"Mr. McClane, please sit down," Picard said as John walked into the captain's ready room. John's eyes focused on the bald man seated behind the desk. He had seen him sitting at that desk hundreds of times before, but this was his first time seeing it in person. It was exhilarating.

He managed to take a seat before Picard could start wondering why he was standing there staring at him.

"What can I do for you?" Picard asked him as he got settled.

"Well sir," John began, "I told Commander Riker earlier that I was in my apartment in Brooklyn right before I was beamed aboard your ship. That much is true. But what I neglected to mention…" John paused. Being at a loss for words was not something he was too familiar with, but at the moment, he was finding it quite difficult to say what he needed to say.

Picard could see the hesitation on John's face. "What are you trying to tell me Mr. McClane?" he prompted.

John bit the bullet. The worst that could happen was that Picard wouldn't believe him and might get angry at John for wasting his time.

"Well sir, when I woke up yesterday morning, the year was 1990."

"So what you're saying is that not only did we transport you from Earth," Picard began, "but we transported you from twentieth century Earth?"

"That's what I'm saying," John agreed. As he had imagined, Picard was actually considering what he had just said, rather than dismissing it as lunacy. In the 24th century he supposed, just about anything was possible.

Picard was about to say something when his comm badge interrupted him.

"Captain," Geordi said over the comm badge, "O'Brien and I have just finished diagnosing the transporter system, and you're not going to believe what we found."

"I'll be down in a minute Mr. LaForge," Picard responded.

He looked at John. "Would you care to join us?"

John didn't know if he'd understand anything they might discuss, but he figured it wouldn't hurt. So he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Sure, why not?"

Picard stood and headed for the door with John right behind him. As they entered the bridge, he glanced at Riker.

"Number One, please join me and Mr. McClane in transporter room three."

"Aye sir," Riker said as he rose from the command chair to join them in the turbolift. As he rose he said, "Mister Data, You have the conn."

As the 'lift doors closed, John could see Commander Data easing into the command chair.

Then Picard said, "Transporter room three," and they began to descend.

As the three men walked into transporter room three, Geordi looked up from where he was studying the transporter console. O'Brien was closing a panel underneath the transporter platform.

"What do you have for us Mister LaForge?" Picard asked as he walked over to the chief engineer.

"Well, to help explain the situation a little better, I should let you know that the primary power loop always has a trickle of power running through it, even when the transporter is in stand-by mode. Even taking it offline wouldn't be enough; we'd have to shut the whole transporter system down to cut the power to it completely. Normally this isn't a problem. In fact it's designed that way intentionally just because it's such a pain in the neck to repower when it's been completely shut down. However, for the purposes of our experiment yesterday, the primary power loop has too many built in safeguards for it to have been useful to us. In terms of the experiment, those safeguards were unnecessary, as we weren't planning on transporting anything alive, and in fact their operation would have prevented us from accomplishing our goals. Therefore, we decided to use the secondary power loop. However, the secondary power loop won't work while the primary one is powered. This is usually fine because the only time the secondary power loop is ever even used is if the primary power loop fails. But in our case, since the primary power loop was still operational, we had to jury rig the system to be able to use the secondary power loop for our experiment. One of the things we did was disable the surge suppression system. Now that system is mostly unnecessary anyway. A power surge in the transporter system caused by an external source is almost unheard of. But it turns out that our disabling it, coupled with a number of exceedingly rare occurrences yesterday, led to a cascade effect that landed us in our current situation," Geordi said, indicating John with a slight nod of his head.

"Now I must say that after working on this problem all of yesterday afternoon, O'Brien and I were really stumped. Fortunately, I developed an unusually severe headache that evening from trying to figure this thing out, so I went to sickbay to get something for it. When I got there, Doctor Crusher was talking to Ensign Lomek who was in one of the biobeds recovering from bad burns he had received earlier in the day. Apparently, he knocked over a vile of acid onto a control panel he was fixing in one of the biology labs, causing it to short out spectacularly. Now that particular system he was working on shares a power subroutine with the transporters. And in fact that short did cause a surge in the system that found its way into the transporter at precisely the same time as yesterdays transport. It cycled around in the system for several seconds before dissipating. Now I knew none of this before hand, because without the surge suppression system in place, the computer didn't even acknowledge that it had happened until I hooked it back up and ran a residual energy scan.

Now even with all that going on, nothing unusual should have happened, and I still had no clue as to why it did. But as I was getting ready for bed last night I happened to look out my viewport. And what I saw made me think. At the time, we were in close proximity to Warren 4006-X3, a large blue giant star. It happens to be quite unstable and will probably be going supernova within a few thousand years. But due to its instability and its proximity to a double black hole, it produces gravimetric waves. Not strong enough to endanger the ship, but for a system as sensitive as the transporters, and especially in the jury rigged condition they were in yesterday, it caused something quite unexpected."

Geordi could see that the captain was eager to hear what he had to say, while Riker had the same eager look, although tinged with slight impatience. John looked as if Geordi was talking in klingon for all that he understood what was being said.

"The power surge caused the trickle of power in the primary power loop to increase beyond a negligible amount. It can be quite dangerous to have the primary and secondary systems running at the same time, because the combined power can overload the system and cause a transport to fail mid cycle. Now the gravimetric waves caused the frequency at which the secondary power loop was operating on to shift to an opposing frequency from the primary power loop. That fortunately prevented the system from overloading. However, it did cause a rather strange and unexpected side effect. O'Brien and I haven't managed to figure out exactly how it happened yet, but during the transport cycle, we managed to create a sizeable amount of chronotons."

"Time travel," Riker said in awe, as he glanced at John.

"Exactly," Geordi replied. "Somehow, we managed to transport Mister McClane here, not only through space, but through time as well."

"Well that would explain the antique weapon he was holding," Riker said. "But it doesn't explain something else."

Riker looked directly into John's eyes as he posed his next question. "If you're from the past," he asked accusingly, "how did you know my name?"

A/N: Please feel free to review this or any other of my stories. I would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have for me.