by Gene DeWeese
Another uneasy silence, and then Koralus said, “I will be honest. I do not wish to offend, but I must know more before I allow your presence to be known to the others.”
The real reason this time, but far from a complete explanation. “There is no need for anyone other than yourself to know of our presence on your ship until you wish to disclose it.”
“That is not possible. The Hope has only one airlock, and anyone entering through it could not avoid being seen by—”
“We have a way around that problem, too,” Picard interrupted. “Our people can transport directly to any point within your ship that you specify.”
“Transport? I do not understand.”
“It is how we often come and go from our own ship. It is a form of matter transmission. Perhaps a demonstration would—”
“You can simply disappear from your ship and reappear here, on the Hope?”
“Precisely.”
“How would you get back to your ship, then?”
“We can transport both ways.”
For several seconds, there was only silence. Then: “You can simply move things—people—from one point to another, regardless of any barriers between the points?”
“Within certain limits, yes.”
“You can go ‘through’ the hulls of both our ships?”
“Easily.”
Another silent pause. “Does that mean you could bring me aboard your ship in the same manner? Without our two ships ever coming in physical contact?”
“It could be done, yes. We are already within transporter range.”
“Then that is what I would like, if it is permissible.”
Picard considered. He still felt that his initial impression of this alien was correct, even though the always-present analytical—skeptical—part of his mind knew that this feeling could be nothing more than wishful thinking. However, if Koralus could not be trusted, it would be safer to bring him aboard the Enterprise than to send an away team to the Hope.
“Very well, Koralus,” Picard said. “If that is your wish, it is acceptable to us. However, you will have to tell us precisely where you are within your ship. And you must separate yourself from everyone else.”
“I imagine I am already at least a hundred meters away from anyone else. I am in the bridge. That is essentially at the center of the forward end of the ship, within a few meters of the rotational axis.”
“Is that sufficient, Mr. Data?”
“I believe it is, Captain. I have identified a single humanoid life-form at approximately the location described.”
“Transfer the coordinates to the transporters.” Picard stood up and headed for the turbolift. “Number One, with me. And ask Counselor Troi to join us in transporter room number two.”
He wanted to trust Koralus, but there was no point in taking unnecessary chances.
Koralus stood waiting, his heart pounding. What was he letting himself in for? Matter transmission? It was an absurd idea on the face of it, but so was their claim of being able to “get around” the limit of the speed of light.
But if it was all true . . .
He shivered, wondering suddenly if there was hope not only for himself and the Ten Thousand but for Krantin as well. With the kind of technology these people obviously had—or claimed to have—almost anything was possible. They might even be able to find what Krantin’s scientists had failed to find—the source of the Plague, a reason for its existence, even a way of turning it back.
On the other hand, everything they said could be a lie, a trick. These beings, if they indeed had the powers they claimed, particularly the ability to “transport” objects unseen through space, might even be the ones responsible for the Plague in the first place.
Or others like them. The one who called himself Picard had spoken of a “Federation,” which meant there must indeed be others out there in the galaxy with equal or greater powers. Who was to say they had not visited Krantin in the past? Who could say what they might have done?
He shivered again, waiting, his mind whirling, his stomach queasy with a sudden feeling of utter helplessness. If they had the powers they claimed, if they were capable of creating—or stopping—the Plague, there was nothing he could do that would keep them from doing whatever they wished, nothing he could do to make them do anything they didn’t wish to do. He only hoped that when—
A sudden tingling sensation gripped him and spread instantaneously throughout his entire body. Involuntarily, he started to pull back, but before he had more than tensed his muscles, he was frozen, unmoving. The bridge shimmered around him and faded out of existence, replaced by a surreal, silvery light that refused to hold still.
Then he was in another room, several times the size of the bridge of the Hope, standing on a raised platform. A woman stood at a console of some kind at the far end of the room. To one side, two men and a woman, all wearing odd, one-piece garments, their exposed skin several shades darker than his own sunless white, stood watching him.
The shorter man, almost totally hairless, stepped forward. “Welcome to the Enterprise, Mr. Koralus.”
So, he thought, they were telling the truth. About their “transporter,” at least.
Chapter Three
THE BRIEF TOUR of the Enterprise completed, Koralus and six of the starship’s officers adjourned to what they called a “conference room.” Koralus lowered himself uneasily into a seat at one end of a table long enough to accommodate a dozen or more. The captain, the hairless one named Picard, sat at the opposite end, hunched slightly forward, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. His second-in-command, Commander Riker, sat easily on Picard’s left. Next was Commander La Forge, an extremely dark-skinned man with a strange silvery device hiding his eyes. He was the one who, if any repairs to the Hope were found to be possible, would do the work or watch over those who did. Troi, the woman who had been in the transporter room to greet him, was on Picard’s right. Her function—“counselor”—was unclear except that she seemed to be the one the others looked to when they wanted to know if he was telling the truth. Crusher, another woman, a doctor who could learn the most remarkable things about a person simply by running a small device over that person’s body, was on Koralus’s left. On his right was the one called Data, the only one whose skin tone matched his own. They described him as an android, an artificial human, but he was also considered an officer like the others.
