by Melanie Rawn
"It's the Project, Mrs. Beckett. Actually, I don't think Sam knows the cost of a quart of milk."
"Well, he wouldn't, growing up on a dairy farm." She smiled. "And I thought I told you to call me by my first name."
He grinned back and gave her a courtly bow— quite an accomplishment, considering he was sitting down. "Formality preserves the proprieties, ma'am."
Her eyes twinkled. "Albert Calavicci! I'm drinking your brandy and sitting in your quarters and it's past midnight—and I'm near old enough to be your mother—and you're talking proprieties?"
"Tina's the jealous type. Can I pour you a bit more of this?"
They talked of Hawaii for a time, and how different it was from Indiana, and how different New Mexico was from both. And at length they came to the subject both of them had intended from the first to discuss. Sam.
"Why is he doing this, Albert?" she asked softly. "With all the things he might have chosen to work on, with all his knowledge and his education—why does he want to travel in time?"
"Because nobody's ever done it before." He heard how that sounded, and hastened to add, "Not that Sam's egocentric, wanting to do something that's
never been done just so his name and work will be unique. He just—he's curious."
"There's more to it than that," she said vigorously. "I know my son. I birthed him, wiped his nose, and swatted his bottom, and I know how that boy's heart works even if I can't understand where his brain takes him." She paused, a bemused smile touching her lips. "John and I never did work out how plain old farm folk like us produced a certified genius. Sam should've been born to geniuses, or at least somebody rich, who could've given him all the things he should've had—"
"Thelma, that is exactly what he didn't need. What you gave him, the way he grew up, that was the best possible thing for him. That's how it was meant to be."
She gave a little shrug. When she spoke again, her voice had softened. "And what about the past, Albert? Isn't history the way it was meant to be? Oh, I know why Sam's doing this. He wants to find out what went wrong. But who's to say it did go wrong?"
Al gazed into his glass. "Sam thinks some things did," he replied slowly. "I'm not sure I don't agree with him. I mean, you look at the bum deals some people get in life, and it makes you mad. Not just individual people, but whole countries. I think Sam wants to find out why history happened the way it did, so it doesn't happen the same way again. The old saw about those who don't learn from history being condemned to repeat it."
"Condemned," she echoed.
"He wants to know what's behind the What If questions. For instance, what if the Allies had
bombed the railroads to the concentration camps? We know fewer Jews would have died. But why didn't it happen that way? Sam can't find that out specifically, of course, because he'll only be able to Leap within his own lifetime."
"Is that the theory?" She smiled again when he frowned slightly in reaction to the skepticism in her voice. "Oh, I don't doubt Sam's equations, Albert. I'm just wondering if he's included all the variables."
Al blinked.
"Have any of you considered what God might think about all this jumping around in Time?" She paused, making a face. "Gracious, just listen to me—calling the Almighty a 'variable'!"
Al considered. Einstein had said that God wasn't a crapshooter, but how did you figure Deity into calculations for quantum physics?
"Umm . . ." He fumbled for a response.
But Thelma Beckett had returned to the original topic with all the directness of mind she had bequeathed to her son. "Sam's interested in great events, then. Things like if the President and Mrs. Kennedy had been in a bulletproof car that day in Dallas. . . ." She sighed, shaking her head. "Do you know what I think? I think Sam's studied so many subatomic particles he's forgotten what they build."
Al glanced up, puzzled. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."
"Of course you don't." She gave him a look of fond exasperation. "You're as bad as he is. Sam knows everything there is to know about all these tiny things nobody ever thinks about. And that's
what most people are, Albert—millions of them who aren't involved in great events. They live out their lives with only their families to notice, and their names only show up in the county recorder's office under Births, Marriages, and Deaths."
"And Divorces," he added with a wince; Wife Number Five was balking over the settlement again.
"That's another discussion—and don't think I'm leaving here without giving you a good talking-to, Albert Calavicci," she stated.
"Yes, ma'am," he answered meekly. "What about Sam and subatomic particles?"
