Work Text:
The Enterprise had a thousand places where a man could stand and feel as though he were inside a machine, and a few where he could almost persuade himself that the machine had forgotten about him.
Montgomery Scott was presently wedged into one of the latter.
The alcove lay behind the port auxiliary power distribution trunk, reached by ducking through a service opening and turning sideways between two conduits before the space widened enough to permit sitting. It had been designed for access rather than comfort. Three gray panels crowded one wall, bundled cables disappeared overhead, and a narrow strip light shone with the peculiar determination of Starfleet equipment expected to survive long after everyone had stopped caring whether it was pleasant to look at.
Scotty had been there for forty-three minutes. The fault was in the retaining assembly for a secondary isolation lever. The lever itself worked perfectly well, and the circuit behind it worked perfectly well. Unfortunately, the spring-loaded catch meant to hold the lever securely in its normal position had begun sticking halfway through its travel. A firm thumb would still seat it. A second push would free it. Nothing important was going to fail because of it tonight.
That was beside the point.
Scotty had the assembly half out of the bulkhead, its cover resting across one knee while he worked a narrow driver into the retaining screw.
“Come away, then,” he murmured, but the screw declined. He shifted his wrist by perhaps three degrees, applied pressure again, and felt the threads move.
“Aye. You knew you were coming.”
The screw came free. Scotty caught it before it could drop into the lower housing and set it carefully beside two others on the cover plate.
Behind the catch was a compact arrangement of spring, guide pin, and cam, all of it designed to accomplish the highly sophisticated task of making a lever go click.
Scotty regarded it with the solemn attention he might have given a warp plasma regulator. There was a faint polished band around one side of the guide pin. That was the trouble. Years of motion had worn the bore unevenly, only by a fraction, but enough that the spring occasionally drove the pin against the side instead of cleanly forward. Scotty worked the pin loose, rolled it between his fingers, then held it near the light.
“Hmph.”
He reached into the small tool case beside him and found the replacement. Same diameter. Same length. Same alloy. The new one slid neatly into the bore.
Scotty pressed it twice.
Click.
Click.
Then a third time.
The pin hesitated and his eyebrows lowered. “Don't start.”
He removed it again.
The pin was innocent. The spring was within tolerance. The bore showed wear, though scarcely enough to account for the binding by itself. Scotty bent closer, peering into the housing. There was probably a slight deformation somewhere farther back, perhaps where the bracket had been fastened to the frame. Enough to push the entire assembly out of line by a hair.
He could compensate for that. First, however, a more important task.
Scotty sat back as far as the alcove permitted and reached behind the tool case. The apple had survived the journey reasonably well, though one side bore a shallow indentation where it had pressed against a tricorder. He rubbed it once against his sleeve and took a bite.
The crunch sounded remarkably loud in the little compartment. Scotty chewed while staring at the open mechanism. But soon his attention shifted to the apple.
It was a decent apple. Crisp and slightly tart. Good resistance in the flesh without being hard. He turned it in his hand and examined the first bite mark with the absent concentration of a man whose mind had failed to recognize that a snack was supposed to constitute a break from engineering.
The skin was interesting. Thin thing. Almost absurdly thin, considering its job. It kept moisture in, dirt out, tolerated handling, stretching, impacts, changes in temperature. Then there was the flesh beneath it, comparatively soft and mostly water, yet the whole apple could survive being dropped a fair distance without coming apart.
Scotty pressed his thumb into the unbitten side and the surface yielded. He pressed harder and the yield increased, spread across a wider area.
“Aye,” he said quietly and took another bite.
There was structure inside as well. Flesh toward the outside, denser material toward the middle, then the core. Different properties arranged around different purposes. No bolts. No ribs. No visible braces. A little sphere of edible engineering that had somehow grown itself around five seed chambers and managed to be strong in all the directions that mattered.
He rotated it again. The bruise from the tricorder interested him now. Damage had occurred precisely where the load had been concentrated. The apple had absorbed it by giving way locally. A few millimeters of flesh had surrendered so the rest could remain perfectly sound.
Scotty chewed thoughtfully and his eyes drifted back to the retaining assembly.
Then to the apple.
Then back again.
“Huh.”
It was hardly a revelation worthy of a paper before the Corps of Engineers. Every first-year cadet learned about load paths, deformation, sacrificial components, flexible mountings. Scotty himself had used all of them often enough to be thoroughly bored by their names.
Still, there was something satisfying about holding the principle in his hand.
A machine was forever being asked to resist the universe. Heat, vibration, pressure, torque, fatigue. Engineers naturally answered by making things stronger. Thicker casing. Harder alloy. More support.
The apple had taken another approach.
Give a little.
Scotty looked again at the worn guide pin and the slightly distorted housing. He had been planning to shim the rear bracket until the guide bore sat perfectly square. It would work. It would probably work for years.
He reached instead into the tool case and selected a thin flexible isolator washer.
“Clever wee thing,” he told the apple.
He finished eating while fitting the washer behind the mounting point, taking occasional bites between turns of the driver. His thoughts continued wandering over the apple's construction as he worked: the curvature distributing force, the skin following the flesh instead of fighting it, the stem transmitting load into the core, the curious economy of the whole arrangement. Nature, he decided, had an unfair advantage. A few billion years of field testing was bound to improve the design department.
Only the core remained now. Scotty examined it, considered another bite, and decided against it. He wrapped it in the cloth that had carried the apple and tucked it back beside his tools.
Then he tightened the final mounting screw and the housing settled against the washer with the faintest degree of compliance. Scotty reinstalled the spring and guide pin, fitted the cam, and pressed the mechanism.
Click.
Again.
Click.
Ten times. Each movement was clean.
Scotty gave the lever itself a final test. It moved through its short arc and seated with a firm, precise snap.
“There we are.” He replaced the cover and started the first screw by hand.
The Enterprise hummed around him, vast and intricate, carrying warp engines, computers, weapons, laboratories, life-support systems, and several hundred people through distances that would once have seemed impossible. Somewhere inside all that magnificence, a small lever would now continue going click when it was supposed to.
Scotty smiled faintly and tightened the screw.
Three more, and he would be finished.