When Wesley Crusher came on duty shortly before 1600 hours, Commander LaForge greeted him with "Wesley. Just the fellow I wanted to see!"

"What's going on, Commander?" Wesley asked. "I heard we were going to be trying to push the Bre'el moon again... is that what you need me for?"

"No, this time Gomez, Barclay and Taurik will be handling that. We'll be hitting perigee in about ten minutes, and this time I think it's going to work. I've got another project for you."

"Sure. Did we manage to do anything about the Calamarain, or did we do something to let us shield from them while we're pushing?"

"Q cut a deal with the Calamarain, apparently. Which is kind of related to what I need you for." He guided Wesley over to a console where Data was very rapidly punching in parameters to display various equations on the screen, and then altering them. "We've got two new challenges to deal with, because the Bre'el III satellites are unstable too. Their orbits are starting to deteriorate, and there's half a million people on Bre'el III. So our two main objectives, right now, are to figure out how to rapidly move all the people to the other side of the Bre'el sun, and housing them once they get there. Q suggested that we reprogram the replicators to produce antimatter-"

"Wait, what? Replicators can't make antimatter!"

"I know. It's a serious technical challenge. But from the perspective of pure physics, think about it... he's right, it should be possible. We just need to figure out how to do it."

"Why do we need to make more antimatter?"

"To power self-replicating construction replicators that can turn the rings of Bre'el VII into habitable space stations, mostly, although the extra power would come in handy for some other purposes, as well."

"So is that what you want me working on?"

"No, that's what I need Data working on, but he was working with Q on developing an artificial wormhole that could transit the solar system so we could beam people directly to the space station on Bre'el VII, and if we can build more stations there that would be the most effective way to get all the people safely evacuated. With three satellites, we can't try this trick with pushing the Bre'el III moons, even if we had enough warp-capable ships, so getting the people out of there is really the only option."

"You think we can develop an artificial wormhole? Commander... that's pretty out there. I'm not even sure how we'd go about trying to do that."

"That's what I need you for, Wesley. You've got a stronger background in theoretical physics and, well, weird science, than anyone here, even Data, at least when it comes to the really esoteric stuff. You're the only one who actually understood the modifications the Traveler was making to the warp engines to allow us to get back home from the Outer Rim, after all."

Data looked up. "Ah, Wesley. Has Geordi explained to you what we are doing?"

"Mostly. You need me to work with you on developing the artificial wormhole?" He looked over the math Data was working with, and his eyes went wide. "Cool. I haven't seen math like that since the Traveler asked me to help him out! This'll be great!"

"Actually, I believe that Geordi would prefer that I assist him in the development of antimatter replication."

"Antimatter replication's a pure engineering problem," LaForge said. "We already have the theoretical groundwork we need to pull it off, it's just a matter of implementing it. But you're my theory guy, Wes. For the artificial wormhole we need to get our heads around the theoretical framework before we can even begin to come up with a strategy, like you said."

"You want me working on this alone?" The implied trust and confidence in Wesley's intellect both thrilled and terrified Wesley, since he was pretty sure that he could not, in fact, figure out a theoretical framework for the development of an artificial wormhole, at least not on short notice.

"Uh, no. Not exactly. See..."

"Captain Picard summoned Q to talk to him, approximately twenty-five minutes ago. He is expected to return to the project, however."

Wesley looked back and forth between LaForge and Data. He could not be understanding this correctly. "You want me to work alone... with Q?"

"Well, you did work with the Traveler," LaForge said, sounding uncomfortable. Now Wesley could guess why LaForge had been beating around the bush so much.

"Commander, he stabbed me with a bayonet!"

"Technically," Data said, "Q did not personally stab you. You were stabbed by one of his creations."

"If I programmed the holodeck to kill someone, that doesn't mean it wasn't me that killed them!"

"I know, Wes. I know. But here's the thing. The guy's a jerk, but he actually does know his stuff, and he's willing to help. We've got five hundred thousand people in danger on Bre'el III, and there's no way we could evacuate them all in time even if we were free to ferry them back and forth... and we're not, because we have to spend the next ten hours pushing Bre'el IV's moon back into place. You have experience working with aliens who understand physics at a much more advanced level than the Federation-"

"Well, yeah, but that was the Traveler, not Q. The Traveler's a really nice guy."

"But he's not here to help us with this. Q is." LaForge sighed. "Look, Wes, I really didn't want to do this to you. Q's hard enough for full-grown adults to deal with. But you and Data are the smartest guys in the engineering department, and Data's got years more experience with straight engineering problems than you do, but you've got more experience with cutting-edge theoretical physics than any of us. And you're good at it. I've got too many critical jobs here and I need to assign the best person for the job, even if that means making you have to deal with Q." He put his hand on Wesley's shoulder. "I'll make it up to you when we're done. Pizza in Ten-Forward or the holodeck adventure of your choice, you decide."

Wesley sighed. He was an acting ensign, there were lives at stake, and LaForge really needed him to do this. And maybe he'd be lucky and Q wouldn't come back from his meeting with the captain. Except, of course, that would leave Wesley with the burden of trying to come up with an entire new theory of physics on short notice, by himself.

Data caught him up on what he and Q had already done, and Wesley spent the next twenty minutes or so trying to wrap his head around it. The math they'd been working on seemed to be the skeleton of a structure that could describe the nature of space. Some of it, Wesley recognized easily; other parts he got quickly when Data explained them; still other parts of it he thought he understood, but he'd want to have a discussion with someone who understood it better than Data did, and if that person had to be Q... well, people in Starfleet had to deal with obnoxious aliens all the time. There was some stuff that Data said Q hadn't had a chance to explain before he left, and neither Wesley nor Data could figure out what it was supposed to be. After Data went over to work with LaForge on the antimatter replication problem, Wesley hammered on the math for a while, trying to map it to his understanding of physics and phenomena he'd observed or read about.

And then Q showed up.

Wesley was actually deep enough in his study of the work Data and Q had already done that he didn't realize Q had shown up until a strident voice boomed out, "You want me to work with a sixteen-year-old boy?"

Wesley turned around. "I'm seventeen," he snapped.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that when you have a microscopically short life span, a single year could possibly make any kind of a difference," Q retorted. "From the perspective of several billion years, a single year doesn't really make all that much difference."

"Wesley is our expert on advanced physics," LaForge said.

Q looked at him with an expression of exaggerated horror. "I knew you were primitive, LaForge, but I had no idea how primitive," he said. "Let me guess, the head of the xenobiology department is a three year old?"

"I've worked with advanced alien physics before," Wesley said hotly. "I worked with the Traveler to get us back from the Outer Rim of the universe!"

Q rolled his eyes. "Oh, a Traveler. Am I supposed to be impressed? They're only a tiny shade less unsophisticated than you are."

LaForge took a deep breath. "Q. I don't need you to like this arrangement. But you don't know enough about our technology to develop an artificial wormhole by yourself, and I need Data for the work on antimatter replication. Wesley may be young, but when it comes to advanced theoretical physics, there isn't anyone on the ship who's as good at grasping new concepts, and no one but Data has as much background in it. Wesley has a better chance of being able to figure out what the heck you're talking about and translate it into engineering specs than anyone else on this ship. So you can work with him, or I can call Captain Picard and tell him you're refusing to cooperate."

Q raised his hands slightly in a gesture of surrender, but his rolled eyes and "give me strength" look at the ceiling made it clear that the surrender was extremely reluctant. "Fine," he sighed. "But when the kid fails miserably to understand the most basic concepts and the entire project comes grinding to a halt, don't say I didn't warn you."

"If you can teach it, I can learn it," Wesley said, because he'd been raised to be polite to everyone, even people who had gotten him stabbed with a bayonet two years ago, so he couldn't say what he really wanted to say to Q.

"We'll see about that." Q slid into the seat vacated by Data, reached over Wesley to take the mug of tea that had been sitting by Wesley's seat, took a drink, and promptly spit it out back into the cup. "That's disgusting! What happened to this thing? It was fine an hour ago."

"When it was hot, you mean?" Wesley asked.

Q considered that. "Hmm... yeah, that might be the difference."

"It's funny, I would have thought that a superintelligent alien being would understand the concept of heat exchange over time. If you left a hot cup of tea here an hour ago, wouldn't you expect it to be cold by now?"

Q glared at him. "Of course I would. I just wouldn't expect the primitive gustatory receptors that come with this body to care nearly so much about the temperature. Iced tea tasted perfectly acceptable, but this... this is repulsive."

"It's also repulsive when people spit into their cups."

"Well, it was disgusting! Was I expected to swallow it? What if it tasted repulsive because someone had poisoned it?"

"Who would poison your tea?"

Q gave him a hard look. "Apparently, almost anyone. Or hadn't you noticed there are people trying to kill me?"

"There's a plasma energy cloud trying to kill you. The people aren't trying to kill you."

"What, you don't think a plasma energy cloud is people? I assure you, Crusherling, they're more sapient than you are."

"Okay, but no people aboard this ship are trying to kill you." Yet, Wesley thought. "And just because something tastes bad doesn't mean it's poisoned, so it's still disgusting to see you spit it out."

"Whatever. You people have so many stupid rules about what you're allowed to do or not do with your food, it's a wonder any of you have the nerve to eat anything. I'm going to get something else to drink."

He got up. Wesley pointed at the existing cup. "Take this over to the replicator and put it in."

Q looked at Wesley as if he were some sort of strange animal. "Why? I don't want more of this gunk."

"Because we don't have an infinite supply of matter, so you throw anything you're not going to use back into the replicator hoppers so they can reuse it. And because nobody likes a used drinking mug sitting around taking up space. Especially if someone just spit all over it."

"Oh." Q actually looked slightly embarrassed. "I suppose I should have realized. You can't possibly have enough free energy just from matter-antimatter reactions to be able to manufacture matter out of energy every time you want." He took the cup with him over to the replicator. Wesley felt a little odd about that. He had actually just told Q to do something, and Q had done it. Maybe this wouldn't be as hard as he'd thought.

When Q came back with presumably hot tea, Wesley was continuing to pore over the math, wondering how exactly he was going to go about phrasing his questions without Q mocking him, or if in fact there was any way to manage that. Q sat down next to him again. "So, wunderkind. You figured out anything from the notes Data took?"

