Chapter 11: A strange coincidence?
Bashir was standing with O'Brien, overlooking the Promenade.
"So, Professor Nguyen is gone?" Bashir asked.
"Yes, he is. We loaded his cargo aboard the Lion's Gate, and he and his staff departed at oh-eight hundred. Lion's Gate will drop him off at the Daystrom Institute at Rigel. He asked me to say good-bye, and good luck, to you and Dax from him."
"Nice of him to do that. I'll wager he's disappointed by Commander Sisko's decision."
"'Disappointed' would be a mild way of putting it. When he tried to appeal to Admiral Seth, and Admiral Seth sided with Commander Sisko, Professor Nguyen was crushed. He had such high hopes for his experiments here. He was hoping that he'd make a big splash with his work. You know, this is just a hunch, but I don't think he came here looking for data to build new wormholes. Instead, I suspect that he was hoping that he'd find something that showed that Vuldt's Equation was plainly wrong."
"So I guess we'll just have to keep guessing whether Vuldt's Equation is valid, won't we? Can we stand the stress of not knowing?" Bashir smiled to confirm that he was speaking in jest.
"You know, that reminds me, Julian. This lady friend of yours: you and she must have had some pretty bizarre discussions over dinner. Vuldt's Equation, wormholes, verterons, null time."
Bashir chuckled and nodded. "Yes, we did."
"Quite a coincidence, wasn't it, that you and this, er, unidentified young lady just happened to discuss, in ridiculously complicated and highly theoretical terms, the exact problem with Vuldt's Equation that we faced these past days?"
Bashir turned to look at O'Brien. "Now that you mention it, it does seem to be a strange coincidence."