[snip]

George felt that he had exhausted everything he could achieve on the Bridge. Diverting power from Life Support to the Shields, or using it to reach a higher orbit, those were all Executive Decisions well above his responsibilities, and he would leave it to the XO ( and to the ex-XO who was really just the barman.) George wanted to return to Engineering where he hoped that the CE or someone else in his department were working on restarting the Warp Engines (and then all of these difficult decisions would no longer be necessary) and he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t happened yet. He thought that he was probably best employed helping them in any case, so he made his excuses and asked if he could leave.

“Ay think Ay oughta get to Enguneering and restur the powuurr!” George said.

“Er… When ay were last down in Engineering thay …err Warp Cawe done had gone awful dark, yes! But ay’ve been sitting at navigashun since ya done told me too!” George added to Joe. “Ayn’ thay …uhh XO ain’t a-tellin’ me where ay oughta be neithuurr!”

Joe in the meantime after swallowing what may have been the last sandwich and last sip of beer he may ever have sat thinking for a moment before burping. As he did, he noticed that the place was boring and getting a bit dark. “Dammit I hate to just be standing about.”. And with this he found the nearest Jeffries tube with a few things in a toolbox and a flashlight. Kicking out the vent and shouting out ” HIHO!” He stepped forward and dropped down the tube to land this time in front of the warp core itself. He stood a bit crookedly having landed a bit off center. Standing then with his hands set on his hips as if he were about to challenge the core to a duel, he asked the warp core. ” So, you’re all dark, are you?”

The Warp Core was definitely dark as were the consoles in the Main Engineering area.

In the absence of new orders, George followed Joe the barman down the Jefferies tube and back to Engineering. He tried to avoid Joe as he landed awkwardly himself. George was keen to find out what his colleagues in Engineering had been doing all this time and whether or not they had solved the problem.

” Ah , George my man!” Joe spoke as he clumsily handed over the engineering tricorder to George. ” Here you go Engineer George. Extra power cell and a tricorder. I think we should start at the front and work back what do you think? You know this could be some game of all of us losing our minds together. So, let’s take this beast’s temperature. Joe walked over and stood, looking down into the dark maw where the matter anti matter core should in theory be. Making a bit of noise and making at least a bit of heat.

The tricorder would turn on but unfortunately as it only scanned with signals, it would not scan. They could open things up with tools that were battery operated though and look at things.

There was an urgent and angry high-pitched animal vocalisation, and something small and dark ran across Engineering in front of them. It headed for the doors, which had stopped working, only half open, and escaped through the gap.

Joe promptly jumped into the air thinking that surely the warp core had exploded in his face. Finally, the thing decides to work as I’ve got my face in it!” He thought.

Turning he yelled as the cat was escaping out of engineering. ” You, felonious feline you! If you show your furry fuzzy carcass again and I’ll toss you into the warp core to check the warp core temperature!”

Joe scratched his head. ” Well, this makes no sense George. Taking a temp is a passive thing. The temperature should come to us. ” Well maybe something is completely stopping any air flow. Maybe we got a clog of sort George? Maybe we need to give the old girl a good cleaning what do you think? It’s a darn crazy thing when passive things can’t be measured let me tell you. So, you want to climb in there and see if we can get vaporized George? I know I have nothing better to do at the moment.”

Joe just looked at the silent George and shook his head as he wondered why him. A bartender was crawling into something which could turn him into iddy bits which would be too iddy or biddy to even be registered anywhere. He sighed then and said to himself. ” Yes, I remember. Miri. Adam should never have let that spare rib go.”

Joe gathered more tools than what he thought he would need. But you never did know. Just when you thought you might need a good slippery whosit . You wouldn’t have it. The thing would be somewhere else being used as a paperweight. Joe got to the top and tried the door to the catwalk there. He grumbled as he looked around for the interlock. As he popped it open, he asked Silent George. ” So, George you have a girlfriend or a wife or anything?” Joe then handed George the bundle of tools to carry as they started walking down the catwalk.

“Ay have ayy gerl bak home, Atlanta is huurr name,” George replied.

What George really couldn’t understand was where all the other Engineers had got to and why there was no one in Engineering. He thought his colleagues would have already begun this work, especially considering they were all going to die otherwise.

