BOOGEYMEN Read online

  Wesley squinted as he considered the possibilities. He said, “There must be more to it than just plugging in random numbers.”

  “Certainly. The first value to some extent defines what the second must be. The first and second together help define the third. All creatures are consistent within their own system. The thing that makes one race seem alien to another is the difference between their systems.”

  Wesley saw that creating a new alien, even using the Borders scale, would be quite a challenge. After learning all he could about the scale from the library computer, he could probably get Geordi La Forge to help with the programming.

  The computer said, “Personal memo for Wesley Crusher: Your bridge watch begins in ten minutes.”

  “Acknowledged. Thanks, Lieutenant. You’ve been a big help.”

  “I’m sure.”

  As Wesley walked quickly from the room, he wondered if Shubunkin was being arrogant again or if this was another case of his saying what he meant. Wesley could not help feeling that Shubunkin was strange, even for a first-contact specialist.

  As the Enterprise dropped out of warp, Picard glanced at the man in the seat on his right. He was large and round with side-whiskers rather longer than regulations allowed. His thick face shone as if he were sweating despite the controlled climate of the Enterprise. His chubby fingers never stopped moving on the arms of the chair. The form-fitting design of the Starfleet uniform did not make him look thinner, though the short cape he affected helped. Commander Riker stood behind and above him, next to Worf at the tactical rail.

  Ensign Crusher came onto the bridge with a minute to spare before his watch began. Winston-Smyth gave up her chair at the conn, and Wesley sat down, immediately logging in his arrival with a few deft touches on the control panel.

  Feeling much too much like a tour guide, Picard said, “We’ve just dropped out of warp, Commander Mont. Mr. Data, how long till we reach Tantamon Four?”

  “Fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds, sir.”

  “Let’s have it on screen.”

  On the main viewscreen, the forward star field wavered and an Earth-type planet appeared. From this distance, Tantamon IV seemed to be covered with gray-green moss on which some cotton wool had snagged. Picard was always amazed how many planets looked like that from space, like the human home world. The Enterprise was his home, but like many humans, Picard felt a spiritual connection to the green hills of Terra that never quite went away.

  “Standard orbit, Mr. Crusher.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Commander Mont smiled, and his hands were still. He looked like a hungry man mesmerized by a table laden with food, Picard thought.

  In his gruff voice, Mont said, “It’s a likely-looking place.”

  Likely for what? Picard wondered. Mont seemed to enjoy saying things that barely made sense. Still, he was the one Starfleet had sent to debrief Baldwin after his six months on the planet below. Mont must be good at his job.

  The aft turbolift doors opened, and Lieutenant Shubunkin entered the bridge. With his eyes on the screen, he stepped forward.

  Picard said, “Mr. Worf, please inform Professor Baldwin of our imminent arrival.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Tantamon IV turned placidly below them for a few seconds. Worf said, “I have Professor Baldwin.”

  “On screen,” said Riker.

  The picture on the viewscreen was replaced by a steamy planetary scene. Baldwin, ever the showman as well as the scientist, stood in such a way that Picard and the others on the bridge could see a silver teardrop shape lying in the humid alien jungle behind him. Next to him stood an alien. Based on what Picard had seen in preliminary reports, he assumed it was one of the Tantamon natives.

  The jungle was recognizable as such, steamy and dense, but unlike the wild earthly jungle growth that was mostly vertical, the Tantamon jungle seemed to be mostly horizontal, made entirely of bowls of various sizes, shapes, and colors. Buggy eyes looked over the rims from inside some of the larger ones. Above each buggy eye was a bright blue cranium.

  The alien standing next to Baldwin was probably typical of his race. He—if human sexes meant anything—was on the edge of being human. He had tiny bowls for ears and a shiny blue exoskeleton, which gave him a faintly insectoid appearance. Adding to this were the things at the ends of his arms, not hands but delicate pincers with gripping grooves in them. He might have been wearing clothing. Picard could not tell.

