Korl Harland kept his eyes fixed on the central monitor, taking in Drei Silveris's voice while he ignored the erratically shimmering photon array over his head, and the steadily growing tremors beneath his feet. His hands flashed across the control array.

"Professor," Silveris said, steadying himself in the lab's doorway, his own eyes glued to a hand-held seismic readout, "it's reached theta pattern! Shockwave impact in less than two minutes!"

"I am aware of our time constraints," Harland said calmly. The photon array, its normally soothing patterns of light swimming and transforming in the air above him, flickered and dimmed.

Silveris stepped hesitantly into the lab and found that, on top of his dread and horror at the approaching catastrophe, his mind still found room for awe and a trace of fear of the immense, mysterious alien machine housed there.

The professor leaned closer to the controls and spoke, voice barely above a whisper. "I believe you can hear me," he said. "I believe I can talk to you."

Another tremor came, this one more violent; a stack of padds toppled from a nearby workbench and one of the lab's windows shattered. Harland's eight-fingered hands flew across the machine's control console, searching, practically begging the system to respond.

Professor Korl Harland, the Keorgan who had made possible his planet's petition to join the United Federation of Planets by inventing the Keorgan warp drive, had assembled -- to the best of his abilities -- the huge alien computing system in his own workshop, which occupied space in a building on the outskirts of Yirgopolis, Keorga's capital. Yirgopolis itself, with a population of just under three million citizens, was a coastal city, nestled into a bay on the eastern seaboard of Keorga's most populous continent. Part of a chain of cities and towns stretching both north and south along the coastline, Yirgopolis gleamed as the heart of Keorga, the brightly focused center of Keorgan art -- art that had already attracted interplanetary attention... art that, along with the rest of Keorgan culture, currently faced a threat of cataclysmic proportions.

Harland worked as fast as he could, tried every control combination he could think of as perspiration beaded on his brow and ran down between his vividly colored eyebrows. He knew it could work. He knew it could be done. He'd seen it.

Just after he and several assistants had assembled the machine seven days ago, the big central monitor had flared briefly to life, a brilliant violet energy matrix playing across the screen for precious seconds before fading to black. Since then the screen had come to life on three other occasions, but for no more than a few seconds at a time, and in response to what seemed to be random manipulations of its control console.

Now, with tremors rumbling through Yirgopolis and shockwaves approaching that could easily level the city, Harland wanted nothing more than to see the computer flare to life once again.

So when the first shockwave struck and brilliant violet light flooded the lab, Harland's eyes filled with tears of joy.

Elsewhere in Yirgopolis -- roughly one kilometer from Harland's lab -- two small children huddled together in the basement of their home. They had been playing a game, but when the earth began to quake and rumble they grew frightened and hid together in a corner.

Rand, the boy, held his younger sister Ria close to him, despite her struggles. "I have to see if Munna's all right!" Ria cried, referring to their pet, which lived in an aviary behind the house.

"Munna's fine," Rand said. "She'll just fly away if anything bad happens." But Ria slipped free of her brother's grasp and dashed across the basement floor.

She never made it to the stairs. In a single movement the earth convulsed and split apart beneath them, a chasm suddenly yawning between brother and sister. Wooden beams and chunks of metal and glass rained down around them as their house ripped nearly in half. None of the destruction registered on Rand, though. All he could see was his younger sister as she teetered on the edge of the gaping chasm, then toppled backward into it.

Nor was he aware of a quick violet flicker in one corner of the basement near the ceiling... or of the small, glittering sphere that abruptly materialized there, hovering, light winking from its surface.

The only thing in Rand's mind, as he dove forward and lunged to grab a scrap of Ria's clothing, was the fervent, soul-deep wish that the tremors would stop, that the ground would close, that everything would go back to the way it was before the earthquakes started.

The glittering silver sphere revolved, gleamed once, and a sheet of violet energy exploded from it, blasting outward from Rand and Ria's house to encompass all of Yirgopolis, and all of its surrounding countryside, in slightly less than two seconds.

The shockwaves traveling through the earth rapidly slowed, then stopped altogether, canceled out by a strange new vibration through the rocks and soil. Just as quickly, massive spikes of violet brilliance erupted from the ground and joined together, pulling the ruptured earth closed again, setting aright the toppled buildings, effecting millions of tiny repairs within the space of a heartbeat.

Then, before any witnessing Keorgans even had time to process what they saw, the violet energy crackled and vanished.

In the basement of their home, Rand found himself holding a sobbing Ria in his arms, crouched on a floor that only revealed its earlier destruction in the form of the tiniest of hairline cracks.

Yirgopolis breathed again, pulled back from the brink of grinding, shattering death.

And as Rand comforted his sister, the glittering silver sphere, still unseen, gleamed once more and faded out of existence, leaving only an odd, deep whispering voice:

"Test Program One complete. Sentients compatible with interface parameters. Readying Test Program Two."

In his laboratory, Harland sprawled on his back on the floor, staring up at the computer's central monitor as the violet energy matrix faded from the screen. It took him a few moments to realize Silveris was speaking to him.

"They've stopped! The shockwaves have completely stopped!"

Harland glanced over at Silveris, who kept looking from his seismic readout to a window onto the city and back again. Silveris rushed to Harland's side as the older man got to his feet.

"You did it, sir! You made the system respond!"

A little shakily, Harland approached the control array, then ran his hand over it. He got no response -- the energy matrix had gone. The great machine stood cold and lifeless. But Silveris was correct: The system had stopped the shockwaves. It had saved Yirgopolis from destruction. And he had brought it to life. Somehow, in some way, he had woken the machine from its slumber, if only briefly.

The ground beneath no longer trembled, but Harland knew it could only be a temporary reprieve.

"I will understand you," he whispered. "I will."

He went back to work, more determined now than ever.