Chapter Text
What about Sam?
He’s not here anymore…he’s on the job.
In the future, right?
Right.
Without me!
I didn’t think you were needed.
You’d be a Leaper, like Sam, with all the inherent risks.
I still want to join him.
That’s all it takes.
What do you mean?
You just have to want to do it.
✦
The blue-white light receded rapidly, leaving Al blinking in confusion. The old-fashioned wooden bar, the mysterious bartender, and the sooty-faced miners were all gone. Now his forearms were resting on the edge of a shining metal bar framed with neon lights, and the bartender had long, bright turquoise hair that was pulled back and tied in an elaborate knot. The reflections in the mirror behind the bar showed that the rowdy miners had been replaced by an equally ragtag group of men wearing metal pauldrons, studded vests, and iridescent belts. They were all varying degrees of unsavory and appeared largely unwashed, except for—
Oh, hello.
She was beautiful—no, not beautiful: drop-dead gorgeous. Curling platinum-blonde hair cascaded past her shoulders, which were wrapped in a sparkling, high-waisted purple jacket studded with gold stars. The same color scheme was reflected in her heavy eyeshadow, though her lips were a brilliant cherry red. Al bet they tasted like cherry, too. His gaze dropped slightly, appreciatively.
He brought his gaze up to eye level, grinned, and leaned forward slightly, turning up the charm as he prepared to face the beautiful woman sitting next to him. Instead, he watched as the bombshell in the mirror leaned forward and gave him an identical grin. Al’s expression faltered. So did hers.
Oh no. Oh…no.
He heard the creak of leather and watched in the mirror as the Gene Simmons lookalike seated to his right leaned over, his stale breath preceding him.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said, giving Al a lecherous grin not so very different from the one Al himself had worn just moments ago. “I’ve been in a hundred rec bars from here to the Magellanic Clouds and believe me, you’ve got the greatest set of casabas I’ve ever targeted.”
Al swallowed nervously, and so did the bombshell in the mirror. “Oh, boy,” he muttered.
“So, what d’ya say?” the man pressed, sliding one hairy hand across the bar and resting it on Al’s right wrist. “Wanna tour my ship? The cockpit’s nice and cozy.”
“No—no thanks,” Al said quickly, withdrawing his hand from the stranger’s grip and shifting on his barstool so he was closer to the empty seat on his left. His gaze lit upon a drink sitting in front of him at the bar, something electric blue in a martini glass with a curling straw, and he reached for it hastily.
“Oh, c’mon, darling,” the man insisted, leaning even closer. “What’s your name?”
Al opened his mouth to tell the man to mind his own damn business and then closed it again. What was his name? And, for that matter, where the devil was he? What was he doing here?
The answers were there, on the tip of his tongue, but fading as rapidly as dreams come waking. He remembered…the bartender—the other bartender, the pain in the ass—and asking him for help finding something. Finding someone. That was it: he was here to find someone. Urgently.
“Sam,” Al remembered suddenly, knowing even as he said it that this was no idle recollection. He was here to find Sam and bring him home. He clung to the single, solid memory with relief. He might not know who he was, but he knew why he was here. He had to save Sam.
Whoever Sam was.
“Samantha, that’s a pretty name,” drawled the man who clearly couldn’t take a hint, moving his hand to caress Al’s shoulder.
“Look, knock it off!” Al snapped, yanking his arm free and scowling at his assailant. Seeing the man’s face so close made him want to recoil further, but he refused to give any more ground. He had as much of a right to sit at this bar and not be harassed as the next guy. “I’m not in the mood. Take a hike, and walk off a tall cliff while you’re at it.”
The man’s sticky smile vanished immediately, a hard glint entering his eyes.
Al drew himself up to his full height, glaring right back at the man like he was staring down a wolf. He was vaguely aware that several people seated at nearby tables were watching them curiously. He didn’t care; he wasn’t about to let this nozzle mess with him or the work of art he was currently inhabiting.
Inhabiting. God, this was all wrong.
Years in the service kept Al’s doubt or confusion from entering his expression, though, and the other man broke first, scowling and noisily climbing off his barstool. “You won’t get many friends with an attitude like that,” he growled before grabbing his drink and stalking off.
