Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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Zetha shrugged. “Just accurate. If I hear something, I can play it back in my mind like a recording. If I read it, it scrolls across the inside of my eyelids.”

Cretak tilted her head like a bird, skepticism written in every plane of her handsome face. She tapped something into her personal comm and turned the screen so that Zetha could read it. Zetha did. Then closed her eyes and recited it verbatim.

Even Cretak, it seemed, could occasionally be surprised. “Impressive,” she said, “but that puts us only halfway there. Try this.”

She coded a sequence into the keypad on her desk and a voice recording began to play. Zetha listened intently. After a moment or two, Cretak stopped the recording.

“What language is that?” Zetha asked.

“Inconsequential. If your memory is what you claim it is, you can reproduce it.”

Again Zetha shrugged, and began to speak the foreign tongue, though she understood not a word of it, perfectly.

Cretak seemed to have been holding her breath. Now she let it out in a great slow exhalation. “Eidetic!” she breathed. “No wonder your lord treasures you. This may make matters more complex rather than simpler.”

“How so?”

“Not for you to know.” Cretak opened a wall safe and handed Zetha a datachip. “Your lord has given you to me for now. I will provide you with a room and a listener. You will memorize everything on this chip, however incomprehensible it may seem. You will recite it for me so I am certain you have it right, then you will not speak it again until you reach the person to whom you are also to entrust the locket.”

Something thrilled in Zetha’s blood. Who was this person, on what side of the dilemma of good and evil? If she refused this mission now, would she be killed? It seemed apparent, considering the amount of information she’d just been given. This,she thought, is where you must decide.

“Who is this person? Where?”

In answer, Cretak had one more bit of media to display, a grainy visual full of static and flutter, the audio fading in and out. Zetha lacked the sophistication to recognize that what she was looking at was an intercept of a long-range comm signal, but didn’t care. She had seen vids about humanoids and had a vague idea what they looked like. And she knew that there were hundreds of other species to be found in known space. She had simply never seen so many in one place before. Her mouth opened in awe, and stayed open.

The setting seemed to be a classroom. Zetha’s own experience with such venues was limited, but she recognized that the person in the center of the room was instructing those around her. Most of them appeared young, and most of them wore some manner of uniform. Holoscreens around the room showed other listeners from an even wider range of species in attendance.

“They are so confident of their own security that one of our officers was able to register for the course by posing as a Vulcan,” Cretak mused, shaking her head in disbelief. “That is how we were able to intercept this transmission. Do you understand how long-range communication works?”

Zetha shook her head, and managed finally to close her mouth.

“No reason why you should.” Cretak froze the screen. “If I explained that this transmission is several years old, but we received it only yesterday, will you understand?” She saw the younger woman’s skeptical look. “No matter.” She brought the image in close on the instructor’s face. “It is this one. She is Admiral Nyota Uhura, head of Starfleet Intelligence, yet she teaches a basic-level course in communications to cadets. Can you imagine the head of the Tal Shiar doing likewise?”

Zetha had no idea who the head of the Tal Shiar even was. She could only shake her head, transfixed by the different faces on the screen.

No one spoke the words “Federation” or “Starfleet” or even “human.” A kaleidoscope of broken bits of information knit together in a patchwork quilt in Zetha’s mind.

“How am I to find this person?”

“Memorize what I’ve given you. You will be gotten to where you need to go. The fewer questions you ask…”

After she had committed the contents of the chip to memory, Zetha knew no more about the mission than she had before. No point in asking: What happens to me after I give this information to the one called Uhura? Am I alive, am I dead? Am I in exile or must I return to Ki Baratan? Am I to do this for the rest of my life, or only this once?No answers to these questions now. Just get the job done.

“I’ve cleared it with your lord. No, don’t ask me how. Just go and get whatever personal belongings you can carry in one hand, and come back here at once.”

Zetha laughed wryly. She had a flat polished stone Tahir had given her stashed in a pocket; she caressed it whenever she was cross or tired or confused. The sash she wore around her slender waist in lieu of a belt was something Aemetha had given her that no one had managed to steal. There was nothing else.

“I’m already carrying it,” she said. “Where am I going?”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way of knowing ahead of time whether you’re going to be space-sick,” Cretak mused, almost to herself. “You’re going with me.”

