“I’ll have the diplomatic corps see if they can get a response out of the Romulans,” Collins said, “as to whether this is actually a decommissioning act.”
“It better be,” Lambert grumbled. “We’ve all got enough medals already, and if Johnny Archer earns any more, his dress uniform will collapse under their gravity.”
“I’ll tell him you said that. In the meantime I suggest you mark the limits of the field.”
“I’ll get Harry on to it. Unless you want to send Enterprise out here to do it, and we’ll—” The screen went black so suddenly that La Forge rocked on his heels as if he had felt an impact. He looked across at the other people on the bridge. The other engineers looked as if they’d stepped off a cliff, and Rasmussen was looking pale and shaky.
“Damn,” Rasmussen whispered. “They showed it so many times, on all the news feeds.” He shook his head. “I never watched someone die before they showed that.”
“You didn’t know for sure that he, or anyone else aboard, was dead,” Geordi said reasonably.
“Not intellectually, no,” Rasmussen admitted. “But in our hearts, everyone who saw it knew. Romulans . . .”
“We know it wasn’t the Romulan mine,” Geordi pointed out. “The ship’s still here.”
“I bet they were still behind it somehow.”
When Rasmussen had gone across to the Intrepid with the newly replicated replacement parts, Brahms had taken her chance to catch some lunch in Nelson’s. She could have eaten from the replicator in her quarters, but she was hoping to talk to Guinan. It was easy to talk to Guinan, even about things she thought she wouldn’t normally talk about aloud.
“I know Geordi can be a little obsessive, but I never thought he could be vindictive.”
Guinan frowned, a rare and rather sad vision. “Vindictive? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him vindictive.”
“You haven’t seen the way he looks at Rasmussen, or heard the way he talks about him.”
“Ah, Rasmussen . . .” There was a long story in her tone. Leah might not be a Listener like Guinan, but she knew the signs when she heard them.
“You know what I’m talking about?”
Guinan blinked slowly. “Unfortunately I do. I was on the Enterprise when Rasmussen visited, and I remember him pretty well.”
“He is a memorable person.”
“In all the wrong ways.”
Brahms was disappointed by Guinan’s tone. Of all the people she thought would understand, Guinan topped the list. “Not you as well?”
“Rasmussen stole from a lot of my friends. He tried to kidnap Commander Data. He pretended he could help save a planet under threat but was refusing to do so.”
“He couldn’t have actually helped.”
“No, he couldn’t, because he wasn’t from the future. He could just have said he didn’t know what happened. Even if he wanted to stick with his story about being from the future, he could have said it wasn’t his field, or the records had been lost, or something. But he seemed to take a great pleasure in giving the appearance of being happy to refuse to use knowledge.”
“You seem to be suggesting that if he had been from the future, and did know what happened, he’d have been right to refuse.”
“Yes, he would. But he wasn’t.”
“Do you think I should stay away from him?”
Guinan hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t think he’s cruel or violent. He’s a thief, but I couldn’t see him deliberately harming anyone.”
“And Commander Data?”
“I’m pretty sure that, from Rasmussen’s perspective, he was stealing, not kidnapping. He just saw Data as an invention, not as a person.”
“Thanks, Guinan.”
“For what?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Leah admitted.
“If I wasn’t seeing this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it,” Scotty breathed.
“That’s exactly what I thought, Scotty,” La Forge agreed. He, Barclay, and Brahms were in the lab that had been set up aboard the runabout Thames, reporting on the data recovered from Intrepid’s computer core. “In fact I almost wonder if it couldn’t be some kind of modern fake, like Worf thought.”
“Placed there how? Intrepid’s files have been bricked for centuries,” Brahms said.
“If Rasmussen was an expert in quantum slipstream mechanics, I’d wonder if he couldn’t have somehow introduced these readings while we were bringing the sensor logs online.”
“But he isn’t.”
“No, and the date stamps all match up perfectly.”
“Slipstream, but not slipstream . . . I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” Scotty said. “It could be natural, or it could be artificial . . .”
“Either way, it’s definitely worth thinking about.”
Scotty nodded. “Aye . . . I don’t know which idea is worse, it bein’ natural, or it bein’ artificial. Leah and I worked on the Vesta-class test-beds—but if this data truly was artificial, it’d have to be far beyond . . . Is there anything more like this in Intrepid’s files?”
“We’re downloading and decoding as much as we can, now that Rasmussen has gotten us into the system, but there are a lot of corrupt files,” La Forge said.
“Do your best.”
Scotty and Barclay left the lab, and La Forge looked at the data again. “It looks like Rasmussen has actually done us some good.”
“Is that so surprising?” Brahms asked. “Starfleet did assign him for a reason.”
“I guess they did. I still don’t have to like him, though.”
“He may have been a liar and a thief, but he doesn’t seem violent.”
“He kidnapped my friend at gunpoint,” La Forge said hotly.
“Ineffectually,” she reminded him.
“He didn’t know that. Besides, there’s the matter of how he got that time pod in the first place.”
“How did he get it?”
“I don’t know,” Geordi admitted, “but the implication was that its original owner was in no condition to use it again.”
