Slideways Leap (A Sliders/Quantum Leap crossover)

By Perri Smith
Copyright 1997

Author's Notes
This is set well before 'Exodus', and takes place between the third-season Sliders episodes 'Murder Most Foul' and 'Slide Like an Egyptian' (and contains mild spoilers for 'Murder Most Foul' and 'In Dino Veritas', plus spoilers for 'Gillian of the Spirits'), and around the beginning of the fourth season of Quantum Leap (no spoilers, I think). Whew! And I guess this is rated around PG. Oh, and I'm using the 'body Leap' theory.

My deepest thanks go to the keepers and authors of the Quantum Leap FAQs and Ed Hall, keeper of the most-excellent Sliders FAQ, for reminding me of crucial details; to my beta readers David J. Warner, Susan Crites, Dawn Steele and Me, for the tips and ego-boo; and to Jennifer, for being my sounding board, remembering the obligatory lech, and figuring out whodunit before the writer did.

Dedicated to Abby, just because.

"Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
a long, long way from home."
-- Traditional

Chapter 1

"Quinn, come on!"

"Just a minute."

"Mr. Mallory, we have only twenty seconds."

"I know, I know, just let me finish this page."

"Move it, Q-Ball, we're gonna miss the slide!"

"All right, already!" Quinn Mallory gave up and closed his book, tucking the paperback into his back pocket as he pushed himself to his feet. He was two pages away from finding out who the murderer was -- although he was pretty sure he'd figured it out somewhere in the middle -- and now he was going to have to wait until the next world to see if he was right.

At least he could take the book with him this time, he consoled himself as he loped across the grass towards his friends, who were clustered impatiently next to the statue of Newt Gingrich. The last time he'd tried to read anything, the book had gotten left in their room at the Dominion Hotel when they'd had to slide out of trouble, and the author apparently hadn't had any published doubles on any other world. He *still* didn't know how that damn book ended.

It was all Arturo's fault, anyway. Ever since they'd gotten trapped in his so-called 'therapy' session, living out a Sherlockian murder mystery, Quinn had been addicted to the stupid things. Wade called them morbid and Arturo refused to even acknowledge their existence, but Quinn had discovered a fascination for trying to outguess the writer.

He chuckled at himself. *Competitive? Me? Naaah....*

"It's about time." Wade Welles grinned up at him as he made it to their sides. "We were going to leave you, you know."

"Sure you were," he said smugly. That threat had stopped having any force the third or fourth time the group had risked missing slides to wait for anyone. "Anyway, we've got plenty of time. I'm actually going to miss this world -- no one tried to kill us the entire time we were here."

"We were only here five hours," Rembrandt Brown pointed out. "They didn't have all that much time."

"That's never stopped anyone before."

"Well, I'll tell you one thing," Wade sighed, "I sure won't miss this world's idea of fashion."

"I don't know about that." Quinn pretended to look her over. "You kinda look cute in acid yellow."

"Yeah, well, neon fuschia doesn't do a thing for you!"

"5,4,3...." Professor Maximillian Arturo ignored the usual pre-slide banter as he counted down, then aimed the timer at an empty stretch of space next to the statue as its digital readout clicked over to 00:00:00. A stream of colorless light shot from the end of the timer, then hovered in mid-air, warping the space around it as it twisted and expanded into the familiar wormhole. As the interdimensional wind tugged at his clothes, Quinn marveled again at how beautiful this thing he had created was.

*And how dangerous,* he firmly reminded himself. *Don't forget the dangerous part.* Sliding had already stolen their home from them, had come too close to stealing their lives, as his nightmares liked to remind him.

"The relative merits of this world aside," Arturo said pointedly, "I believe it is time we departed it, before we, too, become color-blind."

Rembrandt made an elaborate bow towards the wormhole. "After you, Professor."

"Oh no, Mr. Brown, after you," Arturo responded hastily. "I was privileged to be your landing pad on the last world -- this time, I'm happy to say, it's your turn."

Rembrandt grimaced, then took a few running steps forward and jumped into the middle of the interdimensional vortex, his shout echoing behind them. Arturo shook his head at the other man's exuberance, then made his own, slightly more awkward, entrance into the vortex.

