All Good Things__ - Michael Jan Friedman [66]
Dr. Crusher placed her hand on Picard’s shoulder. “Jean-Luc, you’d better come with me.”
But the captain jerked away from her. “Leave me alone!” he croaked. “I’m not crazy.”
Data had his doubts about that. It seemed that Picard was farther gone than he had thought.
“The tachyon pulses,” the older man ranted. “They were used in the same spot. The same location in all three time periods… don’t you see?”
The doctor tried again to calm him down. “Jean-Luc… please…”
But Picard persisted. “When the tachyon pulse used the… I mean, when the Pasteur used the tachyon pulse, we set the… you know, we… we started everything. We set it in motion.”
The android felt badly for him. He knew what it was like to lose one’s faculties. There had been several times during his stint on the Enterprise when he’d been partially or completely incapacitated.
However, those had been temporary conditions. He had never had to endure a slow and painful deterioration, as in the captain’s case—or to face the certainty that, one day, he would lose his faculties entirely.
“It’s like… the chicken and the egg!” rambled Pi-card. “You think it started back then… but it didn’t. It started here, in the future. That’s why… why it gets larger in the past…” Larger in the past… ?
The android tilted his head slightly as he considered that. How strange. Though it seemed to be merely a component of a sick man’s ravings, there was a certain logic to the statement as well.
Was it possible that the captain knew what he was talking about after all7 Data thought for a moment— and only a moment. He was, after all, an artificial intelligence.
Admiral Riker hit his corem badge. “Riker to security. We have a problem in Ten-Forward. Send a team to—”
Data spoke up. “Just a moment, sir. I believe I understand what the captain is saying.” The admiral looked at him. “You do?”
“Yes. If I’m not mistaken, he is describing aparadox.”
Picard held his trembling fists out to the android. “Yes! Yes, exactly!”
Data began to pace. He had become accustomed to doing his best thinking that way. And besides, it seemed like a very professorial thing to do.
“Let us assume for the moment,” he said, “that the captain has indeed been traveling through time. Let us also assume he has initiated an inverse tachyon pulse at the same location in space in all three time periods.”
“Go on,” instructed Geordi. Obviously, he was intrigued, now that Data had gotten into the act.
“In that case,” the android continued, “it is possible that the tachyon beams could’re transited through the subspace barrier and caused an anti-time ruptureú This rupture would manifest itself as a spatial anomalyú”
“Right,” said the former chief engineer. “I see where you’re going. The anomaly is an eruption of anti-time ú.. and because it operates in the opposite way normal time does, the effects would run backward through the space-time continuum.”
“Yes!” rasped Picard. “That’s why the anomaly was larger in the past… than in the futureú It was growing as it traveled backward through time.”
The doctor shook her head. “Wait a minute. We didn’t see any evidence of an anti-time reaction in the Devron system.”
“Not yet/” insisted the captain. “Chicken and the egg! You see?”
“Indeed,” agreed Data.
It was remarkable how all Picard’s seeming fantasies were coming together. He wished that he had seen the solution earlier.
“In a true paradox,” he explained, “effect sometimes precedes cause. Therefore, the anomaly the captain saw in the past existed before we came to the Devron system and initiated the tachyon pulse.” They all looked at one another. “All right,” said Riker. “Let’s say, for the moment, you’re on the money. How do we prove any of this?”
“Go back,” the captain advised. “Go back to the Devron system. It’ll be there this time—I know it.”
Data looked at the othersú “He may be right. If our tachyon pulse contributed to a rapture in the fabric of anti-time, it may not have developed immediatelyú A return to the Devron system might show