Tuvok frowned slightly. Everything the girl said had the ring of truth. He had no doubt she believed everything she had just told him. But whether she had been programmed thus, or had simply chosen to omit some things, would require deeper questions.

But she was yawning, and he wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. She was so young, younger than his youngest child. He suppressed a parental urge to suggest she rest now. Illogical, and self-defeating. Nevertheless, if she was overtired, her answers would make no sense. Only one more question, for now.

“Are you a member of the Tal Shiar?”

For the first time she laughed outright. It would have been a pleasant sound, if it hadn’t been laced with sarcasm. “You mean am I a spy? There are no spies on Romulus; don’t you know that? There is no need for spies, because everyone in a spy.”

“Answer the question, please.”

That made her angry. She leapt out of her chair, almost knocking it over.

“I am nothing! Don’t you understand? I don’t exist. On the way here, Cretak and I went past two sets of sentries and three sensor arrays inside the space hub. The sensors recognized Cretak, but they never even registered me, because I don’t exist. You’re aiming in the dark.”

“Are you a member of the Tal Shiar?” he asked again, unperturbed by her outburst.

Did he notice that she hesitated for the space of half a breath? No,Zetha told herself, watching sidelong as the impassive face revealed nothing. He has not noticed.

“No,” she said carefully. “I am not.”

Chapter 5

“Okay, what have we got?” McCoy demanded, rubbing his hands together, exhilarated by the chase in spite of himself.

“A bug of unknown etiology which can affect humans and Vulcans, kills everyone it infects, and may have been artificially created,” Crusher reported grimly.

“And a possible disease vector,” Selar chimed in from aboard the science vessel whose ETA at Spacedock was 1900 hours that evening.

“This is new,” Uhura said from the center seat. “Let’s hear it.”

She had “assembled” all three of them in a holoconference in her office. Each of them, wherever they were, experienced the presence of the other three in situ.This level of holo technology was not yet Fleet standard, but was something Uhura, working with the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, had been instrumental in developing. It not only gave the impression that she and the three doctors were actually, three-dimensionally present in four locations at once, but the transmission frequencies were virtually impenetrable by at least current Starfleet technology. At the moment the prototype could be transmitted only from her office at SI, though she knew that some of the newer starships were being fitted with holodecks employing the same principles.

For now, Crusher, looking tired but no less groomed in her characteristic blue smock, her waves of bright red hair barely contained in a practical ponytail at the nape of her neck, had arranged three empty chairs in a clear space between the countertops and autoclaves in her lab at Medical HQ. Dr. Selar, for her part, had arranged some low couches in a space in her vessel’s sickbay, confident that, on a Vulcan ship, neither she nor the confidentiality of the meeting would be disturbed.

McCoy, in his favorite rocker on the porch of a retreat so remote only Intelligence had been able to track him down, was enjoying the company of three beautiful women seated in a semicircle of cushioned Adirondack chairs on his back lawn, under a starlit sky and accompanied by the sound of crickets. Uhura, hosting all three of them in her office had, just to be whimsical, seated his flannel-shirt-and-old-Levi’s incarnation on a windowsill overlooking San Francisco Bay, where the sun was starting its late-afternoon slide down the sky beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. McCoy had refused to shave for the occasion and, with his tousled white hair and three-day stubble, looked like nothing so much as a wild-eyed mountain man.

“First things first!” he blustered now. “We’ve got to know what this thing is before we start trying to figure out where it came from.”

Uhura shot him a Who’s in charge here?look and turned to Crusher. “Dr. Crusher, you have the floor.”

“Right.” She took a deep breath and began. “Assuming this is actually a variant of the disease the Romulans call the Gnawing, its original source is a naturally occurring bacterium found in the soil of the Romulan homeworld.

“Bacteria, for our purposes, Admiral, are ‘big’ germs, easy to see under a microscope, fairly easy to kill. Just for show and tell, I’ll give you some examples….”

