A Lesson in Sacrifice
Part 7
"What just happened?” To his own ears, Sam’s voice was shaky. He hadn’t meant for it to sound like that. He tried putting his hand on Liz’s shoulder again, but she moved away from him. She was obviously in shock. She must have seen the visions too.
Suddenly, a noise behind him made Sam turn. He was very relieved to see Al. He motioned for the hologram to meet him in the other room. Turning back to face Liz, he saw that she had positioned herself between him and the door to the other office. She looked absolutely terrified.
Sam tried to move past her but she stopped him. “You… you can’t…” she started, her voice unsteady. He gently put his hands on her shoulders and was planning to move her aside, but she shook from his grip and looked him straight in the eyes.
“You absolutely CANNOT go in there,” she said, her voice much stronger. He could tell by the determination in her eyes that she meant it, too.
He cast a questioning glance in Al’s direction.
“Future Max is in there. She thinks that if you two meet, you’ll both be destroyed. Which would happen, if you really were Max,” the Observer said.
“And now?”
Liz looked at him, caught off guard for a second.
“No, not now, not five minutes from now, not ever! I think you should leave, Max,” she replied.
At the same time, Al was answering the question that had really been meant for him.
“Now, Max is back at the project. Ziggy says there’s a 99,4% chance that nothing will happen if you meet.”
“Okay,” Sam said and, pushing Liz aside, he opened the door to the second office.
“Max!!” Liz screamed. “He’s coming in, GO!”
**************
When he heard Liz’s scream, Max quickly looked around the room. There was a window on the far side, maybe he could make it in time. With three long steps, he was across the room. He put his hands on the window lock.
“Wait,” he heard his own voice say. He resisted the urge to turn.
“It’ll be okay, I promise,” the younger Max continued.
“You don’t understand,” the older man replied. “I have to get out of here.”
“Al, I can’t tell him!” he heard him say.
Max knew he should move, try to leave while his younger self was seemingly having a one-sided conversation with thin air, but he couldn’t.
“I’m not Max,” the younger man finally said. “If you turn around, we won’t explode or anything. Actually, we already would have, if it had to happen.”
Max thought about it for a moment. It made sense. When she had masterminded the whole time-travel thing, his friend Serena had been very clear about the fact that the younger Max shouldn’t see him. Now that he had and nothing had happened, there was a fairly good chance that nothing would happen if he turned around and actually faced himself.
So he did. A sense of déjà-vu washed over him. He had come face-to-face with himself once before, at the carnival so many years ago. He tried to shake the feeling. It wasn’t a happy memory.
He saw Liz from the corner of his eye, and quickly moved to stand beside her. He put his hand on her arm and rubbed it lightly.
“Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.
She looked up at him, visibly shaken. “I had a flash when I kissed him, Max. He’s right, whomever he is, he’s not you.”
Max put his arm around Liz’s shoulders and held her close to him. He turned to face the other man.
“Okay, then. Who are you?”
*************
They were still sitting in Congresswoman Whitaker’s office a few hours later, trying to make sense of what “Max” was telling them.
The concept of someone leaping from life to life, temporarily replacing the soul in the body he was visiting was hard to grasp, or believe, at first. But Liz had been brought back from the dead by an alien she had then fallen in love with and of whom a future version was now holding her hand; Sam’s story didn’t seem too farfetched after all.
Once they had established that her Max was safe and actually not too far away, albeit nine years in the future, in Stallion Gates, New Mexico, she had relaxed and soon found herself fascinated by the Leaper’s story.
After Sam finished telling them about project Quantum Leap, it was Future Max’s turn to fill Sam in on the presence of aliens on Earth. Every once in a while, Sam would hold his hand up and listen to the silence. He would then repeat a question that was asked by someone named Al that Max and Liz couldn’t see. Sam had explained that Al was his link to the project.
So Max explained everything, from when the aliens were born to how he saved Liz at the Crashdown that day in September. He explained about Tess and Nasedo, and about Antar and Khivar. About the future, he didn’t say much. Only what he had already told Liz.
“So your plan is to make sure Tess stays in order to save the world?” Sam finally asked once Max was done.
“Yes, in essence that’s what we thought would be the best course of action,” Max answered.
“We?”
