Sam Becket could be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the intruder in his office at Stallion's Gate. After all, how often is it that one sees oneself from the back? As it was, he had dropped into a defensive stance and was reaching for the security alarm button when the vague sense of familiarity resolved itself, freezing him in place. Not only was it his own handwriting covering the dry erase board next to his desk on the other side of the room, but the hand doing it was his as well, though noticeably older and thinner.
"We did it!" he whispered with both awe and disbelief coloring his voice. "We did it!"
Shoulders slumping, hand pausing mid-equation, his older self answered, "No, no, we didn't." There was a world of defeat and melancholy in his words, so much so that Sam couldn't have doubted despite the evidence before him.
Nevertheless he protested,"But..."
Not giving him a chance to go on, the other Becket said quietly, "They closed us down two days from now. For Washington, there simply wasn't enough evidence to prove that Quantum Leap was ever going to work, and they had other projects they wanted to see me - you - do."
Slowly the older man turned to face Sam, eyes downcast, his sorrow showing clearly. "Losing Quantum Leap... I could have handled that, I think. I would have fought for more funding until the government committees threatened to arrest me for harassment, gotten angry as hell for a few years if that didn't work, finally mourned the Project, then moved on."
Looking up and directly into his own younger face for the first time, Beckett went on, tears forming as he did. "But a month after the announcement, while we were still fighting to keep it going, Al was killed in a bar brawl by some terminally angry Air Force pilot named Stanton." He closed his eyes in remembered pain, and said to himself softly, "After making it through so much, he died trying to break up a meaningless alcohol-fueled fight."
"No," Sam denied quietly, shaking his head in disbelief. He shuddered, then said grimly, "This is a trick of some kind, or a sick joke. You're lying to me; you have to be lying to me."
"God, I wish I were!" The other man started to turn back to the board but swung around and added fiercely, "It never stopped hurting! You hear me? I miss him and love him and need him as much today as I did when he died over 20 years ago. And my biggest regret in a life full of them is that I never told him what he meant to me. That eats at me as much as his passing."
Hearing his worst and deepest fear spoken aloud made Sam want to scream, made him want to believe he was having a nightmare or hallucinating or anything but listening to his future self quietly destroy every hope he had. But the other man's pain was far too real, and the image of loss he painted far too believable. He sank to his knees, huddling over his middle as if he'd taken a physical blow. "No," he whispered. "No, not Al. I couldn't survive that." He looked up through tear-laden lashes. "How did I survive that?"
Sighing, the silver-haired scientist resumed writing. "I'm not sure I did. Oh, my body moves around, functions the way it's supposed to, but inside... inside there's nothing."
He leaned his forehead on the white board for a second, then straightened and said evenly, "After I stopped screaming in pain, I crawled off to the first backwater college that would hire me and hid there in obscurity. I taught freshman physics and chemistry, and refused to officially do another piece of original work until the world literally fell apart around me. You could say I was trying to deny my existence by living like I didn't.
"In the long run, being around proved to be useful, at least for other people. When everything went to hell in a hand basket, I remembered that Stallion's Gate had only been mothballed. Things had fallen apart so badly that nobody official even knew it still existed, I think. A check showed that my hidden back doors and clearances hadn't been cleaned out of the security systems. Guess no one cared enough about a defunct, wasted effort to bother making sure it couldn't be re-accessed, top secret or not.
"I brought the teachers and students I worked with, along with their families, to Stallion's Gate, and they created a good place to live. There was clean water from the Artisan well originally used to cool the nuclear reactors for the project, materials and equipment left behind that could be used to set up greenhouse and hydroponics - everything they needed to get started. It was an opportunity for them for safety, a way to escape from the insanity of a civilization falling."
"What happened?" Sam asked hoarsely, not sure if he cared but his innate curiosity surfacing regardless.
With a barely there shrug, the other answered cryptically, "Entropy. Chaos theory personified. Dominoes falling. One thing going wrong, causing another system to fail, and that one crashing yet another system and every one scrambling to try to piece it all back together but causing as much damage as they're trying to repair.
"That's what eventually happened to the refuge at the Project. Mankind's fumbling caused an earthquake that closed off our well a couple of years ago. We've made do as best we can, and a few of us, older people with no families, have been helping stretch the water supply by drinking the contaminated water from the coolant systems. But it's being abandoned, my time, and before the power grids are taken down, I decided to take a chance. Like I should have a long, long time ago," he finished bitterly.
"You Leaped," Sam said rhetorically.
"Yes," the other affirmed shortly. "I had years to study why we didn't have any success initially, though I never published or told anyone that I was doing it. The results were mind-boggling." Apparently either expecting or picking up on skepticism, he motioned to the board. "Read, and think about it while you do."
