by KATHY OLTION
The laboratory door slid open behind him. Footsteps, then: “I should have known I’d find you here. Looks like you’re working hard.” The Southern drawl and the derision it carried were unmistakable.
Spock didn’t open his eyes. “It may be difficult for you to fathom, Doctor, but yes, I am indeed working hard.”
“Yeah, I can practically smell the smoke.” Another three footsteps. McCoy stood just behind his left shoulder now. “What are you working on? Looks like all your equipment is at the other end of the bench.”
“That is another experiment, irrelevant to the matter at hand.”
“Oh? What’s it do?”
Spock took a deep breath. “It was an attempt to increase our ship’s long-range sensing capabilities utilizing the quantum instability and extreme energy density of an olivium power supply. Unfortunately, it does not function as designed.”
“Why not?”
Spock opened his eyes and turned his head toward the doctor. “Did you have a purpose in coming here other than to disrupt my thought processes?”
“Not really.” Instead of taking the hint, McCoy came around and sat on the countertop beside him. “I’ve got everybody patched up as best I can after our little encounter with the laser beam out there, so I thought I’d check out the wounds that aren’t so obvious on the surface.”
T’plana-Hath save me, thought Spock. He’s talking about human psychology.
Sure enough, McCoy said, “We’re lookin’ defeat in the eye and we haven’t got so much as a pop-gun to even the odds. The depression around here is thick enough to cut with a knife. And you and the captain are under the most pressure of all. I wanted to see how you were holding up.”
“Thank you for your concern,” Spock said. “I am fine.”
“I’m the doctor. Let me be the judge of that. Are you eating okay? Sleeping at all? Sleeping too much?”
Spock thought of the antiphase wave cancellation headphones resting against the grav board just a half-meter away. He could put them on, adjust them to the pitch of a human voice, and Dr. McCoy could ask all the questions he wanted. The headphones would generate an exact duplicate of the sound waves that made up his voice, only out of phase with the original, effectively cancelling it out. McCoy could natter on at length, and Spock could get on with the business of figuring out how to neutralize the laser.
Unfortunately, decorum and basic civility required that he endure the doctor’s personal inquisition instead.
“My caloric intake is adequate. I have not slept in seventy-nine hours, but this is not unusual for a Vulcan.”
“You’re half human. We need eight hours a day; you should get at least four.”
Antiphase wave cancellation, Spock thought. Then he suddenly said it aloud. “Antiphase wave cancellation.” He nearly inflected his voice with excitement, but McCoy would never let him hear the end of it if he did.
“What?”
Spock stood up. “Thank you, doctor. You have provided the solution to our dilemma.”
“I have? How?”
“Lasers are collimated light beams, with all the waveforms aligned peak-to-peak. We merely need to fire another laser beam of exactly the same frequency, but out of phase with the first, along the same path as the original. The two beams will cancel one another out.”
McCoy squinted at him as if he had confessed to an emotional fondness for Klingons. “You, uh, want to fire another laser at Belle Terre?” His right hand edged nervously toward his communicator.
“It would work,” Spock said. He moved down to the end of the bench and carried his sensor experiment back to the center. It hadn’t behaved as he had designed it, but with a little more modification it might suffice to detect the wavefront of the approaching laser beam. “When light waves cancel out, they leave no trace. Both beams would simply cease to exist.”
“If they cancelled out. I don’t know a whole lot about optics, but isn’t it true that two light waves can reinforce each other just as easily?”
Spock nodded. “That is true, but only if they are in phase. We will be sure not to allow that to happen.”
McCoy slid off the bench to give him room to set his breadboarded circuitry. “How are you going to do that? A wavelength of light is, what, a couple of microns across? How are you going to position your second laser that accurately? It’d be impossible under the best of conditions, but yours would have to be fired during Gamma Night! We’d be lucky if we got within a country mile of where we needed to be.”
“That is what this equipment is for,” Spock said. “I believe I can modify it to provide a subspace echo off the laser beam. Its efficiency is less than two percent, which makes it useless for general scanning because of the poor signal-to-noise ratio, but since we already know roughly where the beam is, we should be able to filter out extraneous signals and eventually locate it with the necessary precision.”
“You think. You’re going to trust people’s lives to an untested gadget?”
Spock started plugging in his equipment. “No, Doctor, I plan to trust their lives to a tested one, which will be much easier to do if you allow me to get to work.”
“You’re nuts! You’ve cracked under the pressure. You—”
“Is that your professional evaluation?”
“It is.”
Spock counted slowly to ten. As the ship’s chief surgeon, McCoy could order him to sickbay for mental evaluation. It could be hours before his monitors proved that there was no pathological illness, if indeed the doctor believed his monitors. By the time Spock was free of his clutches, the point could be moot.
Choosing his words with care, he said, “I propose to fire a second laser beam at a planet that is already doomed if we do nothing. If we fail, we do no harm. If we succeed, we save the planet, the colony, and with it the Federation’s control of perhaps the most valuable resource in the galaxy. I believe the idea has enough merit to at least do a feasibility study.”
