“How’s it going, Dr. Martinez-O’Farrell?” she said politely in return.
Tina looked bewildered. “Are you mad at me, Dr. Beeks?”
“Of course not. Why ever would you think so?”
“Nobody around here calls me Dr. Martinez-O’Farrell unless they’re being, like, really really formal, or they’re mad at me or something.” Tina batted huge blue eyes. Verbeena resisted the impulse to check to see if the napkin had survived the resulting breeze.
“Well, hardly anyone calls me Dr. Beeks, either,” she pointed out reasonably, sawing at the chicken. She managed to tear a piece loose and put it in her mouth, chewing determinedly. “Except Gooshie. And you.”
“But you’re a doctor Doctor.”
This almost made sense. Verbeena considered it, managed to swallow the bite of chicken, and smiled. “Tell you what. You can call me Dr. Beeks when you come in for your physical, okay? Otherwise you can call me Verbeena, and I’ll call you Tina. Okay?”
Tina thought about this. “Okay!” she said at last. “We’ll be, like, friends!”
“That’s right. Like friends.”
Tina seemed to run out of things to say to her new friend at that point and, smiling tentatively, bent to her soup. Verbeena was content to let the silence go. There were only half a dozen other people in the cafeteria at this hour, and the two women were separated from the nearest potential listeners by at least fifteen feet.
What on earth could Al Calavicci see in a woman like this when he had Janna, Verbeena wondered. Yet there was no mistaking Al’s tightly controlled anguish when he’d told her about the different past on the other side of the Imaging Chamber Door, a past in which Janna was just another face among the hundreds at the Project, and Tina Martinez-O’Farrell was the object of Al’s overwhelming interest. Well, at least that was his version.
The Admiral was known throughout the Project as an outrageous flirt, of course, the kind who left a red rose on every woman’s desk at least once a year and would pledge undying love at the drop of an eyelid. In private he’d been known to express a connoisseur’s appreciation of the female form. But he was married, for heaven’s sake, and very happily so. The women at the Project joked about it. If anybody actually took him up on his flirting he’d run like a rabbit.
Which made that other past intriguing. Definitely intriguing. That other Al that her Al described was no rabbit. Would be insulted at the very idea, she suspected.
Of course, this Al would be equally insulted. She chuckled to herself.
“I’m sorry?”
Verbeena looked up, startled. She’d been so involved in her thoughts and in the tough chicken that she’d almost forgotten about the other woman at the table.
“Oh, nothing,” she said hastily. “I was just thinking about something Al said.”
“Al? Admiral Calavicci?” Tina was intent suddenly, and wistful.
Interesting reaction, Verbeena thought. “Mm-hmm. Tell me, Tina, do you remember when you first met Al?”
“Sure I do,” she said promptly. “The first night I got here. There was a party.” She smiled a little. “It was right here. Dr. Beckett played the piano—that piano over there— and Al and I danced.” She twirled her spoon in her soup, moving pieces of clam and bits of corn around, and her voice dropped. “There were a lot of new people there that night. Janna was there, too. Jessie Olivera—you know, from the Senate liaison office?—she says Al and Janna fell in love that night. Love at first sight.
“Do you believe in love at first sight, Verbeena?”
The high-pitched, Marilyn Monroe breathiness was missing from her voice now. She sounded thoughtful, and sad.
Oh, you poor child, Verbeena thought in a rush of sympathy. You’re plain crazy about the man, aren’t you?
“I think two people can be attracted to each other the first time they see each other,” she said. “They say it’s pheromones. That sort of takes the magic out of it, though.”
Tina smiled again, wry. “But that’s not really love.”
“Honey, I don’t know for sure what love is, and nobody else can tell you either. Sometimes that attraction just disappears, poof like magic, and nobody knows why. One minute two people are crazy for each other, and the next they’re not.”
“Sometimes people stay in love for years.”
“Sometimes,” Verbeena agreed. “Sometimes only one stays in love and the other one doesn’t. That’s the really tragic story.”