Quinn checked to make sure the book was still secure in his back pocket, then raced Wade for the wormhole, beating her there by better than a foot and jumping in. He could hear her half-hearted shout of "Cheater!" as he slid into the vortex.

The colors surged around him, fantastic shades of red and green and blue and a thousand other hues, including some he'd never known existed before sliding. They twisted through the silver waterfall of the wormhole in a dizzying whirlpool of sight and sound, the greatest waterslide in all the universes. Behind him, he could hear Wade's usual shouts; ahead of him, he could barely see Arturo and Rembrandt's forms as they made their own journeys. Not for the first time, he wondered if they saw the same things sliding that he did, but none of them had ever been able to adequately describe the wormhole, even to each other.

The end of the wormhole loomed in front of him; he braced himself for impact with what would, judging by their track record, be either pavement or rock. Through the distortion of the wormhole exit, he saw Arturo land on Rembrandt and realized that he was going to have the same point of entry. *Oh great,* he groaned, *The Professor's going to spend the entire world complaining about this.*

The exit swung up to meet him and he squeezed his eyes shut in anticipation of his landing. So he didn't see the flash of blue lightning that suddenly enveloped him, only felt himself being torn away. He tried to shout, to scream, but before he could force the sounds from his throat, there was nothing.

Sam Beckett had found himself in some interesting situations immediately following a Leap. He'd wound up in the middle of barfights and basketball games, in aircraft getting ready to crash-land, and on the wrong end of more weapons than he really wanted to think about. Actually, he thought irrelevantly, there wasn't really a right end of any weapon.

But rarely did he recover from a Leap in the middle of falling through mid-air toward a pile of people below him. He didn't have time to brace for impact before he landed on them, and he was even less prepared for the second impact on his back, which drove him down harder against his landing pad.

He lay still for a long moment, trying to recover his wind and his thought processes, before the heap below him started shifting and cursing. "Mr. Mallory, please remove your elbow from my kidney," an irritable bass voice growled from somewhere in the vicinity of Sam's chest.

"Why don't you try getting your chin out of my back first," a second, baritone voice complained from even lower.

"All of you just relax," a female voice ordered from on top of the pile. "Let me get off, then Quinn can." The weight on top of him squirmed, revealing quite convincingly that yes, this *was* the source of the woman's voice, then slid away with a thud and a loud "Ouch!" Sam found himself suddenly able to draw a deep breath and did so, quickly, gasping for air and thanking whatever Power looked over him that Al wasn't around to see this.

"If you're quite ready, Mr. Mallory," the bass voice said acerbically, "You can move off me at any time."

Sam took the hint and slid backwards, finding grass beneath his feet and collapsing gratefully. With a variety of moans and groans, the other members of the pile unfolded themselves; he prepared himself, then opened his eyes to start the process of figuring out just where the heck he'd landed this time.

He was in the middle of some kind of park, as near as he could tell, since everything more than ten feet away was hidden in a thick fog. But the grass was green and the air, while wet, wasn't very cold. He was wearing what felt like jeans and a flannel shirt which the weather couldn't penetrate, although the seat of his pants was rapidly getting damp. He ignored the minor discomfort in favor of studying his companions.

Two men sprawled with a considerable lack of dignity on the ground only a few feet away. Both were heavily built, although the black man's frame seemed to be more solid than that of the older white man, and both seemed to have had the wind knocked out of them. They were both dressed well, if strangely, in shirts and pants of familiar material, but in Day-Glo shades of purple, pink and green that would have put Al into sartorial heaven. The black man had short hair and neat mustache; the other man had a full beard, and slightly shaggy black hair, which he was even now pulling his fingers through in what looked like a habitual gesture.

"I fail to understand," the older man, who proved to be the owner of the bass voice, said irritably, "why every slide must find people landing on me. Can't any of you attempt to aim better when you exit the wormhole?"

"Come on, Professor," the other man groaned, "it's not like anyone lands on you deliberately. And you did a pretty good job finding me, you know."

