A Captain And A Madman

Chapter Six: The Doctor And The Listener

Thirty-Six Hours Later...

"So, let me see if I get this straight," LaForge said, arms crossed over his chest as he eyed the nearly-finished device the Doctor was fussing over.

The holodeck was bare at the moment, except for a single workbench in the center of the room. Over the past day and a half, various tools and devices, ranging from handheld to massive structures, had filled the chamber, offering a variety of functions... some obvious to the Enterprise's Chief Engineer, and some quite obscure.

At the end of all that work, though, there was the device; the bottom segment of it looked like any piece of Starfleet; burnished gray duranium alloy in a circular base, with a glossy black control pad on one side. The interior was a mess of circuits and even some old-fashioned wiring, a jury-rigged amalgamation of several generations worth of human and Federation technology.

The truly alien component was what was locked into the base; what had once been a hunk of dilithium crystal had since metamorphosed due to Doctor Crusher's guided treatment of it. Instead of a smooth, shimmering piece of crystal, it was misshapen, a pale white and orange tiny, covered in numerous tiny pockmarks throughout its surface. To LaForge's visor, the thing looked like quite literally nothing he had ever seen.

"Your TARDIS doesn't work because it can't draw on energy from our universe," LaForge started slowly, as if fully expecting to be corrected. "And the reason it can't do that is the materials its constructed from originate from your own universe, and it has a quantum signature that leaves it fundamentally incompatible with this 'Time Vortex.'"

"Mhm, good so far," the Doctor chirped distractedly.

"So this... coral... looking stuff..." his head tilted as he considered it. "Because it's made from raw materials in our universe, it'll draw the necessary power, and let your TARDIS do whatever it is your TARDIS does..."

"In theory," the Doctor chirped. "Truth be told, never attempted it before, never had the chance. Dunno if anyone ever has. Without your replicators, your dilithium crystals, I wouldn't have been able to jury-rig something to draw on its own supply of fuel... and let me tell you, last thing I want to do is go giving it my life force again; blase as I acted the first time, that's an absurdly risky thing to be tossing around. Now, because a TARDIS is grown from a species of pseudo-coral, I had hoped to find perhaps a planet with a similar supply but, lacking that, I decided that it would be close enough to use a fifth-dimension crystal lattice and make some very, very minor tweaks to its molecular makeup."

"Aren't you worried you're revealing the deep, dark secrets of time travel to me?" LaForge asked slowly, brow lifting.

"Well, let me put it this way," the Doctor chirped, clasping LaForge's shoulder with one hand and giving him a winning smile. "If you can deduce the complexities and inner workings of a TARDIS, from development to operation, based entirely upon the words 'She's grown from a sort of coral,' then you most absolutely deserve a TARDIS. But I'm not necessarily holding my breath... in all honesty, there are quicker, easier, if somewhat less effective, less accurate and far more risky means to achieve time travel. According to your historical database, your Federation's even figured out a few. We don't monopolize the concept... we just happened to find the most stylish way of going about it."

LaForge couldn't help but grin at that, but before he could continue the conversation, a repressed yawn pushed at him, his jaw straining and shifting as he tried desperately not to give in and let it out. Even though he was certain he'd repressed it completely, the Doctor didn't even have to look at him to notice, and the Time Lord's tongue 'tsked' lightly.