The curious onlookers’ interest waned as Al turned back to the bar and took a sip of his drink through the curling plastic straw. He coughed a little at the taste; whatever it was, it tasted strongly of Curaçao and ozone.
He was still trying to get the taste out of his mouth when a voice from his left said, “Men like that are a discredit to us all.”
Al glanced over sourly, already formulating a barbed comment, as a young man with midnight blue hair took the empty seat on Al’s left. Unlike the majority of the people in the bar, who were dressed like rejected Star Wars extras, the new arrival was wearing a trim midnight blue suit that perfectly matched his hair. It looked a little frayed around the edges, like it had seen better days, a fact that he seemed to be trying to obscure with the addition of an elaborate silver brooch to his lapel.
“Relax,” the newcomer said, giving Al an easy smile and sending a friendly nod in the direction of the bartender. “I’m just here to do business. I got your call. Do you have the money?”
Al blinked. “The money?” he echoed dumbly. He was almost entirely certain he’d never seen this man before in his life.
“Yeah,” Mr. Midnight Blue said, and then he paused to give Al a once-over. Suddenly self-conscious, Al crossed his arms over his ample chest. “Rhonda, wasn’t it? You don’t have to pretend. This entire sector is off the beaten path, and I did a sweep for blues on my way in. We can do this quietly. So long as you have the money?”
Al did some thinking on his feet. “Would I have come here if I didn’t?” he suggested. At the same time, he turned the name Rhonda over in his head. It didn’t seem to fit him—but, of course, neither did the reflection in the mirror.
“I understand,” the man said smoothly, giving Al a smile that revealed pearly white teeth. “You can rest assured that I, too, wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have the item.” He glanced casually around the bar, scratching idly at his ear as he did so. “But not here. Too many people.” He tugged back his sleeve to reveal a battered silver watch with nine blinking lights of different colors adorning the face. “One hour. Meet me at the observation lounge on deck four. Bring the money.”
Al could only nod bemusedly as his visitor stood, straightened his jacket, and strolled casually out of the bar. Al watched him go; a scuffed metal door set into the wall slid open at his approach, revealing a nondescript stretch of metal corridor.
Al turned back to his drink, feeling the first stirrings of panic. Where on earth was he?
Based on the lack of windows, they were probably underground. The plain metal walls, and especially that sliding door, reminded him of the Project. That was entirely underground, buried deep beneath the caked desert earth of New… New…
His train of thought stuttered to a halt.
The Project… He remembered the Project! Project Quantum Leap. He’d worked there for years; hell, he’d helped build it! How could he forget it? He’d been the one to wheedle full funding out of the Congressional committee, grease the ever-squeaky governmental wheels, and oversee the construction and day-to-day management of the Project while—yes!—while Sam ran the science side.
Al grinned in relief as he felt the fragments of memory return, their comforting familiarity tamping down his burgeoning panic. The Project was a top-secret time travel experiment, and Sam had been the first to test its theory, stepping into the accelerator and Leaping backwards in time.
But…Sam was the one who Leaped. Al was the observer, a hologram from the future. That was how it worked.
He gazed at his reflection. It certainly seemed that he was Leaping now. He didn’t have a firm conception of what he was supposed to look like, but a blonde bombshell was not it. Though, there were certainly worse things to be. In fact… His gaze turned admiring again. This experience could be quite…educational…
Al caught a glimpse of one of the other men at the bar eyeing him with interest and quickly changed his mind. Maybe there’d be time later, but for now he needed to focus. Whenever Sam Leaped, there was always something he needed to do, a wrong to put right. Apparently Al had Leaped into someone named Rhonda, but all he knew about her was that she had great fashion sense, a set of coconuts fine enough to make her own piña colada, and an interest in shady business deals with men she had never met before. Great.
Another surreptitious glance around the bar revealed that he was still drawing plenty of attention from the predominantly male clientele—it probably didn’t help that he was considerably better-dressed than any of them—so Al stood and searched his pockets for money. He located a collection of triangular coins in one of the front pockets of his tight, purple leather pants and set a couple near his half-finished drink. Then, before he could be accosted by anyone else, he made for the door he’d seen Mr. Midnight Blue leave through.
