by Glenn Hauman
What could it hurt?
All right, we’ve established that we’ll go ahead and do it. Now how can I help Dr. Lense? Play manager here, David. She’s determined to go through with her plan. My question is, how can I help her? How can I make it easier for her? Heck, how can I help us both avoid prison time?
CHAPTER
6
Dr. Lense was running among three different terminals, checking the progress of the sims. She had set up simulations of the modified DNA sequences, and was now testing them against DNA records of various human genotypes to determine if they would actually work in the field.
The first set of results had not been encouraging, and had forced Lense to lose a half hour, time she was acutely aware of. She knew that the deaths would plot out over time like a bell curve, and knew that with every minute wasted she was beginning to ascend the curve. She imagined a grisly pile of corpses, piling up higher and higher in the shape of a bell curve ….
“Gold to sickbay.”
The interruption snapped her out of her reverie. “Whatever it is, make it quick. I’m busy.”
“Doctor, I need a quick medical opinion. Would you concur that not being able to survive in the ecosystem one was born in would be considered a severe birth defect in the individual?”
Lense blinked, then answered slowly. “Yes. Yes, it would.”
“Then I must concede that you are acting to correct a severe and widespread birth defect in the population of Sherman’s Planet. I will so note in the official log and all reports I make to Starfleet on this matter.”
Lense almost fumbled the petri dish in her hand.
“Congratulations, Doctor. You have my blessing for a go-ahead. I’m on board with you—we’ll deal with the legal ramifications later.”
“If it helps, I’ve set up the forty-seventh chromosome with their own marker tags. We’ll probably be able to flush them out of people’s systems later, after we’ve determined that the plague is out of the atmosphere.”
“Probably, she says.”
“Medicine isn’t an exact science, Captain.”
“You’re not doing a very good job of reassuring me, Doctor. How soon can your crazy plan be implemented?”
“Give me another ten minutes. The initial sequences didn’t work out; I’m running simulations on the latest batch now. You can start checking in on the rest of the crew up here, and see if they’re going to be ready to go when I am.”
“Will do. Gold out.”
Lense exhaled. She didn’t realize how much of her breath she had been holding. “Sickbay to Stevens.”
“Go ahead, Doc.”
“How soon are you going to be ready?”
“Cargo transporters are done. I’m finishing final tweaks on the mains. Diego’s been consulting over the coms and whimpering a lot, but we’re actually ahead of schedule here.”
“Good. Get ready, I’m going to have specs for you in a bit.” She turned to Emmett. “How are you doing on the airborne antivirus?”
“I believe we have it completed and ready for testing.”
“Now we’re cooking. Upload them to Stevens. Fabian!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You’ve got a file coming to you from Emmett. Feed that into the cargo transporters and go!”
“Reading the file—got it. And it’s loaded into the transporter buffers. And now, with a wave of my little magic wa—”
“Just run it! I’ve got too many other things to do!”
“You take all the fun out of things. Energizing!”
* * *
“Stevens to bridge. Captain, you should be seeing the first transports now on the big board, if you want. I’m headed to the main transporter room now.”
“Let’s take a look. Wong, put it up on screen. Zoom in.”
“Aye, sir.” A picture of the planet’s surface directly below the ship appeared on the bridge’s main viewscreen, about a hundred square kilometers’ worth. In the atmosphere of the planet, a transporter twinkle started appearing on the planet in a grid pattern—barely seen from high above, it was a thousand points of light blinking in and out, flickering all over the place.
“Okay,” said Gold, “it’s a start.”
* * *
“Okay,” said Lense, “it’s a start. Now comes the hard part. Fabian, how’s it going?”
“Not too bad. Just waiting to hear from—”
“Duffy to Stevens,” said the new voice over the com channel.
“Stevens here. How’s it going down there, Duff?”
“The pattern enhancers are in place around the worst cases down here, Fabe.”
“Cases? Plural?”
“Yeah, Docto—oh, damn. We can’t do it that way? The genetic patterns will get mixed up?”
“No, it should work when we’re doing it en masse, we should be able to do six at a time. But for my initial tests, I need one.”
“Then we can calibrate off that,” Fabian added.
“Okay, hang on.” There was a pause, then a beep. “I just placed my communicator on a patient here. Can you get a lock on her?”
“Scanning—got it.”
“Make sure you’ve got all the medical equipment with her.”
“Tha-a-a-ank you, Duff, I knew that. We’re ready to energize. Doctor?”
Lense stood in sickbay, not moving for five seconds. Had she forgotten anything? She was sure she’d covered everything, and she had to test it somewhere. “Wait, Fabian. I want to be there and see the patient,” she said as she walked toward the door.
“You won’t be able to interact with her. She’ll be behind a force field, to prevent contamination.”
She had already reached the turbolift. “I know. But I want to see her for myself. Deck five.”