Reluctantly, nearly refusing because of a formless dread he didn't understand, Sam turned his attention to the elegant figures and symbols flowing across the board. At first they were well known territory, but as they progressed, he was drawn deeper and deeper into a theoretical landscape that few people could imagine existed. In that terrain, one concept followed logically and necessarily from the other, leading to the next inevitable step, until he gasped, fully realizing why Quantum Leap, as he had originally designed, it could never work.
His mind whirled, trying to deal with the full impact of the new information, and he huddled over himself again, shutting out the sight of the math that completely changed his view of reality. "Unified field, but not the way Steven thought it would be at all," he mumbled. "Inertia, momentum, light, sound, electromagnetism, time, space, faith, belief, will, thought, emotion... it's the same thing. At the core it's all the same thing."
"Because of that, calling a human lifetime a string that could be balled up was putting it very, very simply," Beckett said dryly, sounding as if from a great distance. "It all *touches:* all thoughts, all lives, all times. There's no way to separate your life from the many surrounding you, influencing you, being influenced in turn by you. There's a kind of, of, well, temporal/mental pressure to keep you in place."
"But you're here!" Sam blurted.
Beckett didn't answer immediately; instead he finished the last line he'd been working on, then went to sit behind the desk, fatigue marring his steps as he walked. "One thing we had right," he said tiredly, "Was that by knotting the ends of your string together you can move within your own lifetime." He smiled ironically. "Just not within your own life. Once you're shoved off your string, you tumble, then bump to other people's lives, literally taking their place, I think."
"Knotting...." Sam rose unsteadily from the floor, and plopped into the couch near the door. "Life and death," he muttered, studying his counterpart carefully. The man was too pale and thin, and now that he was paying attention, he could see minor tremors in the slender fingers. "You're dying," he said flatly. "That's why you came back now, instead of when you first solved the problem."
"Cancer from the contaminated water," Beckett agreed mildly. "Not that there were many rads in it, but I worked with radiation for the accelerator chamber for so long, I guess it was more than my body could handle. That's why I decided to stay behind while the others evacuated, why I decided to power Ziggy up after leaving her dormant all that time. With my impending death, Leaping became possible."
Sam sat on the edge of the couch, thinking furiously. "Of course! If you're at the end of the string, there's not as much pressure. You're not going to touch any more lives, and, for the most part, they're not going to touch yours, especially if you've been alone awhile when it happens. Since you're about to leave your string anyway, it wouldn't take more than a hard burst of energy. You'd have enough temporal mass from your life span, so to speak, that you could aim yourself like a bullet.
"I still don't understand why. Why be here except to give me preview of how miserable and pointless my life is going to be?"
Standing, Sam paced uneasily, not getting far from the door, as if the escape implied by being near it was necessary for his peace of mind. "There's only one reason I can think of for you doing it." He spun to look over the equations again, this time seeing what was implied, not just mathematically spelled out. "Pressure or not, time can be changed! You came here to save Al by telling me when and how he's going to die!"
"It's not that easy," Beckett warned, leaning back in the desk chair and letting his head drop onto the back of it. "To stop the fight, you have to do something equal in mass, so to speak, as the accumulated effect Al's death had the first time around. There's no way to be sure, but my guess is it would take another death to do it. You - we - can't cold-bloodedly murder someone, not even for him. Or maybe especially for him."
There was too much truth in that, and Sam went back to pacing. "Okay, who says it has to be one big thing? Why wouldn't a bunch of small things all added together do it?"
"How many?" the other man said, obviously playing teacher since he'd had the opportunity to consider all the factors. "And maybe more importantly, when?"
Seeing the equations in his head, plugging in the numbers, Sam muttered too himself, "Too many, too soon, if you say he's going to die in a month or so."
Beckett's face was gray with exhaustion, but his eyes were sparkling with internal amusement. "Think of it as trying to divert a stream. You either need a large rock to do it, or a whole lot of small ones. And the farther upstream you are, the easier it is."
Unable to help himself, Sam stared at his counterpart. "You aren't going to live long enough to do multiple leaps; you have to be trying to make a big change."
"Actually, I'm trying to do both. Who is the one person who has the most influence on Al Calavicci's life?"
Not sure where the older man was going, Sam hesitated, but finally admitted, "Me."
Nodding in agreement, Beckett said, "His last divorce may have be precipitated by his wife finding him in bed with that Dallas Cheerleader, but it was constantly being at work or in DC with me that really killed the marriage."
There was only one conclusion Sam could come to, and he said accusingly, "You want me to Leap. Now, before they close the project down."
"Since there's no guarantee that simply physically leaving would be enough to change his history so that he'll live, what other choice is there? If you Leap, they'll be forced to keep the Project going, at least for a while, if only to see what the ultimate result is. Then Al will be acting as your observer and trying to run things here in your absence, making it likely that he'll never have a reason to go near that damned bar in the first place."
