Worlds in Collision (40 page)

McCoy stood in the plaza before the ungainly structure, wondering how anyone could have become enamored of an architectural style that had arisen on a world where people spent most of their time burying things underground so they couldn't be detected by hypothetical enemies from space. That cultural paranoia, supported by fiber optic data transmission that prevented stray radiation from leaking out into space, had kept Earth's first expedition to another star from discovering there was an inhabited, technologically advanced civilization virtually next door until the first shuttles were almost ready to land.
The members of the Federation are all so eager to find new life and new civilizations,
McCoy thought,
but when we find it, none of us wants to go first.
Maybe that was the real reason for what had happened on Talin: not that Kirk had been engaged in brash adventurism, but that everyone else involved, including the First Contact Office, had been too cautious.

“Doctor McCoy?”

McCoy turned to see Uhura come up beside him, her eyes fixed on his beard. She looked somehow out of place in her civilian clothes—a rough textured brown and white caftan that floated above her ankles. No doubt he looked similarly odd to her out of his science blues and in a vat-cotton, multistriped shirt and hiking trousers.

“How long have you been here?” Uhura asked, not taking her eyes off the beard.

“Just arrived,” McCoy said. He ran his fingers through his whiskers. “I don't blame you for staring. There
is
a lot of white in it, isn't there? Took me by surprise, too.”

“It's not the white, Doctor. It's just the beard. I didn't recognize you at first and I was worried that I had left you standing here for the past half hour.” Then she peered more closely at the beard. “But you're right, that
is
a lot of white.”

McCoy laughed, held out his arms to her, and they hugged each other tightly. “It's good to see you again, Uhura. Damned good.”

“I know the feeling.” Uhura took his hand in hers. She looked somber for a moment. “Is there anything to your being late?”

McCoy smiled. “Oh, no. Not a thing. I got in this morning and went down to Tranquility Park. Had a very interesting discussion with a young lady.”

Uhura smiled. “I see.”

“A young lady of eight on a school band trip,” McCoy clarified. “And with any luck, she'll be running Starfleet in fifty years.” He pointed over to a tunnelway a few hundred meters west of the justice building. “There's a restaurant over there in the Park Dome. Wasn't too bad a few years ago. Want to get some civilian food to go with the civilian clothes?”

Uhura nodded. “I'd like that. I…I can't get used to…any of this.”

“Neither can I,” McCoy said and they began to walk to the park together, arms linked. “So,” McCoy began after a few steps in silence, “how did the hearing go this morning?”

“Just fine,” Uhura said. “For a dishonorable discharge.”

“I'm glad they let you out.” McCoy glanced sideways at a group of three officers walking by in gold shirts with commanders' braids. They saw him and Uhura as well, but there was no flicker of recognition. McCoy was surprised, considering the coverage the
Enterprise
Five had been given.

“No choice, Doctor. They could only hold me on contempt charges for three months in peacetime. Anything longer is against the Articles.”

McCoy squeezed her hand. “Well, now that you're out, you should know that there's a big fat loophole in that regulation. Technically, they could have dropped charges against you one day before the limit ran out, held you over for any one of a hundred different minor violations, and the very next day brought new contempt charges against you good for another three months.”

“What?” Uhura stopped walking and other pedestrians scrambled to move around her and the doctor.

“It's not often done,” McCoy said, “but if they had really wanted you, they could have kept you pretty much indefinitely.”

“I suppose that means my so-called legal advisor was right. Starfleet does want to cover up what happened.”

McCoy tugged on Uhura's arm to get her walking again. “Starfleet doesn't go in for cover-ups, Uhura. The preliminary board hearing was a public forum and the update services got the full story out. There's no sign that Starfleet's trying to hide anything, even after the fact.”

“But, Doctor, they didn't want to court-martial you—”

“That's because they said I didn't do anything. But I was on the ship. I would have…” He broke off, feeling his blood pressure soar.

“But they didn't want to court-martial the captain, either—or anyone. They just forced us all to…resign. Except for me.”

“Careful here,” McCoy warned as they came to the edge of the civic dome and a large caution display warned that they were entering a zone of natural gravity. The sudden stomach dip into point one seven gee wasn't quite as bad as going into free fall, but it was close enough for McCoy. As far as he was concerned, even cycling down to point nine gee was one point variation too much.

He let go of Uhura's hand so they could both use the guide rails set up for tourists and, he was sorry to read on the signs, for seniors. Meanwhile, a flurry of youngsters went bounding back and forth through the brightly illuminated interdome tunnel like giant rabbits on cordrazine. The automatic safety system's voice droned on nonstop to tell the children they were moving at too high a velocity for public safety.

As he moved stodgily along, feeling the breeze created by the bouncing youngsters, McCoy found himself thinking of the old two-dees the first Moon explorers had taken on their brief visits here, and during the construction of Base One. What the doctor always found remarkable on those tapes was that almost within seconds of their first arrival, the explorers had all instinctively begun hopping like these children, and that this type of locomotion was still common in Moon-normal gee fields today. McCoy marveled that the human body was so adaptable, not just for the Moon but for a thousand other worlds as well. It was a body designed to be propelled wherever its mind pushed it. No matter what. He thought about the young girl again.

“Well, don't you think that seems suspicious, Doctor?” Uhura asked. “Getting us to resign like that?”

