Verbeena sat up a little straighter. “Can you remember not falling in love with Janna that night?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I can remember—Sam was working in his lab, and I called down and told him to come on up and join the party.” He spoke with assurance. His next words were slower, more uncertain. “I met . . . a lot of people that night. I met Janna—no, she wasn’t there, or—was she?” The look in his eyes was a little frantic. “Verbeena, how am I supposed to remember something that didn’t happen?”
“But it did happen,” Verbeena said. “You told me so.”
For a moment she wondered if they weren’t both crazy. Al was right; how could he remember something that never happened? If a patient of hers said that, she’d say he was delusional. Was Al delusional? Was the whole Project a figment of someone’s fevered imagination?
If it weren’t for the EEG tracings and the responses of the man in the Waiting Room, she’d commit Al in a minute. Lock him up in a rubber room, as they used to joke in the darker moments of her residency.
And put herself in the next room over.
But the man in the Waiting Room was a man named Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski, in the body of Sam Beckett.
And Wickie swore that it was June 1975. The president was Gerald Ford. He was vaguely aware of Snow Owl’s plans for the Bicentennial. And he didn’t know about anything after that.All past—any past—experience indicated that Sam had to fix something that had gone wrong—in the past.
She was sick and tired of recapitulating.
“Janna Fulkes arrived at the Project in one timeline on June fifteenth, 1993, your birthday. In another she joined us five days later.” Ziggy recited as if the computer were a little girl standing up in front of her third-grade class, doing a book report.
“Five days later?” Al and Verbeena chorused, staring at each other. “How do you know?” Verbeena went on. “If that isn’t a real past any more, how can you know?”
“I told you, Dr. Beeks,” and suddenly the little girl’s voice was very sad, “I don’t participate. I observe.”
“So because she was five days late, I didn’t fall in love with her?” Al said mutinously.
“By that time you were thoroughly involved with Tina Martinez-O’Farrell.”
“In only five days?”
“Al,” Verbeena reminded him, “you’ve fallen in love in less time, with less excuse, several times before.” Before you were married, she thought but did not say.
“That’s not the same thing!” Al slid from mutiny to indignation without missing a beat.
“It’s never the same thing,” Verbeena said dryly. “Ziggy, why was Janna late in that other past?”
The little girl’s voice was gone, replaced by an adult woman’s. “I don’t know that yet, Dr. Beeks.”
Verbeena opened her mouth to ask why and then reconsidered. She did not want to get into another metaphysical discussion of spacetime and Ziggy’s place in it, or out of it, or wherever it was.
“Well, let us know,” she said briskly. “Meanwhile, don’t you need to get back there, Al, and give Sam the new pieces to our little puzzle?”
“We appear to be losing sight of the essential problem,” Ziggy reminded them.
“What do you mean?” Al snapped, still not comfortable with the idea of going back. “I think I’ve got it pretty clearly in mind.”
“The essential problem is still to discover what it is that
Dr. Beckett has to put right. You’ve forgotten. Admiral, that led to this present is what has gone wrong."
“That can’t be right,” Verbeena objected. “Unless the past is slipping and sliding all over the place without Sam's help.”
“What do you mean?” Al asked, confused.
“The past that used to be, before Sam arrived to change it, led to your involvement with Tina. Right?”
“Right,” Al and Ziggy chorused, in exactly the same wary tone.
“Then Sam arrived and started changing things. As a result, Janna got here on time, you met her, fell in love, and here we are. Right? So maybe the wrong Sam’s supposed to be putting right is that you didn’t get together with Janna in the first place!”
“Then why hasn’t Sam Leaped?” Al said bluntly.
“It’s far more likely—an eighty-seven-percent probability—that some change he has made in his effort to save Bethica caused this situation to begin with,” Ziggy agreed. “It may even be that he remains in Snow Owl to correct the details. In this case, one of the results would be to put things back the way they were for the Admiral.”
“Whether I want him to or not,” Al muttered under his breath. “Sometimes all this damned do-gooding really gets on my nerves.”
“Or,” Ziggy continued, “there’s a ninety-percent chance that the whole business with the Admiral and Janna Fulkes has nothing to do with Dr. Beckett’s task in this Leap at all, and the whole situation is nothing more than an unfortunate side effect.”
“Oh.” Verbeena hadn’t thought it through that far. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry, Al, I really am.”
Al let go a deep breath. “You know the only good part about this, Verbeena?”
“Is there a good part?” she muttered, and then caught herself. Never act despondent around a patient: first rule of client counseling. “What?”
“Once the past changes, you won’t remember any of this. It’ll never have happened, from your point of view. And Janna won’t remember either.”
“But you will, won’t you?” she said softly.
Al’s eyes were bleak. “I’m linked to Ziggy, and to Sam, with his photographic memory. I won’t forget Janna, any more than I could ever forget Beth.
“I can’t. And”—he paused, and the look on his face made her want to cry—“I think, this time, I want to.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Al was dressed in silver and shades of blue, from his silver shoes to his dark royal blue shirt. He walked up the ramp, through the airlock doors of the Accelerator, into the Imaging Chamber.
Sometimes, on walking into this room, he remembered the frisson of
