He got to his feet. “Just one, as it happens.”
He wanted a cigar in the worst way, but he couldn’t smoke here. And it would have made such a great distrac-tion, too.
“She’s waiting for you,” Ziggy said.
There had to be a feminine side to either Beckett or Calavicci, Verbeena thought, to give Ziggy that exquisite sensitivity. She watched Al go, wondering how on earth he could stand to do what he had to do.
There was, however, one more issue she’d like to have resolved. “Ziggy,” she said quietly. “Who’s the father of Bethica’s child? Is it Kevin?”
Ziggy paused. “There’s a ninety-nine-percent chance that the father is . . . Wickie Starczynski.”
She was waiting for him at the bottom of the ramp, as if she knew there was something different about this time, something important. He came up to her and took her hands and kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose. “Hey, sweet-heart.”
Her blue eyes were troubled. “Hey, sweetheart.”
He didn’t know what to say. He had a hundred things he could say, and none of them, not one, seemed appropriate. He had a sudden image of the airport scene in Casablanca, a flash of memory of Seymour, the kid who wanted excite-ment and got more than he’d bargained for, whose view of life was shaped by Mickey Spillane and dime novels. Any second now he was going to hear himself saying something like, “the troubles of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world.”
She knew something was wrong, badly wrong, and she wanted him to share it with her, knew he wouldn’t.
The only mercy in all of this, he thought, was that Janna, like Verbeena, wouldn’t remember once the past was changed back. They weren’t linked to Ziggy, whom God or Fate or Chance or Whatever had thrown outside of Time so Sam could Leap, making things right.
And sometimes making things wrong that accidentally went right in the process.
He would be left with the memories of such a short time—a shopping trip to Santa Fe, liquid honey, comfort after bad dreams, quarters that looked more like a home than an institution.
Tina was a delight. Had been. Would be. She was in his future, the future he’d been used to, had enjoyed before and would again. But it wouldn’t be Janna.
But if he didn’t do this, he’d regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow . . .
“I love you very much, you know that?” he said soft¬ly.
“Have I ever shown you the Imaging Chamber?” he asked.
“What exactly is your relationship with Bethica Hoffman, Mr. Starczynski?” Verbeena Beeks in the throes of an attack of motherliness was not to be denied. She’d never met Bethica Hoffman; she didn’t have to. She’d swept in— literally; her caftan caught on a chair and she kicked it aside without a second thought—and marched over to the diagnostic bed upon which the Visitor was lying. Now she was standing, arms akimbo, staring down at him.
The man in the Waiting Room shot her a wary glance, setting aside the magazine he was reading—an old issue of a popular science magazine. “Who wants to know?”
“I do.” Verbeena Beeks was not in the mood to take any back talk from a Visitor. “This young lady is a minor child, and she’s pregnant, and I have reason to believe you’re the father.”
“Holy sh—How do you know?” The face that was Sam Beckett’s was white with shock. It was enough to con¬vince Verbeena that Ziggy was right. Wickie Starczynski sat upright. He would have gotten to his feet, but Verbeena didn’t allow him the room. Her snapping brown glare pinned him to the bed.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “What does matter is just what you plan to do about it.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my fault—”
“Oh, really,” Verbeena said dryly. “Last I heard, it takes two.” Now that she’d gotten his attention, she stepped away, striding to the opposite side of the room.
“She came on to me! She broke up with that fancy boy-friend of hers because she finally found out what he was really like, and she came to me to make sure he’d leave Davey alone, and—-I guess she was mad. She thought she’d show him. She was crying. And, and it just kind of . . . happened. I’m not saying it was right.” He was on his feet immediately, but he knew better than to follow her.
“Do you even care about her?” Verbeena was making an elaborate show of glancing through a stack of other books and magazines on the table. An interesting, if eclectic, collection: Psychology Today, New Discoveries, the math books they’d been working with, Call of the Wild. Cross-word puzzles. She looked up just in time to see the look on his face.
“Of course I care about her,” he was saying bitterly. “But what difference does that make? I’m just a half-breed bartender.”
It was the wrong thing to say, and definitely the wrong person to say it to.
“Pretty soon”—I hope, she added prayerfully to herself— “you’re going to be going back to yourself. I think you better start thinking about how you’re going to handle the situation you’re going to be walking into. Just what do you plan to do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
He only had an eighth-grade education, Verbeena re-minded herself.
But he also had a mind. And if he had a mind, he could do anything.
And he was going to get a determined push toward using it, right here, right now.
“This is where you stand?” Janna said, pirouetting around on the disk. “What do you see?”
“I see Sam. I see wherever he is—” He thought with a pang about the bachelorette party in the Polar Bar.
Janna caught the gleam in his eye. “And just where is that?” she said with mock sternness.
Al shrugged. “Wherever he is.” Halfway up the mountain by now, he thought. In fact he’d probably already arrived at Kevin’s little party in progress.
