The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (9 page)

“Th-th-anks,” I said, shivering.

“How was your furlough?” Castro said.

“Great until a second ago …”

“This human type of humor is very confusing,” Thelin said.

“I’m not laughing either,” I said.

“Atten-shun!” Castro said as Ben Finney walked in. We all stood at attention. Finney took in the scene, then turned to me.

“Kirk, you want to explain this?” he said.

“Sir, I have no explanation, sir!”

Finney picked the bucket up off the floor, then went over to the door, which was dripping with water. He clearly put together what happened, and addressed my roommates.

“Did you men do this?”

“No sir!” Thelin and Castro said in unison. Undoubtedly, Finnegan had ordered them to not say anything, and Ben was smart enough to figure out that they weren’t to blame. He could’ve asked if they knew who was responsible, but we’d been taught the academy honor code. If they said they didn’t do it, Finney had to believe them. Whether he would ask them to inform on another cadet was another question, and would cause us all a lot of headaches. It was a tense moment.

“Clean this up,” Finney said, “and get to bed. You have classes tomorrow.” He left. Whatever we had thought about Finney up to that point, we now liked him.

“So, Mr. Kirk,” Professor Gill said, “your theory is Khan wasn’t all that bad.”

That I had expounded a theory at all was news to me. We were covering some very dense, confusing material in my History of the Federation class, and as far as I knew up to that moment, I didn’t have a theory about any of it. Professor Gill was ascribing something to me I don’t remember even saying. And this was the shallow end of the academic swamp I found myself in every day.

Now that plebe summer was officially over, the long slog of the academic year began, and it was much tougher than I imagined. Along with all the usual subjects of literature, history, physical sciences, there was a whole slew of other disciplines not covered in the usual college education: xenobiology, xenoanthropology, galactic law and institutions, planetary ecologies, interplanetary economics. This went hand in hand with semantics, language structure, comparative galactic ethics, epistemology, xenopsychology, and so on. And on top of all that, Starfleet Academy had to be an engineering school. Its graduates, no matter what they decided to concentrate in, needed to understand technology in a practical way for a whole slew of possible emergencies, because the situations Starfleet officers faced might require a physician to pilot a shuttlecraft or a historian to operate a transporter. The standards were rigorous because lives were at stake.

Contributing to the high standards, many of the professors were the foremost scholars in their fields, and their teaching would affect me for the rest of my life. John Gill, the professor of my history class, was no exception. The history he wrote on the Third World War won the Pulitzer and MacFarlane prizes, and was one of the texts we used in his class. It was the subject we were currently studying.

“Uh … I don’t think I meant that,” I said. “I just meant that it was amazing for one man to rule such a large part of the Earth—”

“So you admire him?” I had been in Gill’s class long enough to know he was setting some kind of intellectual trap, but I couldn’t figure out what.

“I guess I admire his ability, yes.”

“His ability to enslave millions of people?”

“I wasn’t judging the morality of what he did,” I said. “Just his capacity to get it accomplished.”

“But weren’t his accomplishments as a leader,” Gill said, “directly related to his own lack of morality? His own feeling of superiority that allowed him to oppress his subjects?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“And you still admire him,” Gill said. “How do you justify that?”

“I admire the railroad of the old American West,” I said. “It was an amazing piece of engineering and planning for such a primitive time, and directly led to the future prosperity of the United States. Yet it could only be constructed using slave labor, and its importance to capitalists led to the near genocide of the Native Americans. But I still admire the railroad.”

Gill looked at me and smiled.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t. The cost sounds like it was too high.” Gill was trying to make a point, one that I wouldn’t fully understand until much later. Interestingly, this conversation would come back to haunt us both.

But at the time I was too under siege by work to stop to think about it. I was determined to be an academic success. I was seeing less of Ruth than I wanted; I turned down furlough passes on several weekends to focus on my studies.

On one of these nights, alone in the deserted barracks, I was so lost in trying to make sense of the Xindi Incident
*
that I didn’t notice Ben Finney standing in my doorway.

“Sir, sorry, sir,” I said, quickly standing to attention.

“At ease,” he said. “No plans tonight, cadet?”

“No sir.”

Finney came into my room and looked at what I was studying.

“Oh, this mess,” he said. “I never could make head or tail of it. Do you want to take a break?”

Finney wasn’t acting like the usual upperclassman. A few minutes later we were in his room; he gave me a chair and then pulled out a bottle. It had a long, slightly curved neck. He poured us drinks in a coffee mug and plastic cup.

“Ever tried Saurian brandy?” He gave me a wry smile. In truth, I had had little exposure to any kind of spirits and was flabbergasted that my instructor was introducing them to me now.

“Sir, isn’t this against regulations?”

“It is indeed. You should report this infraction to your immediate superior.” That was him.

“Sir …”

“Call me Ben,” he said. “Anyone finds out about this and we’re both done.”