When he was halfway there, drawing plenty of looks and an appreciative whistle, the door slid open and Dr. Sam Beckett walked in.
Al stopped as suddenly as if he’d collided with an invisible wall. “Sam?” he said incredulously, his voice changing octaves halfway through. And although Al couldn’t have given a physical description of Sam ten seconds ago, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was looking at him now. And, better yet, it was Sam as he was supposed to look, how he had looked, before his first Leap, and during his last. It was him, right down to the streak of white in his hair.
Sam broke off his scan of the room, his head swiveling towards Al. He looked, if anything, a little sad and confused, but there was no sign of recognition.
“Sam!” Al tried again, hurrying up to him and gesticulating wildly. “It’s me! It’s—god—I can’t remember my name—from the future!—or—or the past…dammit! The Project, Sam! The Project!”
Disbelieving recognition began to dawn in Sam’s eyes. “Al?”
“Yes! God!” Al drew a deep breath, recognizing his own name and clinging to it like a lifeline. He dragged a hand across his face, but when he pulled it away he was smiling. It seemed that everything had just become half as difficult. “I don’t know how you do this, kid. I can’t remember a thing.”
“It…is it really you?” Sam asked, reaching out a tentative hand. Al half-expected it to pass right through him, and it looked like Sam did, too, so it was a bit of a shock when Sam’s fingers actually prodded his shoulder. Then there was a second shock, this one more like electricity, and Sam’s face broke into a huge grin. “Al!” Then it faltered. “But you…how…?”
“I don’t know!” Al protested. “I just showed up here, I don’t remember anything.”
Sam drew a breath and glanced around at the patrons seated at the nearest tables, several of whom were openly staring at them. “Come on, let’s sit down,” he muttered, leading the way to an empty table in the corner. When they’d settled down and stopped drawing looks, he hissed, “Al, I don’t believe this—when did you get here?”
“Just a few minutes ago. I was over at the bar—oh, hey, the bar! Sam, there was a bar, another bar, an old one, before I Leaped! A bartender…” The memory was slipping away as quickly as he could recall it.
“A bartender? You mean at Al’s Place, with the coal miners? In 1953?”
“I—I don’t know,” Al said hopelessly. “Yes? Maybe?” He buried his face in his hands.
“You’re swiss-cheesing; it’s normal,” Sam told him reassuringly. “Although, I think it’s getting better for me. The bartender said I would be Leaping as myself from now on. And it’s true! People here know me—they know me as Sam and act like they’ve known me for years! But you—you Leaped into somebody.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Al groaned into his hands.
“So you must have gone into the accelerator, but Al—why…why would you do that?”
Al rubbed at his eyes and sat back. “I’m telling you, honest to god, Sam, I don’t remember.”
Sam just looked at him for a long moment, as though wondering whether to believe him. Then he took a breath and dropped his gaze to where his hands were resting on the table. “I—I did try to come home,” he said, sounding like saying it cost him a great deal.
Al tried to give him a faint smile, but Sam didn’t see it. “It’s all right, Sam,” he said instead, gently. “I believe you.”
“But I—I thought I had it figured out. I really did.” Sam looked up, transferring his gaze from his hands to something in the middle distance. “After I left 1953, I Leaped to where I wanted to, once, but then afterwards I was trying to get home and I ended up here, and I…I wasn’t even sure if, after that, if you—if the Project would be…” He trailed off.
Al tried unsuccessfully to piece that together. “If the Project would be what?” he prompted.
Sam looked like he was debating something internally, indecision written all over his face. Knowing him, it was some grand moral dilemma. Or, more likely, something he just didn’t want to tell Al.
“Come on, out with it.”
Sam grimaced. His gaze wandered around the table for a few seconds before finally moving to Al. “Did you…do you remember Beth?”
Al sat back, feeling like he’d been blindsided. Something strange was happening in his chest. “What?”
“I—look, if you don’t remember, I…”
“Tell me, Sam. What about Beth? What happened to her?” He had only confused half-memories around the name Beth, but he knew from the feeling in his gut that she meant a great deal to him.
