STAR TREK - TOS - 50 - Doctor's Orders

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 491.93KB 222 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Doctor's Orders

DIANE DUANE

POCKET BOOKS New York London

Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

places and

incidents are either the product of the author's

imagination or are

used fictitiously. Any resemblance

to actual events or locales or

persons, living or dead, is entirely

coincidental

An Original Publication of POCKET

BOOK

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon and

Schuster Inc.. 1230

Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of

Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a

division of Simon and

Schuster Inc., under exclusive license from

Paramount Picture.

to reproduce this book or

portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information

address

Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the

Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN 0-671-66189-2

First Pocket Books printing June 1990

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET and colophon are registered

trademarks of Simon and Schuster

Inc.

Printed in the U.s.a. For Laura, Nita,

Tom, the good Dr. Spencer,

and the many other friends who worked (or work) in and

around Payne

Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New

York City

with happy memories of the Sixth Floor and the

Pros from Dover.

And for them all, this variation on a theme

"Why would anyone want to rule the world? They'd just

have to

do the time sheets." "In the ancient names of

Apollo the

Physician, and Aesculapius, and by Health and

Allheal his daughters,

I swear this oath-though chiefly by the One above

Them, Whose Name we

do not know. I swear to wield my art in such

ways, and only in such

ways, as serve to preserve sentient life in its

myriad forms, or to

allow such life to depart in dignity. I shall turn

aside from every

act, or inaction, which would allow any being's life

to depart

untimely. Into whatever place I go for the healing of the

sick, I shall

hold such things as I see there to be as

secret as the holy

Mysteries. I swear to perform no procedure in

which I am unqualified.

Nor shall I use my position as a tool in the

seduction of any being.

I will teach this, my art, without fee or stipulation,

to other

disciples bound to it by oath, should they desire

to learn it; and I

shall hold the ones who taught me the art as close

as family, and

help them in their need should they require it. I

ask the Power Which

hears oaths to hear me swear this one. As long as

I keep it, may I

stand rightfully in the respect of my fellow beings

but should I break

it, may the reverse be my lot."

comHippocratic Oath, revised ed.

"I wish that blasphemy, ignorance and tyranny

were ceased among

physicians, that they might be happy and I

joyful."

comationicholas Culpeper

(specialist in alternative medicine,

fl.

1608)

"Do YOU REMEMBER," said Leonard

McCoy, "when I stole your cadaver?"

The tall gray-haired man lying in the other

lounger laughed.

"Disaster," he said, "alas! Murder most foul,

alarums and

excursions, theft, buggery, barratry,

incomplete perfusion!"

McCoy suspected that Dieter was trying to say

that, at the time, he had

gone into shock. It was always a matter of

guesswork, figuring out

what he meant. Dieter Clissman's grasp

of English had never been

less than perfect, but sometimes he seemed

to want to make you

wonder about that a little. McCoy leaned forward a

little to signal

to one of the waiters looking out toward the hotel

terrace. "Here,

never mind," he said, "you've gone right through that. You

and your

milk drinks. Let me get you

another." The waiter glanced at McCoy,

nodded, and went off. McCoy leaned back in his

lounger and looked

out through the railings of the terrace at the landscape.

The old

hotel sat on the highest shoulder of the little

plateau that held the town of Wengen against the

Jungfrau, "the

Maiden," queen-mountain of all the Bernese

Alps. The sky was that

perfect light clear blue of late Alpine

summer, the color of the very

end of July, just before the fall first begins to assert

itself. Down

below, among the dark green scattered pines, under the

brown peaked

roofs, lights were beginning to show in windows, as the

day drew on

toward sunset and the houses farthest west in town

fell under the

upward-leaping shadow of Schilthorn across the

valley. A pair of

lights down toward the Lauterbrunnen valley

spoke of a train coming

up the old cog railway, loaded with

tourists and the day's commuters

from Interlaken, Thun, and Bern. Nothing else

moved down there in the

streets of the town but people walking, and electric or

horse-drawn carts; bigger ground vehicles and

fliers came no farther up the mountain than

Lauterbrunnen, a restriction that McCoy found

hard to fault when the result was such perfect

quiet, broken only by the bells on the horses"

harness, and on the tuned bells of goats and cows on

the green alp higher up the

mountainside. High above everything, the razory

peak of the Maiden was half- hidden in veils of

wispy cloud, but that was the best possible news to

McCoy. Cloud at the end of the day in Wengen

meant incredible sunsets. They were one reason why

McCoy was here. The other reason was to see

Dieter.

