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  “James T. Kirk . . . say it, pal! Jimmy, look at me, buddy. Can you say ‘James’? Say James Teee . . . ”

  Images of their young family and the anticipation of the future shriveled as he realized what his younger son was becoming.

  “What can I do?” he asked quietly. “He’s too big to spank . . . I can’t lock him in his room, can’t give him extra chores . . . you can do things to a six-year-old that you just can’t do to a sixteen-year-old . . . I can make him come home but I can’t make him stay. I can’t help feeling that he’s salvageable, but he’s fallen in with the wrong crowd and now he’s tight-lipped as a convict. He’s going to turn into one if he stays on this track, and I don’t know what to do to head it off. The beardless twirp won’t even talk to me. What can I do?”

  Deep in the nearby farmlands, their Amish tenant and his four sons tilled the cornfields with horses and plows, mirroring a more distant past than George could imagine anymore. His mind was used to another kind of field, a field of stars, tilled by cranky, hard-working space vehicles held together with spit and spare parts, by people who rarely set foot on a real planet anymore. Only on leave . . . only in emergencies . . .

  “I’m scared, Winn,” he murmured. “My boy’s turning into a gangster, and I can’t stop it.”

  Behind him, Winona Kirk stood with her arms folded and her one shoulder poetically against the wall. She was a leaner, always had been, always had her shoulder or her elbow or a hand propped against something, and did her best thinking while holding up a building.

  “Sam was never like this,” she said. “Jimmy’s strong and he’s rebellious, always a smoke-chaser, looking for trouble and calling it fun . . . he’s so much more skeptical than Sam ever was, so much less fulfilled . . . ”

  George turned and started to say something, but his wife’s appearance there in the natural light struck him silent.

  Her hair, a mass of tight buff curls, was too much like Jimmy’s. She even had her arms folded the same way the boy did—both hands tucked under, fists knotted—not in relaxation, but in tension and thought. Neither she nor Jimmy ever folded their arms just to get them out of the way like most people did.

  She still had her lab coat on and she didn’t look so different from the girl he’d eloped with—how long ago? Almost twenty years?

  And after twenty years, the only things they had in common were the two boys. No animosity . . . just not much in common.

  It hadn’t been a problem when they were eighteen years old. Being married had been impressive all by itself at that age. They’d wanted to be completely grown-up, big man and big woman. They hadn’t seen reality lurking behind the wedding pictures. Prestige was the only trophy at that age.

  Then one year, two, three, a couple of children . . . and they’d discovered that being together at eighteen and being together at twenty-five . . .

  Between themselves, they’d made it work. For the children—

  He sighed and walked toward her. “My emergency leave won’t last forever, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. “Forty-eight hours, eighteen of them gone already.”

  Her voice was utterly passive. She’d gotten used to his not being around. They both had.

  But this . . . this was too much for her to handle alone. They both felt that.

  He paced right past her and halfway into the dining room. “Maybe I should leave Starfleet.”

  “Oh, cripe, there’s an echo in here,” Winn said. “How many times have I heard that?”

  She turned to lean against the other shoulder so she could still be facing him.

  “How is it going to help Jimmy to see his father wandering around the farm, bothering the Amish workers, knowing you gave up your career because of him? And it’ll straighten him right out to see Mom and Dad carping at each other.” She smiled ruefully, but her eyes were forgiving. “You know how we get when we’re too close together for too long.”

  “Well, I’m not helping him from out there, am I?” George desperately bellowed.

  She shrugged. “You’re having some kind of effect on him. First chance he got, he headed for open water, didn’t he? All that sailing stuff when he was little—not wasted, apparently.”

  “And not enough, apparently,” he grunted. “Well, you know Jimmy best. I’ll help if I can, Winn. If he’ll accept it—but I won’t make any bets. Got any suggestions?”

  She pushed off the wall without unfolding her arms. She moseyed around the room, staring at the carpet and biting her lip.

  When she turned, she looked squarely into her husband’s eyes.