He handed me the cup, and I took a swig. That first taste was vile. It was like turpentine with a fruit taste, something like apples, and burned my throat going down. I coughed and Finney laughed.

“Give it a second,” he said.

Its effects were almost immediate. A warm, relaxing cloud fell over me.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. You looked like you could use it.”

We spent the next couple of hours drinking and laughing, and found we had a lot in common. We were both from the American midwest, both our parents went to the academy, and we both had dreams of serving aboard starships. Ben asked if I had a girlfriend, then showed me a picture of his, a lovely woman named Naomi, whom he was about to marry.

“Marry?” I said. “You graduate this year. Isn’t that going to be hard if you get posted to a ship?”

“I’m already an instructor in computers; they’ll probably ask me to stay on at least another year after graduation,” Ben said. “Then we’ll just have to see what happens. Naomi understands.”

Ben let on that he didn’t like the role he had to play as an upperclassman. He was gregarious and friendly, and, as I would learn, had a deep-seated need to be liked. He was a popular cadet not only in his class but in the other classes as well. Looking back, I can now see that Ben’s desire to not only be my friend but everybody’s undermined his own ability to command respect as a senior officer. This aspect of his personality, I think, contributed to the difficulties he would face later. But at the time, I was thrilled to have a pal and confidant. It helped me get through the rest of my plebe year, which was no easy feat, as 23 percent of the first-years dropped out.

A cadet’s second summer was spent in outer space, at the academy Training Station in Earth orbit. There we learned zero gravity combat techniques and got our first taste of actual piloting. They were century-old shuttle pods, but to get behind the stick of any kind of spacecraft was a thrill.

When I returned to the academy for my second year, things felt very different. For one, Finnegan had graduated and been posted to a starbase. He’d been a constant irritant during my first year. The hazing was endless. His parting shot before graduating was to switch my dress pants with someone much larger than me, which led to an unfortunate incident on the final day of that year during a full-dress parade.

I’ve often wondered what it was that made me Finnegan’s target. I think it goes back to that first day, when he saw me standing at attention in my room, holding all my belongings. In that moment, I thought he was being nice to me, telling me to go to lunch. Because of that, because of my ingenuousness, he saw me as weak, as a target. Like many bullies, he enjoyed the power he had over me. I was there to do the work, and my seriousness somehow provoked him. Ironically, his lack of seriousness led to an unremarkable Starfleet career; I never ran into him again after the academy.
*

Suffice it to say, it relieved a lot of stress when he was finally gone (though it still took me a while before I would open a door or get into bed too quickly). But more important, I’d made it through my first year. Except for the demerits I’d received from Finnegan, I was near the top of my class, and I was determined to stay there.

The only thing that suffered was my relationship with Ruth. She was still in her job in the records department, her life a little bit on hold. As my workload increased, I had the sense she was always waiting for me to spare some time for her, and I didn’t like the pressure. Ben Finney, now my best friend, encouraged me to not let her go. Ben had graduated, but as he predicted, was asked to stay on as an instructor in Advanced Computer Programming. He had married Naomi and moved into faculty quarters, and on our off days, they would seek Ruth and me out for dinners, drinks, and other socializing. I enjoyed these times, but I wondered whether Ben himself was getting restless waiting for a ship assignment. One day, Ruth and I were sitting at dinner with them at their home, and I asked him.

“My career can survive my staying an instructor a little longer,” Ben said, turning to Naomi, who was smiling. “I want to see my son.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Ruth said. She gripped my hand under the table as she said it.

“Good job,” I said, with a smile. I gently removed my hand from Ruth’s to shake Ben’s. Ruth got up and gave Naomi a hug.

We talked at length that night about raising a family, where they wanted to live, how Ben’s career might still be flexible enough to make it possible. I did my best to be supportive, but something about the dinner made me angry. I tried not to show it, though I think Ruth could sense my distance. After a little while, she and I said our goodbyes to the Finneys, and I walked her home.

“You didn’t seem happy for them,” she said.

“No, I am,” I said. “It’s just … I don’t know if they’re being realistic.”

“They’re grown-ups; they can make their own decisions.”

“They’re making decisions that affect a child,” I said, somewhat harshly. “Starfleet makes demands that can get in the way of a family. Both my parents had to give up their careers.”

“And you think that was wrong, that they gave up their careers for the people they loved?” She was asking more than one question, and though I had known this conversation was coming, I didn’t think it would come so soon.

“It’s not wrong,” I said. “It’s just not for me.”

We walked the rest of the way to Ruth’s apartment in silence. Ruth loved me, and she was trying to make it easy for me, give me what I wanted. We kissed goodnight, and it was the last time I saw her. I often look back with regret on how I treated her. I did love Ruth; she was in fact my first love, and I don’t know if I was being honest with myself about why I broke up with her. She was willing to commit to me, but for some reason I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, trust that. So I pushed her away.