ARTHUR COLEMAN, MD, in Star Trek: Turnabout Intruder (#3.24), was the team physician on the first Camus II expedition, under the leadership of Dr. Janice Lester. His unrequited love for that worthy led him to become an accessory to murder and even to an attempted assassination of a Star Fleet officer. Contents [hideshow] 1. Note on Realities Lieutenant Arthur Coleman went to the Star Fleet Academy School of Medicine Their records show he was one of the low men in his class. He did his internship and residency in space medicine and surgery at the medical center of the Star Fleet Headquarters complex in San Francisco, Alta California, Earth.But on his first deep-space assignment, he was summarily relieved of duty as chief medical officer for administrative incompetence, and for a series of therapeutic misadventures all attributable to errors of medical judgment. Or, in the scathing words of his commanding officer at the time, flagrant medical blunders. (And that was the official version. A rumor, probably totally apocryphal, has his old captain telling him, get off my ship in very ungentlemanly language.)Politics--and law--being what they are, Coleman managed to win the usual honorable discharge in exchange for resigning quietly from Star Fleet and not kicking up any space dust. So that next he applied for a job in the University Health Department at the Makropyrios, and got it.A modern, multi-system university health department does not limit itself to treating the mundane medical problems of students, faculty and administration. At the Makropyrios, in any event, the university health department also supplies team physicians to archaeologists going out on digs. Which is how Arthur Coleman met Dr. Janice Lester.When he first met Dr. Lester, he fell in love with her, and hard. But she was unapproachable--almost as if she didn't want to admit that the feelings were mutual. Still Coleman hung around long enough, and for whatever reason, she requested of DUH that they assign him to her expedition to the planet Camus II, long rumored to hold the remains of an advanced civilization that had died.Camus II did not disappoint. This civilization, while Earth was in its renaissance, had nuclear power (using celebium, or what Earthers still called plutonium ). And incredibly, the team found--in original and working condition--a device for exchanging life entities between two bodies!The implications were staggering. Boy, what Pope Alexander VI could have done with this! If he had had this, he might have survived after he drank out of the wrong vessel and died of self-inflicted poisoning. Or passed himself off as Pope Julius, and every Pope after that!But Janice Lester had something else in mind: using this device to change places with an old flame of hers. None other than Captain James T. Kirk.Six months the two collaborated on this plan, during which time Janice Lester obsessed about James T. Kirk. First Janice sent every other member of the team to a place where anti-celebium shielding was weak. Then he, Coleman, put Janice to bed and gave her just enough of a drug to make her lightheaded, but not too lightheaded. That done, he put out a medical distress call. Knowing that the first ship to respond would be USS Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk commanding.Captain Kirk arrived, with Dr. Leonard E. McCoy, his CMO. Coleman told them the cover story: the whole camp was down with radiation sickness, except for Janice, who was farthest from the source, and Coleman, who was at the camp headquarters, hence unaffected. Then Coleman took McCoy to the makeshift hospital where he had put the rest of the team. All were dead, of course. McCoy diagnosed celebium poisoning at once. But of course Coleman couldn't let that rest, and insisted it couldn't be celebium.The two came back to HQ--and there, Coleman found a woman near death. He assumed that the transference had gone through, and that the patient he was treating, who looked like Janice, was actually James T. Kirk.He was disappointed--but only a little--not to find the woman's body dead. But Janice, now inhabiting Kirk's body, successfully transported everyone aboard the Enterprise. There Coleman took nominal charge of Janice, though he still had McCoy to deal with.That didn't last long. Kirk started to make trouble, insisting on his true identity despite obvious appearances. Coleman repeated another cover story: that Janice Lester had deluded herself into thinking she really was Captain Kirk, and the radiation sickness (the source of which he still wouldn't own up to) only made it worse. The real Janice Lester, in Kirk's body, actuall took McCoy off her counterpart's case and turned it over to Coleman. Who immediately shot the Janice body full of sedatives.Yet he