There was a blinding flash of light
accompanied by a deafening thunderclap and the sharp smell of ozone. A man materialized
a few feet above the floor and at a 45 degree angle from the vertical. He flailed
his arms and legs in a desperate attempt to right himself, but gravity asserted
its inexorable influence and proceeded to dump him unceremoniously on his butt.
"*Oof!*"
The blinding light quickly dissipated to nothing, and the last vestiges of the
flickering static electricity danced across the man and nearby metallic surfaces
and then they too flickered out altogether. The grimace of pain on the man's
face faded and he breathed a sigh of relief. *I made it!*
Now that the glare from the man's unorthodox arrival was gone, he could be seen
more clearly. He was tall and well built, with broad shoulders, dark hair and
a face that was handsome in spite of a wicked scar above his left eye. There
was something in his eyes and in the set of his jaw though that spoke of great
hardships in his past. Most striking of all however, was the fact that the man
was wearing a ragged Starfleet uniform!
The man looked about. He was in some sort of office. The lights were dim so
he couldn't see too much detail, but outside the windows he could see the myriad
lights of a city skyline. It looked familiar somehow. He tried standing, but
a wave of nausea and weakness washed over him and he sank back to the floor.
*Must be the after-effects of the quantum transformation,* he thought. His head
spun violently.
Just then the room lights came on. A woman's voice demanded, "What's going
on in here? Identify yourself!"
The man craned his neck to look at the speaker behind him. He saw a prim young
girl in her twenties wearing a neatly pressed Starfleet Command uniform and
holding a phaser on him. Reading the pips on her collar, he said, "Ensign,
my name is Benton. I've come here from a parallel universe...."
As the ensign looked on, the mysterious Benton slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Benton awoke somewhere else. He found
himself lying in a bed. All around him were beeping and blinking lights. A few
blue-uniformed people were buzzing about. As his vision cleared and full consciousness
returned, he became aware of another blue-clad person hovering over him. *I
must be in a medical facility.*
The doctor saw he was awake and put down the tricorder he'd been waving over
Benton. "Well, you're finally awake." He signaled to a leather-clad
man who had been standing some distance away, who now came over. The doctor
excused himself and walked off.
Benton tried to sit up, but found to his surprise that his wrists were strapped
to the bed. The leather-clad man stopped at Benton's bedside and smiled, but
instead of reassuring Benton, the smile just gave him a chill. "It's for
your own safety," said the man. "My name is Sloan. You gave Ensign
Piper quite a start when you fell out of the sky like that in her office."
"Where am I?" said Benton.
"Starfleet Medical in San Francisco, on Earth," answered Sloan. "You
identified yourself to Yeoman Piper as 'Benton'. Is that correct?"
"Yes, that's my name."
"Well, now you see, that's where we run into a little problem. We checked
the records. It turns out there is indeed a 'Benton' in Starfleet. But he's
a Lieutenant Commander and chief of security aboard the *USS Virgo* on the other
side of the galaxy. So that still leaves the question, Who are *you*?"
"I know it sounds impossible, but I really *am* Benton. I came here from
a parallel universe using some sort of alien mirror device. In my universe I'm
a Lieutenant in Starfleet fighting a desperate war against an alien invasion
of the Milky Way galaxy. It's the Kelvans! They've beaten us! I only just barely
managed to escape." Benton was getting a little agitated. "They haven't
attacked here too, have they?" He struggled against his restraints a second,
but then realized it was useless, and he relaxed his muscles. He knew he had
no proof of his story to offer Sloan. "What can I say to convince you?"
Sloan seemed to listen to Benton's story. Through his interaction with his operatives
on the *Virgo* he already knew of the existence of this alien 'mirror device'
of course. He also knew of the Kelvan invasion in the alternate universe through
his contacts. He didn't reveal any of this, naturally. Instead he said to Benton,
"Well, we're still doing tests, Lieutenant. We'll get to the truth soon
enough. In the meantime, just relax." With that, Sloan walked off, leaving
Benton alone wondering what would become of him now.
A week later, Benton found himself
sitting in a Starfleet apartment suite, staring out the windows at the scintillating
nighttime San Francisco skyline - he'd been living here since his release from
the hospital. He was absentmindedly rubbing the place on his forehead where
the doctors had healed his scar, while thinking about the improbable events
that led up to his being here: It had turned out that eventually, the tests
that were done at Starfleet Medical on him showed that his basic structure did
indeed resonate at a different quantum frequency than matter from this universe
should, which proved the part of his story that he was from a different universe.
After that, he had been released from Medical, and the interrogations had begun.
It seemed every admiral, scientist and doctor had questions for the man who
fell to Earth. Every now and then, he would catch a glimpse of the man he knew
only as Sloan hovering in the background.
But what really amazed Benton was the relative ease with which he had been released.
He had always imagined that it would be a much more prolonged and difficult
ordeal. But somehow, just a few days after his arrival in this universe, here
he was on his own. He suspected the hand of Sloan smoothing the way before him,
and wondered at Sloan's motivations.