Stardate: 47988.1. After his encounter with Q, Picard assembles the senior staff, and wonders if Q is actually giving him a chance to save humanity by showing him that the spatial anomaly also exists in the past. As they talk, the ship reaches the Neutral Zone, then Picard returns to the future, where Beverly's ship is also on the edge of the Neutral Zone. He convinces a reluctant Worf to accompany the group into Klingon territory, and then travels to the past, where he orders the crew into the Devron system. Finally, he returns to the present, where he is able to get Tomalak, the Romulan Commander on the other side of the border, to agree to entering the Neutral Zone together. Now heading for the anomaly in all three time periods, Picard learns that it exists in the present, and is larger in the past, but does not exist in the future.