Spock Must Die

Chapter One — McCOY WITHOUT BONES

From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4011.9:

We are continuing to record a navigation grid for this area of space-time, as directed. Mr. Spock reports that, according to the library, the procedure is still called “benchmarking” after ancient ordinance mapping practices laid down before the days of space flight, though these cubic parsecs of emptiness look like most unattractive sites to park a bench.

Though we are not far by warp drive from the Klingon Empire, and in fact I am sure the Klingons would claim that we were actually in it, the mission has been quite uneventful and I believe I detect some signs of boredom among my officers. Their efficiency, however, seems quite unimpaired.

“What worries me,” McCoy said, “is whether I’m myself any more. I have a horrible suspicion that I’m a ghost. And that I’ve been one for maybe as long as twenty years.”

The question caught Captain Kirk’s ear as he was crossing the rec room of the Enterprise with a handful of coffee. It was not addressed to him, however; turning, he saw that the starship’s surgeon was sitting at a table with Scott, who was listening with apparently deep attention. Scotty listening to personal confidences? Or Doc offering them? Ordinarily Scotty had about as much interest in people as his engines might have taken; and McCoy was reticent to the point of cynicism.

“May I join this symposium?” Kirk said. “Or is it private?”

“It’s nae private, it’s just nonsense, I think,” the engineering officer said. “Doc here is developing a notion that the transporter is a sort of electric chair. Thus far, I canna follow him, but I’m trying, I’ll do mysel’ that credit.”

“Oh,” Kirk said, for want of anything else to say. He sat down. His first impression, that McCoy had been obliquely referring to his divorce, was now out the porthole, which both restored his faith in his understanding of McCoy’s character, and left him totally at sea. Understanding McCoy was a matter of personal as well as ship’s importance to Kirk, for as Senior Ship’s Surgeon, McCoy was the one man who could himself approach Kirk at any time on the most intimate personal level; indeed, it was McCoy’s positive duty to keep abreast of the Captain’s physical, mental and emotional condition and to speak out openly about it — and not necessarily only to the patient.

When McCoy joined the Enterprise, Kirk suspected that it had been the divorce that had turned him to the Space Service in the first place. The details, however, were a mystery. Kirk did know that McCoy had a daughter, Joanna, who had been twenty back then and for whom the surgeon had provided; she was in training as a nurse somewhere, and McCoy heard from her as often as the interstellar mail permitted. That was not very often.

“Somebody,” Kirk said, “had better fill me in. Doc, you’ve said nine times to the dozen that you don’t like the transporter system. In fact, I think ‘loath,’ is the word you use. ‘I do not care to have my molecules scrambled and beamed around as if I were a radio message.’ Is this just more of the same?”

“It is and it isn’t,” McCoy said. “It goes like this. If I understand Scotty aright, the transporter turns our bodies into energy and then reconstitutes them as matter at the destination.”

“That’s a turrible oversimplification,” Scott objected. The presence of his accent, which came out only under stress, was now explained; they were talking about machinery, with which he was actively in love. “What the transporter does is analyze the energy state of each particle in the body and then produce a Dirac jump to an equivalent state somewhere else. No conversion is involved — if it were, we’d blow up the ship.”

“I don’t care about that,” McCoy said. “What I care about is my state of consciousness — my ego, if you like. And it isn’t matter, energy or anything else I can name, despite the fact that it’s the central phenomenon of all human thought. After all, we all know we live in a solipsistic universe.”

“A what?” Kirk said.

“We inhabit two universes, then,” McCoy said patiently. “One is the universe inside our skulls — our viewpoint universe, as it were. The other is the phenomenal universe — but that in the long run is only a consensus of viewpoint universes, augmented by pointer readings, and other kinds of machine read-outs. The consensus universe is also a product of consciousness. Do you agree, Jim?”

“Tentatively,” Kirk said. “Except that I find what you call the consensus universe is pretty convincing.”

“Statistically, yes. But it breaks down very rapidly when you examine the individual data behind the statistics. All we really know is what we register inside our skulls — a theory which used to be called logical positivism. I go further: I say that there may not even be any consensus universe, and that nothing is provably real except my consciousness, which I can’t measure. This position is called solipsism, and I say that the fact of self-consciousness forces us all to be solipsists at heart and from birth. We just seldom become aware of it, that’s all.”

“Space travel does that to you,” Kirk agreed. “Especially when you’re as far from home as we are now. Luckily, you recover, at least enough to function.”

