"Bet you he will."
"That is absurd, Captain." Spock raised one eyebrow in a disbelieving expression.
"You'd think so, right?" Kirk grinned, handing a signed PADD back to the yeoman. "But he's been wound tighter than a Yutaxan clock lately."
"Even so-"
"Just let me demonstrate, okay?" Kirk held his hands out, palms up.
Spock frowned. "I have no desire to gamble on an officer's mental state."
The captain leaned forward in his chair, reaching up to clap the Vulcan on the shoulder. "Call it a behavioral studies experiment, if that makes you feel better."
The frown deepened. "It does not. What you are proposing, Captain, is an act of psychological manipulation for your own amusement and to prove a point to me. Furthermore, it is being carried out without the consent or knowledge of the individual concerned, and as such, falls under no accepted interpretation of scientific ethics as practiced by Starfleet, the Federation, or either of our peoples."
Kirk put his head in his hands. "All right, all right. Enough with the legalese already. Can I just show you?"
Spock paced back and forth for a good minute. Finally, his shoulders slumped, and he turned to the captain, a look of resignation on his face. "Proceed. But be it known to all and sundry that I do not condone these actions."
"Gotcha." Kirk stood up from his chair, signalling everybody on the bridge to quiet down. He waited a full minute, until all of the personnel were still and idle, their chairs and bodies turned to face the captain with looks of expectation and mild amusement. Spock seemed merely to be tolerating the disruption from the day's activities.
Taking a deep breath, Kirk held it for a moment, then let out a quiet cough, barely breaking the relative silence of the room. Some started, others moved to the edge of their seats.
It only took seconds for Kirk to be proven right.
A low rumbling caused everyone to look to the floor beneath their feet. It grew in intensity until it began to shake the bridge. Sulu slid forward in his seat before recovering himself, while Chekov gripped the side of the glass screen he sometimes worked at. Uhura put a hand on Spock's arm to steady him as the Vulcan stumbled backwards slightly.
Everyone gaped in surprise as something exploded through the floor of the bridge with a loud CRASH! Kirk parted his lips in an O, startled only by the intensity of the breach. Others jumped backwards from the large hole as the figure jumped towards them.
"Where?! Where?!" a frantic voice yelled. Dr. Leonard McCoy seemed to materialize from the dust particulates stirred up by his entrance. Wild-eyed, he clutched a medkit in his right hand. "I heard that! Who coughed?" he queried, whipping around to make eye contact with everyone individually. "Heaven help me, we could have a full-blown pandemic on our hands by 0900 if somebody doesn't-"
"See Spock? Told ya." Kirk smiled at his first officer. "Somebody's waaaaay overdue for shore leave."
Spock's shoulders slumped. He cast his gaze towards McCoy, who was whipping from one person to another, waving his medical scanner erratically around the bridge like a flashlight in a haunted house. "I suppose, then," he conceded, "it is probably fortunate that I did not gamble on the low probability of this outcome."