‘Tis Charity
to Show
Chapter V
Part 1
Rand was
still smarting from the nasty fall she suffered earlier, and when she recovered
she had to muster up every ounce of willpower inside her to withhold the urge
to sock Riley in the jaw. Instead,
she had elected to go to her quarters and lie down for a while.
Rand stood
in the dining room and was pleased to see that the table and chairs were
exactly where they were supposed to be; nothing was missing, nothing was in
disarray, so dinner could be served.
She could thank Dr. Begay and Scotty for putting all the furniture and
other things back where Riley had found them. She even gave kudos, albeit
reluctantly, to Nurse Rose for fixing Riley with a healthy shot of hypo right smack
in the arm.
Satisfied, she walked over to the
kitchen and saw Scotty busy at the coffee pot, measuring coffee and gingerly
pouring it into the metal filter.
This sight made Rand smile, so she walked over to Scotty at the counter
and decided to needle him a bit.
“So, you’re
trying to steal my job, eh?” she asked teasingly, leaning in over the
countertop to where Scotty was.
On hearing
Rand, Scotty turned from behind the counter and smiled bashfully.
“Wuh,
w-well, r-r-ruh-regardl-luh-lesss of w-w-whose on m-m-muh-meeal d-duh duty,
ya-ya-you always m-m-muh-makke the coffeee. I wuh-wuh-waaanted t-to ga-give yooou a b-bree- break,” he
stuttered, standing proudly over his handiwork while the coffee percolated in
the pot.
“Oh, that’s
so sweet of you, Scotty! Thank
you.”
Poor
Scotty. She hoped that she wasn’t
wincing too much while he had been talking to her, but Scotty’s stuttering had
gotten much worse, and understanding him was becoming more difficult.
No,
difficult wasn’t the word to use here.
Difficult was being kind.
Try painful.
The word was
brutal, but it was certainly more accurate.
Scotty’s
smile faded from his face as he turned away from Rand, reached for a coffee cup
and a saucer from a basin under a small cart, and placed them in front of
her. He seemed sad, the look on
his face betraying a kind of turmoil.
“I-Immm
s-suh-sorry about th-th-thu-thiss st-st-stuh-stuttering. I cuh-can’t unnderstuh-stand ittt. I-h-h-huh-haven’tt st-st-stuhttered
s-since I w-w-wuh-was a w-w-w-weee little th-thing.”
He shook his
head hopelessly, drawing his lips tightly together.
“I never
knew you had a stuttering problem as a child, Scotty,” Rand said softly.
Scotty
nodded his head timidly, almost in an apologetic manner.
“Yup,” he
said. It was the only word he was
able to say without stuttering.
“I-I-I knuh-know-I t-t-tuh-tollld Kh- Khuh-Khhobrannn. We t-t-t-tuhkk- a l-l-l-luh-lottttt.”
“Oh,
really?” Rand asked warily, wondering why Khobran never told her this little
fact, since they shared just about everything together. Well, who was she kidding after that
little fiasco of hers.
She quickly
pushed any thoughts of Khobran away, not wanting to experience any loneliness
at all, not wanting her heart to dwell there, not wanting to even think about
the hurt.
She smiled
gently at Scotty and reached for his hand that was on the counter and patted it
reassuringly.
“Don’t worry
about it, Scotty Ol’ Boy. Things
have been kind of crazy around here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
They both laughed. Rand couldn’t speak for the others, but
she knew that she never mentioned anything about Scotty’s stuttering out of
embarrassment for him, and had tried to act as if he didn’t have the problem at
all, even after Riley’s cruel remark in the meeting room earlier.
“Do I see
Scotty making coffee?! Heart be still!
I sure hope I don’t get the runs after drinking it,” Riley said on
entering the kitchen.
Then don’t
drink it, asshole.
Scotty’s
mood brightened as he turned to Riley and shook his fist playfully at him.
“Y-yuh-you
n-n-nuh-neeeed the r-r-ruhns ‘caussse yuh-yourre f-f-f-fuuullll offffff
ittttt!”
“I’ll second
that,” exclaimed Dr. Begay not too far behind Riley. “But Scotty, I’m warning you, it better be good, because no
one makes a cup of coffee like Janice!”
He flashed a smile at Rand, placing a hand over his heart.
She smiled
back at Begay, but there was something about his demeanor that struck her;
something tightly coiled and edgy behind the good naturedness.
Rand
shrugged. “Oh well,” she thought.
It was like
she just told Scotty, things were kind of crazy around here.
Everyone was
on edge.
When the pot
finished percolating, Scotty took it by the handle and poured Rand a cup.
“Oh, talk
about first class service! Thanks,
Scotty!”
Scotty bowed
his head, smiling broadly.