"Well, what is it they do? As I understand it, they join together and make things."
"The way people join together and make societies?"
"Just like that." She set her empty glass aside and folded her hands in her lap, with an air of having explained the whole matter to her own exacting specifications.
Al struggled to keep up—his usual sensation in Beckett company. "So what you're saying is that it's not the big events that make history. It's the people who form the society where the events happen."
She tilted her head slightly to one side, and Al suddenly saw the girl who—by Sam's telling of it— knocked John Beckett's socks off the first time he clapped eyes on her.
"A rock rolls down a hill when somebody pushes it," she said. "But both the rock and the hill have to be there first."
It was his first intimation—a year before the breakthrough that led to Sam's random Leaps—
that Time didn't focus on the so-called Great. The anonymous, the overlooked, the unremarked and unremarkable: they were the stuff of which history was truly fashioned.
In her plainspoken way, Thelma Beckett had voiced the theory that there were inalterable trends and inevitable tendencies in history. That even if Torquemada had never shown up, someone like him would have; thousands would have burned no matter who sat in the Grand Inquisitor's chair. If Julius Caesar had died at birth, someone like him would have stepped into the power void; though Rome would have lacked his unique military brilliance, it would have kept expanding anyhow.
A variant of the same theory could be applied to individual genius. No matter what went on sociopolitically, Beethoven would have composed, Michelangelo would have sculpted and painted (well, maybe not the latter, considering how he felt about doing the Sistine Chapel), Edison would have invented, and the Beatles would have rocked and rolled. Hell, look at Sam Beckett: even if nobody had ever thought up quantum physics, he still would have made some kind of mark on the world. True genius must serve itself or burn to ashes in its own fire. To use Thelma's metaphor, it always put its shoulder to one rock or another.
The point was that there were thousands of rocks atop millions of hills, and sooner or later somebody gave them a push.
It was therefore fairly hopeless to consider changing history—or to change the future based on lessons learned from history—because although trends
and tendencies were recognizable, they were simply too large to manage. And while Al had read and loved every single one of Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, he didn't see Sam as Hari Seldon, inventing a version of psychohistory to predict those trends and attempt to steer or at least mitigate them.
So what was the point of Quantum Leaping? Sam was convinced that it was to learn, to find out the whys of the past so that in similar circumstances similar mistakes could be avoided. After his talk with Sam's mother, Al wasn't so sure. And once Sam began his uncontrolled Leaps, he knew Thelma Beckett had been right.
You couldn't change the whole world. But you could change little bits of it for the better, one life at a time. Move a rock so it wouldn't be there to push down that particular hill.
Flattening the hill was harder. But sometimes Sam even managed to do that.
This time, though, Al saw a mountain looming, and the distinct possibility of avalanche.
When Sam was
upset, he moved. Indoors, he paced. Outdoors, he ran. It was as if all the negative energy of his anger, confusion, fear, frustration, or any combination of same sluiced down his body to his heels and thence into carpet, earth, or concrete. Grounding the energy, Al thought, giving it somewhere to go before it blew up.
He wavered between two interpretations of Sam's habit. First, that because that off-the-IQ-scale mind was usually faster than his troubles, Sam figured his feet ought to be just as fast. Second, that he was
in effect stomping his problems into the ground.
Today Sam held himself to a steady, long-limbed walk through the campground. Al kept an eye on him, centered on him and popping in and out as Sam put distance between himself and the disappointing briefcase and that damn fool manuscript. After a time, when Sam finally slowed down, Al positioned himself directly ahead of him on the footpath leading through the forest.
"Dr. Beeks says it's common among you big-brain types," he began, his delivery deliberately breezy. "You need a recreational outlet, something completely removed from your research. Richard Feynman pounded on bongo drums. Einstein played the fiddle."
"And Philip Larkin wrote trashy novels. Bad trashy novels, if that's not a redundancy."
"I don't suppose you remember your little hobby."