"I think so," Wesley said, trying not to feel intimidated. He was used to sitting down next to adults, dealing with them on their own level. Some of the adults he was used to dealing with, like Commander Riker and Lieutenant Worf, were physically very tall, imposing men. Others, like Commander LaForge and Data, were very intelligent men. And Captain Picard had been a very powerful man, who disliked him, and whom Wesley had had very strong emotions about since he was a young child, given his friendship with Wesley's father and the fact that his command had gotten Wesley's father killed. All of these people had been very intimidating at the very first, and Wesley had gotten over it then. He should be able to get over it now. The problem was that Q was superintelligent, physically imposing, and while he wasn't powerful now he had been... and he'd tried to kill Wesley two years ago. This was really something Wes was having a hard time just getting over. Wesley took a deep breath. Just get into the science. If he could just get his head into the science he could stop caring about anything else. "But I'm not sure what this coefficient is doing. Data wasn't clear either; he said you hadn't had a chance to go over it with him, and he couldn't figure out what it might represent."

"Well, what do you think it's for, o prodigy?"

"I'm not sure, but maybe something to do with how stable a wormhole will be if you put it in a particular region of space?"

Q's eyes went wide. "You came up with that on your own?"

"Well, yeah. Data didn't know what it does, but I've been looking at it in the context of these other equations and the notes Data took on what you two were discussing, and it looks like it's supposed to be a factor in stability. But it's not related to time, and I'd think that would be the main factor in stability, so I was wondering what else could be involved in keeping a wormhole stable and I thought maybe there was something about the nature of space, or maybe some other dimension of space – not subspace, but maybe some deeper structure than that."

"And nobody helped you with this."

Wesley sighed. "If Data didn't know what it does then who was going to help me with it?"

"I may have misjudged you, wonder boy. That actually is impressive." Q pointed at the symbol on the PADD. "This describes the, hmm, how to put this... the 'thickness' of space. The structure of spacetime - including the related substructures such as subspace and, uh, you don't have a name for it so let's call it transspace, it's what wormholes and transwarp corridors use - has variable, mm, density. Not density of matter, obviously, but density of structure. 'Thick' space can support wormholes and suchlike more easily than 'thin' space. And space tends to be thick near solar systems because over time gravitation pulls at the structure of space in such a way that it congeals and becomes, well, thicker. But it's much easier to tear a hole in thin space; it just won't be stable for very long."

"So how do we find out the value of this... how do you pronounce that symbol anyway?"

Q shrugged. "I don't know, make something up. It was just a doodle."

"Well, what do you call it?"

"We don't call it anything. We just know what it is. Half the problem I'm having with you people is that you don't have the words for the concepts you need, and since where I come from concepts don't need to be put into words, it's not as if I can borrow a word from my own language the way you borrowed words from the Vulcans when you first got into space."

"It looks kind of like a cursive G with a lot of extra loops. Can we give it a different symbol? One with a name?"

"Oh, fine." Q scrawled something on the PADD with the stylus. "That's 'thenno'. It's the letter for the sound TH in Coristani. Since we're talking about thick and thin... and 'theta' usually means something else in math."

"Okay, so how do we derive the value of thenno?" Wesley wasn't going to ask who the Coristani were and why Q was borrowing words from their language.

"Haven't the faintest. That's a technology issue. We can just see it."

"What's it related to that we might be able to measure?"

"Well, gravity for starters, but with a black hole in the area most gravitometric assessments are going to be problematic. Mmm... the exact speed of light, because it goes faster when space is thinner, but I'm not sure if your instruments are accurate enough. Let me think... Oh, a detailed spectral analysis of Bre'el ought to be able to tell you, because the fact that light goes slightly slower in thick space will have a Doppler effect, so you can compare the light from Bre'el here, in the system, to the light that reaches the nearest deep space observatory, and then get the same readings for, um, where's a good spot... Bajor. That would work."

"Why Bajor?"

"Space around Bajor is extremely thick. There's a gateway to a pocket dimension nestled into folded transspace right around there. And then measure the Badlands near the border with Cardassian space. Space there's very thin. You can use, um, damn, I can't remember the name of the planet but it's right around there. What are you doing?"

"Sending a priority message to Astrometrics. I don't have the authority to tie up the com lines by just calling the science department every time I need a scan, so I just put the request in their work queue and give it a high priority, and it gets done that way."

"An acting ensign has the authority to set priorities? Your hierarchies are even flatter than I thought."

"Well, only in emergencies." Actually, Wesley had a backdoor in the computer that allowed him to prioritize things beyond the level that his rank should allow, but he only used it when it was a matter of life or death and he didn't want to bother Commanders LaForge or Data, and besides, he was pretty sure he didn't want to tell Q he was doing it. "Once we get the scans back, will we be able to put together a scale to describe where Bre'el space is on the range and what that means for our equation here? Would you know how to do that?"

"Of course I'd know how to do that. Math's universal, Crusher. I may know more nifty math tricks than you do, but I can do math at your level as well as you can do simple arithmetic." Q pointed at another symbol in the equation. "So can you figure out what this is?"

"That's easy. That's the differential of the gravity between the source and the target for your wormhole."

"Data told you that."

"Data told me I was right when I asked if that was what it was."

"Well. This might actually work."

After that it was a lot easier than Wesley had expected. Q was still often obnoxious, insulting and rude, still mocked Wesley or snapped at him for small mistakes, was frequently sarcastic, and had no concept of personal space... but he also seemed to have acquired a grudging respect for Wesley's intelligence, which despite every reason Wesley had to hate Q was actually flattering, because Q was a genius. It wasn't just that he knew vastly more than Wesley did, or than anyone Wesley knew except the Traveler did; that probably came with the territory of being an ancient, superpowerful entity from an immensely advanced civilization. It was that, despite knowing next to nothing about their technology, Q could look at the specifications Wesley showed him, once he had explained the nature of space and the challenges involved in creating and stabilizing a wormhole well enough that Wesley could come up with technological proposals, read them over, and declare whether or not the proposed solution would do what they needed... and then Wesley would run the computer simulation and Q would turn out to be right. At first Wesley had thought Q was being obstructionist and defeatist, because he didn't think anything would work. As they got deeper into the work, though, Wesley realized that Q was being a realist. Nothing they'd come up with so far would work.

Q was plainly fading, though. The speed with which he could read through Wesley's specs was decreasing, he was spacing out and needing Wes to repeat himself fairly often, his eyes kept glazing over when he wasn't reading, and finally Wesley caught his eyelids drooping. "Q, do you need to take a nap or something?"

Q started, eyes snapping wide open, and then shook his head rapidly. "I'm awake. I'm not falling asleep. What is it?"

Wesley didn't know how to handle this. Adults could take care of their own bodies in his experience; he'd never had an adult falling asleep on him, then denying he was doing it. "You just almost fell asleep here at the desk."

"I was just resting my eyes. They hurt. The lighting in this engineering room is terrible."

"Look, if you need to get some sleep we can finish this later."

"We don't have time. At best we've got half a day before tidal stresses start doing damage to Bre'el III, maybe a day and a half before one of its three moons actually crashes into the planet. I can't afford to spend any time being unconscious right now."

"Yeah, but you're not very useful if you're falling asleep."

Q glared at his teacup. He had drunk five of them in the past hour and a half. "Troi said that drinking tea would help me stay awake."

"It will, it's got caffeine in it. But first of all coffee's got more, so why are you drinking tea if you're trying to stay awake?"

"Does coffee taste anything like raktajino?"

"Um... yeah, the way that black pepper tastes like jalapeno pepper."

"Having never had either, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Raktajino's like coffee on enhancers. It's about three times as strong as coffee and has an even more bitter taste. If you put enough sugar and cream in coffee it tastes pretty good, but there's nothing you can do to raktajino to make it stop tasting bitter."

"I'll try coffee."

"How long have you been up, anyway?"

"I haven't the foggiest. When did I arrive on this ship?"

"I'm not sure, because I wasn't on duty when you showed up, but I think it was around 1500 hours yesterday or something."

"And what time is it now?"

"1730 hours."

"So, since Picard let me out of his oubliette around 1900 hours last night, and I'd been asleep shortly before that... 22 hours, I suppose."

Wesley shook his head. "And you've had how many cups of tea?"

"I wasn't counting."

"I counted at least five. Did you have any earlier today?"

"A few when Troi and I were working on the te... the thing we were working on."

"If you've been up for 22 hours and you've had that much caffeinated tea, I don't know how much coffee's going to help. Come here. I'm going to have to introduce you to a Crusher All-Nighter Special."

"A what?"

Wesley walked over to the replicator. "Insomerium 5 cc's, neoephedrine 2 cc's. Crusher authorization alpha seven twenty-five." He extracted the hypo from the replicator and showed it to Q. "When you absolutely, positively, can't take time to sleep or people will end up dead."

"I had no idea the wonder child was also allowed to prescribe drugs."

This had been something of a risk. Wes swallowed. He'd assumed that Q wouldn't know enough to know that insomerium was a restricted substance, only replicatable by doctors. "I, uh, don't tell anybody, okay? I don't actually have the authority."

Q blinked at him. "Then how'd you do it?"

Wesley sighed. "You can copy one account's access privileges to another account if the computer thinks they're the same account. I created a corrupt account with my voiceprint and my mother's information and password, and merged them to get her access privileges, and then since the voiceprints were the same I could merge the account with my own. So, uh, yeah, I can get anything the chief medical officer can." At Q's look, Wesley hastily clarified. "Look, I'm not irresponsible with this stuff. I've learned a lot about medicine from living with my mom, and I used to study it when I was a kid, when I thought I'd be a doctor too when I grew up and I hadn't decided to do engineering instead. I know the risks and the side effects, and I don't do this kind of thing unless it's necessary. It's just... my mom will say no, you have to sleep, because... well, because you're you. She won't cut you the kind of slack she'd cut anyone in Starfleet or anyone who actually works in engineering; she'll do the right thing medically and she won't give you any leeway to argue, because... what you did to me. She won't violate her oath, but if she can do something to annoy you or stop you from getting what you want because her idea is better from a medical perspective, she'll do it. And you're right that we've got to solve this, or figure out that we can't solve it and move on to something else, as soon as possible, and I can't do it by myself. So, uh, here."

