One rainy day, T'Beth was cleaning out her closet when she found the printout of an old high school composition. Though dog-eared and faded, the relic of her youth stirred a sharp, bitter memory. In her mind's eye she saw the little apartment where she had lived with her father when he taught at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. She saw him sitting at his desk and felt her teenage heart madly pound as she walked over and placed the composition before him. It had been storming on that day, too. She remembered the sound of raindrops pelting a nearby window. She remembered how Father glanced up and questioned her with his inscrutable brown eyes before lowering them to the English assignment that had earned her an A+.

"There," she had boldly said. "Are you happy now? But I almost forgot; Vulcans are never 'happy', are they? And nothing is ever quite good enough."

As usual, he had been demanding that she improve her grades. Well, she had brought this one up, alright...at his expense. The composition was something more than a high school assignment. It was a personal challenge. If he took the effort to read it, he could not possibly accuse her of plagiarism, as he had in the past. This subject matter was too personal.

Standing by his desk, she had waited. As he caught sight of the A+, his eyebrow climbed. Would he simply murmur some vague remark and get back to his own business?

"Well," he had said, and as he handed it back, his next words caught her by surprise. "Read it to me."

She had blushed then and hated herself for it. This was not the time to turn coward. It should not have mattered whether he read the words quietly to himself or she spoke them aloud. She had written the story for only one purpose—to hurt him, if that were even possible. Well, maybe now she would find out. Settling into a chair, she cleared her throat and began.

The story was not long. At its completion, T'Beth had kept her eyes on the paper. It trembled slightly in her hands as she awaited her father's reaction.

At last he had stirred slightly in his chair. Then in a mild voice he said, "A good effort, T'Beth."

Shocked, she had bolted to her feet. Hadn't he heard the insult she wrote into it? "That's all you have to say? A good effort?"

He had gazed at her with a cool, maddening façade of innocence. "Were you expecting something more?"

"I guess you really are stupid!" she had exploded. With that disrespectful proclamation, she escaped into her bedroom to sulk. The fact that he did not come after her only added to her frustration. Didn't he care if she called him names? Of course, she knew that he wasn't stupid in the usual sense of the word. She had only been trying to provoke him. Back then, it seemed that she was always trying to provoke an emotional response from him…and only rarely succeeding.

Now here she was, a grown woman with teenage children of her own, but the memory of that turbulent confrontation still stung. What had she really expected from her father that day? She saw the answer plainly now. There was only one thing she had ever truly wanted from Spock, the one thing he had seemed unwilling…or unable…to give, back then. Oh, there had been fleeting moments when he almost seemed to love her. But afterward, his stoic Vulcan demeanor left her wondering if she had only imagined it.

Her eyes focused on the yellowed pages of her story. In writing it, she had relied heavily on rumors, for pivotal elements of that fateful mission were top secret and remained so. Now, stretching out on the bed, she read her way through the imaginative drama surrounding her father's death aboard the Enterprise.

The Solution

By Cristabeth S'chn T'gai

Admiral James T. Kirk and Captain Spock stood together in Kirk's quarters aboard the starship Enterprise.

With only five minutes left, Kirk replenished his glass of Saurian brandy and proposed a one-sided toast. "To what might have been…" His voice, for all its false heartiness, sounded strained.

"Four minutes," Spock said, "and forty-five seconds."

Kirk polished off the remaining liquor in one gulp.

"Admiral," Spock said very patiently. "Khan is expecting you aboard the Reliant with the doomsday data in four and one half minutes. He is expecting you to be sober."

Kirk slammed the empty glass down on a nearby table. "Dammit! Sober or soused, what difference does it make?"

Unperturbed by the outburst, Spock raised a slanted eyebrow and considered. "I cannot predict the eventual outcome. But Jim, we have agreed that even slight variations will aggravate our present difficulty."

Kirk slumped into a chair, his anger gone. "I'm sick of this conversation. Sick to death…"

Standing over him, Spock said, "I know."

Kirk rubbed his face and felt ashamed. Of course Spock knew. More than anyone, Spock knew. "I'm sorry," he said. "I get so damned frustrated…my attention slips. I know it only makes matters worse."

For the first time, Spock's face showed subtle signs of stress. "Nor am I entirely blameless."

Kirk laughed despite himself, a short nervous sound. "You mean stopping to put on a protective helmet. I'd have done that myself, Spock. You would have done it the first go around, if you'd been sure of the time element. Why let yourself go blind?"

"Self-indulgent," Spock remarked. But radiation blindness was not a pleasant memory, so he turned his mind from it.

