Margeret Bonanno - Probe

In sickbay of the Enterprise, Dajan and his sister were frozen in each other's arms, while the four-year-old Kevin Riley found himself held just as tightly by first his mother, then his father, as they bid him goodbye.

Gently, swiftly, the entity placed the mites and their spacegoing bubbles beyond the point at which their killing rays-if indeed they possessed them-could trigger a response.

It released them.

We will talk, it said.

On the Enterprise viewscreen, the Probe suddenly began to shrink. Within seconds, even its huge bulk was a speck in the distance.

The Galtizh, as if attached to the Enterprise by an invisible rod of force, seemed not to move at all.

As suddenly as it had come, the paralysis lifted.

Sulu's hand jerked backward from the firing control.

The Galtizh's phasers lashed out harmlessly into empty space, followed a fraction of a second later by a photon torpedo. A hundred kilometers out, the torpedo vanished, harmlessly vaporized.

In the Enterprise sickbay, Dajan and his sister, realizing they were going to live, released each other with a smile. And Commander Kevin Riley's eyes fluttered open, and before the four-year-old boy from his nightmares faded entirely from his memory, he realized that, somehow, the goodbyes he had never been able to say had finally been spoken.

The Probe spoke, now using only the frequencies the computer used.

"We will talk," the computer translated.

And they did talk.

For hours, with the computer constantly mastering new aspects of the Probe's language, adding new complexities to the dialogue, they talked.

And they learned, all of them. Even the stubbornnest of the Romulans, listening, first eagerly, then angrily, found themselves learning.

Finally, of necessity, the return to reality-to the Neutral Zone and the problems that could only have grown worse in their absence-was begun.

TWENTY-FIVE

Captain's Log, Stardate 8501.2:

According to Mr. Sulu's "looking out the window" calculations, the Probe made equally good time-roughly warp thirty-on the return leg of what must have been one of the longest towing jobs in either Federation or Romulan history. Its departure moments after releasing the Enterprise and the Galtizh at the edge of the Temaris system was equally speedy.

Not surprisingly, the Temaris "conference" has not been resumed, and all parties involved are anticipating orders to withdraw from the 'Neutral Zone until further notice. The one surprise is that the reform-minded Interim Government is still in power, albeit precariously. They are reportedly getting a boost from Hiran's accusations of sabotage against Ambassador Tiam and Commander Jenyu, but Jenyu's sponsors are firing back with the expected accusations against Hiran, most of which boil down to "collaboration with the enemy," meaning me. At least Hiran has

regained control of his ship-and Jenyu and his men are locked safely in the Galtizh's brig.

We learned a lot from the Probe in the last three days, and the Probe appears to have picked up a little from us "mites." Spock, for instance, once he became the only mite to be allowed direct access to the Probe's "innards," as Dr. McCoy calls them, was able to resolve the various paradoxes that had apparently driven it, first, to drag us halfway across the galaxy, and second, to almost shut itself down. With the help of the Enterprise computer, Spock expanded on its creators' rather rigid definition of intelligence, so that it now includes most technologically advanced mites, even those such as ourselves who can generally carry on only one conversation at a time. Similarly, he was able to modify the goals its creators had given it, so that it will be able not only to go on searching for life-forms who might someday become like its creators, but also to search for the creators themselves, wherever the survivors might have gone, in or out of the galaxy.

One thing Spock was not able to do was restore the Probe's "lost" memory, other than to confirm the logic of what the Probe had itself already deduced: that it had encountered a particularly nasty and persistent group of space-faring aliens who had half-destroyed it before it had managed to drive them off, and that these same aliens had traced it back to the homeworld, where the Second Winnowing was the result. As Dr. McCoy remarked, they sound like "super-Kiingons," and we can only hope that their current three-hundred-thousand-year absence continues.

Dr. Benar, however, has suggested that that is an overly optimistic hope. She suggests, in fact, that they have not been entirely absent and may even have played a role in the disappearance of the Erisians, whose ancestors, she now believes, were the very mites whose civilization was destroyed in the first Winnowing.

Unfortunately, she makes a compelling case.

"Do you go along with these crazy ideas, Spock?" McCoy asked, a not-uncharacteristic skeptical frown creasing his brow. Senior officers and scientists, including Dajan, had gathered in a briefing room while they waited for official word from Starfleet that the conference had indeed ended. McCoy had missed most of the earlier discussions, having spent more than the usual amount of time keeping a personal eye on the nowconscious Commander Riley during the return towing, and was using this opportunity to catch up.

"Either of her hypotheses would account for the observed data, Doctor," Spock observed, not for the first time.

"Let me get this straight, Dr. Benar," McCoy persisted. "You're saying you were able to recognize that city as Erisian? In just those few seconds before the asteroid blew it all to hell?"

"Not as Erisian, Doctor," Benar responded quietly, though she had answered basically the same question many times before, "as Erisian-like. The pattern in which it was laid out appeared to be a simpler version, perhaps a primitive forerunner, of the patterns in which the Erisian ruins I have studied were laid out. If we had not been barred from returning to the chamber, I could have proven or disproven the relationship with a mathematical analysis. As it is, I can only say that I recognized the pattern, in the same sense that you would recognize the `pattern' of an adult human in a human child and be capable of distinguishing it from a Vulcan or Klingon child. In addition, however, there is the matter of the memory crystals that have been found in the Exodus Hall of every Erisian site. As Captain Spock has pointed out, that crystal is indeed identical to the crystal that

produced the `sonic holograms' and that occurs naturally on that world."

"But it's a pretty big jump from saying the Erisians started out from there two million years ago to saying that those super-Klingons did them in more than a million and a half years later. For instance, how the blazes did they even find them after all that time? Even if the Erisians were building Exodus Halls back then, there wouldn't have been much left of them after the asteroid and the volcanoes."

"Perhaps not, but the other worlds in the system were not similarly afflicted. And for there to have been survivors at all, there had to have been off-world colonies, possibly with Exodus Halls of their own."

"Don't fight it, Bones," Kirk said with a grin. "She's got all the bases covered."

"So the super-Klingons found some of the worlds they'd moved to," McCoy persisted, pointedly ignoring Kirk's admonition. "You'd think by the time they got to Temaris-when was that again? A hundred thousand years ago? You'd think they'd have learned not to leave a forwarding address by then, wouldn't you?"

"Perhaps they did not know they were being pursued," Benar said patiently, "although I suspect that they did. If they did, it would explain a great many things. For example, why all known Erisian worlds were evacuated at approximately the same time, roughly one hundred thousand years ago. Why Erisians were so careful to leave no record of their physical appearance."