  “Take him into deep space with you.”

  George almost choked. “What?”

  “It’s an idea.”

  “Deep space? I can’t do that! I’m in the Diplomatic Corps’s Security Division! Our missions are touchy! We deal with unstable cultures, unknown sectors, border disputes, angry representatives, assassination attempts—nothing you take a civilian on, much less a kid civilian! You get court-martialed for that! I go dangerous places!”

  Her left shoulder went down and her eyebrows went up.

  “Then go someplace not so dangerous this once,” she said. She paused, strode to the window at his side, and leaned there for a change. “We’d better show him there’s something better out there than what happened to him the first time he went in space, don’t you think? There must be something that’s routine to you, but that a sixteen-year-old will think is kind of enchanting. Isn’t there? You’ve been promising him for years.”

  “I promised . . . but you know what happened . . . whole sections of space started to open up . . . I got called away—besides, he didn’t seem all that disappointed. He didn’t seem like he really wanted to go.”

  “George, look back. You know what it’s like to be a boy. It’s taboo to show emotions like those. He saw that Sam wasn’t particularly bothered by not going, and he didn’t want to throw a tantrum while his big brother stayed cool—you know how that is.”

  “Yeah, I know how that is.”

  “And he didn’t want to make you feel guilty when you couldn’t work it out. Eventually, I guess he realized it probably wouldn’t happen.” She paused, tightened her arms around herself, blinked out the window, and frowned. “Come to think of it . . . that may have been when he started to close up.”

  Turning a troubled gaze on his wife, George let the revelation hit him full in the face.

  “Oh, God, is it my fault?” he murmured. “Is it all my fault?”

  She seemed troubled as he said that, and faced him. “That’s not what I was after,” she said quietly. “He’s responsible too. He’s sixteen, after all. I know it’s an age when you blame other people, but still . . . ”

  “I’ve got to do something,” George said, pacing tightly. “I’ve got to fix this.”

  “I always knew he would go away someday . . . there’s something in his eyes. He can’t stay home.” Winona pulled at one of her own curls and twisted it while she helped him feel guilty. “Use some of those connections of yours. Why don’t you do it, George? Your son needs more than just me these days. He needs to see a man work, not a woman. He needs to see his father at work. And you need to spend time with him too. Go ahead . . . take Jimmy into space on some safe little cakewalk. It’ll be good for both of you.”

  Ten hours later . . .

  A Federation utility ground-to-space stratotractor, in space over the U.S.-Mexican border

  Jimmy Kirk sat smoldering where he’d been left in the miserable excuse for a galley, going over how his father could have caught him.

  The porthole was thick and scratched and had evidently served duty as a dart board, because it had little round dirty spots all over it. Through those dirty spots, Jimmy looked down at Earth.

  Around him the stratotractor growled and burped. The chunky, squared-off utility crawler had looked more like a sleeping rhino than a space vehicle when he’d first seen it only an hour earlier. But yes, it launched into sp
ace, and yes, it made orbit. When had vessels gotten so ugly? Didn’t anybody care what ships looked like anymore?

  Below, the planet was particularly sleepy. The sun was just setting over America, and there was a chalk-dusting of clouds in the north. Otherwise, not a storm to be seen.

  Except here, in his own head.

  He felt his mouth set hard and his teeth grind. It awakened something.

  Here he was, in space. Big deal.

  The walls were cold, the engines were a dull grumble, the view of space was empty and black, Earth looked like a lonely old woman with white hair, and every ship he’d seen so far was a battered old barge with too many space hours in its log.

  “Damned depressing,” he proclaimed to the porthole and the planet, and the walls. Obeying the twist of determination inside, he got up, and his eyes went into a stiff squint. “I’m not going. I’m getting off this junkheap.”

  He pulled his cap low over his eyes, raised his jacket collar like a cat burglar trying to hide his face, and started going through the crew’s lockers.

  FOUR

  “George! You crimson dragon! How are you?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Contentious as ever, eh?”