Q smiled broadly. "Dear child, were you under the misapprehension that I thought less of you for breaking the rules? I'd begun to believe you have half a brain on you already, but now I discover that you're no Boy Scout after all - that you are perfectly able and willing to break the regulations you live by if it allows you to accomplish what you think you need to do? Now I am impressed."

"I'm not trying to impress you," Wesley snapped. "I'm just trying to help you stay awake so we can save the people on Bre'el III."

"People who are trying to impress me rarely do," Q said. He gestured at the hypo in Wesley's hand. "Now, explain to me what this stuff actually does."

"Neoephedrine is like adrenaline, only it's weaker and bound to a time-release agent. So instead of a quick, sharp spike in your level of alertness, that drops off and makes you more tired afterward, it's a long-term, slower arousal that simply keeps you more alert and awake for several hours. And insomerium breaks down a chemical that your brain produces which tells your body that it's time to go to sleep, and blocks the receptors for that chemical so for a while you can't feel sleepy. It'll keep you awake and alert for about four or five hours and then the bottom will drop out and you'll have to go to sleep."

"Well, what would happen if I took more then?"

Wesley frowned. "People can go up to three weeks without sleep with the proper medical regimen, but it's really, really bad for their health. They stop being able to properly regulate their sugar balance, and they risk all kinds of metabolic disorders, and your mind goes too. You lose the ability to remember things properly or to memorize them in the first place, you start hallucinating, all kinds of things. Plus, people can get addicted to it, or psychologically dependent, which is worse - we can treat addiction, but it's hard to get people to break a dependency."

"What would happen to me if I took the drugs for three days?"

"I don't know. And I'm not going to help you do that, because I'm not a doctor. When we're in an emergency and no one can afford to take time to sleep, my mom will come down here and prescribe this mix for everyone, but she usually only lets people have two doses, and that's people who've only been up for eighteen hours at most. You're already on twenty-two hours, so I don't know if there's a good medical reason why she doesn't let people stay up more than twenty-four, and I can't ask her without telling her what I did."

Q stared at Wesley for several seconds. "Well. Let me share something with you, then, since you were good enough to trust me with your little secret. It won't actually matter if ten doses of this stuff gives me a morphogenetic virus that turns my heart muscle into a giant bloody red snowflake and my intestines into tapioca pudding, because I'm not going to live long enough for it to matter. I don't want to spend any part of the next three days sleeping because that's all the time I've got."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that in approximately three days, give or take a few hours to spare, the Calamarain are going to kill me. So it really doesn't matter what sort of long-term damage I do to my health."

Wesley was horrified. "Do Commander LaForge and Commander Data know about this?"

"No, and it's not any of their business so I didn't tell them. I wouldn't be telling you except to disabuse you of the notion that it matters in the slightest what health issues the medications I take now might have on me in six months, given that corpses rarely need to worry about their health. Picard knows, and he's the only one who needs to."

"But - I mean - the Captain isn't just going to let the Calamarain kill you! I mean... we were shielding from them before..." Wesley trailed off as he realized that they had been unshielded for nearly two hours now and no Calamarain attack had occurred. "Is that why they're not attacking?"

"Yes, that's why," Q said shortly. "And I really prefer not to dwell on it, so can we get back to work? You keep me supplied with this stuff, I keep being able to advise you people, we save Bre'el III from its troubles and stop Bre'el IV's moon from falling on it and the day is saved and in the end everyone's happy, even the Calamarain."

"Except you," Wesley pointed out.

"Yes, well, being human is such a dull and painful existence that I'm sure I'll be happier this way in the long run." This was obviously not what he really thought, because Q's voice was cracking slightly and his eyes were suspiciously bright. "Just give me your wakeup pills, boy genius. I'm too tired to think straight and my eyes feel like they're conducting an experiment in cold fusion."

Wesley handed him the hypo, stunned. "Did... no, he wouldn't. Captain Picard's not... not going to hand you over to them, is he?"

"If he knows what's good for his little ship, he will," Q said. "Or at least not stand in the way when I hand myself over. How does this work? I just push it against my neck?"

"Like this," Wesley said, taking the hypo and injecting Q with it. Q took a deep breath.

"Well. That's an improvement already. Let's get back to work, shall we?"

Wesley followed him back to the desk. "Was this... was this your idea?"

Q turned on him. "Crusher, I explained this to you already. I don't want to discuss this. I only brought it up in the first place so you wouldn't assume I have a long-term future to worry about when you consider whether or not to give me medication to stay awake."

"I just... this doesn't make sense. Captain Picard wouldn't sacrifice you."

"No, he's entirely too stupid to. Sad, really, but apparently the only way you humans have managed to achieve the high level of moral behavior you've accomplished is to codify your ethical beliefs into some sort of immutable list of Thou Shalt Not's and follow it rigorously, like a computer following a program, no real thought given to the consequences. So as the more advanced life form in the situation, it falls on me to make the hard but necessary choices, since Picard still lives in a fantasyland where every problem can be solved with no loss of life if you just assemble a committee to study the issues hard enough." He looked away. "Picard thinks he can solve the problem without my death. More power to him for trying, and I appreciate the gesture, foolish as it is... but it's not going to work. I bought three days of life off the Calamarain by promising them the pleasure of seeing me voluntarily march to my death at their hands at the end, and I wouldn't have done that much, given how pathetically short three days is, except that I'm supposed to advise you on how to save these idiots, and if we don't get on with it they will all die and my sacrifice will be for absolutely nothing, so how about you stop asking me questions on this topic that is none of your business and we can get back to work!"

LaForge came over to them. "Is there a problem here, Q?"

"No. No problem." It was probably obvious to Commander LaForge that Q wasn't telling the truth; Q was breathing hard, his face sheened with sweat and his skin flushed, and if Wesley could see that much, Commander LaForge and his VISOR could probably see a whole lot more.

"I could have sworn I just heard you shouting at Wesley."

"It's okay, Commander. I just... I asked a question that was really kind of rude, and he said he didn't want to answer that, and then I asked it again."

"You were rude to Q." Commander LaForge's voice made it clear that he thought this was on the order of Data scratching and hissing at Spot.

"Yeah, I guess I was. I'm sorry for causing a disruption." He turned to Q. "And I'm sorry I asked. It really was rude of me."

Q looked amazed. He probably didn't usually get apologies... since most of the time, probably anything anyone ever did to him was more than deserved. "I accept your apology," he said, sounding surprised.

LaForge looked back and forth between the two of them as if he really didn't believe Wesley's story for a moment, but couldn't figure out why Wesley would be lying to cover for Q. Finally he said, "Well, engineering's not the place to have a shouting match, guys. How about a little more working and a little less yelling, huh?"

"Fine," Q grumbled.

The next couple of hours were very frustrating.

Q went from being tired, slow, mumbling and occasionally glazing over completely to being totally wired. He talked too fast, too loudly, kept getting out of his seat to pace frantically in circles around Wesley and the desk, and gesticulated so wildly that several times he almost hit Wesley in the face by accident. When Wesley demanded that he actually sit down, Q would not only tap his foot or fidget with his fingers relentlessly, but when Wesley asked him to stop doing that too, he first refused to believe that he was actually doing it, and when Wes pointed it out to him and he tried to stop, his leg just twitched involuntarily in an almost constant jerky tic until he got frustrated and got up to pace again. Obviously, even as exhausted as Q had been, the stimulant had been a bad idea. The three cups of coffee Q consumed probably didn't help any. He was also irritable and snappish - not that he hadn't been before, but now he'd interrupt with insults before Wesley even finished explaining his approach.

None of that was the frustrating part, although it didn't help Wesley's mood any. The really frustrating part was that nothing they tried worked. Q might be irritable and hyper, but he was on his game; he was very quick to identify problems with approaches Wesley suggested, which always turned out to be accurate when they went through the math or ran a simulation, and he was equally quick to propose solutions, which always turned out to be technologically infeasible. Wesley had a good grip on the conceptual framework by now, and a good understanding of the engineering requirements for doing what they needed... he knew what they'd have to do, but they didn't have the power or the equipment to do it. The basic problem was that space had thinned in response to the black hole's transit, and worse, was warped out of shape by the gravitational forces. It was possible, just barely, to punch a wormhole open here, but it would be next to impossible to pick where it would open out, and completely impossible to keep it stable. There was no way they could create an artificial wormhole stable enough to transport anything through, let alone people.

Around 2000 hours, Wesley gave up and headed over to tell Commander LaForge the bad news. Q stayed back at the desk, running various last minute simulations. Wesley was pretty sure Q had actually given up hope that they could solve the problem a long time ago and was simply running the simulations because he was bored, but until LaForge reassigned them it wasn't like there was something more useful he could be doing. "We can't make it work, Commander," he said dejectedly. "The full output of the warp engines at maximum wouldn't provide enough power to stabilize it enough to safely beam anything through, and I think we'd need to build a specialized device to govern where the output of the wormhole would be anyway."

"All right, Wes," LaForge said. "That's disappointing, but I've had an idea. We don't actually need to beam people to Bre'el VII at all. Space stations with impulse engines would be more than capable of resisting the gravitational pull...heck, we could put rocket thrusters on them and that would be enough. So I think we want to concentrate on programming self-replicating fabricators to build habitats rapidly, maybe on the planet itself on the far side. We'd want to finish ironing out the bugs in antimatter replication, but I think we're close."

"Is that what you want me working on?"

"Yeah, you've got some experience with that. The other thing we could be doing is calculating if it's possible to destroy any of the Bre'el III satellites. The planet isn't fully terraformed; they've only got one continent with people on it. We just might be able to bring down the satellites in a controlled way so they impact the far side and don't have any effect on the people. Maybe we can break the satellites into bite-size chunks and then get the bigger chunks to come down on the opposite side of the planet."

"That might work, I guess. All three of Bre'el III's moons are only about half as massive, all put together, as Bre'el IV's moon by itself. And the atmosphere on Bre'el III's so thick we could get some good burnup on atmospheric entry, so if the chunks are small enough they'll never even hit."

