Captain Gold waited.

Commanders of Starfleet vessels seldom had to endure the endless waits David Gold often found himself facing. True, he was the top man aboard the da Vinci, but aside from seeing to it that the ship got safely from point A to point B, much of his time was spent waiting for the various scientists and engineers under his command to finish their jobs before moving on to the next point on the map. Naturally, he took a great interest in what his people did and expected them to keep him fully apprised of their progress, but there really wasn’t a whole lot for him to do while they built their gadgets and adjusted their gizmos. Absent an emergency, he was pretty much left to hang back and let his people do what they did best.

Which left him feeling, at times, very much like a third wheel. Sometimes that separation caused command issues, as happened at Rhaax a little while ago, but mostly it caused boredom. And sometimes, when an emergency did arise, the captain felt guilty that he might have brought it on by wishing for something to do to relieve the tedium.

If nothing else, the Uncertainty Drive was fast curing him of the desire for something to happen while he waited. At the moment, he would have given anything for some good old tedium in an environment that didn’t make the impossible routine.

“Captain, look at this.”

Gold looked. The viewscreen on the bridge showed a section of the Sargasso where the derelict ships were drifting into a new and very strangely recognizable pattern. “Is that…?” he asked.

Gomez nodded. “Yes. Those ships are rearranging themselves into a diagram of a sodium chloride molecule. Common table salt.”

“But…why?” Gold said with a shake of his head.

“Because the odds are that they can,” Gomez said. “The readings in the field of altered probability appear to be intensifying.”

A muffled explosion that caused the da Vinci to shudder and alarms to go off punctuated Gomez’s words. It was quickly determined that a newly installed convection tube in the recently repaired port nacelle had, against all odds, burst.

“Those tubes don’t just burst,” Gold said angrily.

“They do when there are even odds that they might,” Gomez said. “We’ve been experiencing more and more improbable failures over the last hour. Most of them were relatively minor, but what are the odds they can continue that way? The longer we’re held here, the more likely the chance we’ll experience a catastrophic failure, a structural abnormality, or even human error that could destroy this ship.”

“We’re just an accident waiting to happen,” he said.

“Bet on it,” Gomez agreed.

The lift doors opened and, as a kangaroo hopped onto the bridge, the da Vinci’s sensors chose that moment to crash.

Soloman settled himself on the floor beside the Uncertainty Drive and began shuffling the cards.

“Define ‘game of chance’?” the Drive inquired.

“Diversions that are dependent on chance, such as the drawing of a specific card or the rolling of dice to achieve a specific number to determine victory or loss. Your civilization has no such games?” Soloman was surprised. Most civilizations across the universe had developed such games, and he would have guessed that a culture that developed this mode of travel would have such.

“The Khnndak attained mastery of probability millennia ago. Games of chance, under such conditions, would contain no element of risk.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s so,” said Soloman. “Still, if you’re interested, I could teach one such game to you.”

“Explain.”

Soloman dealt two hands of five-card poker, all faceup, to demonstrate to the Drive how the game was played. He quickly explained the fifty-two card deck, the different suits contained therein, the various odds of achieving the desired hands, and the methods of betting. A single simulated hand and the Drive indicated its understanding of the fundamentals.

The Bynar gathered the cards back up, shuffled, cut the deck, then dealt, turning the Drive’s cards toward a visual sensor on the wall.

Soloman had drawn a pair of fours and three useless cards. In a real game, he would likely have folded his hand on such a pair, but there was more at stake here than winning a round of cards. “We each discard the cards that do not fit into our hands and draw an equal number of new cards in the hope of achieving a better hand.” This he did, finding himself little better off than he had been with his original cards. He asked the Drive, “How many cards do you want?”

“I will maintain the initial selection.”

“Really?” Soloman reached over and turned the Drive’s cards, unprepared for the shock of seeing a perfect royal flush, just as he had dealt it.

“Remarkable,” Soloman said. He gathered the cards, shuffled thoroughly, and dealt out another hand.

Even after drawing four new cards against an ace, he could not better the straight flush held by the Drive.

A third hand produced another royal flush for the Drive, followed by two full houses, a straight, two pairs (three times in a row), three of a kind, a third royal flush, and three more straights, all exactly the same. The best hand Soloman was able to achieve had been that initial pair of fours. After that, even the humblest pair of deuces had eluded him.

“Fifteen hands in which you’ve been dealt nothing less than three of a kind, including not just one but three royal flushes. In any individual hand the probability of a royal flush is some thirty-one thousand to one.”

“Probability of drawing the five necessary cards: fifty percent for each individual card.”

“But what of drawing all five necessary cards in every single hand? In fifteen consecutive hands,” Soloman said, “the odds are mind-boggling. Where exactly does probability currently stand for us?”

“Probability is normal.”

Soloman began dealing the newly reshuffled cards, one at a time, faceup on the floor. They came out of the deck in sequential order, by suits.

“This, Minstrel,” he said, “is not normal.”

A loud, high-pitched screech filtered up to the bridge from belowdecks of the da Vinci.

“What now?” Gold demanded.

Gomez signaled engineering and a stressed-sounding Nancy Conlon’s voice said, without any preamble, “You’re not going to believe this one!”

Gold closed his eyes and braced himself. “Try me.”

“The warp drive…it’s been replaced by steam engines, Captain,” she said. “That noise was a pressure valve venting excess steam.”

Gold shook his head. “Meshuggah,” he said. “The whole universe has gone meshuggah!”

“Just our corner of it,” said Gomez. “But the way the effects are spreading, the rest of the galaxy may not be far behind.”

Soloman produced a small, coin-sized medallion from his pocket and held it up for Minstrel’s visual sensor to inspect. The image of a starship was stamped on one side, the Starfleet insignia on the other.

“Maybe this will help,” the Bynar said. “What would you calculate the probability of this disk, flipped through the air and allowed to land without interference one hundred times, falling with the side picturing the starship facing up?”

“Probability states the result to be fifty of one hundred such throws.”

“That’s correct,” he said. “Each throw offers a fifty-fifty chance of landing on either side.” Soloman flicked the medallion into the air with his thumb and watched it rotate head over tails before clinking to the deck.

“Heads, or starship side,” Soloman announced. He picked up the medallion and prepared to toss it again. “There’s still a fifty-fifty chance it will land on either side, but since the first toss came up heads, there is a greater likelihood—a three in four chance—that the next will come up tails.”

Soloman flipped the medallion again, waiting for Minstrel to challenge his dubious statistical information, but the computer remained silent.

“Heads again.” He retrieved the medallion. “Meaning there’s now an even greater chance that the next flip must be tails.”

But it wasn’t. In fact, the medallion came up heads again and again. Sixty-two flips later and there was still nothing but the embossed starship’s image facing the Bynar and the computer.

“Minstrel, what is the probability of so many consecutive flips being the same?”

“Probability: fifty percent.”

“Excuse me?” Soloman said.

“Each toss of the coin offers an even chance of one side or the other coming up.”

“Yes, on the basis of each individual toss,” Soloman agreed, “but when taken as a set of tosses, the odds increase exponentially.”

Soloman tossed the coin for the sixty-third time and watched in surprise as it landed, this time, on its edge and stood there, perfectly balanced.

“And the odds of this?”

“Probability: fifty percent.”

An answer which convinced Soloman, finally, that he was dealing with a mechanism that had lost all reason.

Aboard the da Vinci, Captain Gold and Sonya Gomez discovered that, improbably or not, the rest of the crew had gathered together in a three-foot by three-foot utility closet on the engineering deck. Which turned out well since the hull around the bridge deck had gone off somewhere, leaving the entire area exposed to the vacuum of space.

By the time the hull returned—minus all its electronics and decorated in a colorful but tasteful floral wall-covering—the starboard nacelle was showing fatal signs of metal fatigue and threatened to snap off at the slightest provocation.

Meanwhile, the CO₂ scrubbers responsible for recycling shipboard air had begun to spew lethal carbon monoxide rather than renewed and breathable air. A quick thinking, but improbable, Qwardian tree-slug with an engineering background shut down the environmental systems before the CO levels reached the danger point. Fortunately, a breeze blowing in from the mountains beyond the mess kept the da Vinci supplied with fresh air.

Gold, Gomez, and Tev watched the Minstrel’s Whisper on the viewscreen in the captain’s ready room. It was just one derelict ship out of millions, but one which random chance had vested with the power to destroy the da Vinci.

“Soloman is not answering any of our signals,” the Tellarite said.

“Odds are,” Gold said dryly, “his combadge isn’t working.”

“But Soloman is,” Gomez said. “We’ve got to trust he’s doing the best he can.”

Tev growled deep in his throat. “So you’re saying that the mind that conceived a statistical jest such as his ‘fifty-fifty’ theory is all that stands between this ship and its doom?”

“Well,” said Gold, “when you put it that way….”