Pathways - Jeri Taylor [47]
But to stand even a chance of entering the Academy, he would have to shore up those other disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and anthropology just for starters, as well as mathematics. He’d been exposed to algebra and geometry, but the vast array of mathematical studies that loomed before him was like a dark, impenetrable forest, terra incognita.
He gave up every other aspect of his life in order to study. His clarinet stood unplayed on its stand; the P’i P’a rested in its case. He allowed himself one social outing a week, usually the Parrises Squares game at his school. He did not date. He kept his place on the volleyball team because he knew athletic participation was a requirement at the Academy. He had one burning, single-minded purpose: to become a part of Starfleet.
He was vaguely aware that his parents were worried, and whenever he allowed himself to see the situation from their vantage point, he understood their concern. He had become a recluse. He didn’t go out with friends, he didn’t attend concerts anymore, he didn’t dance or ride hovercycles or do any of the things the other young people his age were wont to do. He was trading part of his adolescence in order to pursue his dream.
And yet not once in the four years of his arduous preparation did he regret his choice. Nothing about it felt as though he were being denied; rather, he had a greater sense of purpose than he had ever imagined possible. Everything had always come so easily to him—love, approval, musical prowess—that he enjoyed taking on this overwhelming challenge. He used parts of himself that he’d never tapped before, muscles of the mind that had lain fallow for too many years. He felt an edge, a sharpness, in his thinking that hadn’t been there before.
And, to his great surprise, he found that once he tackled their labyrinthine depths, science and mathematics were utterly fascinating. There was a purity, an exactness, to both disciplines that was as refreshing to him as a plunge into a cold pool on a hot day. He loved literature, especially poetry, but realized now that while poems were good at posing questions, they rarely provided answers. Good literature made you wonder, set your mind to bubbling with the possibilities of this or that, led you to ponder ideas heretofore imponderable.
But it provided no absolutes. In physics, force equals mass times acceleration. In chemistry, a compound contains two or more elements combined in a definite proportion by weight. In calculus, the derivative of x squared is two x. Once you solved a problem, it was solved. The square root of forty-nine wasn’t somewhere between six and eight, it was seven. Period.
Harry found this incontrovertibility comforting. It was firm ground rather than shifting sands, and that kind of stability was pleasurable to him. He redoubled his efforts, learning to get by on less and less sleep each night in order to have more time for study. He could feel his mind growing, expanding, stretching to touch truths he had never dreamed of. It was an experience far more appealing than sleep.
And so it was, three weeks after his seventeenth birthday, that Harry Kim transported to San Francisco to take the entrance examination for Starfleet Academy.
He sat in a vast room lined with long tables, at which sat four hundred people just like himself: seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds with the blistering desire to enter Starfleet Academy. This test session was just one of many that would be held in San Francisco, and there were similar tests held in locations all over the Federation, for the thousands and thousands of young people of many different species who wanted one of the coveted places in next year’s freshman class.
The test lasted eight hours, with one ten-minute break in the morning, another in the afternoon, and an hour for a lunch that none of the test subjects really tasted. It covered a vast array of subjects: Federation history, astrophysics,