Gold closed his eyes and braced himself. “Try me.”
“The warp drive…it’s been replaced by steam engines, Captain,” she said. “That noise was a pressure valve venting excess steam.”
Gold shook his head. “Meshuggah,” he said. “The whole universe has gone meshuggah!”
“Just our corner of it,” said Gomez. “But the way the effects are spreading, the rest of the galaxy may not be far behind.”
Soloman produced a small, coin-sized medallion from his pocket and held it up for Minstrel’s visual sensor to inspect. The image of a starship was stamped on one side, the Starfleet insignia on the other.
“Maybe this will help,” the Bynar said. “What would you calculate the probability of this disk, flipped through the air and allowed to land without interference one hundred times, falling with the side picturing the starship facing up?”
“Probability states the result to be fifty of one hundred such throws.”
“That’s correct,” he said. “Each throw offers a fifty-fifty chance of landing on either side.” Soloman flicked the medallion into the air with his thumb and watched it rotate head over tails before clinking to the deck.
“Heads, or starship side,” Soloman announced. He picked up the medallion and prepared to toss it again. “There’s still a fifty-fifty chance it will land on either side, but since the first toss came up heads, there is a greater likelihood—a three in four chance—that the next will come up tails.”
Soloman flipped the medallion again, waiting for Minstrel to challenge his dubious statistical information, but the computer remained silent.
“Heads again.” He retrieved the medallion. “Meaning there’s now an even greater chance that the next flip must be tails.”
But it wasn’t. In fact, the medallion came up heads again and again. Sixty-two flips later and there was still nothing but the embossed starship’s image facing the Bynar and the computer.
“Minstrel, what is the probability of so many consecutive flips being the same?”
“Probability: fifty percent.”
“Excuse me?” Soloman said.
“Each toss of the coin offers an even chance of one side or the other coming up.”
“Yes, on the basis of each individual toss,” Soloman agreed, “but when taken as a set of tosses, the odds increase exponentially.”
Soloman tossed the coin for the sixty-third time and watched in surprise as it landed, this time, on its edge and stood there, perfectly balanced.
“And the odds of this?”
“Probability: fifty percent.”
An answer which convinced Soloman, finally, that he was dealing with a mechanism that had lost all reason.
Aboard the da Vinci, Captain Gold and Sonya Gomez discovered that, improbably or not, the rest of the crew had gathered together in a three-foot by three-foot utility closet on the engineering deck. Which turned out well since the hull around the bridge deck had gone off somewhere, leaving the entire area exposed to the vacuum of space.
By the time the hull returned—minus all its electronics and decorated in a colorful but tasteful floral wall-covering—the starboard nacelle was showing fatal signs of metal fatigue and threatened to snap off at the slightest provocation.
Meanwhile, the CO2 scrubbers responsible for recycling shipboard air had begun to spew lethal carbon monoxide rather than renewed and breathable air. A quick thinking, but improbable, Qwardian tree-slug with an engineering background shut down the environmental systems before the CO levels reached the danger point. Fortunately, a breeze blowing in from the mountains beyond the mess kept the da Vinci supplied with fresh air.
Gold, Gomez, and Tev watched the Minstrel’s Whisper on the viewscreen in the captain’s ready room. It was just one derelict ship out of millions, but one which random chance had vested with the power to destroy the da Vinci.
“Soloman is not answering any of our signals,” the Tellarite said.
“Odds are,” Gold said dryly, “his combadge isn’t working.”
“But Soloman is,” Gomez said. “We’ve got to trust he’s doing the best he can.”
Tev growled deep in his throat. “So you’re saying that the mind that conceived a statistical jest such as his ‘fifty-fifty’ theory is all that stands between this ship and its doom?”
“Well,” said Gold, “when you put it that way….”
Chapter
12
Reason, Soloman thought, should be left to the reasonable.
But seeing as there was precious little reason to be had there in the Uncertainty Drive’s den, he was best off taking another tact entirely.
When in Rome, he reminded himself before taking a deep breath and saying to the Drive, “Minstrel, do you know how long you were offline?”
“Query asked and answered. Insufficient data.”
“I have the necessary data, gathered by the instruments aboard the da Vinci. You were offline for something in the vicinity of one million years.”
“Probability: zero.”
Soloman shook his head. “But you don’t even know what happened to your crew. Have any of your attempts to contact your Empire met with success?”
The Drive made no response, but Soloman noted that the flow of bubbles inside Minstrel’s chamber had increased. He pressed on. “You set the probability that a coin could come down heads in sixty-three consecutive tosses at fifty percent,” he said. “What chances would you give the da Vinci, arriving at any random point along a one-half light-year-long stretch of space, coming to rest within visual distance of any particular ship, in this case the Minstrel’s Whisper?”
“Probability: fifty percent. The da Vinci is either near the Minstrel’s Whisper or it is not.”
Soloman realized that when he had initially encountered the Drive, it had been capable of offering odds—whether correctly calculated or not—other than fifty-fifty. The cards and the coin, meant to allow Soloman to establish the computer’s concept of stable probability, seemed to have served only to confuse the device. That signaled to him a rapid deterioration of its processing abilities—and he doubted they would deteriorate in favor of the da Vinci’s survival.