"Well, at least we know you two are all right," the woman's voice said wryly. "If you can fight, nothing's broken. Quinn, are you okay?"

Sam blinked; when no one else answered, he assumed Quinn meant him and turned to face the voice. It belonged to a short, delicately built woman in her early twenties, with short reddish-brown hair and a pixie face that looked as if it had been born to smile. She was dressed, like the men, in colors that almost glowed, although they looked considerably less ridiculous on her petite frame than on the other two. She was also wearing short sleeves and a skirt, rather than the men's warmer clothes, and looked pretty good in them.

Studying himself quickly, Sam discovered that his clothing followed the same color scheme. His shirt almost made his eyes hurt.

"Quinn?" the woman pressed, starting to look worried.

"I'm fine," Sam said hastily. "Just got the wind knocked out of me."

"Good," she said, with a wink. "That's what you get for cheating. Just because your legs are longer, you always get to go through the wormhole first."

"Come on, girl," the black man protested, standing and stretching. "If you went first, you'd wind up underneath the professor and trust me, that's one place you do *not* want to be."

"Thank you for that ringing endorsement, Mr. Brown," the professor growled, hauling himself to his feet with a visible effort. "Let me assure you, you are no pleasure to be caught under, either."

Sam looked from one man to the other, trying to decide if any punches were going to be thrown. But, although they seemed serious enough in their complaints, the tone was more of an oft-repeated argument than anything else. Since the woman looked disgusted rather than worried, Sam assumed they were all friends here.

"If you two are finished," the woman said, shivering slightly, "can someone look at the timer and find out how long we've got on this world, whatever it is?"

The professor fumbled in his shirt and pulled out a black object that resembled nothing so much as a universal remote control. He looked at it for a moment, then frowned, slapped it against his hand, and studied it again. Sam had a sudden, amusing flash of Al and his handlink Leaping into the man.

"Oh, damn," the professor swore softly. "Mr. Mallory, your infernal machine appears to have loosened another screw."

Everyone's face turned towards him, and Sam blinked, then figured out Mr. Mallory must be him. He knew his name, then -- Quinn Mallory. That was good.

However, the people he was with expected him to fix something that was related to wormholes and 'this world'. That was bad. He gritted his teeth and pulled himself awkwardly to his feet, then looked over the professor's shoulder, very carefully not touching the 'remote control' and trying to act as if he knew what he was doing.

Instead of buttons or a keypad, a digital readout, with red dancing furiously and incomprehensibly over it, greeted him. Green danced up and down another set of readouts. As he'd expected, he had absolutely no clue what it was -- but the other three were still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

He sighed softly. "Oh, boy."

"A descriptive response, Mr. Mallory," the professor snapped, "but hardly helpful. Do you have any idea what could have gone wrong this time?"

"You know," the woman said slowly, "I thought I saw something at the end of the slide, some kind of... weird blue light. Quinn, do you think that could have affected the timer?"

*She saw the Leap? How could she...? And what's a slide? Well,* Sam told himself firmly, *when in doubt, stall until you can talk to Al. Darn it, Al, where are you, anyway?*

"I'm... not sure," he said out loud. "I'd have to take a closer look at the timer." *And figure out what it's a timer for*, he added to himself silently.

"Man, Q-Ball," the black man -- Mr. Brown? -- groaned. "Every time we slide, seems like that timer gets messed up. Can't you fix it for real?"

"Knock it off, Remmy" the young woman told him, apparently resigned. "You know it's not Quinn's fault. Let's just get to the Dominion so he and the professor can figure out what's gone wrong this time."

She shivered again and Sam realized that wherever they were, it was chilly out, and she was not dressed for it. He stripped off his long- sleeved shirt and put it carefully around her shoulders. She blinked, then smiled warmly up at him, snuggling into the shirt.

As they headed out of the park, Sam had to stifle an entirely inappropriate laugh. He'd give good money to find out what had gone wrong in this time -- so he could fix it, and Leap away before he had to fake his way through repairing a wormhole generator. Or before he was driven as insane as these people seemed to be.