“Nothing’s happened to her!” Sam said hastily. “Well, I hope not. Here, forget I said anything. We have bigger problems right now.”
“Bigger—we do?” Al echoed, still preoccupied with whatever emotion was tying his stomach into knots.
“We’re here for a reason; that’s always how it is with Leaps. Something must have gone wrong here that needs to be fixed. But we’re not in the past anymore. We don’t have Ziggy, we don’t have historical data, we’re on our own and I can’t even figure out where we are. Some kind of space station, I think.”
Al’s attention was abruptly dragged back to the conversation. “Space station?” he repeated. “In—in space, you mean?”
“Yes, of course in space!” Sam said a bit snappily. “Look, I Leaped as myself so I don’t have anything to go on. Who did you Leap into? Have you found anything out?”
“Ah—my name—well, her name—is Rhonda,” Al said, and gave Sam a little smile that showed how pleased he was with himself.
Sam was not impressed. “Rhonda? Rhonda what? Do you have an ID?”
“ID…that’s a good idea,” Al admitted, and started patting himself down for pockets. In addition to the triangular coins, he discovered ten rectangular strips of some sort of teal-colored metal embedded with circuitry, a multi-colored plastic fob, and finally a plastic card about the size of a driver’s license.
“Aha, here,” Al said, squinting at the holographic card that displayed a smiling, three-dimensional portrait of the bombshell. “Rhonda Cassini. Oh, great name! She’s 21, her address is—my god, Sam, it says she lives on Earth. They had to specify that!”
“How about a year?” Sam pressed.
Al returned his attention to the license. “It expires in…gosh, 2042. 2042! And…look at this.” He set the license on the table and flipped it around to face Sam. He tapped the top edge, where it proclaimed ‘interstellar spaceship license’ in chunky silver letters.
Sam leaned over the license to inspect it himself. “2042…that’s so soon,” he whispered. He looked up at Al. “It’s—what? 1999 back at the Project? 2000? And we’ll have interstellar travel in just forty years? And well-established travel, at that!” Sam’s face was overtaken by a slightly distant expression that Al recognized from long nights spent working out the kinks of Project Quantum Leap. “Either this space station is in our solar system, or someone developed faster-than-light travel,” he said definitively. “It has to be one of the two.”
Al considered this for a moment. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it…well, maybe you’re right. It’s just…strange.” Sam scratched the back of his neck and passed the ID back to Al, who returned it to its pocket. “But it does answer the question of whether we’re still Leaping within our lifetimes. Within yours or mine, I’m not sure, but at least we’re not hundreds of years in the future.”
“Might as well be,” Al muttered, picking up the colorful fob and inspecting it next. He pressed one of the buttons and nothing happened. “What do you think this is?”
Sam frowned at it. “I don’t know. It kind of looks like car keys, doesn’t it?”
Al looked at it again. “Car—wait, no, Sam! It’s spaceship keys! I bet you anything!” He gestured excitedly towards Sam. “Because I’m not from around here, right? I was at the bar and this piece of work in midnight blue came up, said he—uh—said he got my call and he had the item, wanted to make a trade with me!”
“A trade? A trade for what?”
“Well, maybe more of a purchase,” Al allowed. “He said he had ‘the item,’ all spooky-like, and wanted me to bring the money to a rendezvous. Ah, crap, what time is it? He said in an hour. I don’t have a watch.”
Sam checked his. “How long was this before you ran into me?”
“Uh, five minutes?”
“Okay, we’ve got plenty of time. Did this guy say anything else? Anything helpful?”
“Just that he wanted to meet at the observation lounge on deck four. Deck four! Oh god, you’re right, Sam, this is a space station!” Al paused, his eyebrows drawing together. “Unless it’s a ship.”
“Based on the signage I saw out there, it’s a station,” Sam said, picking up one of the metal strips still on the table, its surface flashing various shades of teal as it caught the light. “Did this salesman say how much money you were supposed to bring?”
Al thought. “Ah…no.”
“Well, I bet this is it,” Sam said, holding out the strip to show Al. “See that stamp there? It’s a treasury seal. And the electronics are probably some kind of security system. Unless you have something else on you that looks like cash?”