“You mean he’s dead. Was dead. Will be dead, if he’s from the twenty-sixth century . . .” Brahms groaned and rubbed her temples. “Whichever.”
“I mean there’s a good sized doubt over how Rasmussen came into possession of the pod. There’s a very good chance that he may have murdered that professor from the twenty-sixth century.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“Data thought that Rasmussen was implying it, when he tried to kidnap him. And Data wasn’t prone to flights of fancy.”
Outside, Rasmussen had been about to go in and enjoy the credit for discovering the sensor logs, when he heard the conversation turn to his previous life.
He had never forgotten the professor whose time pod he had inherited, and he never would.
He hadn’t forgotten much about those days.
It wasn’t for want of trying.
9
The leaves were turning red and gold in Trenton, and Berlinghoff Rasmussen was starting to notice a slight chill in the air at nights. The days were still almost warm enough for summer, so he preferred to work in his garage, with the big door rolled open.
That was where he preferred to work, but in general he preferred to be either down in the riverside park, or lunching at The Hidden Panda, where the bar was as relaxed and filled with as much variety as the Chinese menu was. As his new molecular cutter sliced through another neoprene square, Rasmussen felt like he was about thirty seconds from going there and drowning his sorrows as well as, hopefully, feeding his muse.
The device was basically a tubular laser-cutter, intended to use a reactive plasma as part of the cutting torch. He had a test object, made of layered steel, neoprene, plastic, and Kevlar, mounted on a frame in the center of the garage. In theory the cutter should slice through the metal only, and not through the materials used in EV suits for space walks. It would therefore be safer to use while wearing an EV sui
t.
That was the theory. In practice, the damned thing would cut through anything, and he couldn’t quite figure out how to tune it to the right molecular structures. He tried again, with a new setting and new test object. The cutter burned through it all, and the test object clattered to the floor in two halves.
Rasmussen felt his shoulders slump, and he dropped the cutter back onto the worktop. He wondered whether perhaps he should start calling it the flop-top. He sat down and glared at the prototype. “Lunch. We’ll see what we can do with you after lunch.”
In a few minutes, he was walking across a small green park toward The Hidden Panda, occasionally glancing up at the shuttlepods that came and went from the university’s transport pool. Those were exactly the sort of vehicles that his devices should be installed aboard.
A few comnet pads were dotted around on The Hidden Panda’s tables and in booths, all keyed to only function inside the establishment. Rasmussen glanced at a couple as he came in, without picking one up. Most of the headlines were about the state of the economy in the wake of the Romulan War, and the resurgence in exploratory missions. Stories about the appointments to Federation posts barely rated a sidebar.
Jo was at the center bar when he entered, and he was glad to see her. The day didn’t seem so bad when she smiled at him. “Hi, B.R. The whatsit still not working?”
“How did you know?”
“You only come in here at this hour when something’s gone wrong with it.”
“Oh, bravo. Well observed, Holmes, now rack ’em up.”
“The usual?”
“Yeah, the usual.”
She slid a cappuccino and a bourbon across to him. As usual, Jo had the Federation News Service on above the bar. Some talking head was beaming brightly, as she told everyone, “In Federation news, the Vulcan Science Council has announced a review into the possibility of whether time travel might someday become possible. In concert with representatives from Earth and Tellar—”
“Time travel,” Jo echoed, shaking her head. Rasmussen didn’t notice so much as a single gray hair, and he’d been looking for them as long as he’d been coming here. “First thing I’d do with a time machine is go back to my bachelorette party and give myself a ticket to somewhere a long way from New Jersey. You know what I mean, B.R.?”
Berlinghoff Rasmussen knew exactly what she meant. He had met Jo’s husband. “If it was me, I’d put money on a lot of World Cup games. Always helps with the travel funds.” He smiled at the thought.
Jo laughed. “Good thinking, my man. Good thinking.” She slid Rasmussen a cappuccino without being asked. “Oh, the buffet’ll be starting in about ten minutes, if you’re interested.”
“It is one of the two reasons I come here.” He caught himself, fearing he’d said too much.
“That thing you’re working on being the other?”
“There’s no thing,” he said, putting a finger to his lips, and tapping the side of his nose. “Not yet, anyway, but hopefully in a couple of days, always assuming our new über-government doesn’t find someone else working on the same thing first.”
“Uber-government? Oh, you mean the Federation. I don’t think they’re in charge of New Jersey . . . just offworld.”
“You say that now, but . . .” He brightened, and laughed. “It’s better than having new Romulan overlords.”
“The war’s over.”
“For now. Wars have a way of coming back.” Rasmussen cursed himself, not having intended to give the conversation such a depressing turn. “I mean, imagine if they invented time travel first. They could come back and change the outcome of the war.”
“I can’t see the Vulcan Science Council sharing their results with the Romulans, can you?”
“No, I can’t, really.” He turned to see a man he’d noticed once or twice over the past couple of months come into the bar. It was the small, middle-aged guy who looked like a professor. The university was a hotbed of AI and cybernetics development.
The man saw him, and came over. “Hello there. It’s B.R., isn’t it? I remember you from yesterday.”
“Yesterday? It was more like eight weeks ago I last saw you.”
