INTO THE NEBULA Page 15

  The five of them were in Zalkan’s private lab, a small, locked room several floors away from the one in which the tests on the laser unit had been run. It was cluttered with jury-rigged circuits and machines of all kinds. The only “standard” items, on a bench at the rear of the room, were a massive vacuum pump, one of the laser units for the power plant, and several vacuum chambers, each studded with a mass of sensors capable of detecting and analyzing virtually any form of matter inside the jars.

  Picard had offered to take the scientist to the Enterprise to talk, but Zalkan had insisted on returning to this lab. He had given no reasons, but Troi had indicated that it was not a trap of any kind and that Zalkan still seemed intent on telling them the truth. He wanted them to promise not to tell Khozak or any of the others, but in the end he had had to settle for Picard’s promise to listen to the entire story before making any judgments.

  As if still delaying what he must say, the scientist gestured at the jumble of equipment. “Can you tell me,” he asked, “if any of this—if anything has a chance of blocking the Plague? I’ve been trying for ten years to develop an energy field that would at least keep it from infecting the vacuums in the laser units.”

  Picard turned to Data, who seemed to consider for a moment. “If they were in operation,” Data said, “it is possible I could compare the field characteristics with those of a device Commander La Forge is building for a similar purpose on the Enterprise, but I would not suggest activating it while anyone other than myself is in close proximity to it. If the field characteristics are similar, it could be just as harmful to living organisms as the fields it is intended to block.”

  Zalkan was silent a moment, then nodded. “You know about those effects, then?”

  “We have only speculated,” Picard said quietly, “based on similar fields we have encountered in the past. And on your own failing health.”

  Zalkan smiled faintly. “Your doctor’s examination of me, yes.”

  “That and more. Counselor Troi saw that you knew more about your illness than you admitted,” Picard said. “She also saw that you recognized the ships when we showed you the holograms. Based on those insights and previous experiences of our own, we suspected that your illness could be the result of having been aboard similar ships when they made their jumps—to wherever they go.”

  “And you thought I was one of them . . .”

  “We didn’t know what to think. You recognized them and you were afraid of—of something, she could not tell what.”

  Zalkan nodded and then shivered. “There is little I am not afraid of.” He was silent a moment, then smiled, almost chuckled. “Except death. I’m sure your doctor knows how close I am to that.”

  “She has an idea,” Picard admitted. “But she also has been searching for something that could help you.”

  “And has she found anything?” A resigned smile.

  “No miracle cures, but she tells me there is a treatment that could stabilize your condition, perhaps even reverse it to a modest degree.”

  “But that would require, I would guess, that I no longer expose myself to the energy fields that seem to have caused my problem in the first place.”

  Picard nodded. “And it would, essentially, put you in a coma for several weeks, if not months.”

  This time Zalkan did laugh. “At this point, a coma sounds very attractive, if only I could afford the time. Has she found nothing else?”

  “Nothing that offers any long-term hope.”

  “But short-term?”

  “Only very short-term—a powerful metabolic enhancer called CZ-fourteen. In all likelihood it would briefly restore your strength, but it would also very probably kill you in a matter of hours.”

  When the scientist did not respond for several seconds, Picard prompted, “The quicker you tell us what the situation is here, the more time we will have to address it.”

  “Obviously. But it is difficult to admit this kind of truth, even when I have no choice.” Again he fell silent for a long moment, shaking his head. When he looked up again, his eyes fell on Koralus, who had been standing silently in the background throughout the exchange.

  “Koralus,” Zalkan said, “I must ask. Before you left on the Hope, did you know a woman named Endros?”

  Koralus’s eyes widened, as did Picard’s. “How did you know?” Koralus asked softly.

  Zalkan let out a sigh, not of relief but of something else, something even Troi could not completely identify. “She was my grandmother,” he said softly.

  “Impossible!” Koralus snapped, scowling at the scientist. “Endros left with me on the Hope. Nearly half a century ago, she died while I slept.”

