She laughed. “Well, you might. Even though it isn’t his fault either. He’s caught, just like you are.”
Caught. Trapped in his, Wickie Gray Wolf’s, body. He felt a flare of anger. How dare this white man take his body from him?
At least she was being honest with him. So far.
“What do you want to know?” he asked cautiously.
They weren’t his quarters, for one thing. And the woman waiting for him, the woman Ziggy called “Mrs. Calavicci”— he never thought he’d get married again without Sam to stand up for him. If Sam stood up for him the marriage would last, he’d always believed. A walking good-luck charm, that was Sam Beckett.
And the terrifying part was, he didn’t even know who she was.
He’d cut the connection with Sam and the first thing Ziggy said, before Al even had a chance to ask, was, “Admiral, you’re married in this present.” He’d stood there in the Imaging Chamber, surrounded by blank walls, gasping like a gaffed fish, his mouth opening and closing, completely unable to react.
Sam’s Leaping changed things; he’d gotten used to that. Once, on a trip to Washington, he’d been testifying before a congressional committee and watched the chairman change to a chairwoman before his very eyes. Nobody else had noticed; he’d slipped without missing a beat into a different future created by Sam’s actions in the past.
But the past Sam was in now had thrown up a new future, like flotsam onto the beach, that Al Calavicci was supposed to live in. Be a part of.
He wondered briefly what would happen if Sam changed something so that he, Al, wasn’t part of the Project. Would he know? Would he even realize anything had happened?
Probably not. He wouldn’t even remember anything had ever been different.
He was stalling. He could tell he was stalling.
He’d never heard of this woman, this “Janna” before, never seen her, and he was supposed to walk in and be a loving husband. It scared him more than he wanted to admit.
She had to be connected with the Project somehow, he knew that much; this was not a place where people brought their families, raised kids, and built computers to sell commercially. A scientist, an engineer, an administrator, a janitor?
If he really concentrated, he might be able to remember her—one face out of a couple of thousand faces that made up the workers on the Project.
A personnel specialist, Ziggy said. With a specialty in counseling. In this history Al had met Janna Fulkes in 1993, and married her last year. She wasn’t his usual type, but they’d been happy together, Ziggy said.
Al had beaten a strategic retreat to his office, unable to cope. He buried himself in paperwork and tried not to wonder about “not your usual type.”
Happy. That was good to know, as he stood now in front of a door to quarters he’d never seen before, prepared to enter a life he didn’t know. He closed his eyes and smothered a wry chuckle. Sam Beckett wasn’t the only one who leaped into his own life.
Raising his hand to knock on the door, he paused. He lived here. He ought to just walk in ....
The quarters were larger than the ones he thought of as his own. He stood in the entryway, looking around.
Unlike the Spartan place he thought of as his own, these rooms looked as if people lived here. Before him was a cozy living room with a blue camelback sofa, a wood-and-glass coffee table, a couple of easy chairs, with an HDTV and sound system along one wall. On the coffee table were a couple of magazines and a reproduction Chinese jade horse—at least he hoped it was reproduction. If it wasn’t, he was a lot poorer than he’d been this morning.
The far wall was covered with the various plaques, commendations, and commemorations of years of Navy service, and family pictures.
Wedding pictures. Of himself. With a smiling woman.
If he closed his eyes, and concentrated—and it was taking less and less concentration as the minutes ticked by— he could remember that wedding picture being taken. He swallowed dryly.
He could remember a whole series of things, things that never happened. Meeting Janna. Making a token pass—he hadn’t been that interested in her, really, but it was expected of him. And she’d laughed at him.
He shook himself. None of this had ever happened. None of it. He denied it. He wasn’t married. He’d never met anyone named Janna. He’d stepped into the Imaging Chamber a happily randy single man with five marriages behind him, and stepped out again married, and somehow he could almost remember both pasts, as if they were both real. The memories shifted in and out of focus. At one moment, he knew he was involved with Tina, was determinedly single after five marriages. At the next, he knew just as certainly that he had met and romanced and married Janna, that Tina had never been a factor in his life. The memories blurred in places, stood sharp in others. It was as if Sam’s Swiss-cheese effect had reached out and affected him, too. But that wasn’t possible.
Then who was the woman coming out of the back room, dressed in blue jeans and an ivory lace blouse, smiling at him?
“Al, honey. How’s it going—” She paused, looked at him with concern. “Is something wrong? Is Sam all right?”
She was only an inch or so taller than he was, and at least twenty years younger. She was slender and graceful and moved lightly, like a dancer. Her brown hair was medium length. Her eyes were blue.
She looked too damned much like Beth. He gasped for air, for balance.
Instantly she was at his side, holding the back of her hand against his forehead, loosening his tie. “Al? What’s wrong? Is it your heart?”
His heart? He bit back an imprecation, “remembering” just in time that references to his poor, weak heart were a running joke between the two of them, a way of