“Was it?” He glanced at his watch. “Oh, terribly sorry. I thought I saw you yesterday, but I may have got just a tiny bit distracted. Must have been someone else.”
“I wasn’t out of the house yesterday, I’m afraid.”
“Ah, inventing! Anything good?”
Rasmussen was simultaneously pleased and suspicious at the attention, and he strove to find the right expression. “Well, it’s got potential. Like everything.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“So, what have you been working on, er, Prof? Doc?” He offered a palm.
“Professor. Dominic Kent.” He shook Rasmussen’s hand. “I’m in the history department, over at the university library.”
“I see. I work on the future, you work on the past.” It was as Rasmussen had thought. The guy practically had “dusty history professor” tattooed on his forehead.
“Exactly, yes. And I also love to work on the buffet in here, if you catch my meaning. There’s nothing quite like it,” he added to Jo.
“Best in Trenton,” she agreed. “And, by the way, guys, it’s open.”
“Excellent,” Kent crowed. Rasmussen couldn’t disagree. They almost raced each other to the buffet.
Rasmussen saw Professor Kent twice more that week, exchanging a few pleasantries with the guy both times, but it was the third time that stuck in his mind. There was no chit-chat this time, because, Rasmussen was sure, the prof hadn’t seen him.
Rasmussen had gone over to the university to consult some books in the library, and, when he came out a couple of hours later, he had noticed a familiar figure struggling to free his rental groundcar from a steel clamp around the wheel. Rasmussen laughed to himself as he thought of the staid professor illegally parking.
His laughter stopped, as Kent glanced both ways down the road, then knelt beside the wheel and drew a stubby metallic cylinder from his pocket. It was a laser-cutter, but when Kent drew it across the wheel, only the metal structure of the clamp fell off. The rubber of the tire not only didn’t puncture, but seemed totally unaffected by the cutting beam.
Rasmussen recognized the concept immediately. He had, after all, been working on it for months. And here was this stuffy professor with a working model. Could he be an inventor too, and the story about being a historian just some bull to put Rasmussen off the scent while he stole the invention? Or had someone else already invented and even sold them?
A few hours on the comnet was enough to convince him that the prof didn’t buy his cutter. That only left the possibility of his having invented it, or copied the concept from Rasmussen.
Rasmussen hadn’t really intended to start following the professor around then, but somehow he just fell into it. It seemed the most logical way to make sure the guy wasn’t following him.
It was kind of fun following Kent, and Rasmussen began to see what attracted people to being cops or private eyes. The novelty would wear off, he knew, but it was fun while it lasted. Every night for a week, the prof turned into the parking lot of a U-shaped beige-colored building, with fake red tiles on the roof, and a veranda around the inside of the U. A holographic sign projected from the ceiling proclaimed it to be the Cheep’N’Cheerful Motel. It wasn’t exactly top class, but it wasn’t a flea trap either. It was middle of the road, clean without being flashy, cheap without being seedy or dangerous. It was, Rasmussen thought, anonymous and safe. Exactly the sort of place you’d go if you didn’t want anybody to take any notice of you.
One morning, Rasmussen got there early, to watch Professor Kent leave. The cutter prototype that he had brought along made short work of the door lock, its handle and a part of the door. The room was neat, tidy, and boring. It took Rasmussen about fifteen seconds to decide that there was nothing of the remotest interest in it. Then he went to check the garage that was ben
eath the room. The cutter removed the lock and part of the door again. He expected to find a workbench and tools. He didn’t expect to find a car, because the prof had just driven away in his rental.
There was, bizarrely, a shuttlepod. For a moment Rasmussen thought he was hallucinating, but the jagged-edged silver craft remained resolutely solid.
He touched it, felt metal, and that was reassuring. He couldn’t find a control to open the door, nor could he see in through the darkened windshield. He didn’t expect the cutter to have a problem getting him in.
It didn’t even warm the surface.
“So, when are you from?” Rasmussen asked the instant Professor Kent pushed his door open. The prof was still reeling from the sight of the hole in the door, and Rasmussen went straight for the kill while he was off-balance.
“What?”
“It’s a simple enough question, I’d have thought. When do you come from?”
“You mean where do I come from. That’d be Cambridge.”
“I meant when exactly are you from?” Rasmussen laughed companionably at Kent’s attempt to look puzzled. “Oh, come on, you don’t have to be coy with me. I’m a scientist, an inventor . . . I have had the occasional thought about the possibilities of time travel.”
“There’s still a market for science fiction in the entertainment industry. You could make a fortune—”
“Professor, please. I’ve watched you over the past few weeks. I followed you after I saw you cut that wheel clamp. I’ve seen your . . . whatever that thing in the garage is, that’s made of some substance I’ve never seen before.”
“You had no right to do something like that! What are you, some kind of stalker?”
“Actually,” Rasmussen said, “that’s what I just thought you were. I thought you’d followed me, stolen my cutter invention, and made it work. So I wanted to steal it back. But then I figured out the truth. Besides, I have as much right as you to walk into a motel. All right, I maybe have less right than you to walk into this particular little room that you’ve rented, but I’m glad I did.”
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