  Zalkan closed his eyes a moment. “In this world, yes,” he said, his words barely audible. “In my world, you and she—”

  He broke off, shaking his head again. When he spoke again, his voice was firmer. “It is so complex, it is difficult to even know where to start in order for it to make any sense.”

  Picard nodded sympathetically, gesturing to an agitated Koralus for patience. “The world that you come from?” Picard asked. “Is that the world the ships and the people in the mines are from?”

  Zalkan nodded. “Krantin. My Krantin. But where it is in relation to this Krantin, I have no idea. No one knows. Wherever it is, the two worlds were once virtually twins.” He glanced again at Koralus. “Even now, despite the massive differences caused to both worlds by the Plague, people who exist here also exist there.”

  “An alternate reality,” Picard said, remembering. “We don’t fully understand it ourselves, but we have encountered enough examples to accept the existence of such things.”

  “ ‘Alternate reality,’ yes, as good a way to describe it as any. Some of our scientists—including our Koralus—have advanced the concept.”

  Picard glanced at Troi before speaking again. “Zalkan, are you or these others somehow responsible for what the Krantinese call the Plague?”

  Zalkan was silent for several seconds, then shuddered. “God help us, yes, we are all responsible.” Abruptly his voice was trembling with emotion, as if he were finally letting go not only of the secrets he had been hiding but of the iron control he had had to exert for so long. “For five hundred years—But we had no idea what we were doing! I swear, all we knew—”

  He broke off, almost sobbing, his sudden surrender to anguish reflected momentarily in Troi’s face as she reached out to touch his arm again.

  After a minute, he straightened, his breathing returning to normal. “Thank you, Counselor Troi.”

  He turned to face Picard and Koralus, his face once again an emotionless mask. “The ones in the ships, they—or their leaders, the Directorate, what passes for a government on our Krantin—know now what they are doing. The Directorate has known for decades, but they have kept it a secret from all but those directly involved. And they simply do not care what they have done—are still doing to Krantin. I am part of a small underground network of scientists, but we are powerless to help in any meaningful way—unless we are able to obtain at least a small portion of the dilithium we are searching for in the mines. Then we will at least have a chance to save ourselves and perhaps even Krantin. If the Directorate obtains it, both our worlds are doomed. That is why the dilithium must be kept as secret as possible here. Those energy surges you detected in the city, they are almost certainly the work of the Directorate.”

  “This Directorate has people here?” Picard was not surprised. “In Jalkor?”

  “None live here, as I have done for more than a decade. They come and they go, we believe.” The scientist seemed to have regained complete control, now speaking calmly, almost formally, the only indication of any distraction an occasional sideways glance toward Koralus. “We also believe they have monitors attached to the computer system. Normally they rarely check them. The Directorate sends someone through once a year at most, primarily to confirm that Krantin still presents no real threat to them. But now that they have
seen your ship and you have told them you intend to help Krantin—they will at the very least check their monitors, perhaps even activate new ones. The surges you detected in the city almost certainly were theirs. Anything that is in the city computers, they will soon know, if they don’t already.” Zalkan shivered and fell silent.

  Picard looked questioningly at Troi, though he was already convinced that what he was hearing was true. It would explain much, particularly Zalkan’s terror when Khozak had wanted to make the dilithium general knowledge throughout Jalkor.

  “He is telling the truth as he knows it,” Troi confirmed.

  Picard turned back to the scientist, still silent, looking frailer than ever, his thin shoulders hunched forward.

  “What is the Plague?” Picard asked when Zalkan did not resume speaking.

  The scientist pulled in another breath. “It is the waste material of our world,” he said softly, “reduced to its component atoms and molecules by the process that sends it here. Five hundred years ago, our scientists were experimenting with matter transmission, what you call transporter technology. They were never successful, but purely by accident they discovered something else—an energy field that made material objects disappear. Forever.”