  “Robert, please. Couldn’t you be a little less jolly once in a while?”

  A lanky forty-some-year-old fellow in a sweater tilted sideways to see past his cross-grained old friend and peer from under an awning of fluffy brown hair at the stratotractor’s foredeck lift. The opening was small, as was usual in these planetary station grunt vehicles, so it couldn’t hide much.

  “Where’s Jimmy?”

  “Below.”

  “Of course—good for you! Taking no chances. Don’t want him to see you bashing dignitaries with a pole-ax like you did the last time, eh?”

  “Quit rubbing that in! The greenhorn punk just wouldn’t come up, that’s all.”

  “Cat-and-doggish as ever, the two of you. What would I do if George were not George and Jimmy were not Jimmy? Ah, the Kirks!”

  Robert April shoved his hands into his cardigan pockets, bunching the shawl collar up around his jawline, shoved the sweater forward until it nearly hid his gold command tunic, and regarded George with open affection.

  He rocked on his heels and grinned sentimentally. Lean and casual, his expression always neighborly, Captain April still carried a forbearance that betrayed him as a Coventry uppercruster. He was a happy, broad-gauged English string-puller whose steady hand had kept Starfleet on good footing since the beginnings of the long-range exploration program. Easily imagined as Sir Robert or Lord Robert, he had come to be regarded by his crews as something closer to Uncle Robert. He was a man to whom life was a jubilee, who could even take the jading tedium of space travel without a hint of wear, and he was as comfortable here on a maintenance tractor’s foredeck as he was on the command bridge of a ship of the line. He’d ushered hundreds of young inductees into space exploration as the Federation of Planets expanded, simply by treating them as though they really could do this remarkable thing and do it plenty well.

  To that dauntlessness George now pinned his last chance.

  “Have you got a mission for me?” he asked.

  Robert tilted a little forward as though sharing a secret. “I’ve got . . . Faramond.”

  It sounded mysterious, especially the way he said it. George tried to get it in context, but there wasn’t any.

  “You got what?” he asked.

  “Faramond,” Robert repeated, smiling. “Faramond. It’s a planet. And on it there’s a newly discovered archaeological mecca. A massive project. George, wait until you see it!” He spread his hands illustratively. “They’re dealing with an ancient advanced race. Think of it! With an ordinary dig we’d have to be careful, but we’d never stumble upon anything we didn’t understand. But this—this is remarkable! The information at Faramond could boost Federation science and medicine forward immeasurably. It’s comparable to scientists of Columbus’s time stumbling upon a sunken nuclear carrier, complete with computers.”

  George tucked his chin and blinked. “Wow.”

  “Yes, very wow. And listen to this part—Faramond is a cold planet. No volcanic activity whatsoever for ten million years, and it’s far from its star, so it had no heat to speak of at all. We’ve had to build huge atmospheric domes to work under. We’re just now ready to start the actual archaeology.”

  “Why would some advanced culture bother with colonizing a planet they had to heat up? That’s a hell of a lot of wasted energy, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what we want to know,” Robert corroborated. “If they were interested in it, perhaps we’d better be also. It wasn’t used for farming or mining, yet it was a massive complex, obviously far beyond us. Then all at once the entire culture packed up and left. And here’s the clinch . . . we haven’t the frailest idea how they left.”

  “‘How’? You mean ‘why’?”

  “No, George,” the captain insisted. “How.”

  George squinted at him. “Are you telling me there’s no vessel residue?”

  “No vessel residue, no technological droppings, no fossilized dock casualties, in fact no remnants of docks at all, no fuel film, no space markers, nothing to take care of a ship,” Robert said, and paused. He spread his elbows in a shrug without taking his hands out of the pockets. “So how did they leave? It’s a sociological mystery. And, George, we are finally ready to start solving it. The Federation has asked me to break ground with the ‘golden shovel,’ so to speak. Very easy on our parts, nothing to it.”

  He hesitated, sighed.

