Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [26]
“No change, Captain,” Dr. Crusher said. “I might suggest we get him out of my sickbay, as I can use that bed.”
“All right,” Picard said. “Have him put in secure quarters.”
“And by the way,” Crusher said, “I find no indication of any subcutaneous transporter link anywhere on or in him. I checked everything— his bones, even the fillings in his teeth.”
“Fillings?” Geordi said.
“Don’t ask,” Crusher said. “Their dentistry is a touch on the invasive side.”
“All right,” said the captain. He looked at Data. “Report, please.”
Data folded his hands and looked thoughtful. “I have accessed all Federation data regarding parallel universes. Most of the information is either apocryphal or sheerly theoretical. However, there is at least one recorded instance of a Starfleet crew having had personal experience withand in a parallel universe.”
“Where?” Picard said. “When?”
“Where is not necessarily pertinent in this connection and would actually be rather difficult to define,” Data said. “The when is stardate 4428.9; the personnel involved were members of the command crew of NCC 1701, before any of the additional registry letters were added.”
“That Enterprise,” Picard said softly. “Kirk’s Enterprise. But this is a tremendous occurrence. How is it that this brush with another universe doesn’t appear in the ship’s formal service record?”
“All details regarding it were classified immediately afterward,” Data said. “Starfleet was apparently concerned about the effects of dissemination of the information: they thought other species might find it either ethically distressing or militarily exploitable.”
Picard found that pair of possibilities an odd one. “Continue.”
“Apparently the event began as a transporter accident,” Data said. “If accident is the correct term.”
Chief O’Brien made a slightly pained face. “The transporters in those days didn’t have the fail-safes built in that ours do now,” he said. “In fact, the incident in question caused some fail-safes to be added. Enterprise was orbiting omicron Indi III, a planet called Halka. The ship’s mission was to negotiate with the planetary government for permission to start dilithium-crystal mining there. Due to ethical constraints of the Halkans—the fear that the crystals might possibly at some future period, if not immediately, be used for warlike purposes—they had refused permission, and the crew were preparing to beam back to the ship. Space in the area was at that time experiencing an ion storm of severe force nine—”
“I’m amazed they considered using the transporter at all under such circumstances,” Picard said.
O’Brien looked pained again. “The transporter was more of a rough-and-ready business in those days. More powerful than ours, even if not as sophisticated. Among other things, there were still disagreements about some of the theory affecting it—the effects of field phenomena like ion storms on the transporter, for example. It still wasn’t fully understood how some aspects of it worked, or didn’t work, under such circumstances. But the sheer power of the transporters of that period often managed to successfully bring people through, even in the face of very adverse conditions.”
“However, the conditions in this case were most unusual,” Data said, “as the Enterprise crew discovered shortly. It was the first known example of events in another universe directly influencing events in this one.”
Geordi nodded. “I went through the debrief logs made by the four officers in question—Captain Kirk, his chief engineer, the ship’s chief medical officer, and the communications officer. Their debriefs are just exhaustive—apparently they were all absolutely shocked by what they experienced and wanted to make sure that no details were lost. And the chief engineer made sure that the subroutine logs of the transporter during the event were appended to the debrief, which is going to be a big help. Anyway, the Enterprise personnel involved worked out that, while they were transporting up from Halka, their counterparts in a very closely associated parallel universe were doing the same thing.