Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [74]
Picard simply stood and let him hold it for a long second or two before returning the salute, then moved around the board toward him, slowly.
“Well, Mr. La Forge, about that report
La Forge stood his ground as Picard drew near and lifted one hand near La Forge’s badge. La Forge actually set his teeth. Picard wagged a finger of the raised hand at him and said, “Be more careful next time. I should dislike losing my chief engineer just as I’ve gotten him broken in.”
La Forge sagged a little. Picard said, “Now. You seem to be studying something here with some interest?”
La Forge looked concerned for a moment, turning his attention back to the panel. “Yes, Captain. I was noticing some odd energy readings over the last couple of hours—fluctuations I’m not sure how to explain.” He added hurriedly, “We’ll find out what they are, no problem.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less of you, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said as mildly as he could, and wandered around the status board, thinking, They’ve noticed our transports, small as they are. I’ll have to tell Troi and Geordi not to risk any further ones. He brushed a hand idly over the board as he passed, changing some of the displays until he found one that showed, as the bridge display had, the main power couplings to the nacelles, to ship’s systems and shielding, and to that third source. Here it had a label: Inclusion Apparatus.
Greatly daring, he tapped that spot on the schematic and said, “How’s this behaving itself?”
“Come and see.” La Forge led him off down the great right-hand corridor leading away from the exchange column, down one of the “transepts.” Picard followed him, not too quickly, with Barclay in tow.
They turned left into a huge bay some twenty meters wide and thirty deep. In the midst of this, connected by optical, computer, and power conduits that vanished under the floor, was an apparatus that seemed to be housed in several great cabinets. It made no sound. Several status boards were erected around it, one at each corner of the installation. The whole thing had a balanced and symmetrical look, and Picard found himself wondering whether that symmetry had something to do with the basic theory of it.
He paused by one of the boards, tapped it a few times to cycle through its available display configurations, and tried desperately to memorize what he was seeing—for Geordi would need this information. He wished Geordi himself were here to make some kind of sense of it. Just have to do the best I can by myself. There were references to “chord ingress” and “egress,” “oscillation.” He remembered abruptly that Hwiii had been discussing oscillation in relation to hyperstrings. “Negative sines,” “positive sines.” He shook his head. “It’s a masterwork,” he said, “that much I understand.”
He started to walk around the installation slowly with Geordi beside him and Barclay bringing up the rear.
“Everything continues to test out normal,” Geordi said. “The local structure of space is continuing to show some slight irregularities, but that’s understandable under the circumstances.”
“You’re sure it won’t produce a problem?” Picard said sharply.
“Oh, no, Captain, not for the time that ship will be here. If it were here too long, there would be growing field disturbances. After all, this universe would have just gotten heavier by one point five million metric tons. On the macro scale, the universe can absorb that kind of change of mass. On the local scale, though, in median time, say within a few hundred thousand parsecs, things could get pretty shaken up—the space of our universe being closed, after all, and balanced for a certain amount of matter, the amount present at its inception. It’s a good thing there aren’t any stars or planets in this area: they would have reacted adversely by now.”
Picard nodded at all this. His brain was resounding now with the phrase for the time that ship will be here. “And when it’s gone?” he said, trailing off.
“Then everything snaps back to normal.”
“Even after—energy discharges,