Quantum Leap - Random Measures

by Ashley McConnell

  “Not one,” he said with false heartiness, stepping away. He raised one hand to wave to Bethica, who was walking past the cabin on the path through the trees.

  Rimae shot the retreating teenager a sour look. “That kid needs to find a hobby.” Her finely penciled brows knit together. “What the hell got into you yesterday?” she asked, changing the subject. “Are you out of your freaking mind?”

  “No.” The interruption allowed him to find something else to occupy himself; he got down on one knee, looking up at her while he cleaned rapidly drying compound off the blade of the putty knife, wiping it against the edge of the can. “I told you the truth about Davey. His mother drank when she was pregnant. And it affected him.”

  She shook her head. “What is it with you, honey?”

  “I’m just not feeling myself lately.” Mom would be so proud of me, he thought ironically. Always tell the truth, Sam, she used to say, and shame the devil. He stood up again. It was a mistake.

  Rimae stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him. He caught at her arms—in case she wobbled—and returned the favor, to be polite. Mind your manners, Sam, and manners will mind you.

  Mom, do you mind? he thought desperately at his memories. Sometimes his memories were rather inconvenient, especially at times like this. He didn’t know what was worse, Al the hologram trying to coach or Mom the memory sitting back and looking motherly.

  Rimae pulled away.

  “I still don’t know there’s anything to that. You can’t prove it. No one can. I don’t know who Davey’s mother was, so there’s no way to know.”

  “I suppose not.” There was no point arguing with her. It was too late anyway. He looked down the path, hoping he could catch a glimpse of Bethica. In case that wreck was going to happen, he still needed to keep her from going to the party tonight; still needed to keep her from driving back, getting into an accident, ending up a paraplegic. It was sometimes difficult to keep track of what he was supposed to be doing on a Leap, especially when Al wasn’t around quoting odds all the time.

  In any case Rimae was settling back on her heels, her fingers still entwined behind his neck. “Wickie, sweetheart, your heart just isn’t in this. How about you go get ready to work and we’ll talk about this again tonight when you get off from the second shift.”

  “Uh, that’s going to be pretty late,” Sam mumbled.

  “It’ll give you lots of time to think up a way to apologize for upsetting me, won’t it?” She stepped away, tapped him on the nose again, and left him standing there staring after her.

  “I guess it will,” he mumbled. She turned the comer, moving out of sight, and he took a deep breath and turned to the trees, following Bethica, the one he might be intended to save.

  She was waiting, as he suspected, hovering behind an oak tree near the stream, nudging a twig into the flow of the water. Leaps worked that way sometimes, as if God or Chance or Fate tried to give him a break when it could.

  “Bethica?” He paused a few feet away. “I guess you heard all that. About Davey, and his mother drinking, and everything.”

  “I heard.” She was looking at the ridge of mud on the toe of her sneaker.

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” he offered. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I don’t want to preach to you, but your baby. ..”

  A wing of brown hair sheltered her face. She hunched a shoulder, building a barrier between them, and he wondered

  what was going through her mind. When she finally spoke, he had to strain to hear her. “You party.”

  It was true. Wickie drank. So did Sam Beckett. He wished he could promise Bethica that Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski would stop drinking, would provide a role model for Bethica and Kevin and all the other restless young people of Snow Owl. But he couldn’t; he wasn’t Wickie, he was Sam Beckett, and if he did what he was supposed to do, he’d Leap out soon. He couldn’t make promises and leave other people to keep them.

  “You don’t have to make the mistakes I make,” he said at last.

  “Do you really think Davey’s the . . . the way he is because his mother had a drink while she was pregnant with him?”

  “I think she had more than just one, but yes, that’s the reason why. It’s called fetal alcohol syndrome.”

  “You’re making it up. You sound like Rimae. She keeps telling me not to party too, but she drinks. She owns a bar! And she knows I hang out with Kevin.”