Sam stopped walking and eyed him warily. "I—I play piano, and guitar . . . and sing a little. . . ."
Gotcha! Al hid a grin. "Does the word 'hula' conjure up any memories?" he asked, Grouchoing his cigar suggestively.
"Al!"
"Tina always said you looked cute in a sarong. But not as cute as me," he ended with a self-satisfied swagger.
It worked. Sam laughed, some of the tension draining away. "For a minute there I thought you were going to say 'a grass skirt and a coconut brassiere.' "
"Well, there was that time Gushie and I got you plastered on mai tais. . . ."
"Nice try," Sam scoffed. "I'm allergic to rum."
Mission accomplished. Back to business. "How about mead?"
Sam looked blank.
"You'll be drinking it at the banquet tonight. It's fermented honey," Al explained. "Kick like a moose on the loose. Think of it as the Jack Daniel's of the fifteenth century."
Sam made an angry, dismissive gesture. "I'm not going to the banquet."
So much for easing tension. "You have to. Even if you do have two jobs here, fixing up Philip with Cynthia is the main concern."
"Whose main concern? Theirs, mine, or Ziggy's?" Sam didn't wait for an answer. Long legs in knee-topping leather boots took him quickly up the footpath.
A stab at the handlink flashed Al into the space immediately ahead of Sam again. He was fairly sure his friend wouldn't just plow through him; hologram or not, the evidence of his eyes was not easily ignored. He was right. Sam stopped, and even though the face was Philip Larkin's, the expression on it was pure Beckett mulish-ness.
"Everybody's," Al said in response to the last question.
Sam kicked at a loose rock, caroming it off a tree root. "It's been so long, Al," he muttered. "Every so often I get a little taste of hope, or home—I know because I remember things. Faces, feelings . . . not exactly what I did, or anything except pieces of what happened, but—" Another rock went sailing. "I just
know that home is still there for me, people I love— even if I can't remember their names."
Al had heard some of this before. Loneliness, resentment, longing for home—and who could blame him? More than four years of this. Four years of being other people, living bits of their lives, putting things right for them—while living his own life was denied him.
But there was something different about Sam's depression this time. Something deeper. Shock treatment, Al told himself, instantly flinching from the term. The worst it had ever been, the cruelest he had ever had to be, had come after a literal shock treatment in a mental institution. They'd almost lost Sam that time.
"Do it, Sam! Tell them—or you'll never see me again!"
He rejected the memory, then grabbed at it for guidance in how to beat his best friend over the head again—God help him.
"You sound awful damned sorry for yourself," he said harshly.
Sam blinked. "It's not that."
"Sure sounds that way."
"It's not!" he protested. "I'm only trying to understand why it happens. Why I Leap into situations that directly touch my own life. I thought once that it was a reward for a job well done."
"Maybe it is, Sam."
"Yeah, right."
Another stone went flying from the toe of his boot, right through Al's kneecap. Deliberate? Al chose not to consider that.
"So what's your point?" he challenged.
"The point?" Sam impacted a fist against the tree trunk. "The point is I've wised up. I'm slow sometimes, but I'm not stupid. A glimpse of home is the carrot that keeps the poor dumb donkey plugging along."
It was even worse than Al had guessed. Bitterness etched every word in acid. Shock wasn't going to do it; deliberate therapeutic cruelty was out of the question. Al just couldn't, not when Sam looked and sounded this way.
"What's going on here, Al?" Sam went on, angrier by the moment. "Is it compassion that puts me in places where I can maybe do myself some good? Or is it just accidental?" His mouth drew into a sneering line Al would have bet the Pentagon's annual budget he'd never see. "'Oh, by the way, while you're straightening out so-and-so's life, you can see your father again—' "
"You remember those times?" Al asked quietly. "Seeing people you knew before?"
Sam's shoulders jerked up and down, and he started walking again. "I remember a little," he said as Al hurried to catch up. "Enough to keep going. To keep hoping. And that's why it happens. It's just—"
He spun around, both hands lifted as if to grasp something that wasn't there, then falling helplessly to his sides.
