Stress reduction. Like the stress of stepping out of the Imaging Chamber, into—Al took a deep breath. He didn’t even want to think about it. Al wondered if the studies Ziggy was working on addressed a stress situation like this. He doubted it.
These days he had to make himself go down to the Waiting Room to greet each new stranger. He’d seen so many. Sam had been every color, every sex, every level of intelligence—
Well, no, come to think of it, no, he hadn’t. Because what Leaped was still, always, essentially Sam Beckett. So while he might occupy, for instance, the body of a retarded man, somehow Sam Beckett’s mind managed to use the sometimes inadequate organic equipment and yet remain Sam Beckett. Al’s eyes narrowed.
“Ziggy, could that be why his memory Swiss-cheeses?” he said to the empty air.
“Could what be, Admiral?” The voice responding out of the still-empty air was a woman’s, light and beautiful and faintly peevish. “I can’t read your mind, you know.”
Al hiked an eyebrow. He wasn’t sure he believed that last remark. “Could Sam’s memory be affected by his occupying other brains?”
“Yes,” the reply came, without hesitation.
Al waited. He could hear nothing but the subdued roar of the air-conditioning system and, off in the distance from the cubicles outside his office, a ringing telephone. “Well?” he prompted at last.
“Well, what?” The voice was definitely petulant by now. “It’s certainly a viable hypothesis, Admiral, but there’s no way to test it, and certainly no way to run a controlled experiment. I don’t understand the human soul, or mind, or whatever it is. Not any more than I understand God or Fate or Chance or Time or Whatever. I’m only a computer, after all.”
If Ziggy were a flesh-and-blood woman, Al would be budgeting perfume at this point; the computer sounded like his third ex-wife, those times she claimed he wasn’t paying her enough attention.
But Ziggy wasn’t flesh and blood, exactly. She was neural tissue and electronic circuits and one hell of an ego. Al
wondered whether that ego was supposed to be a result of his contribution to the neural chips. He didn’t think so. Sam had done that part of the programming, with Gooshie’s help. And it sure wasn’t Gooshie’s ego; the poor guy didn’t have any to spare.
Which left Sam. Sam Beckett, egomaniac.
Naaah. Al chomped on the cigar. “Well, I thought if anybody could figure it out, it was you.”
“It won’t solve the problem of bringing him home.”
Al sighed. “Nothing’s gonna bring him home,” he muttered.
“That’s not true!” Ziggy said sharply. “We will bring him home! It may take time—”
“It’s already taken ten years. If the most advanced computer on earth can’t figure out what went wrong in ten years of calculations, nobody can. We’re all going to be dead first.”
“Admiral!”
Al thought he could hear shock and, yes, fear in the computer’s voice. Perversely, he continued. “Well, look at the odds. Figure your own probabilities—that seems to be your favorite thing to do. How many times has he almost died? Do you really think you’re going to get it figured out before he manages to get himself killed? Every single Leap it’s the same thing.”
The silence was eons long, for a computer.
“I can only conjecture,” Ziggy said at last, much subdued, “that whatever it is that controls Dr. Beckett’s Leaps wouldn’t permit him to die.”
“You want to take a chance?” Al challenged. He shouldn’t enjoy torturing the poor computer so much, he knew, but he could say these things only to Ziggy, and he had to say them, sometimes, to somebody. “If you’re so sure Somebody Up There is taking care of him—if it would save him somehow—how about we let him go through a whole Leap sometime and let him wing it? See if miracles really do happen?”
“I won’t abandon him,” Ziggy said quietly. Al bit his lip, ashamed of himself.
“I wouldn’t ei----” he started, when the computer interrupted.
“It’s also true,” Ziggy said thoughtfully, “that if we accept the possibility that some outside intelligence is directing the Leaps for a purpose, then we must also accept that this intelligence has chosen Dr. Beckett as its instrument because it is unable to intervene directly. And if that’s the case, that intelligence would be unable to protect Dr. Beckett in a life-threatening situation. And the question of whether that intelligence would permit him to die is moot, since it cannot prevent his death, any more than it can intervene directly to effect the changes it wishes to make.
“I’m aware that I can have no contact with Dr. Beckett without you, Admiral, but I repeat: I will not abandon him.”
Al tossed the file onto the stack on the table. “Oh hell, Ziggy, neither will I. I’m just frustrated.”
There was a long companionable silence, and then the computer speakers released a long sound that was Ziggy’s version of a sigh.
“Go get some sleep, Admiral,” the computer said. “It’s late.”
Al looked around the office, at the stacks of papers, the never-ending piles of reports and notices. “I never really appreciated a good yeoman before,” he muttered. Getting up, he shoved the nearest pile of paper lopsided. He liked things neat and tidy; you didn’t go to sea and have things lying around loose. If a storm came up, things could get broken or lost.
But there were times when things were so screwed up anyway that it didn’t much matter. Like now. This time they were a real mess.
“Admiral,” Ziggy said again, with unwonted patience.