The final participant was the frightening-looking creature they called Worf. A “Klingon,” whatever that was. Koralus watched him uneasily. Despite their assurances, he could not completely overcome the terror that had gripped him when he had emerged onto the bridge and almost run into the creature.
Visible through a series of windows—or viewscreens?—in one wall of the conference room were the stars, motionless. There was no need for the constant rotation the Hope required, they had said. Their gravity was another of their technological miracles, generated at will. On their bridge, they had shown him an image of the Hope on a huge screen, and for the first time he had been able to see what it was that had killed two dozen of his friends. And why it was beyond repair. It was only luck—and the skill and courage of those who had died—that had kept the habitat section of the Hope intact and the nuclear power generator even marginally functional.
Uneasily, still not certain of their motives, Koralus nonetheless answered their questions, truthfully in the main, about the Hope, about its sister ships, but mostly about the Plague, never letting his suspicions show through his words.
“Nebular dust,” they called it at first, until he told them that it fouled Krantin’s atmosphere even more than it did the surrounding space, and their seeming puzzlement at that information both encouraged and frightened him. Encouraged because their seeming ignorance indicated that they were not the ones responsible for the Plague. Frightened because their puzzlement cast doubt on their ability to help.
Five hundred years ago there had been no Plague, he assured them when they expressed
not only puzzlement but doubt. The stars had shone as brightly on Krantin as they did here in interstellar space. Five hundred years ago, when Krantin’s technology had just begun to develop and the world was emerging from a long agricultural stage, the atmosphere had been clean and breathable, and more than a billion had lived on the planet’s surface.
No one was sure precisely when the Plague began. Krantin’s fledgling industrialization began to pollute the air, and for nearly a century, most assumed that was the sole source of the pollution. But then, as efforts to eliminate it evolved from determined to desperate, scientists gradually came to see that there had to be another source. Finally, Krantin’s technology reached a point at which its machines produced virtually no pollution of any kind, and still the atmosphere continued to grow worse. It was as if the very air was being converted into toxic materials of all kinds. Even radioactive contaminants began to appear, though no one realized at the time what they were. It was another fifty years before Krantin developed nuclear power and scientists recognized the radioactive parts of the pollution for what they were: elements found in the waste products of nuclear-fission power plants.
Meanwhile, the Plague had apparently spread to space. The “nebular dust” had begun to appear in their asteroid belt and slowly thickened and expanded until the cloud—the Plague—enveloped Krantin itself. The stars faded year by year until finally they were invisible altogether from Krantin. Even their sun began to dim and redden in the sky.
The atmospheric Plague was the critical factor, however. Long before the dust in space had enveloped Krantin, the atmosphere had become a disaster. Entire species of plants and animals were dying off, and breathing masks were becoming a necessity. Finally, when all else failed and they seemed faced with extinction, they began a campaign to enclose their largest cities and to convert all their food production to hydroponics. Soon after the first of the enclosures was begun, Koralus and several others managed to divert some of the money and resources to building the Hope and its sister ships. Even the enclosures could not protect the Krantinese forever, Koralus had argued. Small amounts of pollution were already appearing within supposedly airtight individual structures, indicating that, in the long run, the Plague could not be kept out, no matter how tightly sealed the cities became.
There were only two chances for long-term survival of the race, Koralus and his allies said. Either the scientists must find the source of the Plague and stop it, or ships must be built to allow at least a few tens of thousands to attempt to reach other star systems. Enough people agreed for enough time to construct and launch the Hope and five other ships. It all ended when a seventh ship nearing completion was destroyed by a group of workers who became furious when they found they would not be among the one in ten who would be given space on the ships they were building.
“That was the end of the program,” Koralus said. “The seventh ship and three others under construction were also destroyed, along with most of the orbital facilities needed for the construction. Tens of thousands of stranded workers died as well, including the ones who caused the destruction. After that . . .”
He paused, lowering his eyes to the glistening surface of the conference table. “After that, I don’t know what happened. We were a year on our way, and the few messages we received after the disaster indicated that there were no plans to even try to build any more ships. All their efforts were going to be concentrated on enclosing the cities. Most wanted to simply forget that any ships had ever been built. Some, I think, would have killed us all if they had been able to reach us. Because the ships had been built, they said, fewer cities would be enclosed and more people would have to die.” He shook his head. “Perhaps they were right. Perhaps Krantin would have been served better had we all concentrated on enclosing the cities and searching for the source of the Plague. There have been no messages from the other ships. None of them may have survived. At this point, I don’t even know if anyone is still alive on Krantin.”
