“A bunch of kids,” Sam said, still annoyed. “It was a bunch of kids.”
“Ahuh. So, knowing you, I gather the delivery didn’t get made. That’s not going to endear you to Rita Marie Hoffman, who owns the bar. Wickie lives behind the bar in one of the cabins Hoffman also owns. I suggest you not push her too far.” He examined the handlink. “She has the reputation of being a feisty lady. She’ll escort some drunks out of her place with a shotgun in 1978.”
“What does Ziggy say I’m supposed to do this time?” Sam asked, desperately trying to bring Al back to the point.
Al chewed his lip. “We’re working on it. I thought we had it. There was something about a party this coming Monday night, and preventing a wreck, but things seem to be kind of flexing at this point. Ziggy’s not sure any more.”
Sam sighed and looked up, past the roof of the truck cab into the side of the mountain beyond. “Why can’t I ever get a straight answer?” he inquired. “Ziggy’s not sure. Or there’s a glitch. There’s always something. Why can’t I ever just Leap in, fix it, and Leap out again?”
“You’ve done that,” Al pointed out. “You clipped the line on that balloon. If you hadn’t done that, the guy would never have bounced. He’d’ve just gone splat.”
“I would have gone splat, you mean, and thank you very much for letting me know!”
“What good would it have done? Of course, I didn’t expect you to actually go over the side,” Al said thoughtfully.
“Just what were you looking at on the handlink while I was dropping several hundred feet straight down?”
“Huh? Oh. Gooshie and I have this fantasy basketball team, and I was trying to figure out a way to buy up Michael Jordan’s contract.”
Sam was speechless. Al noticed. “It doesn’t do any harm,” he protested. “Hey, Ziggy has gigabytes of memory she doesn’t use.”
Sam closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Are you going to stay out here all night?” the hologram asked. “Isn’t it kind of cold?” Al couldn’t feel the cold. Physically, he was back in the Imaging Chamber. He couldn’t touch or be touched by anything in Sam’s “moment” of time. That didn’t keep him from empathizing. “And they’ve been having thunderstorms around here. People have been seeing twisters around—” he peered at the handlink “— Ellicotville, wherever that is. And south of Rochester.”
“Yeah, I guess it is pretty cold,” Sam sighed. He got back into the truck, slammed the door, shifted back into gear, and edged away from the precipice, guiding the vehicle back onto the road. He drove at least two miles farther down the twisting, narrow road before the quivering in his gut calmed down.
Al, floating along in the passenger seat, kept pace. He’d found that putting a chair in the Imaging Chamber allowed it to appear to Sam that he was actually sitting in the front seat of a vehicle with him. It was better than having his body appear to be cut in half by the seat, at least.
Road signs told Sam that Snow Owl was only a mile away. He allowed himself to draw a cautious breath of relief as the road flattened out, following the bank of a stream. He passed a bowling alley, a few small houses, and then what looked like the beginnings of Snow Owl’s business district. The Polar Bar was on the near end, a wooden building standing by itself. A stretch of crumbling asphalt and gravel served as a parking lot; four or five cars were nosed up to the building like puppies looking for milk. The sound of a piano being beaten upon by someone with a grudge came through an open window. Neon beer signs in the windows advertised Olympia and Heineken.
“Wickie’s cabin is around back,” Al reminded him.
Sam hesitated, wondering whether he ought to take the keg back into the bar, and decided to avoid the inevitable confrontation for as long as possible. As Al had pointed out, the bar owner wasn’t going to be happy about Wickie’s failure to do his job.
Well, Sam wasn’t too happy about the bar owner’s customer base. Liquor to kids? It wasn’t right.
A memory surfaced abruptly, a taste on his tongue, in his throat. His first beer. He’d been, what, thirteen? Tom had given it to him. It was metallic-tasting. He hadn’t liked it at the time.
After a while he’d gotten used to it. He’d never really enjoyed the sensation of being drunk, though. He’d tried it once, as an experiment, in college. He kept careful notes.
He couldn’t read his notes in the morning, and decided that he wasn’t going to try it again.
It had never occurred to him before to wonder where or how Tom got that beer. From their father’s supply, no doubt. John Beckett used to have a beer maybe once a week. It was no big deal.
He pulled around the parked cars and spotted a line of modest buildings, each perhaps a third the size of the bar, half-hidden in the trees. The one remaining headlight picked out well-used ruts that ran up to the porch of the first cabin. It seemed as likely as any of them.
He parked and got out, walked around to the back to look at the keg again. There was a tarp stuffed behind it; he pulled it out, found where it hooked up to the shell of the truck, and lashed it into place. It really wasn’t good enough, but— “Does Ziggy say anything about this keg going missing tonight?”
Al raised an eyebrow, punched an inquiry into the handlink. “Nope. It’s still there in the morning.”
“Good.” Sam dusted off his hands and felt around in his pockets for keys to the cabin door.
There was a light on inside. Al was patting through another inquiry, a worried look on his face, when Sam swung the door open.
To see a half-dressed woman turn toward him from
