Star Trek - TOS 38 Idic Epidemic (21 page)

“Affirmative, Captain. However, I might point out
that sickbay is crowded with people who are not ill, and are annoyed at being confined. They are not under arrest, and so are not denied access to the
intercom system—”

Kirk glared at the ceiling for a moment. The news was undoubtedly all over the ship by now.

“If you know that,” Kirk said to Sendet, “then you
know that the people we beamed aboard are not carriers. That does not change the fact that
you
beamed something up.”

“I did not,” Sendet said flatly.

Kirk glanced at Spock with a frown. Spock had to
agree: the man did not appear to be lying.

“Would you care to search my cabin?” Sendet
offered. “Perhaps you can locate this mysterious ob
ject you think I beamed aboard.”

“That will not be necessary,” said Kirk. “Whatever
it was, it’s obviously not in your cabin. You may go.”

When Sendet had left, though, he looked at Spock. “I am very tired,” he said. “I got the feeling that I just
couldn’t think of the right question to ask.
Something
happened in the transporter room; Scotty doesn’t misremember how he left the controls, and Sarek wouldn’t be wrong about finding Sendet skulking
about the corridor after everyone had beamed down.
Damn! If I stick
him
in sickbay now, I have to put myself in, too, and you, your parents, anyone who’s
been near Sendet since the mysterious beam-up.”

Spock shook his head slowly. “It is not feasible, Captain, and it is too late even if it were. We have nowhere to confine so many—and we cannot filter
and decontaminate the air for the entire ship as we do for sickbay. If Sendet brought the virus aboard, and it
found a host, it is in the ventilation system by now.
We seem to have no choice except to wait out the next
forty-eight hours.”

Chapter Twenty

It was only twenty hours later that the first case of the
Nisus plague appeared aboard the
Enterprise.

Spock had the con, maintaining synchronous orbit over the science colony on Nisus, when the turbolift doors opened to admit Amanda.

“Mother? What can I do for you?” he asked in
surprise. Passengers were allowed on the bridge by
invitation only.

She stared as if she were confused to see him there.
“Spock? What are you doing in that uniform? Oh,
Spock, what have you done? Your father—”

Spock pulled his lips between his teeth with the effort not to show emotion. Amanda’s eyes were
glazed, her words an echo of that long-ago day when
he had told his parents of his decision to make a career in Starfleet … after which Sarek had refused
to talk to him for eighteen years.

“It’s all right, Mother,” he said calmly. “Nothing is
wrong.” He had to get her to sickbay, for either this
was the first symptom of the plague, or his mother was
suffering a stroke. In either case, he had to keep her
calm.

“What do you mean, nothing’s wrong?” she de
manded. “Sarek wants you to follow in his footsteps
at the Vulcan Academy!”

Everyone on the bridge turned to look at mother and son, and Spock could feel their sympathy, a
palpable wave encompassing him. They didn’t know
Amanda’s babbling could be a plague symptom, didn’t understand the danger to themselves.

“Please, Mother,” said Spock, “let’s go some place
where we can discuss it. Mr. Sulu, you have the con.”

Spock got up, trying gently to guide Amanda to
ward the turbolift—just as the doors opened and Sarek stepped out. “Amanda!” he exclaimed. “Why
did you—?”

Suddenly Spock’s normally gentle, restrained mother became a fury, leaping at her husband with a
shriek, raking her nails down his cheek.

Caught completely off guard, Sarek gasped
“Amanda!”—his face showing every nuance of horrified realization.

But Amanda was shouting, “How can you
do
that to
him? He’s your son! You can’t disown your own flesh
and blood!”

This time Sarek caught the flailing fists as his wife sought to strike him. Spock came out of his momen
tary shock and grasped Amanda’s shoulder for the
nerve pinch.

Sarek swept her into his arms as she collapsed, and
strode into the turbolift, Spock following. “Sickbay,”
Spock instructed, and then punched the intercom.
“Dr. Gardens, the plague is aboard. Segregate every
one already there. We’ll come in through Entrance C—straight into the isolation unit.”

When the doors opened, Sarek carried Amanda
out. Spock lingered in the turbolift only long enough
to instruct the computerized system to take that
carriage off-line until it had been sterilized.

A futile effort, he thought, seeing people in the
halls, the warning to clear them blaring now, too late.
And everyone on the bridge had been exposed. He
had to call the captain, have the bridge crew isolated,
send in a decontamination crew before another shift
could take over—

And it was all useless; if the virus had not been in
the ventilation system before—if Amanda had caught
it by contact with Sendet—it was certainly in the
ship’s air supply now.

