All Good Things__ - Michael Jan Friedman [48]
Her colleague sighed. “Sure I am. But I can’t help thinking about rule number twenty-nine.”
“Rule number twenty-nine?” repeated Gomez. “What’s that?”
“The sightseeing’s just as good on the way home,” replied Lefler. Her brow creased as she scrutinized her monitor a little more closely. Gomez regarded her. “What does that mean?” Without looking up, Lefler patted her on the shoulder. “It means pay attention to those power-transfer ratios— or we might not get home.”
“Oh,” said Gomez. And, reflecting on the wisdom of rule number twenty-nine, she put her thoughts of undiscovered star systems aside.
At least, for the time being.
It hadn’t taken long to reach the Devron system, Picard reflected, as he considered the viewscreen from his captain’s chair. Or, for that matter, to discover that there was something there well worth the trip.
Data swiveled in his chair. “According to our sensors, we have located the anomaly.”
Geordi whistled from his engineering station. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he commented. “Nor have I,” agreed Worf. “It’s beautiful,” observed Deanna. “So’s a Venus’s-flytrap,” Riker reminded them.
It was just as the long-range scan reports had described it—a riotous blaze of color, pierced through with shafts of silver light. On the screen, the phenomenon had an ethereal quality to it, rendering it both spectacular and frightening all at once.
Getting up from his chair, Picard took a few steps toward it. He could almost feel it staring back at him, challenging him to unravel its secrets before it was too late.
He turned to Data, who was sitting at ops. “Full scan,” he said. “Aye, sir,” the android replied, and set to work.
As the captain watched Data’s fingers fly over his controls…
… he had the strangest feeling that he had made another time shift. A quick look around confirmed it. If Tasha was at tactical, he was back in the past.
Data turned to glance back over his shoulder at Picard. “We are approaching the Devron system, Captain. Sensors are picking up a large subspace anomaly directly ahead.”
Picard grunted softly. Where had he heard that be-fore? “All stop. Put it on screen,” he commanded.
As before, the viewscreen showed him the conflagra-tion of temporal energies that composed the spatial anomaly. This time, however, it took up a good deal more of the screen.
Without meaning to, the captain said, “It’s bigger, isn’t it?” Troi looked at him. “Sir?”
Picard shook his head. “Nothing. Full scan, Mr. Data.” “Aye, sir.”
Taking a couple of steps forward, the captain peered at the screen, where the anomaly… … was gone!
Picard blinked, but he couldn’t make the thing come back. Instead, the viewscreen displayed a single yellow sun and three lifeless, nondescript planets.
Even before he surveyed his surroundings, he knew that he was in the future again. It was the only one of the three time frames in which his thoughts were so mud-dled, his brain so unresponsive.
“I’ve made a complete scan of the Devron system,” said Data. “Sensors show nothing out of the ordinary.”
Picard turned and saw that the android was at an aft console, working with La Forge as Worf looked on. The Klingon was shaking his shaggy head. “No,” said the captain. “That can’t be.”
He walked aft to join them; his heart was thudding against his ribs. Surely, they had made some mistake.
“I’ve already seen it in the other two… the other two time periods,” he protested. “There should be a… a huge spatial anomaly here.”
Geordi looked up. ‘Tm sorry, sir, but we’ve checked everything. There’s just nothing here.”
That wasn’t right. It had to be here, thought Picard. It had to be.
CHAPTE R 117
It wasn’t the result Beverly had hoped for. As she stood there with the othhers at the science station, her heart went out to Jean-Luc.
He had been so sure that they would find something out here. She had even begun to wonder if he might not be right—if all this business about time travel and mankind’s destruction might not have had some tenu-ous basis in fact.
However, the evidence