  “I’m so wrapped up in the starship program, I was thinking of turning them down until you contacted me about Jimmy, and I thought how much he might grow at seeing such a place, so far away. It’s a minor diplomatic mission . . . well, I suppose it’s not minor to the fellows involved, is it? Glad I thought of that,” he added. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone.”

  George, even in this choleric mood, couldn’t resist an appreciative chuckle and wondered how a gate-crasher like him had ended up with a friend like Robert. The thought eased him somewhat. Robert April was well known to shun the lionizing offered by a grateful Federation of Planets as it bloomed outward like a rosebush, wanted little to do with the celebrity he deserved, but he did understand people’s natural need to fuss and cheer. George knew Robert believed that’s what kept the blooms on the roses—the spirit of exploration, as much as the purpose.

  Drawing a breath that betrayed the tight hopes chewing at him, George heard himself say, “I’ll go get the little gangster.”

  “Go easy on him, now,” Robert admonished. “He’s probably sitting alone, making a lip hang.”

  “Yeah, he thinks he’s been bushwhacked. I’ll be right back.”

  “George—”

  He spun on a heel. “Yes, sir?”

  Robert’s mouth quirked and he raised both eyebrows. “I have a surprise for you.”

  As though he couldn’t take a surprise, George held still and asked with his silence.

  The captain grinned slyly. “We’re going to take her out again.”

  For a moment George didn’t understand. Then he felt his nerves twist and realized what was being waved before him.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asked, staring.

  Robert grinned wider.

  Stepping feebly toward him, George gasped, “Are you telling me . . . that my boy . . . is going to get to ride on her?”

  The silence between them tingled.

  “I’ve gotten you out of your hitch with the Diplomatic Corps,” Robert said, “temporarily at least, and you’re going to be one of my officers again. Won’t that be like old times? Here we are, thick as thieves, all set for adventure and chivalry. Be quite something for Jimmy to see, eh?”

  He hadn’t been told anything. Just asked a favor. Hadn’t been given the details. Yet, Robert knew. Had sensed, pieced it all together, the needs of old friends. Even though he had too many
other friends to count, Robert April had known what two particular friends needed.

  How many strings had he pulled? How many favors had he cashed in?

  She was going to fly again, for the Kirk boys.

  Overwhelmed and unable to hide it, George simply murmured, “I don’t know what to say . . . ”

  The captain gazed warmly at him. “She’s spacedocked. We’re almost there.”

  George’s mouth dropped open. “You mean now? Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “Oh, this is—this is . . . I’ll get Jimmy! He’s gotta see her from the outside! How close are we? Where’s she docked? No—forget that—it doesn’t matter! This is great! Slow us down, will you? No, never mind! I’ll move fast!”

  He took the captain’s nod as permission to leave the deck, and hopped the lift doublequick, and just before the panel slid shut he stuck his head back out.

  “Robert, you really know how to ice a cake!”

  On a station stratotractor, from anywhere to anywhere was a very short jog. A matter of seconds put George on the utility deck, stepping between mooring harnesses and powerloaders to the little crew galley where he’d left Jimmy sitting alone.

  “All right, champ, on your feet. Wait’ll you see—”

  He stepped in, and another second told him the rest. There was nothing in here but the gurgling snack dispenser.

  “Ohhhhh—no!”

  He left the galley on the run, stumbled over two triaxial coils and a spooled umbilical, and this time didn’t wait for the lift. This time he climbed the companionway ladders, squeezing past pitch adjusters, going directly from the trunk deck to the anchoring deck to the tonnage deck, right into and then past the crew saloons. He peeked into every portal, every cargo gate, platform, hatch, and hole, and got strange glances from the crew. They weren’t used to anyone hurrying, much less a Starfleet Security guy, because nothing ever happened on a stratotractor.

  Of course, they probably weren’t used to Starfleet officers hitching rides on maintenance craft either.

  He didn’t stop, except for a brief few seconds in one of the six dispatch silos, where he spied a compact fellow in a Security uniform being pressed against a stored antigrav pontoon by two Neanderthal mechanics.