Al produced the triangular coins. “I’ve got these, but they don’t look very valuable.” He proceeded to double-check all the pockets he could find, which was a not insignificant number—there were pockets on the inside and outside of the jacket, on the blouse, in the pants, and even in the boots.
“Geez, you got enough zippers on that thing?” Sam snickered, watching as Al discovered yet another hidden pocket in the jacket.
“It’s fashionable,” Al snapped.
“You’d think so.” Sam tilted his head and smiled. “So, what do you think?”
“I told you, I think Rhonda and I have great fashion sense. It’s not my fault if you—”
“No, not about that! You’ve spent enough time pursuing women. How does it feel to have caught one at last?”
Al started stuffing the metal strips back into the pocket where he’d found them, refusing to look at Sam. “Don’t you start.”
Sam’s grin grew. “What, after all the grief you gave me? Don’t like the tables being turned?”
“What I don’t like,” Al said stiffly, “is showing up in a space station in the middle of god-knows-where and god-knows-when, not even knowing my own name and apparently way in over my head. Let’s just pay this Midnight guy and get out of here.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Al watched Sam’s expression do something strange. “Yeah, okay,” he settled on after a moment. “But are we supposed to make sure Rhonda completes the sale, or stop her from doing it?”
“Beats me. Makes you almost miss Ziggy, doesn’t it?”
Sam gave him a rueful smile and glanced at his watch. “We have about forty minutes to the rendezvous, let’s try to get some information in that time, figure out if we’re supposed to make the purchase or not.” He stood and paused, waiting as Al zipped all his pockets. Then he said, “For what it’s worth, Al, even if you don’t remember why, I’m glad you’re here.”
Al shrugged, busying himself with pocketing the spaceship keys. “Don’t mention it.”
Sam gave him a sad smile that Al studiously avoided noticing, falling into step behind Sam as he led the way back to the bar.
“Excuse me,” Sam said, flagging down the turquoise-haired bartender.
“What can I do for you, Sam?” the bartender asked. His eyes drifted briefly to Al, lingered there slightly too long, and returned to Sam.
“I was wondering, there was a man here earlier, talking to my frie—uh, talking to Rhonda here,” Sam said, indicating Al. “We were wondering if you knew anything about him, if he’d been here before.”
“All dressed in midnight blue,” Al supplied. “Silver pin. You saw him.”
“Yeah, I remember,” the bartender said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, though. I’ve never seen him in these parts, you neither.”
“Do you get a lot of people like that? Strangers…um, visitors?” Sam tried.
The bartender frowned at Sam. “’Course we do. Not as much as the inner sectors, and we don’t often get people like her—” He gestured at Al— “but this is a rec bar, anyone can come in.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course,” Sam said.
“I suppose you get a lot of people passing through, though,” Al suggested to cover Sam’s misstep. “Gotta be places outside of the inner sectors worth visiting, right?” He tried for a grin.
The bartender’s perplexed expression shifted to Al. “People passing through?” he echoed. “Haven’t ever had that. If you don’t want to be here, you don’t come here. You just Leap to wherever you wanna go.”
“Leap?” Sam repeated incredulously.
“Yeah,” the bartender said, looking between Sam and Al as though waiting for one of them to yell April fools! “Star Leap. Galactahop. Whatever you wanna call it. You know. In your ship.” Sam and Al exchanged a look, prompting the bartender to lean forward. “Say, Sam, you feeling all right?”
“Oh, ah, just fine,” Sam said, seizing Al by the elbow and beginning to steer him away. “Thanks.”
“Leap?” Al hissed in an undertone as they made for the exit. “Star Leap? What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know.” The door hissed open and Sam led the way out into the metal corridor. It was slightly curved, arcing in a wide circle around the rec bar.
“You don’t think it could have anything to do…?”
“I don’t know,” Sam repeated, double-checking that the hallway was empty before turning to Al. “Could just be a coincidence.”
“A coincidence? Are you serious, Sam?”
“Look, it’s like you said, we don’t have time to find out. We have to deal with Rhonda.”
Al considered arguing further and decided Sam was right. “Okay,” he allowed. “Rhonda. Yeah. Buying a mystery item from a mystery man.”