Tina nodded, straightening up. Before Verbeena’s eyes she regained her sparkle. “Well, lightning strikes for everybody sometime.”
“That’s what they say.” The Project psychologist smiled too, sadly. The last bite of chicken was as rubbery as the first. It didn’t matter any more.
“I think that’s got to be the moment,” Verbeena said later, to Ziggy and Al. They were in the small conference room next to the administrative offices, a room usually used for meetings of a dozen or fewer. The walls were white, the acoustic tiles in the ceiling were white, the floor was white, the automatic recorder on the wall was white. Verbeena’s lab coat was white.
In all that whiteness, the red and black of Al’s clothing, the darkness of Verbeena’s skin and the deeper darkness of Al’s hair and eyes were shocking splashes of color.
“I agree,” Ziggy said from the hidden speakers. “But I still haven’t been able to determine exactly why it happened that way.” The computer sounded irritable.
“I don’t get it,” Al said. He slipped the clear plastic wrapping—something new, a recycled product Verbeena . couldn’t remember the name of—off a cigar, crumpling it in one hand as he rolled the cigar back and forth between the fingers of the other. He tossed the wrapper into a nearby wastebasket and trimmed the ends of the cigar with the deft movements of long habit, then gave the edges a thorough examination.
He didn’t want to look her in the eyes, Verbeena noted clinically. They were, after all, talking about something very, very personal to a man not accustomed to revealing secrets.
“How do we know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be in the first place?” he asked at last, chomping fiercely on the unlit cigar.
“It isn’t,” Ziggy said flatly. “As you recall, Admiral.”
“I’m not sure I do recall that.”
Denial, Verbeena thought.
“Dr. Beckett is correct. His actions in the past have affected not only the immediate future of the people around him, but ours—yours—as well. I have initiated a detailed search of the lives of every person with whom Dr. Beckett has been involved on this Leap.”
“And what have you discovered, Ziggy?”
“Unfortunately, as yet, nothing.”
It was no wonder the computer sounded irritable. Ziggy was linked to both Sam and Al; at times it was almost like talking to one or the other of them. When Ziggy was irritated, it sounded exactly like a female version of Al. Verbeena shuddered at the thought.
“If there isn’t anything to tell him, there’s no reason to renew contact,” Al said, still examining the cigar.
Verbeena folded her hands in her lap and simply looked at him.
“Perhaps,” she said finally, keeping her voice as neutral as possible, “you could try going from the other direction, Ziggy.”
“Please clarify your suggestion, Dr. Beeks.”
“Instead of looking at it from the perspective of the people surrounding Sam, how about looking at it from Janna’s point of view? Wouldn’t it be easier to trace back the records of one person’s life than trying to trace forward the possibilities for several people?”
There was a pause. Verbeena thought she could feel the subliminal humming of the air circulation, of the electricity powering Ziggy pouring through the wires in the walls. She could hear the whisper of the cigar rolling back and forth between Al’s fingertips. She suppressed the urge to snatch the cylinder out of his hands, to crumble it onto the floor and stomp on it. She could not stand the smell of those cigars. Gove
rnment regulations said there would be no smoking anywhere inside Project buildings; they’d decided long since to turn a blind eye to smoking inside private personnel quarters, and Verbeena was morally certain Al lit up as soon as he walked into the Imaging Chamber. There was a reason for that ashtray at the top of the ramp, after all. Elsewhere in the Project—in rooms like this one—Al chewed on unlit stogies.
Of course, he hated it when she called them “stogies.”
“It’s a sound suggestion.” Ziggy sounded annoyed, probably because the idea hadn’t come from it to begin with.
“I guess so,” Al said. There was a thread of resignation in his voice. He drew in a deep breath, almost a shudder, and looked up at last. “Nothing lasts forever, after all.”
He meant his marriage, Verbeena realized. He was saying goodbye to it, cutting himself off from it.
“Al, we don’t know how things will work out on this end.” She was trying to be reassuring.