"I Leap," Sam repeated with growing agitation. "Knowing that it will tumble me out of my own time line, knowing that the retrieval program I wrote won't work because of that. I'll be lost in time, maybe permanently."
Beckett regarded him steadily. "Yes, but Al will be alive. If the first Leap isn't enough to save him, you can do it again. And again and again if you have to. The math shows that you'll have enough momentum from the initial acceleration to keep you going; all you have to do is free yourself from the string you're in by changing it, and you'll ricochet to another life. You'll only be able to aim once, but if you keep your heart and mind locked on Al, you should gravitate towards events and people that connect to him. In a way, it's like charges attracting like charges."
He sat forward abruptly, fingertip going to the top of the desk and tapping it for emphasis as he spoke. "Isn't saving Al worth giving up the worthless, useless life you have ahead of you? Isn't exploring time, however randomly, better than being defeated by those close-minded politicians who can't see past not having a military application for all the work you've been doing? What, besides him, do you really have to tie you to here?"
It was the kind of viciously pointed question that only a good friend or one's own self can see that needs asked, and Sam sagged back into the couch. He had no wife or lover and had stopped pretending he was looking for one when he realized how deep his feelings for Al went. To his friend, he made excuses about being over worked or too frustrated with women who wanted commitment and family now. To himself, he admitted he wanted no one taking even the smallest fraction of his attention from Al.
As far as family was concerned, he only had Mom and Katie left, and it had been months since he'd even spoken to either of them. For whatever reason, Katie blamed him for the disaster her teen years had been - losing Dad, Tom, and the farm, getting pregnant by that Neanderthal, then having him abuse her and her children. His mother knew better, but seeing her torn between being there for the daughter that so desperately needed her, and mothering a son who was usually too wrapped up in own genius to notice her, Sam had painfully let the physical distance between them become an emotional one, as well. For the most part, he only called her a few times a year, around the holidays or his birthday, and he had to think to recall the last time he'd visited her.
His counterpart didn't interrupt his musings, but he said so softly that Sam almost took the words for his own, "It's not like you haven't been thinking about doing it, anyway."
Literally arguing with himself, Sam automatically said, "It's irresponsible and dangerous. It's my work and I'm the only one that completely understands it, though Gooshie, Tina and a few of the others are more than competent with their part of it. If something goes seriously wrong, it's likely I'd be the only one who could fix it."
"What could go more wrong than losing the power plant that's running the whole thing to start with?" Becket argued persuasively. "None of this would have existed if it hadn't been for Al. From the start he was the one who shoved and bribed and cajoled to get the money and the support to make your dreams come true. Without him, all those years, all his effort, will go down the tubes.
"You are the only one who can fix that. You're the only one besides him whose brain has been mapped for the imaging process, and yours is the only life that you can ethically and morally risk in an untried experiment. And frankly, we both know that you're the only one he'd trust to mess with his life to start with."
For a long time Sam sat staring at nothing, refusing to acknowledge either his future self or the argument that had been placed in front of him. Nor did Beckett press the issue. The fight was an internal one now; a choice between what was right and what the heart wanted to be right.
In the end Sam murmured, "It'll have to be tonight, while Al's out trying to wine and dine the committee, and everyone else is off shift. The accelerator is up, nearly full power from the test earlier; all I have to do is program the co-ordinates of a Leap and make sure the control room is empty when I step in. Otherwise they'll try to stop me."
"The man who killed Al lost his father when he was young," Becket said quietly. "He was a test pilot trying to break the Mach 2 barrier, and his plane went down. Stanton's wife was pregnant and went into early labor, losing the baby and going into a depression that led her to alcoholism. If you can save Tom Stanton, you might be able to save Al, too, by changing the son's history so that he has a better life. Maybe when the time comes around for him to get in a drunken brawl, he won't have ever had a reason to be either angry or drunk. Bottom equation on the board has the co-ordinates that will put you in the right place and time."
Sam shot him a penetrating look, but the other man was leaning back in his chair again, eyes closed, expression exhausted but serene. "What will happen to you?" he asked abruptly.
With a small smile, Becket answered, "With luck I will have never existed. And that's good enough for me." He peeled up his eyelids and answered Sam's unspoken question. "Better to have him with you as a untouchable hologram, alive and well, with your love carefully hidden, than to be alone, mourning his loss, believe me."
"Guess I don't have much choice but to believe you." There was smiling resignation in Sam's tone, and he turned toward the door. On impulse he turned back to say thank you, but as he did, the other man became a being of light with electricity flowing through it, then he vanished in a retina-burning shockwave. Sam stared for a minute at where his older self had been, then resolutely left to change his future.
finis