"Now, me," Kirk was saying. "From a one minute deadline on the bridge, to fifteen minutes over brandy in my cabin."

"The computer is down," Spock pointed out. "Khan must grant you enough time to draw the data he is demanding. But you are becoming more persuasive."

Kirk brightened somewhat. "Yes. I am, aren't I? You don't suppose that sometime I might actually convince Khan to give up?"

"Khan Noonian Singh is an unreasonable man with a bitter desire for vengeance. He will activate the stolen doomsday device, with or without the data. However, I would like to believe that there are still…possibilities."

As he always did, Kirk now smiled with grim hope, and stood decisively. "Time."

"Two minutes, twelve seconds."

Together they walked out into the corridor and summoned a turbolift. At least those were working now. Kirk flexed his hands nervously. Spock, still as stone, gazed at the doors.

The doors slid open. Boarding, Kirk said, "Transporter room. You know, Spock, sometimes I think the devastation track is best. Swift, clean, relatively painless. Bones stops you short of the chamber, a quick hypo to the gluteus. My God…you sleep right through it."

Spock glanced at him in surprise. "Admiral, are you actually suggesting that my personal comfort is of more importance than the lives of the crew?"

Kirk looked at his friend. There was probably nothing he could say to make the Vulcan understand a purely emotional, subjective evaluation. What did Spock really know of love? "I'm just tired of grieving," he said as the doors opened at the transporter section. He had said it before.

Stepping from the lift, he asked, "Time, Spock."

"One minute, thirty-three seconds."

Right on schedule.

Spock pressed a packet of data into Kirk's hands. When Khan fed the encoded information into the Reliant computer, it would trigger a command sequence ultimately resulting in that ship's destruction. But Khan might still have time to activate the doomsday weapon and murder Kirk rather horribly, as he had done before. They both knew it.

"Jim…" A human's voice would have thickened with emotion. Spock merely sounded impatient. He turned quickly to the transporter console and set the coordinates. He gave no sign of the temptation he was experiencing…the temptation to tamper yet again…to adjust the beam to wide dispersal and scatter Kirk's atoms irretrievably through space. A painless death for the admiral, but Spock had his orders.

Kirk centered himself on the platform. He was visibly sweating now.

"Thirty seconds," Spock announced. He kept his eyes on the settings, his hands on the controls. Waiting.

"Where's David?" Kirk asked. "I'd like to say goodbye to my son."

Startled, Spock glanced up. So the young man was Jim's son…but shouldn't he have known that already? "I am sorry. Fifteen seconds is insufficient time. However, if at all possible…I will tell him."

Kirk nodded. He moistened his lips. An echo of Khan's knife made his flesh cringe.

"Spock," he said.

Returning his attention to the console, Spock worked the levers. Bluish light began pulsing around the admiral, swirling into a tight cocoon that obscured him, then gradually disappeared. The transporter's hum faded. Its platform was empty.

With restrained horror, Spock raised his palms and studied them. In the last instant, he had done it. He had dispersed Jim's atoms into empty space. Admiral Kirk was dead…safe from the threat of Khan's knife. It was unquestionably the boldest deviation since the deployment of the doomsday device shredded the local space-time continuum into dizzy loops.

He had murdered his best friend…because it seemed logical.

Numbly, Spock started for the bridge. There was a ship to command…a crippled, endangered Enterprise…and her captain must keep a clear mind. Perhaps Khan would accept the excuse of a transporter accident and grant him more time.

The lift opened onto the bridge and Spock froze. Admiral Kirk sat in the center seat, issuing orders. A battle was ending. The damaged Enterprise had just disabled the Reliant, where Khan was in command.

Spock reached for the nearest bulkhead and steadied himself until the brief sense of displacement passed. Recovering as always, he went to his science station and found an energy pattern developing on the display. Its source was the Reliant and it was unlike any energy wave he had ever seen before. It was the doomsday device on its four minute buildup to detonation.

Around him the bridge grew ominously silent, for the Enterprise was crippled beyond any hope of escape.

Suddenly Kirk was on his feet, heading for the turbolift. "We can beam aboard and stop it! Spock…!"

"You can't stop it," David said, nearby. "Once it's started, there's no turning back."

Kirk stared at his son. And in that moment, he saw a solution that even Spock had been overlooking. Triumphant, he drove his fist into the palm of his other hand. "We can lock onto it with our transporter and disperse it into open space!"

