Lieutenant Dhae’s official log, officially mandated entry, stardate [REDACTED]: my activities are within the norm and the parameters thereof are within reason. I have elected to willingly visit Counselor Sakar for motivations that are plausible and conceivable.

Finding Counsellor Sakar’s office wasn’t that difficult, even not knowing where it was or having to ask the computer. Two crewmen were trying to break down its door using a long crate as a ram.

The taller one was a woman, probably human, redhaired, with a teal uniform. The other was a male with a wrinkled forehead who didn’t look human but escaped Dhae’s recognition, dressed in yellow.

They were ramming the door screaming.

“Why do you need to know how we feel?” was hollering the woman.

“What do you do with what we tell you? What do you REALLY do?” was hollering the man.

Dhae looked at them from afar, only his head peeking into that corridor. These two were clearly out of control, so reasoning or talking would be certainly futile.

“It was just a cigar!” screamed the woman, ramming.

“It was never about the cigar!” screamed the man, ramming with her.

In another context, Dhae would have loved to unpack those statements and acquire, in so doing, a lot of secrets.

They were, of course, Dhae’s colleagues, although he didn’t know them personally. Killing them was clearly out of question, although it would have been the most direct option. He could have tried to bypass them by using a Jefferies tube, but probably Counselor Sakar would have locked or controlled them.

“I AM NOT INSECURE!” boomed the woman, making the ram clang on the door.

“MY MOTHER WAS A SAINT!” boomed the man, making the door creak with the ram.

They were so deep in paranoia that probably changing their state of mind from fury to terror wouldn’t have been very difficult.

“The Mugato” whispered Dhae to himself. The Mugato was also famous amongst Starfleet people, right? They must remember the Mugato, Dhae thought to himself. They would recognize a Mugato scream.

He didn’t have his tricorder on him — he wasn’t even dressed in uniform, but rather in his cute brown outfit embroiled with one of his favorite Romulan literature lines. But he did have his commbadge on him.

He approached a wall monitor. A commbadge also included, clearly, a loudspeaker: Dhae just had to find in the database a recording of the Mugato battle scream, and sound it through his commbadge. He quickly found the file he needed.

Usually a Starfleet commbadge was set not to produce too loud a sound, but fortunately Dhae hacked and jerry-rigged his commbadge on a regular basis. It was a long-standing habit, started years ago, when he had started suspecting that regular Romulan commbadges were being used to spy. (Which they explicitly were, but Dhae suspected that they spied much more than they were supposed to).

And now finally his sane, good paranoia was coming in handy. His jerry-rigged commbadge wouldn’t have a problem in producing a really loud Mugato scream.

“AAARRRHOOUUUUUUURRR” screamed the commbadge. What sound was that? Not the combat cry. Wasn’t it the love call? Dhae cursed the mislabelled database file and hoped that the two furiously paranoid rammers wouldn’t pick this time to be rational enough to distinguish their Mugato vocalizations.

He heard the ram falling on the floor and then the sound of running. He peaked in the corridor and it was empty. That was good.

He approached the door and sounded to be admitted.

Of course he didn’t expect the door to open, but nothing. He sounded again.

Then Counselor Sakar spoke through the interspeaker. “I am afraid that I have suspended my office hours for today. If it is for a discussion of my professional methods, ethics or goals, I’d be glad if you could write them on a PADD to be discussed at the earliest convenience.”

“Counselor? I am Lieutenant Dhae.”

Silence for a moment. Dhae felt quite exposed in that corridor: this was good paranoia, as at any time someone else might have walked through.

Sakar finally cleared his throat. “It is agreeable to talk to you, Lieutenant. The Mugato love call was your doing, I presume, although I’d have personally picked the battle roar.”

“I picked the wrong file out of the database and while your patients were using a crate as a ram. I’m having a better day than you so far. Can we talk?”

“Can this wait?”

At least the Vulcan sounded rational, if not reticent to open the door.

“The ship is experiencing some sort of psychotic crisis” said Dhae. “A mass psychosis. I suspect that Vulcans are immune.”

“We are not immune” said Sakar’s voice. “But I maintain control. Are Romulans immune?”

“I am doing well enough. I would like your help.”

The Vulcan seemed to consider that. It wasn’t easy to have this discussion through the speakers of the door. “My help? Do you have a plan?”

“Fine, I want to offer you my help. We are both rational and in control and I think the ship needs us to put our energies together.”

“You mean that you want us to collaborate.”

“Yes. As equals. That’s it. That is, if you can trust me.”

To Dhae’s moderate surprise, the door opened.