Wearing protective gear, Dr. Gardens met them,
helped Sarek arrange Amanda on one of the beds, and turned on the life-signs indicator. It began wailing, for
her fever was at the danger level, her heartbeat rapid
and irregular.

The doctor started the bed cooling and quickly shot
two different medications into Amanda. “Please help
me get her undressed,” she said to Sarek. “No one
we’ve had isolated has become ill so far. I’d rather not
expose my nurses yet if I don’t have to. I fear our whole staff is going to be desperately needed before this thing runs its course.”

While Amanda was being settled, Spock called Kirk. There was a moment’s silence from the captain’s quarters after Spock relayed the news. Then, “God, Spock, I am so sorry. Don’t worry, I’ll take
care of it from here on.”

Don’t worry.
How typically Human. Spock did not bother to claim Vulcans don’t worry—he admitted to
himself that he was indeed worried, and knew that
Sarek was as well. He turned from the intercom, going
back to where his mother lay, pale and unconscious,
now clad in a green sickbay coverall.

“She’s stabilized for the moment,” said Dr. Gar
dens. “Now there’s nothing to do but wait, and treat
symptoms as they occur. Stay with her if you like. You
can’t be more exposed than you’ve already been.”

Sarek pulled up a chair beside the bed. Spock
started to do the same, when he suddenly realized—

“Doctor, I must be isolated. You saw the reports from Nisus. I have both Vulcan and Human blood: even now, my body may be spawning some even deadlier form of the disease, one that could kill both my father and my mother.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Dr. Leonard McCoy was already tired when he beamed down to Nisus. Within a day, he was ex
hausted. Every able-bodied physician was on call, for
the hospital was flooded with plague victims. When
he was not treating patients, he was in the computer room with Nisus medical staff and whoever of the experts they had brought along was also free at that
moment.

He saw why more than half the doctors and nurses
here had died; in the perpetual exhaustion caused by
caring for such huge numbers of patients, they had no
resistance.

Exposure was inevitable; no one could spend his
life in mask, gloves, and protective clothing. Even in
the contagion wards, stress brought mistakes. All it
took, for example, was wiping one’s own bare fore
head with the same gloved hand that had just touched
the patient’s arm while administering a hypo. In his long career, McCoy had seen it many times before.
Most would never even remember the slip that intro
duced the virus into their systems, nor would they ever know whether it was an error while on duty, or
other exposure while off.

So far, the only hopeful discovery was the fact that
the virus lived for less than an hour outside a living
organism; any environment unoccupied for at least an
hour was plague-free. But people could not stop interacting altogether. Families could not separate. Victims had to be cared for, and every day more
succumbed than recovered.

Finally, after eighteen straight hours of physical labor interspersed with concentrated mental effort,
McCoy fell asleep in his chair. When someone tried to
lift him, he woke only enough to cooperate in trans
ferring himself to a couch.

But he had slept hardly enough to take the edge off when someone shook him. “Sorry, Doctor—
emergency priority from the
Enterprise.”

He was led to a communications console. “Yeah,”
he said groggily. “McCoy here.”

“Bones.” The gravity in Jim’s voice brought him
wide awake.

“What’s happened?”

“We’ve got it aboard. Amanda. Spock and Sarek
have both been exposed.”

“Beam me up,” was McCoy’s first thought.

“Wish I could—but you’re needed where you are.”

“Jim, it’s a shambles here! I’m working like a damn
intern, and so are all the other doctors. We’re not
getting anywhere on research because of patient cri
ses. Half their doctors and nurses have died of this
thing, and the rest are walking wounded with stress
and exhaustion.”

“All the more reason to stay,” Kirk told him. “Your
staff can handle sickbay. At least there’s one good
thing.”

“What’s that?”

“We can’t go off and leave you now. The
Enterprise
is stuck here until you figure out a cure. So when we
do
leave, you can come with us.”

“Thanks,” McCoy said cynically. Then something
the captain had said penetrated. “Jim! Remember the
mutation pattern! If Spock’s been exposed—”

“He knows. He isolated himself immediately,”
Kirk replied. “So I’m stuck without either of you. But then, I don’t have anything to do except stay in orbit.”
McCoy heard the frustration in his captain’s voice; a
virus was not the kind of enemy a man of action knew
how to fight.

Do I?
McCoy wondered as he broke contact.

After that bad news, McCoy could not go back to
sleep, so he went over to the bank of computers. Sorel
and Corrigan were conferring over schematic dia
grams of the virus in its varied forms. “Computer,”
said Corrigan, “schematic of strain C-four, interacting with the blood sample from Karl Katasai.”