McCoy was momentarily startled and he glanced back as he pulled himself along the railing. “Uhura, if you were in their position, wouldn't
you
rather have avoided the publicity of court-martialing the entire bridge crew of one of your most prominent ships when there were easier, less noticeable, and less damaging ways of getting rid of them?” He stopped talking for a moment to catch his breath. Why did lower gravity fields always seem to take more effort to move around in? “What happened at Talin happened. It's a closed datafile. Starfleet doesn't want to cover it up. It just doesn't want to reopen old wounds.”

Uhura pushed off against the tunnel floor and jumped to McCoy's side, then pulled down on his arm and forced him under the guide rail where they could stand face-to-face without impeding the flow of others moving through the tunnel. She dropped her voice to an angry whisper. “Doctor McCoy, if I didn't know you better, I'd say you were talking as if you believed what Starfleet says. You can't, can you?”

McCoy hooked his hand under the guide rail and pushed down, increasing the pressure of his feet on the tunnel floor to lessen the feeling that the turbolift his stomach was on was going to hit bottom any second. “Of course, I don't believe it. I was there, remember? All I'm saying is that I understand Starfleet's position on this. I'm not saying that I like it or that I'm not going to try and change it, but as somebody somewhere once said, ‘It's logical.' ” McCoy put his hand to his eyes as if to clear them. “Lord, I never thought I'd miss hearing those words as much as I do now.”

Uhura waited for a few moments while McCoy collected himself. Then she spoke again. “Did you know that Mr. Spock had resigned?”

McCoy's shocked expression said that he hadn't.

“I just found out today myself. My legal advisor told me. Apparently it was in yesterday's updates.”

“But he was supposed to help you with your appeal,” McCoy said. “I mean, that was the whole point of you going through this, wasn't it?”

“That's what I thought.”

“Has he contacted you at all? Sent a message through anyone?”

Uhura shook her head. “When I thought you were late in coming to meet me back there, I thought maybe…well, that you and he were…together.”

“I haven't heard a thing from Spock since that…meeting with Hammersmith at Starbase 29.”

Uhura laughed in spite of her mood. “ ‘Meeting' wouldn't be the word I'd use for it.”

McCoy smiled, too. And then he frowned.

“What is it?” Uhura asked.

“Over the past few weeks, I've just started to realize how spoiled we all were on the
Enterprise.
We could talk to anyone virtually anywhere over subspace.”

“We still can, Doctor McCoy.”

“But have you seen how long it takes to get online just to send a text-only message to Centaurus? And that's a local transmission. Good Lord, on the ship we never had to wait to gain access to anything. And we had personal communicators. And shuttles. The computers always ready. Even the transporter.” He groaned. “Listen to me, I'm missing the blasted transporter.”

“All that technology is available right here. It's available almost any place.”

“That's not my point. Here, we have to present our travel documents, we have to wait in line, go through channels…. On the
Enterprise,
why, we could just
do
something. Spock's missing? The sensors could do a sweep and you'd have locked onto his communicator in five seconds flat.” McCoy took his hand away from the guide rail, holding both hands empty before him. “We're powerless now. It's so much harder to do just about everything.”

“Are…are you giving up?” Uhura's voice roughened.

McCoy watched as three children sped past, bouncing high through the tunnel and turning somersaults in midair, their laughter drowning out the staid warnings of the safety system. “On the shuttle here this morning, I thought about it, Uhura. I really did. But at Tranquility…they didn't have much. Hell, they didn't have anything any sane person would have taken into space. But they came here anyway, didn't they?”

Uhura nodded her head silently as children played around them on what had once been an airless, lifeless rock.

“It wasn't the equipment they built,” McCoy continued, watching the stream of people, humans and otherwise, passing through the tunnel. “It wasn't the knowledge or the experience they had. It was”—he shook his head, out of words—“…something else.”

Uhura's eyes filled with relief. “I know,” she said softly. “I know.”

“So to answer your question, Lieutenant. No. I am—”

Uhura placed her hands on McCoy's shoulders. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“For what?”

“You called me ‘Lieutenant.' I've missed hearing that.”

McCoy took a deep breath. The thoughts he had been struggling with these past months at last came together. All because of a child he had happened to meet.

He thought of being at the end of a chain of thousands, of millions who had worked so hard to push humans so far.
How could you quit?
the child had asked him, and McCoy had had no answer for her. Because there was no answer. Because he hadn't quit. He wouldn't quit.

“Well, listen carefully, Lieutenant. Because to answer your question: No, I am not giving up. It's just that…I'm not quite sure what to do next.”

“Don't worry about it, Doctor. Because I do.” Uhura ducked back under the guide rail.

“Are you going to tell me?”

Uhura flashed a brilliant smile, then leapt across the tunnel in two four-meter hops to the pedestrian pathways leading back into the civic administration dome.

McCoy grumbled, pushed himself over the guide rail, and joined her, barely missing being blasted out of the tunnel by runaway tumbling children. “So what do we do, Lieutenant?”

“We go back,” Uhura said.

McCoy looked down the tunnel. Through the distant opening, he could still see a corner of the squat Hall of Justice. “To Starfleet?” he asked in puzzlement.

But Uhura shook her head. “Back to where it all began, Doctor. To where the answers are.” She smiled in satisfaction at the look that came over his face. “That's right,” she said. “To Talin.”

“The last I heard, Uhura, there was no regular tourist service out to the frontier. How do you suggest we get there?”

Uhura patted McCoy's arm. “I told you not to worry. We can find someone who'll want to take us there.”