“If that’s what this Leap is about, we need to make sure we’re doing the right thing. One of us should find the seller and see what we can find out about him or the item.”
“You do that,” Al said, thinking. “If Rhonda does have a spaceship, it should be around here somewhere. I’ve got the keys; I’ll see if I can find it. There might be something there that can help us. Or clues. Or maybe even a friend of Rhonda’s. I bet—”
“You are not hitting on Rhonda’s friend,” Sam interrupted. “You are Rhonda, remember. You’ve got to act like it. No hitting on people.”
Al scowled, offended. “That isn’t what I was going to say.”
“No?”
“No,” Al insisted. “I was going to say, I bet she’s here with someone, because it’d be awfully brave of her to come out here dressed like this if she was alone. I’m drawing a lot of attention, and she would have known that.”
“I don’t know,” Sam said with a smile. “She dresses like you. Maybe she has your aptitude for ‘social encounters’ as well.”
“I hope so,” Al said, rather more genuinely than he had meant. He straightened his jacket to cover it. “Remember the rendezvous at the observation lounge. Meet you there a little early, okay?”
“Be careful,” Sam cautioned as he started down the hallway. “Remember, you’re not a hologram anymore.”
“And you don’t have one to watch your back.”
✦
Al was delighted to discover that the colorful fob was indeed the keys to a spaceship. He was less delighted to learn that Sam had been right about them being on a space station.
This part of the station consisted of several circular concourses stacked on top of each other. The rec bar was on the lowermost deck, which alone of them was windowless. According to the information panel in the elevator, the second level included the spaceship docks, the third was shopping, and the fourth held the observation lounge and rentable event spaces.
Al got off on the second level. The elevator had brought him to the edge of a spacious two-story atrium dotted with floating holographic works of art and plants set on decorative plinths. A balcony running along one side provided a glimpse of the busy shopping level above them. On the whole, it had the feeling of a very clean mall, and might have passed for one if it hadn’t been for the windows. Set at regular intervals along the wall opposite the balcony, they framed a magnificent view of a white-green planet crowned with glittering stars.
Al spent several minutes just staring out one of the windows, taking it in. He had the sense that he’d seen space before, and not just from long nights spent in the desert, but he was certain he’d never had a view quite like this. For one thing, he didn’t recognize the icy-looking planet, and neither could he locate any familiar constellations. So either his brain was still swiss-cheesed or they were outside of the solar system like Sam had said.
I’ve never been so far from home, he realized. Separated by space as well as time.
Then Al drew a deep breath and pulled himself away, striding down the concourse and pressing random buttons on the fob every few feet until one of the parked spaceships lit up. They were docked on the outside of the station, each accessible by an airlock door set between two of the tall windows. As Al approached, he glanced out the nearest one, catching a glimpse of the ship that answered to Rhonda’s fob.
It was so impressive that he actually stopped to get a better look. He didn’t know much about 2040s spaceship design, but as far as he could tell, she was a beauty: streamlined, polished, and painted cherry red. Emblazoned across the side in white and gold letters were the words ‘G&T Starcruiser.’
Gin and tonic? he wondered, and then decided it must be a brand name.
From somewhere behind him, amongst the holographic sculptures and decorative plants, he distantly registered the sound of a door sliding open. He ignored it; there was plenty of chatter from people strolling along the concourse and shopping on the upper level, and all the doors here made strange noises.
“Still,” he said wistfully, gazing out at the beautiful red spaceship and wishing he could have met Rhonda instead of Leaping into her, “woman after my own heart.”
“I thought that was my job,” an amused voice said from behind him.
Some part of Al knew what he would see before he finished spinning around in shock. And there she was: radiant and smiling, a few streaks of gray traced through her dark hair, the woman Al thought he had lost forever. He recognized her instantly.
“Beth,” he whispered.
“Sorry about the wait,” she said, taking a step closer and prodding at the colorful handlink she was holding. “Ziggy would never admit it, but she has no experience scanning the future. And I think she’s sweet on Sam as well, because she kept trying to scan for him instead! We had to keep reminding her that you were the one we had the lock on.”