"What the hell's gone wrong this time?" Admiral Albert Calavicci's voice echoed through Ziggy's domain, sending frightened techs scurrying for cover before his sometimes excessively Italian temper could descend on them. Al felt vaguely guilty about that, but concern for Sam overrode everything else. It had been three hours since Ziggy had confirmed the end of Sam's Leap, and they still had no idea where he was.

Gooshie, used to Al's explosions, stood his ground. "We don't know what went wrong," he said, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips nervously. "There was a power surge just as Dr. Beckett's Leap finished. At the same time, Ziggy's memory banks went.. well, a little crazy."

Al narrowed his eyes in the expression that had reduced many a petty officer to a cower. "A little crazy? What's a little crazy? Haven't you ever heard of surge protectors? What happened to Sam?!" He was shouting again by the last sentence.

Gooshie blinked rapidly, another of his twitches coming into play, but still didn't flinch. "Of course we've heard of surge protectors -- there's a power surge every time Dr. Beckett completes a Leap, that's one of the ways Ziggy knows he's arrived. Dr. Beckett built surge suppressers into the hardware, but this time, somehow, they failed. As for the memory banks... well, Ziggy seems to have lost access to them. We *should* still be able to use the Imaging Chamber, but finding out exactly where Dr. Beckett is will prove, ah, challenging."

"We could try reloading the backups from the mirror mainframe," one of the techs suggested hesitantly, coming out of hiding. Al still couldn't see his face. "If we reintegrate the primary memory systems with the back-up control files, we should be able to resurrect the command files -- that's what they're there for, after all."

Gooshie nodded consideringly, his attention shifting from Al's noisy displeasure to the problem at hand. "We'd need Ziggy's help to access the resurrected commands, which would mean we'd need to get the main AI generator back on-line. Then we could..."

The conversation rapidly degenerated into technobabble that Al couldn't follow, even after all those years of hanging around with Sam. Reluctantly, he decided to trust that Gooshie knew what he was doing -- it was a cinch Al didn't.

So, instead of breathing down the techies' necks, he told himself firmly, he'd go see if the Waiting Room's latest guest was, by some miracle, coherent. If the Visitor knew where and when he'd been before the Leap, it would make Gooshie and Ziggy's job that much easier.

Reluctantly, he left Gooshie and headed down the walls of the mountain lab to the Waiting Room, to see what Dr. Beeks and her staff had managed to learn from the Visitor.

As he strode determinedly down the halls, he noticed that no one who passed him would meet his eyes. Bad news had, as usual, traveled fast. He set his jaw and opened the door to the Waiting Room, grimly determined to get answers out of anything from a catatonic to a raving lunatic, if he had to go through an entire swarm of shrinks to do it.

So it was a shock when he saw Sam's body standing by itself, methodically studying the waiting room, and when Sam's eyes turned to look at him with a calm, oh-so-familiar intelligence, he felt his heart stop. Could the power surge have scrambled things that much? Could this finally be...?

"Sam?" he whispered on a wild surge of hope.

That hope died hard when Sam's eyes hardened into a foreign expression. "Where am I?" a stranger demanded in Sam's voice. "What have you done with my friends?"

Chapter 2

Quinn was not happy. In fact, he was so far past unhappy that the word didn't even apply anymore. It wasn't the first time he'd ended a slide separated from the others, and he was unpleasantly certain it wouldn't be the last. But he didn't usually black out during slides and wake up in strange clothing -- except for when he'd been shot, but that didn't count.

*At least I can touch things this time,* he consoled himself. He'd tried that right off, after promising any deity who happened to be listening anything he/she/it wanted if only he wasn't a ghost again. Someone had been listening, for once; no astral plane.

Unfortunately, that was about the only thing that had gone right. When he'd woken up, doctors had been swarming around him, all of whom had looked shocked when he opened his eyes and started demanding to know what was going on. No one had told him anything, not even the woman in charge, Dr. Beeks, although she had seemed sincere in her assurances that he was safe.

He didn't believe her, of course -- she and everyone else were still refusing to tell him anything, while carrying on one of the most subtlely persistent interrogations he'd ever been through, poking and prodding to find out where he'd come from. But he wasn't about to admit to sliding before he knew where he was -- and where the others were.