He wasn’t accepting it. He didn’t want reassurance or empty comfort. He was looking at an ending with open eyes and cold knowledge, and he didn’t need help with it.
“You first met Janna at your birthday party, back in ’93, didn’t you?” Verbeena asked. If he wanted to deal with reality, well, that was one of the things she was good at.
There were a lot of new people there. Tina was one of them, wasn’t she?”
The heavy dark eyebrows knit in confusion. “Yes, I—I remember that.” His eyes squeezed shut, as if his vision had blurred momentarily and he were seeing double. “I met Tina that night, too.” He shook his head sharply. “This is a bizarre feeling. I can’t keep things straight.”
Verbeena sat up a little straighter. “Can you remember not falling in love with Janna that night?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I can remember—Sam was working in his lab, and I called down and told him to come on up and join the party.” He spoke with assurance. His next words were slower, more uncertain. “I met . . . a lot of people that night. I met Janna—no, she wasn’t there, or—was she?” The look in his eyes was a little frantic. “Verbeena, how am I supposed to remember something that didn’t happen?”
“But it did happen,” Verbeena said. “You told me so.”
For a moment she wondered if they weren’t both crazy. Al was right; how could he remember something that never happened? If a patient of hers said that, she’d say he was delusional. Was Al delusional? Was the whole Project a figment of someone’s fevered imagination?
If it weren’t for the EEG tracings and the responses of the man in the Waiting Room, she’d commit Al in a minute. Lock him up in a rubber room, as they used to joke in the darker moments of her residency.
And put herself in the next room over.
But the man in the Waiting Room was a man named Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski, in the body of Sam Beckett.
And Wickie swore that it was June 1975. The president was Gerald Ford. He was vaguely aware of Snow Owl’s plans for the Bicentennial. And he didn’t know about anything after that.All past—any past—experience indicated that Sam had to fix something that had gone wrong—in the past.
She was sick and tired of recapitulating.
“Janna Fulkes arrived at the Project in one timeline on June fifteenth, 1993, your birthday. In another she joined us five days later.” Ziggy recited as if the computer were a little girl standing up in front of her third-grade class, doing a book report.
“Five days later?” Al and Verbeena chorused, staring at each other. “How do you know?” Verbeena went on. “If that isn’t a real past any more, how can you know?”
“I told you, Dr. Beeks,” and suddenly the little girl’s voice was very sad, “I don’t participate. I observe.”
“So because she was five days late, I didn’t fall in love with her?” Al said mutinously.
“By that time you were thoroughly involved with Tina Martinez-O’Farrell.”
“In only five days?”
“Al,” Verbeena reminded him, “you’ve fallen in love in less time, with less excuse, several times before.” Before you were married, she thought but did not say.
“That’s not the same thing!” Al slid from mutiny to indignation without missing a beat.
“It’s never the same thing,” Verbeena said dryly. “Ziggy, why was Janna late in that other past?”
The little girl’s voice was gone, replaced by an adult woman’s. “I don’t know that yet, Dr. Beeks.”
Verbeena opened her mouth to ask why and then reconsidered. She did not want to get into another metaphysical discussion of spacetime and Ziggy’s place in it, or out of it, or wherever it was.
“Well, let us know,” she said briskly. “Meanwhile, don’t you need to get back there, Al, and give Sam the new pieces to our little puzzle?”
“We appear to be losing sight of the essential problem,” Ziggy reminded them.
“What do you mean?” Al snapped, still not comfortable with the idea of going back. “I think I’ve got it pretty clearly in mind.”
“The essential problem is still to discover what it is that
Dr. Beckett has to put right. You’ve forgotten. Admiral, that led to this present is what has gone wrong."
“That can’t be right,” Verbeena objected. “Unless the past is slipping and sliding all over the place without Sam's help.”
“What do you mean?” Al asked, confused.
“The past that used to be, before Sam arrived to change it, led to your involvement with Tina. Right?”
“Right,” Al and Ziggy chorused, in exactly the same wary tone.
