He could feel his heartbeat slowing down. Respiration was returning to normal. He thought about taking his pulse and decided not to bother. He seemed to be getting a lot of exercise this Leap, anyway. He wondered whether Wickie would be grateful.
He wondered whether Rimae would be, too. But he decided not to pursue that line of thought, since that seemed to be what was leading to all this sweating stuff. It wasn’t the way he usually reacted, but then, he hadn’t been himself lately.
Laughing hollowly, he trudged back up the road, back past the delis and ski shops and boutiques. He hadn’t been himself for as long as he could remember, but with the state of his memory, that wasn’t saying much, either.
If it wasn’t Davey, and it wasn’t Rimae, what was it? Kevin? Bethica?
Bethica?
He paused at the light, putting out a hand to support himself on the pole and using the other to scrub the sweat from his face with the hem of his T-shirt. About three more
miles to go, he calculated. It might as well have been three hundred. He couldn’t drive himself, or this body, any farther, not with any kind of speed. After a minute or two the panting stopped.
He couldn’t seem to get a grasp on this Leap. He was doing a lot of sweating, and getting some music in, but that seemed to be about it.
Headlights spotlighted him again, and a truck pulled up beside him. He looked up to see Kevin grinning at him from the driver’s-side window.
Oh, yeah. He’d been doing some fighting this time around, too. And it was beginning to look like he was going to be doing some more. He straightened up slowly as the truck pulled around the corner into the wrong lane, blocking his path, and the driver’s door opened.
“Hey there, Wickie.”
There wasn’t anyone else in the truck, which surprised him. He wouldn’t have expected Kevin to challenge him without an admiring audience. But audience or no, Kevin was getting out of the truck and facing him.
“Hey there, Kevin.” He was glad he had his breathing under control, though the after-dark breeze of an early mountain summer was beginning to chill him. He wanted to keep moving. If he did, Kevin would interpret it as a victory.
He supposed he could live with that, but he wasn’t sure Wickie could. But he didn’t see any point in getting into another wrestling match with his self-appointed antagonist.
He stepped around the boy and started up the slope toward the Polar Bar. He wasn’t particularly surprised when Kevin reached out and grabbed his shoulder.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Sam exhaled deeply. “I’m going home. It’s late.”
“You and I have something to settle first.”
Sam still hadn’t turned around to face the boy. “I thought we already settled it,” he said. “Come on, Kevin. Haven’t you done enough?”
It was the wrong thing to say; he knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but there was no way to call them back short of Leaping into himself in Wickie’s body and putting right his own mistake. Which didn’t seem
too likely. Kevin’s fingers were digging into his shoulders. Looking, he realized almost a moment too late, for the nerve center that would paralyze his right arm.
He dropped out from under Kevin’s hand and took a long stride away.
"I’m not interested in getting into a fight,” he said.
Instead of charging as expected, Kevin stood there and grinned at him. “You will be,” he said. “Maybe not right now, but you’ll be interested one of these days.”
"You think so?”
"I know so. I don’t forget.” Kevin turned his back on Sam and paused, as if daring him to do something, and when Sam didn’t take him up on the unspoken challenge he got back into the truck and started the engine.
“Real soon now,” he shouted above the revving engine. "Wait for it.”
The truck roared up Ski Line Drive, and Sam lifted his hand to protect his eyes from the gravel.
“You could at least have given me a lift,” he muttered.
"Kids got no respect these days.”
He was beginning to sound like Al, he thought.
But where the hell was Al anyway?
Verbeena Beeks tapped the point of a pencil against the desk protector, sharp, hard blows just short of stabs. Her office, just off the Waiting Room, was painted an austere off-white, the same off-white that coated all the offices of the Project hundreds of feet under the ground. Verbeena had covered the plain background with oil paintings of fields filled with flowers, of barges in the canals of Venice. Al Calavicci called it her art gallery. He teased her about seeing patients in a museum.
