Shortly before they beamed Captain Christopher back to his airplane, Dr. McCoy gave him a thorough physical, to ensure that nothing he'd eaten or drunk or breathed while on the Enterprise would leave a detectable sign on or in his body. Just as he finished, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock arrived to hear McCoy's summary.
"I don't see any unusual chemical signatures in your readings, and you're in extremely good health for a person of your era. You do have a touch of prostate cancer, but it's so slow-growing that it won't even begin to bother you until you're around 70." McCoy grinned. "I can give you a hypo that will cure it in about five minutes, a little benefit to you from having been abducted."
Spock shook his head. "Unfortunately, Doctor, you cannot cure Captain Christopher. We must do nothing to alter the timeline, so Captain Christopher must sicken and die at his appointed time."
"Blast your logic, Spock!" McCoy blazed up. "Will it make such a big difference if an old man dies in pain at 75 or dies peacefully at 90?"
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow. "That, Doctor, is something we cannot know. I would not wish pain or death on Captain Christopher, but neither can we spare him it, lest his additional life span cause a change that destroys the future that must be."
McCoy's voice was full of loathing. "I always thought you actually had a heart, even if it beats in your side, instead of in your chest like a normal person's! But now I see that green ice-water you call blood has frozen your heart. Or maybe you really ARE a machine."
"Bones!" Kirk looked stern. "That's enough. Spock is right. I'm sorry to deny medical care to Captain Christopher, but we can't risk altering the entire timeline just to save one man." McCoy subsided, and Kirk smiled at him. "If things work the way we hope they will, Captain Christopher will never have been here, anyway, so your cure would be superfluous at best." He turned to Spock. "Let's go check in with Scotty one more time, and then we can get started." Spock nodded, and the captain and first officer exited sickbay.
As soon as they left, Captain Christopher looked at Dr. McCoy in puzzlement. "How can you talk to him like that?"
McCoy looked surprised. "You mean Spock?"
"Yes."
McCoy smiled. "Starfleet isn't a military organization like the ones you're used to. Strictly speaking, it's a quasi-military organization. We do have ranks, but no one salutes anybody, and officers who are close in rank can usually talk frankly to each other." He paused for a moment, and his eyes twinkled. "Of course, I'm maybe a bit franker with Spock than I am with most people, since he rubs me the wrong way."
Captain Christopher shook his head. "I didn't mean because he outranks you. I meant because he's a miracle, one you should be grateful for."
McCoy cocked his head to one side and stared at the 20th-century man. "Now, how do you figure that?"
Christopher sighed. "Remember when I come from — a time from before first contact. In my era, a lot of people believed that any sentient creatures who might evolve on other planets would be so different from ourselves as to be fundamentally unknowable, that trying to talk to them would be like trying to talk to a rock or to the sea. They might not even communicate with sound waves; they might use light or pheromones or something, and they might talk about concepts we couldn't even begin to understand."
McCoy nodded. "There've been one or two of those."
Christopher said, "Some people believed that aliens would be implacably hostile, that they'd try to destroy us or enslave us or eat us. Even those of us who believed that it was possible for aliens to be both knowable and friendly thought that the speed of light couldn't be broken and interstellar distances were so vast that we'd never get to actually meet them. We thought the human race would be effectively alone in the universe, all alone forever."
He caught McCoy's eyes and held them, then continued. "Spock isn't just an alien who's similar enough to humans that you can achieve a rudimentary understanding; he's similar enough and friendly enough that you can speak the same language, serve on the same ship, make friends with the same man." Christopher shook his head. "If I'd been given such a gift, by God I'd appreciate it!"
"Spock as a gift," McCoy said wonderingly. He shook his head and smiled at Christopher. "I'm not sure I can ever consider him that, but I will think about what you've said. I'm so used to a Federation with Vulcans, Tellarites, Andorians, and the rest that I guess I've never considered what the alternatives could have been."
Christopher looked at him soberly. "The alternatives are either lonely or frightening. I can assure you, if someone gave ME Spock as a fellow officer, I'd understand just what I'd been given." He left sickbay to report to the Bridge.
Now alone in sickbay, McCoy repeated "Spock as a gift," softly to himself, trying the unusual idea on for size. "Knowable, friendly aliens are a gift." He blinked rapidly, trying to assimilate this idea. But no, surely a 20th-century man had nothing to teach a 23rd-century man?
An idea, once it takes root, is a hard thing to dislodge, and it is all the harder if that idea is true. McCoy still sparred with Spock as much as ever, but his heart wasn't in it quite as much as before, and every once in awhile, Captain Christopher's words would come back to him.
Because Leonard McCoy was no dummy, and the thought of being stuck in a world before first contact sounded unbearably lonely. Aliens who were enough like you to actually surprise you when they differed, enough like you that you actually cared what they thought and how they felt, enough like you to bicker with — no, Leonard McCoy didn't want to live without them. He would never tell Spock that, but somehow ... he thought maybe Spock knew.
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Author's Note
1. Why do I have McCoy say that Starfleet is only QUASI-military? Because at the time of the original series, that's how it was. Nicholas Meyer thought of Star Trek as "the Navy in space" and added a lot of militaristic touches to the Star Trek movies he helmed that weren't present in the original series. (Notice that those touches were NOT present in TMP, TSFS, and TVH — the movies helmed by Roddenberry and Nimoy.)
The writer's bible for the original series included this set of questions and answers. (I'd include a link to it, but FanFiction doesn't permit that. If you want to see it, though, google "Star_Trek_TOS_Writer's_Guide." There are two different versions floating around, but they're pretty similar to each other.) The material in italics here is quoted directly from the TOS writer's guide:
Speaking of the starship U. S. S. Enterprise, is it a completely military arrangement?
Semi-military but without being heavily authoritarian. For example, we will not be aware of "officers" and "enlisted men" categories. And we will avoid saluting and other annoying medieval leftovers. On the other hand, we do keep a flavor of Naval useage and terminology to help encourage believablity and identification by the audience. After all, our own Navy today still retains remnants of Nelson and Drake.
2. I'm considering writing a series of episode follow-ups — small stories that are a "missing scene" from during the episode or right after it — for every episode. I know lots of people have done that already, but well, I think I might want to. :-) Would anyone read them?
3. Sadly, I still don't own Star Trek. Are you listening, Santa? :-)
4. Thanks for reading!
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