The doctors had finally retreated, presumably to talk out of his earshot, and he was grateful for the few minutes of peace.

The room didn't look much like a prison, but he'd learned about the infinite variety of jail cells. This one was white and stark, with a reasonably comfortable bed in one corner and medical equipment, most of which he didn't recognize, everywhere. He'd been searching the walls to find the catch for the odd door panel when another one across the room had suddenly swished open.

The new arrival was obviously not a doctor; he was wearing civilian clothes, and looked so 'In Charge' that the words should have been tattooed across his forehead. Quinn knew authority when he saw it, and instantly demanded, "Where am I? What have you done with my friends?"

Caught in his own worry, he almost missed the deep disappointment on the stranger's face. The expression flickered away faster than Quinn, in his confused, angry state, could follow it, and the man stepped forward, his jaw set in a determined line.

"I don't know where your friends are," the stranger said in a voice that was probably supposed to be soothing, but held an edge of stress that was anything but. "You're safe, I promise. I just need to ask you some questions."

"I'm not saying anything to anyone until I see my friends," Quinn said belligerently, trying yet again to search his non-existent pockets for the timer.

The stranger's voice got a little more impatient, his eyes a little less conscientiously calm. "I told you, I don't know where your friends are -- you're the only one who came here. But they're probably with *my* friend, and I need to find him. So if you tell me who you are, and where and when you were before you woke up here, we can try and figure this whole thing out!"

Despite the man's obvious efforts, his voice rose with every word, until he almost spit out the final words. Quinn bit back his instinctive response, and took a second to study his latest inquisitor instead. The man was shorter than he was -- not unusual -- and looked a little older than the Professor and much more weathered. His clothing would have been right at home on the world Quinn had just left -- his suit was purple and his tie a Day-Glo lavender, cut in strange geometric shapes. His build was that of a man who would keep in shape until the day he died, and his eyes...

His eyes had lines around them which suggested more smiles than frowns, and there was something in them that Quinn instinctively trusted. Maybe it was the soul-deep worry behind the exhausted frustration -- Quinn knew that expression from his own eyes, knew it much too well. Despite his anger and buried fear, he found himself believing that maybe this -- whatever it was -- wasn't this man's fault.

Taking a deep breath, he sat back down on the bed. "I'll tell you the same thing I told the doctors," he said with forced patience. "My name is Quinn Mallory. We were in California, in the morning, about 9 am. Then I woke up here. So who are you, and where am I now?"

The man breathed out as hard as Quinn had, obviously groping just as hard for control. Quinn's unwilling sympathy grew. "You can call me Al," the man said, sitting heavily. "And I can't tell you exactly where you are. Trust me, you don't really want to know and it's not important anyway."

"Try me," Quinn demanded levelly.

"I don't have *time* to explain it," Al said, visibly losing a thread of patience again. "My buddy is with your friends, and we have to find him before they all get into trouble. Now, *exactly* where and when were you?"

"I told you," Quinn said through his teeth. "California, about 9 am."

"The date," Al demanded, "and where in California?"

Quinn blinked. "The date? How can the date be different? Slides don't-- Unless time is running differently again...." He broke the words off fast, before he gave any more away. "It was January 27th, I think, 1997. Yeah, New Year Eve's was a few weeks ago." A memory flashed before his eyes, of the kiss Wade had given him at midnight; he shut his eyes and willed it away until a time when he could deal with it. Until he saw her again. "And I don't know where in California we wound up -- it could have been anywhere within a 400-mile radius."

"You don't know where... Well, that's just great," Al exploded, jumping back to his feet and stalking across the chamber, then back. His arms waved emphatically in the air, punctuating his shouts. "You don't even know where you were! How stupid can you--!"

"I don't even know where I am now!" Quinn was yelling just as loudly as Al, and was grimly determined not to breathe a word about sliding. "And I'm not telling you anything else until you tell me what this is all about!"

