Quantum Leap - Random Measures

by Ashley McConnell

  “I’m going to marry—” Sam exchanged a panicked look with the Observer.

  “It’s your baby,” Al said, looking at the handlink. “Wickie’s, I mean. Thanks a lot, Ziggy, we could have used that a little earlier.”

  A light dawned for Sam Beckett, and he looked over Bethica’s head at the hologram. “Kevin knows you were with Wi—with me, doesn’t he? That’s why he hates me so much.”

  She half nodded. “I guess it was pretty dumb. Telling him.” She paused. “I am just a kid still, I guess.”

  Sam hugged her. “Did he know about the baby then?”

  “No. I told him today. It made him even more mad. He almost wants the baby to be his. But he’s afraid it’s yours.”

  Sam sighed. A lot of things were clearer now. But it wasn’t going to make the next eight hours any easier.

  TUESDAY

  June 10, 1975

  . . . never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

  —John Donne, Devotions XVII

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Flustered or not, Sam had to act as if he knew all about Bethica and Wickie’s past physical relationship, brief though it had been. Al and Ziggy were unable to help; there weren’t any records, no father recorded for a baby who had, in the original history, never been bom. All they had was Verbeena’s discussion with the Visitor. He’d had a lot of practice pretending, though, and Bethica couldn’t see the sometimes panicked expression on his face either.

  He finally got her calmed down. After a while they both fell asleep. Al looked down on them, hand poised above the handlink to open the Door and return to the Imaging Chamber; after a moment he sighed, tugged his fedora over his eyes, and sat down on empty air, prepared to take the night watch.

  “Who told you you couldn’t go back to school?” Verbeena said impatiently. She had no intention of letting up on the Project’s involuntary guest. “Which part of it is impossible? Walking up to the door? Signing the form? Sitting in a desk? Listening to somebody?

  “Or are you just one of those men who runs out on pregnant women?”

  “It’s not my fault,” Wickie repeated. He didn’t like it. He

  made it clear he didn’t like it. He tried to withdraw in stony silence.

  Verbeena wouldn’t have it. “What, you’re scared? Child, you have no idea about scared. Scared is being a little girl with a baby and no idea in the world what she’s gonna do about it. You’re smart. Look at all you’ve done! Are you gonna bury yourself behind a bar, drink yourself to death, and prove all those nasty words they say are true?”

  Wickie glared. “I don’t even know for sure that it’s mine!”

  “But you broke off with Rimae as soon as it happened, didn’t you?” she said shrewdly.

  Wickie sputtered.

  Verbeena kept hammering, hoping to spark smoldering resentment into flame.

  They woke, stiff and sore, in the light of morning, to find that only a few feet farther along, the cliff down which they’d fallen softened into a slope gentle enough to climb. Sam helped the girl up and then looked over their night’s refuge.

  “I guess it wasn’t so bad after all,” he said with false heartiness.

  “That’s because you haven’t looked over on this side,” Al remarked. Sam looked up, startled. “I decided to see this one through,” the hologram muttered, stretching and scratching at the grizzled stubble on his chin. He pointed to the side opposite the one they’d climbed. A few inches to the other side of the ledge they’d spent the night on, a ravine at least sixty feet deep yawned.

  Sam decided to be grateful for small favors, and draping Bethica’s arm around his neck, they started back for the clearing.

  Not surprisingly, most of the cars parked along the dirt road were gone, including the one in which Bethica had come. “I guess one of the others took it back.” Two of the partyers were still stretched out by the blackened embers of the campfires. Neither one was Kevin.

  One of the boys looked at them blearily. “Hey, lookit. It’s Bethie. You okay, Bethie?”

  They seemed to have forgotten the gauntlet of the night before, or at least weren’t willing to resume their teasing in front of Wickie. That was fine with Sam, and with Bethica as well.

  “Where’s Kevin?” the other boy asked. “Ooooh, my head hurts!”

  “He probably went home if he had any sense,” Al said.

  “He went looking for you after a while, but he didn’t find you. I think he decided to leave when the booze ran out,” the first boy said. “He was going up the mountain to his parents’ cabin up by the run. I forget when.”

  “Fine,” Sam muttered. He and Bethica both wanted to get home; Bethica was making noises about bathrooms, and Sam empathized. The two of them staggered on to the Polar Bar truck and got in.

  It was a lot easier to find his way back to the road in the light of early morning. He managed to miss most of the potholes on the way back to the pavement. The roof of the cab was never going to be the same, though.

  “Could you, um, kind of hurry?” Bethica asked, not look-ing at him.

  “Could you kind of wrap this up?” Al said, sticking his head through the rear window to appear between them. “I’d suggest you get a move on. There’s somebody behind you, and I don’t think he’s friendly.”

  They had just passed the place where, the previous Fri-day, Sam had gone all over the road in an effort not to hit the squirrel. He glanced in the rearview to confirm Al’s information; as he suspected, it was Kevin, in a fire engine red Ford truck.

  “He must have been waiting for us,” Sam muttered.

  “Who?” Bethica asked.

  “See if you can get your seat belt on,” he said. “I wonder how he knew?”

  Al tapped at the handlink. “Who knows? Maybe he went looking for you guys and saw you over the edge. I didn’t see him, though. Still, he must know this mountain like the back of his hand. He’d figure you’d climb out in the morning.” He studied the handlink. “I hope you’re a really good driver, Sam. Ziggy says it’s ninety-nine percent now that this is the accident Bethica gets hurt in.”

  If Sam could have spared the attention, he might have asked what happened to Wickie. Al wasn’t mentioning Wickie. Sam decided he really didn’t want to know, and concentrated on his driving.