  To his own surprise, Picard found himself having to suppress an impulse to laugh. The Plague was the result of a planetwide high-tech garbage-disposal system! But then he wondered: What would Earth have done if its scientists had stumbled onto such a device when the water and air were thick with pollution and the landfills were overflowing? Would they have been able to resist the temptation?

  “Did they know where the waste was going?” Picard asked, sobering. “Did they try to find out?”

  Zalkan shook his head. “Many probably did try, at first. But not knowing where the material went didn’t stop them from sending it. It was just too easy, too convenient. Anything subjected to the energy field simply disappeared and was never seen again. As far as anyone knew, it was being snuffed out of existence. Within a few years, the process was being used everywhere by virtually everyone, and the ones who controlled it controlled our world, and they were no longer interested in where the waste was going. They eventually became the Directorate, and no one objected. After all, because of them, our industries became pollution-free virtually overnight. Within fifty years, our world—our Krantin—was cleaner than it had ever been. Not that it wasn’t disfigured. The Directorate used the process for mining as well, stripping great chunks of soil and rock away in order to get at the material they—we—wanted. The same happened in space—that cloud of interplanetary dust that is smothering this Krantin is simply the ninety percent and more of tens of thousands of asteroids that the Directorate ‘mined’ over the last four hundred years.”

  “What of the ships out there among the asteroids in this reality?” Picard asked. “What are they doing there? Are they the Directorate’s as well?”

  “They are. They are looking for the dilithium.” Zalkan grimaced. “It is a complicated story. Our world once had the same dilithium deposit as this Krantin, but before anyone knew of its value, it had gone the way of all the rest of our ‘waste products’ and could not be reclaimed.”

  Picard nodded when Zalkan paused. “Our sensors detected a molecular form of dilithium in the Plague cloud,” he said.

  Zalkan almost laughed. “A thoroughly useless form, at least to us.”

  “And to us,” Picard agreed.

  “But then a small group of scientists and engineers—one of them my father, the son of our Koralus and Endros—discovered how to use the crystalline form. The Directorate of course confiscated the tiny amount that still existed. They apparently assumed they could find more, or that it could be duplicated, but they soon found it could not. So for the first time, the Directorate began a serious effort to learn where over four hundred years’ worth of our world’s trash had gone. It took nearly twenty years to learn to ‘look’ through to this world and another ten to develop a way to physically come through—and to learn that the dilithium, like everything else we sent through, was unrecoverable. But they had also discovered that the two worlds—the two realities—were virtually identical physically. So they assumed—hoped—that this world would still have its dilithium.”

  “But if the dilithium is here on Krantin,” Picard asked puzzledly, “why are they searching for it out among the asteroids?”

  “Because we were incredibly lucky,” Zalkan said. “The only ones who knew precisely where the dilithium originated in our world were not of the Directorate, and they were able to tamper with the computer records and fool Directorate scientists into thinking it had come from the asteroids. That gave us the chance to—”

  Without warning, the single door to the lab burst open, slamming back as if it had been hit by a battering ram, and a flood of Khozak’s security officers, their projectile weapons drawn, stormed in. Before anyone could react, the comm units were torn from the tunics of the three Enterprise officers and, more violently, from Koralus’s. Only Zalkan reacted, his right hand, released by Troi, darting into a pocket of the coveralls he wore. Then, like the others, his every muscle seemed to freeze.

  Behind the officers came Khozak, a weapon in his hand as well. His face was flushed as he pushed Troi roughly to one side and stood facing Zalkan.

  “Who are you?” he grated, bringing the weapon up until it was leveled at the scientist’s sunken chest. “What are you, that you would destroy our world?”

  Zalkan flinched at the rage in the president’s face and voice.

  An instant later, a brilliant flash of light blinded everyone in the room.

  And the roar of Khozak’s weapon slammed at their ears.

  When vision returned, Zalkan was gone.