Dhae set carefully foot inside. The counselor’s office surprised him for its weirdness: half of it looked like a Vulcan room, minimal and spartan, decorated only with a water sculpture, an IDIC at the wall, an elegant bookshelf and a large desk; the other half resembled an overgrown greenhouse and instead of a chair or a sofa it featured a hammock.

Lieutenant Sakar was standing next to his desk, looking controlled and cautious.

“That half is holographic, isn’t it?” asked the Romulan pointing at the greenhouse half.

“Yes” answered the Vulcan calmly. “I try to host in an environment that is simultaneously familiar, relaxing and therapeutic to my guests.”

“I am a little bit surprised that you opened the door. It would be very rational to suspect of the Romulan.”

The Vulcan opened his arms. He was an uncharacteristically thin Vulcan, elegant and sinewy, with a large mouth. Dhae knew him to be over a century of age.

“It wouldn’t” answered the Vulcan. “We serve together, and thus I trust you implicitly.”

“Is it really this simple?” wondered the Romulan.

“Are you suggesting I should be more paranoid?” pondered the Vulcan cocking his head.

“Not today, Counselor, there’s enough of that going around.”

The Vulcan nodded deeply and walked to a side of a desk. He pressed a button on its surface and part of the wall became a screen.

Dhae looked at the screen and the text that had started scrolling. “A comprehensive list of causes of mass hysteria, mass psychosis, and mass delusions?”

“Correct” nodded the Vulcan.

“There must be thousands.”

“Seventeen thousand, nine hundred and seven known to Federation science. I have managed to winnow them down to six.”

He pressed a button and the text reconfigured, only showing six entries.

Dhae felt triumphant. “The first item on the list is a telepathic attack. It was my same thought precisely. I thought that maybe you, a Vulcan, would manage to detect our assailer.”

Sakar shook his head. He pressed a button and the first option vanished, leaving five. “There is no assailer.”

“But Betazoids, who are telepaths, were clearly attacked.”

Sakar shook his head. “Betazoids reacted to the fact that everyone around them started having strongly paranoid thoughts. I need you to run a scan, Lieutenant Dhae.”

Dhae opened his arms, still a bit annoyed at the dismissal of his preferred theory. “You can see that I have no tricorder. I am dressed for an elegant dinner party.”

The Vulcan looked the Romulan from head to toes. “Yes, your dress is very tight-fitting, especially around the waist. The citation is a line from The Secret Secret.”

“You are familiar with Romulan literature.”

Sakar walker to his desk and picked up a tricorder. “Vulcans hold that if you read a single Romulan book you’ve read all of them. Were that true, which I’m sure you’ll contend it isn’t, I’d be familiar with the whole of Romulan literature. You may use my tricorder.”

Dhae took the tricorder that was offered to him, having to concentrate very hard not to be provoked by that unacceptable snub of the supremely rich Romulan literature. “What am I to look for? Vulcan snark?”

The Vulcan sat on his chair and pointed at a spot on his head. “Scan me for an inflammation of the gymnocortical membrane.”

Dhae noticed that it was a medical tricorder, and as such had one of those small cylindrical scanning devices that he had already observed doctors using. He assumed that any Starfleet officer would have been trained to use it correctly, but he, as a two-week exchange officer, hadn’t. He did have a crash course on all Starfleet things — he was learning so much — but this hadn’t yet come up.

But he said to himself that, on the other hand, he could find Bragg peaks in reciprocal space, so pointing a cylindrical scanning thingie in the right direction shouldn’t be a problem. He pointed and the data started flowing in the tricorder.

“Do you know where the gymnocortical membrane is?” asked Sakar.

Dhae felt himself suspicious and angry at the question, but calmed himself quickly. “Please do not irritate me when I’m trying to keep my paranoia in check. And, to your question, you do know that the Romulan brain and the Vulcan brain are too close, evolutionarily, to have developed substantial differences. Unless you have a spastic brain, I’ll find your gymnocortical membrane where I’d find mine.”

“Apologies.”

Dhae looked at the data. “Like me, the membrane is highly irritated. I think I detect some swelling too.”

The Vulcan nodded, inscrutable. “Accumulation of liquids?”

“Slight.”

“Can you isolate any chemical that shouldn’t be there?”

Dhae, for this task, had to type a bit. The commands of the tricorder were a little alien to him, but soon he managed to filter out anything that wasn’t supposed to be in the Vulcan biochemistry, and found only one compound. He identified it.

“Oh” said the Romulan, recognizing the only life form that the abnormal chemical could come from, and what it meant. “It is Astrolisomyces paranoosferos.”

“Fear is an irrational attitude” expounded Sakar, “but I feared you would say that.”