The part of the night sky that he could see, that wasn’t blocked by trees and mountains, was covered with clouds, was like velvet. He couldn’t see any stars. Even if he got out of the truck and looked up, he probably wouldn’t be able to find too many: maybe Orion the Hunter, with the three stars of his belt, chasing eternally after the Great Bear, but not much else.
Not like the desert. The air was clear in the desert. You could almost reach out and touch the stars. He had a sudden mental image of himself reaching up to the sky, laughing.
He blinked, and wondered where that memory had come from, just as a small creature bounded across the road almost under his tires, and he jammed on the brakes. The truck pulled hard to the left, toward the darkness. He jerked it back again, taking his foot off the brake, and the truck fishtailed, skidding on loose rock. The back end drifted out.
“Steer toward the skid,” he muttered, not hearing himself. If he steered into the skid he’d go over the edge.
If he didn’t, he’d go over the edge.
He wondered if he’d Leap before the truck hit the bottom. Of the cliff, the ravine, of whatever it was. That would leave Wickie to die, though. And he didn’t think he’d Leaped into Wickie in order to trade his life for that of a squirrel.
He tapped the brakes, lightly, twisted the wheel forward, back again. The truck skidded into the soft dirt along the shoulder of the road. A chunk of granite the size of one of the truck’s tires loomed up in front of him. He steered frantically for the clear space on the roadside, pumped the brakes.
The truck stopped.
Elsewhen, a new set of possibilities blinked into existence and began branching.
He took a long shuddering breath and leaned his forehead against the wheel. If he hadn’t been slowing down to begin with, he would have hit that rock and flipped over.
Of course, if it hadn’t been for the squirrel, he probably wouldn’t have been in a skid to begin with.
“Hey, maybe next time you’ll Leap into Al Unser,” said an all-too-familiar gravelly voice next to him.
Sam jumped. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough to see you miss Rocky the Flying Squirrel back there.” Al shook his head. “Sam, you gotta learn about cost-benefit analysis. The benefit of hitting the nut-guzzler versus the cost of going over a very steep cliff, in this case.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t speak up while I was trying to straighten out. I didn’t even hear you coming.” Sam got out of the truck and then leaned back hastily. It was too dark to tell for sure, but it looked like the vehicle had stopped about six inches from the edge of a long drop, and this time he was positive he didn’t have a bungee cord attached anywhere.
“I know that.” Al’s tone was distinctly injured. “You were otherwise occupied. I wasn’t going to startle you. Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “watch your step there. They don’t have safety barriers along this road.”
“I noticed.” Sam swallowed his heart back into place and stomped over to the rock. It wasn’t quite as big as it had looked when he was bearing down on it, but it was plenty big enough to make him grunt as he got his arms around it, staggered a few feet, and heaved it over the side. The crashing and crunching as it fell went on for several seconds.
The handlink squealed loudly. Al glared at it, bushy eyebrows knit. “Now what, Ziggy?”
The computer Ziggy, back at Project Quantum Leap, blinked a message in the colored cubes of the handlink. Al sighed in response, the sigh of a man seeing something familiar and not particularly pleasing. His next words, however, continued the previous topic. “Besides, I didn’t say anything because I was trying to get oriented. It’s dark out here.”
“No, really?” Sam drawled, glaring.
Al was dressed in a black shirt with interlocking vibrant yellow-pink-and-purple designs, matching suspenders, and black slacks. A black fedora with a bright blue feather in the band tilted on his head at a jaunty angle. For a change of pace, he wasn’t juggling a cigar with the handlink.
“Sure it is,” Al said, ignoring the sarcasm. “It’s nighttime.”
“It’s usually dark in the nighttime. I’ve noticed that. Why am I here, Al?”
Why am I here, Al? One of these days he was going to ask that question and Al was going to say, Because this is where you belong, Sam. This is home. But he’d given up, almost, on expecting that day to come.
“Well.” Al made a show of consulting the handlink. “You’ve Leaped into Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski—”
“Who?” Sam interrupted, startled. “Gray Wolf?”
“Wickie Gray Wolf Starczynski. He’s half-Mohawk Indian, half-Polish. Some combination, huh?”
“I guess it could be.” A scrap of past history focused for him. “This isn’t 1990, is it? And Canada? Didn’t the Mohawks take over some place—”
“As I was saying .. . ?” Al raised one eyebrow, inviting another interruption if Sam cared to make one. Sam, recognizing Al’s I’m-giving-the-briefing-here-ensign look, didn’t. “It’s not Canada, it’s not 1990, and you’re not involved in a Native American uprising.” He paused, distracted momentarily. “I wonder if that should be Native Canadian? Except Ziggy says he was born in New York State, and . . . Never mind.
“It’s Friday, June 6, 1975, and you’re in upstate New York. You didn’t pick a world-beater this time: Wickie dropped out of school in the eighth grade. He’s a bartender and man-of-all-work at the Polar Bar. He was