Once again on the bridge, Picard watched the irregular torus that Koralus called the Plague grow ever larger on the viewscreen. Koralus, his face a stoic mask, sat in Riker’s chair while the commander stood to one side. The alien had rejected the suggestion that he return to the Hope and explain the situation to his ten thousand charges.
“Until I know there is a world they can return to,” he had said, “I would prefer not to have to tell them the Hope is doomed. Nor do I wish to raise false hopes. That is the reason I did not want you come aboard the Hope and reveal your existence to them.”
A billion kilometers from the outer edge of the Plague cloud, the Enterprise slowed to quarter impulse.
“Is it safe to enter, Mr. Data?” Picard asked.
“I believe it is, Captain. Though the associated energy field is highly variable both from one moment to the next and from one location to another, the intensity is too low, even at its peak levels, to have a significant effect on either physical structures or life-forms.”
“What effect would higher levels have?”
“I could not say, Captain. The energy itself bears a superficial resemblance to some of the energies involved in molecular-level transporter operation, but its only observable effect is to interfere with the sensor beams.”
“But you say it varies wildly in intensity. Is there a pattern to the variability?”
“None that the computer can discern. It appears totally random from moment to moment and location to location. It is also impossible to rule out sudden, massive upswings at any moment, in any location.”
“And the dust itself?”
“At our present distance, interference from the energy field prevents reliable sensor readings.”
“Can the interference be compensated for?”
“I have been attempting to do so, but the random variations make it impossible.”
“Mr. La Forge, is there anything Engineering can do?”
“I’ve been trying, too, Captain,” Geordi’s voice came from the Engineering deck, “but I think getting closer is the only solution. I tried boosting the power to the sensors and narrowing their focus, which helped a little, but not enough to give us anything reliable. It’s like trying to look into a lake that’s constantly being stirred up by millions of little storms. Up close, I think the extra power and tight focus will give us relatively reliable readings, at least for small areas.”
“Very well. Keep me informed, Mr. La Forge, Mr. Data. Ensign, take us in, minimum impulse.”
Once again, though he still didn’t realize he was doing it, Picard leaned forward a fraction in his chair. This was something he never tired of, was never completely comfortable with and probably never would be—never should be. If the time came when approaching an unknown star system became routine, that would be the time to retire to a desk somewhere in the depths of Starfleet—before such an attitude had a chance to kill him or his crew.
At a million kilometers, Data reported the first stable readings, but only of the outer fringes of the cloud, where the energy field was as attenuated as the cloud.
“This is quite remarkable, Captain,” he reported after a moment’s silence. “Sensors indicate the presence of hundreds of elements and compounds but nothing larger than individual atoms and molecules. More appear to be coming into existence every moment.”
“ ‘Coming into existence,’ Mr. Data?” Picard’s pulse quickened. “Are you positive this isn’t still a result of the energy field’s interference?”
“I cannot be one hundred percent positive at this distance, Captain.”
At a hundred thousand kilometers, Data and Geordi agreed—they were positive. The sensors still wouldn’t penetrate more than a few thousand kilometers into the cloud, but the readings at the very fringes, where the energy field was weakest, were now rock solid.
“Matter is being created right before our eyes—our sensors?” Picard stood abruptly and moved to look over Data’s shoulders at the ops readouts. “Are you saying we’ve stumble
d across a pocket of steady-state matter creation?”
“That is unlikely, Captain. There have been no confirmed instances of such a phenomenon in Starfleet history.”
“But there’s always a first time.”
“That is correct, Captain. However, the theory regarding such hypothetical phenomena states that the matter thus created would be of a more elemental nature, primarily individual particles. Helium atoms are the most complex that could be produced within the framework of current theory.”
Koralus had come to stand next to Picard. “Captain, you have said that an energy field of some kind blankets virtually the entire Krantin system, and that this energy is similar in some ways to the energy you use for your so-called transporters. Have I understood the situation correctly?”
“Essentially, yes,” Picard admitted.
“Then is it possible that someone is doing this?
Transporting this material here, from another part of space?”
Frowning, Picard turned to Data. The thought had crossed his mind, but he had not verbalized it yet, perhaps hoping it would be proven wrong before speaking it aloud made it real. “Possible, Mr. Data?”
“I would never say anything is totally impossible, Captain, but it is highly unlikely. There is no obvious source for the material within sensor range. To transport anything over the necessary distance would require a subspace transporter, which itself would leave a distinctive signature.”
“Is it any more unlikely than that—that ‘steady state’ idea?” Koralus asked.
“With no more information than we have,” Data said, “both suggestions can be said to be equally unlikely.”
“But you don’t have anything to offer that’s any more likely!” Koralus persisted testily.
“I suggest, gentlemen,” Picard broke in, “that we move on to Krantin itself. Perhaps the scientists there have found something that will be helpful.”
“If there are any still alive,” Koralus said bleakly.