MR. SPOCK HAD spent a small part of his very busy day getting reacquainted with his personal set of microsuitable tools. He had paid top credit for them some years ago in a specialty shop on Orion; Spock had no idea where the Orionites might have gotten them. But the tools had served the Vulcan in good stead. They weren't Starfleet issue; they were far better. Spock would never admit it—he wouldn't see the point—but some of the more observant people aboard the Enterprise had noticed long before that Spock was, at heart, a tinkerer.
It suited the Vulcan to improve the instruments with which he worked every day. The original designers of Spock's science station on the bridge would no longer recognize some of its innards; Spock had streamlined here and double-circuited there, always improving, changing and reworking things for his benefit. For instance, the chattering of the computer—the trinary code in which parts of the computer "spoke" to other parts—was never meant by its designers to be audible. Spock had changed that; he preferred to hear what was going on. The ship's humans were at first amazed, and then amused, by Spock's ability to understand that computer chatter as if it were a language—which it was, in a way. Similarly, Spock had tinkered with his standard-issue tricorder, improving it until it did things never intended, or imagined, by its makers. Spock had also had an idea or two about improving warp engine performance to a point where a starship could achieve a consistent and safe cruising speed of warp fifteen—but those were just ideas; Spock had nothing practical to present to the captain … yet.
Tinkering gave Spock a very personal pleasure—something to which he would never admit, and would barely admit to himself—but he justified it by telling himself that any improvement of the ship's instrumentation allowed the ship to do its job better and was, therefore, beneficial to the ship and the service: a logical and desirable outcome. The Vulcan preferred not to notice that the logic of his reasoning was precisely human and the subject of many Starfleet regulations written to encourage personal initiative for the benefit of the service.
With the environmental chaos aboard the Enterprise, Spock had not had a chance to study the ship's computers themselves; the science officer had spent most of the day patching manual controls for ship's functions and interrogating the computer software to see if the source of the ship's problems lay there.
It didn't. Spock had quickly found that all software errors could be attributed to a hardware breakdown of some sort. Spock wondered about that: In all his experience, he had never seen a computer hardware breakdown of such magnitude. The Vulcan had never heard of even a minor breakdown involving the quintuply-redundant computers aboard a Starfleet cruiser. If one component should fail, its four backups would handle traffic until someone could make a repair.
In the Enterprise's case, all the main computer systems—except for navigation and a handful of others—had failed utterly; the backups had not taken over. Spock intended to find out why, and had gone down to the computer room to find out.
The Vulcan was dressed in an immaculately clean coverall; he was gloved and booted, and he wore a face mask, tool belt, air tank and fishbowl helmet. His equipment had been carefully vacuumed. A grounded wire trailed Spock to carry static electricity away from his body. The precautions were not for Spock's benefit, but the computers'. No grime, no dust could be tolerated here. An operating theater was a germy pigsty compared to a Starfleet computer room.
Spock had not been in the room in more than two years—not since he'd had to repair damage done to the primary memory banks by a disgruntled records officer named Finney. Finney'd been in and out of the computer room repeatedly, without having taken sanitary precautions; Spock had even found a food wrapper on the floor. The Vulcan had almost gotten angry.
The Enterprise carried two hundred thirty-six computer banks, all tied together into one megasized electronic brain. The banks were closely stacked like a row of thin dominoes and were seated in a protective chamber set flush into a specially constructed bulkhead. Spock thought it not incorrect to liken the structure of the computer banks to a set of printed-on-paper books sitting on a library shelf—except that this shelf held the cultural inheritance of many planets and races.
The capacity of the computers aboard the Enterprise was at least one hundred times greater than the total computer capacity available on Earth in the year 2200. The computer banks represented more than three hundred years of progress in the design and manufacture of artificial intelligence machines. Its incredible memory held all the knowledge the ship needed to function, an encyclopedia of all historical and scientific facts, a library of all major and many minor literary and artistic works from all Federation worlds—in short, everything anyone ever wanted or would need to know about anything.
But now the computers were nearly mute and couldn't tell Spock much at all.
The Vulcan faced the wall of computer banks and consulted his tricorder. His right eyebrow went up in surprise as the instrument's sensors began to wiggle. Radiation? the Vulcan thought. Primary, secondary, tertiary—characteristic of nuclear fission . . . very strange. Spock saw from his readings that he was in no danger; the radiation level was not harmful to a humanoid. But the radiation level in this protected room should have been zero.
Spock noted that while the tricorder indicated the aftereffects of nuclear fission—or something like it—there was no trace of fissionable material anywhere in the room. The science officer quickly set his tricorder to make a full sweep of the computer room, using all sensors at once.
Ah, Spock thought with some satisfaction. A temperature anomaly … in the direction of the computer banks. A very slight warmth. He looked at the long row of computer banks, set into the wall. Nothing seemed wrong, at least at first glance. By touch Spock located the inertial screwdriver on his tool belt and walked over to the middle of the computer banks. As he approached he looked the banks over carefully. Spock saw nothing.
Spock stood before the thirty-fifth bank and touched it with the 'driver on the correct spot; the bank withdrew itself from the wall, sliding out easily. The waferlike bank was about as tall as he was, only six centimeters thick, and about a meter and a half wide; four centimeters of bulkhead insulated this bank from the next one in the series. The Vulcan touched his inertial 'driver to each of the small screws holding the cover of the bank onto its chassis. He watched as the 'driver disrupted the field attaching the screws to the chassis, allowing the screws to pop up for removal by hand. Spock pulled out the screws, gathered them together, and carefully placed them in a pouch on his tool belt. He then gripped the face of the bank and pulled it away from the chassis.
Spock's right eyebrow rose in surprise. There was a tiny, clean, perfectly circular hole drilled into the super-tough material of the computer bank grid. As a result the bank was disrupted, shorted out, wiped clean: It was utterly dead.
Spock inspected twenty more banks chosen at random before concluding that more than eighty-eight percent of the ship's computer capacity was irretrievably gone. All the affected banks had that mysterious, tiny hole in them in exactly the same place, just below and to the right of the center—and as small as it might be, a hole such as that was more than enough to shatter the delicate molecular balance of a grid; each bank depended on that critical balance for its rationality. The only banks still working were the fourteen leftmost and the twelve rightmost, where only a few of the ship's routines were stored. The ship still had navigational control because those routines were stored in banks five and six—but the gravity control routines, for instance, were stored in bank fifty-three, and that bank was dead.
The Vulcan quickly satisfied himself that everything that had gone wrong aboard the Enterprise could be traced to the destruction of the computer hardware. Spock fretted at not being able to attack the problem immediately—and he was not sure what he could do, anyway—but the captain had to be informed that the brain of his ship was gone and could not be restored.