Quantum Leap - Random Measures

by Ashley McConnell

  Al was leaning back in the chair, arms crossed across his chest, his stare cool and unwavering, and Verbeena recalled suddenly that he had faced worse interrogations than hers. Threats, especially threats she couldn’t, wouldn’t follow through on, would only increase his resistance.

  So she tried the opposite tack. She surrendered.

  Tossing her pencil onto the desk, she held up her hands. “Al, I don’t understand. I don’t understand the Project, I don’t understand what went wrong. I don’t understand why Dr. Beckett seems to be possessed at regular intervals by other people—”

  “He is other people,” the man across the desk interrupted.

  Verbeena felt a small flash of triumph, quelled it before it could show.

  Instead she heaved a large sigh.

  “That’s what you and Ziggy tell me, and a lot of the evidence supports you—electroencephalograms, physical responses, kinesic patterns, IQ tests. If it weren’t for the little matter of DNA, retinal patterns and fingerprints, I wouldn’t have any trouble at all believing you.”

  “Sam’s mind Leaped. His body is occupied by the mind of the person he Leaps into.” Despite himself, Al could not prevent a small gesture of one hand. Mal’occhio, Verbeena noted. The sign against the Evil Eye.

  So it bothered him more than he liked to admit. She studied him curiously. “When you go into the Waiting Room, Al, who do you see?”

  The abortive gesture again. “I see ... I see Sam Beckett. I see . . . people.” His arms sprang apart from each other as if they were like poles of a magnet, and windmilled. “I don’t know how to tell you what I see. I look at Sam Beckett’s body and as soon as I look in his eyes I know, that’s not Sam. I don’t know who it is, but I know it’s not Sam.”

  “We don’t know how the brain organizes information so that we can look at pictures and know whom they represent,” Verbeena said quietly. “We don’t know how we can see a person as a child and recognize him as an adult. We don’t know how we can tell the difference between two people, superficially similar, without conscious thought or decision—”

  “I don’t know either,” Al said. “I don’t care. I told you from day one, that isn’t Sam in there. He’s”—Al waved vaguely at the wall, the ceiling—“out there somewhere.”

  “And when you go into the Imaging Chamber and Ziggy centers you on Sam, what do you see?”

  Al’s eyes narrowed, and suddenly he was very calm and controlled again. He could tell where this was going, Verbeena realized.

  Good. Let him.

  “I see people. I see”—he paused, capitulated—“Sam.” He rallied. “Why are we going over old ground, Verbeena? Are you working for the Senate now?”

  She ignored the questions, pursuing her line of argument. “And you’re the only one who can see Sam Beckett, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes other people can,” he protested feebly. “Kids can. Animals. Even you once.”

  “That’s not really true, Admiral, and you know it. It takes more power than even Ziggy is capable of to allow me to see Sam, and even then—

  She paused and bit her lip, exhaling a long breath through her nostrils. She’d stepped between the disks of the Imaging Chamber, she’d seen—someone—once. Someone in torment. Someone Al had assured her was her friend, the Director of the Project, Samuel Beckett.

  That person had looked more like an inmate of an insane asylum to her. A very poor, very primitive insane asylum.

  And it was obvious that the man looking at her couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

  “Okay,” Al said at last. “Okay. I know why I’m here.” He fumbled at the inside pocket of his rust red suit jacket for a cigar, unwrapped and trimmed it with neat, economical, practiced movements, and bit down hard on it without lighting it.

  “You want me to go back and make contact with him again.” He looked her in the eye, defiantly.

  “More than that, I want to understand why you’re reluctant to do so.” There was Ziggy’s version, of course. She didn’t want to think about Ziggy’s version.

  The Observer had broken eye contact as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He took the cigar out of his mouth and examined the chewed end as if there were something particularly interesting about it.

  “Admiral, he needs you.” It was the second time she’d used his title, in a not-so-subtle appeal to his sense of duty. He knew the gambit, and recognized its power over him. He wouldn’t look at her.

