Quantum Leap - Random Measures

by Ashley McConnell

  He stepped back from the intensity of her anger, back again as he saw her fighting tears, and that made her even angrier. “Get out of here, damn you. I don’t know what you came over for, but I’m in no mood to listen to it now. Go lecture somebody else.”

  He couldn’t find anything to say to that, which was just as well, Rimae thought, if he was going to stay employed at her bar. Her fingers curled around the glass of the bottle, pressed tight against the slippery, sticky surface. How dare he? How dare he? How dare he stand there with that look on his face, as if he was the only person capable of understanding her son? How dare he look at her with that mixture of accusation and compassion? She stared back and ground the glass into the innocent wood of the cabinet.

  His shoulders slumped—his whole body seemed to shrink in on itself all of a sudden, as if he had been defeated somehow. He turned away without another word and went out the door, closing it quietly behind him.

  She would not cry. She would not cry about something she’d lived with for sixteen years, ever since she found out that her lovely baby boy, whom she had chosen and loved with all her heart, was never going to grow up, not really. She had decided then, in that doctor’s office, that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. She would take care of him just the way he was all his life, and she wouldn’t even think

  about what Wickie had just said, wouldn’t even think that it might be true. Rimae Hoffman had had plenty of things to cry about her life long, and she wasn’t going to pick just one this late in the game. Davey was hers, and she never regretted it.

  Past was past, and that was all there was to it. She’d take care of Davey, and Wickie Starczynski could mind his own damned business. And if he didn’t, she’d fire his ass so fast he’d never know what hit it.

  At the Project, Ziggy registered a change. Recalculated a percentage. Regarded it worriedly.

  Something had to be done. Soon.

  But what?

  As the odds for Sam increased, the odds for Al decreased, and the computer that was the product of both of them hummed in discontent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Gooshie hunched over the sports page in the Project cafeteria, absentmindedly munching a handful of tortilla chips as he scanned the scores. Little shards of baked white corn obscured the page, and he brushed them away impatiently. The cafeteria was filled with people taking a lunch break—it only held tables for thirty. The sound of conversation, eating utensils, and moving chairs made a blur of white noise.

  Verbeena Beeks stood beside Gooshie’s table, carrying a tray. “Good afternoon, Gooshie. May I join you?”

  The Project’s chief programmer peered up at her myopically and then heaved himself halfway to his feet. “Oh, Dr. Beeks. Of course. Please. Sit down.”

  Verbeena smiled and sat opposite him, unobtrusively brushing the detritus of his snack over to his side of the table. “How’s it going?” she inquired, tapping the contents of a packet of creamer into her coffee.

  Perhaps her tone was just that small bit too nonchalant; perhaps something else gave her interest away. In any case, Gooshie was no fool. He folded the newspaper away and thrust his head forward nervously. “It’s going very well, Doctor. Why?”

  “Oh, no reason.” She smiled abstractedly at him, pretending far more interest in her packaged meal than it actually warranted. The little cafeteria had a couple of wall-sized

  refrigerators, well stocked with frozen dinners, and lots of canned goods, but haute cuisine was beyond the Project budget. Verbeena had chosen ravioli with meat sauce; she poked at the pasta and wondered whether she might not have been better off with clam chowder.

  Or if she’d stayed in her San Francisco practice, she could be dining out on Pier 39, eating fresh Alaska salmon. Was salmon in season now? She couldn’t remember.

  Instead she’d taken on a professional challenge and landed in the middle of a desert in New Mexico, and she was eating defrosted ravioli under the anxious eye of a man who probably thought in binary.

  Smothering a chuckle, she laid her fork aside and smiled at Gooshie. “No reason, really. Just asking.”

  “But you’re a psychiatrist,” Gooshie said.

  “You sound like that joke about the two psychiatrists meeting and saying ‘Good morning’ to each other, and spending the rest of the day wondering, ‘What did he really mean by that?’ ”

  “Well, I was wondering.”

