Star Trek - TOS 38 Idic Epidemic (11 page)

They left the turbine chamber for the plant status office before Korsal could ask his question. By that
time, Torrence was having a reaction he had seen in Humans before: she was shaking, her skin turning
gray beneath the brown.

Humans had a gland that poured a chemical into their blood during emergencies, to make them alert,
strong—and in battle, supremely dangerous. When
the situation passed, however, Korsal had discovered,
they often had withdrawal symptoms.

Torrence wore a waterproof jumpsuit, unlike Korsal, who had not stopped to change clothes. He was soaked to the skin from the spray, but it was
Torrence who was chilling.

There were towels in a top drawer. Korsal handed
one to Torrence, who mopped her face and began
scrubbing at her hair.

Korsal stripped off his soaked shirt and toweled the
water out of his hair and beard, keeping an eye on
Torrence. She was coming out of the shock reaction,
her skin texture and breathing returning to normal.
He draped a dry towel around her shoulders, and she looked up at him gratefully, then poured them each a
cup of steaming coffee from the machine that was
ubiquitous in offices frequented by Humans.

“Now,” said Korsal, taking the other chair before
the status console, “what’s this about ice?”

“The early thaw,” she replied. “Up in the mountains the ice broke loose in huge pieces this spring —too big to melt away before they reached the
reservoir.”

Korsal said, “There are supposed to be safety
sluices above the dam, to prevent anything too big for
the system to handle from getting through until it’s melted down to size.”

“Apparently,” Torrence said grimly, “the safeties
have stopped working.” She turned to the computer
and logged onto the inspection schedule. “Look here
—Dekrix and T’Lin were scheduled to fly an inspec
tion tour five days ago, but there’s no log notation that
they did so.”

“Check the hospital admissions,” Korsal suggested.

The names were there. T’Lin was a fatality. Dekrix
was on the critical list.

Torrence bit her lower lip. “Both pilot and backup out of commission—and we’re so understaffed that we’re running with only one person on watch out
here. I plead guilty. My last shift was over by the time I had run all the status checks; I didn’t call up the logs.
And this shift I hardly got started before that ice hit
the turbine. You realize what would have happened if
that wheel had gotten away from us?”

“It probably would have spun down and knocked out all the turbines below it,” Korsal replied. “With
only one and two operating, Nisus would have lost three quarters of its electrical power.”

Torrence nodded and started to get up. “I’ve got to
do the rest of the status checks.”

“I’ll do them,” said Korsal. “You check the logs.”

“The hydroelectric plant’s not your job,” Torrence
protested.

“Give me the checksheet so I don’t miss anything,”
he told her. “Emily, all I have to do is watch for yellow
or red lights! I’ll call you if I find any.”

She looked up with a smile. “Thanks.” Hunting
around under various tools and printouts, she found
an electronic tablet, which lit up with the checklist. As
she handed it to Korsal, she put her hand on his arm.
“Thank you for coming today without asking questions first. I couldn’t have—”

“Take your hands off my wife!”

Korsal turned. The man in the doorway was some
one he knew only slightly, Torrence’s husband.
“Charlie!” she was saying. “What are you doing
here?”

“What are
you
doing?” the man countered. “I heard there was some kind of emergency, that you
were calling all over town for help—but when I get
here I find my wife half naked—”

“Charlie, shut up!” Torrence exclaimed, getting up
and pulling the towel off her shoulders to show that
she was fully dressed. Korsal, of course, was not—his
shirt was hanging over the back of the chair, still
dripping, while his soggy trousers clung uncomfort
ably to his legs.

“I
won’t
shut up!” the man replied, moving face-to-
face with Korsal. The two were close in height, but
Charles Torrence was built like an athlete; he was
head athletic coach at the school, and Korsal remem
bered that he had an Olympic gold medal in some
form of hand-to-hand combat. Torrence taught many
forms of the martial arts, including Kershu. Korsal
had encouraged his sons to take lessons with this man.

“Ms. Torrence was calling all over town,” Korsal
said calmly, “for any engineer who could handle the
waldos in the turbine room and help her rebalance the
system afterward. I happened to be the first one she
found.”

“Yeah—and now you’re trying to take advantage of
her.” Torrence moved closer. “I don’t know why we ever let you stay on this planet, Korsal. You weren’t satisfied with white and green—now you got a taste for black—”

“Charlie!”

The anger in Emily Torrence’s voice cut through the
man’s own. “You stop right now, and you apologize!
What is the
matter
with you?”