Spock's brow climbed. "Of course. I should have arrived at that very conclusion…instead of…"

Kirk was not listening. Dropping back into the command chair, he called to the transporter room, but no one answered. His eyes found Spock. Without a word, they rushed into the turbolift together. The lift plummeted to C-deck and abruptly stopped in its shaft. The doors opened onto the wrong area.

"Damn!" Kirk growled. "I thought this system was repaired."

"Not entirely, it would seem." Spock took the lead, bounding down emergency stairwells to the transporter room.

Kirk arrived flushed and out of breath. He went straight to the console where Spock was already setting the controls, and double-checked the Vulcan's work. They might only have this one chance and it had to be perfect.

"Energize," Kirk ordered.

Spock's hands played over the controls. The transporter briefly hummed, and instruments confirmed that the doomsday device was safely stored in the transporter matrix, ready for dispersal. Standing side by side, they waited, hardly daring to breathe. Was the crisis truly over? Or was the time loop merely waiting to reach out and ensnare them yet again?

Mister Sulu's voice reached them from the bridge. "Admiral, the buildup to detonation has ended."

The moment stretched. Spock turned to Kirk. The look on the Vulcan's face was almost sheepish.

"You never had to die," Kirk told him.

"Nor you," Spock admitted. "I should have known. I should have formulated this solution immediately."

Kirk shrugged as if it did not really matter. But it did. He had depended on Spock, and the Vulcan had failed him. There had been no need for heroics, no reason for either of them to suffer and die...repeatedly. And with that realization it came to him that he would never fully trust Spock's advice again.

Forcing a weary, magnanimous smile, Kirk said, "Well, let's finish this up once and for all." And taking the matter into his own hands, he spread the doomsday machine over an empty parsec of space.

The End.

Upon reading the final word, T'Beth drew in a deep breath. Those dizzy time loops reminded her of younger days when she was cast into confusion by her father's death and subsequent resurrection. In her story she had created a world where Spock was a fool for throwing away his life and Jim Kirk was the dashing hero who saved the day. But was there any truth to it? In reality, Father had died saving the Enterprise. All these years she had wondered if he really had to sacrifice his life. Would her final solution have spared him…and her?

More than ever, the question seemed to cry out for a response.

There was a phone screen in a corner of the bedroom. Heading over, she called her father and told him about finding the old school assignment.

"Ah," he nodded, "'The Solution'. I remember it well. A fine piece of writing."

"A fine piece of provocation, you mean," she said contritely. "I was only trying to rile you."

"Yes," he agreed. "Our relationship was strained and I knew that you admired Jim. It was only natural that you portrayed him in a heroic light."

"But I made you so…so heartless."

His right brow rose and his lips curved into the suggestion of a smile. "Really? As I recall, your Spock knew more of love than you seem to realize. He disobeyed orders so that he could spare Kirk from suffering. Afterward, he was 'numb'. The reader would wonder why. Was Spock experiencing grief over the death of his friend?"

She made no response. Her mind was on the deeper question that had driven her to place this call. Swallowing hard, she said, "I want to know something. My idea about using the transporter to get rid of that device. Would it have worked?"

He took a moment to frame his reply. "I can neither confirm nor deny that any such device existed." Pausing, he looked deeply into her eyes and said, "I gave my life because there was no other acceptable choice…and with regret…for you were very much on my mind."

T'Beth felt a strange tangle of relief and vexation. "Then why didn't you just say so when I first read you the story?"

He gazed upon her fondly. "On that day, would you have believed me?"

She sighed, for the answer pained her. "No. But you just sat there and let me call you stupid."

His dark eyes twinkled with a dry hint of amusement. "When it came to parenting you, I was rather…obtuse."

Again, she sighed. And not for the first time, said, "I wish things could have been different…"

Spock refrained from comment. They both knew there was no way to alter the past, but their present relationship was more solid than the rebellious teenage T'Beth would have believed possible.

"Father," she said suddenly, and it was as if the child in her was still trying to make up for the many hurts she had inflicted. "Father, I know you tried your best with me…and I love you for it."

His lips parted, and in a voice as thick as any human's, he replied, "You are most kind, T'Beth-kam…and I am truly glad you are my daughter."

Not an outright profession of love, but his use of the Vulcan endearment felt like a caress. A great rush of warmth filled her heart to overflowing. Outside, the clouds parted. A shaft of mid-afternoon sun cut across the phone screen, reminding her that her youngest child would soon be home from school.

Glancing at the strewn contents of her closet, she said, "Well, I better take care of this mess."

And so they said their farewells and she tucked the story away with some vague idea of rewriting it later. Perhaps on some other rainy day.

oooOOooo