"I'm tired, Al. Do you have any idea how tired? I want to go home. And I'm beginning to think that Whatever or Whoever is Leaping me around won't let me go home. Ever."
(The air nearby shimmered with more than the afternoon heat. A slim, predatory redhead materialized from the middle of a chaotic rainbow. From the pocket of her crimson silk suit—which Al would have recognized as an Yves St. Laurent knockoff and scorned as lacking the maestro's class—she drew a small complex rectangle that chittered and whirred at her.)
"You're just tired, Sam, like you said. It'll work out."
"Will it? When?"
(The redhead glanced around, startled—then pursed her lips in a long, appreciative whistle when she caught sight of Sam Beckett. "Well! If it isn't the studly darling himself! Lothos! Jackpot!")
Al tried again. "Quantum Leaping is your dream, Sam. You're in the middle of it, living it—how many people get to live their dreams?"
"When do I wake up?" Sam countered. "When do I get to climb out of my own bed and see my own face in a mirror? My God, Al, I've almost forgotten what I look like!"
(The woman sauntered closer, taking a visual tour. "Mmmm ... 1.85 meters, give or take, about 80 kilos arranged with perfect taste—but when did you trim your hair, sweet cheeks?" She circled Sam, moving through a sapling as if it didn't exist, and perused him at lustful leisure. "I must say, you've improved sartorially since last we met— or didn't meet, more's the pity. Alia has all the luck. I approve the poet's shirt. And have I ever mentioned how black leather boots affect my blood pressure?")
"What if I do get home?" Sam demanded. "What happens next? Do I send somebody else into the Accelerator? I can't do that. I won't. I know what it's like, I know what kinds of temptations come with every Leap—"
"You won't let anybody else do the work because you're the only one you trust to do it right?" Al felt his facial muscles pull into a snarl. "That's pretty damned arrogant, if you ask me."
("Having a little heart-to-heart with your hologram sidekick?" the woman asked Sam. "Pity I can't hear his side of things. But you are simply fasc
inating me. Say on, dear boy, say on.")
"Who says I've done so great? Who says that for every single thing I've put right, something else didn't go wrong?"
("We do our best," she murmured silkily. "Though I suppose you'd call it our worst. It's all a matter of semantics.")
"Even if that were true," Al argued, "don't you trust that if it was bad enough, you'd Leap back in and—"
"I'm fresh out of blind faith, Al. I trust me, and I trust you, and that's about it."
"Should I be flattered?" Al flung his cigar on the Imaging Chamber floor and stomped on it." The instant it left his hand it became invisible to Sam. Al dug his heel into the crushed tobacco viciously. A genuine Havana at ten bucks a smoke, and he was so mad he'd wasted half of it, and it was all Sam's fault. Al wished he could grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.
"Let's say you are home," he grated. "You won't allow anybody else into the Accelerator. So what're you gonna do? Huh? Go on vacation? A month on the beach at Maui? Go visit Paris again—" He bit back the rest; he'd been about to say with Donna, and she would've had his hide for it.
"I don't know!" Sam cried. "But it'd be nice to have the option for a change! How long has it been since I had any choice about where I go or what I do? I'm tired of this!"
("Oh, poor baby!" the woman cooed.)
"So what happens when you get back from your little R and R?" Al pressed. "Do you jump back into the Accelerator and start all over again? Or do you shut the whole Project down?"
Sam backed off, as Al had hoped he would. Confusion and pain were difficult enough to watch in his face, even filtered through someone else's features, but they were preferable to despair.
"I—I don't know," Sam faltered. "I'm not sure what I'd do. But don't you see that that's exactly why I won't be allowed to find out? I'm never getting home, Al. Whatever I do about Philip and Cynthia and Roger and that stupid book, whatever does or doesn't happen, none of it matters. I can do everything I'm supposed to, make everything right—and it won't matter. I'm never going home. Never!"