Three images, projected from a fifth locus of the holoprogram, materialized in the middle of their field of vision. Each was about a foot high and floated in mid-air; each was a many-times magnified three-dimensional realization of what would be visible under a microscope. One was a bright red-orange podlike shape containing five orange ovules that could have been peas or soybeans but, in fact, as the readout beside it attested, were the spores of botulism. The second, a methane-blue sphere with a fluid, coruscated surface, from which smaller, seedlike purplish spheres were escaping like solar flares, identified itself as bubonic plague. The third and central one featured scatterings of purple rods like the sprinkles on an ice cream cone, though with the characteristic drumstick knob at one end which identified the “sprinkles” as tetanus. As Crusher spoke, the images pirouetted slowly to 360 degrees and back again, displaying themselves in all their deadly glory.

Uhura, to whom this was all new, watched transfixed. The others, who had seen these maleficences and others before, still found them strangely compelling. When she thought they’d seen enough, Crusher made all but the tetanus image vanish, and brought up a new image whose “drumsticks,” interspersed with vague, shapeless blotches, looked very similar to the tetanus, except that they were yellowish-brown in color.

“What you’re looking at here,” Crusher said, “is a specimen, taken from the locket Admiral Uhura delivered to Starfleet Medical yesterday, of something that we have been told is killing Romulans on some of their colony worlds, and which may be related to the historic Romulan plague known as the Gnawing. If this is in fact the same entity, it’s very much like tetanus and, like tetanus, it’s a killer, a killer that can lie dormant for decades, even centuries, until the soil is disturbed by plowing or building roads, or even by a child playing in the dirt. And, like tetanus, the original form is only dangerous if ingested or if it infiltrates an open wound. It’s not contagious. It can’t be passed from person to person like a head cold.”

“Further,” Selar chimed in. “It would be most unlikely for an identical bacterium to be found in the soil of as many different planets, spread across as wide a region of space, as have thus far yielded casualties of this disease. The bacterium that resulted in the Gnawing has thus far never been found on any world other than Romulus.”

“With you so far,” Uhura said, hearing a resonance of the shared Vulcan/Romulan it-is-not-a-lie-to-keep-the-truth-to-oneself behind Selar’s words. Later she would take Selar aside privately and ask her how much she’d known about the Gnawing, and from what sources, before this. But now was not the time. “But if it’s not contagious, how did it kill up to fifty percent of the population of Romulus nearly two thousand years ago?”

“We do not know that for certain, Admiral,” Selar said. “History is often replete with exaggeration.”

“Nevertheless, Selar, it did kill enough people to make it into the histories. I can’t believe they all contracted it from soil samples.”

“There might have been an airborne version,” Crusher suggested. “Which might have been contagious, transmitted by a cough or sneeze. As could an animal-to-Romulan form, like the bubonic plague on Earth, which was transmitted from rat to flea to human. Or by eating the meat of an infected animal. While we know that Vulcans post-Surak generally don’t eat meat, modern Romulans do.”

No one actually looked to Selar for confirmation or denial. The question, like the holos, hung in the air unanswered.

“Even so,” Crusher said after an uncomfortable silence. “Bacteria, as I say, are incredibly easy to kill. If that was all we had here, we could develop a vaccine from the killed strains, inoculate anyone in a hot zone, maybe share the vaccine with the Romulans as a good-will gesture, problem solved. But…”

With the flick of a toggle, she made the tetanus bacillus vanish and moved the Gnawing bacillus to one side.

“Some bacteria can mutate into viruses, which is what we think was the case with the prototypical Gnawing,” she said as several new images slowly materialized. “We can only conjecture, because we don’t have records from the pandemic two thousand years ago. And I imagine it might be very difficult to send someone to Romulus to gather soil samples in remote areas in the hopes of finding an unadulterated cluster of Gnawing microbes.”

Difficult,Uhura thought, but probably not impossible.She had in fact sent one of her Listeners to do just that, but the Listener had not yet reported back.

“Now, viruses are much, much smaller than bacteria, more difficult to detect, and much more mutable, hence difficult to cure,” Crusher was saying. She had conjured up six new images by now. “I’ve selected just a few examples that have plagued humans in the past…”

She highlighted each image as she identified it: “Herpes” was an orange, sponge-shaped orb with a spiked multicolored ring around it. “Polio” looked like nothing so much as an attractive blue-green sea anemone. “Smallpox” was a rusty-looking ovoid with an hourglass shape inside. “Hantavirus” looked like land masses on a planet, sickly pink, dotted with malevolent-looking little black seeds around the edges of each “continent.”