  “Don’t worry so much, Gooshie.” Gooshie was one of those people a junior therapist would have a field day with, pinning him down and asking him questions until the man’s skin popped out with beads of sweat and his hands twisted around each other, wringing with terror. Verbeena, on the other hand, had Gooshie pegged as someone who was naturally nervous. He didn’t need a doctor harassing him.

  “Well, you don’t usually sit with me.”

  “Nope, not usually. But I looked at my list this morning, and it said I’d had lunch with practically everybody else, so—” She grinned. “And besides, it was the only free seat in here. Give me a break, hon, I’m not a doctor all the time.”

  Gooshie grinned uncertainly and nibbled at his mustache, which was ragged from the habit.

  “So how’s the programming biz?” Verbeena inquired, giving the ravioli another try. If she concentrated, maybe

  she could pretend it was sole, covered with lemon sauce

  and capers. . .

  "Oh, it’s fine, just fine.”

  “Made any progress on the problem?”

  Gooshie looked away, his face turning red. “No.”

  I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” she said gently.

  "I was just hoping.”

  "It isn’t right,” Gooshie burst out. “Everything runs just

  It doesn’t make sense. If there was something wrong somewhere, it ought to show up in other programs. Everything’s knit together. But everything’s working the way it’s supposed to.”

  Don’t let Al hear you say that, Verbeena thought, smil ng through a mouthful of overcooked pasta. As for the sauce—

  Gooshie’s hands wrapped around the plastic bag, twisting it, and the handful of chips left inside crumbled. He didn’t notice. “We’ve gone through everything,” he said earnestly, as if Verbeena might not believe him. “Everything we can think of. There was that time that Ziggy was trying to add on to herself, years ago, and we thought that might be involved, but that all happened after Dr. Beckett Leaped, so mat couldn’t be it. We thought maybe she’d started earlier, but Dr. Beckett wouldn’t have let her.

  “And then there were those new chips he invented. I’m not sure what they might have done.” Gooshie’s eyes were magnified by his glasses. He’d never bothered with the surgery that would have made glasses unnecessary; too worried about things going wrong, Verbeena thought. Gooshie was always worried about things going wrong.

  They rarely did in his part of the Project, but the one thing that had gone wrong was more than enough to make up for it. And Gooshie was sure it was all his fault, no matter how much he’d like to blame the neurochips Sam invented.

  Verbeena was in no position to argue with him. All she could do was keep an eye on him, make sure that guilt, and

  the effort to locate the bug in the program, didn’t drive him into a breakdown.

  She finished her lunch, glanced at her calendar, and sighed. She needed a staff meeting, needed to look at performance review, wanted to talk to the compensation people about hiring a new doctor to work in the Waiting Room. The trouble was getting someone through the clearance process. A medical doctor who could undergo the kind of scrutiny involved in getting cleared for Project Quantum Leap usually didn’t want to work there to begin with. It wasn’t a particularly attractive place to work, off in the middle of the desert.

  First, though, she needed to go look in on her most important patient again.

  She nodded farewell to the chief programmer and put away the debris of her meal and stepped into the elevator to the depths of the Proje
ct.

  The Accelerator, the Imaging Chamber, the Control Room, the Waiting Room were all together on a level about halfway down. Below them were the layers of computer offices, the cabinets that held Ziggy’s mechanical guts, the lowest-level offices, Beckett’s abandoned biochip laboratory. Verbeena never had occasion to visit the lower depths of the Project. Her concerns centered on the Waiting Room. She walked through the Control Room without even a glance at the large table of glowing cubes in many colors that occupied its center, or the glittering silver ball suspended in the air above it. She nodded at the technicians buzzing like flies around a rectangular box of Jujubes and kept going.

  Pausing outside the door to the Waiting Room, she glanced up at the ceiling. “Ziggy? I don’t suppose Al’s come back yet?”

  “No, Dr. Beeks.”

  Drawing a deep breath, she knocked lightly at the door, waited a moment, and walked into the white room with the hospital bed and the state-of-the-art monitoring equipment, the stairway and the office up in the observation deck.