  “She wants you to be better,” Sam said helplessly. “I want to make sure you never have a baby like Davey—”

  “It’s not Davey’s fault!” she said.

  “Bethica, that’s the whole point! It isn’t his fault! It isn’t a disease, it isn’t genetic, it isn’t anything but alcohol passing through the placental barrier and damaging developing cells so they can never be repaired. There isn’t any cure for Davey or thousands like him—”

  She was staring at him, eyes wide. “You’re nuts.”

  He wasn’t nuts, but he was preaching. And preaching, he well knew, only turned people off. It certainly hadn’t impressed Rimae.

  “Bethica, look. Promise me you won’t go to that party tonight. That’s all. Don’t tell me you won’t drink for the rest of your life. Just don’t go tonight.”

  “You’re nuts,” she repeated. And turned, and ran away, leaving him standing.

  Now what?” he muttered. “I can’t do anything right on this Leap.” Out of habit, as much as anything else, he added, "Now what do I do, Al?”

  Beats me, kid,” came a familiar voice from behind him. He spun around and caught himself on the trunk of a tree. There, standing in the doorway to the cabin, cigar in one hand and handlink in the other, familiar in snap-brim fedora and loud suspenders, stood Al, looking inexpressibly weary.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  He was barely able to contain himself until he got into the cabin, out of sight of witnesses. “Where have you been?” he burst out, torn between relief and outrage at having been abandoned. “I’ve been waiting for you for days. I thought something might have—” and then he got a good look at his friend, and his own feelings went into a skid. “Al? What’s wrong?”

  Al shook his head, raised one hand in a waving-away gesture. A puff of smoke hung in the air around Al’s head, a smoggy halo from the ever-present cigar. “Never mind.” He looked around appraisingly. “I like what you’ve done with the place.. . . What have you done with the place?”

  "I cleaned up a little.” Sam wanted to ask a dozen questions, and Al wouldn’t meet his eyes. After elaborately surveying the living room, Al inspected the kitchen, stuck his head in the bedroom and bathroom, came back out again and made a great show of examining the handlink.

  The silence between them stretched. Sam watched, bewildered, not sure what to say.

  At last he fell back on business. “So, uh, has Ziggy figured out what I’m supposed to do on this Leap?”

  Al’s lips compressed, as if he was biting back a sharp retort, and he jabbed at the buttons on the handlink. “There’s a girl—”

  “Bethica.”

  Al’s head jerked up and his eyes burned. “Already figured it out, have you?”

  “No.” Something was wrong, badly wrong.

  Al continued, “It seems we were right all along about the wreck. She’s going to go to that party up on the mountain tonight. On her way home she gets into a car wreck and ends up spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”

  “So much for theory.” After all that time spent trying to figure out what he was supposed to change—“Does Ziggy have any suggestions about what I’m supposed to do?”

  “You seem to be doing just fine as it is.”

  Sam had had enough. “Al, what’s wrong?”

  Al opened his mouth to answer and shut it again, shaking his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “Like hell it’s nothing. You disappear for three days and when you come back you’re snapping like a dog with a sore paw—”

  “Colorful.
Real colorful.”

  “You’re ticked off at me for some reason, and I don’t even know why.”

  Al sighed. “Okay, okay. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it.”

  “Help what?”

  “Changing things.”

  Sam felt like a fish yanked out of water, his mouth gaping. “Al, I hate to remind you, but I’m supposed to change things. That’s the whole point. It has been for years. So why are you all of a sudden so upset about it?”

  “You never even think about it,” Al burst out. “You blip around from one life to another, bim, bam, fix something here, change something there, and you never even think about the consequences—”

  This was so blatantly unfair that Sam would have taken a swing at the other man if he’d had any hope of connecting. “I never think about the consequences? What are you talking about? I spend every minute of my life thinking about

  consequences! Consequences are all I’ve got!”

  “And now they’re my consequences!”

  “Yours? What do you have to do with it?”

  1 don’t know! You’re the genius, you figure it out!”