“And the probability of your being dealt nothing but winning hands sixteen straight times?”
“Probability: fifty percent. Either one will be dealt the high hand or one will not.”
“Then it stands to reason that there is a fifty percent chance that you were offline for one million years.”
The logic was, of course, completely specious. It was as though he had said because it’s possible to ride a bicycle without hands, it’s also possible to take an unprotected stroll across the surface of a gas giant. One had nothing to do with the other, but Soloman was placing his faith in the fact that he stood a fifty-fifty chance of Minstrel accepting his argument.
“Logic error…”
The golden liquid began bubbling ferociously.
Soloman held his breath, suddenly convinced he had gone too far, too fast.
“…Supposition irreconcilable with Minstrel’s Whisper’s two-thousand-year rating for organic memory matter.”
“Minstrel,” he said, exhaling and trying not to smile, “have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s Cat?”
Torches lined the corridor of the da Vinci, filling the air with oily smoke. The crew, clad in monks’ robes of coarse gray material, walked slowly along in double-file, chanting dirges in a language that none of them recognized.
Captain Gold felt as though his head were about to burst from the constant shifting of reality and the impossibility of everything that was happening to him and his crew. It was his responsibility to see that these forty beings under his charge came to no harm, but he was just so damned helpless in the face of this ancient and overwhelming alien technology. He would have felt humiliated had he for a second believed what they were going through was being done deliberately, but he knew better.
It was all just chance, science gone amok.
What had he called it that first morning when he and Gomez had discussed their respective runs of bad luck? “Random acts of capricious nature.” Only in this instance, technology was giving nature a helping hand.
Bart Faulwell had died because of it. His ship, this home to Gold and his crew, was, moment by moment, coming that much closer to destruction. Just before they all found themselves chanting in robes, the sensors had picked up an approaching and powerful electromagnetic pulse, apparently generated from the magnetic field that helped hold the Sargasso of derelicts in stasis. Of course, that was relatively minor compared to the kilometer-wide meteor hurtling on a collision course for the da Vinci.
Or, he noted with renewed alarm, the gradual disintegration of the da Vinci’s physical structure, as though the ship were made of spun sugar and had been dipped in a basin of water. The hull was melting away, inch by inch, exposing them all to the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space.
Gold tried to cry out, to warn his crew of the coming disaster, but all that came out of his mouth was the unintelligible dirge. Capricious nature couldn’t even give him the comfort of prayer in this final moment.
But even had he been able to pray, the best he would have been able to summon would have been the kaddish.
Chapter
13
Captain David Gold opened his eyes and looked around the bridge of the U.S.S. da Vinci.
He sat, as was his custom, in the commander’s chair in the center of the bridge. Wong, Shabalala, and Haznedl were at their respective stations, while Gomez and Tev were positioned at aft consoles, and other crew moved about in routines so blessedly familiar to the captain.
Gold knew, from the looks on the other faces around him, exactly what his expression must have been.
Shock.
A second ago, they had all been robed monks on a march to oblivion, singing a song to which no one knew the words.
A second ago, all hands had watched the slow, inexorable disintegration of their ship that promised to expose them to instant death in space.
A second ago…
And then, against all odds, their world had returned to normal.
“Soloman to da Vinci.”
Sonya Gomez jumped, startled by the voice coming over the comm. She slapped spasmodically at the switch, her own words coming out in a surprised stutter. “Soloman? What, I mean, where are you?”
“Aboard the Minstrel’s Whisper and ready to come home.”
Tev leaned in and, trying to appear unruffled but failing miserably, said, “Has the situation been resolved?”
Gold was certain he heard Soloman chuckle. “Indeed it has.”
Behind the captain, the lift hissed open and someone stepping from it said, “What situation?”
Gold sucked in a breath. Before he could turn to see if who he thought he had just heard was indeed who he believed it to be, one look at Gomez’s face confirmed it.
“Bart!” she shouted and raced across the bridge, throwing her arms around his neck.
Bart Faulwell, hale and hearty as ever, staggered back under her affectionate assault. “Missed me that much between shifts?” he laughed.
Everyone on the bridge was staring at the language specialist in open disbelief. He looked from face to face, not sure what to make of their expressions and of the sniffling woman clinging to his neck.
“Uhm,” he said, “have I missed something here?”
David Gold stepped toward the younger crewman and clasped his forearm in his hand. “No, Faulwell,” he said in a voice momentarily choked with emotion. “We’re the ones who have been missing something.”
The command crew were there to meet Soloman in the shuttle bay. He stepped from the shuttle, casually flipping and catching the starship medallion, a satisfied smile on his face. He looked at them, Captain Gold, Sonya Gomez, Tev…and Bart Faulwell?
“Everything has, I take it, returned to normal?” Soloman stammered.
Faulwell smiled, “Surprise!”
Soloman looked to Gold, then Gomez. “But he was—”
“Dead,” Bart said. “Done in by a peanut butter power bar, they tell me. Guess it was just too ridiculous a way to go for the powers that be to let it stick.”