"Admiral Calavicci!" Neither of the men had noticed the other door slide open again; Quinn blinked as he saw Dr. Beeks standing in the doorway, carrying two paper cups of coffee and glaring at Al with a force that suggested she was ready to strangle him with willpower alone. "What are you doing harassing my patient?"

Quinn was reluctantly impressed at the speed with which Al -- Admiral Calavicci? This guy was an admiral? -- backpedaled. "I wasn't harassing him, and he's not your patient! He knows where Sam is and..."

"I know about the problems with Ziggy." The doctor cut Al off with an upraised hand and an authoritative tone. "But that does not excuse upsetting a new Visitor. You should have come to me as soon as you knew Dr. Beckett had Leaped, instead of trying to intimidate the boy alone."

Quinn heard the capital letter without paying much attention to it; he was too fascinated by how easily the woman had gotten Al to back down. "I wasn't trying to intimidate the kid --" Quinn couldn't suppress a snort and got a dirty look in return, "--I was just trying to get him to tell me where Sam is!"

The doctor's eyes softened, and she gave Al one of the cups of coffee, laying her newly-freed hand gently on his shoulder. "I understand, Admiral, but he doesn't." She nodded once towards Quinn. "So calm down, and let's try to work this out, all right?"

Al looked away from her and nodded once, reluctantly. She smiled and patted his shoulder again, then turned to Quinn, extending the other cup of coffee his way. "I'm sorry, Quinn, I hadn't expected Admiral Calavicci to make an appearance, although I suppose I should have."

Quinn took the coffee after a slight hesitation. "Thanks." He sniffed it and didn't smell anything but coffee, but still didn't drink, setting it down on the table next to him instead. "You called me your patient, but I told you, I'm not sick." He'd spent almost as much time in psychiatric wards as prison cells -- it was a good idea to get some things, like his sanity, established *fast*.

"Of course not," she agreed readily. "In fact, you seem to have adapted to this situation extremely well; much more quickly than I'm used to seeing."

Quinn rolled his eyes. "I've seen stranger things than this place before breakfast. Will someone *please* tell me where I am?"

"I told you, we don't have time--" Al started to say again.

Quinn cut him off. "You explain what's going on, or I'm not telling you anything else. Period." He tightened his jaw and sat back to wait.

Dr. Beeks and Al exchanged glances; Al looked irritated and frustrated, Dr. Beeks just looked resigned. "He's been like this since he woke up," she told Al. "He's much more coherent than the usual Visitor and, well, much less willing to cooperate."

"Did he tell you anything else? Anything at all?"

Dr. Beeks shook her head. "His name, and the time and state he was in, when he was still too groggy from the Leap to control what he was saying. Then he woke up all the way and he's said nothing since, except to ask about his friends."

"And that's all I'm going to say," Quinn interrupted, tired of being talked about as if he weren't present, "until I get some answers."

Al gave him a killing glare, trying intimidation one more time; Quinn set his jaw harder and glared back. After a long, tense staredown, Al turned abruptly away, draining his coffee cup in one long gulp.

Dr. Beeks pursed her lips, and nodded as if a decision had been made. "All right, Quinn, I think you can handle this. Come over here. Come on," she urged, and he reluctantly got up, following her to a flat area of the wall. She pressed a button somewhere and the wall slid aside, revealing a wide mirror. "Now, look at yourself."

Quinn looked, and almost fell over as he realized he was looking at himself through someone else's eyes -- an older man, slightly shorter than Quinn, with a shock of white hair at his forehead. His jaw hanging open, Quinn stretched his arms, in their stretchy white jumpsuit, out before him. The mirror image did the same. He pinched himself and felt his own skin, as he had heard his own voice earlier.

"Quinn Mallory," Dr. Beeks said calmly, "meet Dr. Sam Beckett, founder of Project Quantum Leap."

"That's not the right street."

"Read the sign, you blistering idiot, it *says* Lombard Street."

"That's not Lombard, Lombard doesn't start for another three blocks."

"Mr. Brown, we have walked to the Dominion countless times over the last two years, I know where to turn!"