“Beth,” Al said again, hardly parsing her words and feeling something enormous rising through his chest, bringing pinpricks to his eyes.
And, seeing her now, he remembered: he remembered falling in love with her and coming home to discover that she’d left him; he remembered the drinking and smoking and moving on, and the endless line of women he’d entertained in his search for anyone remotely like her. But he also remembered coming home and launching himself into her arms; he remembered the years spent with her, the years spent raising their daughters, and the fine balancing act he’d had to do between his family and his career. He held both the tragedy and the joy in his memory, and he finally understood what Sam had been trying to tell him earlier, in the bar. He’d changed time again. He’d given Beth back to him.
Al couldn’t stop himself from reaching out for her, needing some final confirmation that she was real. But when he reached for Beth’s hand, his fingertips passed right through her, her form as insubstantial as mist or stardust. For a dreadful moment Al’s heart clenched, and then he remembered.
Of course. He had Leaped into the future. Beth was his observer, a hologram from the past, but just because they were physically separated didn’t mean she wasn’t real. And as proof of that he had her image, here, particles of light bridging time and space to be with him.
“Al? Honey?” Beth asked, pausing with the handlink still raised. “Are you okay?”
Al drew a stuttering breath, withdrew his hand, and looked away as he wiped the rising tears from his eyes. “Yeah,” he said unevenly.
“Do you remember me? Do you know what’s going on?” Beth asked anxiously, ignoring his obvious preference for privacy by circling around him and studying his face carefully. “Sam was all swiss-cheesed the first time, did it happen to you, too?”
Al looked up and smiled at her, allowing himself to feel for the first time the years of happiness they’d shared. “I’m all swiss-cheesed, yeah, but I…I remember you, Beth. Oh, I do.”
She smiled back, looking relieved, and then glanced around the concourse, where a nearby passerby had stopped to stare at Al. “Okay, good. We need to talk. And remember, no one else can see me; you look like you’re talking to yourself. Can you open this door?”
Al looked idly at the airlock door and back at her, not immediately processing her words. Now that she had moved closer, he could see all the lines on her face, the crow’s feet and careworn lines of a life well-lived, and they were tremendously distracting.
Then her request finally registered, and Al fumbled with the fob. “This? Ah…” He managed to trigger the airlock door on the third attempt.
Beth strolled past him into the five-foot airlock, which was painted cherry red and held a control panel on one wall. Al followed after her as if magnetically drawn, blindly hitting the same button on the fob to close the door behind him.
He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. It felt like he hadn’t seen her for a lifetime, but simultaneously like he had spent every day for forty years studying her every mannerism. He was in love with the way she walked, the way she stood, the sound of her voice.
“Perfect,” Beth said, turning back to the handlink and giving it a hearty smack when it squawked at her. “For basics, Ziggy says it’s October 5th, 2035. You’re not on Earth, you’re on a space station halfway across the galaxy. I’ve got coordinates, but I’m not sure what good they would do you. We don’t know how they map space in the future; they could be using an entirely different notation system. That’s the issue with Leaping into the future—there’s no real, hard data Ziggy can use. It’s all predictive. Luckily, that’s what Ziggy was built to do, even if it is all backwards.” She looked at him expectantly.
“I…” Al said faintly. He could tell she expected him to say something, ask some sort of question about what she’d just told him, perhaps, but what came out was, “You’re beautiful.”
Beth just looked at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to blush, or perhaps laugh outright at his earnestness, but then she grinned devilishly and said, “You’re not too bad yourself. The lipstick really suits you.”
Al felt the blood rush to his face and he folded his arms defensively, wondering with some alarm whether Beth was seeing him as Al or Rhonda. “It’s not mine, it’s Rhonda’s,” he protested weakly. At the same time, some part of him that had been coiled tightly ever since her arrival was beginning to unwind, buoyant with elation. Beth loved him. He remembered it, but now he saw it. They were together, and she still loved him.
“Rhonda? Oh, good,” Beth said, tapping a few buttons on the handlink. “I couldn’t get anything out of the woman in the waiting room. She must be as swiss-cheesed as you, couldn’t even tell me her name. She said something about a necklace, though—said she really needed to get it, multiple lives were at stake. You know anything about that?”