  Kevin was pushing, just a little, tailgating them, nudging the truck’s back bumper. His vehicle was a heavy truck, massing less than the Polar Bar’s but more than enough to push them off the road. His driving was erratic, wobbling. He was drunk.

  Sam hugged the side of the mountain, refusing to let Kevin push him into going too fast for the mountain road. He could remember too well the sickening feeling of lost control. “I hope he didn’t mess with the brakes,” he asked Al as directly as possible. He was wishing, too, that he’d replaced the seat belt as well as the burned-out headlight.

  Al punched in the query. “Ziggy says no. Ziggy also says Verbeena’s working on Wickie. She thinks that has something to do with what has to be fixed.”

  A flash of disjointed memory of arguments lost from long ago came to Sam. “Poor Wickie,” he muttered.

  “What do you mean?” Bethica was still struggling with the seat belt, in between turning around to try to see behind them.

  “Never mind,” he answered, his tone grim. Kevin was trying to get between them and the cliff, and on the last hairpin turn he had nearly succeeded. They were heading toward the last switchback before going into town now, and the dropoff was going to be on their side of the road.

  “Ziggy says there’s a good chance you’re all going to buy the farm on this one,” Al advised.

  “That’s so comforting,” Sam said between his teeth. He had one more idea, but it depended on flaws, just as every-thing else in this Leap had been flawed. He slowed down again, and Bethica yipped as the red truck jolted them.

  “Do you have your seat belt fastened?” he asked her.

  “Y-yes,” she said. Her fingers were d
igging into the cush-ion of the bench seat. “Wickie, you don’t have to marry me, or anything, if we get out of this.”

  The handlink squealed. “Oh, that’s interesting. Verbeena has just told Wickie about high school equival”—Al whacked the handlink—“lency tests, and—” He fell silent.

  Sam risked a glance at him. “Al?”

  Al shook his head, stuck his cigar in his mouth at a jaunty angle and said, “Well, that’s the easiest divorce I’ve ever had.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam whispered.

  “Easy come, easy go,” the Observer responded. “You still have to keep yourself from getting killed, Sam. Where’s your seat belt?”

  “It got broken,” he said between his teeth. The truck jolted again, and Sam nearly lost it. He focused on his driving, wishing he picked Formula II driving as a hobby instead of karate—what did anybody need with more than one martial art anyway? In any event, he didn’t need to look at his friend to know the look in Al’s eyes.

  The rising sun cast sharp shadows across the road, and they came up on the boulder in the road into the full glare of its rays. This was the place, Sam knew; this was it, win or lose, do or—No. They weren’t going to lose. He slowed down to take the turn wide, staying away from the dropoff to his right. He could hear the roar of the engine behind him, coming up one last time for the final push over the cliff.

  Sam stomped on the brakes.

  The Polar Bar truck screeched to the left, and Sam steered frantically, not into the skid this time but away from it, encouraging the heavy truck to swing around. The vehicle

  behind them suddenly had nothing to hit—and not enough room to stop.

  The Polar Bar truck slammed sideways into the solid rock face of the cliff, facing back up the way they’d come, jolting Sam nearly through the door.

  The red truck sailed through the crash barrier and over the cliff.

  Sam and Bethica watched it go, silent, listening to it hit. Sam closed his eyes against the memory of the brown-haired kid, alive and vibrant and, and alive, dammit, and he reached out for Bethica’s hand to remind himself that he hadn’t just set Kevin up only to save himself. It wasn’t like Maggie and Tom. It wasn’t. Bethica unsnapped the seat belt and grabbed his arm, peering through the window at the column of smoke rising from the gorge below.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Kevin . ..”

  “That’s it,” Al announced, examining the handlink. “Bethica and her baby survive”—he slanted a glance to the girl—“even if she doesn’t believe it yet. You can Leap, Sam.”

  Sam took a deep breath and tried to quit shuddering. “What about—”

  “Ziggy says there were two things that needed to be fixed on this Leap. The second one was yours—saving Bethica and the baby. So she’ll grow up and call on her favorite counselor for help during orientation.” There was no par-ticular emotion in Al’s voice as he said it.

  “But . . .” Sam was ignoring Bethica’s wide eyes. He took her into his arms and tucked her head under his chin.

  “The first thing was getting the baby’s father to marry Bethica. No, I guess that really would have been second, wouldn’t it. Ziggy says to do that Wickie had to be con-vinced he could do something with his life. And that was a job for Verbeena. It took both of you this time. You had to Leap in to send Wickie back to Verbeena, and at the same time save Bethica and the baby. Wickie and Bethica do okay. They have three more kids, in fact.”

  “But—”

  “I know. I know. So why haven’t you Leaped? I don’t know.”

  “I think I do,” Sam muttered. His lips brushed Bethica’s hair, and she sat up slowly to look at him. “Bethica? It’s over. You’re okay. The baby’s going to be okay too. It’s all right.”

  She still didn’t cry well. “How do you know?” she demanded, through a veil of matted hair and tears.

  Sam took a deep breath. “Because I’m going to marry you.” He smiled, thinking of Rimae as Wickie’s mother- in-law. She was a tough woman, but a good one. It might be a shock, but he thought she’d get used to it.

  Bethica was shocked out of her tears, anyway. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “I promise. And if I forget I prom-ised”—he rubbed his head and gave an entirely sincere wince—“you have to remind me. All right?”

  “If I do you have to go to school,” she said, ever prac-tical.

  “I’ll go to school, too.”

  “Promise?”

  “I can’t imagine you’re going to let me forget.”

  She smiled, shaky but brave, and reached out one hand to touch his face. “You’re a good man, Wickie Gray Wolf.”

  “Nothing like the love of a good woman,” Al said sadly, and waved goodbye as Sam Leaped.