“Is that all?” he said patiently.
“Uh-huh.” Al’s voice and Bethica’s blended in an eerie chorus.
“Can you wiggle your toes?”
Sniff. “Yes.”
“I think it’s just a sprain,” he diagnosed. “I could tell better if I could see anything.”
“Well, can’t you—” Bethica began, trying to get up on her good foot.
Sam caught her just before she toppled down into the unknown depths. “Hold on!”
She held on. He pulled her back onto the ledge and began feeling around them, shooting Al an aggrieved look.
“Don’t go glaring at me, Sam, I don’t know where the heck you are,” the Observer snapped. “Nobody recorded the precise location of this particular piece of real estate. There are some real bad dropoffs along that path. I think you’d better stay put until you can see better.”
“Oh, great.” Sam settled his shoulders against the back of their oasis and pulled Bethica into his arms to make sure she didn’t try any more lunges. “Bethica, I think it’s just a sprain, okay? But neither one of us can see well enough to figure out how to get out of where we are, and even if your friends were disposed to help us”—
Al snorted.
—“I don’t think they could hear us if we yelled. I’m sorry, but I think we’re going to have to spend the night here.”
“They’d probably push you over the cliff,” Al muttered acerbically.
Bethica curled up against him, her head fitting under his chin. Under Wickie’s chin, he reminded himself. Bethica was acting very ... comfortable.
“That’s pretty cozy, Sam,” Al remarked. “Looks like she’s had some practice.”
Sam glared, and stilled his hand, which was resting all too familiarly on Bethica’s tangled hair. “You’ve got leaves and stuff here,” he muttered. “Hold still and let me get them out. It’s going to be okay. I promise you.”
“Mostly,” Al murmured around his cigar. “Almost every-body gets happily ever after in this one.”
“Does that mean you’re going to marry me, or some-thing?” she demanded. “I thought you said that was a dumb idea.”
“I’m going to marry—” Sam exchanged a panicked look with the Observer.
“It’s your baby,” Al said, looking at the handlink. “Wickie’s, I mean. Thanks a lot, Ziggy, we could have used that a little earlier.”
A light dawned for Sam Beckett, and he looked over Bethica’s head at the hologram. “Kevin knows you were with Wi—with me, doesn’t he? That’s why he hates me so much.”
She half nodded. “I guess it was pretty dumb. Telling him.” She paused. “I am just a kid still, I guess.”
Sam hugged her. “Did he know about the baby then?”
“No. I told him today. It made him even more mad. He almost wants the baby to be his. But he’s afraid it’s yours.”
Sam sighed. A lot of things were clearer now. But it wasn’t going to make the next eight hours any easier.
TUESDAY
June 10, 1975
. . . never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
—John Donne, Devotions XVII
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Flustered or not, Sam had to act as if he knew all about Bethica and Wickie’s past physical relationship, brief though it had been. Al and Ziggy were unable to help; there weren’t any records, no father recorded for a baby who had, in the original history, never been bom. All they had was Verbeena’s discussion with the Visitor. He’d had a lot of practice pretending, though, and Bethica couldn’t see the sometimes panicked expression on his face either.
He finally got her calmed down. After a while they both fell asleep. Al looked down on them, hand poised above the handlink to open the Door and return to the Imaging Chamber; after a moment he sighed, tugged his fedora over his eyes, and sat down on empty air, prepared to take the night watch.
“Who told you you couldn’t go back to school?” Verbeena said impatiently. She had no intention of letting up on the Project’s involuntary guest. “Which part of it is impossible? Walking up to the door? Signing the form? Sitting in a desk? Listening to somebody?
“Or are you just one of those men who runs out on pregnant women?”
“It’s not my fault,” Wickie repeated. He didn’t like it. He
made it clear he didn’t like it. He tried to withdraw in stony silence.
Verbeena wouldn’t have it. “What, you’re scared? Child, you have no idea about scared. Scared is being a little girl with a baby and no idea in the world what she’s gonna do about it. You’re smart. Look at all you’ve done! Are you gonna bury yourself behind a bar, drink yourself to death, and prove all those nasty words they say are true?”
Wickie glared. “I don’t even know for sure that it’s mine!”
“But you broke off with Rimae as soon as it happened, didn’t you?” she said shrewdly.
Wickie sputtered.
Verbeena kept hammering, hoping to spark smoldering resentment into flame.
They woke, stiff and sore, in the light of morning, to find that only a few feet farther along, the cliff down which they’d fallen softened into a slope gentle enough to climb. Sam helped the girl up and then looked over their night’s refuge.
“I guess it wasn’t so bad after all,” he said with false heartiness.
“That’s because you haven’t looked over on this side,” Al remarked. Sam looked up, startled. “I decided to see this one through,” the hologram muttered, stretching and scratching at the grizzled stubble on his chin. He pointed to the side opposite the one they’d climbed. A few inches to the other side of the ledge they’d spent the night on, a ravine at least sixty feet deep yawned.
Sam decided to be grateful for small favors, and draping Bethica’s arm around his neck, they started back for the clearing.
Not surprisingly, most of the cars parked along the dirt road were gone, including the one in which Bethica had come. “I guess one of the others took it back.” Two of the partyers were still stretched out by the blackened embers of the