“Nobody ever recovers, completely,” McCoy said somberly. “I believe that the first discovery of this situation is one of the great formative shocks in human development — maybe as important as the birth trauma. Tell me, Jim: wasn’t there a moment, or an hour, in your childhood or early adolescence when you realized with astonishment that you, the unique and only Jim Kirk, were at the very center of the whole universe? And when you tried to imagine what it would be like to see the universe from some other point of view — that of your father, perhaps — and realized that you were forever a prisoner in your own head?”

Kirk searched his memory. “Yes, there was,” he said. “And the fact that I can still remember it, and so easily, does seem to indicate that it was fairly important to me. But after a while I dismissed the whole problem. I couldn’t see that it had any practical consequences, and in any event there wasn’t anything I could do about it. But you still haven’t answered my question. What’s all this got to do with the transporter?”

“Nary a thing,” Scott said.

“On the contrary. Whatever the mechanism, the effect of the transporter is to dissolve my body and reassemble it somewhere else. Now you’ll agree from experience that this process takes finite, physical time — short, but measurable. Also from experience, that during that time period neither body nor consciousness exists. Okay so far?”

“Well, in a cloudy sort of way,” Kirk said.

“Good. Now, at the other end, a body is assembled which is apparently identical with the original, is alive, has consciousness, and has all the memories of the original. But it is NOT the original. That has been destroyed.”

“I canna see that it matters a whit,” Scott said. “Any more than your solipsist position does. As Mr. Spock is fond of saying, ‘A difference which makes no difference is no difference’.”

“No, not to you,” McCoy said, “because the new McCoy will look and behave in all respects like the old one. But to me? I can’t take so operational a view of the matter. I am, by definition, not the same man who went into a transporter for the first time twenty years ago. I am a construct made by a machine after the image of a dead man — and the hell of it is, not even I can know how exact the imitation is, because — well, because obviously if anything is missing I wouldn’t remember it.”

“Question,” Kirk said. “Do you feel any different?”

“Aha,” said Scott with satisfaction.

“No, Jim, I don’t, but how could I? I think I remember what I was like before, but in that I may be vastly mistaken. Psychology is my specialty, for all that you see me chiefly as a man reluctant to hand out pills. I know that there are vast areas of my mind that are inaccessible to my consciousness except under special conditions — under stress, say, or in dreams. What if part of that psychic underground has not been duplicated? How would I know?”

“You could ask Spock,” Scott suggested.

“Thanks, no. The one time I was in mind-lock with him it saved my life — it saved all of us, you’ll remember — but I didn’t find it pleasant.”

“Well, you ought to, anyhow,” Scott said, “if you’re as serious about all this. He could lock Onto one of those unconscious areas and then see if it was still there after your next transporter trip.”

“Which it almost surely would be,” Kirk added. “I don’t see why you assume the transporter to be so peculiarly selective. Why should it blot out subconscious traces instead of conscious ones?”

“Why shouldn’t it? And in point of fact, does it or doesn’t it? That’s pretty close to the question I want answered. If it were the question, I would even submit to the experiment Scotty proposes, and ask everybody else aboard to as well.”

“I,” said Kirk, “have been on starship duty somewhat longer than either of you gentlemen. And I will say without qualification that this is the weirdest rec room conversation I’ve ever gotten into. But all right, Doc, let’s bite the bullet. What is the question?”

“What would you expect from a psychologist?” McCoy said. “The question, of course, is the soul. If it exists, which I know no more than the next man. When I was first reassembled by that damnable machine, did my soul, if any, make the crossing with me — or am I just a reasonable automaton?”

“The ability to worry about the question,” Kirk said, “seems to me to be its own answer.”

“Hmmm. You may be right, Jim. In fact, you better had be. Because if you aren’t, then every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder.”

“And thot’s nae a haggle, it’s a haggis,” Scott said hotly. “Look ye, Doc, yon soul’s immortal by definition. If it exists, it canna be destroyed — “

“Captain Kirk,” said the rec room’s intercom speaker.

Kirk arose with some relief; the waters around the table had been getting pretty deep. But his relief was short-lived.

“In the rec room, Mr. Spock.”

“Will you relieve me, please, Captain? We are in need of a Command decision.”

McCoy and Scott looked up in alarm. A Command decision, out here in a totally unexplored arm of the galaxy?

“I’m on my way,” Kirk said. “What, briefly, is the problem?”

“Sir,” the first officer’s voice said, “the Klingon War has finally broken out. Organia seems already to have been destroyed, and we are cut off from the Federation.”