“You admit to breaking and entering? I should call security—”
Rasmussen gave a magnanimous wave. “Go right ahead, don’t mind me.”
“What?”
“Go on, if you want to. See, I don’t think you can, really, because they’d ask you for identification, and while you’ve presumably got sufficiently legit ID to rent the room and the garage, I’m guessing you don’t have ID that would stand up to a really thorough background check.”
“You’re drunk. And offensive, I might add.” Kent tried to usher Rasmussen out, but the taller man didn’t budge.
“I don’t think it’s offensive to hold the belief that a man who hasn’t been born yet won’t be able to produce a valid birth certificate. So, when are you from?”
“I’m . . . an alien.” Rasmussen shook his head at that.
“No, you’re human. You left a newspaper from next week on the chair too.”
Kent slumped, and flopped into a chair. “All right, you win. Yes, I’m from the future. Fine. Isn’t that enough? Does it matter exactly when?”
“Let’s have a drink at The Hidden Panda, and maybe some lunch, and talk about that.”
“Er . . . All right. Let me just change my coat.” The professor hurried out, and Rasmussen followed him lazily. Kent was standing in the garage when Rasmussen caught up with him. The empty garage.
“What have you done with my—with my property?!”
“Anyone can hire a truck.”
“Not anyone did this. You did.”
“Well, I can’t have you zipping off back to whenever you come from without first having that chat.”
Drinks calmed things down. For once, Rasmussen wasn’t paying much attention to Jo.
“What if you brought a lot of technology back? You could become rich! Invent all those—”
He broke off as Kent shook his head vehemently.
“Can’t do that. You’d be risking a violation of the conservation of reality.”
“The conservation of what?!”
“Reality.” The prof took a drink and sniffed. “Look, it’s like this. Some people think that there might be an infinite number of parallel universes, and that every action, however small, is just one of however many possibilities, and there’s a universe for all of them.”
“Okay, so far so good. What’s wrong with that?”
“Well. Look at this drink. Bourbon, a decent brand. What if it was a different brand of bourbon? Is there a separate reality, a separate fourteen-billion-year existence of a universe for each brand of bourbon in that glass at this moment?”
Rasmussen felt his head start to spin. He didn’t think he’d had that much to drink yet. “That would seem rather excessive, but that’s the natural—and may I say wonderfully so—world.”
“Exactly!” He nodded and took a sip. “Except it’s probably a load of bollocks.”
“It is?”
“The theory of the conservation of reality goes like this: Time and space as we know it both came into existence in the first couple of seconds of the Big Bang, right?”
“That’s what I was taught,” Rasmussen agreed.
“They’re both pretty elastic. If a new planet forms out of a nebula, the universe can accommodate it, it’s not a problem. With me so far?”
“So far.” Just, Rasmussen thought.
“Right, so, if I come back and, say, drink this bourbon, thus causing the alcoholic who would have drunk it otherwise to not do so, and have a hangover, and not make it to work . . . Time can absorb that too.”
“Okay . . .”
“But, if I come back with, say, a Klingon battle fleet of four hundred years hence and make sure the Federation never existed . . .”
“Time can’t absorb that?”
“No. It’d have to cough it up and spit it out. A new timeline.” Kent emphasized the words with a jabbing finger.
Rasmussen followed that fine. “Right. But, from the way you’re talking, I’m presuming there’s some kind of limit below which that doesn’t happen?”
“Exactly!” Kent seemed delighted at Rasmussen’s understanding.
“And what sort of limit is it?”
Kent shrugged. “Buggered if I know. It’s not an exact science, really. Oh, there are those who’ve made up little names for discrete units of unreality or paradox, but they’re all just guessing like the rest of us. Smaller is safer though.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Don’t be too sure. Smaller is safer now, but may not always be, or have been. Depends on whether there’s anything to the homeostatic factor of the universe.”
“The what?” Rasmussen had never heard of that.
“There appears—in my time anyway—to be some truth to the homeostatic universe theory, which says that anything might exist or not exist according to whether the universe needs it to maintain its own best-balanced existence.”
“You’re drunk.”
“No, no, no . . . So for example, magic and dragons. If the universe needs magic and dragons to exist, then they exist. If it needs them not to exist, then they don’t. If it needs them to have never existed—even if it and they previously did—then they never existed. Even if it and they, et cetera, et cetera . . . You’re right, I’m a little bit rat-arsed, aren’t I?”
“Just a tiny bit. Not so much that anybody else will have noticed.”
“I need . . . medicine.”
Two weeks after their conversation in The Hidden Panda, Rasmussen was still pressuring Professor Kent to share his knowledge of the future in an equal partnership, and making sure he didn’t find his time pod. He had hoped that encouraging the prof to talk about the laws of causality and conservation of reality would loosen his tongue enough to let slip about other historical events and technological developments.
If he could reverse-engineer something so advanced as to be magical, he could make his fortune. Sadly, Kent was still taking the conversations away from those issues, and getting more out of Rasmussen about the recent Romulan War than Rasmussen was getting out of him.
