Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation (31 page)

But Adrik Thorsen was not of that generation. He would always be a creature of Earth’s past, and in time he fled even the system of his birth, to hide on distant colonies, using his artificial nerve pathways to control machinery and spaceships, finding safety in the oblivion of mindless work.

And during all his struggles to survive, he seethed with the kno~vledge that each ship he rode was powered by the genius of Zeaeram Cochrane.

He still
‘oke at night screaming Cochrane’s name.

The laser beam still burned hellishly in what was left of his optic nerve.

The same energy that had fueled the Optimum now fueled Thorsen and his obsession.

Hatred.

He dreamed of revenge. He dreamed o f forcing Cochrane to build a warp bomb so powerful whole systems wouMfall before it. Before him. He knew it could be done. He wore out pens in his mechanical fingers and wrote out the figures and diagrams on endless sheets of paper, on endless display screens, on walls, on sheets, on whatever surface he could find In time, other geniuses created machines into which he could plug his stumps with their artificial pathways to see his work appear on screens as fast as he could think.

His dreams came alive then, no longer bound by nonoptimal flesh. He only feared that he would die before he had a chance to complete his work. To make Cochrane finally do what he should have done so many years ago. To bow down and submit to his master.

But the universe hem many possibilities.

And one of them was an alien race called the Grigari.

Thorsen saw in them his future.

He was eighty years old now, but flesh itself, he had come to realize, was nonoptimal.

And the Grigari did not deal in flesh.

Thorsen paid their price and he was renewed.

From his exile, he journeyed to Alpha Centauri.

He set in motion his challenge to Zefram Cochrane—one that wouM take from the scientist everything he had held dear, just as Cochrane had taken from him.

His plan was perfect. Cochrane would suffer. And then, because he would be left with no other choice, the scientist would at last be forced to give Thorsen the secret. The warp bomb.

It did not matter that Thorsen no longer had the armies to use that secret. It only mattered that Thorsen win.

It would be him against Zefram Cochrane, just as it was meant to be, as if they had met on Titan as history had demanded.

The challenge began. Cochrane’s wife died at Thorsen’s hand.

Cochrane’s students were consumed by fire.

But then Cochrane the scientist did the unthinkable—what Thorsen the warrior had never considered.

Cochrane ran.

Thorsen was stunned. Cochrane was supposed to be a genius.

A genius would have known. There was no escape from the Opti-trl It In.

Thorsen had not escaped it.

And neither wouM Zefram Cochrane.

BI71 AlffIT#flE II OUTWARD BOUND Earth Standard: April 2117

It was over, and Cochrane was glad of it.

Alpha Centauri was light-years behind him. Stapledon Center, where he was expected in the next month, light-years farther still.

And his past life, farthest away of all.

His small ship hummed along at time-warp factor four. In his first voyages, half a century ago, he had had to drop back to normal space every few days, in order to check his bearings. But now the continuum-distortion fields were so tightly focused that he could see the stars slip past the viewports, and a navigation computer could constantly adjust his course.

Which was good, because he had no intention of ever again leaving the continuum he had discovered. He would die here, for no other reason than that he had nothing more to do except bring pain to others.

The ship, a personal yacht with one hundred square meters of living space, luxurious by the standards of the day, was filled with music, a symphony by Brahms. For years he had been haunted by the melody he had heard that first night back at Christopher’s Landing. At the time he had thought that it had sounded like Brahms. But he had never been able to find it again, in any collection of recordings. Almost as if Brahms had dropped into the twenty-first century and written one final piece.

But even this music was just background noise now. He had given up his search. He had given up everything.

His Monica lay in the soil of Centauri B II. His staff and students were at risk. Colonel Adrik Thorsen had returned from the dead. And all because of him. Cochrane no longer felt like fighting. Science and the thrill of discovery had been his life and they had brought him nothing.

Fame, yes. There were planets named after him.