It had been a long time since they were at medical

school together. After graduation, they had gone their

separate ways. Now Dieter ran the Xeno

department at the University of Bern and was

practically a legend among the xenomedics of the

Federation; and McCoy . . . Heaven only knows

what I am, he thought. 2

"When does it start?" he said to Dieter.

"In about an hour, I should think," Dieter said,

looking down toward the valley. After a long, long

drink, he added, "And whatever did make you

steal my cadaver?"

McCoy laughed softly at that, and took another

drink of his mint julep. "If I hadn't, someone

else would have," he said. "I thought it would be better

if a friend did it."

"Mmmmm," Dieter said. "We did have a few

rogues among us, did we not."

McCoy nodded. There had been people studying

xenomedicine in the same class as the two of them who

turned out not to have been particularly well fitted for

it. Well, he thought, better they should find out in

training, rather than in practicing on a patient. But

some of them had been less than kind to the hard-working,

hard-studying man who got better grades than

any of them, and made them look less than competent

in the labs and on the wards. A lot of them had

tried to make Dieter's life less pleasant

than it might have been. That had annoyed McCoy.

It annoyed him now, even though it was all a long

time ago. But some memories would not lie down and be

still.

"Rogues, yes," he said. "Well, they're

all in other jobs, I hope and

trust."

"What I don't understand is what made you put

the cadaver in the Dean's

office," Dieter said, leaning back to gaze at

where the clouds around

Schilthorn and Morgenburghorn and Niesen to the

west were already beginning to crimson.

"Seemed like a good idea at the time," McCoy

said, looking, around him as the terrace slowly began

to fill

up with tourists, people with stillshooters and cameras.

Most of them had

sweaters on-a good idea; it was cooling down, and

McCoy wished he had

brought his own jacket. "It also seemed to me,"

he said, "that the Dean

would be forced by such a gesture to take a more

personal interest in what was going on in our

classes. That seemed like a good thing."

"But you were flunking anatomy," Dieter said.

McCoy blushed. That was one memory he had

never quite been able to come to terms with. "Such only brought

more attention to bear on you," Dieter said,

ignoring the blushes. "Not a good thing."

"It's all relative," McCoy muttered.

"And it all turned out all right in the end." Indeed

it had, though it had meant the Dean of Medicine

tutoring him within an inch ofhis life for the next

three months. He had passed

anatomy with a more than respectable grade, and the

Dean had shook him by the hand and told him that she never

wanted to see him again. "Getting a little thick up

here, isn't it?" McCoy said, looking around him

at all the tourists, who were beginning to gather

expectantly at the railings.

"I decline to be distracted," Dieter said.

"You went to great trouble for my sake. I have never

forgotten it."

"Yes, well. What about that time-was McCoy

stopped himself, then. What's

wrong with just letting a thank-you in? he thought.

"Never mind," he said after a second or so. "I

was glad to help."

"I was glad to be helped. Which is one reason

I wanted to see you before you went off again. Your last

couple of letters-there was a lot of

complaining about Starfleet bureaucracy."

McCoy chuckled. "You recruiting,

Dieter?"

"Don't joke. You haven't my budget cuts

to deal with. I just wanted to know that you are all right."

McCoy sighed, looked out at the darkening

valley. "Well, good usually

manages to triumph over bureaucracy, at

least lately. But good has to be very, very careful. It

can tire you out."

Dieter said nothing to that, just took another drink.

"This mission that means you can't stay to dinner," he

said, "will it take you away for long this time? I'd like

you to come lecture, if you can spare the energy when you have

some more leave. Your last few articles left the

other department heads hot for your blood. That

Gastroenteriditis denebiis one in

particular. Old Kreuznauer threatened to feed you

that article with-. out a GI tube."

McCoy chuckled. "I don't know," he said,

gazing out at the sunset. It was becoming

magnificent; the late a fternoon had become almost a

recipe for

splendor-high clouds in an otherwise clear

sky, the reflected crimson light of a sun already

gone down now lingering on the highest snow-covered

peaks so that they blazed pink-orange against the

deepening blue, as if lit from within by fire. "It's

officially a post-survey survey. The First

Contact people have been down to the planet in question and counted

the species. Apparently they already have some knowledge of

space travel. The survey has done the initial

language analyses and so forth. Now we have to go in

and do the fine calibrations for the Universal

Translator . . . and evaluate them to see if

they're Federation material. And if they want

to be." He

shrugged. "It's work we've done before. I'll be

busy . . . there's a lot of xenopsych involved,

as you might 6

expect. Other than that-biological survey of

flora and fauna, especially the

germs-anatomical and medical analysis of the

species involved-was

"Wait a moment. Species plural?"

