Captain David Gold opened his eyes and looked around the bridge of the U.S.S. da Vinci.

He sat, as was his custom, in the commander’s chair in the center of the bridge. Wong, Shabalala, and Haznedl were at their respective stations, while Gomez and Tev were positioned at aft consoles, and other crew moved about in routines so blessedly familiar to the captain.

Gold knew, from the looks on the other faces around him, exactly what his expression must have been.

Shock.

A second ago, they had all been robed monks on a march to oblivion, singing a song to which no one knew the words.

A second ago, all hands had watched the slow, inexorable disintegration of their ship that promised to expose them to instant death in space.

A second ago…

And then, against all odds, their world had returned to normal.

“Soloman to da Vinci.”

Sonya Gomez jumped, startled by the voice coming over the comm. She slapped spasmodically at the switch, her own words coming out in a surprised stutter. “Soloman? What, I mean, where are you?”

“Aboard the Minstrel’s Whisper and ready to come home.”

Tev leaned in and, trying to appear unruffled but failing miserably, said, “Has the situation been resolved?”

Gold was certain he heard Soloman chuckle. “Indeed it has.”

Behind the captain, the lift hissed open and someone stepping from it said, “What situation?”

Gold sucked in a breath. Before he could turn to see if who he thought he had just heard was indeed who he believed it to be, one look at Gomez’s face confirmed it.

“Bart!” she shouted and raced across the bridge, throwing her arms around his neck.

Bart Faulwell, hale and hearty as ever, staggered back under her affectionate assault. “Missed me that much between shifts?” he laughed.

Everyone on the bridge was staring at the language specialist in open disbelief. He looked from face to face, not sure what to make of their expressions and of the sniffling woman clinging to his neck.

“Uhm,” he said, “have I missed something here?”

David Gold stepped toward the younger crewman and clasped his forearm in his hand. “No, Faulwell,” he said in a voice momentarily choked with emotion. “We’re the ones who have been missing something.”

The command crew were there to meet Soloman in the shuttle bay. He stepped from the shuttle, casually flipping and catching the starship medallion, a satisfied smile on his face. He looked at them, Captain Gold, Sonya Gomez, Tev…and Bart Faulwell?

“Everything has, I take it, returned to normal?” Soloman stammered.

Faulwell smiled, “Surprise!”

Soloman looked to Gold, then Gomez. “But he was—”

“Dead,” Bart said. “Done in by a peanut butter power bar, they tell me. Guess it was just too ridiculous a way to go for the powers that be to let it stick.”

“This,” Soloman said, “is more than I could have hoped for.”

Gomez’s laugh was loud with her relief. “Yes,” she exclaimed. “Everything’s back, one hundred percent. How did you do it?”

Soloman shrugged. “In truth, the Drive did it to itself. I merely helped point it in the statistically correct direction.”

“Would you care to explain how?” Tev said impatiently.

“Of course,” Soloman said. “As I suspected, the Drive, either because of age or,” and here he smiled, “because of random chance, was basing its probability calculations on corrupted data. How else could the odds for the frequent impossibilities we were confronting have become so skewered in favor of their happening? Apparently, my attempts to ascertain its baseline for so-called stable probability through demonstrations of chance served only to confuse it. I think it was the coin toss that did it, but before I was done, Minstrel was operating on the assumption that all odds for all things were fifty-fifty.”

“No!” exclaimed Tev in disbelief, glaring at his superior when Gomez failed to completely suppress a snort of laughter.

“Yes,” the Bynar replied modestly. “I recorded the entire confrontation on my tricorder if you would care to check it. Anyway, it expressed doubt when I tried to explain that it had been dormant for a million years and had only just, by random chance, come back online. It was composed of organic components which were only supposed to function for two thousand years before deteriorating, a fact it could not reconcile with my claims of the vast passage of time.

“All those factors pointed to the solution to our dilemma. The Drive itself had established that it was functioning on the assumption that the odds of all things were even, so I told it the story of Schrödinger’s Cat, reinforcing through the immutable laws of physics…”

“Some immutable laws, said the dead man,” Faulwell chuckled.

“Immutable, then, under normal circumstances…the state under which the Drive believed itself to be functioning, by the way. I explained how the hypothetical cat is in a superposition of both life and death until an observer opens the box to determine the cat’s fate. Alive or dead. Fifty-fifty.

“I explained that its great age was the cat and the vastly overdue life span of its materials was the radioactive particle.”

“And you,” said Sonya with sudden understanding, “were the observer!”

“That’s as preposterous as your theory on probability,” said Tev with unconcealed disdain.

“I couldn’t agree more, but the Uncertainty Drive didn’t know any better. As far as it could perceive, I had opened the box to see whether the cat was alive or dead. And, as it was programmed to function under the Uncertainty Principle, it instantly understood that the mere fact of my observing it altered it. And since it was operating under the principle that something either was or was not—fifty-fifty, remember—it had only two states, or two probabilities, to choose from: function or nonfunction. Since it had been functioning, my observation could only offer it the alternative of nonfunction.”

“You mean,” asked Gold, “it just shut down?”

“On or off. Yes or no,” Soloman said and directed his smile at Tev. “Fifty-fifty.”

“Preposterous,” the Tellarite grumbled and stalked out of the shuttle bay.

Bart Faulwell sat by himself in the forward observation deck, sipping a cup of coffee, staring out at the Sargasso Sector.