Fortune, as much as he wanted, though when actually given the choice, he had realized he wanted very little. Admiration. An unconscionable amount.

The ears of the powerful, the beds of the beautiful, the eyes of the media on a hundred worlds.

Zefram Cochrane knew that by anyone’s measure, he had been given everything.

But he had nothing.

And he didn’t know why.

What he did know was that the action he took now wasn’t killing himself. He was simply returning to his natural state.

One of nothing.

He welcomed oblivion.

Io be free of the selfish loneliness left by Monica’s death, of the unreasoning implacability of Thorsen’s hate, of all the useless regret and self-doubt that had plagued him all his life.

He watched the stars slipping past him. But it wasn’t the stars that drew him now. It was the void between them.

Perhaps this was why he had invented the superimpellor. Not to take humanity to other worlds, but so that he could cast himself into nothingness.

After an unchanging week of travel, sitting passively in his pilot’s web, venturing out only to use the head, Cochrane believed he was beginning to think less often of his past. He found the tedium blessedly healing. Numbing. The stars slipped by. Forever.

The same music recordings played for the twentieth cycle. The fiftieth cycle.

He didn’t move. His beard grew shaggy. His fingernails ragged.

He wondered idly how long it would take for his body to just stop.

He could open the airlock, he knew. At his age, in ten seconds it would be over.

He could jump out the airlock and be the first human to experience continuum-distortion propulsion without benefit of a spaceship. For about one nanosecond.

He could plot a course to a star and be drawn into its endless gravity well, or drop to impulse and drive into it at half the speed of light, creating a nova that all the human worlds would see.

But all those deaths required willful action. And he who had never believed that life would run out of challenges to inspire him, was spent, without the will even to die.

It seemed to Zefram Cochrane that he had faced life’s challenges, but life had won.

He was old, he was sick, he was ready to die.

And life’s final challenge to him was that it would not let him go.

Five weeks passed.

He knew they would be searching for him now. But the knowledge meant nothing to him. Not only had he succeeded in blanking his mind to his past, he was beginning to hallucinate, to create new images for his future.

In spite of himself, he found this development wildly funny.

Deprived of stimuli, the brain created its own diversions.

He wondered when his fantastic mirages would begin talking to him.

They began at the end of the fifth week.

He awoke, distraught that he still lived, his body clamoring for sustenance, stinging from the sores on his skin where restraining straps kept him from floating in the cabin. His mouth was parched. His lips cracked and dry. A squeeze bottle of water was hooked to his chair, but he merely watched it swing back and forth on its tether, the water thick weightless globs within it.

The aurora was back.

He had seen it before. Three times now. Maybe four.

Gold-flecked and shimmering, it would rush up beside his ship, swirl around it, then rush away.

The first time he had seen it, it had reminded him strongly of dolphins following the wake of a ship, playing and splashing in the free ride.

The second time he had seen it, he had wondered how a phenomenon like it could travel at faster-than-light velocities.

The third and fourth times, he had decided it was a hallucination like all the others.

Except he liked this one.

It was pretty.

Now, instead of swirling all around his ship, the glowing cloud hung on the viewports, obscuring the streaking stars beyond. Its shifting, shining patterns pressed against the transparent aluminum panels, and through some trick of the lighting or his failing eyesight, Cochrane was almost convinced that he saw tendrils of the thing push through the window to reach inside the cabin.

He tried to speak. To say, Careful there, you’ll make a breeze if you open the window. But he had not spoken for many weeks and no sound came from him.

Yet the tendril withdrew. Or it seemed to, at least. And the cloud remained against the viewport, as if it were looking in. As if it wanted something.

Wanted something.

Cochrane squinted, trying to see it more clearly. The absurd question expanded in his mind. What could an energy cloud capable of traveling faster than light want?

His thoughts seemed to clear as he focused on the cloud. It was interesting to have a problem again.

