Boogeymen - Mel Gilden [0]
Wesley Crusher’s Personal Log, Stardate 43747.3: I don’t seem to be making any progress in my pre-commission course. I’m proficient in science or math, anything for which logical thinking is all that’s needed. But when it comes to command, I don’t know if I have what in the twentieth century they called “the right stuff.”
Commander Riker tells me that being a good commander is at least half intuition. Generally, the more important a question is, the less data you have available to answer it. He says that the skills one uses to decide correctly are more likely to be learned playing poker than chess. Maybe it’s too bad I’m such a good chess player.
Commander Riker assures me that even Captain Picard, who likes to do things by the Starfleet book, is as successful as he is only because he knows when to ignore the book and go with his gut feelings. He expects the unexpected. When I told Data about this, he said that expecting the unexpected was, by definition, impossible. Sometimes Data is too literal to get the point.
What about Data? Being a machine, he has no intuition. At least, that’s what he tells me. But he is a very complex machine, and the vast number of circuits in his positronic brain—a number that appreaches the number of synapses in a human brain—allows him to manifest behavior that sometimes looks like intuitive thinking. Are appearance and reality ever the same thing? How do you know? Not Mom or Riker or Geordi or even Data can give me a satisfactory answer.
Therefore I have to believe it’s possible to learn to be intuitive. Or, if I can’t do that, maybe I can gain so much experience that it will look like intuition. But how can I get experience running a starship? I had a hard time convincing Captain Picard that I belong on the bridge. What are my chances of convincing him that I should sit in the center seat? I have two chances—slim and none. (That’s kind of a joke. I’ll have to see if Data understands it. He always appreciates an opportunity to understand humor, even when he fails.)
Leaving the Enterprise and going to Starfleet Academy is out of the question. I’ll have to go eventually, but right now—
“MR. CRUSHER to the bridge.” It was Commander Riker’s voice, and Wesley smiled.
Enterprise had entered the Omega Triangulae region three days before, searching for the source of a signal that possibly was being broadcast by an unknown intelligent race. The signal was too ordered and repetitive to be natural. Its origin was more a cloud than a point source, and it seemed to move. At the moment, specialists were taking sensor scans, doing the dull grunt work of which most exploration consisted. Commander Riker had promised to call Wesley if they found anything interesting.
Excitedly, Wesley touched his insignia and said, “I’m on my way.” He touched a pad on the recorder, ejecting the isolinear chip on which he was recording his personal log, and ran from his room.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard watched the main screen intently, though at the moment nothing was on it but deep space. His mind drifted from the object of their search and Mr. Data’s constant updates to the hard, cold beauty of space itself. He always found deep space to be hypnotic, which was one of the reasons he’d joined Starfleet, perhaps the main one.
Earth psychologists had defined a mental state they called rapture of the deeps. Originally it described the euphoria one felt when looking into a very large, deep hole such as North America’s Grand Canyon. The euphoria was even stronger in space; recruits needed to constantly fight the urge to leap through the main viewscreen and into the vastness beyond. In a limited number of cases smashed noses had been the result of someone losing control.
To Picard’s right sat Commander William Riker, his number one. Riker narrowed his eyes and nodded in answer to some private question. He had a temper and could be too quick to judge, but he also had an analytical mind second to that of few humans, so his judgments were generally correct. As for his temper, well, lesser men had mastered worse things.