“Well, you don’t usually sit with me.”
“Nope, not usually. But I looked at my list this morning, and it said I’d had lunch with practically everybody else, so—” She grinned. “And besides, it was the only free seat in here. Give me a break, hon, I’m not a doctor all the time.”
Gooshie grinned uncertainly and nibbled at his mustache, which was ragged from the habit.
“So how’s the programming biz?” Verbeena inquired, giving the ravioli another try. If she concentrated, maybe
she could pretend it was sole, covered with lemon sauce
and capers. . .
"Oh, it’s fine, just fine.”
“Made any progress on the problem?”
Gooshie looked away, his face turning red. “No.”
I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” she said gently.
"I was just hoping.”
"It isn’t right,” Gooshie burst out. “Everything runs just
It doesn’t make sense. If there was something wrong somewhere, it ought to show up in other programs. Everything’s knit together. But everything’s working the way it’s supposed to.”
Don’t let Al hear you say that, Verbeena thought, smil ng through a mouthful of overcooked pasta. As for the sauce—
Gooshie’s hands wrapped around the plastic bag, twisting it, and the handful of chips left inside crumbled. He didn’t notice. “We’ve gone through everything,” he said earnestly, as if Verbeena might not believe him. “Everything we can think of. There was that time that Ziggy was trying to add on to herself, years ago, and we thought that might be involved, but that all happened after Dr. Beckett Leaped, so mat couldn’t be it. We thought maybe she’d started earlier, but Dr. Beckett wouldn’t have let her.
“And then there were those new chips he invented. I’m not sure what they might have done.” Gooshie’s eyes were magnified by his glasses. He’d never bothered with the surgery that would have made glasses unnecessary; too worried about things going wrong, Verbeena thought. Gooshie was always worried about things going wrong.
They rarely did in his part of the Project, but the one thing that had gone wrong was more than enough to make up for it. And Gooshie was sure it was all his fault, no matter how much he’d like to blame the neurochips Sam invented.
Verbeena was in no position to argue with him. All she could do was keep an eye on him, make sure that guilt, and
the effort to locate the bug in the program, didn’t drive him into a breakdown.
She finished her lunch, glanced at her calendar, and sighed. She needed a staff meeting, needed to look at performance review, wanted to talk to the compensation people about hiring a new doctor to work in the Waiting Room. The trouble was getting someone through the clearance process. A medical doctor who could undergo the kind of scrutiny involved in getting cleared for Project Quantum Leap usually didn’t want to work there to begin with. It wasn’t a particularly attractive place to work, off in the middle of the desert.
First, though, she needed to go look in on her most important patient again.
She nodded farewell to the chief programmer and put away the debris of her meal and stepped into the elevator to the depths of the Project.
The Accelerator, the Imaging Chamber, the Control Room, the Waiting Room were all together on a level about halfway down. Below them were the layers of computer offices, the cabinets that held Ziggy’s mechanical guts, the lowest-level offices, Beckett’s abandoned biochip laboratory. Verbeena never had occasion to visit the lower depths of the Project. Her concerns centered on the Waiting Room. She walked through the Control Room without even a glance at the large table of glowing cubes in many colors that occupied its center, or the glittering silver ball suspended in the air above it. She nodded at the technicians buzzing like flies around a rectangular box of Jujubes and kept going.
Pausing outside the door to the Waiting Room, she glanced up at the ceiling. “Ziggy? I don’t suppose Al’s come back yet?”
“No, Dr. Beeks.”
Drawing a deep breath, she knocked lightly at the door, waited a moment, and walked into the white room with the hospital bed and the state-of-the-art monitoring equipment, the stairway and the office up in the observation deck.
He was lying on the bed, half-dressed, his fingers knit under his head, staring at the ceiling. She marched briskly over, picked up the chart and scanned it as she said, “Good morning, Mr. Starczynski. And how are we feeling this afternoon?”
The hazel-green eyes—familiar eyes—shifted to follow her. The cold, suspicious expression on the man’s face didn’t fit well, as if the face had never been shaped to accept it. “I don’t know how you’re feeling, Doc. I’m doing just fine.”
It was Sam Beckett’s voice. It had to be, coming from his lungs and his vocal cords, shaped by his palate and lips and tongue. But Wickie Starczynski would hear his own voice. That was what his mind was used to hearing, so that was what he’d hear.
It was a fascinating dilemma, this separation and mix-and-match of mind and body. Verbeena could never publish any of her observations, but she made her notes anyway. Most of her colleagues wouldn’t accept the proposition that the mind could be separated from the body—from the brain—to begin with. That was the school of thought that didn’t accept the idea of the soul, or God, either.
Verbeena smiled coolly and scanned the chart. Blood pressure still high, but otherwise healthy. It could be worse. She could still remember the time Sam had Leaped into a woman with an insatiable craving for Milk Duds, chocolate turtles, and Godiva chocolates. As well as German chocolate cake, Hershey’s Kisses, and almost anything else containing theobromine. Sam’s blood sugar level