“God, I’m
starving,” said Nurse Rose, grabbing a tray of food from the counter and
hurrying to the dining room.
Rand placed
her cup of coffee on one of the trays and took it, carrying it to the dining
area to sit down for supper. Claiming their chairs, everyone sat around the
table and engaged themselves in conversation, all except Mr. Spock, who sat quietly
at the end of the table, steepling his hands over his food, lost in thought,
closing himself off from everyone else, into his own world.
“Well, good
of him to join us for dinner,” thought Rand sarcastically as she found her
place at the table, placing her tray in front of her.
It was never
too difficult to be intimidated by Mr. Spock, most people were. But, there was something particularly
uncomforting in his presence since the mission had started, so Rand just
assumed sitting as far to the other end of the dining room table as possible if
she was going to have a fairly relaxing meal with the rest of her colleagues.
Riley was
sitting across from Rand, talking incessantly, throwing around gestures and
posturing; his was the loudest voice at the table. Rand rolled her eyes.
She’d just about had her fill of Riley. The other members of the landing party, however, had their
necks craned out in his direction, eager to listen in.
When Riley
turned his head towards the giggling Nurse Rose, Rand spotted a small cluster
of whiteheads right in the center of his cheek. They hadn’t been there when they had their little run-in in
the meeting room earlier.
“Riley? Are those pimples on your cheek?” she asked rather bluntly. She was still
pretty pissed at him and didn’t give a rat’s ass about his feelings right
now.
Visibly
perturbed with the interruption, Riley reached over with his left hand and
brushed his fingers rather hastily over his right cheek.
“Oh, yeah,”
he said flatly, shrugging his shoulders.
“I guess they popped up during the afternoon or something, I don’t
know.”
Riley cocked
his head to the side just then, his eyes aimed upward, like an idea had just come
to him. “Funny though, since I
haven’t had any kind of acne since junior high school. The girls used to call me
‘connect-the-dots-face’…” His
voice trailed off before he shrugged his shoulders again, this time with more
emphasis.
Shaking his
head vehemently, Riley reached up and waved both hands in the air in violent,
dismissive movements, like an angry spectator in the bleachers of a
ballgame. He changed the subject
without missing a beat, resuming back to his ravings about how he was going to
beat Mr. Russo at his own game. He
went on about being royally screwed on his GPA to the point of exaggerated
idiocy. Even Nurse Rose began to
show signs of impatience, her own eyes rolling while her head bobbed back and
forth in a gesture that clearly said she’d heard this all before.
“Look,
Riley! At least he didn’t fail
you! He gave you a C. Not a D. Not an F. Not
an incomplete…”
“That’s not
the point! I had a perfect 3.5 GPA
until Mister Tough Guy brought it down so that his little weenie would feel
bigger!”
“Weenie? What is this with guys and other guys’
penises?” thought Rand.
She took a
deep breath before entering the conversation. “Look, Kevin. I’ve
met people who were on their way back home because they couldn’t make it
through the full training and were asked to leave! Count yourself lucky, Mister. You’re here, they’re home.”
Scotty, Rose
and Begay punctuated their nodes of agreement with muttered phrases like
“that’s right” and “you got it.”
Rand didn’t think this would stop Riley from his tirade of self-pity,
but one can always hope, even if that sense of hope was dim.
Riley
smirked and snorted at what Rand said.
“Russo was petty and jealous of my special abilities,” he pronounced
slapping his hand on his chest, his other hand pointing up in the air at
absolutely nothing.
Oh, give me
a break.
“I notice
you have your finger pointing to the sky.
May these gifts you speak of be of a divine nature?” asked Rand raising her brows mockingly.
During this
whole conversation Spock continued in his semi-frozen state at the end of the
table, detached from the others, his head slightly bent down over his meal, his
hands still steepled. The only
things active were his dark eyes, darting back and forth under his lowered
brows like a predator bird.
Rose, on the
other spectrum, was shoveling food down her mouth like she hadn’t eaten in
days. Rand turned to her, noticing
this behavior.
“Hungry, I
see,” she said to the nurse with a small insincere smile across her lips.
Rose
giggled, rather embarrassed, placing her head delicately over her mouth. “I know. Isn’t it terrible?
I guess I didn’t realize how hungry I was, huh?”
“Guess not,”
said Rand.
Their
conversation was drowned out by Riley, who started to go into babbling detail
about how low his GPA got, and how many As he needed to get his average back to
its former glory.
“Exactly
what is it that you do? Sit up all
night and calculate these numbers for your records?” asked Dr. Begay in a
biting tone.
Rand could
see that his patience with Riley was also running thin, his earlier good
spirits put on the back burner.