  There was another pause while Sam tried to figure out how the conversation had gotten so completely out of hand and Al chewed ferociously on his cigar.

  “I don’t understand,” Sam said at last. “I’m sorry, Al, I don’t understand.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I did.”

  "I guess you don’t.” Al looked at the handlink again. "Ziggy says the accident happens late at night, when she’s her way home. If she doesn’t go to that party, that should take care of it.”

  He was still angry, but his body language and tone conveyed clearly that he was setting aside his personal feelings order to get the job done. The subject was changed, the dispute was closed. It was thorough and professional and subtly insulting, and it was treatment Sam Beckett had never received from Al Calavicci in all the years they’d worked together.

  Al was his best friend, and he didn’t understand. But if that was the way Al wanted to play it—

  "Then all I need to do is talk her out of it.”

  Al, scanning the handlink, snorted. “It’s not likely to be that easy. Ziggy says Bethica’s going to talk some kid out of—” He whapped the little mechanism and stopped, staring at the information feeding across to him. “Give me that again, Ziggy.”

  The handlink squealed and blinked, colored cubes lighting up in sequence. Al tapped in a new series of codes, seeking a different answer and not getting it.

  “What?” Sam circled behind the other man, trying without success to see what was going on with the glowing assemblage of cubes in Al’s hand. “What is it?”

  When he looked up and around at Sam, he was pale, and no vestiges of resentment or anger remained in his bright

  brown eyes. “Sam—she doesn’t know it yet, but she’s going to go to the party to try to convince a kid named Kevin not to kill Wickie Starczynski.”

  “Ziggy,” Verbeena said to the empty air.

  “Yes, Dr. Beeks?” The response didn’t move the air as the spoken words of a physical presence would have. There was no sense of another person answering her.

  Verbeena had never quite gotten used to it.

  “Ziggy, tell me about Janna Calavicci.”

  The pause that ensued was uncharacteristically long, even for Ziggy, who had been programmed to include pauses to make its conversations more human. Finally, the computer answered, “The personnel files currently identify Janna Fulkes Calavicci as a personnel specialist who was hired into the Project in 1993.”

  “When did she and Al get married?”

  She knew the answer. She had the personnel file on the computer screen in front of her. She knew exactly how Janna Fulkes had done in her performance ratings, how much she’d been paid, what days she’d taken off sick.

  She knew Janna and Al’s wedding day, not only from the file but from her own memory. She’d been there. She’d stood with the other women, Janna’s friends, and tried to catch the bouquet. She’d had two pieces of wedding cake, carrot with cream cheese icing. She’d cried to see Janna and Al dancing their first dance as man and wife.

  “Ziggy, Al tells me that before he last went into the Imaging Chamber he’d never met Janna. Never married her. He says you’ll back him up on this.”

  Another long pause.

  “Admiral Calavicci is correct.”

  Verbeena rubbed her eyes. “Could you go over that again slowly?”

  “Ad-mir-al. ..” Ziggy’s voice, a light soprano, deepened to baritone as the computer slowed down its speech.

  “Ziggy, stop that. You know what I mean.”

  Yes. Doctor.” The soprano was back. “While the Admiral is in the Imaging Chamber, the changes effected by Dr. Beckett’s presence in the past are potentials in this sphere, in own present. When the Admiral returns—leaves the Imaging Chamber—he actualizes the change. In effect, he is carrying those changes with him into our present.”

  It sounded familiar, but—“He said he’d actually seen changes happen when he was in Washington. If he’s carrying the change with him, how—”

  Those are changes outside the confines of the Project itself, Doctor. For a change to take place within this area—

  where I am—the Admiral has to trigger it. The same phenomenon which allows me to stand outside of Time to observe is disturbed by the Admiral’s triggering of the Imaging Chamber and the link to Dr. Beckett. I can’t maintain the integrity of the Project under that stress. They’re part of me, after all.”