“Ebola,” Crusher continued. This looked like an aerial view of a series of crop circles in a wheat field. “Skorr pox.” This was a series of gray concentric hexagons. “And finally human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.”

Glanced at quickly, this one was formless, a spider’s nest, a tuft of cat hair, something that might have rolled out from under the bed. But Crusher dismissed all the other images except the Gnawing, which still lingered on the periphery, and began to slowly enlarge the HIV virus. Gradually it became an elliptical shape with another shape inside it like an inverted tear drop, with a third, cylindrical shape within that. All of the shapes were studded about with strange artifacts that the readout identified as “surface glycoproteins,” “HLA I and II,” “core proteins (modified by AT-2).”

“I chose this one,” Crusher said, “Because it seems to most closely mimic the end stage of the bug we’re dealing with. Or, at least, one of the end stages.”

“One of them?” McCoy echoed her, scowling.

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” Crusher said.

“Go on,” Uhura encouraged her.

“Let’s take another look at our prime suspect,” she said. The HIV, rather than disappearing, simply moved slightly away from center stage at her instructions and the Gnawing bacillus moved in to hover beside it.

“I started with the specimens from the locket,” she explained. “There were four distinct compartments inside with blood, skin and hair samples from four victims. They were collected so meticulously I was able to classify them by gender and blood type. Whoever put this together was very skilled.”

She looked pointedly at Uhura. The question she wanted to ask was one Uhura still couldn’t answer. Were the samples themselves faked? Was this all a ploy to spread false rumors about an epidemic that didn’t exist, to divert Starfleet energies into pursuing a phantom, even to create an interstellar incident based on accusations of biological warfare? No way to answer any of that yet. Uhura wondered what progress Tuvok was making with Zetha.

“Go on,” she told Crusher.

“I grew each of these specimens in culture, and compared them with specimens from healthy Romulans kept in stasis on Starbase 23—and while we’re on the subject, I got a lot of flak when I requisitioned those. Mind telling me what we’re doing with Romulan blood specimens?”

“Left over from the Earth-Romulan War,” Uhura said tightly, watching Crusher’s and Selar’s eyebrows go up simultaneously. “And…other sources. On the rare occasion we’ve taken a Romulan prisoner alive, we take blood samples. They do the same with captured humans.”

She was avoiding McCoy’s eyes, though she could see him in her peripheral vision, scratching his stubble and looking uncomfortable. They both knew of at least three captured Romulans from their early years together, a commander accidentally beamed aboard Enterprise,and two of her guards who had started out as exchange prisoners but had not been returned until long after Enterprisehad beaten a hasty retreat out of the Neutral Zone with a stolen cloaking device.

“Go on,” she told Crusher again.

“When I compared the normals with the disease entities, the results were almost too good. There was the bug, all right. So I knew it would grow in vitro.I ran simulations based on several terrestrial and Vulcan life-forms.”

“Quite logical,” Selar commended her.

“Anyway,” Crusher went on. “There it was. But then I thought, ‘It can’t be this easy.’ And I was right. Because within two hours of regrowth, it had mutated into a viral form.”

Slowly she enlarged the Gnawing specimen image until the yellow-brown rods and vague blotches almost blotted out the empty space between, and some of the blotches showed bright green patches of something else. The entire entity moved, replicating inexorably as they watched, seeming almost to pulse malevolently.

“This is why it took me twenty-four hours to report,” Crusher explained. “Because we had to rule out the possibility that this might be a totally separate entity, so we observed isolated specimens of the bacillus until we actually caught them mutating into the viral form. What you’re looking at here is a time-lapsed version, ten hours compressed into less than a minute.” She froze the image. “And right about here seems to be the point at which the virus then mutates into a retrovirus.”

She paused. Her fellow MDs were looking grim. Uhura looked puzzled.

“Now I’m going to have to ask you to explain to me the difference between a virus and a retrovirus,” she said. “Use nice, simple words, please. As if you were explaining it to your son.”

The mention of Wesley, who’d just turned eleven, made Crusher smile.

“I think Wes is a lot more interested in physics than medicine. I guess most kids want to find themselves instead of following in their parents’ footsteps. Still, it isn’t really that complicated. A retrovirus is a virus that can infiltrate at the genetic level, become part of the patient’s DNA. HIV is a classic example. And I believe this thing is, too.”

“Okay,” Uhura said. “Still with you.”