“All right. We’re holding here.”
“Thank you. Be there in a few seconds. Lense out.”
Lense sprinted from the turbolift down the corridor to the main transporter room. Stevens was at the console when she came in, and a shimmering force field wall had been erected in front of the transporter platform.
“Ready to go?” Stevens asked.
She took out a tricorder. “Ready. Let’s do it.”
Fabian nodded. “All right, here we go. Energizing.”
He moved his hands across the console, and the familiar hum started. On the platform, a woman appeared on a sickbed. Lense looked at the woman, and she was already beginning to fade—Fabian had programmed the transporter to immediately cycle back and forth. The patient was elderly, Lense estimated her age at around one hundred twenty from what she could see, but the years had not diminished her stare. She caught Lense’s eye just before she completely winked out.
“She’s back here,” Duffy said over the com.
“Confirmed,” Stevens said.
“Are they in her?” Lense asked.
“Yup, no problems. The extra chromosome has been systematically added to every cell in her body. Are we going to wait and see how she took it?”
“No time. I wish there was, but—”
“Right, I understand.”
Stevens nodded. “I think we can start going for multiple transports, then. Duff, how you set up down there?”
“Ready to roll, Fabe. We’re tagging the worst cases and transmitting their frequencies to you.”
“Great. Executing transporter cycling program Stevens-9 now.” Fabian’s hands flashed over the console, and the transporter platform filled with six patients and sickbeds—then they disappeared, to be replaced by another six. Here, then not, here, then not, over and over again in a slow motion strobing effect. It was entrancing.
Lense looked over at Stevens, who was concentrating on the console and muttering under his breath. She got closer to listen, and heard him saying, “Yes, happy to see you here … no waiting, we’ll be right with you … just leave your payments up front … take two of these and call us in the morning …”
Lense reached over tentatively and touched hi
s arm. Stevens half-glanced down where she touched him, but went on with his tasks and mutterings. “Yes, turn your head and cough … Feeling run down? By what?”
She hugged him then.
Stevens didn’t respond, he just kept on working.
She let go and turned to leave, and saw Captain Gold standing quietly in the back of the room. She missed him entirely—had he been there when she rushed in, or did he come in during all the excitement? She started to speak, but Gold held a finger to his lips, then pointed to the door.
The two of them walked out together.
Captain’s Personal Log, Stardate 53670.1.
The worst of it all has passed.
It’s been two weeks since we released the antiviral regimen. We’ve been able to halt the spread of Sherman’s Plague. No new cases have been reported in the last ten days. We repaired much of the damage to the population. Fatalities have been, all things considered, very few—we couldn’t save about a half a percent of the population, they were too far gone. We also had to destroy a portion of the animal population, much to our regret. Luckily, this is a planet that remembers famines, and has prepared for it. And none of the grains were poisoned, so that’s a help.
The real problems have been the secondary effects from lack of services, but Gomez, Corsi, and Duffy have been working long and hard to get them back up to snuff.
Everybody is back on the ship. Gomez has requested that the next time I suggest combining an assignment with a shore leave, I should consider building a hot tub for the Founders’ home-world.
And then there’s Dr. Lense. I ordered her to bed right after they started the transporter therapy—I told her that right now, the only thing to be doing was waiting, and I could do that as well as she could, but I couldn’t catch up on sleep for her. She slept for twenty hours, then she jumped right back into the fray, checking on reports from the planet, seeing how patients were responding, and commandeering the ship’s sensors to track the spread of the antivirus.
She took to the authority much better than I thought she would have. We talked about it, in what I believe will be the last conversation with her I will have to record.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS
G: Come.
L: Good afternoon, Captain.
G: Good afternoon, Doctor. Water for you? Something to nosh on?
L: Tangerine juice, if you don’t mind.
G: Here you go.
L: Thank you. I have the final report on the crew. We were able to keep all of our crew free of the cure virus. As we suspected, many of them were indeed infected, a few weren’t. I’m still trying to figure out why. I suspect a different regime of childhood vaccinations. But it’ll take a while to figure out.
G: So we’ve seen the last of Sherman’s Plague?
L: Except for two test tubes full of it. One’s down there, in the main medical facility. The other’s up here in sickbay.
G: High-level containment fields?
L: No, a jar on my desk. I’m saving it for the holiday party.
G: Cute. Does that mean we’re ready to release the … what would you call it, a counter-chromosome?
L: Already in the works. I want another forty-eight hours, then we can release it.
G: And there should be no side effects from that?
L: None whatsoever.
G: I’m glad to hear it. Speaking of which, I’ve heard back from Starfleet Headquarters.
L: How nice to hear from my favorite people in the quadrant. And what do they have to say for themselves?
G: They’re happy to hear that Sherman’s Plague has been contained. They’re none too thrilled about your methods; however, they’re willing to accept our interpretation of the statutes regarding genetic engineering.
