“Are we looking at the four distinct specimens from the locket?” Uhura guessed.

“I wish it were that simple,” Crusher said. “No, these are all time-elapsed shots of the same specimen. What I thought was just one bug became two. Or was it three? And did I just imagine it, or had the first bug mutated into two new bugs? Or had it vanished altogether? This damn thing won’t hold still. It’s a moving target. Every time I look at it, it’s something else. Sometimes it moves so fast even the instruments can barely detect it. Nothing natural can do that.”

“At least nothing with which we are familiar,” Selar suggested.

“Copenhagen theory…” McCoy muttered, scratching his chin. “If it works for quantum physics, why can’t it work for medicine?”

All three women gaped at him. Selar’s fingers stopped moving.

“Indeed,” she said. “Why not?”

“Okay,” Crusher said. “Now I’m the one who needs nice, simple words.”

“The wave-versus-particle theory of quantum physics was first described by the Nobel physicist Niels Bohr in Earth year 1927,” Selar said. “Bohr was born in Copenhagen, hence his theory is referred to as the Copenhagen theory. Prior to this, physicists could not understand why quantum matter appeared in the form of particles, but behaved like waves. Bohr suggested that quantum particles function as waves as long they are unobserved. Each quantum particle is equally distributed in a series of overlapping probability waves. But when observed, the waves revert to particles.”

“What’s that got to do with—?” Crusher began.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Uhura suggested.

“Oh, now we’re talking magic—!” Crusher protested.

“Like the placebo effect?” McCoy countered.

“Not the same thing at all,” she shot back.

“In English, please,” Uhura said.

“C’mon, Bev, think about it,” McCoy argued. “Every MD knows that every time you introduce a new medication, outcomes are always influenced by the fact that some people get better just because they’re taking a pill. You give a hundred people a sugar pill when they think they’re getting the actual medication, and ten to thirty percent of them will report that they feel better. Except with antidepressants, where up to sixty percent of patients given a placebo report effectiveness, just because someone’s listening to their troubles, patting their hand, and giving them a magic bullet.”

“If you’re talking about human patients, sure,” Crusher acknowledged. “But that doesn’t apply to all species across the board. Vulcans, for instance.”

“Oh, well, Vulcans!” McCoy dismissed them with a wave of his hand, then seemed to remember that Selar was there. “Sorry, Selar. No offense.”

“None taken, Doctor.”

“And anyway,” Crusher went on heatedly. “We’re talking about a virus here, not a patient or a tree. What the hell does the Copenhagen theory or the placebo effect have to do with—”

“Time out!” Uhura said sharply, and they subsided. As if on cue, her intercom sounded.

She’d sent Thysis home early and diverted all incoming calls to other offices. Only her Romulan Listeners and Tuvok had authorization to interrupt.

“Uhura,” she said, touching a contact on her console and settling an earpiece in her ear.

“Listener Tau-3,” said a voice through the static.

“Go ahead.”

“Confirming presence of disease entity designated colony world…” the voice said shakily. Male or female, and of what species, impossible to tell. The voice was deliberately filtered to foil attempts to intercept it or trace it back to source. “Have visual…”

“Project when ready, Tau-3,” Uhura said crisply. She nodded toward Crusher, who turned off the medical holos with the snap of a toggle. In their place appeared images out of several species’ infernal places.

The source was obviously a vid unit secreted on the person of someone walking through a hospital or clinic or quarantine station, then coded and transmitted on a piggyback frequency across parsecs of space, and the quality of the image was commensurately bad—shaky, in and out of focus, the lighting sometimes so poor the image was lost altogether. What came through was a jumble of ghostly figures, and a great deal of sound.

The figures were Romulans of all ages, some packed together on rows and rows of medical cots, the overspill milling about, propped up in corners, lying on the floor. Healers, some of them looking as ill as their patients, moved hastily among them offering whatever little comfort they could. A no-doubt dangerously obtained close-up of a group of children showed them huddled together, some coughing uncontrollably, others retching helplessly, great running sores on their faces, virid blood running from their noses or flecking their parched lips. Those whose lungs still worked howled or whimpered with pain. The others could only gasp helplessly, their eyes frightened, their little sides heaving with the effort to draw breath.

The Listener with the hidden camera, probably a Vulcan passing as a Romulan, moved with difficulty past a steady stream of incoming patients until the camera showed daylight, and a line of sick and dying Romulans, some too weak to stand without holding themselves up against the outer wall of the building, waiting for admission to the clinic. The line extended as far as the camera could project before the image was lost.

“Confirmation…” the Listener’s voice said once the image disappeared. “Estimate ten percent of the population of…” The code name for the city was lost in static, but Uhura knew the Listener’s location anyway. “Among the sick, no survivors. This is no rumor.”

“Message received, Tau-3,” Uhura said, putting far more bravado into her voice than she felt. “Get out of the hot zone now. Your job is done. Report back to base for some leave time, and—”

“Negative, Command. Evidencing the symptoms myself. Estimate less than one hour before delirium ensues. Terminating now…”

No one spoke for some moments after the transmission ended. Finally McCoy cleared his throat.

“Just when you think you’ve seen everything…guess there’s no question now whether this is real or not.”

“Or that it’s manufactured,” Crusher added sharply. “This isn’t a natural phenomenon. It was created. How, why, or by whom—”

“We can assume the why,” Uhura said. She would deal with losing a top operative, and also a friend, later. “The three of you are going to find out how, and I’m going to find out by whom. Dr. Selar?”

“There is a traceable disease vector, Admiral,” Selar reported evenly, the best among all of them at disguising her reaction to what they had just witnessed. “If all of your Listeners confirm what your original source provided…” Now it was Selar’s turn to use the holo program to draw up a star map highlighting a sector which included several Romulan colony worlds, a segment of the Neutral Zone, and a cluster of Federation worlds on the other side. Four of the Romulan worlds were highlighted. “…we can be certain that the disease has occurred at selected sites on these four worlds. In addition…”

She manipulated the map to show more of the Federation side.

“Beginning with the seventy-three seemingly isolated cases on these seventeen worlds, I have developed an algorithm which would not only analyze any reports of similar symptoms anywhere within Federation space, but also analyzed any undiagnosable illnesses within the same field.”

“Anyone sneezes, she’s on it,” McCoy offered, trying to shake them all out of the mood the Listener’s video had plunged them into. “Clever girl!”

“Indeed,” Selar said, accepting the compliment. She either was in awe of the senior physician or simply had a far greater tolerance for McCoy’s humanity than most Vulcans. “Such variables as reports of increased numbers of head-colds, absenteeism from work or school, antiviral prescriptions, and use of native remedies or vitamin supplements are included in the algorithm.”