“Now, we have the technology to not only identify every known virus, but to develop algorithms to identify unknowns. It might take a while, but we’d eventually catch the thing. Then we’d work backwards to create a decoy and—”

“A decoy,” Uhura repeated.

Crusher nodded. “I’ll use the HIV as an example, because it’s old news and we know exactly how it behaves and how to circumvent it: The virus attacks healthy cells by finding a way to get inside them and kill them. In the case of HIV, it does this by infiltrating a protein embedded in a T-cell membrane.

“T-cells are the Good Guys,” she said helpfully before Uhura could ask. “But HIV invaded the T-cells by attaching itself to the CD4 receptor located on the surface protein, and deactivated the T-cells. Without enough healthy T-cells, the patient had no defenses against a host of opportunistic infections and even certain cancers, and wasted away and died. With me so far?”

Not about to ask what a CD4 receptor was, Uhura nodded. “So far, yes.”

“Now, one way to distract the HIV virus and keep it from attacking the T-cells was to create a decoy cell. Decoy cells are genetically engineered molecules which look exactly like normal cells. They fool the virus into attaching to them instead of to the patient’s naturally occurring cells. The decoys grab onto the virus before it can do any harm, flush it out through the liver and kidneys and voilà.”

“So can we do that here?” Uhura nodded at the prime suspect, the Gnawing bacillus-turned-virus and, as if on cue, Crusher made the HIV disappear.

“We might,” Crusher said. “If this were only one virus.”

“Uh-oh,” McCoy murmured.

Crusher manipulated the image, creating a duplicate. As they watched, one model developed small splashes of orange, while the other continued replicating in green. When Crusher created a third image, it showed no growth at all and, in fact, the yellow-brown rods began to disappear. A fourth image showed no rods, but splashes of orange and green, interspersed with round gray nodules.

“Are we looking at the four distinct specimens from the locket?” Uhura guessed.

“I wish it were that simple,” Crusher said. “No, these are all time-elapsed shots of the same specimen. What I thought was just one bug became two. Or was it three? And did I just imagine it, or had the first bug mutated into two new bugs? Or had it vanished altogether? This damn thing won’t hold still. It’s a moving target. Every time I look at it, it’s something else. Sometimes it moves so fast even the instruments can barely detect it. Nothing natural can do that.”

“At least nothing with which we are familiar,” Selar suggested.

“Copenhagen theory…” McCoy muttered, scratching his chin. “If it works for quantum physics, why can’t it work for medicine?”

All three women gaped at him. Selar’s fingers stopped moving.

“Indeed,” she said. “Why not?”

“Okay,” Crusher said. “Now I’m the one who needs nice, simple words.”

“The wave-versus-particle theory of quantum physics was first described by the Nobel physicist Niels Bohr in Earth year 1927,” Selar said. “Bohr was born in Copenhagen, hence his theory is referred to as the Copenhagen theory. Prior to this, physicists could not understand why quantum matter appeared in the form of particles, but behaved like waves. Bohr suggested that quantum particles function as waves as long they are unobserved. Each quantum particle is equally distributed in a series of overlapping probability waves. But when observed, the waves revert to particles.”

“What’s that got to do with—?” Crusher began.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Uhura suggested.

“Oh, now we’re talking magic—!” Crusher protested.

“Like the placebo effect?” McCoy countered.

“Not the same thing at all,” she shot back.

“In English, please,” Uhura said.

“C’mon, Bev, think about it,” McCoy argued. “Every MD knows that every time you introduce a new medication, outcomes are always influenced by the fact that some people get better just because they’re taking a pill. You give a hundred people a sugar pill when they think they’re getting the actual medication, and ten to thirty percent of them will report that they feel better. Except with antidepressants, where up to sixty percent of patients given a placebo report effectiveness, just because someone’s listening to their troubles, patting their hand, and giving them a magic bullet.”

“If you’re talking about human patients, sure,” Crusher acknowledged. “But that doesn’t apply to all species across the board. Vulcans, for instance.”

“Oh, well, Vulcans!” McCoy dismissed them with a wave of his hand, then seemed to remember that Selar was there. “Sorry, Selar. No offense.”

“None taken, Doctor.”

