Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (13 page)

Quarks have fractional charge of one-third or two-thirds, and attributes such as charm and strangeness. The sub-elementary particles had fractional charge as well: four-ninths and one-ninth, the squares of the charges of the quark. According to Madison, they could be sorted further by “five unmistakable marks,” which the team had proposed designating taste, tardiness, humor, cleanliness, and ambition.

All this had begun to sound peculiarly familiar to Spock. He searched his memory for resonances. Just as he finally came upon the proper reference, March took over to offer terminology for the particles themselves.

When March recited several stanzas of a poem by a Terran nonsense writer, half the audience responded with delighted laughter and the other half with offended silence.

Spock maintained his reserve, but in truth he had been very tempted to smile.

“We’d like to propose that the sub-elementary particles be designated ‘snarks’ and ‘boojums,’ ” March had said. “When we picked the names, we didn’t realize quite how appropriate they were. But after we worked on the math for a while we discovered that the two entities are actually images of one another, one real, one virtual.” He displayed on the auditorium screen a set of formulae, a transformation that proved the mathematical equivalence of the two separate particle-waves.

“Now,” March said with a completely straight face, “and with apologies to Lewis Carroll:

He and Madison left the podium.

After the presentation, Spock had heard one normally dignified elder scientist say, laughing, “If they get bored with science they can go straight into stand-up comedy,” to which her colleague, who was not quite so amused, replied, “Well, maybe. But the jokes are pretty esoteric, don’t you think?”

Spock had made a point of attending their question-and-answer session later that day, and during the week-long seminar became fairly well acquainted with them. He had more in common with Madison, whose intellect was firmly based in rationality, than with the high-strung March, whose brilliance balanced on a fine edge of intensity. But Spock had found their company stimulating; he would be pleased to encounter the two young humans again, on Spacelab.

“Spock?” Kirk said.

Spock returned from his reminiscences. “Yes, Admiral?”

“I said, were they your students?”

“Indeed not, Admiral. They are pioneers in the field of sub-elementary particle physics. I am honored to have been a student of theirs.”

Del March glared at the computer terminal. No way was he going to be able to transfer Boojum Hunt. Every portable byte of memory was already packed full of essential Genesis data, and the team still would have to let some go when they blanked the built-in memory cells.

He had a hard copy of the program, of course, a printout, but it would take a couple of hours for the optical-scan to read it back in, and it always made mistakes. Boojum was a real pain to debug. Well, no help for it.

He was glad they would not lose the program entirely. Boojum was the best piece of software he and Vance had ever written. It was an adventure game; yet it paralleled their real-world work of the last few years. Vance referred to it as “the extended metaphor” but agreed that “Boojum Hunt” was a lot more commercial.

Then Del got an idea. When the storm troopers arrived tomorrow, they would be looking for
something.
It would be a shame to disappoint them.

Vance came over and put his hand on Del’s shoulder.

“Might’s well get it over with, don’t you think?”

Del grinned. “No, Vance, listen—don’t you think it’s about time Mad Rabbit got going again?”

Vance gave him a quizzical look, then began to laugh. He had a great laugh. Del did not have to explain his plan; Vance understood it completely.

Carol returned to the lab. Most of the really sensitive data had already been moved. Only the mechanism of Genesis itself remained. They had another whole day to finish collecting personal gear and to be sure they had erased all clues to their whereabouts.

“I could use a good joke about now,” Carol said. She sounded both tired and irritable.

Among other things, she’s probably sick of hassling with Dave about Starfleet, Del thought. He really had it in for them—now he had good reason, but it was hardly his newest theme.

“Vance and I just decided to leave something for the troops,” Del said. “The latest Mad Rabbit.”

“What in heaven’s name is a mad rabbit?”

“Do you believe it, Vance, she never heard of us.” Del feigned insult. “Carol, we were famous.”

“What do you mean, ‘were’? You’re pretty famous now.”

“We were famous in Port Orchard, Del,” Vance said mildly. “That isn’t exactly big time.”

“Port Orchard?” Carol said.

“See?”

“What’s Mad Rabbit!”

“I’m Mad,” Vance said, “and he’s Rabbit.”

“As in March Hare. We started a minor revival of Lewis Carroll all by ourselves.”

Carol flung up her hands in resignation. “Del, I guess you’ll let me in on the secret when you get good and ready, right?”

Del started to explain. “We used to have a company, when we were kids. It still exists; we just haven’t done anything with it since—before grad school, I guess, huh, Vance?”

“Reality is a lot more interesting,” Vance said. He pulled a chair around and got Carol to sit down.

Del grinned. “If you call quark chemistry reality.”

Vance took heed of Carol’s impatience, and, as usual, brought Del back on track. “We used to write computer-game software,” he said. “Our company was called Mad Rabbit Productions. It did pretty well. In Port Orchard, we were ‘local kids make good’ for a while.” He started to rub the tension-taut muscles of Carol’s neck and shoulders.

“I had no idea,” Carol said. She flinched as Vance found a particularly sore spot, then began to relax.