Her response seemed to pull her husband out of his
rage, and Korsal felt a breath of relief. It was not
another attack of the plague.

Then he realized how absurd his relief was—the
stress of the plague on the science colony was bringing
out hidden prejudices. Perhaps
…
he wasn’t really at home here, after all.

Charles Torrence was looking from his fully dressed
wife, her wet hair, to Korsal’s also-wet hair, his
dripping shirt hung over the chair. “The emergency
was in the turbine room?” he asked with tremulous
calm.

“Yes, the turbine room,” his wife replied acidly.
“You’ve been in there, Charlie. No one can work in
there without getting soaked.”

The man looked stricken. “Oh, man—I am
sorry!”

“You should be!” his wife told him.

“I
am,
Emmy. Korsal, listen, man—you’ve got a
beautiful wife. If you caught her with another man,
his clothes off—I mean, you’d think—”

“I hope,” Korsal said, trying hard to curb his anger, “that I would trust her enough to ask questions before
I accused her.”

The Human looked thoroughly chastened. “I’m sorry. Both of you—dammit, Emmy, if I didn’t love you so much—”

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said wearily. “Right
now I have work to do, and Korsal has volunteered to
check the status boards. There are clean jumpsuits in
the locker room,” she added to Korsal. “You’d better
put one on. I hear Klingons may be immune to the
plague that’s going around, but it wouldn’t do to have you catch pneumonia!”

“No, and it won’t do to have more ice hit the
turbines,” he told her. “I’ve got a hoverer license, and
my son Kevin just got his. Round me up some maps of the safeties, and we’ll fly upriver tomorrow to see what’s happened.”

“I’d be happy to,” she replied. “Thanks.”

“And set the computer to run the logs daily and report any tests not done.”

“Someone should have thought of that a week ago!” Torrence said.

“No one is thinking clearly on Nisus,” said Korsal, “not even the Vulcans.”

Chapter Eleven

On the
Enterprise
observation deck, T’Pina stared
out at the passing stars. “Nature has such beauty to
offer,” she said at last, “and we see so little of it. Most
people never leave the planets on which they are born.”

“Perhaps that is what nature intended,” Sendet
replied—not at all the answer T’Pina had expected.
She turned, looking up into his face, but he was as controlled as a healer. “I have never before been off
Vulcan,” he added.

“Then I hope that after the epidemic has been stopped, you will be able to spend some time on
Nisus,” said T’Pina. “It is very different from Vulcan.
Nisus is a watery planet, very humid by our stan
dards. There are oceans—you must take a sea voyage
while you are there!”

“A
…
sea voyage?”

T’Pina was amused to see him slightly disconcerted
at the idea, a common reaction among Vulcans. Travel by water was not in the heritage of their desert-born people, and the first experience of the deck of a boat shifting beneath one’s feet was as
strange as free-fall. She wondered if Sendet had ever
known that sensation, either, and determined to find
out if the
Enterprise
had a zero-g recreational facility.

“Wide experience increases wisdom,” she quoted
Surak, “provided the experience is not sought purely
for the stimulation of sensation.”

“Sensation is necessary,” Sendet replied, “lest the spirit die.”

It had the sound of an oft-quoted saying, but T’Pina
had never heard it before.

“Not every Vulcan has always agreed with Surak’s
precepts,” said Sendet in response to her raised
eyebrow. “Surak’s philosophy brought peace to Vul
can’s warring tribes, and made civilization possible. However, the complete suppression of emotion will kill a civilization as certainly as the complete denial of rules or authority.”

“Complete suppression of emotion?” T’Pina asked.
“No, I have never desired to seek the disciplines at
Gol. However, my teachers have always warned me
that my curiosity quotient is extremely high, even for
a Vulcan.”

She was rewarded with a slight quirk of Sendet’s
lips as he controlled a smile. “As is mine.”

“Then why do you say that nature intended us to
remain on the worlds where we were born? Intelligent
beings grow by seeking what lies over the next hill, on
the other side of the mountains—or beyond the farthest star.”

“There is growth,” he said, “and there is corrup
tion. On the other side of the mountain may be other people—weak but seductive people who leach away one’s strength.”

Now T’Pina was thoroughly confused. “What are
you saying, Sendet? Many on Vulcan opposed our joining the Federation—but after all these years, the
benefits of interaction with other cultures have been
well proven.”

“T’Pina—look what it has done to us. Once the only Vulcans to interact with other cultures were
those who left the planet, like the scientists who went to Nisus, and the traders. We did not permit aliens on
our world. Now they overrun it. Nearly a quarter of
the students at the Academy—”