“Liz and I.” He turned to the young woman and squeezed her hand harder. He opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind. He smiled at her instead.
“What were you going to say?” she whispered to him.
“Nothing…it’s not important.” He smiled again. “Well, it is to me, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you.” He knew he had already said too much. Liz was curious. He leaned in closer and whispered to her. “I’ll tell you later.” She smiled.
Sam looked at the couple in front of him and then glanced at Al. Al’s eyes had a faraway look, as if he remembered a time when he had shared something like that with someone special. He soon came back to the present.
“It won’t work,” he told Sam. “You have to tell them.”
Sam nodded and took a deep breath.
“Tess is not the key,” he said.
Max and Liz looked at him curiously. Sam went on. “We don’t know for sure, because you come from a time that is still future to Al’s, but Ziggy, our hybrid computer, thinks that the end of the world will happen anyway, even if Tess stays.”
“But how? Why?” Max asked.
Sam looked at Al. Al nodded to him.
“Our best guess right now is because you’re not with Liz.”
Liz blinked in surprise and looked at Max and Sam in turn.
“Me? What do I have to do with this?”
“Well, we’re not exactly sure. Ziggy is still running scenarios. Max, why do you think Tess is the answer?”
“Well,” Max started. “We weren’t strong enough to hold off the invasion. If Tess had been there, we might have had a chance.”
He looked at Liz, then at Sam. “It’s the only thing we could think of. Two weeks ago, after Isabel died…”. He heard Liz gasp. He turned to look at her. “We replayed what happened over and over again. We were up all night. We couldn’t come up with anything we could have done differently. Except maybe a mindwarp.” He looked back at Sam. “Mindwarping is Tess’s power. Isabel could do it to a certain extent, but she was not as good at it. She was killed trying to mindwarp--“ He stopped and shook his head. “It’s not important now. Liz and I figured that if Tess had been there, Isabel might have had a better chance. And the more we thought about it, the more it made sense.”
Max looked at the faces staring back at him and lowered his head. He looked at Liz’s hand in his own, how perfectly it fit there. It suddenly dawned on him that he would never hold his Liz’s hand again. The rational part of his brain had known it all along, of course, but he had never actually realized what it would feel like. He ran his thumb over Liz’s delicate fingers. He thought of everything they had shared in the past 14 years, of everything he was asking her to give up for the love of his sister, and the fate of a planet. What he really was asking of her was to give them all a lesson in sacrifice. When he spoke again, his voice was unsteady.
“We figured that the best way to make sure Tess would stay was for me to… be with her. For me to give Liz up.” He laughed cheerlessly. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. What the hell were we thinking?”
Liz smiled dolefully and ran her free hand through his hair. “If we thought it was our best chance of survival, I’ll do it,” she said softly.
“But it’s not,” Al said. “Ziggy has more information. Sam, I’ll be right back.”
Al opened the door to the Imaging Chamber and vanished.
“There was that flash of light again,” Max said absently.
Sam looked at him with a small smile. “Al just left. Ziggy has new information.”
But Max wasn’t listening to him anymore. “That’s what you said to me before we asked Serena for help,” he told Liz. She wiped a tear on his cheek he hadn’t realized he had shed. “And you knew what you were giving up…”
“I know what I would be giving up,” she replied.
Max smiled sadly and said nothing.
**************
Al stood in the Imaging Chamber. “Are you going to come out, Admiral?” Ziggy asked.
“No, I just wanted to talk to you without Sam hearing. What’s this new information about Max? How did he die?”
“He died in a car crash last summer. It was suspected to be a suicide; he had a fight with Tess and drove his Jeep over a cliff. But after further investigation, it was ruled an accident.”
“Liz also died in a traffic accident, didn’t she?”
“Yes. And so did their friend Alex Whitman.”
“Hmm…,” Al said. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Ziggy, do you still think the world will end in five years now that Max Evans is dead? I mean, he was the King, would the aliens still attack us if he’s no longer here?”
“No, I don’t think the aliens will attack in five years.”
Al sighed in relief.
“Michael is now the leader of the Antarian on Earth. As you know, he left Roswell after Liz died. He has made many new enemies. According to my latest projections, Earth will be destroyed by aliens in 6 to 8 months.”
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