  He was lying on the bed, half-dressed, his fingers knit under his head, staring at the ceiling. She marched briskly over, picked up the chart and scanned it as she said, “Good morning, Mr. Starczynski. And how are we feeling this afternoon?”

  The hazel-green eyes—familiar eyes—shifted to follow her. The cold, suspicious expression on the man’s face didn’t fit well, as if the face had never been shaped to accept it. “I don’t know how you’re feeling, Doc. I’m doing just fine.”

  It was Sam Beckett’s voice. It had to be, coming from his lungs and his vocal cords, shaped by his palate and lips and tongue. But Wickie Starczynski would hear his own voice. That was what his mind was used to hearing, so that was what he’d hear.

  It was a fascinating dilemma, this separation and mix-and-match of mind and body. Verbeena could never publish any of her observations, but she made her notes anyway. Most of her colleagues wouldn’t accept the proposition that the mind could be separated from the body—from the brain—to begin with. That was the school of thought that didn’t accept the idea of the soul, or God, either.

  Verbeena smiled coolly and scanned the chart. Blood pressure still high, but otherwise healthy. It could be worse. She could still remember the time Sam had Leaped into a woman with an insatiable craving for Milk Duds, chocolate turtles, and Godiva chocolates. As well as German chocolate cake, Hershey’s Kisses, and almost anything else containing theobromine. Sam’s blood sugar level and cholesterol count had gone through the roof.

  “I see you’ve been eating well,” she remarked. The chart showed he’d been exercising, too. That was very good. It would help keep his borrowed body in condition.

  “They feed good here. The booze isn’t great.”

  “I’ve often noticed that myself.” He must not be much of a cook, she thought, placing the chart on the end of the bed. “Any other problems? Can I get you anything?”

  He looked up at her and smiled lazily. “What did you have in mind?”

  If he flexes his pecs at me, Verbeena promised herself, I’m going to show the tape at the medical section’s Christmas party. I’ll save it for when we get Sam back and torture him with it. See what happens when you’re not in your right body, Dr. Beckett? Serves you right for not being in your right mind either. Oh please, please flex ’em.

  He didn’t. But he did grin, a slow, lazy grin, and lay still, enjoying the survey. Verbeena hoped he couldn’t tell she was blushing.

  “Can’t help you with the booze, hon,” she said at last. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. We’re still working on things. If you don’t have any questions, I’ll check back with you later.”

  She turned around briskly and marched up the steps to the observation deck, closed the door behind herself and reached for the window blanker. “Dave, what’s the story?”

  The nurse on duty, a burly Hispanic with tightly curled hair, shook his head. “He doesn’t show any signs of disassociation, anomie, stress, or tummy upset, but when he shaves he still stops to look at his face. Touch it. He still looks down at himself. Usual pattern. But he just doesn’t react. Seems to be perfectly comfortable where he is.”

  “Weird. Really weird.” Not exactly a professional diagnosis, but it would do.

  “Yeah.” Dave was starting work on a dissertation in abnormal psychology. Ziggy did the lit searches for him; he read the articles. He wanted to study multiples. Since he couldn’t use the patient in the Waiting Room, he’d have to leave the Project in a few weeks to continue his studies under one of Verbeena’s former professors at Cornell. Verbeena wasn’t looking forward to losing him.

  “So what do you think?”

  Dave shrugged. “Ziggy ran old TV sports programs for him for a while—he’s especially interested in the karate championships. He’s been looking at some of the books. His profile shows a lack of self-esteem, a lot of insecurity, he’s a good kid. Too bad it isn’t something in his life

  that will change.”

  "Isn’t it, though,” Verbeena muttered, looking at the monitor. Wickie was lying staring at the ceiling, doing nothing. “What a waste.”

  Can’t we do anything about it?” Dave asked hesitantly. He was itching to apply his new knowledge.

  Verbeena had a few theories of her own. The two of them looked at each other, then at the Visitor in the Waiting Room below.