“And anyway,” Crusher went on heatedly. “We’re talking about a virus here, not a patient or a tree. What the hell does the Copenhagen theory or the placebo effect have to do with—”

“Time out!” Uhura said sharply, and they subsided. As if on cue, her intercom sounded.

She’d sent Thysis home early and diverted all incoming calls to other offices. Only her Romulan Listeners and Tuvok had authorization to interrupt.

“Uhura,” she said, touching a contact on her console and settling an earpiece in her ear.

“Listener Tau-3,” said a voice through the static.

“Go ahead.”

“Confirming presence of disease entity designated colony world…” the voice said shakily. Male or female, and of what species, impossible to tell. The voice was deliberately filtered to foil attempts to intercept it or trace it back to source. “Have visual…”

“Project when ready, Tau-3,” Uhura said crisply. She nodded toward Crusher, who turned off the medical holos with the snap of a toggle. In their place appeared images out of several species’ infernal places.

The source was obviously a vid unit secreted on the person of someone walking through a hospital or clinic or quarantine station, then coded and transmitted on a piggyback frequency across parsecs of space, and the quality of the image was commensurately bad—shaky, in and out of focus, the lighting sometimes so poor the image was lost altogether. What came through was a jumble of ghostly figures, and a great deal of sound.

The figures were Romulans of all ages, some packed together on rows and rows of medical cots, the overspill milling about, propped up in corners, lying on the floor. Healers, some of them looking as ill as their patients, moved hastily among them offering whatever little comfort they could. A no-doubt dangerously obtained close-up of a group of children showed them huddled together, some coughing uncontrollably, others retching helplessly, great running sores on their faces, virid blood running from their noses or flecking their parched lips. Those whose lungs still worked howled or whimpered with pain. The others could only gasp helplessly, their eyes frightened, their little sides heaving with the effort to draw breath.

The Listener with the hidden camera, probably a Vulcan passing as a Romulan, moved with difficulty past a steady stream of incoming patients until the camera showed daylight, and a line of sick and dying Romulans, some too weak to stand without holding themselves up against the outer wall of the building, waiting for admission to the clinic. The line extended as far as the camera could project before the image was lost.

“Confirmation…” the Listener’s voice said once the image disappeared. “Estimate ten percent of the population of…” The code name for the city was lost in static, but Uhura knew the Listener’s location anyway. “Among the sick, no survivors. This is no rumor.”

“Message received, Tau-3,” Uhura said, putting far more bravado into her voice than she felt. “Get out of the hot zone now. Your job is done. Report back to base for some leave time, and—”

“Negative, Command. Evidencing the symptoms myself. Estimate less than one hour before delirium ensues. Terminating now…”

No one spoke for some moments after the transmission ended. Finally McCoy cleared his throat.

“Just when you think you’ve seen everything…guess there’s no question now whether this is real or not.”

“Or that it’s manufactured,” Crusher added sharply. “This isn’t a natural phenomenon. It was created. How, why, or by whom—”

“We can assume the why,” Uhura said. She would deal with losing a top operative, and also a friend, later. “The three of you are going to find out how, and I’m going to find out by whom. Dr. Selar?”

“There is a traceable disease vector, Admiral,” Selar reported evenly, the best among all of them at disguising her reaction to what they had just witnessed. “If all of your Listeners confirm what your original source provided…” Now it was Selar’s turn to use the holo program to draw up a star map highlighting a sector which included several Romulan colony worlds, a segment of the Neutral Zone, and a cluster of Federation worlds on the other side. Four of the Romulan worlds were highlighted. “…we can be certain that the disease has occurred at selected sites on these four worlds. In addition…”

She manipulated the map to show more of the Federation side.

“Beginning with the seventy-three seemingly isolated cases on these seventeen worlds, I have developed an algorithm which would not only analyze any reports of similar symptoms anywhere within Federation space, but also analyzed any undiagnosable illnesses within the same field.”

“Anyone sneezes, she’s on it,” McCoy offered, trying to shake them all out of the mood the Listener’s video had plunged them into. “Clever girl!”

“Indeed,” Selar said, accepting the compliment. She either was in awe of the senior physician or simply had a far greater tolerance for McCoy’s humanity than most Vulcans. “Such variables as reports of increased numbers of head-colds, absenteeism from work or school, antiviral prescriptions, and use of native remedies or vitamin supplements are included in the algorithm.”