  “Al”—she was shifting from an appeal to duty to an appeal to friendship—“what’s wrong?”

  He wasn’t really looking at the cigar, she realized suddenly. He was turning it over and over in his hands, drawing her eyes to it, but his own eyes were elsewhere. He was looking at his wedding ring.

  As if he’d never seen it before.

  “Ziggy was right,” she breathed.

  He glanced up then. “Ziggy? Right? Give me a break!”

  “She was. She said, every time you went into the Imaging Chamber to help Sam change the past, the future changed too. And this time you don’t want it to. It’s your future, isn’t it? It’s your present. Your now that you’re trying to preserve.”

  There was a long silence, and then the man sitting across the desk from her closed his eyes. “It’s never happened like this before, Verbeena.”

  "What do you mean?”

  He drew in a long, shuddering breath and looked down the dark end of the cigar in his hands, the indentations where his teeth had clamped into it.

  "Did you know,” he said, so softly she had to strain to hear, “he once had the chance to save my first marriage? To Beth?” A sudden thought struck him, and he glanced up. “I as once married to a woman named Beth, you know.”

  "I know,” Verbeena said. Of course he had been. Why would he think she needed to be told?

  Then she realized why, and sat back again.

  "He didn’t do it. It was against the rules, he said. So Beth had me declared dead, and she got married to somebody else.”

  He smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile to see. “He’s not perfect, you know, Verbeena. Oh, eventually he always does the right thing—that’s what makes him Sam—but he’s tried to break the rules a time or two for his own benefit. He’s thought about it, at least.

  “But he never knows—he’s never even asked—what it does to us here. And that’s why he made the rule in the first place, to protect the future from random changes in the past.”

  Verbeena bit her lip. Al’s face was a study in resignation.

  “You know, sometimes I step out of the Imaging Chamber and Sam is married? A dozen times, that’s happened now. Not always to the same woman, either.

  “Sometimes Tina and Gooshie are married, and sometimes Tina and I—” He paused, glanced up at her. “Ziggy says we’re all kept in a kind of static globe, the same stasis that allows her—and me, of course, because of the link—to remember all the histories that happen and unhappen again. Except I’m only human, of course, so I can’t keep things quite as straight as she can.

  “For some reason, the Project never changes while I’m in it. Outside, it’s probably changing all the time. I’ve even

  seen it happen, when I’m in Washington.” He laughed quietly. “You know, one time I came back and Tina was a blonde. Not even Ziggy could figure out how Sam caused that one.”

  “So it’s true, then? The last time you went into the Imaging Chamber you weren’t married to Janna?”

  He let go a long breath. “Yes. I didn’t even know who she was. Then.”

  It was the hardest thing Verbeena Beeks had ever done in her life. But it had to be done, and she was the one who had to do it.

  She stood up, a tall angry black flame, and pointed at him. “Are you going to abandon Sam Beckett in the past for the sake of the present, Albert Calavicci?”

  “I never said I wouldn’t go!” He was sitting straight in his chair now, looking up at her, his black eyes snapping.

  “But you’re
going to put it off, and put it off, until it’s too late, aren’t you? Until it’s too late for Sam to change the past, to change your present! And what happens to Sam if you do that, Al? What happens to Sam if he fails?”

  “We don’t know! Maybe nothing! He hasn’t always changed what we thought he would! It’s all random! His Leaping doesn’t depend on his changing things. . . .” He shut up abruptly, inhaled.

  “Not the things you think he ought to be changing, anyway. Isn’t that it, Al?” She sat down again, deflating into the chair. “He doesn’t change the things we think he ought to, but we don’t really know what God or Fate or Chance wants changed. We don’t really know, ever, what tomorrow is supposed to look like. Do we?”

  The two of them stared at each other. “The question really is, is it supposed to look like today?” she finished. “And what are you going to do about it, Al?”