"Yeah, that's the idea. We can run some feasibility simulations on that, and also work on programming the fabricators to churn out some habitats. Did you get anything to eat yet?"

"Not yet."

"I can give you half an hour to head over to Ten-Forward if you want, but you have to drag Q with you. I can't spare Data to make sure he gets fed."

"We'll just get something from the engineering replicators and eat it here. Do you have a new assignment for him, sir?"

"Mm, I might put him on the feasibility analysis. It's pretty pure math, and it looks like he's figured out how to use the computer to run simulations pretty well."

Wesley went back to the desk. "Any luck?" he asked Q.

"Yes, while you were gone I magically figured out a way to alter the physical laws of the universe without using my powers." Q looked up, scowling. "What do you think, boy wonder?"

I think my name is Ensign Crusher, not wunderkind, boy wonder, or Crusherling. "Commander LaForge is reassigning us, but he says we can get some dinner before that."

"I'm not hungry."

"I'm not shocked. Stimulants can suppress people's appetite." Wesley took a deep breath. "That thing we discussed about not sleeping, and stimulants?"

"Yeah?"

"It's turned out to be a bad idea. I don't think I should give you any more."

Q's scowl deepened. "I told you long-term health risks aren't exactly a concern here."

"I know, but I don't want to have to explain to my mom and Captain Picard why you keeled over from a heart attack in a day or so."

"A heart attack?" Q snorted. "Really? Is that your expert medical opinion?"

"I'm not a doctor. That's why I don't want to take the risk. Look, Q, you've had way too much. You can't sit still-"

"That's normal, I never sit still."

"—your legs keep twitching and jerking, you're talking too loud-"

"I thought my voice was at a perfectly reasonable volume."

"—you keep almost hitting me when you wave your hands around, and you keep interrupting me."

"I interrupt people all the time too. Usually because their topic of conversation is too boring to endure any more of than I have to."

"Well, I'm sorry, but it doesn't matter if you're bored by this conversation or not. You're acting completely wired. I think you've had way too many stimulants, between the drug I gave you and all the caffeine, and since I'm not a doctor I can't take the risk that you could overdose or something. We aren't going to need you much for the next big thing – Commander LaForge might ask you to run some simulations on destroying the Bre'el III moons, but that shouldn't be too hard and if you don't do it, any of us could. You could go get some sleep."

"I'm not tired. And I've already explained that the time I have left is far too short to waste any of it on unconsciousness."

"You're not tired because you've had too many stimulants. When they wear off, you'll be tired. I'm not going to get you more stimulants when that happens. You need to get some sleep."

"Why do I need to go to sleep? If your medical technology can allow human beings to go without sleep for a few days without serious ill effects kicking in right away, I see no good reason why I should sleep. If I put it off for three days it'll be a non-issue."

"Because not all humans can safely go without sleep for three days without serious ill effects kicking in right away. If, for example, something the Calamarain did to you weakened your heart, and my mom didn't do anything about it because she figured it would heal on its own in a few weeks, you might have a heart attack because you took too many stimulants. And besides, you don't know for sure that you're going to die in three days; I'm sure Captain Picard is working on a way to try to save you. He'd never just sacrifice someone unless there was absolutely no choice."

"That would be the problem, Crusher. There's absolutely no choice. Picard thinks maybe he can figure out a solution, but I know perfectly well he can't. The Calamarain are much more intelligent than you people are. You can't fight them unless you take them by surprise and you've got nothing to negotiate with them with. And I honestly don't see why you're so obsessed with reiterating that Captain Picard will save the day, unless it's your daddy issues with him coming out. I fully expect that in three days when you're sitting on scans and pick up the reading for my cold and lifeless body, you'll get out of your seat on the bridge and do a little jig, so why pretend my health matters to you?"

"I don't want you dead," Wesley said, shaking his head. "I mean, after what you did to me, maybe I should, but I don't."

Q blinked. "What did I do to you? Today is the first time we've even had a conversation."

Q didn't even remember what he'd done? Angrily Wesley said, "Your animal things stabbed me in the back with a bayonet! How do you forget something like that? Or have you gotten so many mortals killed over the centuries none of their deaths or almost-deaths even stick in your head?"

"You didn't almost die!" Q snapped. "Riker healed you within five seconds!"

"And what if he hadn't? Don't tell me you were going to!"

"I didn't need to. I knew Riker would do it."

"Just like you knew he would take your offer and become a Q, right?"

Q shook his head. "No, Crusher. I knew there was a possibility he could refuse me; I just didn't seriously think he was going to, as I had no idea how fundamentally unimaginative, not to mention surgically grafted to Picard's apron strings, Riker was. But I knew he couldn't stop himself from saving you and Microbrain, because I know what it takes to resist using Q powers. Our power responds to our thoughts, to our very desires in the moment they form; it takes millennia of training in not using them to be able to resist, and under severe emotional stress like Riker was under, most Q would fail to restrain themselves. The only way Riker could have kept himself from saving you and Worf is if he really hadn't given a damn whether you lived or died."

"Then how did he stop himself from saving all those colonists?"

"Because 'people will die if I don't do something' is different, in your tiny, linear human brains, from 'people did die because I didn't do anything'. You didn't evolve to think of bringing people back to life as having the same urgency as stopping them from dying, due to the obvious fact that the vast majority of you have no ability to reverse death whatsoever... and if I'd given the powers to your mother, well, aside from the fact that the Q Continuum would have had to not only strip me of my powers but commit me to a mental institution for congenital idiocy, she wouldn't have been able to stop herself from healing the dead, because she thinks in terms of healing the dying. Riker simply doesn't think of himself as someone who can save dead people, so there was no emotional urgency to the colonists' plight after they were mostly all dead. His desire to use his powers to save them was intellectual, the same as his desire to age you into a completely nondescript adult or get Worf a girlfriend. We can override intellectual desires easily; it's the emotions that get us." Q took a sip of his most recent cup of coffee. "You were never in any danger. None of you were. I put you in that situation precisely because if one of you got hurt, Riker wouldn't be able to stop himself, and if he used the powers, I thought he'd be that much more likely not to want to give them up."

"Well, I didn't know that. And it hurt! I mean, even if it was only for a few seconds - and it seemed like a lot more to me - it really hurt. I heard you weren't too happy about Guinan stabbing you with a fork, in the hand. Can you even imagine what it's like to be stabbed through the guts with a bayonet?"

"What did you expect? You ran out onto a battlefield with no weapons to try to... what? Go to the aid and comfort of a downed Klingon warrior? You're not a doctor and you had no weapons, so what exactly did you think you were doing, running onto the battlefield to go save Worf?"

"I was a kid. Yeah, what I did was stupid, but I don't think I deserved to die for it."

"And you didn't die. Obviously, as you are standing here in front of me being self-righteous. So you learned an important lesson about not stupidly running out onto battlefields where people are getting killed, and all you had to suffer for it was five seconds of the pain of being stabbed with a bayonet. Which, I'm sure, was quite excruciating for five seconds, but it was five seconds. I'll trade you those five seconds for any of the Calamarain attacks I've suffered so far."

"I'd make that trade," Wesley said. "You don't have any concept of how much being stabbed hurts."

"Fine. Mea culpa. I let a poorly assembled, fifth-tier, seriously subpar nightmare creature stab you. I should definitely have made sure that if I was going to stab you, I should have done it with some really good nightmare creatures instead of the things I spent about three picoseconds doodling out before creating them."

"I don't really care how much time you spent designing those animal creatures! That's not the point!"

"Says you. I'm ashamed. I used to take pride in my work." Q sighed deeply. "Isn't that always the way? You start out really focused on getting all the tiny details right, trying to do the best job you can... but then the boredom sets in, and you cut corners, and skimp on the details, and stick wild boar heads on humanoids with bayonets and energy weapons, and the next thing you know your performance review turns into a firing squad and you get canned for poor performance, and you end up on the street begging with your hat in your hand."

Wesley realized that there was no point to this. Either Q honestly didn't see what he'd done as wrong, or he just was never going to admit any guilt to Wesley. "Look. This conversation isn't getting either of us anywhere. Do you want me to go order you some food, or not? Because if you're not going to eat, then you should go to Commander LaForge and get your next assignment."

"I'm not hungry. In fact I'm finding the entire concept of ingesting dead organic material slightly nauseating at the moment."

"That'll last until the stimulants start to wear off. And then you're going to be really hungry."

"Well, then that's when I'll eat. Go do whatever you need to do. I'll find out what LaForge wants me to do."

LaForge glanced up at Q, and could immediately see that he wasn't particularly well. He was too warm, too flushed, and the faint color gradations that LaForge could see at a humanoid's throat as the blood pulsed through their veins were cycling too rapidly, indicating too fast a heart rate. "You don't look so good, Q. Do you need to go to sickbay or something?"

"No, I need something else to do, now that our last plan has crashed and burned spectacularly. Wonder Boy said something about you wanting to simulate destroying the Bre'el III moons? Why exactly would you want to do that?"

"Because we might have to. The orbits are too complex to try the trick we're pulling on Bre'el IV's moon, even if the Ferengi and Kaeloids show up with warp-capable ships in time. And I don't seriously think that even with self-replicating fabricators we're going to be able to evacuate five hundred thousand people in two days. But Bre'el III is only partially terraformed; everyone lives on a single continent, and they've already got domes and massive air scrubbing plants. If we can bring down the moons on the far side of the planet, well away from the ocean and on the opposite side from the inhabited region, we might be able to control the crash well enough that by the time the shockwave reaches the inhabited regions it's reduced to a Richter 5 earthquake... big, but manageable. And the dust cloud shouldn't cause an artificial winter condition or ice age, because of the air scrubbers... in order to live on the planet at all they've had to get large quantities of ionized dust particles out of the air already. They could do it again if they had to."

"Hmm." Q frowned slightly as if concentrating. "I didn't actually know that. Under those circumstances you may be right... the best outcome might be to assume we can't stop the moons from crashing and just work on making sure they crash where they'll do the least harm. Have you got detailed specs from the Science Council on exactly where the people are?"

