Too often, these days, he had to remind himself that they were trying to bring Sam Beckett back. If it weren’t for the fact that he was the only one who could contact Sam, he would have resigned long since, sick of watching hundreds of people batter themselves senseless against a puzzle that
simply would not be cracked. If it weren’t for the fact that Sam was still out there—
And it was getting harder and harder to measure the cost of continuing the Project against the difficulty of convincing the Project’s sponsors that while the shell of Sam Beckett, Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., M.D., was still in the Waiting Room, what occupied that shell was not Sam Beckett, that God or Time, Fate or whatever had thrown him back in the past to put things right that had gone wrong.
It had been a lot easier to convince them when the bill was only nine or ten billion. Now they were beginning to question whether Sam had ever really disappeared at all. “Look at his fingerprints,” they argued. “Those are Dr. Beckett’s. The retinal imprints are the same. The DNA is the same. How can you say Sam Beckett is missing?”
The only physical evidence was in the brain scans. Once the difference was pointed out to them, even congressional aides could see the difference between Sam Beckett’s ultraencephalograph patterns and those of X2 test pilot Captain Tom Stratton; of private detective Nick Allen; of Jimmy La Matta, who had Down’s syndrome; of Cheree Walters, teenage singer; of secretary Samantha Stormer; of any of the dozens of people he’d Leaped into in the past several years. But now the people controlling funding were muttering about forgeries, about substitutions, about outright fraud. There were suggestions that Sam had completely lost touch with reality, that the whole Project was involved in a conspiracy to protect their Director and prevent him from (a) obtaining the psychiatric help he so desperately needed or (b) being exposed as a hopeless paranoid schizophrenic. Not that they believed any of it, but it would make an excellent excuse to shut things down, to make a cut in the deficit. Ever since Congress had pulled the plug on the Superconducting Supercollider, they’d had it in for basic science.
Al snorted softly.
The best witness, and sometimes the only defense that made any difference, was Ziggy. They bargained for time to keep searching for a solution by renting out Ziggy’s problem-solving capabilities, with Al acting as the front man and chief salesperson for the Project’s computational capabilities. But Ziggy was more than just an incredibly advanced computer; it was self-aware, and it made its own bargains. It agreed to work on the calculations for traffic control in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area, the balancing of the declining water table for the San Fernando Valley, seven or eight major sports books for Las Vegas casinos, stress-reduction studies, the Human Genome Project, and flood-control calculations nationwide for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, if and only if it was allowed to continue the search for the secret of Sam Beckett’s return undisturbed. Al might tell Sam he was playing fantasy basketball; actually, Ziggy had been calculating the effect of certain minor tectonic shifts on the New Madrid fault.
It was discreet blackmail, was what it was, and Al Calavicci was never sure whether the Project was the blackmailer or the blackmailee. At least he had the comfort of knowing that the government didn’t realize the consequences, the ramifications of a random factor in the past. They were satisfied, at least for the time being, with the tidbits Ziggy offered, and for the most part left the Project alone, never realizing the desperate focus of its work.
But it never seemed to do any good. They never seemed to make any progress. Since the day in 1995 when Sam Beckett stepped into the Accelerator, determined to prove his theory was right, they seemed to be caught in an endless loop: Sam Leaped, made some minor change in history, and Leaped, and made some minor change in history, and Leaped, and made some minor change .. . but never came home. None of the solutions offered, none of the measures attempted, ever seemed to have an effect.
They were no closer to bringing him home than they were that first day, when the body of Sam Beckett had collapsed in the Imaging Chamber and Ziggy told them
what had happened. Meanwhile, the past was getting more and more confusing.
Al sighed and propped his feet up on the comer of his desk, surreptitiously unwrapping a long cigar and wadding the plastic into a ball between his fingers. It was against federal regulations to smoke anywhere within a public building; since federal funds built the Project, his office qualified as “public,” even though it was necessary to add several sigmas to a Q clearance to get in. Nothing said he couldn’t stick an unlighted stogie in his mouth, though.
It was a neat, well-organized room, with space on the wall for a shadow box holding assorted medals and honors and an American flag, a presentation from his retirement more than a dozen years before. The desk was metal, standardissue gunmetal gray, though he could have requisitioned a wooden desk with a glossy sheen; he wanted something he could work on and put his feet on and kick from time to time, so he stuck to metal, and if visitors thought it was less than he was entitled to, that was their problem, not his. He knew who he was.
A wide strip of graph paper ran the length of one wall, with a series of dates plotted against each other, zigging and zagging insanely in lines of blue and red. Only