Dieter said, sounding surprised. "More

than one?"

McCoy nodded. "It's unusual," he said.

"They're not planted, either-not put there by some other

spacefaring species earlier on in history.

Three

species on the one planet, all true

convergent evolution. Starfleet is hot to find out

what's going on . . . seeing that no such planet

has ever been found before. Enterprise was headed somewhere

else first, but this mission has pushed that other one

farther down the list. So-off we go tonight, and not next

week as I thought. Otherwise, I would come

lecture for you,

happily. There's no telling how many years

it'll be this time. You know how it is."

Dieter made a little sound like a sigh. "Here we

are in the prime of our careers," it said, "and we have

no more time to ourselves than we did as first-year

students. Something's gone wrong somewhere."

McCoy studied his drink. "At least we're not

bored."

"We weren't then, either," Dieter said. He

paused, and added, "You know, I think they may be

starting early. Let's look."

McCoy got up and followed his friend to the end of the

railing, where there was still a little room left. They

looked out, down past the town, down the valley.

There were sparks of light showing not electric

lights, this time, but fires, burning on the nearby

heights and hills. One after another, they started

to blaze up. Down in the valley, near

Lauterbrunnen and 6

Murren and right down to Interlaken and Spiez by the

lake on the heights on the far side of Lake

Thun and Lake Brienz, on the Brienzer and

Sigriswiler Rothorns, and eastward to the

Schrattenflue they shone, so that the fires

doubled themselves in the still waters of the lakes; and right

down into the lowlands, atop the hill-heights of

Rammisgummen and Napf. And one tiniest

light, farthest away, due north by Lake

Luzern not a bonfire, but a

laserbeam starting upward straight as a spear from the

peak of Mount

Pilatus, and vanishing into the night.

"They just can't wait till midnight anymore,"

Dieter said. "The impatience of the young. But

anyway, you understand why I wanted you to see this. This

year in particular."

McCoy nodded. All around them, on every

mountaintop, new fires were being kindled. One was

lit down in the main square in Wengen; in

response to it, another laserbeam lanced out upward

from the meteorological research

facility on the peak of the Jungfrau, pure

white, casting a light like

bright moonlight on everything around. The sound of

singing began to drift up-at first a few voices

together, then more and more of them, thin but

clear, singing a simple tune in a major key,

something that might have been mistaken for a music-box

tune. But the translator handled the words without

hesitation, even though they were in the oldest Swiss

language, Rumansch, and made it plain that this was

not a song for music-boxes. "Freedom or

death, that is our will; no foreign rule, for good or

ill; Free folk are we, in a free land-was

"Almost a thousand years since they spoke those words

first," Dieter said, "in the middle of the night, 7

in the Riitli meadow up north by Luzern.

Thirteen stubborn people, annoyed with the local

representative of a foreign empire."

McCoy nodded again. That pact, the Perpetual

Alliance, had been the seed of the formation of

Switzerland the declaration that the Swiss belonged

to themselves, and each other, not to whatever empire felt like

conquering

them. And the Swiss Articles of Confederation had

been one of several

useful models for the Articles of Federation of the

United Federation of Planets-a loose

association of fiercely independent parties bound

to help one another in distress, to protect the group

against threat or

interference from outside, and otherwise to leave each

other pretty much alone. It was all history, and

well enough known. But a little thread of suspicion

woke up in McCoy and wouldn't go away. "How

much of it really

happened?" he said. "All the William Tell

stuff?"

Dieter chuckled. "Willem Tell certainly

lived," he said, "but he didn't

kill the tyrant with his bare hands, or shoot any

apples off his son's

head. He was a stubborn man with a talent for

withholding his taxes in

protest, and getting his neighbors to do the same.

Among many other things. And as for the Rutli meadow,

it's there, all right, but who knows what

happened nearly a thousand years ago, in the dark?

All we have is the

signed Pact in the Bundesbriefarchiv in

Schwyz. And its results."

Some of the people up on the terrace were singing, now, in

German or French or Italian; the words

all came out the same in McCoy's

translator, though it often had trouble with the

Rumansch, and kept trying to treat it as if it were a

sort of worn-down Italian with 8

pig-German mixed in. "Our homes, our

lives, no one's but ours our earth,

our blood, no foreign power's-was

The song chorused up to its end. Applause and

cheering broke out as more fires flared up on the

heights. Glasses were raised, drained, but not

smashed-this was Switzerland, after all; smashed

glasses were untidy-and people went in search of

refills. In McCoy's back pocket, the

communicator cheeped.