"Yeah, they're already in the computer. I noticed you figured out how to run simulations."

"Well, I can't exactly test my theories in pocket dimensions with replicas of the things I want to affect anymore, so simulations in the computer is the best I'm going to be able to manage."

"But you're at least familiar with the concept of running a simulation first before you actually do something."

"How stupid do I look?" Q asked angrily. "Of course I'm familiar with the concept of running a simulation first. I've been doing this kind of thing since before the first slime molds formed DNA on your misbegotten planet! How could you even ask if I know what a simulation is? What part of 'millions of years old' makes you think I'm an idiot?"

LaForge took a step backwards, literally taken aback by Q's belligerence. He put his hands up. "Calm down! No one's saying you're stupid, Q, but I have no idea how you did the things you used to do. For all I knew you've never needed to run a simulation because you used to be able to just make things work the first time. I know there's things we have to do that you're not familiar with, and I'm just making sure that this isn't one of them."

"Oh." Q was breathing hard, a little raggedly. "Oh, I guess that makes sense."

LaForge took a long steady look at Q. "I was going to have you run those simulations," he said, "but after that outburst I think maybe we'd all be better off if you got some rest."

"I'm not tired. Why does everyone keep trying to put me to bed, like a toddler who needs to take a nap?"

Because you're acting like an overtired toddler? "You really don't look good, Q. And your voice is raspy. When did you wake up this morning?"

"I wasn't watching the clock. And I'm fine. I don't need to rest."

"Are you sure? This isn't like the theory behind wormholes. Anyone here can do the job. I don't mind having the extra pair of hands, when we've got so much going on, but it doesn't actually need to be you. You can take some time off, get some dinner, get some sleep..."

"I'm not hungry either. I'm fine, LaForge. I can do the simulations."

He wasn't shouting, but there was a sharpness in his voice, just a little bit of the belligerence that had been there before. LaForge took a deep breath. "Q, you are really on edge. You're shouting at people over nothing, you sound extremely irritable... I think I'm going to have to give you the time off whether you think you're fine or not."

"No, wait!" Q's heart rate spiked, and his temperature pattern shifted as if he'd just broken out into a cold sweat. "Please, I won't do it again. I - I'm sorry. I know I've been irritable lately... this whole being human thing is putting a lot of stress on me. I'm sorry I snapped. Please, I can still be helpful."

Weird. For some reason the thought of being released from Engineering was terrifying Q. Or at the least he showed all the symptoms of being on the verge of a panic attack. LaForge wondered why that was, but it wasn't really his problem; he could use the help if Q was this adamant about it, and the fact that the entity had actually apologized, apparently sincerely, impressed him. "Okay, but you're on probation. Flip out at anyone the way you just did to me, for any reason, and you're out of here until you've gotten some food and some sleep."

"I understand." Q was nodding his head rapidly. It was actually a little disturbing - Q was behaving as if LaForge had threatened to beat him up or arrest him or some other terrible thing, and had just now reprieved him, not like someone who just wanted to stay and do a job. What was he so afraid of? Had Captain Picard told him he'd be thrown off the ship if he wasn't helpful? That could explain it, LaForge supposed.

"You do know that you're allowed to go off shift eventually, right? No one thinks you can go indefinitely without food and sleep. Humans need to do those things, that's just the way we are. No one's going to hold it against you if you take the time you need."

Q shook his head, as rapidly as he had nodded before. "That's not - I'm not worried about that. I just - we don't have a lot of time, and I wasted a lot of time today going down a blind alley to a dead end. As long as I can keep working, I'd rather do that."

LaForge was pretty sure that this could not possibly be about Q's sincere sense of urgency for the innocent people on Bre'el III, but he was at a loss to figure out why Q would be so obsessed with being helpful if he didn't have something like Picard's continued tolerance riding on it. However, it really wasn't his problem. Let Counselor Troi worry about Q's mental state. If Q wanted to help, and could control his temper, LaForge could use him. "Okay. As long as you don't snap at anyone, you can stay and do the simulations. If you get hungry before you're done, you can replicate yourself something over there; we mostly use that thing for coffee and donuts, but it's a full-service food grade replicator, so you can get yourself a pizza or dorowat or something. Just nothing that'll make a big mess all over the consoles."

"You know more about what humans eat than Data does. If I do start to feel hungry, can I ask you what I should get?"

"You probably wouldn't like my favorites, Q. I'm a big fan of spicy food. My dad used to make the most amazing peppered fish... Anyway, I think you'd be better off asking Wesley."

"He's mad at me because I got him stabbed with a bayonet for approximately five seconds."

"Well, he's got a right to be mad at you. Getting people stabbed with a bayonet, even for approximately five seconds, is the kind of thing that's why no one likes you. But he's only got one job right now, and I've got to monitor all of them, so he's got more time to help you than I do."

Q sighed. "Fine. If I get hungry, I'll ask him what to eat."

"Or you could just get pizza. That's what most human engineers eat on the job."

"I'm getting sick just thinking about food right now. Let me go do that job for you, and I'll worry about food if and when my appetite comes back."

For a few moments, LaForge watched him go, until he'd gotten back to his seat. Then he shrugged and went back to the work he was doing with Data on antimatter replication.

The work continued. It was getting quite late, and LaForge had had a long, long day. 2100 hours... damn. He'd been on duty since 0530 this morning. LaForge yawned. "Data, I'm thinking about turning in. Does Captain Picard need you on the bridge for night shift, or can you stay down here and hold down the fort?"

"Since we are continuing to push the Bre'el IV moon, and will be continuing to do so for another five hours, I believe it would indeed be best if I remained here. I am not required to be on the bridge tonight." As Data didn't need sleep, and since he was the second officer, he had taken command of the bridge every night shift back during the first few months since Enterprise's maiden voyage. But eventually, Picard had told him that it was unfair to expect him to work around the clock simply because he didn't physically need rest, and gave him leave to work the same shifts everyone else did so he would have personal time. The bridge would be managed by a night shift lieutenant, as was traditional. Data wanted the command experience, though, so every few nights he did in fact take the bridge on the night shift.

"Well, then I think I'm going to head off to bed. Good night, Data."

"Good night, Geordi. Sleep well."

LaForge turned, and almost ran smack into Q, who had come up behind him. "Wha—Q? What do you need? I'm going off shift."

Q's voice was extremely hoarse. "I'm done. You want the simulations now or tomorrow?"

"You're done? Didn't I put you on that twenty minutes ago?"

"I prefer not to be enslaved to the chronometer, so I honestly have no idea. Why? Is that a long or short period of time?"

"Twenty minutes is... pretty short for a full series of sims. How many scenarios did you get?"

"Twelve, in the end, though I only recommend five."

LaForge frowned. Twelve successful sims? "How many did you run?"

"Sixteen. I was going to do seventeen, and then I remembered that you humans have ridiculous superstitions about the number thirteen so I decided to stop at twelve scenarios."

"No one's superstitious about the number thirteen any more, Q. Show me your sims." Twelve out of sixteen successes would explain why he was done this fast, but was itself highly implausible... it would imply that he had an unbelievably good rate of picking likely scenarios to test in the first place. LaForge would have assumed that such a success rate was impossible for anyone but Data or a Vulcan if he hadn't seen Q figure out that there was a black hole that none of their sensors had detected on the basis of five minutes of looking at a viewscreen while whining about how much his back hurt. But he still thought he'd better check it before heading to bed.

"Oh, do you want me to run the seventeenth then?"

"No, twelve successes is more than plenty. Let me take a look." He sat down in the chair and pulled up Q's simulations. "Why did you run so many, anyway? I mean, most of us need to run twenty sims to get one success, so I suppose if you were having such a high success rate it explains why you got so many scenarios, but why twelve? Normally we have four or five."

"Well, I'm hardly an expert on your technology, as we've established earlier today, and some of my scenarios might have been... tactically impractical. I mean, if you use up all the photon torpedoes and run most of the power to the phasers you can get a very good result, very quickly, but I guessed that possibly Captain Picard might not want to leave the ship quite so defenseless. So I thought I'd run a large number of them so you would have the widest possible range to pick from, since I wanted to make sure that at least some of the scenarios would be practical given your limitations. I think I've isolated the best five as the ones that seem to fit the specs for your ship's capabilities with the widest margin of error, but since I'm not an expert I wanted to have as many of those as possible too."

That was impressive. Being able to pick so many good scenarios to test in the first place might be an artifact of Q's experience and knowledge, but LaForge would have guessed that that same experience and knowledge would have led Q to decide that he knew the best strategy and so he'd simply pick out one, without any concept as to whether or not their technology or other limitations would make that implausible. If Q had really run twelve good scenarios and gotten five that were well within Enterprise's tolerances, that was a lot better than LaForge had expected of him. It seemed he might have taken his mistake with the gravitational constant to heart.

LaForge reviewed the scenarios. Q was right, some of them were completely impractical. Skimming the atmosphere to get the best angle from which to hit the moons in such a way that they would be knocked entirely out of orbit as they were destroyed would be a great idea on a planet with a much thinner atmosphere, but there was no way Enterprise could descend that low into an atmosphere as thick as Bre'el III's without taking serious damage from it. The one that involved using up all the photon torpedoes probably would be rejected for tactical reasons by Worf, as it would effectively leave the Enterprise defenseless. The idea about using some of the ship's antimatter supply was right out, even if they did figure out how to replicate antimatter, because apparently Q was unaware that the Starfleet engineering philosophy of antimatter handling was not to do it, ever, unless there was absolutely no other way. But some of the ideas seemed really workable. He'd have to have a full discussion with an engineering team in the morning, with a fresh mind, but a few of these looked pretty good, and he said so.

"You should go get some sleep, Q," he added. "There's nothing else you need to get done here tonight."

Q shook his head. "I'm not tired," he said stubbornly.

This was obviously a lie. His voice was hoarse, he kept rubbing his eyes, and he looked even worse than he had before... his heart rate had slowed and his temperature had dropped, so he didn't look feverish and panicked any more, but the colors of his body temperature indicated that his core temp was dropping, the way it did for most humans late at night when they were tired whether they were actually asleep or not. But LaForge wasn't his dad. "Well, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," he said. "I'm leaving for the night and you should too."