She was the Project’s senior medical staff member and had, in the current version of technobabble, “official
oversight” of the Project medical team. Everything about the physical and mental health of the Project personnel was her responsibility.
She emphatically was not an expert in quantum physics or time-travel theory. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem, as interpreted by Samuel Beckett, M.D. and multiple Ph.D., was a source of enduring frustration to her. She agreed in principle that the patient must be led to personal discovery of the self rather than simply being told, but... in this context, it meant that Al couldn’t just come right out and tell Sam all about who he really was. Sam himself had set up an elaborate network of rules based on his own programming. It kept him in a state of chronic partial amnesia.
But that wasn’t the key problem at the moment. It was second order at best.
Her key problem at the moment was Al Calavicci. Since Sam’s only real link to his own identity was Al Calavicci, the Observer, linked to Sam through Ziggy the computer, Al was not only an Observer, but the focus to remind Sam of who he really was. It placed an incredible amount of pressure on him.
Verbeena had been about to suggest a little vacation to Al when Ziggy had notified them once again that Sam had found—or been placed in—yet another host, and the physical shell in the Waiting Room contained yet another Visitor.
Normally that news led to a carefully orchestrated series of events. Verbeena would make an immediate assessment of the Visitor. Al would enter the Imaging Chamber and Ziggy would center him on Sam. Simultaneously Ziggy would begin scanning history, looking for data on the individual into whose life Sam had Leaped, running projections on whatever it was that had gone wrong in that person’s life, tracing possibilities of new histories predicated on changes Sam might effect.
All that had happened this time, too. But not even Ziggy could calculate the infinite consequences of seemingly minor changes, and Sam usually managed to screw up the most elegant of solutions. So Al needed to be there, on call; not
to reinforce Sam’s sense of identity but to keep track of what he was doing.
And Al wasn’t.
And it had been more than two whole days since Al’s last contact with Sam. He’d made his initial contact, left the Imaging Chamber, and gone back to his office. The next day he’d taken a trip to Santa Fe with his wife. Ziggy, too, bad been uncharacteristically silent on the question.
"Ziggy.” Most of the time she looked up to that point at the ceiling she’d picked out as the “presence” of the omnipresent Ziggy. This time she stared straight ahead.
"Yes, Dr. Beeks.”
"Do we have a problem here?”
"In what respect?” The computer was being careful. She hated it when Ziggy was careful. It generally meant trouble.
"In that Admiral Calavicci shows no signs of being interested in returning to his duties as Observer.”
The computer didn’t answer. Verbeena counted to one hundred, twice.
"Ziggy, don’t you think this is a problem?”
“I can’t provide guidance to Dr. Beckett without the intervention of the Admiral.” The computer’s voice was female, and at the moment petulant. If the computer had occupied a human body, it would be kicking something.
“So it is a problem.”
“Of c
ourse it’s a problem!” the computer snapped.
“Have you tried talking to the Admiral?”
“He’s busy.” Ziggy was definitely sulking. Verbeena could detect a distinct undercurrent of jealousy, and she stifled a smile.
Ziggy’s visual sensors were sharper than she thought. "You’re laughing at me.”
Better watch it, Verbeena thought, or I’m going to be back to psychoanalyzing the computer. 1 don’t think I’m up
to a virtual Electra complex today.
“No, I’m not laughing at you,” she prevaricated, groping for something else to be laughing at to divert the computer’s wrath. “It’s the Admiral. He certainly is busy these days.”
There was a long pause before Ziggy answered, an unaccustomed hesitation. “He wasn’t that busy before.”
“No, he—” Verbeena paused, a small alarm bell having gone off deep inside. “Before what, Ziggy?”
An even longer pause, as if the computer wasn’t sure it should speak. “Before the actualization of the present.”
Verbeena blinked. “The what of the present?”
“The actualization.” Now that Ziggy had made up its “mind,” the computer was impatient, as it often was with mere human intellects. “Before the current present became real, when the Admiral wasn’t married to Janna Calavicci. He was dating Tina—”
Now Verbeena was completely confused. “Tina Martinez-O’Farrell? Al dated the Chief of System Design?”
“Constantly,” Ziggy confirmed.
A horrible suspicion was beginning to dawn in Verbeena Beeks. She tried to visualize Al with the tall, brilliant, idiotic-sounding redhead. On the one hand, it was patently ridiculous. On the other hand ... it was all too possible.
“Are you saying the current reality isn’t real, Ziggy?”
“No, Dr. Beeks. It is perfectly valid.” The computer paused in a way she instinctively mistrusted.
“What aren’t you telling me, Ziggy? What do you mean, Al dated Tina? Al’s never looked at Tina.”
“In this reality,” the computer repeated patiently.
“You mean ... in some other reality ... he did? He cheated on Janna?” She’d kill him herself, she thought wildly, she’d . ..
“In other realities he was never married to Janna Fulkes.”
That silenced her for several minutes. She gazed unseeingly at the sheaf of reports sitting on her desk, on the little ragged holes in the desk protector. At last she said softly, “Did I know about this, Ziggy? About Al dating Tina? In these—” It was hard to say. Hard to believe. “In these ‘other realities’? ”
“Of course you did.” Ziggy sounded impatient. “Tina was your best friend on the Project.”
“Tina—my best friend?” That thought alone was enough to boggle the mind. She couldn’t imagine having enough in common with the Chief Design Engineer to have a conversation about. “And I know for a fact that Al Calavicci has never given her the time of day. . . .”
“This time.”
Verbeena opened her mouth as if to protest, and then closed it again. She was trying to grasp the implications of what she was hearing, as well as the multiple definitions of “time.”
“Ziggy,” she said at last, “when did all this happen?”
“When the Admiral was last in the Imaging Chamber,” the computer said. “It doesn’t always happen that way, of course. Dr. Beckett can—and does—change the time line at any time. His being in the past is the first change to begin with.”
Verbeena laid the pencil down, very carefully, and knitted her fingers together. “At any time,” she repeated flatly. “Sc while we’re talking here, he could change things?”
“That’s correct.”
The doctor stilled a frisson of fear. “And would I know? Would I be aware of the change?”
“No. Because the ‘you’ you would be in that moment would have a different history. Surely you realized this Doctor. When Dr. Beckett puts things right, he changes the future. Not just for a particular individual, but for everyone that person touches. Changes . . . change things. For every one. Everywhere.”
For everyone? Verbeena wondered. For me? Is Ziggy saying I’m different too ? The thought made her mind reel, as if the world around her had shuddered, settled into a slightly different, more awkward and definitely uncomfortable configuration. She couldn’t accept it. If what the computer said
was true, then nothing—nothing was dependable any more. “Have you told me this before, Ziggy?” she whispered. “Yes,” the computer said softly. “Often.”
Verbeena closed her eyes, took a deep breath.
Opened them again.
“How do you know?” she challenged. “Don’t you have a new history too? How can you be aware that anything is different?”
“Because of the nature of the Project and whatever went wrong with it,” the computer said, almost sadly, “I don’t participate in time, Dr. Beeks. I observe it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sitting at the dining room table, moving the silverware randomly back and forth and down and up, Bethica heard the crunch of gravel, saw beams of light stab through the front windows and probe the gauze curtains as Rimae’s station wagon pulled into the driveway. She sat unmoving, staring at the patterns in the grain of the maple table, listening to the sound of the engine being killed, the car door being opened. After a measurable pause the door slammed, and footsteps came up the walkway.
“Hey there, sweetie. Where’s Davey? Is that dinner?” Rimae dropped a large purse beside the sofa in the front room, went to the liquor cabinet, and fixed herself a drink. She took a long swallow, looked at the glass, and made a face. “You’d think this stuff would taste better, wouldn’t you?”