He had at least inadvertently provided Rasmussen with some reading material. There had been a data slate—a current commercial model—in his pocket, but it was filled with files and reports about people with names like Picard, Seven, and Gowron. It was fascinating stuff, and he could have filled whole shelves in a library with these reports of starships and space stations in distant areas of the galaxy that no one had ever heard of.
Now Kent was, as far as Rasmussen was concerned, playing the sick card.
At least the prof was saving money, as Rasmussen had let him move in to the spare room. He lived alone, since his wife had left him five years ago.
“I’ll get you some medicine. There’s a pharmacy two blocks away, and there’s the university hospital if there’s a more specialized problem.”
“No, no hospital.” Kent laughed uncomfortably. “Identification might be a problem, and as soon as they take a blood sample . . . They might see some things they really oughtn’t to see.”
“The pharmacy, then.”
“They won’t have the medicine I need. The condition won’t be discovered for another three hundred years, because it will be almost that long before the random mutations occur that allow the condition to arise. There is no medication for it in this century. I need the medicine from the pod.”
“Oh no, no. That’s just a little convenient, isn’t it?” Rasmussen said. “No, I don’t buy that one, Prof!”
“Look, you bloody twat, I have to—”
“No.” And that, Rasmussen thought, was the end of it.
At least Kent wasn’t snoring or wheezing the next morning, which was a nice change.
“Come on, Professor, it’s a bright new day in beautiful downtown Trenton!” Kent didn’t stir. “I’ve got sausages and tomatoes and mushrooms on the stove. That’s what you Brits like for breakfast, isn’t it? The full English. At least they do in this century, so I hope they still have that
in your time . . .”
There was still no reaction from the older man, and the joke was wearing a bit thin, as far as Rasmussen was concerned. “All right, come on. Joke’s over, and it’s time to get your ass out of bed and get to work.” He reached down and grabbed the professor’s shoulder, to shake him awake.
He instinctively knew something was wrong, even as he hauled the man over. By the time the professor’s slack, pale face slumped into view, Rasmussen’s brain had caught up with how cold the guy’s skin felt under his hand.
The professor’s eyes were stuck slightly open, and a trail of dried drool ran down his cheek from the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t breathing, putting a dampener on Rasmussen’s joy at his silence.
Every curse and swearword that Rasmussen had ever heard of tumbled through his head, fighting for airtime that none of them got. There were just too many of them for one to take control of his tongue, and he found that he suddenly couldn’t shift the breath in his chest either. The best Rasmussen could manage as a eulogy was a rather strangled little gasp.
How did one get rid of a corpse? Worse, how did one get rid of a corpse that had never been alive, or at least not yet? Rasmussen knew he couldn’t just take the prof to a hospital, lest some doctor discover something about future medicine. He couldn’t let that happen unless he had already formed a partnership with the doc to share any patents and royalties.
He also couldn’t just dump the prof somewhere, because pretty soon he’d be tracked down on suspicion of murder.
In the end, he took the body, in the middle of the night, to the shabby and run-down self-storage garage that he’d hired to keep the time pod in. It sat gathering dust on the grimy cement floor, with only a freezer, a steel filing cabinet, and a couple of moldy cardboard cartons for company.
This was the first stroke of luck he’d had in a month, because, as he was dragging the corpse toward the freezer in the back of the room, its hand flopped across and brushed the side of the time pod, just for a moment.
The time pod made a clunk.
Rasmussen froze, dropping the feet of the corpse, and turned slowly to look at the time pod. The door, at long last, and with painful slowness, lifted open. Rasmussen could hardly bear it, and crouched down with his head cricked to one side to see the fabulous revelations as early as possible. This was, after all, the first true time machine, or at least it would become the first once he “invented” it.
Just how advanced was such a vehicle? Would it have anything he would even recognize as technology, or would it be as far beyond his understanding as a warp reactor would be beyond a Victorian steam engineer? The anticipation was killing him.
The door edged up and out, and Rasmussen drank in the sight that he beheld. There was a small cargo space, the walls and ceiling all quilted with some kind of shining metallic mesh, but otherwise little different from the back of a van or a shuttlepod. A couple of seats at the front gave the user a comfortable position from which to operate the controls on the dashboard console.
Rasmussen’s smile froze on his face. Regular seats and a dash. Somehow it wasn’t as magical as he had hoped. It was one thing to go along with Clarke’s Law, and accept that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, but it was strangely disappointing when said advanced technology was indistinguishable from the downright commonplace.
He sighed. “Should have expected it, I suppose,” he muttered to himself. Ever since humans had started building enclosed vehicles, the layout had always been the same. Two seats in front of a dash, whether they were in a ground car, a truck, an airplane, a shuttlepod, or a time vessel.
There was a data slate lying on the seat, and he hoped it contained a user manual.
Forgetting about the body cooling on the cement, he picked up the slate and began to read. He already knew where, and when, he wanted to visit.
10
Scotty and La Forge walked through the corridors of Intrepid’s D-deck, admiring the handiwork of the engineers. The ship looked as good as new, as far as Scotty could tell, with not a speck of dead biomatter remaining. It was a cold ship, though, as if its bones were still frozen somewhere deep inside.