  MONDAY

  June 9, 1975

  I have done one braver thing

  Than all the Worthies did

  And yet a braver thence doth spring

  Which is, to keep that hid.

  —John Donne, The Undertaking, st. 1

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sam was getting tired of waiting. On Monday, according to the rota tacked to the corkboard behind the bar, he was scheduled to work from eleven to three in the afternoon and from eight until midnight. He spent the morning working on the broken windows of the cabin, making a list of the people he'd met and what he knew about them. It was something like trying to identify the suspects in a murder mystery, with all the motives, before the murder was even committed. He

  wished he had a better idea of what the future was supposed to look like.

  But since the future wasn’t putting in an appearance, he decided to try it on his own. Pulling on a pair of heavy work gloves he’d found in one of Wickie’s dresser drawers, he picked out the broken glass with a pair of needle-nose pliers. He’d gotten new panes of glass, cut to specification, the first thing that morning. Then it was just a matter of picking out dried putty and old glazier’s points, cleaning out the rabbet, doing a little sanding and painting. While he waited for the paint to dry he chewed thoughtfully on a straw, staring into the trees, and started mentally sorting and organizing.

  There was Kevin, the first person he’d met on the Leap. He was just a kid, but he was obviously a leader to the local teens; he was the one buying the booze. He had a very nasty

  streak in him. What could go wrong in Kevin’s future?

  Anything or nothing, he had to admit. If he racked his memory, he could recall that he’d known a lot of kids who’d had beer parties in high school. Some of them had become upstanding citizens. Some of them were dead. He decided to leave the question of Kevin open.

  Rimae Hoffman. His eyes narrowed. Wickie had a relationship with her, an “arrangement” Al would say, but it clearly didn’t interfere with the employer-employee relationship. Rimae was a tough lady.

  Bethica? She kept turning up in the oddest places. He’d seen her at the kegger with Kevin and the others, and what was she doing around Wickie’s cabin last night—looking for her wannabe-Superman foster brother? Did Bethica have something else in her life about to go wrong?

  Maybe he was here to prevent Bethica’s baby from turning out like Davey. Was he going to spend the remaining months of Bethica’s pregnancy following her around, making sure she didn’t go drinking with her friends?

  He didn’t think so. Leaps didn’t work that way. Of course, it wasn’t a bad way to spend his time while he was waiting to figure out what else to do.

  Who else?

  Something in Davey’s life, maybe?

  He doubted it. Davey was mildly retarded, with an IQ somewhere in the low seventies. On top of that he was emotionally disturbed, belligerent, indifferent to instruction, discipline, or correction. Through no fault of his own, he was probably going to spend the rest of his life pushing a broom around a barroom floor, or something no more challenging. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d spend time in jail for fighting. His chances of addiction to drugs or alcohol were high. His life expectancy was two-thirds that of Wickie Starczynski.

  And for the life of him, Sam couldn’t think of anything anyone could do to change what had gone wrong for Davey. Oh, Rimae could put him in a halfway house, arrange for supervised care for the rest of Davey’s life, but for all Sam knew, she’d already made those arrangements. She certainly wasn’t going to welcome any suggestions from him about it.

  He sighed and examined the chewed end of the straw. Somewhere, in the lives of one of these people, something was going to go wrong. It was something that could change, something he could make right, something that could make a life better than it would otherwise have been. The wreck?

  But how was he supposed to know what that something was all on his own? He was supposed to have an Observer They were a team. He couldn’t do this job by himself. God or Fate or Chance or Whatever had set things up in such a way that he had to work with a partner, and it wasn’t fair for G or F or C to take that partner away from him.

  He was feeling extremely sorry for himself, in fact, and be knew it. He was also feeling helpless. And angry.

  The paint was dry. Taking a strip of glazing compound, be rolled it between his palms to make a thin rope, set it, installed the glass in the windows, reset the points, and fnished off with more compound, neatly trimmed. There. His father would be proud of him. There was still something he could do right.