Again Q shook his head. "I... my quarters are mind-numbingly dull. Can't I just stay here in engineering and continue to work until I get tired?"

"I've got nothing for you to work on." And he'd need Q to have a fresh mind in the morning, which wouldn't happen if Q kept pushing himself to stay up. Seriously, was he millions of years old going on four?

"There has to be something. Maybe something unrelated to this current crisis that could use my expertise, if you have nothing else. Or maybe I could help with the antimatter."

LaForge latched on to that. This idea would keep Q out of the way. "Actually, that's not a bad idea... but you're not up to speed on the technology, so here's what I want you to do. Go in my office over there so you don't disturb anyone, shut the door, and go over the tech specs for the transporter and replicator systems. The computer's already set up to give you access to anything you need that isn't classified; I had your voiceprint ident temporarily assigned to the engineering pool. You can get some food from the replicators if you want before you go in; I eat at my desk all the time, so I don't mind if you do as long as you don't make a mess."

Q smiled tiredly. "It can't be a very challenging field of study. I'm sure I'll have a full grasp of your systems by the time you come back to Engineering tomorrow."

"I hope you're right. We've got a team on Bre'el III working in tandem with us on the project, so we hope to have it resolved pretty quickly, but we could use the help if you can train yourself up to be helpful. And if you don't stay up all night and then oversleep in the morning."

"I won't oversleep. I don't even like sleeping."

"Trust me, it's a lot more fun when you're really tired than when you're just too bored to do anything else."

"What's fun about all the energy draining out of your body like your brain is a bathtub and someone just pulled out the plug?"

"The problem is that the energy drains whether you're awake or asleep. When you sleep, you replenish it. Maybe you don't like sleeping so much, but trust me, staying awake when you're exhausted is much worse."

"Did you say engineers eat pizza?"

For a moment LaForge had trouble following the non sequitur, until he realized that Q probably never had gotten around to eating dinner. "Yeah, that's simple enough that you probably can't go wrong. Order yourself a cheese slice, a pepperoni slice and a Gomez Vegetarian Special and see which one you like best, and then you can get more of whichever one you like if you're still hungry."

"What's a Gomez Vegetarian Special?"

"It's Sonia's recipe. It's got peppers and onions and spinach and black beans and Tocarian mushrooms and five different cheeses."

"I have no idea what any of those things are. Except cheese, isn't that what was inside the little rolled up meat things with the squishy white stuff inside, at the conference today?"

"Yeah, that was cream cheese. There's a lot of different kinds of cheeses. The Brie dip for the carrots and broccoli was cheese, too. If you liked the salami - that was the meat stuff around the cream cheese - you'll probably like pepperoni. Besides, since you don't know what anything is, you should make it a point to keep trying new things, learn as much as you can about being human, right? I mean, six months from now you don't want to be still eating nothing but salami with cream cheese."

Q's colors changed. His heart rate went up, he started to sweat again, and the muscles in his face changed in some subtle way that LaForge couldn't quite make out. Possibly a person with normal eyesight would be able to tell what Q's expression had just changed to; LaForge couldn't, but the things he could see indicated that something he'd just said had upset or frightened Q. "Hey, is something wrong?"

"Absolutely nothing," Q said, and LaForge wondered if he should point out to Q what his VISOR allowed him to see and how he knew Q was lying, except firstly he remembered how Q had flipped out on Counselor Troi for being able to sense his emotions, and secondly, Q's voice was unchanged, still hoarse but no element of whatever emotion had just surged through him in it, and that meant that Q was prepared to keep it from being LaForge's problem. And if Q could keep it from being LaForge's problem, then it wasn't LaForge's problem, and he wasn't going to get into it. "I'd just like to go get started."

"Sure, go on."

He walked back to the station where Data was still working on the problem, communicating with the Bre'el III team. "Hey, Data. Two favors if you could?"

"I am always prepared to do favors for you, Geordi. What would you like?"

"First off, Q's going to my office to read up on transporters and replicators. He sounds and looks exhausted, but he's refusing to go to sleep, and some things he said made me think he's scared to do it. You might want to keep an eye on him and make sure he actually does get some sleep tonight."

"Certainly. What is the second favor?"

"We should be done pushing the moon around 0200 hours. Can you call me to wake me up when it's back into normal orbit? I'd really like to see that."

"If we restore it to normal orbit, it will still be in its proper orbit when morning comes and you are required to wake up. It should not be necessary to interfere with your sleep simply to see that the moon is in normal orbit."

"Trust me, Data, it won't be the same. I'll go back to bed right after... I just really want to see it. I don't think a starship has ever pushed a moon into orbit before."

"If you are certain that it will not disrupt your ability to be wakeful and concentrate in the morning, then I will endeavor to wake you when the push is complete."

"Thanks. You're a good pal, Data."

"You have always been a good pal to me as well, Geordi. Have a good rest."

LaForge grinned - somehow the colloquialism of "good pal" sounded funnier coming from Data - and headed off to bed.

When Data woke him up later, and he came into engineering to look at the readings, it was almost anticlimax. There were no singing choirs, no balloons and party favors... there wasn't even any visual sign that what they had done was impressive. A normal moon, in normal orbit. It took knowing how the work had been done to make it impressive.

LaForge checked with the Science Council to let them know the work was finished, since Captain Picard was of course asleep, and to notify them that the Enterprise would continue to hold position here to keep the moon in place for the next five days. He checked over Wesley's work briefly; although the boy had of course long since gone to bed, he'd done so after LaForge had, so there was some work there that LaForge hadn't seen yet. And then LaForge went into his office to check up on Q, figuring that if Q was still awake, maybe the good news about the moon might take off some of the tension he seemed to be suffering from that he could finally get some sleep.

But in fact, Q was slumped over LaForge's desk, head pillowed on folded arms. The PADD on the desk was displaying detailed replicator specifications. LaForge grinned, wondering how many documents Q had actually gotten through before passing out. There were six pizza bones on two plates on the desk, and a half-drunk cup of now-cold coffee.

His core temp was distinctly lower than the average awake human's, lower than it had been before. Wondering why he was bothering, since Q certainly wouldn't thank him for this, LaForge got a thin thermal blanket out of the replicator and draped it over Q in the chair, covering him up to his shoulders. He'd sleep better if he didn't get cold, and LaForge rationalized to himself that Q would be more manageable and more helpful if he actually got a good night's sleep. Not that he was likely to sleep all that well slumped over a console, but since he'd acted like a toddler who didn't want to take his nap earlier, LaForge didn't want to wake him to get him to move to a more comfortable sleeping place.

And speaking of a more comfortable sleeping place, LaForge's own bed was calling him. Morning and its duties would come soon enough. LaForge looked around at engineering a final time, making sure everything was running smoothly, before heading back to bed for the few hours left in the night.

Slowly Q became aware that his neck and back were in excruciating pain.

Carefully he lifted his head. This was a mistake. His eyes felt as if they might pop out of his skull from the pressure pounding inside his head, a pressure that pulsed as if it was his own heartbeat that was making his head crack open. His neck felt as if it had been stretched until it was ready to break, and his back wanted to fold up as if it were a book where the pages were his shoulderblades and his backbone was the spine of the book. Also, his mouth was so dry it felt like the back of his throat was cracking like the mud flats of a flood plain in the dry season, his arms ached, and his nose felt squashed.

He pushed back in the chair. Something behind him fell off his back. Startled, he turned—too quickly, and his neck informed him of what a bad idea that had been - and saw a blanket on the floor.

A blanket? Who the hell had put a blanket on him, and why? Did all humans show such lack of consideration for others' privacy? Q got up, stumbling, unsteady on his feet. Someone had come in here while he was unconscious, helpless, completely unaware of their presence, and had not only looked at him in that helpless state but had actually touched him. Whoever they were could have done anything to him, and he'd have been completely unaware and unable to stop them. The humiliation and terror - that someone had seen him that way, that he had been so vulnerable in front of another being - burned in him along with rage, at himself and at the mysterious person who'd put the blanket on him. He had lost time. He had only three days – less than that, now - of existence left, and he had wasted some of it in being insensate. And someone had come in here and dropped a blanket on him and hadn't even had the consideration to wake him up so he wouldn't have to waste so much of the preciously little time he had left.

Crusher and LaForge had both been full of it, he thought angrily. He felt much worse for his period of unconsciousness than he had last night. The only improvement he noted was that he no longer felt an overwhelming compulsion to close his eyes and sit still for unconsciousness to take him, and really, how circular was that? Humans wanted to sleep because it was uncomfortable to be falling asleep and trying to resist it. It didn't actually improve anything, it just took away the compulsion to sleep. It was more pointless than urination, and that was saying something. At least that, disgusting as it was, purged the body of poisonous wastes. What good did sleeping do at all?

He stormed out of LaForge's office. "Who's responsible for this?" he demanded, waving the blanket.

LaForge looked over at him. "You mean, who put a blanket on you when you were asleep? I did. You can thank me anytime, you know."

"Thank you? For invading my privacy while I was completely helpless, and not even having the decency to wake me up so I could avoid this horrific state of unconsciousness or at least perform it without my neck bent over at an unnatural angle for six hours?"

LaForge looked over at Wesley Crusher and Data. "This has to be a new record, even for him," LaForge said dryly. "You know, I said to myself that I didn't even know why I was bothering with the blanket, because he wouldn't appreciate it, but I didn't even guess that he'd try to blame me for it."

"Excuse me? I'm right here," Q said. "If you have something to say about me, why not say it to me directly?"

"Fine. You're an ingrate and a really lousy excuse for a human being. That direct enough for you?"

The words hit Q like a blow, because they were true, and he knew they were true. He was, in fact, a lousy excuse for a human being. He covered the feeling of despair and self-loathing the words triggered in him with an attack. "You'd make an even more pathetic excuse for a Q," he shot back.

"Yeah, well, I wouldn't want to be a Q."

"Well, I wouldn't have wanted to be a human if I'd had a choice!"

"I had understood that you did in fact choose to be human," Data said. "When you first arrived on the Enterprise, you did say that it was by your own request that you had become human."

