“Admiral, he needs you.” It was the second time she’d used his title, in a not-so-subtle appeal to his sense of duty. He knew the gambit, and recognized its power over him. He wouldn’t look at her.
“Al”—she was shifting from an appeal to duty to an appeal to friendship—“what’s wrong?”
He wasn’t really looking at the cigar, she realized suddenly. He was turning it over and over in his hands, drawing her eyes to it, but his own eyes were elsewhere. He was looking at his wedding ring.
As if he’d never seen it before.
“Ziggy was right,” she breathed.
He glanced up then. “Ziggy? Right? Give me a break!”
“She was. She said, every time you went into the Imaging Chamber to help Sam change the past, the future changed too. And this time you don’t want it to. It’s your future, isn’t it? It’s your present. Your now that you’re trying to preserve.”
There was a long silence, and then the man sitting across the desk from her closed his eyes. “It’s never happened like this before, Verbeena.”
"What do you mean?”
He drew in a long, shuddering breath and looked down the dark end of the cigar in his hands, the indentations where his teeth had clamped into it.
"Did you know,” he said, so softly she had to strain to hear, “he once had the chance to save my first marriage? To Beth?” A sudden thought struck him, and he glanced up. “I as once married to a woman named Beth, you know.”
"I know,” Verbeena said. Of course he had been. Why would he think she needed to be told?
Then she realized why, and sat back again.
"He didn’t do it. It was against the rules, he said. So Beth had me declared dead, and she got married to somebody else.”
He smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile to see. “He’s not perfect, you know, Verbeena. Oh, eventually he always does the right thing—that’s what makes him Sam—but he’s tried to break the rules a time or two for his own benefit. He’s thought about it, at least.
“But he never knows—he’s never even asked—what it does to us here. And that’s why he made the rule in the first place, to protect the future from random changes in the past.”
Verbeena bit her lip. Al’s face was a study in resignation.
“You know, sometimes I step out of the Imaging Chamber and Sam is married? A dozen times, that’s happened now. Not always to the same woman, either.
“Sometimes Tina and Gooshie are married, and sometimes Tina and I—” He paused, glanced up at her. “Ziggy says we’re all kept in a kind of static globe, the same stasis that allows her—and me, of course, because of the link—to remember all the histories that happen and unhappen again. Except I’m only human, of course, so I can’t keep things quite as straight as she can.
“For some reason, the Project never changes while I’m in it. Outside, it’s probably changing all the time. I’ve even
seen it happen, when I’m in Washington.” He laughed quietly. “You know, one time I came back and Tina was a blonde. Not even Ziggy could figure out how Sam caused that one.”
“So it’s true, then? The last time you went into the Imaging Chamber you weren’t married to Janna?”
He let go a long breath. “Yes. I didn’t even know who she was. Then.”
It was the hardest thing Verbeena Beeks had ever done in her life. But it had to be done, and she was the one who had to do it.
She stood up, a tall angry black flame, and pointed at him. “Are you going to abandon Sam Beckett in the past for the sake of the present, Albert Calavicci?”
“I never said I wouldn’t go!” He was sitting straight in his chair now, looking up at her, his black eyes snapping.
“But you’re going to put it off, and put it off, until it’s too late, aren’t you? Until it’s too late for Sam to change the past, to change your present! And what happens to Sam if you do that, Al? What happens to Sam if he fails?”
“We don’t know! Maybe nothing! He hasn’t always changed what we thought he would! It’s all random! His Leaping doesn’t depend on his changing things. . . .” He shut up abruptly, inhaled.
“Not the things you think he ought to be changing, anyway. Isn’t that it, Al?” She sat down again, deflating into the chair. “He doesn’t change the things we think he ought to, but we don’t really know what God or Fate or Chance wants changed. We don’t really know, ever, what tomorrow is supposed to look like. Do we?”
The two of them stared at each other. “The question really is, is it supposed to look like today?” she finished. “And what are you going to do about it, Al?”
MONDAY
June 9, 1975
I have done one braver thing
Than all the Worthies did
And yet a braver thence doth spring
Which is, to keep that hid.
—John Donne, The Undertaking, st. 1
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sam was getting tired of waiting. On Monday, according to the rota tacked to the corkboard behind the bar, he was scheduled to work from eleven to three in the afternoon and from eight until midnight. He spent the morning working on the broken windows of the cabin, making a list of the people he'd met and what he knew about them. It was something like trying to identify the suspects in a murder mystery, with all the motives, before the murder was even committed. He
wished he had a better idea of what the future was supposed to look like.
But since the future wasn’t putting in an appearance, he decided to try it on his own. Pulling on a pair of heavy work gloves he’d found in one of Wickie’s dresser drawers, he picked out the broken glass with a pair of needle-nose pliers. He’d gotten new panes of glass, cut to specification, the first thing that morning. Then it was just a matter of picking