In the twenty-four hours since his…becoming not dead anymore (he felt silly using a word like resurrection, which was far too biblical for his tastes and, besides, didn’t really describe his situation), he had hardly found a moment for himself. Everyone had wanted time with him to express their sorrow over his death and their happiness at his…well, not-death. And while he appreciated their sentiments—and how many people, really, ever got the chance to hear their own eulogy and learn how their death had affected those around them—he needed time on his own to digest the situation for himself.

Not that he remembered dying, of course. Or undying either, for that matter. As far as he could tell, there had been no break in his life. It was as though he had taken a nap, nothing more.

But he hadn’t been napping. He had been dead. Dr. Lense hadn’t been mistaken. She had placed his body in a stasis chamber and his friends had mourned his sudden and senseless passing.

Except now he wasn’t dead.

He had been there, of course, when twenty-three of his colleagues had died at Galvan VI. He had ridden the very same emotional roller coaster the da Vinci’s crew had experienced in the wake of his death, but now, suddenly, he wasn’t dead and it was as though they had wasted all that sadness and emotion.

And how could they not resent him, on some level at any rate, for daring to cheat death when those twenty-three others could not? Duffy, Feliciano, Barnak, McAllan, and the others—they had stayed dead. Of course. That’s what dead was, a final, irrevocable state. But Bart had, quite literally, beaten the odds and, while he was naturally happy to learn that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, he was also saddened that his happiness and good fortune was no doubt causing pain for others.

“Hey.”

Bart heard Sonya Gomez’s voice and, coming as it did on the tail of his particular train of thought, he winced. But he pretended not to and turned to her with a smile and waved her over to sit beside him.

“Sorry if I’m interrupting,” Gomez said.

“You’re not,” he lied.

“I’ve just—” she said, then stopped herself. “I’m glad you’re back, Bart.”

He smiled. “Me too. It’s freaky, though. Soloman figured that since the probability of my, you know, dying by peanut butter was so astronomical, when normal probability started to reassert itself, it just kind of spit me back out as too impossible to be dead. Or maybe it was that the odds of my staying dead were the same as my having died in the first place, but to tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying with all those numbers and equations.”

“Me neither,” she said. She reached over and took his hand. “You’ve been hiding in here, haven’t you?”

He nodded and shrugged. “Sort of.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, staring into his cup, “I can’t quite figure out whether or not it’s fair. Not being dead, I mean.”

“Now why in the world would you think that, Bart?”

He looked her in the eye, determined to get it off his chest, no matter how difficult it was. “Because of the others who died and didn’t get a roll of the damned dice to bring them back. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to go blithely along with this fortuitous second chance of mine when I know every time you look at me you’ll be thinking ‘Why Bart and not Duffy?’ ”

Sonya looked down. He could see she was fighting hard to hold back tears. She and Duffy had found something miraculous together, something that had been ripped from her, never to be returned.

“You are such an idiot,” she finally said.

Faulwell, taken aback, was forced to laugh. “Excuse me?”

“Yes, I loved Kieran and always will. Yes, I would give my left arm for five more minutes with him to tell him that. And, yes, I will miss him for as long as I live, but how shallow do you think I am, Bart?”

“I never said—”

“Listen, pal,” she said with heat, “you’ve been given a gift. My God, we’ve all been given a gift. We’ve gotten back someone precious to us that we thought we had lost forever. It’s a miracle, Uncertainty Drive or no Uncertainty Drive, and it just shows me that death doesn’t have to be final, doesn’t need to be the end. As long as we’re alive, there’s still a chance, still hope, no matter how infinitesimal.”

Bart Faulwell could only sit and stare in wonder at his beautiful colleague. “I suddenly understand what Duffy saw in you, Commander.”

“And don’t you forget it, buster.” Gomez released his hand and stood. “So, okay, I’ll leave you alone now.”

Faulwell stood with her. “Naw, I think I’m done here. Thanks.”

Sonya Gomez smiled her most dazzling smile. “Don’t mention it.”

Two days later, Captain Gold logged off the computer after going over the day’s reports. Since the finish of the Minstrel’s Whisper, the opening of navigable lanes through the Sargasso Sector had proceeded without a hitch. The derelicts that could be safely moved were and those that were either of no interest for further study or deemed too dangerous to tamper with—including the now inert Minstrel’s Whisper—were being disposed of under Gomez’s black-hole demolition scheme.

Should their luck hold, the da Vinci would complete this mission well ahead of the appearance of the first colony ship.

Of course, their ordeal under the influence of the Uncertainty Drive hadn’t been entirely without repercussions. There were several of the crew who would no doubt jump in worry that it was back every time they stubbed a toe or lost a possession. And Tev could be seen stewing whenever he was reminded by Soloman’s presence of the Bynar’s ridiculous probability theory that had been proposed initially to mock the Tellarite but which wound up saving the life of everyone on board.

And then, of course, there was Soloman’s luck at cards. Ever since his return from his encounter with the Uncertainty Drive, he had displayed the most uncanny run of luck. Well, Gold thought, he deserved every winning hand for what he had done.

And speaking of hand, the captain was reminded again of his missing wedding ring. He had chalked its disappearance up to the Uncertainty Drive, but even after the Drive had shut itself down he still had not found it.

Perhaps this was simply a case of his actually having lost it. No improbability field or alien technology to explain it, just a very human case of carelessness.

But still, there was Rachel’s voice…“Odds are it’s right where you left it, David.”

He went over to that shelf again, sure he wasn’t going to find it because hadn’t he been over this room, the shelf included, a dozen times and come up empty-handed? But he had to look, just to satisfy Rachel.

And, of course, as usual, she was right. The simple gold band was right there, where he had left it.

David Gold smiled and picked it up and placed it immediately on his finger. Chance was, however it came to you, a funny thing.