Star Trek_ A Choice of Catastrophes - Michael Schuster [59]
He and Jocelyn share a small Atlanta apartment, and while he studies, she works at an interstellar shipping firm downtown. She likes the work, but it’s not very difficult—as opposed to his studies. His senior year was hard, but this is worse. Rare is the moment when he’s not thinking about something school-related. As an undergraduate, he made a point of never doing schoolwork on Saturdays; as a medical student, he doesn’t have that luxury.
He’s doing something he loves, and he’s with the woman he loves. How can that not be fantastic?
By the beginning of his second year, his exuberance over medical school has faded… as has his exuberance for Jocelyn. He loves her, but things have become strained. They don’t spend as much time together, and Leonard’s studies are to blame.
“You spend too much time studying,” Jocelyn says to him one night as she goes to bed, leaving him sitting at the computer terminal. “Plenty of your classmates get by on less.”
It’s after midnight and he’s been up since six—and he’s heard this complaint before. “I’m not my classmates,” he snaps.
It’s hard for both of them, especially when Jocelyn’s job demands so little of her, but somehow they make it work.
In his third year, Leonard is doing clinical work at Emory University Hospital, and that only makes things worse, now that he’s working long hours. The only relief he gets is when he does four weeks of off-world experience, on the colony world of Dramia II. Leonard and Jocelyn can’t talk in real time, and the messages they exchange are positive and encouraging, if a little banal. Part of Leonard wonders if he’s running away from his problems, but he resolves that when he gets back to Earth, everything will be better.
Stardate 4757.9 (2034 hours)
Auxiliary control was a small, cramped room that contained a medium-sized viewscreen and one large console with three terminals. To either side of the viewscreen, two chairless consoles were set into the walls.
When McCoy entered, Uhura was sitting in the central chair. DeSalle was hunched over the control panel on the port wall, while the chair to Uhura’s right was occupied by a man in an engineering coverall. McCoy recognized him as Lieutenant Singh, who was usually responsible for manning the room. With Padmanabhan, the excitable spatial physicist, standing next to Uhura, it was already rather crowded.
“Good to see you, Doctor McCoy,” said Uhura, cutting off the science officer. “You should hear this, Doctor. You remember Ensign Padmanabhan, from spatial physics.” She looked at the young man and gave him a nod. “Begin, please.”
Padmanabhan took a deep breath and looked back and forth between Uhura and McCoy before launching into his explanation. “The distortions in this zone of space are places where another universe’s laws are extending into ours, rewriting the way our universe works. The farther we travel, the more that other universe intrudes into ours.”
“It’s pushing into normal space,” McCoy said slowly. “That’s why the hits keep on getting bigger.”
“Yes, sir,” Padmanabhan said. “There could be distortions where our physical laws have been completely overwritten. The last one barely pushed into our universe, only twenty-five percent permeation.”
“We think that explains the computer difficulties,” began DeSalle. “Damage control says the problem is that quantum superposition ceased entirely.”
“Oh, wow.” Padmanabhan looked astounded for a moment, then began scribbling something down on his slate.
Even Uhura looked impressed. “The effects of that would be terrible.”
“Look, I’m just a simple old country doctor—” McCoy began.
You’ve got that right. Out of your depth again.
“—so I’d appreciate some help.”
Padmanabhan obliged. “Quantum superposition is when a system simultaneously exists in a combination of the states the system can potentially be observed to take—”
“Dial it back a little, Ensign,” said Uhura. “I think that’ll just confuse the doctor further.”
Heaven knows we don’t want you to be any more confused. Things here are bad