Wade rolled her eyes at Quinn and stepped forward to referee between the two men, as usual. Just once, she really wished they could skip the 'new world' arguing, but, for some reason, the four of them were incapable of getting along unless they were in trouble. "Rembrandt's right, Professor," she said calmly, "Lombard Street must start earlier on this world for some reason. It's another few blocks to the Dominion."

"Oh really?" Arturo drew himself up imposingly. "Mr. Mallory, would you care to venture an opinion?" *And prove me right,* his tone added. Wade resisted the urge to smack him; it was always a temptation when he got on one of his arrogant kicks.

"I, ah... I don't remember this too well," Quinn said non-commentally.

Wade frowned. It wasn't like Quinn not to have an opinion, or to forget something; his memory could be terrifying. Still, even Quinn wasn't infallible; no one knew that better than her. "Well, that makes two against and one abstaining," she shrugged, "so we'll go another few blocks."

She started down the street with Rembrandt, Arturo looking after them irately. "When did this become a democracy?" he demanded.

"Come on, Professor." Wade could hear the chuckle Quinn was trying to hold back. "They're getting ahead of us." Arturo huffed indignantly, but followed.

After only a few steps, Wade spotted a news vendor. "Oh, hey, Rembrandt, look! We can get some newspapers."

"Good idea, girl." Rembrandt fumbled in his pockets for money. "I wonder if they've got 'Rolling Stone' on this world."

"Newspapers, Remmy, newspapers," Wade told him teasingly, looking over the racks and taking a San Francisco Times, a San Jose Mercury- News, and an L.A. Post.

"We've got those on disk, miss," the vender told her as he came over. "You can keep from getting that old newsprint all over your hands."

"Um, no thanks." Wade eyed the small cd-roms carefully. "I'm... kind of old-fashioned."

The vender shrugged and put the cd's away. "That'll be $15."

"$15?" Rembrandt yelped. Wade stepped on his foot and glared; he shut up and started peeling off bills, complaining under his breath the whole time.

Arturo and Quinn caught up with them as they left the stand. "Ah, well done," Arturo said, rubbing his hands together. "I would dearly love to find out how this world has advanced in technology so far beyond ours."

"Me, too," Wade muttered, looking enviously at a sports car that came roaring by -- with no exhaust coming out of the back. "I wonder what this place looks like at night."

"We'll most likely be here long enough to find out," Arturo commented, before burying his nose in the papers. Quinn was ignoring the entire conversation, staring off into space with the expression that meant he was thinking about something else entirely -- probably repairing the timer.

"Quinn! Wrong way!" Wade teased, as he continued to go straight after they reached the correct corner.

"Stop trying to figure out how to fix the timer until we're out of traffic," Rembrandt told him, "Or we're gonna be scraping you up off the street."

"Right." Quinn laughed with them, looking embarrassed, and retraced his steps from the curb. "Sorry, I was..."

Before he could finish explaining, a scream broke through the air. He turned automatically, and was almost knocked into the street again, as a young man in grubby clothes shoved his way between Quinn and Wade. She fell backwards against Rembrandt as the scream of "My purse, my purse!" repeated from somewhere behind them.

Wade wasn't even slightly surprised when Quinn took off down the street, ducking and dodging bystanders as he chased the mugger. "You all right, girl?" Rembrandt asked as she got her balance back.

"I'm fine," Wade said, shaken and worried, "but we'd better catch up with Quinn before he gets into trouble. Again."

"I hear that," Rembrandt said feelingly, and they took off down the street, Arturo shouting something from behind them. Both Quinn and the mugger ducked down an alley before they caught up; Wade sped up, certain that Quinn was about to get himself killed. Her heart pounded with more than just the exertion.

She skidded into the alley, Rembrandt close behind, just in time to see the mugger pull a knife on Quinn, who backed off. The mugger took a swing at him and Quinn ducked, then, amazingly, swung his foot in a high kick that ended at the mugger's head. The mugger staggered and Quinn spun gracefully to kick him again in the stomach; he dropped to the ground and lay still, the knife and the stolen purse on the ground beside him.

Quinn bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, as Rembrandt cut loose with a low whistle. "Man, Q-Ball, when did you learn to do that?"

"Yeah," