nodded. “All right, I think we’ve got the basis for a little experiment. I want to plant a mine right under the bow of that cruiser, using a deflector and a tractor beam in tandem, with a little more power on the deflector. At the same time, I want our velocity run up so that our warp field will fail just as the mine explodes. Fill in the parameters, including the cruiser’s pseudo distance and relative velocity, and see if it’s feasible.”

Spock Two turned to the computer and worked silently for a few moments. Then he said, “Yes, Captain, mathematically it is not a complex operation. But the library has no record of any Starship ever surviving the puncturing of its warp field by a deflector while under drive.”

“And when nearly balanced by a tractor?”

“No pertinent data. At best, I would estimate, the strain on the Enterprise would be severe.”

Yes, Kirk thought, and just maybe you don’t much want that Klingon cruiser knocked out, either.

“We’ll try it anyhow. Mr. Sulu, arm a mine and program the operation. Also — the instant we are back in normal space, give us maximum acceleration along our present heading on reaction drive.”

“That,” Spock Two said in the original Spock’s most neutral voice, “involves a high probability of shearing the command section free of the engineering section.”

“Why? We’ve done it before.”

“Because of the compounding of the shock incident upon the puncturing of the warp field, Captain.”

“We’ll take that chance too. In case it has escaped your attention, we happen to be in the middle of a battle. Lieutenant, warn ship’s personnel to beware shock. Stand to, all, and execute.”

Spock Two offered no further obstructions. Silently, Uhura set up on the main viewing screen a panorama of the sector in which the trap — if it worked — was to be sprung. The Klingon cruiser would have looked like a distorted mass of tubes and bulbs even close on, under the strange conditions of subspace; at its present distance, it was little more than a wobbly shadow.

Then the dense, irregular mass, made fuzzy with interference fringes, which was the best view they could hope to get of the mine, pushed its way onto the screen, held at the tip of two feathers of pale light, their pinnae pointing in opposite directions, which were the paired deflector and tractor beams (which in normal space would have been invisible). As the mine reached the inside surface of the warp field, that too became faintly visible, and in a moment was bulging toward the Klingon vessel. The impression it gave, of a monstrous balloon about to have a blowout, was alarming.

“Mr. Sulu, can the Klingon see what’s going on there from the outside, or otherwise sense it?”

“I don’t know, Captain. I wish I couldn’t.”

“Lieutenant Uhura?”

“It’s quite possible, Captain, considering how excited the warp field is becoming. But perhaps they won’t know how to interpret it. Like the library, I’ve never heard of this having been tried before, and maybe the Klingons haven’t either. But I’m only guessing.”

The bulge in the warp field grew, gradually becoming a blunt pseudopod groping into subspace. From the Enterprise it was like staring down a dim tunnel, with the twin beams as its axis. From the depths of his memory there came to Kirk a biology-class vision of the long glass spike of a radiolarian, a microscopic marine animal, with protoplasm streaming along it, mindless and voracious.

“Captain,” the intercom squawked. “I’ve got trouble down here already. My engines are croonin’ like kine with the indigestion.”

“Ride with it, Mr. Scott, there’s worse to come.”

The blunt projection became a finger, at the tip of which the mine, looking as harmless as a laburnum seed, dwindled into the false night of subspace. Very faintly, the hull of the Enterprise began to groan. It was the first time in years that Kirk had heard his ship betray any signs of structural strain serious enough to be audible.

“Thirty seconds to breakout,” Spock Two said.

“The Klingon’s peeling off!” Uhura cried. “He’s detected something he doesn’t like, that’s for sure. And he’s under full drive. If…”

Was the mine close enough? Never mind, it would never be any closer.

“Fire, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said.

An immense ball of flame blossomed on the view screen — and then vanished as the Enterprise dropped into normal space. One second later, deprived of the ship’s warp field, the fireball, too, was back again.

“Got him!” Sulu crowed.

The fireball swelled intolerably as the matter and anti-matter in the doomed Klingon’s warp-drive pods fused and added their violence to the raging hydrogen explosion of the mine. The viewing screen dimmed the light hurriedly, but finally could accomodate it no longer, and blacked out entirely.

At the same time, the Enterprise rang with the blowtorch howling of the reaction engines coming up to full thrust, and a colossal lurch threw them all to the deck. The light flickered.

“Posts!” Kirk shouted, scrambling back to his command chair. “All department heads, report!”

The ship was screaming so fearfully in all its members that he could not have heard the answers even had his staff been able to hear the order. But a sweeping glance over the boards told him the bare-knuckle essentials; the rest could wait though not for long.

The Enterprise had held together — just barely. The three surviving Klingon corvettes had taken several seconds to react to the destruction of their command cruiser and the disappearance of their quarry. They had dropped out of warp drive now, but in those few seconds had overshot their target by nearly a million miles, and the long, separating arcs they were executing now to retrace their steps were eloquent of caution and bafflement — and, if Kirk knew his Klingons, of mind-clouding fury.

The Enterprise, so fleet on warp drive, was something of a pig under reaction thrust, but she was wallowing forward bravely, and gaining legs with every stride. Within only a few minutes she would be plowing through the very midst of her erstwhile harriers.

“Klingons launching missiles, Captain,” Uhura reported.

Pure, random desperation. “Disregard. Mr. Sulu, engage the enemy and fire at will. When you’re through with them, I don’t want one single atom left sticking to another.”

“Yes, sir,” Sulu said, a wolfish grin on his normally cheerful face. This was the opportunity of a lifetime for a Starship gunnery officer, and he was obviously enjoying it thoroughly.

As the Enterprise picked up speed, she responded better to her helm; in that respect she did not differ much from a nineteenth-century clipper ship on the high seas, though the comparison failed utterly on warp drive. And she had a tremendous amount of energy to expand — indeed, even to waste — through her reaction engines. The Klingons apparently were stunned to see her bearing down on them, but their stupor didn’t matter now. The corvettes could not have reformed in time to meet her, even had their commanders understood the situation instantly.

Sulu’s hands danced over the studs before him. A stabbing barrage of phaser fire shot out from the Enterprise. The deflector screens of the corvettes fought back with coruscating brilliance; the viewing screen, which had crept cautiously back into operation after the death of the cruiser, dimmed hastily again.

Then there were no Klingon corvettes — only clouds of incandescent gas, through which the Enterprise sailed as majestically as an ancient Spanish galleon over a placid Caribbean bay.

“Very good, ladies and gentlemen,” Kirk said. “Assess damage and report to the First Officer. Mr. Sulu, relay course for Organia at Warp Three, to a position in opposition to the present calculated position of the planet. Lieutenant Uhura, open all lines to the staff — including Spock One. I want a conference, as of right now.”

“I’ll give you a report, Captain Kirk, and it’s a twenty-four carat dilly,” Leonard McCoy’s voice said out of the middle of the air. “I can now tell you how to determine which Spock is the ringer.”

Kirk shot a glance at Spock Two, but the incumbent First Officer showed no reaction whatsoever. Well, that was in character, as far as it went; Kirk had expected nothing else.

“Belay that,” Kirk told McCoy evenly. “Our present business is much more urgent, and I want both Spocks to hear it.”

“But, Jim —!” McCoy’s voice said, almost as if in shock. Then there was a sound of swallowing, and the surgeon started over again. “Captain, this matter in my opinion has the highest possible urgency.”

“Belay it. And attend, all.”

 

James Blish

Spock Must Die

 

Author’s Note

 

Unlike the preceding three STAR TREK books, this one is not a set of adaptations of scripts which have already been shown on television, but an original novel built around the characters and background of the TV series conceived by Gene Roddenberry. I am grateful to the many fans of the show who asked me to tackle such a project, and to Bantam Books and Paramount Television for agreeing to it.

And who knows — it might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969, and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lease on life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.

I for one refuse to believe that an enterprise so well conceived, so scrupulously produced, and so widely loved can stay boneyarded for long.

And I have 1,898 letters from people who don’t believe it either.

JAMES BLISH

Marlow, Bucks, England.

 

Chapter One — McCOY WITHOUT BONES

 

 

From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4011.9:

We are continuing to record a navigation grid for this area of space-time, as directed. Mr. Spock reports that, according to the library, the procedure is still called “benchmarking” after ancient ordinance mapping practices laid down before the days of space flight, though these cubic parsecs of emptiness look like most unattractive sites to park a bench.

Though we are not far by warp drive from the Klingon Empire, and in fact I am sure the Klingons would claim that we were actually in it, the mission has been quite uneventful and I believe I detect some signs of boredom among my officers. Their efficiency, however, seems quite unimpaired.

“What worries me,” McCoy said, “is whether I’m myself any more. I have a horrible suspicion that I’m a ghost. And that I’ve been one for maybe as long as twenty years.”

The question caught Captain Kirk’s ear as he was crossing the rec room of the Enterprise with a handful of coffee. It was not addressed to him, however; turning, he saw that the starship’s surgeon was sitting at a table with Scott, who was listening with apparently deep attention. Scotty listening to personal confidences? Or Doc offering them? Ordinarily Scotty had about as much interest in people as his engines might have taken; and McCoy was reticent to the point of cynicism.

“May I join this symposium?” Kirk said. “Or is it private?”

“It’s nae private, it’s just nonsense, I think,” the engineering officer said. “Doc here is developing a notion that the transporter is a sort of electric chair. Thus far, I canna follow him, but I’m trying, I’ll do mysel’ that credit.”

“Oh,” Kirk said, for want of anything else to say. He sat down. His first impression, that McCoy had been obliquely referring to his divorce, was now out the porthole, which both restored his faith in his understanding of McCoy’s character, and left him totally at sea. Understanding McCoy was a matter of personal as well as ship’s importance to Kirk, for as Senior Ship’s Surgeon, McCoy was the one man who could himself approach Kirk at any time on the most intimate personal level; indeed, it was McCoy’s positive duty to keep abreast of the Captain’s physical, mental and emotional condition and to speak out openly about it — and not necessarily only to the patient.

When McCoy joined the Enterprise, Kirk suspected that it had been the divorce that had turned him to the Space Service in the first place. The details, however, were a mystery. Kirk did know that McCoy had a daughter, Joanna, who had been twenty back then and for whom the surgeon had provided; she was in training as a nurse somewhere, and McCoy heard from her as often as the interstellar mail permitted. That was not very often.

“Somebody,” Kirk said, “had better fill me in. Doc, you’ve said nine times to the dozen that you don’t like the transporter system. In fact, I think ‘loath,’ is the word you use. ‘I do not care to have my molecules scrambled and beamed around as if I were a radio message.’ Is this just more of the same?”

“It is and it isn’t,” McCoy said. “It goes like this. If I understand Scotty aright, the transporter turns our bodies into energy and then reconstitutes them as matter at the destination.”

“That’s a turrible oversimplification,” Scott objected. The presence of his accent, which came out only under stress, was now explained; they were talking about machinery, with which he was actively in love. “What the transporter does is analyze the energy state of each particle in the body and then produce a Dirac jump to an equivalent state somewhere else. No conversion is involved — if it were, we’d blow up the ship.”

“I don’t care about that,” McCoy said. “What I care about is my state of consciousness — my ego, if you like. And it isn’t matter, energy or anything else I can name, despite the fact that it’s the central phenomenon of all human thought. After all, we all know we live in a solipsistic universe.”

“A what?” Kirk said.

“We inhabit two universes, then,” McCoy said patiently. “One is the universe inside our skulls — our viewpoint universe, as it were. The other is the phenomenal universe — but that in the long run is only a consensus of viewpoint universes, augmented by pointer readings, and other kinds of machine read-outs. The consensus universe is also a product of consciousness. Do you agree, Jim?”

“Tentatively,” Kirk said. “Except that I find what you call the consensus universe is pretty convincing.”

“Statistically, yes. But it breaks down very rapidly when you examine the individual data behind the statistics. All we really know is what we register inside our skulls — a theory which used to be called logical positivism. I go further: I say that there may not even be any consensus universe, and that nothing is provably real except my consciousness, which I can’t measure. This position is called solipsism, and I say that the fact of self-consciousness forces us all to be solipsists at heart and from birth. We just seldom become aware of it, that’s all.”

“Space travel does that to you,” Kirk agreed. “Especially when you’re as far from home as we are now. Luckily, you recover, at least enough to function.”

“Nobody ever recovers, completely,” McCoy said somberly. “I believe that the first discovery of this situation is one of the great formative shocks in human development — maybe as important as the birth trauma. Tell me, Jim: wasn’t there a moment, or an hour, in your childhood or early adolescence when you realized with astonishment that you, the unique and only Jim Kirk, were at the very center of the whole universe? And when you tried to imagine what it would be like to see the universe from some other point of view — that of your father, perhaps — and realized that you were forever a prisoner in your own head?”

Kirk searched his memory. “Yes, there was,” he said. “And the fact that I can still remember it, and so easily, does seem to indicate that it was fairly important to me. But after a while I dismissed the whole problem. I couldn’t see that it had any practical consequences, and in any event there wasn’t anything I could do about it. But you still haven’t answered my question. What’s all this got to do with the transporter?”

“Nary a thing,” Scott said.

“On the contrary. Whatever the mechanism, the effect of the transporter is to dissolve my body and reassemble it somewhere else. Now you’ll agree from experience that this process takes finite, physical time — short, but measurable. Also from experience, that during that time period neither body nor consciousness exists. Okay so far?”

“Well, in a cloudy sort of way,” Kirk said.

“Good. Now, at the other end, a body is assembled which is apparently identical with the original, is alive, has consciousness, and has all the memories of the original. But it is NOT the original. That has been destroyed.”

“I canna see that it matters a whit,” Scott said. “Any more than your solipsist position does. As Mr. Spock is fond of saying, ‘A difference which makes no difference is no difference’.”

“No, not to you,” McCoy said, “because the new McCoy will look and behave in all respects like the old one. But to me? I can’t take so operational a view of the matter. I am, by definition, not the same man who went into a transporter for the first time twenty years ago. I am a construct made by a machine after the image of a dead man — and the hell of it is, not even I can know how exact the imitation is, because — well, because obviously if anything is missing I wouldn’t remember it.”

“Question,” Kirk said. “Do you feel any different?”

“Aha,” said Scott with satisfaction.

“No, Jim, I don’t, but how could I? I think I remember what I was like before, but in that I may be vastly mistaken. Psychology is my specialty, for all that you see me chiefly as a man reluctant to hand out pills. I know that there are vast areas of my mind that are inaccessible to my consciousness except under special conditions — under stress, say, or in dreams. What if part of that psychic underground has not been duplicated? How would I know?”

“You could ask Spock,” Scott suggested.

“Thanks, no. The one time I was in mind-lock with him it saved my life — it saved all of us, you’ll remember — but I didn’t find it pleasant.”

“Well, you ought to, anyhow,” Scott said, “if you’re as serious about all this. He could lock Onto one of those unconscious areas and then see if it was still there after your next transporter trip.”

“Which it almost surely would be,” Kirk added. “I don’t see why you assume the transporter to be so peculiarly selective. Why should it blot out subconscious traces instead of conscious ones?”

“Why shouldn’t it? And in point of fact, does it or doesn’t it? That’s pretty close to the question I want answered. If it were the question, I would even submit to the experiment Scotty proposes, and ask everybody else aboard to as well.”

“I,” said Kirk, “have been on starship duty somewhat longer than either of you gentlemen. And I will say without qualification that this is the weirdest rec room conversation I’ve ever gotten into. But all right, Doc, let’s bite the bullet. What is the question?”

“What would you expect from a psychologist?” McCoy said. “The question, of course, is the soul. If it exists, which I know no more than the next man. When I was first reassembled by that damnable machine, did my soul, if any, make the crossing with me — or am I just a reasonable automaton?”

“The ability to worry about the question,” Kirk said, “seems to me to be its own answer.”

“Hmmm. You may be right, Jim. In fact, you better had be. Because if you aren’t, then every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder.”

“And thot’s nae a haggle, it’s a haggis,” Scott said hotly. “Look ye, Doc, yon soul’s immortal by definition. If it exists, it canna be destroyed — “

“Captain Kirk,” said the rec room’s intercom speaker.

Kirk arose with some relief; the waters around the table had been getting pretty deep. But his relief was short-lived.

“In the rec room, Mr. Spock.”

“Will you relieve me, please, Captain? We are in need of a Command decision.”

McCoy and Scott looked up in alarm. A Command decision, out here in a totally unexplored arm of the galaxy?

“I’m on my way,” Kirk said. “What, briefly, is the problem?”

“Sir,” the first officer’s voice said, “the Klingon War has finally broken out. Organia seems already to have been destroyed, and we are cut off from the Federation.”