"Yeah, I did, but that's just like saying the condemned prisoner with a choice between hanging and burning really wants to be hung. I picked what I thought would be the least of many possible evils, and it's caused me nothing but agony. And by the way, you're an idiot. You don't have to suffer pain and you don't have to sleep and you don't have to stink if you don't wash yourself and yet you envy humans and wish you were one? How utterly moronic could you possibly get?"

LaForge scowled. "That's enough, Q. You're being a bigger pain in the butt than you were yesterday, and that's saying something. If you can't do anything constructive, go back to your quarters until you're calm enough to behave yourself."

"Go back to my quarters? What good would that do? My back and neck have been contorted into some sort of Moebius strip monstrosity, my eyes feel like they're going to fall out of my head and go rolling around on the floor, a small party of Vulcan monks is building a temple in the back of my throat, with dynamite, and you think going to my quarters and being bored out of my mind will improve my mood?"

"Fine. Go to sickbay, then."

"Where Ensign Boy Scout's mother can torment me and ignore my medical problems at her leisure? No thank you."

"My mom's not on until later in the shift," Crusher said. "If you go now, Dr. Selar's on duty."

Q blinked. Well. Under those circumstances, going to sickbay actually made sense. "Fine. Any opportunity to find what might possibly be a marginally competent doctor."

"You know, my mom is actually a really good doctor," Crusher said. "You don't get to be the chief medical officer on the flagship of the fleet by being incompetent. Just because she can't personally stand you doesn't make her a bad doctor."

Q remembered being transported to sickbay after the first Calamarain attack, his limbs so heavy he couldn't move them and the world swirling around him, gray spots in his vision and a roaring in his ears and feeling so cold, like the entire universe was falling away from him and leaving him alone in nothingness. He had been terrified beyond anything he'd ever experienced, worse even than the fear he'd felt in the brig when he'd fallen asleep... that one had actually not really been fear at all so much as resignation and despair, believing that his weakness and the exhaustion he was perceiving as life draining from his body might be killing him but being too tired to fight back against it. In sickbay after the Calamarain attack, though, he had more than enough emotional energy for terror, even though he didn't seem to have enough physical energy for making his body work properly. This time, the reactions of everyone around him told him that his fear was justified this time - he was dying. And Crusher had bent over him, running some kind of scan in what seemed to Q like an overly leisurely fashion, and he had begged her not to let him die, his eyes burning and then blurring with moisture that he'd later figured out were tears. Crusher had just looked at him like he was a bug on her shoe, given an exasperated sigh, and continued to do whatever she was doing without a single word to him, as if he were so far beneath her she couldn't even be bothered to give him reassurance.

He'd survived, so perhaps the wonder boy was right and his mother was in fact a competent doctor, but Q would almost rather die than tolerate anyone looking at him or treating him like that again. "You cling to your illusions, little boy," Q said, and stalked out of engineering.

By now, he knew the way to sickbay; he'd been beamed there the two times he'd actually needed medical attention, but both times he'd left under his own power, and later he'd returned to sickbay to talk to Data, after he'd made the decision to sacrifice himself the first time. He was rapidly developing a mental map of the Enterprise... not that it would much matter that he'd finally learned his way around the place, in a few days... no. Q dragged his mind away from that particular train of thought and concentrated on what he would tell the doctor.

Dr. Selar proved to be a Vulcan. Q did a doubletake for a moment; her resemblance to one of his closest friends' preferred female humanoid pattern was so strong, he thought for a moment that she had actually come to visit him in his exile... which would mean she might be amenable to helping him, and he might not have to die. Then he remembered her blocking his communications from the point where the Continuum had told him to take a hike, after the debacle with Riker, and her pointed refusal to look at him at his sentencing, letting herself be subsumed into the overmind with no individuality visible as if she didn't want to take any personal responsibility for his destruction. No. She wouldn't have come to see him, and she wouldn't have taken the form of a Vulcan if she had - one thing they'd always been able to agree on was that Vulcans were incredibly boring. Hope died as quickly as it had arisen. Besides, the Vulcan didn't look exactly like his friend's chosen pattern.

The rise and fall of the short-lived hope left him in an even fouler mood than before. "Are all Starfleet doctors total incompetents, or is it just Crusher?" he demanded as soon as she looked at him. "I'm in excruciating pain here. Are you going to do anything, or just stand there and stare at me?"

"What seems to be the problem?" Selar asked, completely unruffled. Even her voice reminded him of his friend's humanoid form, reminding him of precisely how abandoned and alone he was. To his horror, a burning pain that had become entirely too familiar pricked at his eyes. Oh, no. I am not going to cry in front of one of these mortals. This is ridiculous!

"What isn't the problem? Everything hurts."

"Sit on the diagnostic bed." She motioned him to the bed. Q sat down with bad grace as the Vulcan ran the medical tricorder over him.

"Well? What can you do about it?" he asked sharply.

"To treat your problems, it would be best if I knew what had caused them, and which ones are causing you the most difficulty. Have you done anything that might explain the muscle strain in your back and neck?"

"I fell asleep at a desk," Q muttered.

"Ah. That would explain it. What other symptoms are you experiencing?"

"My mouth and my eyes feel completely dehydrated, I have a terrible headache, and I'm in a truly foul mood."

"How many hours did you sleep last night?"

"I have no idea. I wasn't watching the chronometer. I just got up half an hour ago or so... it couldn't have been more than six hours. Maybe less."

"And did you consume stimulants yesterday?"

"Stimulants like what?" As annoyed as he was with the Wonder Boy and everyone else in engineering for letting him sleep in such a horrible position, he didn't want to sell Wesley out for getting him medications without a prescription. For one thing, if he did, he'd have no hope of getting the boy to give him anything else, and Q was determined that he wasn't going to falter again. He'd stay awake until he died, if it killed him.

"Coffee, for example. Or tea. Or raktajino."

"Yeah. Coffee and tea. Lots of it."

"Well, then I have a simple explanation for all of your symptoms." Selar closed up the tricorder. "Caffeine, which is present in coffee and tea as the stimulating ingredient, is a diuretic. You actually are dehydrated. The caffeine interfered with your ability to sleep properly, explaining why you stayed up late enough that you would fall asleep at your desk, which caused sufficiently poor sleep that you are exhausted and have strained your neck and back muscles. Caffeine also causes headaches... as does withdrawal from caffeine the morning after, as does dehydration, as does poor sleep. And your mood can easily be explained by the pain you're suffering and your poor sleep." She brought over an instrument. "I recommend water, or rehydrating solutions, with some breakfast, and then go back to sleep in an actual bed where you won't do yourself harm."

"What is that thing? What are you going to do?"

"This is a sonic relaxer. It will ease the tension in your muscles."

Q tensed further, sending shooting sparks of pain up through his spine. "Can't you just give me a painkiller?"

"I will, after relaxing your muscles. A painkiller will not solve the problem of tense muscles; it'll only treat the symptoms. There's no need to be so tense; this will not hurt."

He started to protest that what Crusher had done to fix his back had been excruciating, if brief, but then she turned the device on, and to his amazement it didn't hurt at all. He could feel the vibration in his flesh, and a sensation of warmth, as the horribly tight muscles loosened and the pain eased. In the sudden enforced relaxation, Q swayed, so used to bracing himself against pain that he almost fell over when it was gone.

"Well, that is a considerable improvement," he said. "When Crusher did this, whatever she did to fix the problem was almost worse than the disease."

"It is quite likely that Dr. Crusher had limited time. If I had only a minute to repair your back I would have to use a neural shocker to stun and then reset the muscles, which can be quite painful. But I believe the cure will be more effective if I take the eighteen minutes it will take to do this with the sonics."

"Mmm. Yes. I'm fully in agreement with that."

The process made him dizzy, and it was actually an effort to stay sitting up when the warm vibrations were melting his back into boneless goo. He wanted nothing more than to lie down on the diagnostic bed, let Selar continue to work on his back, and close his eyes.

"As I thought. The pain has been keeping you awake. You should have no difficulty getting back to sleep this morning; make sure you drink the water or rehydrating solution before you go to sleep, though, or you'll be more dehydrated when you awaken."

Q sat up straight, fear surging through him, ruining some of Selar's work. "I can't go to sleep!"

"Why not?"

"There are three moons on Bre'el III, and a colony of half a million people, and those moons are about to destabilize and crash for the same reason Bre'el IV's satellite nearly did. I'm supposed to help with technical solutions. If I don't go back to Engineering and help out, they might not be able to stop those moons from crashing into the colony and killing all those people."

"And you're indispensable to the work?" Selar said dryly.

"Not indispensable, no. But sufficiently valuable that I don't want to take time to sleep. Isn't there anything you can do to help me with that? I mean, sleep's just a biological process. Can't you suppress it or something?"

"As a matter of fact, that is possible," Selar said. "We'll discuss the matter in a moment. I'm going to get you some rehydrating solution."

"That doesn't sound very tasty."

"My understanding is that humans actually find it quite pleasant to drink when they are extremely thirsty. You can have grape flavor, lemon flavor, or mint. Which do you prefer?"

Q had no idea, so he picked the first thing she'd said. "Uh, grape, whatever."

When she came back with the drink, Q took a sip, and then proceeded to gulp the whole thing down as fast as he could. It was delicious, or at least his throat thought so, and he wasn't entirely sure his tongue was in any shape to have an opinion other than that it was wet and therefore good.

"Before we proceed with any sort of treatment," Selar said, "I would like to clarify your motives."

"My... what?"

"You claim that you must stay awake in order to save lives. That would be a noble ambition, if it were true, but your past history makes this a dubious claim at best." She fixed him with an eagle-like gaze, as if he were prey. It made him uncomfortable, and he shifted on the bed. "When you first appeared on the Enterprise, you froze Lt. Torres for pointing a gun at you, although the gun was set to 'stun' and, as we now know, you had many other alternatives available for your defense, such as dematerializing the gun, always assuming you might have been vulnerable to phaser fire at all, which seems unlikely. You also froze Lt. Yar, although you undid that on your own at Counselor Troi's request. And you created constructs that appeared to Counselor Troi, a trained empath, as if they were fully sentient, and allowed them to kill each other. When next you came to the Enterprise, you threatened Lt. Yar's life again, and also allowed constructs to fatally injure Ensign Crusher and Lt. Worf. Finally, in your last visit here you caused the death of 18 members of the crew."