He sighed, yanked down suddenly from the odd

elation that had been building in him. "At least I

got to see this," he said to Dieter, and pulled the

communicator out. "McCoy," he said to it.

"Doctor, was Spock's voice said to him, "The

Captain has asked me to say to you, All aboard

that's coming aboard. ?"'

"Tell him I appreciate the extra time,

Spock," McCoy said. "Tell Uhura I'm

ready."

"Noted." There was a brief pause.

"7t is a most notable sight, Doctor. And a

bit of a curiosity. his

"Oh? Why's that?"

"1 had not thought of you as much of a historian. his

McCoy chuckled a bit. "It's personal

history, more than anything else. And besides," he

said, "those who ignore the mistakes of the past

usually wind up treating the resultant bullet

holes in the future. Just consider this as

prophylaxis. McCoy out."

He could hear Spock's puzzlement as he

closed the frequency down, and he approved of it.

"A longer stay next time, old friend," he said

to Dieter. Dieter raised his glass. "Grusse

Gott, was he said.

"Mud in your eye too," said McCoy. He

drained his 9

julep, putting it down just before the transporter

effect started to take

him. "And ciao. his

James T. Kirk leaned back in the helm and

appeared to take no particular notice of the

predeparture checks going on around him. That

appearance was one he had cultivated for a long, long

time. It didn't do for a Captain, in terms

of the everyday running of a ship, to let his crew think

he was

watching them too closely. Such scrutiny only

made them nervous, or gave them ideas about their

Captain's opinion of their competence. No, it was

better to lean back, enjoy the view, and let them

get their jobs done.

At the same time, Kirk knew every move of the

predeparture ritual, for

every station of the Bridge. He paid scrupulous

(though low-key) attention to it, for the same reason that

old-time parachutists used to pack their own chutes,

having first signed the silk. With the back half of his

attention he listened to the checks on the warp and

impulse engines, and the OK'S from the various

departments around the ship, and assured himself that everything

was proceeding correctly. But in the meantime, the

front half of his attention was busy with a

philosophical problem.

Am I lonely? he wondered..

He had had a birthday not too long ago, and some

of his congratulatory mail had just caught up with

him. One card that had come from an old friend on Earth

had made some mildly humorous remark about

wondering when he was

going to settle down with someone. Kirk's first

reaction, after chuckling at the question, had been to think that

he already was settled down with someone with the

Enterprise. But a 10

moment later, some annoyed part of his brain had very

clearly said to him. How long are you going to keep

feeding yourself that answer? You made it up a long time

ago. Is it still valid? Was it ever valid? And how

come it's

been so long since you even gave it any thought?

Because it was true then, and it still is, he had

answered the mouthy part of his brain. But the derisive

silence that was the only reply had brought him up

short. Slowly, over years, Kirk had learned

to pay attention to the things his brain said to him without

warning; accurate or not, they tended to be worth

considering. So he was considering the question, regardless of the

fact that it made his brain hurt.

This is all McCoy's fault somehow, he

thought, a bit sourly. I never used to be this

introspective. He's been contaminating me.

"Sickbay," he heard Lieutenant Uh ura

say behind him, as she went down the checklist.

"Sickbay ready, was he heard Lia Burke

say she was acting as McCoy's head

nurse while Christine Chapel was out doing her

doctorate practicals.

"Doctor McCoy's on his way in from the

Transporter room."

"Ask him to come up to the Bridge when he has a

moment," Kirk said

suddenly, deciding in momentary wickedness that if

he had to be

philosophically uncomfortable, he was going

to spread some of the

discomfort back to the source.

"Certainly, Captain. Anything in particular?"

"I'll discuss it with him when he gets here," he

said. Let him sweat, he thought with mild amusement.

"Ah, Mr. Chekov. Thank you."

He reached down and took the datapadd Chekov

was offering him; he looked it over, saw nothing on the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Doctor'sOrdersBYDIANEDUANEPOCKETBOOKSNewYorkLondonTorontoSydneyTokyoSingaporeThisbookisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,placesandincidentsareeithertheproductoftheauthor'simaginationorareusedfictitiously.Anyresemblancetoactualeventsorlocalesorpersons,livingordead,isentirelycoincidentalAnOriginalPublic...

展开>> 收起<<

STAR TREK - TOS - 50 - Doctor's Orders.pdf

共222页,预览45页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

STAR TREK - TOS - 50 - Doctor's Orders

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: