Quantum Leap - Random Measures

by Ashley McConnell

  Elsewhen, a thwarted teenage boy dragged a nauseated girl upright and shook her until her long straight hair flopped around her shoulders. “Did you see that? He threw it back in my face and took back my keg! What did he do that for?” the boy demanded.

  Stifling a moan against the back of her hand, the girl shook her head, cautiously. “Ow. I dunno. Leave me alone.”

  “Stupid bitch, you spend enough time hanging out with him.” He shoved her, and she staggered back a couple of steps and landed on her rump, staring up at him with her mouth in a round O of surprise.

  A few of the others gathered around; one placed a warning hand on the boy’s arm. “Better cool it, Kev. She’s not your old lady any more, you can’t push her around like that.”

  Other voices murmured agreement.

  “She’s not my old lady because she spends all her time with that drunk Indian who’s screwing her aunt!” Kevin yelled.

  “He is not!” the girl yelled back, getting to her feet. “And he isn’t drunk, you are!”

  “He’s a—” Kevin began.

  The girl interrupted. “He may be an Indian but he’s more of a gentleman than you are!”

  This was greeted with laughter and catcalls. She looked around defiantly. “Well, when was the last time Wickie beat one of you up for the fun of it? I think that makes him better than Kevin Hodge any day!”

  Nobody wanted to answer that. Someone at the other fire found a keg that hadn’t been emptied yet, and the wave of anger poised over the clearing dribbled away.

  “C’mon, Kev. Let’s get a drink. We don’t even need the other keg.” The peacemaker stumbled across the way to join the rest.

  But Kevin wasn’t quite ready to give up. He looked toward the opening in the trees through which the Indian had disappeared, and over to his friends—and his former girlfriend—who had seen the Indian make fun of him and get away with it, and his face contorted. “He’ll be sorry,” Kevin whispered. “Damn Indian.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Talking sense into a crowd of drunken teens, particularly when one has just delivered the makings of the next carouse, was a waste of time and energy. Sam watched long enough to make sure the girl was going to be all right, and that no one else looked sick, and then he went up to the boy who’d paid, handed him his money back, picked up the keg, and came back the way he came. The boy came after him, shouting something about how he couldn’t do that, he’d paid for it, bring it back.

  Sam ignored him. The pursuit stopped when the boy fell over something behind him.

  Thirty feet along his backtrack, out of sight of the fires, he found a pickup truck with a side panel emblazoned with a large white bear and the logo, “Polar Bar: Snow Owl’s Finest Entertainment.” The truck reeked of beer. He heaved the keg into the back end, heard it bounce and hoped it cracked, and scrambled in his pockets for keys.

  He had keys. He even had a New York State driver’s license, though it didn’t have a picture. He got in the truck and held the license up to the overhead, studying it curiously, and compared the description to the face staring back at him from the rearview mirror.

  Wickie G. W. Starczynski was twenty-two, with black hair and brown eyes. He was cleanshaven, with deepset eyes and high cheekbones and a wide, thin-lipped mouth; the reflection was dark, but Sam thought at least some of that was probably the lighting from the overhead lamp. Nobody was going to mistake him for a Celt this time around, however; the inside wrist of the hand holding the driver’s license was a lightly toasted brown. He was six-two and weighed 173 pounds. He lived in a post office box.

  Well, that was a great help.

  The post office box was in Snow Owl, New York.

  Maybe he’d get lucky, and find some signs.

  He scrambled in the glove compartment. The truck was registered to a Rita Marie Hoffman. There was an insurance paper, with an expiration date of February 1976. It matched the expiration date on the license. Unless both this Rita Marie Hoffman and his current host were flagrantly ignoring renewals, it was sometime before February, 1976. And while it was cool, it wasn’t wintertime. Early summer, maybe.

  Well, that was something. Always assuming the insurance paper wasn’t out of date. He knew now approximately when he was, and roughly where he was—somewhere in upstate New York. This was definitely progress.

  He shifted the truck into gear and pulled out, bumping over rocks and fallen branches, wincing as branches scraped paint off the roof. He leaned back to look over his shoulder, hoping that the ruts would lead to pavement eventually.

  Eventually, they did.

  The seat belt was broken. After three serious tries to pull out the tongue side, he pulled it completely out of its housing.

  “Great,” he said, as much to hear himself talk as for any other reason.

  Elsewhere, elsewhen, a parallel hybrid neurocomputer noted a glitch in reality, and began tracking a new set of rapidly branching probabilities.

  He made a wild guess and pointed the truck downhill.

  The road was narrow and crumbling along the edges, and there was nothing but darkness yawning on the other side of the upward lane. He saw a “Beware of Falling Rocks” sign, and snorted grimly to himself.

  His left headlight flickered and died, and he muttered wordlessly under his breath and slowed down even more. A gray boulder the size of a child’s playhouse jutted out into his lane, and he had to cross the double yellow line to get around it.

  He glanced at the odometer, as if it would tell him anything. It told him, in fact, that the Polar Bar wanted to squeeze the last possible mile out of its truck; it showed six digits plus the tenth-miles. He could feel cracks in the plastic of the steering wheel biting into his fingers, much as the nylon fibers of the rope on the balloon had.

  The part of the night sky that he could see, that wasn’t blocked by trees and mountains, was covered with clouds, was like velvet. He couldn’t see any stars. Even if he got out of the truck and looked up, he probably wouldn’t be able to find too many: maybe Orion the Hunter, with the three stars of his belt, chasing eternally after the Great Bear, but not much else.

  Not like the desert. The air was clear in the desert. You could almost reach out and touch the stars. He had a sudden mental image of himself reaching up to the sky, laughing.

  He blinked, and wondered where that memory had come from, just as a small creature bounded across the road almost under his tires, and he jammed on the brakes. The truck pulled hard to the left, toward the darkness. He jerked it back again, taking his foot off the brake, and the truck fishtailed, skidding on loose rock. The back end drifted out.

  “Steer toward the skid,” he muttered, not hearing himself. If he steered into the skid he’d go over the edge.

  If he didn’t, he’d go over the edge.

  He wondered if he’d Leap before the truck hit the bottom. Of the cliff, the ravine, of whatever it was. That would leave Wickie to die, though. And he didn’t think he’d Leaped into Wickie in order to trade his life for that of a squirrel.

  He tapped the brakes, lightly, twisted the wheel forward, back again. The truck skidded into the soft dirt along the shoulder of the road. A chunk of granite the size of one of the truck’s tires loomed up in front of him. He steered frantically for the clear space on the roadside, pumped the brakes.

  The truck stopped.

  Elsewhen, a new set of possibilities blinked into existence and began branching.

  He took a long shuddering breath and leaned his forehead against the wheel. If he hadn’t been slowing down to begin with, he would have hit that rock and flipped over.

  Of course, if it hadn’t been for the squirrel, he probably wouldn’t have been in a skid to begin with.

  “Hey, maybe next time you’ll Leap into Al Unser,” said an all-too-familiar gravelly voice next to him.

  Sam jumped. “How long have you been there?”

  “Long enough to see you miss Rocky the Flying Squirrel back there.” Al shook his head. “Sam, yo
u gotta learn about cost-benefit analysis. The benefit of hitting the nut-guzzler versus the cost of going over a very steep cliff, in this case.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t speak up while I was trying to straighten out. I didn’t even hear you coming.” Sam got out of the truck and then leaned back hastily. It was too dark to tell for sure, but it looked like the vehicle had stopped about six inches from the edge of a long drop, and this time he was positive he didn’t have a bungee cord attached anywhere.

  “I know that.” Al’s tone was distinctly injured. “You were otherwise occupied. I wasn’t going to startle you. Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “watch your step there. They don’t have safety barriers along this road.”

  “I noticed.” Sam swallowed his heart back into place and stomped over to the rock. It wasn’t quite as big as it had looked when he was bearing down on it, but it was plenty big enough to make him grunt as he got his arms around it, staggered a few feet, and heaved it over the side. The crashing and crunching as it fell went on for several seconds.

  The handlink squealed loudly. Al glared at it, bushy eyebrows knit. “Now what, Ziggy?”

  The computer Ziggy, back at Project Quantum Leap, blinked a message in the colored cubes of the handlink. Al sighed in response, the sigh of a man seeing something familiar and not particularly pleasing. His next words, however, continued the previous topic. “Besides, I didn’t say anything because I was trying to get oriented. It’s dark out here.”

  “No, really?” Sam drawled, glaring.

  Al was dressed in a black shirt with interlocking vibrant yellow-pink-and-purple designs, matching suspenders, and black slacks. A black fedora with a bright blue feather in the band tilted on his head at a jaunty angle. For a change of pace, he wasn’t juggling a cigar with the handlink.

  “Sure it is,” Al said, ignoring the sarcasm. “It’s nighttime.”

  “It’s usually dark in the nighttime. I’ve noticed that. Why am I here, Al?”

  Why am I here, Al? One of these days he was going to ask that question and Al was going to say, Because this is where you belong, Sam. This is home. But he’d given up, almost, on expecting that day to come.

  “Well.” Al made a show of consulting the handlink. “You’ve Leaped into Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski—”

  “Who?” Sam interrupted, startled. “Gray Wolf?”

  “Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski. He’s half-Mohawk Indian, half-Polish. Some combination, huh?”

  “I guess it could be.” A scrap of past history focused for him. “This isn’t 1990, is it? And Canada? Didn’t the Mohawks take over some place—”

  “As I was saying .. . ?” Al raised one eyebrow, inviting another interruption if Sam cared to make one. Sam, recognizing Al’s I’m-giving-the-briefing-here-ensign look, didn’t. “It’s not Canada, it’s not 1990, and you’re not involved in a Native American uprising.” He paused, distracted momentarily. “I wonder if that should be Native Canadian? Except Ziggy says he was born in New York State, and . . . Never mind.

  “It’s Friday, June 6, 1975, and you’re in upstate New York. You didn’t pick a world-beater this time: Wickie dropped out of school in the eighth grade. He’s a bartender and man-of-all-work at the Polar Bar. He was making a delivery to a private party—”

  “A bunch of kids,” Sam said, still annoyed. “It was a bunch of kids.”

  “Ahuh. So, knowing you, I gather the delivery didn’t get made. That’s not going to endear you to Rita Marie Hoffman, who owns the bar. Wickie lives behind the bar in one of the cabins Hoffman also owns. I suggest you not push her too far.” He examined the handlink. “She has the reputation of being a feisty lady. She’ll escort some drunks out of her place with a shotgun in 1978.”

  “What does Ziggy say I’m supposed to do this time?” Sam asked, desperately trying to bring Al back to the point.

  Al chewed his lip. “We’re working on it. I thought we had it. There was something about a party this coming Monday night, and preventing a wreck, but things seem to be kind of flexing at this point. Ziggy’s not sure any more.”

  Sam sighed and looked up, past the roof of the truck cab into the side of the mountain beyond. “Why can’t I ever get a straight answer?” he inquired. “Ziggy’s not sure. Or there’s a glitch. There’s always something. Why can’t I ever just Leap in, fix it, and Leap out again?”

  “You’ve done that,” Al pointed out. “You clipped the line on that balloon. If you hadn’t done that, the guy would never have bounced. He’d’ve just gone splat.”

  “I would have gone splat, you mean, and thank you very much for letting me know!”

  “What good would it have done? Of course, I didn’t expect you to actually go over the side,” Al said thoughtfully.

  “Just what were you looking at on the handlink while I was dropping several hundred feet straight down?”

  “Huh? Oh. Gooshie and I have this fantasy basketball team, and I was trying to figure out a way to buy up Michael Jordan’s contract.”

  Sam was speechless. Al noticed. “It doesn’t do any harm,” he protested. “Hey, Ziggy has gigabytes of memory she doesn’t use.”