Q squirmed slightly. "You have an admirably complete grasp of the facts for someone who wasn't there to see any of this," he said, embarrassed.

"I have actually been aboard the ship for all of these incidents, although you're correct that I wasn't present at any of them. Moreover, I've reviewed your case since you came aboard."

"Does any of this have a point, aside from humiliating me?"

"Only this. Why would an entity who was so cavalier about committing murder or grievous bodily harm, or allowing such to occur due to events he'd orchestrated, now care so much about the lives of innocent strangers?"

Now Q saw where this was going. Selar wanted her pound of flesh; if he wasn't forthcoming with the mea culpas, she would deny him the treatment he really wanted. Perhaps this was better than Crusher, who wouldn't have given him a chance to argue for what he wanted at all, but he really wasn't appreciating this. "To start with, the only people who died or could possibly have died were the 18 who fell to the Borg. I was well aware that your medical technology could unfreeze that one guy without harming him, and I was well aware that Riker would use the powers I'd given him to save Worf and Crusher. And my constructs might be able to fool Troi, but they're no more self-aware than holodeck programs, so if you're going to blame me for letting them kill each other, you'll have to blame everyone who runs a wargame or a film noir program."

"That doesn't explain why you allowed 18 people to die to prove a point, and yet now you claim to be deeply concerned for innocent lives."

Part of him wanted to storm out of here. Why should he have to bare his soul to a total stranger just so he could get medical treatment, and avoid having to sleep? It didn't say much for the doctor's concern for the millions of innocent lives if she was going to hold his ability to work on their behalf hostage, did it? On the other hand, he really, really, really didn't want to fall asleep. And if Selar could help him avoid that without the side effects he'd suffered from with the coffee and stimulants yesterday, he would do almost anything. So he looked away from her with a wry, slightly embarrassed smile. "I suppose it's a fair question," he murmured.

"I'm glad that you agree."

He looked up at her. "Is it a crime to harm animals, Doctor? If a herd of cows was in danger of being killed by a rampaging wolf, would you actually care, or would you consider it none of your business?"

"I do not work in animal husbandry. But if it was my fault that the wolf was threatening the cows, I would certainly attempt to resolve the situation without harm to the cows."

"Well, you're a Vulcan. What do you think the average Federation citizen would do?"

"The analogy isn't accurate. You caused the threat to the Enterprise by attempting to join the crew. Sentient beings do not attempt to join groups of non-sentients."

This was sounding suspiciously like a conversation he'd had with Picard yesterday about fish. "The point is that it's different now. I would never have been cavalier about the destruction of a Q, or any other entity similar to us. Not that there's much that can harm us. But if there were... if it had been possible for a situation to occur in which, oh, say, five or six Douwds were facing death from some sort of spatial anomaly and their own people either wouldn't or couldn't respond to the crisis, I would have been perfectly willing to lend them aid if they asked." He shook his head. "The inconsistency isn't in my moral beliefs, it's in my nature. What I am, rather than who. Beings that are like me are worthy of my concern for their well-being; beings that are considerably less than what I am are not. And I am, now, vastly less than I was.

"The death of five hundred thousand mortal beings means absolutely nothing to a Q unless we've taken a personal interest in those beings, or at least one of them, and it must be that way because if we cared, if we ran around restoring moons to their proper orbit and preventing supernovae and stopping natural disasters, we would be the gods of the universe. Every mortal species would be our client and we their patrons, and there's a reason 'patron' is the root of patronize. None of you would learn or grow or evolve. Just as you have your Prime Directive preventing you from intervening in cultures that aren't yet aware that there's life on other worlds, we have our own laws, and among them is the principle that we interfere only selectively, that we don't make other species dependent on us. So I couldn't care about five hundred thousand mortals that I didn't personally know or have an interest in; over the course of billions of years, if you don't cultivate callousness toward the beings that are constantly dying, you'll be destroyed.

"Things are different now. Those five hundred thousand beings are fundamentally no different than I am now. Most of them will outlive me, at least if we can prevent their moons from destroying them. None of them are in any danger of becoming dependent on me. Their minds, their capacities for thought and emotion and self-awareness, their understanding of what awaits in their future... none of that is any different from what I have, now. They're like me, the way other beings of power used to be like me."

"I see. Becoming human has allowed you to empathize with the plight of humanoids?"

"I doubt I'd ever actually go out on charity missions to feed the starving children on the collapsing Cardassian colonies, but yes. I do feel... sorry for the people down there. I mean, it's not like it's anything they did to make their moons' orbits collapse; even your technology can't control a black hole. And if I can use the tiny fraction of life I have remaining to me to save them... well, it beats sitting around being bored and obsessing over my death."

"Interesting. You consider your own lifespan a tiny fraction of life, yet other mortal beings with, essentially, the same lifespan as you, have lives worth being concerned about?"

Too late he remembered that Selar didn't know about the sentence of death he was under. Not that he wanted her to know; he despised pity, and was trying to keep the information from as many people as he could. He'd told Wesley Crusher because he'd thought that a little pity from the wunderkind might help get him some assistance in staying awake, and Picard because... well, because Troi had sold him out. Selar didn't need to know any more than LaForge and Data did. But that did make his choice of words seem bizarre, to say the least. He came up with something plausible to cover it. "They don't know what they're missing. Compared to the lifespan I expected, yes, any mortal lifespan's barely an eyeblink. Whereas they've always lived on the scale they live on now, so yes, I have a fraction of my life remaining and they don't. I mean, mathematically, 80 years or so is a much, much tinier sliver of five billion than it is of 120, don't you agree?"

"True." Selar picked up her tricorder again and ran it over him. "There are three options that I see. The first, obviously, is that you sleep. I suspect a nap of 90 minutes would not significantly detract from the available time you have to work; however, I can see why you would rather not take the chance. The second is stimulant medication, but given the symptoms you are exhibiting today, I don't see that as the best option. The alternative I would suggest is that we treat you with medication that will bind to the fatigue toxins and the neurotransmitters in your brain that would ordinarily be flushed out by sleep, and at the same time block the receptors for those transmitters. The effect on your level of alertness and mood will be as if you had had a full night's sleep."

"That sounds marvelous. What's the catch?"

"For a single usage, there is no 'catch', as you put it. It will put a mild strain on your kidneys, as the binder that carries the toxins will carry them out through your renal system. Be sure to drink frequently, or you'll end up dehydrated again. You may also experience a dry mouth. Over the long term, if you attempted to do this on a regular basis as a substitute for sleep, your memory would become impaired, you'd run the risk of developing diabetes or other metabolic disorders, and you would be very likely to develop painful kidney stones."

"I'm not going to be doing this long term, trust me." Because I'll be entirely too dead to worry about sleep. He pushed that thought away.

"Very well." She injected him with two separate hypos. "You should feel better shortly. I strongly recommend having breakfast; lack of blood sugar will not interact well with these medications."

"Humans have sugar in their blood?" Q said, startled.

"Glucose. Simple carbohydrate. C-6-H-12-O-6."

"Oh. Oh, right, that stuff. Oh, hey, yeah, the table sugar stuff they like to eat is two of the glucose put together! Or technically, a glucose and one of its isomers, but same thing. You know, I never actually thought about that... I mean, I knew humans can get obsessive over sugar, and I knew their bodies run on glucose, but I never actually thought about the fact that of course those things are related."

"Yes, it's surprising how often the bodies of living beings affect the minds and desires of those beings in ways that turn out to be extremely logical. Although I could wish that human evolution had provided them with more accurate feedback and control mechanisms, as Vulcans have. A significant number of my patients have difficulty with the fact that their desire to eat sugar, or fats, or salt - all valuable chemicals to the human body, in moderation - won't turn off when they've actually satisfied their body's need for the substances." She gestured at him to stand up. "I also advise you to go to your room and bathe."

"I put on lots of those odor suppressor thingies," Q objected.

"Yes, and that is why you smell like odor suppressors. You only need one in each region that concentrates sweat, but you should shower every day and change your clothes as frequently." She inspected his hair. "And don't put odor suppressors in your hair. It isn't necessary and it will damage your hair."

"And make it tangled and hideous, don't forget," Q mumbled. He'd almost forgotten about this particular nuisance of being human. "Look, I don't know how to use any of the equipment. I tried washing myself yesterday and all I did was burn my skin off with chlorine solution. I realize you're all so used to this stuff that there's hardly likely to be a manual for its use, but-" She handed him a PADD. "What's this?"

"The manual," Selar said dryly. "While adult humanoids of species that must bathe frequently are usually more aware of the necessity than you are, they are no more likely to know how to use the equipment on a Galaxy-class starship than you, if they are not from Earth or Starfleet. Review this, particularly the section for human sanitary equipment for males. Once you have eaten, bathed and changed, you should be alert and comfortable enough to return to engineering without distressing anyone."

"Distressing anyone?"

"Commander LaForge commed me to tell me you were on your way, and why. I would also suggest, in future, that you do not call Data an idiot. Quite aside from the fact that he saved your life, almost at the expense of his own, everyone in engineering is very protective of Data."

"You know, I see your point about the life saving and all that, but honestly that doesn't make any sense. Data doesn't have emotions. He's not going to get offended if I call him an idiot, so why does everyone care?"

"Perhaps everyone cares precisely because Data cannot be offended on his own behalf. I confess I don't fully understand the logic myself, but I have observed it to be a fact. When Dr. Pulaski was replacing Dr. Crusher, she inadvertently caused some ill will with the engineers at first with her mistrust of Data."

"I trust Data completely, but if he's being an idiot I'm going to tell him so."

"Perhaps you might wish to explore the difference between your opinion and objective fact before telling anyone that they are an idiot."

As far as Q was concerned, there was no difference between his opinion and objective facts, but he wasn't going to waste more of his precious time arguing with the Vulcan. "Fine, doctor. Can I go now?"

"Yes." She motioned at the door, and then turned away from him to go back to a desk, since there didn't appear to be any patients who needed her attention in Sickbay at the moment.

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