  Baldwin had grown a beard since Picard had seen him last. Sweat darkened his shirt under his arms and on his chest. His hair was a little wild, and more sweat dripped from strings of it that drooped across his forehead. He looked dashing and wonderful, as he did on the Omniology holochips in Enterprise’s library. Picard, not going in much for vanity, had no idea how dashing and wonderful he himself looked to many people and so felt a small pang of jealousy, which he quickly suppressed.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mont said.

  Picard knew that Mont wasn’t talking about Baldwin or the alien or even the jungle, though the jungle was certainly beautiful, once one dumped one’s earthly prejudices about what a jungle should look like. Mont was talking about the silver teardrop. All sensor readings that Baldwin had taken matched up nicely with the sensor readings the Enterprise had taken months before in the Omega Triangulae region. The teardrop was beautiful scientifically as well as aesthetically.

  “Good to see you, Jean-Luc,” said Baldwin.

  “And you, old friend. Do you need help packing?”

  “No, thanks. I travel pretty light.” He smiled.

  Picard said, “So I remember. Prepare to beam up.”

  “Right, Jean-Luc. See you soon.”

  As he turned away, the screen once more showed the mossy ball of Tantamon IV.

  “What do you think of that, then, eh, Shubunkin?” Mont said.

  “I think that I do not yet have enough to think about.”

  “Right you are.” Mont rose to his feet with surprising grace and moved like a thundercloud to the aft turbolift. “Come along, Shubunkin. We will meet and greet Professor Baldwin.”

  The two of them got into the turbolift, and the doors closed. Counselor Troi began to speak, but Picard put up a hand to silence her. He knew the turbolift doors would open again in a moment, and they did. Lieutenant Shubunkin stepped out and said, “Which transporter room?”

  “Number three,” said Picard, trying not to smile. “Deck six.”

  Shubunkin nodded and ducked back into the turbolift.

  “Now, Counselor, what is it?”

  “There is something odd about Commander Mont.”

  “And his playmate, Shubunkin, too,” Riker said.

  “That is not what I mean,” Troi went on. “Lieutenant Shubunkin is merely a little formal and much too impressed with himself. But I’ve thought all along that Commander Mont is hiding something. I would not trust him.”

  “He’s a Starfleet officer,” Riker said.

  “Even Starfleet officers have secrets.”

  “Logged and noted, Counselor. Mr. Data, make our guest comfortable.” As Data stood up and walked toward the turbolift doors, Picard looked at them as if seeing through them and said, “And see if you can be of any use to Commander Mont.”

  “Understood, Captain,” Data said as the doors closed.

  Chapter Two

  BEFORE DISAPPEARING into his ready room, the captain ordered Wesley to head for Memory Alpha at warp five. At that velocity they would be traveling for two weeks. They could have safely traveled much faster, but Commander Mont and Lieutenant Shubunkin needed time to debrief Baldwin and get a first approximation of his findings on Tantamon IV. Later Baldwin would spend months, maybe years, at Memory Alpha, studying and organizing his data until he’d drawn from it all the conclusions he could. Other scholars would come later, building their work on his.

  For the moment, however, Starfleet was very eager to learn anything they could about the aliens in the silver teardro
p. Were they friend or foe? What could the Federation and these new aliens learn from each other?

  The hours of Wesley’s watch dragged by. Memory Alpha, the central information depository of the Federation, was a well-known destination. There was nothing between them and it but empty space. No Romulans, no Ferengi, no Borg. Nothing but the unexpected, and one, Wesley thought, could get a little too clever about always expecting it. If necessary, the Enterprise could fly itself to Memory Alpha. Wesley’s presence at the conn was almost a formality.

  Captain Picard was in his ready room, and Counselor Troi was off on some errand of mercy. Commander Riker was on the bridge and would be available in an emergency if one should arise, but at the moment he was grunting over the composition of one of the many reports Starfleet inevitably required.