L: Remind me again. What story are we using?
G: Don’t be droll. They still want to punish you for breaking the regs.
L: Ah, yes. Demerits for a job well done.
G: It’s nothing to make light of. I think there are some who wanted your commission, your medical license, and your scalp. Not necessarily in that order.
L: So why aren’t they doing it?
G: Well, there was also a big push from about three million people whose lives you saved that said otherwise. It seemed easier to accept our take on the situation than cause an incident.
L: “An incident”? Captain, I’ve seen some of the opinion columns down there. My favorites were, “we should say we’ve become more genetically enhanced than we really are and scare them into letting us have our way” and “let’s drop a beaker of Sherman’s Plague into San Francisco Bay and see how they like it.”
G: Well, that’s the story and we’re sticking to it. Starfleet doesn’t want a wholesale revision of the laws surrounding genetic engineering.
L: And why not? I’ve recently come to the conclusion that those laws could use a good reexamination.
G: In any event, Doctor, if Starfleet really wanted to take your commission, I’m sure you could retire and live quite comfortably down on Sherman’s Planet. I understand from Administrator Orosz that there’s talk about them putting up statues of you.
L: Oh, good grief.
G: Doctor, you just saved the lives of everyone on the planet.
L: Almost. Not all of them.
G: No, not all. But saving ninety-nine-point-five percent of the population isn’t chicken feed.
L: If you say so. Percentage wise, it’s pretty good. In absolute numbers, that’s 72,134 people—never mind.
G: I know. It’s still a lot of people who died. But it’s a lot more people who lived.
L: A statue, hmm? Are they sure they want a statue for the person who might get them kicked out of the Federation?
G: You saved their lives. I’d think anything after that is something they’d rather deal with than dying.
L: My point all along.
G: For what it’s worth, I don’t think the Federation is going to ask them to leave—they never have before. So they might be a bit healthier than the average human, so what?
L: Of course, there’s never been a case like this before, where a society in the Federation completely reengineered itself.
G: True. But there’s a first time for everything. I just don’t want to think what might happen if a planet decided to do it without this sort of emergency—say, if the Bajorans decided to become stronger than the Jem’Hadar.
L: Speaking of first times for everything, how big is my statue going to be?
G: Oy. Have I just overinflated your ego?
L: I’m a doctor. Our egos are naturally overinflated.
G: I suppose that’s what happens when you have that much pressure placed on you.
L: Simple hydraulics.
G: Occasionally, you do get blowouts. Or fast leaks.
L: Nothing some maintenance won’t take care of.
G: I don’t know how much more I can provide—I’d think you’d want to be handled by more professional psychiatrists, not an amateur like myself.
L: No, I think I’d like to keep coming for a while. Besides which, I really think you have a few issues of your own that need addressing—your feelings of alienation about being the hardcore Starfleet man among all the engineers, all of whom are far more advanced than you in their specialties, and thus you have to rely on them, undermining your authority over them.
G: I’m a Starfleet captain. Our egos are naturally overinflated, too. And unlike doctors, we don’t get extra points for being humble either. Incidentally, Dr. Lense—don’t ever pull that shtick of threatening my command again.
L: I’ll make you a deal, Captain. You don’t attempt to countermand me in my area of expertise, and I won’t try to run the ship.
G: Such a deal.
L: I thought so. Though, to be fair, you do make a decent counselor. Not professional in any sense, but—
G: But good enough for a friend, Elizabeth?
L: Good afternoon, Captain.
G: Good afternoon, Doctor. You�
��re welcome back at any time.
L: I’ll be around. Thank you again for the juice.
TRANSCRIPT ENDS
I’m under no illusions that she’s fully cured—I don’t really have that big an ego. In fact, this recent lionization may have just exchanged one set of neuroses for another, from feelings of inadequacy to feelings of superiority and arrogance. However, at the very least she’s functional again, so I’ll take it as an improvement. But I will have to keep an eye on her.
I wonder what she meant by that “undermined authority” crack. I’ll have to ask her about that next time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GLENN HAUMAN is a man of many talents and many more job prospects. He was in e-publishing back when most folks thought that e-books would be delivered over floppy disks, and he decided finally to write one instead of publishing them. He was an editorial consultant to Simon & Schuster Interactive for many years, contributing to the Star Trek Encyclopedia, Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, and many other Star Trek CD-ROMs (and a Farscape one, just to be different). His X-Men short stories “On The Air” (The Ultimate X-Men) and “Chasing Hairy” (X-Men Legends) were featured on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Seeing Ear Theater. He’s given up on his cunning plan to add extra hours to the day, and is now trying to add the hours to the week where there’s more room. If he can pull that off, he promises to use the extra time to update his web page so you can read an even longer version of his biography.
