“I’ll take your word for it,” Jonathan said.

A new picture appeared on the tank wall, much fuzzier than the view of Alvin. It was projected in simple shades of green and white and was more than 90 percent enhanced from what must have been a very weak signal; but one Patrick Stewart and his legendary starship were immediately recognizable.

“Barely more than two years after your proud and daring shout,” the enemy explained, “you began to show us this.” There came a momentary jumble of green and white static, which resolved itself into Borg and Romulan ships exploding, and a crystal line entity being tom apart, followed by another wave of static and interference, followed by a picture of bright beams shooting down from the Enterprise upon a planet… and another image of beams striking an alien ship … and another … and another….

“All fragments of the same story,” said the enemy.

Static again, then brilliant flashes from handheld weapons. A living machine burst open … an intelligent endoparasite disintegrated … a shapechanger glowed red and blue and vanished under weapon fire … and then something that reminded Jonathan of an octopus was gunned down and reduced to a scarlet stew. The segments repeated and repeated again, faster and again until they merged into an unbroken green glare.

Jonathan got the message. “Okay. You watch what is now our very old TV and pass judgment?” he said. “Don’t tell me you really believed that we were coming after you with the Enterprise and phasers.”

“Of course not. We knew immediately that no starship could be built to look like that and actually work. We knew immediately that it was pure fantasy, by any physics that we knew or that you could ever know. But it was clearly a fantasy of your hopes for the future. We saw a so-called exploratory ship armed to the teeth with weapons enough to destroy whole solar systems. We saw a species that dreamed of colonizing thousands of stars, of overrunning the Galaxy from end to end like a disease, and wherever you found others, they became subservient to your wishes. And when we looked more deeply, we saw that you really welcomed only humanoids like yourselves into the fold, and even those you welcomed were sometimes treated in the most appalling manner. We saw what you wished for in your deepest selves—”

Glare and static gave way to another excerpt. This time Hollis and Wayville were allowed to see parts of a single story. A world was about to explode, for one dubious reason or another, and behaving as if they were gods holding court on Mount Olympus, the officers of the starship Enterprise, adhering rigidly to their Prime Directive of noninterference, decided that rather than transplant a small group of civilized inhabitants and risk changing their culture, the ship’s crew should do nothing and allow the entire culture to perish in the coming explosion.

“All those decades,” the enemy said. “All those spin-off series, and the basic themes never changed. You became a scary people to us, because you seemed incapable of scaring yourselves. But all this would have been as nothing, except that you then started building real antimatter drives.”