“Then Sam arrived and started changing things. As a result, Janna got here on time, you met her, fell in love, and here we are. Right? So maybe the wrong Sam’s supposed to be putting right is that you didn’t get together with Janna in the first place!”
“Then why hasn’t Sam Leaped?” Al said bluntly.
“It’s far more likely—an eighty-seven-percent probability—that some change he has made in his effort to save Bethica caused this situation to begin with,” Ziggy agreed. “It may even be that he remains in Snow Owl to correct the details. In this case, one of the results would be to put things back the way they were for the Admiral.”
“Whether I want him to or not,” Al muttered under his breath. “Sometimes all this damned do-gooding really gets on my nerves.”
“Or,” Ziggy continued, “there’s a ninety-percent chance that the whole business with the Admiral and Janna Fulkes has nothing to do with Dr. Beckett’s task in this Leap at all, and the whole situation is nothing more than an unfortunate side effect.”
“Oh.” Verbeena hadn’t thought it through that far. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry, Al, I really am.”
Al let go a deep breath. “You know the only good part about this, Verbeena?”
“Is there a good part?” she muttered, and then caught herself. Never act despondent around a patient: first rule of client counseling. “What?”
“Once the past changes, you won’t remember any of this. It’ll never have happened, from your point of view. And Janna won’t remember either.”
“But you will, won’t you?” she said softly.
Al’s eyes were bleak. “I’m linked to Ziggy, and to Sam, with his photographic memory. I won’t forget Janna, any more than I could ever forget Beth.
“I can’t. And”—he paused, and the look on his face made her want to cry—“I think, this time, I want to.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Al was dressed in silver and shades of blue, from his silver shoes to his dark royal blue shirt. He walked up the ramp, through the airlock doors of the Accelerator, into the Imaging Chamber.
Sometimes, on walking into this room, he remembered the frisson of fear he’d experienced the first time he’d entered it. He had no idea, back then, whether whatever it was that happened to Sam would happen to him too.
God or Fate or Chance, Time or Whatever, he had long since decided, didn’t want hi
m to get any closer to Leaping than he already had. If he’d given it more thought he would have concluded that Whatever had run him through the wringer often enough, thank you. His job on this adventure was to be the Observer, to coach, to supply information, to provide moral support. Not to burden the Leaper with his personal problems, any more than a good commanding officer burdened his troops. He’d already said too much to Sam. It was time to go back to business as usual.
The room was plain white, with panels set in the walls, a disk in the middle of the floor and a matching disk hanging in the air overhead. The lighting gave the room a blue cast, made it feel cold. Al paused to light his cigar, a personal gesture of self-fortification, and, pressing the power switch on the handlink, he stepped onto the floor disk. “Ziggy. Center me on Sam.”
Around him, the room began to blur and spin, and he shut his eyes briefly. The sound of a Door opening was his signal. He looked up to see Sam, standing behind a bar, against which a dozen women crowded.
They were laughing, teasing, munching peanuts and bar mix. Sam was looking frazzled and frantic.
Sam never did know how to appreciate a golden opportunity, Al thought. He stepped “forward”—some part of him knew he was still in the Imaging Chamber, still standing on the disk, but he’d long ago stopped worrying about that— walked through the bar, and leaned over Sam’s shoulder.
“Too much vermouth in that gin,” he advised.
Sam shared a sickly grin between Al and the middle-aged, overweight woman who’d ordered the martini with double onions just as she added, “I think those two little balls are just so cute.”
Al did a double take. “Uh-oh. Sam, when women turn into party animals, things can get out of control.”
“I know,” Sam muttered frantically. The overweight woman was yelping with laughter.
“I want a screwdriver,” another woman announced. “C’mon, Wickie, make me a screwdriver.”
“Um, uh, sure.”
The level of uncertainty in Sam’s voice pulled Al’s attention away, at least temporarily, from the buxom brunette’s cleavage. “You do know how to make a screwdriver, don’t you?” he asked.
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