“Joke about
it all you want, Doc, you have no idea the work it took to get my GPA…”
“Yeah, yeah,
I know! Russo fucked up your GPA!
Russo was jealous! Russo has a tiny dick!
Get off it, man! Ease up! No one here gives a flying fuck about
your goddamn GPA! If you consider
that failure, then you don’t know what failure is! A GPA can be fixed!
Some things can’t be fixed or undone! Ponder that one for a while! Just shut up about your school tragedy! I’m out of here!”
Dr. Begay
violently pushed himself away from the table, his chair skidding and falling
behind him, and stomped away, out of the dining room. Everyone fell silent, including Riley, who sat dumbly in his
own chair.
The
crewmembers exchanged confused and startled looks across the table until Rose
finally asked: “What’s with him?”
Rand shook
her head. “I don’t know, but I’m
gonna find out.” With that, she
pushed herself away hurriedly from under the table and followed Dr. Begay.
“Mathias! Hey, wait up!”
She followed
him out into the dimly lit hall and picked up her pace.
“God, this
guy walks fast,” Rand thought to herself as she finally caught up with him,
grabbing him by the arm. “Whoa,
hold it! Mathias! Are you all right? I know Riley’s been a real pain in
the…”
“Pain?! That’s putting it mildly, Janice!” The ferocity in the doctor’s voice
jabbed her.
“Mathias. Look at me. What happened in there?”
Dr. Begay
turned to face Rand, his eyes filled with sadness and rage. “Oh shit!” he spits out, throwing his
hands in the air. “He gets me so
damn sick and tired of his pathetic little vendetta against this Russo
guy! Riley really needs to get a
clue!”
Rand stood
square in front of the doctor. She
glared at him hard, her resoluteness making headway into Begay’s anger as he
finally started to soften. The
sadness in his eyes had overtaken the rage that had accompanied it just moments
ago, showing itself in a deep-set hollowness.
Begay just
stood there at first, looking away from Rand, not saying anything. Then, he looked up at the ceiling and
took a deep breath before he finally spoke.
“I thought I
put those memories behind me…” His
voice was so soft Rand barely heard him.
“I’m sorry,
I can’t hear…”
“Ever since
stepping onto this planet they keep coming at me…”
“What keeps
coming…?”
Begay shook
his head absently, looking away from Rand. “They started out small. I was able to shrug them away and go on with the rest of the
day. Now, I think about it
every single waking moment! God, I
thought I had put this all behind me!
I thought I forgave myself…”
His voice
rose in awkward, strained ramblings as if he was desperately trying to
brainstorm a solution that wasn’t going to come. He was like a man in a lifeboat with a hole in it, splashing
wildly while the sea closed in on him.
“Mathias! Just start from the beginning. Tell me
what these memories are. That’s
all you have to do.”
Rand took
Dr. Begay by his chin and brought his face back to her own. She nodded her head just then, gently
urging him to unload his burden.
Begay drew his lips tightly together and folded his arms over his
chest. He looked away from Rand
again, but he calmly nodded, resigned to talk about what had been haunting him.
“I had
literally just graduated from medical school back in the Midwest, and in lieu
of a four year internship I took a paying job on an outpost on Gamma II. I honestly thought it would be better
because I was getting paid, and it was professional experience in space under
my belt, since that’s what I hoped to do in the future.”
He paused
and shook his head, laughing ironically.
“Let me tell you, I was in for a shock. The outpost was a run-down mining colony, almost makeshift
in the way it was set up, like one good gust of wind would throw a building
over. The place was desperate for
resources—because they had none!
Talk about isolation, it was so isolated that at times it could be days
before any of our off-of-planet messages were answered.”
He paused
before he went on. “Man, I should
have taken the internship,” he said, his voice drifting. Dr. Begay walked away and positioned
himself against the wall, leaning on it as if doing so might give him some much-needed
strength, or so it seemed to Rand.
“Well, one
day, there was an accident. Who am
I kidding! It was a
catastrophe! A faulty pipeline blew up under a residential
complex that looked like it was put together by baking dough, yeast, wire, and
spit. Trust me when I tell you it
wasn’t even fit for a dog, the place was so poorly constructed. Families of miners lived there. Their
children…their children…”
“Go on,”
Rand urged softly, not moving from her spot.
“There was
chaos everywhere! It was bedlam. The few doctors, nurses, and EMS
personnel that were stationed there were completely overwhelmed with what they
had to deal with. The resources we
had were precious few so we scrambled around like rats for what we could get,
what we could do.”
Begay’s arms
uncurled from his chest to hug either side of his ribcage. He looked up at the ceiling, his breath
shallow, like a man suffocating.
He paused and took a long, shuttering breath before he started again,
his words cracking under his emotional purgatory.