Bethica didn’t look up. “Davey ate already. He’s back in his room, looking at his Superman pictures.”
Rimae gave her an odd look at her tone and sauntered into the kitchen. She glanced into the frying pan. “Looks good.”
“It’s all gunked up together,” Bethica said. “I have to throw it out.”
Rimae sighed and sipped. “I’m just batting a thousand today, aren’t I?” she asked the ceiling. “Mother of the Year, that’s me. Late again.”
“It’s okay, Rimae.” Bethica got up and started rummaging in the cabinets for something to put the spaghetti sauce in.
“Well, did you eat, anyway?” Rimae asked.
She hesitated, glanced at the table with its betrayingly clean utensils. “Uh, I’m not really hungry.”
Rimae took a last swallow of her drink and looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You sure about that, honey? You look a little peaked.”
Bethica nodded, busying herself with the dishes.
Rimae sighed theatrically. “Well, okay. I’m too tired to argue about it. Besides, you’re putting on some weight. I don’t guess it’s going to hurt you to miss one meal.”
Bethica shook her head, agreeing, and went on scraping out the stainless steel frying pan. She’d gotten sick twice from the smell of frying meat. She was feeling nauseated again at the sight of the cooling sauce.
She couldn’t get sick now. Rimae would figure it out in a second, and then all hell would break loose.
She couldn’t keep it a secret forever. She needed to talk to Kevin, and she’d better do it soon. Maybe at the party tomorrow night; she could get him away from the guys, from Rita, long enough to talk to him. Tell him. Figure out what to do. He was a jerk, but he was smart. Besides, it was all his fault, really.
“Honey, I think I’m just going to go to bed, okay? I’m really beat.”
“Sure. G’night.”
Her foster mother’s hand brushed her hair, and she gave her a quick peck on the cheek and left her there, staring at the table.
It was always this way. Rimae worked ’til late, and then came home. If she didn’t go straight to bed she stayed up and did paperwork for the bar. She’d do the same thing tomorrow night, and Bethica would wait a half hour or so, go into Rimae�
�s purse and get the car keys. She hated driving the station wagon, with its blue-and-white “Polar Bar” sign on the door, but she wasn’t the only kid in the regional high school who still took the bus to school. She wasn’t one of the clique with their own cars, and she didn’t date them. It was the dirt wagon or nothing.
So she’d get the car and drive up to the ski run and meet them up there, and she’d get Kevin alone and tell him, and then ask him what to do. What he was going to do.
She stared at her reflection in the bottom of the pan as suds slid down, at the blurred short brown hair and pale face and two great dark blue eyes, and sniffled. Her reflection blinked back at her, and she wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. It was such a stupid mess. She should be happy, having fun.
Not wondering what to do about a baby.
Kevin could tell her what to do.
He’d better.
His parents were rich. He was captain of the ski team, he was the smartest guy in school. He got all A’s in calculus. He was going to go to USC in the fall. He was going to be an engineer and he was going to have a million dollars by the time he was thirty—he always told her so. If anybody else said that, she’d laugh at them, but not Kevin. Kevin Hodge really would do all those things, and be all those things. He’d have his own plane, and some really fast car. He’d live in a really great house, like the condos Bethica cleaned for the tourists during the season, like the big fancy houses they went home to in Chicago and New York and Beverly Hills. Not like this dump. He was so smart. . ..
And he was a jerk.
She had to tell him because he had a right to know, but the practical side of her nature knew that Kevin wasn’t going to help at all, except maybe to give her some money for a quiet abortion, and she already knew she didn’t want that Even though he’d rejected her, driven her to do things she'd never considered doing before.
All in all, Verbeena thought, it was a most unsatisfying interview.
She’d love to be able to say to the man sitting across the desk from her, “Okay, bud. Either get straight with me or I’m going to yank your clearance, I’m going to make you talk to me—”
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