McCoy cocked his head to the side. Listening to inner voices, perhaps. But whatever they told him, they were apparently on Spock’s side. “All right,” McCoy said. “I agree that the concept has merit. But even if you could fire a second beam with enough precision to do the job, we can’t build the laser in the time we’ve got left. We’d have to drag a comet down here ahead of it, cut it in half, silver it, build the light source . . . it can’t be done. Not in three days.”
“You are correct,” Spock said, powering up the sensor array.
“Look, I’m telling you—what?”
“Your logic is impeccable. We will do it another way.”
“I . . . how?”
“I do not yet know, but the sooner you allow me to begin experimentation, the sooner I will.”
“Oh. Right.” McCoy shook his head as if he were trying to coax a different answer out of it, but at last he took a few steps toward the door. He turned around halfway there. “Do sleep on it before you do anything drastic, okay?”
“I will,” Spock promised. As he watched the doctor leave the science lab, he vowed to keep that promise, too. But he had made no promise regarding how long he would sleep.
Chapter Twenty-eight
SCOTTY LOOKED sadly at the immense starship before him. He was in one of the shuttles, coasting backwards nearly five kilometers ahead of her in orbit, but even from that distance the damage was obvious. Half the ship was still its normal light gray, but the other half was the pearlescent silver of bare hull. Tiny specks of light on the silver side showed where work crews were busy repairing the damage, but Scotty knew they were only patching holes. There was more damage inside that couldn’t be fixed, not this far from a starbase. They were at the far end of a tenuous supply chain, and they could only stockpile so much equipment.
He cursed Vellyngaith, cursed the laser the Kauld had built, cursed the damage it had done to Scotty’s beautiful ship. So the very notion of sitting here in space and waiting for the signal to fire another laser at her felt like betrayal of the
worst sort.
Still, Spock had the only plan going. It had about as much chance of working as an arrow had of stopping a cannonball, but if the cannonball was on its way, he supposed the archer might as well shoot. A last act of defiance if nothing else.
Besides, Scotty had set the shuttlecraft’s laser to a tiny fraction of its maximum-rated power. At this setting, it would barely warm the Enterprise’s hull even if it missed the target: a light sensor mounted dead square in the middle of the deflector army. Scotty wondered how valid a test this would be of their ability to cancel out a beam of the strength that was bearing down on them, but he supposed they had to start somewhere.
The Vulcan’s voice came over the comm. “Ready here, Mr. Scott.”
“Aye,” Scotty replied, reaching for the firing stud. “Here goes nothin’.”
The laser fired, and in the same instant the interior of the shuttle lit up with grainy red light. Scotty had scattered a couple kilograms of atomic iron dust on his way out here so the ship’s sensors could track the light beams, but the scatter shouldn’t have been anything like this.
“Hey!” he yelled. “You hit me!”
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Spock said.
“You’re darn tootin’ it shouldn’t!” Scotty said, blinking rapidly and watching the afterimages flash in his field of vision. That had been bright.
“What was your energy setting?” Spock asked.
Scotty read the digital meter. “One watt, just like we agreed.”
“My beam was one watt as well. Wavelength?”
“Six hundred nanometers.”
“Mine also. They should have cancelled—wait a moment.”
“What?”
“Mine apparently did cancel yours. Unless you missed the target.”
“I can shoot a laser, laddiebuck.”
Spock took a moment before he replied. “Let’s run the test again.”
“Just a sec.” Scotty polarized the window to cut down on the glare if he was hit again, then made doubly sure he was aimed at the target. “Ready.”
“Fire at will.”
He pressed the stud again. Brilliant light flooded the cabin for just an instant; not as bad as before, but only because of the polarizing filter. The Enterprise’s beam had hit him again.
“Interesting,” Spock said.
“I still got zapped over here. Did my beam get cancelled out again?”
“I don’t believe it did either time. Yours seems to have disappeared before mine reached it.”
Scotty rubbed his eyes. “Not to contradict you, but that’s flat-out impossible, isn’t it?”
“Apparently not,” Spock said.
Scotty thought through the stages of the test. When he fired his laser, Spock’s souped-up subspace scanner would detect the energy pulse as the leading edge of the beam plowed through the dust. It would return a very faint but detectable subspace echo that would pinpoint the advancing beam long before it reached the ship. That would trigger the Enterprise’s return beam, which should have met Scotty’s beam head-on. Normally that would do no good, since light beams have to be travelling in the same direction to interfere with one another, but they had used an old trick known as temporal waveform inversion to make the outgoing wave look like an incoming wave. And since the two were out of phase and had the same power level, they should have cancelled each other out.
Okay, so where in that process could Scotty’s beam have been cancelled out prematurely?
“It’s got to be your scanner pulse,” he said. “That’s the only other thing that’s hitting my incoming beam.”
“There is also the dust,” Spock reminded him.
“Aye, but we’ve been firing lasers through dust for centuries and nobody’s ever had one disappear on ’em before. Not at this thin a density.”
“It does seem unlikely that the dust is the cause,” Spock admitted. “That would leave the questing beam, as you say.”
