IT HAD HAPPENED shortly after the start of the evening shift. Whatever "it" was.
Kirk remembered sparring with Ensign Lao in the gym, remembered—half-remembered, in a kind of misty dream—someone calling him to the comm link for a message from the bridge.
And the next thing he knew clearly had been waking at 0400 in a cold sweat, from a dream of horror, a dream of something dark and chitinous, something that ripped men to pieces with casual ease…eyeless, tentacled, winged, and glittering darkly. A dream of a yagghorth, seen clearly visible in good lighting, unlike the dim and flickery image on the warning vid.
But no one of the crew was missing or injured, save Lao and Chapel, in sickbay with extreme phaser shock.
And further back than that, his memory would not go. Alone in his quarters, Kirk screened through the compilation of reports.
Spock had done a hero's work. The moment the temporal discrepancy had been discovered—at shortly before 0800 hours that morning, when he himself had walked onto the bridge—Kirk had ordered every person on board, from Mr. Spock down to the disreputable laundryman Brunowski, to write up what they remembered of the past five days. Most people had very clear recollections of business as usual, but unfortunately, when collated, the accounts did not match. For most of the day Spock had been laboriously extracting what data from them he could, trying to align it with circumstantial evidence and come up with a coherent idea of what actually had gone on.
And had come up with very little.
Sheets of flimsiplast had been found in sickbay, with handwritten admissions notes for Chapel and Lao, listing severe phaser shock for both, complicated in Lao's case by sleep deprivation and nervous exhaustion; the stardates given for admission fell just at the end of the five-day "Time-Out." The notes were in McCoy's handwriting. McCoy remembered nothing.
Fully 189 people—nearly half the ship's complement—remembered waking at or at about 0400 on the same morning, and of those, more than a hundred reported either a troubling dream or a sense of something deeply wrong.
Phaser banks had been down to fourteen percent, with no photon torpedoes gone and none of the damage a battle would have caused.
Thirty percent of the magnetic cover plates to the manual door latches and emergency kits were found to have been demagnetized, and were dangling uselessly from their hinges. The one on the door of the portside engineering head had been clearly forced by a makeshift degausser tinkered together from the electronic field controls of the flushing unit—apparently, according to fingerprints, by Mr. Scott himself, for what purpose even he was now at a loss to relate.
Mr. Bryant, the third-shift communications officer, was rumored to be making discreet inquiries among several female crew members concerning the ownership of a garment he had found in his quarters.
Yeoman Zink of Stores reported that she remembered an out-of-body experience and meaningful revelations about her past lives. Lieutenant Bergdahl of the anthrogeo lab gave a long and detailed account of being taken onto an alien ship by small, glowing beings of unknown origins and forced to undergo invasive medical procedures. Adams, his assistant, reported that Bergdahl had put her on report for not properly tidying up after experiments of which there was no record, on artifacts from regions of the galaxy that they could not possibly have visited in the past five days.
Yeomen Wolfman, Watanabe, and Chavez all reported dreams about yagghorth, though none of them knew the name of the creature, nor had any of them seen the vid.
"I don't get it, Spock," he said, as the Vulcan stepped into the room a moment behind the door comm's chirp. Kirk gestured at the screen. "It adds up to something. . . ."
Turning in his chair made his right leg ache, as if he'd strained a muscle…or, he now realized, as if he'd taken a bad phaser hit himself.
Mr. Spock held out a yellow info-wafer to him. "My final correlation of data, Captain," he said. The pinkish color of his palms caught Kirk's eye—permaskin, keyed to human tones and jarring against the science officer's slightly greenish complexion. Even deep hypnosis had failed to unearth memories of the injury. McCoy had reported more permaskin missing than Spock's hands accounted for, as well as large quantities of the rare but harmless compound D7.
"Any conclusions?"
Spock was silent for a moment, turning the wafer over in his pi-colored hands.
Something had happened. Something had happened shortly after the end of first shift on Stardate 6251.1, something that had touched every person on board to some degree. . . .
Yet the leaves on the small potted plant on his desk—which his personal yeoman, a hulking young man named al-Jasir, was in the habit of trimming every day—had in fact been trimmed. Yesterday, by the look of it. How disastrous could the Time-Out have been?
"I have found none," said Spock. "Only—some rather odd speculations."