“There was a
child. A boy about seven. He was literally eviscerated, his guts
were spilling out of his intestinal area like spaghetti. I tried to hold his lower body together
by stapling him, but he needed an operation! He was shattered down there! He needed an operation room with the proper instruments and
everything else! We have that in
Starfleet. Gamma II wasn’t
Starfleet. Gamma II was nowhere,
and everyone who lived there was treated as such. Forgotten. Even
the medical staff--we were all straight out of school because I guess more
experienced professionals knew better than to go there. We didn’t.”
He paused
before he spoke again. “We waited
for the ambulance to come, but the little boy was dead by the time it reached
us. Honestly, even if they had
made it on time, the resources were so few he probably wouldn’t have survived.
Gamma II had a pathetic excuse for a hospital.
“If only we
had the resources, that boy and many others would be alive today! I could have kept him alive until the
ambulance reached him-- to take him to a good hospital!
“Well, after
that fiasco I turned in my resignation and just left. I took the first shuttle to the next space station and went
home, back to Earth, to the Midwest.”
He smiled
sheepishly, his eyes red. “You
know, I always wanted to practice medicine in outer space, but after what
happened on Gamma II I almost gave up practicing medicine all together…”
“But it
wasn’t your fault, Mathias! To
blame yourself for that child’s death is ludicrous! You were working with the cards you were dealt with! Could you help it if this godforsaken
place had no resources…”
“Don’t you
think I’ve said that to myself over and over, Janice?” he asked
defeatedly. “Intellectually, I
know I was handed a lousy deal, a contract with a certain amount of ‘missing’
provisions. But when you’re bent
over a child whose dying in front of you, and you’re the one who’s supposed to
be able to help him…but you fail to…all the reasons in the world…well, you
know.”
“You didn’t
give up, though. You became a
Starfleet doctor—and an officer, I might add.”
“Yeah,
right,” Begay chuckled. “After
taking the plunge and accepting an internship in a big city hospital I made up
for the wasted time an Gamma II, finished the required four years, took the
entrance exam for Starfleet, and made it.
Now, I work for an organization with top of the line resources, Thank
God!”
The doctor
slid down against the wall until he was squatting, his forearms slung over his
knees. Rand looked at him for
awhile, and then walked over and squatted down right in front of him.
“Hey, all we
can ever do is learn from our ‘mistakes’, no matter how horrible the situation
may be,” she said tapping him gently on the knee with the tip of her finger.
“I know you learn
from it, I just don’t want to be consumed by it the way that I have been since
coming here.”
“Yeah. This planet’s been doing a lot of funny
things to us, all right. Look, I
can’t make the thoughts go away but you can at least talk about them with me. Okay?”
“You don’t
want to listen to me go on about Gamma II,” Begay said flatly.
“Yeah. Why not?” she asked with a shrug. “You tell me about Gamma II and I’ll tell you how much I’d
like to turn Riley into a pretzel.”
They both
laughed. “Come on, Mathias. Let’s go back and tackle that stuff
Starfleet calls food,” she said hoisting herself up.
Dr. Begay
slid up against the wall until he was fully erect and started walking back
towards the dining room. When he
and Rand entered the space, Spock was gone, and Scotty, Rose and Riley were
looking at one another in anger and confusion.
“What’s
going on here?” asked Rand.
“Mr. Spock
told us to be finished eating in half an hour because we were having a night
search,” said Nurse Rose.
“What?! That’s crazy! We’re not scheduled for any night searches on this
mission! Where’s ‘Oh Magnificent
One right now?”
“Probably in
the maintenance room where we store the search gear,” said Riley in disgust.
“I’m too
damn tired to go back on a search.
Besides, this is our time to relax or continue with any individual
work,” complained Rand.
“This is all
very strange,” said Dr. Begay.
“Very strange.” He placed
his hands on his hips and looked at his fellow crewmembers pointedly. “I don’t understand it, but he is
running the show. Who knows, he
may have a theory that metes itself out and we end up finding something.”
“At
night?! It just doesn’t make sense
when we’re on a planet with daylight,” snorted Riley.
“Besides,
it’s like not these archeologists disappeared yesterday and an immediate search
has to be done. This case has been
ongoing. These people might not
even be alive,” said Rand.
“It’s kinda weird,
huh? I mean, what exactly is Mr.
Spock trying to accomplish here?” asked Rose.
Scotty
stepped forward with authority, placing his hands on his hips and drawing his
mouth in tightly. He looked at the
faces of the other landing party members like Begay had done earlier, before he
finally shook his head and let out an exasperated sigh.
“Y-yuh-yourre
g-g-guhess is asss g-g-good as m-m-muh-mine,” he declared.
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