The Fire and the Rose by David R. George

Author:David R. George [George, David R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spock (Fictitious Character), Star Trek Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Science Fiction, Suspense, Adventure, General, Radio and Television Novels, Time Travel
ISBN: 9780743491693
Publisher: Star Trek
Published: 2007-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

After weeks of effort and helped along by the nightly use of Mr. McKenna’s tools, Spock had finally completed a rudimentary mnemonic memory circuit. He had activated it a short time ago, executing a query both for any occurrences of the name Leonard McCoy in its various permutations, and for any discrepancies between the recordings of the two timelines. To minimize the volume of data searched, Spock limited it to the calendar year 1930. Now, at last, the tricorder signaled that some piece of information had been found.

Spock sat down at the chair he’d placed in the middle of the room. Before it sat the nightstand, atop which he’d set the tricorder. All around the room, on both beds, on the short dresser, on the table, equipment buzzed and whined as the electrical components performed a task for which they had never been designed.

On the tricorder’s small display, Spock saw a catalogue of data, each entry simply denoted

FILE

. Knowing that he’d requested the list in chronological order, he selected the first one. For an instant, what appeared to be an image of a newspaper appeared on the screen, but then it blinked off. Spock touched a control, deactivating the display, then reached for one of McKenna’s tools. He raised it to the manual monitor adjustment he’d exposed at the top of the tricorder. He tuned the display, then reactivated it. A moment later, the image reappeared on the screen.

It did, in fact, show a newspaper. Unexpectedly, an image of Edith Keeler appeared, her name spelled out in capital letters beneath it. Above, a banner read:

SOCIAL WORKER KILLED

. Below, the first few lines of her obituary stated that she had been killed in a traffic accident.

A mixture of emotions rose within Spock. He at first tended toward disbelief, even as he understood that this identified discrepancy strongly supported the concept that he and the captain had been swept to the same focal point in time as McCoy. He also felt sadness for Jim; even though the captain would have had to leave Keeler when they returned to their own time, this turn of events would be more difficult for him to bear.

But Spock had a job to do and he quickly settled his mind. He reached to the tricorder display controls to see if he could pan to the top of the newspaper page for a date. Slowly, the image began to move, but then he heard a sizzling sound in one section of the mnemonic memory circuit. A second later, the newspaper disappeared from the display in a coruscation of flashes and jagged lines.

Spock exchanged one of McKenna’s tools for another, then stood and moved to the near bed, to the circuit components there. He reached down to where he believed the problem to be and made an adjustment. The sizzling stopped, and he returned to the tricorder. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought that the data stored in the tricorder from 1930, from either one or both of the timelines, might have been lost.

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