  "He hasn’t asked for therapy,” Verbeena mused. “I wonder if an Ethics Board would consider this an experimental intervention.”

  "Just teaching? Counseling?” Dave asked.

  She’d become a doctor to help people, Verbeena reminded herself. To make a difference. Abruptly, she grinned. “Why, Mr. Medina, I do believe you’re right.”

  Elsewhere in the Project, a shadowy branch of possibilities began to take shape, as yet unconnected to anything at all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was so obvious. How could he have missed it? All the physical signs were there, all the behaviors. He’d thought Davey was just challenged, the way Jimmy La Matta had been; whether it was retardation or autism, it would have been due to some genetic damage. Tragic, but hardly anyone's fault. The sensation of one of the holes in his memory abruptly filling in was almost physical.

  He had to give a lot of credit to Rimae Hoffman. FAS symptoms ranged from imperceptible to incapacitating, but one of the most common was a short attention span. It couldn’t have been easy, raising Davey. And if she’d taken in her niece as well, she must have a truly generous soul, no matter how incongruous her relationship with a bartender young enough to be her son might be.

  He couldn’t remember how much had been known about FAS in 1975, or more to the point, in the middle fifties, when Davey’s mother had been pregnant with him. But it didn’t matter. It was too late now. Nothing he could do could change things for Davey now.

  Nothing. Not on this Leap.

  Once again, frustration expressed itself in action.

  He found himself walking, then jogging, then running along the sidewalk, his shoes slapping the concrete hard. He didn’t know if Wickie was a runner. At the moment he

  didn’t care. He had to get rid of the anger, the despair, the helplessness of finally figuring out what was wrong with a kid who wanted to fly and never would, and at the same time knowing there was nothing he could do to fix it.

  His path took him down the main street of Snow Owl, around minor street repairs, up and down sidewalks, into the street when the sidewalks disappeared. He caught the green light at the intersection of Main and Ski Line Drive and kept going; even the red wouldn’t have stopped him by then. Besides, there wasn’t much traffic down by the auto dealership and pawnshop and pizza parlors, the delis and ski repair shops and boutiques so late on a Sunday evening, with the sun beginning to disappear and shadows slanting long and narrow in front of him, and he could push himself as far and as fast as he wanted, the mile through downtown disappearing under his feet.

  Stabbing pains in his side we
ren’t worthy of his attention, and after a while they went away. He kept on going, driving himself past a runner’s wall and on into a new neighborhood and a second wind, Wickie’s body answering his will, Wickie’s lungs filling and contracting, Wickie’s heart pounding in rhythm with Wickie’s legs, running, running, uphill now, to the residential section of the town. No sidewalks here; he ran on the asphalt, dodging tree branches. Houses here were far apart, hidden at the end of narrow driveways leading from the road up into groves of trees, visible only from the lights that appeared in the windows. The shadows were gathering. The third time he stumbled, he began to slow down, and weariness hit him like a club.

  Within six strides he was walking, holding his ribs, grimacing, hunched forward, gasping for air. He’d gone perhaps seven miles, he thought. Wickie was going to be really ticked off if Sam Leaped out right now and left the body for its rightful owner in this condition.

  At least he was too winded to be angry any more. And now he had to walk all the way back.

  Next time, he thought wryly, he should try to scream and shout, or at least run in circles. That way he’d at least end up where he started from.

  Well, he wasn’t here to prevent Davey from suffering from FAS. He’d have had to Leap into Davey’s unknown mother twenty years ago, and probably the Leap would have to have lasted the duration of her pregnancy—he shook himself convulsively. Once was enough, thank you; the thought of remaining in a woman’s body for the duration of an entire pregnancy was almost enough to start him running again. He couldn’t imagine how women did it. Over and over again, some of them.

  Some things man was just not meant to understand.

  So if it had nothing to do with Davey, what then?

  And where the hell was Al Calavicci?

  It was getting dark. The rare car that passed caught him in its headlights, spotlighting him like a deer and whizzing by, spattering him with the small stings of gravel and buffeting him with displaced air.