After an hour or so, he figured it out.

He forced his stiff fingers to reach out and grab the floating water bottle, then close around it. You’re thirsty, aren’t you? he asked, though he couldn’t speak the words, only think them.

He was fairly certain the answer had been, Yes.

He studied the problem even longer. Then he pulled out the straw and slipped it between his raw lips. He drank for the first time in days.

How’s that? he asked, still without words.

The answer seemed to be that drinking water had been exactly the right thing to do.

But the cloud didn’t leave.

Cochrane almost smiled. You want more, do you?

Shimmering reflections danced in the viewports, answering again.

Okay, Cochrane said in his mind. Okay, I get you.

He fumbled with the seat webs until he floated free and pushed himself back to the food dispenser. He hung there, exhausted, until he could ask another wordless question. Soup? he asked, and soup it was.

Then he set up the shower tube and washed himself.

His scalp felt strange when he used the shampoo. As if there were hair growing on the top of his head again. In his dreams.

He dried off, rubbed ointment on his strap sores, put on a fresh jumpsuit, then strapped himself loosely to his seat and slept.

When he awoke, he was disappointed to discover that the cloud wasn’t at the window anymore. It had been an interesting game he had played with the hallucination.

Then Cochrane realized the stars were no longer streaking by.

They were still. He was traveling at sublight. But the impulse engines were switched off. He had disabled them himself.

He peered through the viewports. A string of glowing dots were laid out before him. Planetoids, he guessed. Too many of them to be planets. Too big to be asteroids.

He found himself hoping he wouldn’t crash into one of the planetoids, for then the cloud would come looking for him and wouldn’t be able to find him. He wondered if not finding him would upset the cloud, if it would miss him. He didn’t like that thought.

But that was exactly what was going to happen, he realized about an hour later, when he saw a planetoid looming before him.

Sorry, he said to the cloud wherever it was. I won’t be here to feed and water you.

The window sparkled at him.

Cochrane released his straps, and his fingers moved so quickly and so easily that he looked down at them in surprise.

There were no age spots on the back of his hands. His fingers weren’t gaunt as they had been. They were strong, well fleshed.

But he couldn’t stop to think about that now. He pushed himself to the window. He put his hand to it.

From the other side, a tendril of the glowing cloud pushed through and wrapped gently around his fingers.

Cochrane had spent forty days alone in space preparing to die.

The sensation of the cloud’s touch felt like the most natural thing of all.

He wiggled his hand inside the cloud, as if he were scratching the ear of a dog. You don’t like it up here, do you?he said. You want to find a home.

Cochrane knew he had figured it out. Poor thing, he said. How about that planetoid right down there?

The cloud let him know that was a magnificent idea.

He went through a list of questions for the cloud, finding out all the things it would need to be content on the planetoid—the right kind of shelter, the temperature range, the force of gravity, food and water.

Amazingly, what the cloud needed was exactly what was conducive to human health and growth. And it could all be found on the planetoid beneath them.

Cochrane landed his ship without touching the controls or using the engines. After forty days in space, why not?

He stepped outside and breathed the air. It tasted just as he remembered the air had been on Centauri B II. He was also surprised by how deeply he could inhale without coughing. He was surprised by how his legs didn’t ache. How he felt he could run right around the planetoid if he wanted to. It was almost as if he were young again. If only that could be true.

The cloud, he decided, was fortunate to have found such a perfect place for itself.

The cloud, right beside him, agreed. He liked the way it swept around him, carefully, tentatively, not enveloping him all at once.

Poor thing, Cochrane said. All alone down here. You need a friend, don’t you?

The cloud needed a friend.

Do you want me to take care of you? Cochrane asked.

The cloud thought that would be fine.

Well, I don’t seem to have anything on my agenda, Cochrane said. Why don’t you let me stay here and help you?

The cloud thought it over for about half a second. The cloud thought it was the best idea ever in the history of the universe.