“The thing is,” Del said, “where the game sold best was to starbases.”

“The more isolated the better,” Vance added. “They don’t have much else to do.”

“Not unlike Spacelab,” Del said.

But it was true. Spacelab was quite possibly the Federation’s least exciting entertainment spot. There wasn’t much to do but work. After concentrating on the same subject eighteen hours a day seven days a week for close to a year, Del had been getting perilously close to burnout. He had begun having bizarre and wistful dreams about going out to low dives, getting stoned to the brainstem on endorphin-rock and beer, and picking a fight with the first person to look at him sidewise.

He thought he had outgrown that kind of thing a couple of years before.

When he told Vance about one of his nightmares, his friend and partner suggested they revive their old business. It was perfectly possible, on Spacelab, to get drunk or stoned or both, and Vance was not anxious to have to start dragging Del out of brawls again.

“We wrote Boojum just to play it,” Del said. “But why not leave it for
Reliant—
”

Carol giggled. “What a great idea. It seems a shame for them to come all this way for nothing.”

They all laughed.

The last couple of days had actually been rather exciting. Everyone had managed to convince each other that the Starfleet orders were some ridiculous, awful mistake, and that as soon as they could get through to somebody in the Federation Assembly, or in the Federation Science Network, everything would be straightened out. Some overzealous petty-tyrant Starfleet officer would get called on the carpet, maybe even cashiered out of the service, and that would be that. All they needed to do was keep Genesis and the data out of the hands of
Reliant
’s captain until he got bored with looking for it and went away, or until they could recruit civilian scientific support and aid.

Looked at that way, it became a big game of hide-and-seek. It was a change in routine, with a tiny potential for danger, just scary enough to be fun.

“I’ll put it in the Monster,” Del said.

“Oh, I see,” Carol said smiling. “This whole thing is a ploy for you guys to get room to play in the main machine.”

“You got it,” Vance said.

They all laughed again. They had been working forty-eight hours straight. Del felt punchy with exhaustion and marvelously silly.

Carol patted Vance’s hand and stood up. “Thank you,” she said. “That feels a lot better.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “You looked like you needed it.”

Zinaida entered the lab.

Over the past year, Del had got used to working with her, but he never had managed to get over a sharp thrill of attraction and desire whenever he saw her. Deltans affected humans that way. The stimulus was general rather than individual. Del understood it intellectually. Getting the message through to his body was another thing.

No Deltan would ever permit her- or himself to become physically involved with a human being. The idea was ethically inconceivable, for no human could tolerate the intensity of the intimacy.

Dreaming never hurt anyone, though, and sometimes Del dreamed about Zinaida Chitirih-Ra-Payjh; in his dreams he could pretend that he was different, that he could provide whatever she asked and survive whatever she offered.

The Deltans, Zinaida and Jedda both, were unfailingly cordial to the humans on the station; they comported themselves with an aloofness and propriety more characteristic of Vulcans than of the uninhibited sensualists Deltans were said to be. They seldom touched each other in public, and never anyone else. They kept a protective wall of detachment between themselves and their vulnerable co-workers, most of whom were acutely curious to know what it was they did in private, but who knew better than to ask.

Zinaida greeted them and turned on the subspace communicator. Ever since the call from
Reliant,
one or another of the scientists tried to contact the Federation every hour or so. Except for Carol’s half-completed transmission to James Kirk, no one had met with any success.

This time it was just the same. Zinaida shrugged, turned off the communicator, and joined her teammates by the computer.

“Genesis is about ready,” she said to Carol. “David and Jedda thought you would want to be there.”

Her eyebrows were as delicate and expressive as bird wings, and her lashes were long and thick. Her eyes were large, a clear aquamarine blue flecked with bright silver, the most beautiful eyes Del had ever seen.

“Thanks, Zinaida,” Carol said. “We’ll get it out of here—then I guess all we can do is wait.” She left the lab.

Del knew she still hoped
Reliant
might be called off: if it was, they would not have to purge the computer memories. Once that was done, getting everything back on-line would be a major undertaking. The last thing they planned to do before fleeing was to let the liquid hydrogen tanks—the bubble baths—purge themselves into space. The equipment only worked when it was supercooled; at room temperature, it deteriorated rapidly. Rebuilding would take a lot of time.

Jan, the steward, came in a moment after Carol left.

“Yoshi wants to know what anybody wants him to bring in the way of food.”

Yoshi, the cook, had put off his leave till the rest of the station personnel returned from holiday. He was convinced the scientists would kill themselves with food poisoning or malnutrition if they were left completely to their own devices.

“He really shouldn’t have to worry about it,” Del said.

Jan shrugged cheerfully. “Well, you know Yoshi.”

“How about sashimi?”

“Yech,” said Vance.

“I think he had in mind croissants and fruit and coffee.”

“Jan, why did he put you to the trouble of asking, if he’d already decided?”

“I don’t know. I guess so you have the illusion of being in charge of your own fate. Do you know when we’re going? Or how long we’ll be?”