“We done had bettuurr do this here!” George replied to Joe’s earlier question. They had to fix the ship if no one else was going to, and if he never saw Atlanta again, well, ‘C’est la vie’ as they said down in New Orleans. He took the bundle of tools and carried them as he followed Joe down the catwalk towards the silent Warp Core. They should be okay, as long as it didn’t suddenly spring into life again.

There was one more bulkhead door to go before they would be in the same chamber as the matter -antimatter chamber. ” So, George.” Joe began, “everyone keeps chattering on about some sort of thing that seems to be around us in us or just creeping around us that keeps stopping things. No one knows what it is. It’s cause, its shape is it living? Can it be measured? Have you heard anything more? All I know really is that it’s a thing that turns everything off.” Joe then used the interlock on the door and as he did he said over his shoulder to George.” Let’s pull that Sonic driver out of the bag George. Hook it up to put us up a bit of a sonic field around the whole works. ” Joe looked at the uncertain hangdog look on George’s face and knew that if he were in the boy’s place he’d feel the same way. ” Bah don’t worry George, ” Joe said with a laugh. ” One day after you get your medal and your leave you can sit around the table and tell your girl Atlanta how you saved the day.”

“Some kaand ov dampening field would be my here guess?” George replied. “Maybe at thay …err nuculaar level?”

Joe considered George and smiled. ” By Golly George one day I can see it now. You a gray-haired old grandfather. Telling your family of about twenty or so of all your adventures. And them all sitting around eating up all your words that they might tell others. You know the types . Those with normal and boring fathers and grandfathers.”

Joe rubbed his forehead a bit as he considering what they were about to do. Well the sonic tool might well do the job. ” Joe said absently. But using sonic waves around that core is like getting an elephant to stand on tip toe on the head of a pin. Not that it can’t be done mind you but let’s be careful just the same. So, let’s start the waves out at the low end of the scale and bring them up slowly, okay?” Joe took a deep breath, clapped George on the shoulder and said,” Well let’s get that gadget going George and see if we can’t make you an Admiral.”

George was certainly a man of little words. Joe had that right. However, at the moment he was still flummoxed about where all the other engineers were… you know, the engineers that usually sat at that big control panel and monitored the Drive, and the senior engineers who managed them. They ought to be doing this work, rather than a multitronic communications engineer and a barman who used to work in security. And this was occupying his mind more than it should be, so he hadn’t really thought about the danger of what they were actually doing here, or of service medals, or of one day becoming an Admiral! When Joe clapped him on the shoulders, that was a bit of a wake up call to George, and brought him back to focus on the job at hand.

“Yup!” George replied, “Ay! We gotta git crackin’ wi that thay …err gadget! And fix this here Warp Cawe!”

George pulled the sonic driver out of the bag he been given to carry, and he passed it between his hands. It was a newer model that he’d used before, with a more responsive delta time and an improved ultrasonic wavefront. If there really was some kind of nuclear dampening field then this device ought to detect it, just as sure as God had made little apples. Whether it was of biological, mineral, alien or supernatural origin, well that might be less certain.

George leaned forward to the Warp Core and he passed the sonic driver over the entire unit, beginning at the top and working down. Then moving to the bottom and working upwards. It looked cold and dead, the usually bright blue light totally extinguished from it. When he reached the bulge in the centre of the machine, where the matter-antimatter chamber would be situated, and where the Dilithium crystal would regulate the energy production, he lingered a little longer. He was looking for annihilation particle pairs, and he wanted to discover if the internal energy was still equal to the sum of kinetic and potential energies, hoping to find some reason why the power was off. This was something he had only done at Starfleet Academy, and then only studied in lectures, in theory without any practical experience. George was a Multitronics and Communications engineer, not a nuclear physicist, but it had been difficult to reduce Joe’s expectations of his abilities. Any energy is released should be discoverable in the form of photons, neutrinos, and occasionally more exotic particles.

George carefully used the sonic driver to unscrew the six security bolts around the centre of the chamber until the cover became loose enough to remove. George then took a Banana out of his back pocket and very carefully placed the Banana inside the Dilithium Chamber.

Bananas emit antimatter because they contain potassium-40, which decays and releases a positron every 75 minutes. But this positron is very quickly annihilated by a passing electron. Bananas turn out to be a reasonably good source of positrons because they’re a good source of potassium. A single banana will produces about 15 positrons a second.

• George, Eng