  And, Picard noted with hope, if not quite relief, the door of one of the vacuum chambers that had been on the bench directly behind Zalkan had been shattered by the projectile.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “CAPTAIN!” RIKER’S VOICE ERUPTED from one of the comm units, still clutched by one of the guards. “There has been another energy surge, apparently very near to your present location.”

  Picard couldn’t help but smile slightly despite the situation. I noticed, Number One. “President Khozak,” he said quietly, “I would suggest you allow me to reply.”

  Khozak, still scowling furiously at the spot where Zalkan had stood moments before, spun toward Picard.

  “And let you be snatched from under our noses, like your murderous friend Zalkan? Remember, I heard your Commander Riker in the mine yesterday—and you, just minutes ago—speaking about keeping a ‘lock’ on those devices with your transporters. That is why they were taken from you!”

  “Precisely,” Picard said mildly. “And the lock is still functioning. Additionally, if there is no reply, the transporter will be activated, and anyone holding a unit will find himself on the Enterprise. Unless there is another energy surge during transport, in which case he could find himself anywhere—or nowhere.”

  The three guards holding the comm units darted quick looks at Khozak, who seemed to be thinking furiously but reaching no conclusions.

  “Just tap one lightly on the front, gentlemen,” Picard advised. “That will activate it. It will pick up anything said in the room.”

  “On the bench,” Khozak ordered, emerging from his momentary paralysis. “Put them on the bench and tap one and stand back.” Before he had finished speaking, the four comm units had clicked onto the bench near the door and all six guards were edging hastily backward. Their weapons were still pointed in the general direction of Koratus and the three from the Enterprise, however.

  Picard smiled faintly, thinking that they might survive the situation after all. “That will be acceptable, under the circumstances.”

  When none of the guards returned to touch the abandoned comm units, Khozak stepped up. Darting angry looks between Picard and the comm units, he extended his hand slowly.

  “Captain, this is Commander R
iker. Respond.”

  Khozak’s hand jerked back from the offending comm unit as if he’d been burned.

  “Tap it, Mr. President,” Picard repeated. “Lightly with one finger will suffice. And I should warn you that Commander Riker’s instructions, in the event he cannot obtain a response, are to set the transporter to scan a wide area and then activate it. I don’t know the exact parameters, but I suspect everything in this room would be taken.”

  “Data! Deanna! Koralus! Respond!” Riker’s words erupted from all four units, sending another twitch through Khozak.

  “Mr. President?” Picard prompted.

  Like a man attempting to pet a scorpion, Khozak sent one hand darting downward, pulled it back too quickly, hesitated a moment, and brought it down again.

  Cautiously, Picard moved a step closer to the comm units. “Number One,” he said, raising his voice only slightly, “we have a situation here. Stand by.”

  He turned to Deanna. “Counselor, what is your reading of our circumstances?”

  “Now that Zalkan has left,” she said after a moment, “there is no specific hostility except toward Koralus, only fear and uncertainty. It is similar to what President Khozak has felt all along, only it is now much more intense.”

  Picard nodded, relieved that he had not miscalculated. “None of them wants to kill us,” he said quietly, “but it could happen anyway, either accidentally or intentionally. Is that fair to say?”

  “Something like that, Captain.”

  “Kill you, Captain?” Riker’s quadrupled voice rattled off the walls. “What is the situation down there?”

  Picard looked inquiringly toward Khozak. “May I explain?”

  Khozak once again gave the impression of furious but fruitless thought. Finally he nodded.

  Picard turned back to face the comm units, marshaling his thoughts. “Number One, it’s a long story. The essentials are these. Both the ships and the humanoids in the mine are, as we suspected, from an alternate reality, containing a world once much like Krantin. Zalkan is from that world as well. He told us that the Plague is, essentially, the waste from that world, unknowingly transmitted here by the people of that world using a method they accidentally discovered five hundred years ago.”