  Sam closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Are you going to stay out here all night?” the hologram asked. “Isn’t it kind of cold?” Al couldn’t feel the cold. Physically, he was back in the Imaging Chamber. He couldn’t touch or be touched by anything in Sam’s “moment” of time. That didn’t keep him from empathizing. “And they’ve been having thunderstorms around here. People have been seeing twisters around—” he peered at the handlink “— Ellicotville, wherever that is. And south of Rochester.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is pretty cold,” Sam sighed. He got back into the truck, slammed the door, shifted back into gear, and edged away from the precipice, guiding the vehicle back onto the road. He drove at least two miles farther down the twisting, narrow road before the quivering in his gut calmed down.

  Al, floating along in the passenger seat, kept pace. He’d found that putting a chair in the Imaging Chamber allowed it to appear to Sam that he was actually sitting in the front seat of a vehicle with him. It was better than having his body appear to be cut in half by the seat, at least.

  Road signs told Sam that Snow Owl was only a mile away. He allowed himself to draw a cautious breath of relief as the road flattened out, following the bank of a stream. He passed a bowling alley, a few small houses, and then what looked like the beginnings of Snow Owl’s business district. The Polar Bar was on the near end, a wooden building standing by itself. A stretch of crumbling asphalt and gravel served as a parking lot; four or five cars were nosed up to the building like puppies looking for milk. The sound of a piano being beaten upon by someone with a grudge came through an open window. Neon beer signs in the windows advertised Olympia and Heineken.

  “Wickie’s cabin is around back,” Al reminded him.

  Sam hesitated, wondering whether he ought to take the keg back into the bar, and decided to avoid the inevitable confrontation for as long as possible. As Al had pointed out, the bar owner wasn’t going to be happy about Wickie’s failure to do his job.

  Well, Sam wasn’t too happy about the bar owner’s customer base. Liquor to kids? It wasn’t right.

  A memory surfaced abruptly, a taste on his tongue, in his throat. His first beer. He’d been, what, thirteen? Tom had given it to him. It was metallic-tasting. He hadn’t liked it at the time.

  After a while he’d gotten used to it. He’d never really enjoyed the sensation of being drunk, though. He’d tried it once, as an experiment, in college. He kept careful notes.

  He couldn’t read his notes in the morning, and decided that he wasn’t going to try it again.

  It had never occurred to him before to wonder where or how Tom got that beer. From their father’s supply, no doubt. John Beckett used to have a beer maybe once a week. It was no big deal.

  He pulled around the parked cars and spotted a line of modest buildings, each
perhaps a third the size of the bar, half-hidden in the trees. The one remaining headlight picked out well-used ruts that ran up to the porch of the first cabin. It seemed as likely as any of them.

  He parked and got out, walked around to the back to look at the keg again. There was a tarp stuffed behind it; he pulled it out, found where it hooked up to the shell of the truck, and lashed it into place. It really wasn’t good enough, but— “Does Ziggy say anything about this keg going missing tonight?”

  Al raised an eyebrow, punched an inquiry into the handlink. “Nope. It’s still there in the morning.”

  “Good.” Sam dusted off his hands and felt around in his pockets for keys to the cabin door.

  There was a light on inside. Al was patting through another inquiry, a worried look on his face, when Sam swung the door open.

  To see a half-dressed woman turn toward him from examining the stereo, saying, “Wickie! Baby, what took you so long?”

  “Oh, boy,” man and hologram chorused, each with their own distinctive expression.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Oh, boy,” Al repeated, yearning stark in his voice. Sam would have elbowed him if it would have done any good. “But Sam, look at her!”

  Sam was looking. He couldn’t not look; the room wasn’t big enough to make it convincing to look anywhere else, and besides, he was human, too. But he was a gentleman as well, and not really Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski, and this woman wasn’t talking to the person she thought she was. She’d probably be really embarrassed if she knew she was standing there, in panties and garter belt and shirt hanging open and . .. and nothing else, in front of a total stranger. She was an older woman, perhaps in her late forties, with graying roots beginning to show under dark auburn hair piled up high, vivid lipstick, heavy eye makeup, and scarlet toenails; she kept herself in shape. In very, very good shape indeed, in fact. The delicate smell of lilacs filled his nostrils, and he found himself taking a very deep breath, savoring the fragrance.