“This,” Soloman said, “is more than I could have hoped for.”
Gomez’s laugh was loud with her relief. “Yes,” she exclaimed. “Everything’s back, one hundred percent. How did you do it?”
Soloman shrugged. “In truth, the Drive did it to itself. I merely helped point it in the statistically correct direction.”
“Would you care to explain how?” Tev said impatiently.
“Of course,” Soloman said. “As I suspected, the Drive, either because of age or,” and here he smiled, “because of random chance, was basing its probability calculations on corrupted data. How else could the odds for the frequent impossibilities we were confronting have become so skewered in favor of their happening? Apparently, my attempts to ascertain its baseline for so-called stable probability through demonstrations of chance served only to confuse it. I think it was the coin toss that did it, but before I was done, Minstrel was operating on the assumption that all odds for all things were fifty-fifty.”
“No!” exclaimed Tev in disbelief, glaring at his superior when Gomez failed to completely suppress a snort of laughter.
“Yes,” the Bynar replied modestly. “I recorded the entire confrontation on my tricorder if you would care to check it. Anyway, it expressed doubt when I tried to explain that it had been dormant for a million years and had only just, by random chance, come back online. It was composed of organic components which were only supposed to function for two thousand years before deteriorating, a fact it could not reconcile with my claims of the vast passage of time.
“All those factors pointed to the solution to our dilemma. The Drive itself had established that it was functioning on the assumption that the odds of all things were even, so I told it the story of Schrödinger’s Cat, reinforcing through the immutable laws of physics…”
“Some immutable laws, said the dead man,” Faulwell chuckled.
“Immutable, then, under normal circumstances…the state under which the Drive believed itself to be functioning, by the way. I explained how the hypothetical cat is in a superposition of both life and death until an observer opens the box to determine the cat’s fate. Alive or dead. Fifty-fifty.
“I explained that its great age was the cat and the vastly overdue life span of its materials was the radioactive particle.”
“And you,” said Sonya with sudden understanding, “were the observer!”
“That’s as preposterous as your theory on probability,” said Tev with unconcealed disdain.
“I couldn’t agree more, but the Uncertainty Drive didn’t know any better. As far as it could perceive, I had opened the box to see whether the cat was alive or dead. And, as it was programmed to function under the Uncertainty Principle, it instantly understood that the mere fact of my observing it altered it. And since it was operating under the principle that something either was or was not—fifty-fifty, remember—it had only two states, or two probabilities, to choose from: function or nonfunction. Since it had been functioning, my observation could only offer it the alternative of nonfunction.”
“You mean,” asked Gold, “it just shut down?”
“On or off. Yes or no,” Soloman said and directed his smile at Tev. “Fifty-fifty.”
“Preposterous,” the Tellarite grumbled and stalked out of the shuttle bay.
Bart Faulwell sat by himself in the forward observation deck, sipping a cup of coffee, staring out at the Sargasso Sector.
In the twenty-four hours since his…becoming not dead anymore (he felt silly using a word like resurrection, which was far too biblical for his tastes and, besides, didn’t really describe his situation), he had hardly found a moment for himself. Everyone had wanted time with him to express their sorrow over his death and their happiness at his…well, not-death. And while h
e appreciated their sentiments—and how many people, really, ever got the chance to hear their own eulogy and learn how their death had affected those around them—he needed time on his own to digest the situation for himself.
Not that he remembered dying, of course. Or undying either, for that matter. As far as he could tell, there had been no break in his life. It was as though he had taken a nap, nothing more.
But he hadn’t been napping. He had been dead. Dr. Lense hadn’t been mistaken. She had placed his body in a stasis chamber and his friends had mourned his sudden and senseless passing.
Except now he wasn’t dead.
He had been there, of course, when twenty-three of his colleagues had died at Galvan VI. He had ridden the very same emotional roller coaster the da Vinci’s crew had experienced in the wake of his death, but now, suddenly, he wasn’t dead and it was as though they had wasted all that sadness and emotion.
And how could they not resent him, on some level at any rate, for daring to cheat death when those twenty-three others could not? Duffy, Feliciano, Barnak, McAllan, and the others—they had stayed dead. Of course. That’s what dead was, a final, irrevocable state. But Bart had, quite literally, beaten the odds and, while he was naturally happy to learn that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, he was also saddened that his happiness and good fortune was no doubt causing pain for others.
“Hey.”
Bart heard Sonya Gomez’s voice and, coming as it did on the tail of his particular train of thought, he winced. But he pretended not to and turned to her with a smile and waved her over to sit beside him.
“Sorry if I’m interrupting,” Gomez said.
“You’re not,” he lied.
“I’ve just—” she said, then stopped herself. “I’m glad you’re back, Bart.”
He smiled. “Me too. It’s freaky, though. Soloman figured that since the probability of my, you know, dying by peanut butter was so astronomical, when normal probability started to reassert itself, it just kind of spit me back out as too impossible to be dead. Or maybe it was that the odds of my staying dead were the same as my having died in the first place, but to tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying with all those numbers and equations.”
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