  It was almost the same conclusion she’d come to on her own. She swallowed. “So while he’s married to Janna right now. as soon as he comes out again he won’t be?”

  "He may not be,” the computer corrected.

  "Well, is he or isn’t he?”

  "You mean, will he or won’t he.” Ziggy had a pedantic streak. “There’s no way to know which possibility will become real until it actually happens. I can track what Dr. Beckett is doing, but I don’t have the capacity to track every person his actions touch, plus every person their resulting actions touch. Nor can I always tell which of his actions is the important one. Futures are infinite possibility trees, Dr. Beeks. All we can see is the result when the Admiral leaves the Imaging Chamber.”

  “That’s ridiculous. If that’s the case, how can you and Al tell when Sam’s succeeded in making the change he needs to make?”

  “Because I’m not tracking all the repercussions. I’m only looking at the gross changes, the effects of a given action on one or two people. The subtle changes, however, will make

  greater or lesser changes like ripples in a pond, and we see those when the Admiral returns.”

  “So we’re different every time the Admiral comes back?”

  “Not necessarily,” the computer said, an edge of impatience in the mechanical voice. “Not every change affects us every time. Other changes may damp out the effects.

  “We do know that no matter what change is made, the Project must still have been created. Otherwise an unacceptable paradox would exist.”

  Verbeena couldn’t help it. She laughed. “ ‘An unacceptable paradox’? Do you have any idea how that sounds?” And then she thought about how she sounded, arguing with thin air, and laughed again. “Ziggy, honey, you may be the wave of the future, but this whole business is crazy.”

  Somehow Ziggy managed to sound mortally offended. “If you say so, Dr. Beeks.”

  “I wish I knew how Sam programmed all those emotions into you,” Verbeena said softly, shaking her head. “That boy could have made a fortune as a psychologist.”

  “Could you explicate, Doctor?”

  “Ziggy, the only emotion he left out of you was the one nobody’s ever been able to figure out. He knew enough about jealousy and anger and loneliness and pain and all the things that torment the human heart that he could put them into a program so a computer could feel them too, and you’ll never know how much
of an achievement that is.”

  “Which one did he leave out?” Ziggy demanded. “He didn’t leave out anything!”

  “Oh yes he did,” Verbeena said softly. “Nobody’s ever been able to program love, Ziggy.”

  It was a good exit line, and Verbeena took it, leaving the office and shutting the door behind herself with an emphatic, soft click.

  “There was another emotion he left out,” the computer said to the empty room. “He left out hate.”

  After a moment the computer answered itself. “That’s because he’s never understood that one.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sam polished the bar with a rag, occupying himself with busywork. There wasn’t anyone in the bar yet. Except AL

  “Don’t they have waitresses here?” the Observer asked. A strange expression crossed his face, as if he couldn’t believe he’d said such a thing. Sam looked at him quizzically. What was so unusual, after all, in Al wondering where the women were?

  “I think so,” Sam said. This Leap was strange in more ways than one: First he couldn’t get Al to show up; now, it seemed, he couldn’t get rid of him. Not that he wanted to get rid of him, he chastised himself. But it was still strange. “The place doesn’t serve food, so it doesn’t attract much of a lunch crowd.” The dusty bowls of pretzels on the counter certainly couldn’t count as food.

  Still, on the off chance someone might come in the door and be attracted to petrified pretzels, he collected the bowls and emptied them into the trash. Surely there were fresh supplies somewhere in the back room. At least digging them out would give him something to do besides polish the bar.

  “So what are you going to do?” Al asked, walking through the bar to inspect the bottles lined up against the mirror. “What kind of place is this, anyhow? Never heard of some of these brands.”

  Sam’s answer, reverberating in the cupboard in which he’d stuck his head, echoed oddly. “I guess I’ll figure out something.”

  “Like what?”

  The answer echoed too, and Sam pulled his head out and looked around to see Bethica pulling herself up on a barstool, with Al standing next to her, eyeing her judiciously.