  Data was where Wesley wanted to be, with Professor Eric Baldwin. Wesley shook his head in wonderment. What a guy that Baldwin was. Wesley wondered what kind of a smart, arrogant, warlike imaginary alien Baldwin could come up with, Borders scale or no.

  Wesley knew many of the women on the ship were having lusty fantasies about Baldwin. Never before had Wesley thought of sweat as sexy, but there it was. He wondered if he would ever understand women. The fact that even Riker was occasionally mystified by them did not give him hope.

  When his watch was over Wesley went to his cabin, keyed into the ship’s library computer, and looked up the Borders scale. To his chagrin, he discovered that it was less a shopping list than an encyclopedia of characteristics. The instructions alone—page after page of cultural jargon and mathematical formulas—took up three volumes.

  Wesley sighed and dived in. He became fascinated. But when he came up for air some hours later, be found that he had barely begun. He didn’t mind working hard for what he learned—finding a subject that could make him sweat was a pleasant change—but he was in a hurry. He wanted to invent those challenging aliens right now. He thought about giving one of the characteristics a number at random, just to get the ball rolling. But that was too much like cheating, and cheating, even if it seemed necessary, never appealed to him.

  He drummed his fingers on the table while he considered what to do next. The answer was obvious. When he had a computer problem, there was only one person for him to go to.

  Wesley found Data in his cabin harassing his own computer terminal. When Wesley entered, Data looked up, his fingers poised over the keyboard, his face holding its usual expression of mild surprise.

  “What are you working on?” Wesley said.

  “Some research for the captain,” Data said and blanked the screen.

  “Does it have to do with Commander Mont?”

  “That would be a logical assumption,” Data said, admitting nothing. “Was there something you wanted to discuss?”

  “Yeah. Do you know anything about the Borders scale?”

  “It is a quantitative scale of the physical, emotional, and rational characteristics of various races. It is used—theoretically—to compare them in an unbiased and logical way.”

  “Theoretically?”

  “Of course. As you must know, any such scale reflects the biases of its creator, in this case of Dr. Sandra Borders, senior exobiology librarian at Memory Alpha.”

  “So it’s no good at all, then,” Wesley said glumly. He’d have to look elsewhere for a solution to his alien problem.

  “Some researchers take the scale very seriously. But Vulcans, despite their penchant for logic, dislike the system because of its built-in prejudices. Others take the romantic, and perhaps more correct, view that any such catalog is bound to be incomplete and therefore is no better than a distant approximation.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  Data cocked his head. From long experience, Wesley knew this meant he was about to fling a zinger of a question. Data said, “I think it can be useful if used with the proper care. Why do you ask?”

  Data was his friend. He could trust Data with his innermost hopes and fears. Wesley said, “I’m testing my ability to command by using Starfleet training programs.”

  “Ah. And how will the Borders scale help?”

  “I want to design an alien that will challenge me, that will help me find out if I’ll ever be good enough to be captain of a starship.”

  “No such alien exists.”

  “Right.”

  “Ah. Then you wish to create such an alien and interact with it.”

  “Right.”

  Data leaned back in his chair and picked up a calabash pipe that lay in a nearby ashtray. Affecting the mannerisms of Sherlock Holmes, he tapped the stem of the pipe against his teeth, something he did occasionally when considering a problem. Wesley had never seen him actually light the pipe, but just holding it made Data seem more thoughtful.

  Data sprang to his feet and began to pace the cabin. He had plenty of room. Data had fewer personal possessions than anyone else Wesley knew. In a clipped Holmesian accent, he said, “You wish to design an alien of superior cunning and intelligence, yet entirely without compassion.”

  “Right,” Wesley said again. “Just for the holodeck.”

  “Of course.” Data sat down, laid the pipe carefully in the ashtray, and began typing into the computer terminal. His hands moved very fast, were almost a blur. Wesley stood behind him, watching. In a few seconds, Data reviewed what had taken Wesley hours to read. Then Data leapt into unfamiliar territory.