criticized Janice. Why, if she killed every member of the team but the two of them, didn't she kill Kirk? Janice said he clung to life too hard. Coleman wasn't buying any: obviously she expected him to commit murder. That he refused to do--though Janice threw up into his face that he knew the team ailed from celebium, could have treated them for that, but didn't. (Celebium is a deadly chemical toxin, as well as a radioactive one. It must never enter the biosphere of any planet to which one brings it.)Coleman had a bad moment when the Janice body got away from him. Apparently she (he?) finagled Nurse Christine Chapel into letting her take her own sedative, and then had smashed the drinking glass offered her and used it to cut her way out of restraint. She tried to talk to Dr. McCoy, but she ran into the Kirk body. Which knocked the glass out of the other's hand and then dealt a karate chop to the neck. Then the Kirk body (with Janice to guide it) ordered Kirk ( Janice ) confined to the brig.And then things really blew up--because Spock got involved. The Vulcan Mind Meld. Coleman should have thought of that.At first Janice had everything in hand. But the court-of-inquiry into Spock's conduct went badly. She ended up ordering executions of three officers.Not long after that, Janice burst into the laboratory that Arthur now occupied, and told him a shocking story: For a moment I was back among the prisoners. The transference was weakening. As they had known it would, until one or the other party died. Janice insisted that Coleman kill Kirk, lest Kirk expose them both for killing the archaeological team. Coleman reluctantly agreed.What followed was utter failure. Janice insisted that Kirk walk out of the common cell where she had confined all four, and to a separate cell. Coleman stood by with his hyposprayer, loaded with a fast-acting minor trank at twice the lethal dose.He tried to give this to Kirk.And she fought him.Just long enough.In the middle of Janice yelling, Kill him! Kill him! a force enveloped them both. Something threw Janice against the corridor wall, while Kirk gripped Coleman's wrist in a death grip.Then he realized it was Janice he was holding, not Kirk. I've lost to the Captain, she said. Then, louder, I've lost to James Kirk! Then she grabbed the hypospray out of his hand and rushed at Kirk, shouting, I WANT YOU DEAD! I WANT YOU DEAD! That didn't work, either, because Kirk, besides being a man, was a better close-combat fighter.She slumped, and Kirk let her go. Right into Coleman's arms. And Coleman said, You are as I have loved you. And all she could say was, Kill him. Please. Kirk, mercifully, wanted to know whether anyone could help her. Coleman at once volunteered. McCoy then took charge of them both.Alas, it was not to be. When Kirk off-loaded Janice and him to USS Potemkin, the captain of that ship, on hearing Kirk's report, arrested them both.An Assistant Federation Attorney sought and got an indictment against Coleman, for conspiracy to commit murder, several counts of murder in the deaths of the team, and attempted assassination of a Star Fleet line officer. A jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to twenty years at New Botany Bay.When he got out, Janice was still in rehab on Elba II. Coleman applied for an appointment to its medical staff, but the warden, Cory, turned him down. His spotty Star Fleet record did it.Arthur Coleman never saw Janice Lester again. He did odd jobs in the various immaculate cities of Earth. He ended up in a seedy dive in Marseilles, where he died.(That particular dive would gain fame when a new proprietress known only as Sandrine bought it, changed the name to Chez Sandrine, or literally, Sandrine's Place, and ran it when a young ensign named Tom Paris would frequent it before getting involved with the Maquis in the Cardassian Treaty Zone. Even that wouldn't have made the place famous. Except that Tom Paris was the son of an admiral, and also because Captain Kathryn Janeway found him at New Botany Bay and recruited him to join the crew of her new ship, named Voyager.)Note on Realities This drama in the life of Arthur Coleman played out in the Prime Reality. The Alternate Reality saw James T. Kirk take command of the Enterprise ten years sooner than he actually did. This reality did not see the Old Boy Network that Janice Lester, in the Prime Reality, blamed for her failure to achieve a command assignment.So we have no reason to suppose Arthur Coleman ever got involved with anything as dire as an attempt on the life of a Starfleet officer. Equally likely, in this reality, Janice Lester recruited him as her team physician, discovered the life-entity transference device, published her paper, and made Dean, with Arthur Coleman along for the ride. Show less «