  He supposed he could call everybody in Snow Owl all together in a room and tell them all to straighten up and fly right—and where did that phrase come from, anyway?— but they’d probably vote to have him put away.

  And that wasn’t funny even as a joke.

  His nose was itching. He rubbed at it, wondering what was going to happen next. Something had to.

  Something rustled in the pile of old leaves and young grass under the trees, and he stood up to get a better look. It rustled again. Not a snake, he thought. Squirrel, maybe, or raccoon ... He walked over to the tree.

  A grey face with huge yellow eyes peered up at him worriedly, and he sneezed.

  The kitten levitated, bounced off his upper leg, and hit the side of the tree running. She paused at his eye level, her legs embracing the trunk, and stared at him, ears sharply forward, the whiskers around her nose and over her eyes quivering.

  Her nose was a dusty pink. Her tongue, stuck out briefly to wash it, was brighter. Sam laughed under his breath, and the kitten tensed, ready to climb higher.

  “Hey there,” he said softly. “It isn’t you, is it? There isn’t something I’m supposed to do for you?”

  The kitten opened her mouth for a soundless mew. Sam wasn’t sure whether that was agreement or criticism.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Sam went on. “Sometimes animals need things to go right, too.”

  This time the kitten was definitely agreeing.

  Sam’s nose still itched.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, cautiously raising his hand to rub his nose again without alarming the cat, “that you ’d know where Al is, would you?”

  He couldn’t help himself. He sneezed. Whether it was the force of expelled air or general panic, the grey cat leaped away, disappearing into the woods.

  Well, it was possible he was here to fix things for the cat, but his medical background ran to humans, and he suspected the kitten wasn’t old enough to need the attention of a veterinarian yet anyway.

  He turned to find Rimae standing at the door to the cabin. She was watching him thoughtfully, one hand on her hip, one foot propped up on the step.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked, her tone conversational. “Standing there talking to trees. Got all the windows in your house broken out. Lecturing me about things that weren’t my fault, or your business. You’re supposed to be helping me misspend my middle age, for cryin’ out loud.”

  Sam couldn’t think of a good response to any
of it; the better part of valor was definitely discretion. “Somebody’s been overfeeding your cat,” he said at last.

  That damn cat’s still hanging around here?”

  "She's not yours?”

  Do I look like somebody who would own a damned

  cat?"

  Sam had met any number of perfectly pleasant women who owned cats. He wasn’t about to argue their merits with Rimae. Besides, he wasn’t sure she meant it anyway. “Well.

  I mean, I thought she was yours.”

  Rimae shook her head, laughing. “Wickie, honey, you are possessed.”

  How right you are, Sam thought.

  "Now you want to explain to me about these windows?”

  She wasn’t going to come to him. He had to go to her, crossing the little clearing, walking past her to open the cabin door. If anything will make Al show up, it’s this.

  She followed him in, looked around, sniffed at the lingering odor of ammonia and cleanser. “You cleaned the place up.”

  “It needed it.”

  "That much?”

  “It really, really needed it.”

  “Hmph.” She turned in place, noting the shampooed rug, the gleaming furniture, the scrubbed-down walls, the missing pictures, the lack of clutter. “You want to come do my place?”

  “I don’t do windows.”

  “Oh yes. The windows. Tell me about the windows, Wickie.”

  “They, uh, got broken.”

  “I can see that. I hope you weren’t having a party without me.” She walked over, checked the molding. “Nice job. I didn’t know you knew how to do this.”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it, either,” he said. He didn’t even have to mentally cross his fingers for that one; “window replacement” was buried in one of the potholes in his memory. He’d surprised himself, knowing

  what to buy and how to use the materials.

  “How did it happen?”

  “I have no idea,” he said with absolute truth.

  She stepped up close to him, walked her fingers up his chest and tapped one red fingernail on his chin. “No idea in the world, huh?”