  Scarcely ten minutes later Data stopped. He popped a clear cylindrical chip into the slot on the terminal, touched a few keys, and seconds later handed the chip to Wesley. It was now a pale blue. “This chip contains the parameters of the aliens you desire along with the Borders scale equations. I suggest you ask Lieutenant Commander La Forge to help you install them in the holodeck computer. No one knows more about the Enterprise systems than he does.”

  “Thanks, Data.” Wesley bounced the chip in one hand while he looked over Data’s shoulder at the schematic of the Enterprise on the wall.

  “Was there something else, Wesley?”

  Wesley smiled at his own presumption. He never thought of himself as a fan type. He said, “Tell me. What is Professor Baldwin really like?”

  “Like? He is a white human male, almost two meters tall and weighing slightly more than one hundred kilograms.”

  Wesley smiled as he shook his head. Evidently Data had even less inclination to be a fan than he did.

  “Is that funny?” Data said.

  “Usually when people ask what someone is like, they want to know about the individual’s personality and whether they have pleasing features.”

  A little confused, Data said, “He seemed pleasant enough.”

  “Okay, Data. Thanks.”

  Wesley left the cabin as quickly as seemed polite. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the day discussing human attractiveness with an android.

  Captain Picard sat at one end of the big obsidian slab that served as a table in the conference lounge just off the bridge. He tried not to stare while he wondered again what it was in Commander Mont that Starfleet found valuable. Mont had a certain blustery charm, but he seemed to know no more about aliens than Lieutenant Shubunkin did. There were times when Picard was convinced that Mont knew considerably less.

  For instance, when Mont and Shubunkin had first come on board at Starbase 123, Picard had thrown a small formal dinner to welcome them. During the dinner, talk had turned to the hot exobiology topic of the moment—a newly discovered race, the Trilg. They were unusual in that while they had grasping organs very much like human hands, they had no technology whatsoever. Not so much as a rock with which to kill one of the local herbivores for food. Not so much as a cave in which to live. Starfleet specialists with high extrasensory ratings could detect no evidence of unusual mental activity. Were the Trilg intelligent or were they not? And if they were not, why not?

  Lieutenant Shubunkin had gone on at length, spinning a gossamer theory supported by obscure ideas about racial talent, harmfu
l solar rays, and synchronistic curves. The ideas were no more than theories themselves. Picard had thought all his arguments pretty unlikely, and Riker had politely argued with Shubunkin; but beyond making a few off-color comments, Commander Mont had said nothing. Picard was certain that before Shubunkin began to speak, Mont had not even heard of the Trilg.

  This was an expert on first contact?

  The next morning Picard had asked Troi what her impression of Mont was.

  “He seems to be very satisfied with himself.”

  “Not shy?” Picard asked.

  “I detected no unease last night. However . . .” She looked to one side, pursed her lips, and shook her head. When she looked at the captain again, it was with the direct, guileless stare Picard had come to trust. Troi said, “He is definitely hiding something. There is a tension in him, a waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Picard had asked her to tell him more if anything occurred to her, but so far, except for making a similar observation on the bridge a few hours earlier, Troi had said nothing about Commander Mont.

  Troi was next to the captain now, staring out the port at the rainbow smudges that the warp field made of the stars. At the other end of the table, Mont and Shubunkin were having a quiet conversation.

  Despite the evidence of his own observations and instincts, despite the corroborative feelings of Counselor Troi, Data’s research into Commander Mont’s background had turned up nothing unusual. He’d gone to school, he’d come up through the ranks in a very normal way, he’d published the following papers. The man was a puzzle, and Picard did not like it.

  The door sighed open, and Mr. Data entered with Professor Baldwin. Baldwin had showered and changed into a clean bush outfit. It was khaki, neatly pressed, and sporting many pockets, just the way it had come from the clothing fabricator. He had trimmed his beard, but it was still there, giving his face a faintly demonic look that, Picard understood, women found attractive.