There were a few seconds of silence as both men tried to puzzle out what was going on. Scotty watched the Enterprise floating before him in space while his mind soared farther and farther away . . . but his thoughts swooped back to the present when Spock said, “Neutrinos?”
“What about neutrinos?”
“When I first tried an olivium-enhanced scanner, I detected a large pulse of neutrinos every time I sent out a signal. I was unable to determine where the neutrinos were coming from. What if they were ordinary photons, quantum-shifted by the olivium?”
Scotty tried to imagine how that would work. “That’s not just a quantum shift; that’s a shift from one kind o’ fundamental particle to another.”
“Not an uncommon occurrence,” Spock reminded him.
“Not in a nuclear reaction, maybe, but in free space it certainly is.” Scotty chewed his lower lip in thought, then said, “We ought to be able to test that theory easily enough. Set up your receiver to look for neutrinos, and I’ll fire another laser at you. If the neutrino count spikes when I shoot, we’ll know that’s it.”
He could hear Spock tinkering with the circuitry, then, “Ready.”
“Here we—wait a second.” Scotty stopped with his finger poised over the button. “Have you shut off your laser? There’s no need o’ me getting blinded for this one.”
“Good point. The laser is now off-line.”
“Here goes.” Scotty fired the laser. This time he could see the beam lance out toward the Enterprise, but it never connected. About a third of the way between the shuttle and the starship, the bright red thread of light simply faded out.
“Neutrino burst detected,” Spock said.
“Let’s try a patterned pulse,” Scotty said, “just to make sure it’s not coincidence.” He tapped the fire button once, then twice in quick succession, then three times, then five, then seven, then eleven.
“I am receiving a sequence of prime numbers,” Spock said.
“That’s what I sent.” A sudden thought made Scotty laugh.
“What do you find amusing about prime numbers?” Spock asked.
“I’m thinking about where these neutrinos might wind up. They can travel right through a planet without being absorbed. That sequence of prime numbers could make it halfway across the universe before they finally hit something. Can you imagine what could happen if somebody in another galaxy detects them?”
“They would think they were being hailed by an intelligent entity. Yes, I see the irony.”
Scotty frowned. “Spock, you have an uncanny way with words, do you know that?”
“My apologies, Mr. Scott. It was not my intention to insult you. I was merely pointing out the—”
“Aye, never mind.” He didn’t really care. They had just discovered an unexplained new phenomenon that might just save their collective bacon from the fire. He said, “It looks like we’ve got a magic transmutation ray that’ll turn photons into neutrinos. Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”
“Unfortunately, the distance between us is too great to allow a mind-meld, but if you are proposing to aim our olivium-enhanced sensor array at the oncoming Kauld laser beam, then the answer is yes. But before we do that, we should test its ability to transmute photon streams at the energy density required.”
“Which means shootin’ a bigger laser beam at the Enterprise.”
“That is correct. Also, we should determine whether or not the neutrinos stay neutrinos outside of the influence of the modified sensor array.”
“You could send a probe out in the opposite direction from me.”
“I will do so.” Scotty heard Spock tapping at the science lab’s control station, then he saw a bright spark shoot away from the back of the Enterprise and disappear into warp drive.
“I am steering the probe into position one light-second away,” Spock reported. “Checking alignment . . . on station. You may fire when ready.”
“I’m setting it at one kilowatt,” Scotty said. If a beam of that strength hit the Enterprise, it would
do some damage to the target, but not to the hull behind it. “Firing.” He pressed the fire button.
The streak of red light was much brighter this time, but it disappeared in the same place as far as he could tell.
“Neutrino burst detected here,” said Spock. “Probe data coming in. This is . . . fascinating.”
“What?”
“Your laser beam destroyed the probe.”
“It turned back into photons?”
“That would seem to be the case.”
Scotty slumped back in his chair. So close. For a moment there he had allowed himself to believe that they had found a way to beat the Kauld’s superweapon, but it wouldn’t work if the beam reappeared the moment it left the influence of the olivium-powered scanners. It would just reappear a few meters underground, and would cook the planet just as well as if it hit from space.
Spock said, “That is not encouraging, but the neutrinos did make it all the way through the Enterprise’s primary hull before they reverted to their original state. That implies a definite duration beyond the influence of my sensors. We should experiment with probes closer to the ship and see if we can determine the point at which the transition occurs.”
“Aye, that we should,” Scotty said. They’d had their moment of serendipity; now it was time to do the science to see if it would amount to anything. It was going to be a long afternoon.
Chapter Twenty-nine
“WAIT A MINUTE,” Kirk said. “You want us to do what?” He had been at his desk in his briefing room, going over progress reports on the repair and refitting of the colony’s starships, when Spock and Scotty had come up from the science lab with the most bizarre cock-and-bull story he’d ever heard.
“Use the deflector array to turn the laser beam into neutrinos,” Spock repeated. “Mr. Scott and I have determined the parameters of the effect, and we believe that a sufficient number of olivium-enhanced deflector units can effect a temporary transmutation of the beam long enough to allow it to pass harmlessly through the planet.”