“It’s like steppin’ back a hundred years,” Scotty whispered in amazement. “Right into history.” He wondered if Geordi would feel the same way about his Enterprise, the original NCC-1701.
“More like two hundred,” La Forge said, “but you’re right, I feel like it’s 2162 today.”
Scotty reached out a hand, letting his fingertips brush across the handle that was set into the circular buttress at his side. “Aye . . . I never thought I’d be aboard a ship that both of us are equally out of place on.”
“Frankly, I wasn’t sure we could actually get her powered up again.”
Scotty, if he was honest with himself, hadn’t thought it was possible either, but if there was one thing he’d learned about getting people to continue doing their best, it was to never express surprise at their success. At his own success, yes, but not at other people’s. “If our people hadn’t had a wee bit o’ practice by bringin’ Columbia home, we might never have managed it, but I guess everything’s easier the second time.” They stopped by the door to engineering, which La Forge unlocked and pushed open. Scotty remained astonished to see a starship door that actually swung on hinges. “Bloody hell, lad, next we’ll be seeing that the shuttlebay doors are sealed with a padlock.”
“They always said the past is another country.”
“Gettin’ an entry visa is always the tricky part, isn’t it?”
La Forge laughed as they entered the engine room. The central reactor and warp core were encased in bronze-colored panels, rather than being transparent and glowing as he was used to. Reg Barclay turned from the main panel as they entered. “Commander, Captain. We’re, uh, pretty sure the warp core is good to go. We’d like to run some more tests before trying to move the ship, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t go to warp right now.”
“We’re in no hurry,” Scotty assured him. “Take as much time as you need.” It was nice to be able to be generous with time, and not have to be rushing to jury-rig things.
“Really?” Barclay seemed surprised, and Scotty supposed it was because he was so used to those kinds of emergencies in his career.
“Really.”
“Besides, Reg,” La Forge added, “we’ve got a long way to go to get full computer control, and we won’t be moving until we do. The logs can tell us what happened here, and if it was an internal problem, we don’t want it happening to us.”
“You’ve no arguments from me on that, Commander.”
Scotty smiled and nodded. “Good. It sounds like you know what needs to be done here, Geordi. I’ll return to the Challenger and see whether we can slave the Intrepid’s computer to ours, and bring it online that way.”
“Okay.”
Scotty tapped the combadge on his vest, and said, “Scott to Challenger, one to beam over.”
As Scotty stepped out of the turbolift and onto the Challenger’s bridge, a proximity alarm blared. Scotty looked over to Nog.
“Klingon vessel decloaking, sir. Vor’cha-class.”
“Put her on screen.” Scotty made for his seat, but didn’t make it there before he was knocked almost off his feet.
The bridge shook with an echoing thud, and Scotty and Nog both had to hang on to the rail to stay upright. Brahms almost fell from the seat at the engineering station, where she had just sat down ten minutes earlier. More alarms went off, and Nog started to announce something. “That was a bloody photon torpedo hit.” Scotty cut him off. “Red Alert!” Qat’qa was already throwing the ship into a roll, but Scotty called out to her anyway. “Evasive maneuvers, Kat!” It was more for the benefit of the rest of the bridge crew, so that they would know he was on top of things. Kat didn’t reply, but Scotty could see her grin from where he was lowering himself into the center seat.
What the bloody hell are the Klingons playing
at? he wondered. Stepping back into history was nice enough, but not when it meant going back to the bad old days of conflict with the Klingons.
The ship rocked again, less severely this time, and the Klingon warship momentarily flitted across the main viewer, swooping toward Intrepid and her cluster of support shuttles and runabouts. “There’s something a wee bit off about that ship,” Scotty mused aloud. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, beyond that it was attacking two Federation ships. He still had to remind himself that it was an unusual act for Klingons in this era.
“Lieutenant Nog, I want a spread of torpedoes up that ship’s jacksie before they can do any more damage. Try to cripple their engines, so we can have a wee chat with them, if we can.”
“Aye, sir.” Nog glanced across his tactical board.
The screen tilted, and the Klingon ship weaved across it again. It was a familiar shape, with two drooping warp nacelles and a long neck stretching out from its infernal red and yellow hull. “That’s it,” Scotty snarled, cursing himself for not having noticed the obvious immediately. He’d had more than enough dealings with the Klingons in his time to know what their ships ought to look like. “That’s no bloody Klingon Defense Force ship. Not in those colors.”
“No, sir,” Qat’qa agreed.
Nog touched a control and looked up. “It’s not transmitting a Klingon transponder code.”
“Of course not,” Qat’qa scoffed.
“If it’s not Klingon, who does it belong to?”
“No one who deserves to be flying it,” Qat’qa said firmly.
“It could be almost anyone,” Tyler Hunt commented from the seat at Scotty’s right hand. “Since the Klingon Civil War quite a few vessels loyal to the Duras found their way onto the black market, and that has only become more common since the Borg conflict. There are a lot of salvageable ships out there.”
“Klingon vessels are robust enough,” Scotty mused, “but they tend not to be state of the art.”
Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic Page 13
