Chapter 26
"Even though that was all a dream, I hope that you do know I will always be here for you! No matter what happens, we'll see it through together," Harriett told him.
"That's how I knew we were meant to be together. We love each other so much in these dreams that I just knew if we ever got the chance, we could in this life too!" Bud answered.
"Oh Buddy!" she exclaimed and pulled him into a crushing hug.
They tenderly held each other for a time until the computer chimed again to warn them they were due on the Bridge soon. They broke apart with self-conscious chuckles and quickly got dressed to go on duty.
During her shift on the Bridge, Lieutenant Commander Simms had many quiet moments. She took that time to do research on problems her patients were having. Today she was concentrating on the reason behind Commander Roberts' dreams. As she worked she occasionally let her eyes stray to where Bud sat on the other side of Captain Rabb. Whenever their eyes met, which seemed to be often, because Bud couldn't resist looking at her either, they would share a secret smile.
By the time their shift ended she had come up with the two most likely reasons for the dreams. Either Bud was reliving an ancestor's life, which could easily be checked out by a search of his family tree, or he was getting messages on how to correct mistakes in the previous incarnations of the people in his dreams. If the latter was the case, Harriett believed that things were already on the road to those corrections. Bud had told her in his dream; 'Commander' Rabb had gone from one woman to another, never finding the happiness he was looking for, but in this time he was happily married with a baby on the way!
As for Bud and herself, she thought of all the things their 'other selves' had gone through and wondered if they too were on the way to having these 'present selves' fixed. With medicine much more advanced than the primitive methods used in the 21st century, she was sure those things, like Bud losing his leg, or their infant daughter dying, wouldn't happen to them now.
That left three other people that his dreams seemed to focus on, Lieutenant Commander Sarah Mackenzie, Lieutenant Victor Galindez, and Vice President Chegwidden. So if the lives needed to be 'fixed' for these dreams to stop then they needed to figure out what the problem these three had in the past so they could be fixed now. She would have to ask Bud to go over anything he could remember about those three.
They got off duty and went to dinner in Ten Forward over their meal she asked him to tell her anything he could about Sarah, Victor, and AJ. Bud frowned at her question and then started relating everything he could remember. Harriett listened and analyzed what he was saying. She looked beneath the surface story and read between the lines. What she came up with was an attraction between Victor and Sarah, as well as between Sarah and AJ.
The problem that she saw in the 'past' there was a rank problem between both sets of couples. With that information she reasoned out that Sarah couldn't really have a relationship with either man. Victor was lower rank than her and AJ was higher. Here in the present Sarah and Victor had the same problem. She was his boss. Neither Bud nor Harriett were aware that the two had already had a romantic relationship, or that it had ended.
The conclusion that they could come to without more information was that they needed to find out what the situation was between the three involved. Harriett thought she might be able to feel out Victor and Sarah under the guise of a yearly psychological check. But how to discover AJ's feelings was the problem eluding an answer for them.
To be continued…..