He stood for a time, head bowed in thought, with the air of a man trying to organize some difficult information in his mind.
"The region of the Crossroad Nebula has long been marked as uncanny, prone to unexpected occurrences," the Vulcan went on. "As you know, the standard warnings include stipulations to recheck all data pertaining to biochemical or biological experiments performed in this part of the quadrant."
"Fine," said Kirk, his mouth turning down at one side. "I always wanted to make it into historical holovids; getting a footnote in the standard warnings wasn't quite what I had in mind."
"Perhaps not even a footnote," said Spock quietly. "In dealing with the crew I have generally attributed the Time-Out to long-range effects of the Tau Lyra flare, but all the evidence points to some kind of careful and deliberate erasure of an incident. It might be that it is better to close the case."
Kirk looked up at the Vulcan in surprise. "Close the case?" He'd seen Spock come within finger-touch of getting himself killed to retrieve small pieces of information or minor artifacts, simply out of the Vulcan's incurable curiosity. "Without learning what actually went on?"
"I am not sure, Captain, that we can learn what went on." Spock sighed. "Nor am I entirely sure that we should. In addition to excising—or altering—the memories of everyone on board, whoever or whatever caused the Time-Out blanked the ship's logs as well."
Kirk nodded. His own had ended on 6251.1 after a mention of instrument packets sent into the Crossroad Nebula that morning, and a comment upon the standard warnings.
"Not only standard logs, but every backup and internal systems log on the ship, even private diaries among the crew. I have just finished examining the microcomponent imprints of those personal diaries, and of your own personal log. In every case, the vocal and retinal prints of those who erased the information were those of their owners. All the evidence I can glean indicates that I was the one who deleted everything—even routine transmission and energy readings—from all ship logs and backups, and that you yourself erased the Ship's and Captain's Personal Logs."
He set the wafer down on Kirk's desk, on top of the small pile of the stiff-covered paper books that were Kirk's hobby.
"It may be that coercion was involved," he said. "But it may be that at the time, we fully understood what we were doing; better than we understand it now. And I think that should be taken into account."
Kirk sat for some time, turning the wafer over in his hand, after Spock had gone.
To seek out new life, and new civilization.
To boldly go where no one has gone before.
It had only recently begun to occur to him that there were, perhaps, places where it might be better not to go.
He sighed, and shook his head, letting the thought go. Whatever it was, it had had its effects: when McCoy had first come up to the bridge after the Time-Out, he'd looked like a man who'd aged ten years—the lines of bitter weariness, of sleepless torment, were only now beginning to fade from his face. For the first twelve hours after he'd regained consciousness Ensign Lao had been quiet, struggling with the memories of dreams he could not describe; for a time Kirk had feared, not for his life, but for the bright ebullience that seemed to have been utterly quenched.
Only tonight, when he'd gone by sickbay to talk to Lao, and to Chris Chapel, had the young ensign seemed more like himself, coming up with half a dozen theories about the Time-Out and talking of ways to bend light waves and outrace visual transmissions—all totally impossible in anything but utter theory—to actually figure out what had taken place. Even the Vulcan mind-meld, which Spock had performed on both Kirk and Lao, had yielded no further information.
Kirk grinned a little to himself at the boy's enthusiasm, and got to his feet. In a few months the Enterprise would have finished her mission. In a few months he would be forty, and so what? It had been a hell of a mission.
And there were more to come, he thought.
He picked up the book he had been reading—Xenophon's The Upbringing of Kyros—and moved toward his bed. As he did so a folded sheet of flimsiplast slipped from between its pages, drifted like a large, pale green leaf to the floor.
It bore three lines of writing.
So unusual was it for anyone to write anything by hand, on plast, that Kirk opened the note and read it before he even wondered who had been in his quarters, and when. It said:
You are my past, but I am not necessarily your future. There are a thousand possible futures, and one degree of difference in a trajectory can change a starship's path by thousands of parsecs, to destroy, or to save, a world. All we can do is try.
A thousand possible futures. Whether one was thirty-four going into a five-year mission, or thirty-nine coming out of one, wondering what the future would bring.
Whatever the future actually was.
All we can do is try.
Kirk did not recognize the handwriting. Eventually he had the computer run a comparison with the handwriting of everyone on the ship. Out of 430 people, it never achieved a match.