Star Trek - TOS by Federation

Author:Federation [Federation]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-07T14:09:34.165000+00:00

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

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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.

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