Boogeymen - Mel Gilden [36]
“Uh, hi, Mom. I’m back. Counselor Troi with you?”
Dr. Crusher backed off and looked at him fondly. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Fine, Mom. Can we sit down? Everybody’s looking at us.”
“Sure. Come on.”
People greeted them as they walked to the table, but the greetings were normal, not the grandiose words you would expect for somebody who’d just come back from a great adventure. A great adventure on the holodeck. That was almost a contradiction in terms.
Counselor Troi smiled at Wesley in the way that always made him wish he were a little older. “Good to see you, Wes. We were worried.”
Wesley nodded, embarrassed again, this time because Troi thought he was a hero. The captain was a hero. Professor Baldwin was a hero. He was just some kid who’d gotten caught hanging a little bad input. Guinan brought Wesley a clear ether. She smiled at him, patted his shoulder, and went away. Wesley pulled the blue plastic spaceship from the clear fizzing liquid and nibbled on the cherry it impaled. As far back as he could remember, the plastic spaceships had always been green. Come on, Wesley, he told himself. The Boogeymen are gone. You’re home. Give it a rest.
“Are you going to tell us about it, or do I have to tickle you the way I did when you were a child?”
“Mom!” Wesley cried, horrified.
She folded her arms on the table and sipped her drink through a straw, waiting innocently for him to begin.
Wesley told the story. Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi listened, interrupting only to gasp in astonishment at every setback and clever solution. They laughed when Wesley told them about Rhonda Howe. Dr. Crusher said, “I’ll have to remember that next time I want to get the captain’s attention.”
Wesley shook his head. He knew his mother and the captain were friends. He even knew his mother had an interest in the captain that went well beyond duty or even friendship. But it was difficult—impossible—for Wesley to think of her in the same way he thought of Rhonda Howe. And it was even more impossible for him to imagine the captain and his mother doing anything together they wouldn’t do on the bridge.
“So how did you get out?” Dr. Crusher said. “Did Geordi save you?”
“He tried, but he was a little late.” Wesley leaned toward them as if confiding a secret and smiled. “This is good,” he said. He felt more comfortable talking about nuts and bolts than about feelings. “Data and Captain Picard overloaded the computer.”
“How did they do that?” Dr. Crusher said.
“Data noticed that the more people the computer fabricated, the slower they moved. He and the captain guessed that if they forced it to fabricate enough people, the computer would go into overload. It would need so much memory and computing power to manifest the other people that it would be forced to overwrite the Boogeymen, which after all are just manifestations of a program.”
Dr. Crusher said, “I’ve seen hundreds of people at a time in some of the holodeck programs I’ve run.”
“Sure. That was a computer running at top efficiency. Obviously the Boogeyman program clogged up the computer somehow.”
“Obviously,” said Counselor Troi.
“Obviously,” said Dr. Crusher.
“So the captain called a meeting of the crew on the recreation deck of the simulated Enterprise. When enough of them had arrived, there was a big flash and the whole simulation disappeared.”
“A remarkable story,” Troi said. “You really are a hero.”
“Not me,” said Wesley. “Data’s the hero. Captain Picard’s the hero.”
“Neither of them was forced to confront his childhood fears.” Troi watched Wesley very seriously.
“Absolutely,” Dr. Crusher said.
“Yeah, well, if I hadn’t designed them that way, I wouldn’t have had to confront them that way.”
They drank for a while. Wesley looked out the window at the rainbows. They were still creeping along at warp five so that Shubunkin would have time to debrief Baldwin before the Enterprise reached Memory Alpha. Thinking about the shuddering turbolift and the blue plastic spaceship made Wesley uneasy, but he could not stop himself.