“A necklace?” Al asked, uncrossing his arms. Now that the worst of the crushing feeling had left his chest, he was finding it a lot easier to focus. “That might be what she’s buying. There’s some guy here, dressed all in midnight blue, who came up to me—to her—and said he had ‘the item,’ wanted to know if I had the money. I’m supposed to meet him in a few minutes.”
Beth frowned at him, looking a little concerned. “That could be bad news.”
“Yeah, well, we thought so, too,” Al said. “But if the real Rhonda says we need to get the necklace, then I suppose we ought to try.”
“We?” Beth echoed, and then her expression brightened. “Oh, did you find Sam? Ziggy’s been running a pinpoint search since we got the lock on you, she’s convinced he’s around here somewhere.”
“He is, I bumped into him almost right away. He’s following the seller right now. Oh, and he looks like himself, didn’t Leap into anyone.”
“We knew that.”
Al blinked. “We did?”
Beth looked equally confused. “Yes. There was no one in the waiting room after the 1953 Leap, and you said that must mean he was Leaping as himself—oh, or did that get swiss-cheesed?”
“Must have,” Al said uneasily. “I don’t remember Leaping.” He paused, debating whether to ask Beth the question most on his mind. He didn’t want to hurt her, especially so soon after getting her back, but he did want to know. “Beth…why did I do it?”
She seemed honestly surprised by the question. “To get Sam back,” she said matter-of-factly. “We couldn’t get a lock on him in the imaging chamber, and you didn’t want to leave him out here alone.”
That’s all well and good, Al thought, finding himself just looking at Beth again, soaking in every inch of the face he had seen only in his dreams for so many years, but what I really meant was…why did I leave you? How could I?
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Beth asked with some concern.
Al forced a smile. “Of course I am.”
Beth eyed him for a moment more before returning her attention to the handlink. “Ziggy wants to know if you got a last name. For Rhonda.”
“Oh yeah, ‘Cassini.’”
Beth pursed her lips as she entered the information. “Interesting. Wonder if she’s related to Giovanni.”
“Who?”
Beth waved a hand at him. “Don’t worry about it. Ziggy’s going to trace the Cassini family in our time and find out what she can about them so she can try to predict what one of their descendants might be doing in 2035. Her parents or grandparents would be alive in our time; maybe knowing more about them could help you.”
“Ziggy, predicting the future?” Al asked skeptically. His memory was still very patchy, but he couldn’t remember ever applying the word ‘reliable’ to the parallel hybrid computer or her predictions.
“She feels left out,” Beth confided in an undertone, glancing upwards as she did so, to something unseen in the imaging chamber. “It can’t hurt to indulge her.”
“Oh, I bet it can,” Al muttered.
“It’ll be fine,” Beth admonished. “Let me worry about Ziggy; you focus on getting that necklace. What time did you say you were going to meet the seller?”
“I don’t know, just a few minutes. I should probably head up there now.” He suddenly remembered what he was supposed to be doing here. “Wait, shoot, I was going to search the ship for clues—her ship, this is Rhonda’s ship.”
“Through here?” Beth asked, hooking her thumb at the inner airlock door. When Al nodded and started moving towards it, Beth stuck her head straight through the door, a sight that made Al suddenly quite queasy.
He immediately understood why Sam had told him off for walking through things when he’d been the one observing. Beth might be a hologram, but she was extraordinarily realistic, and the abrupt intersection of her body with a demonstrably solid object was more than a little disturbing.
“Doesn’t look like much,” she reported a moment later, pulling her head out of the wall. “Nice ship. Very red. There’s room for a couple of people, but it’s empty, not much lying around.”
“That’ll have to do,” Al said, double-checking that the metal strips of money were still in his jacket pocket before using the fob to open the airlock door leading back to the concourse.
“Where is this meeting?” Beth asked, strolling out after him and looking around the concourse interestedly.
“Observation lounge,” Al said, turning back to face the airlock as he closed the door so it would be less obvious that he was talking to someone who wasn’t there. “Two floors above us.”
“I’ll meet you there,” she said, and before Al could steal a final, longing look, she vanished.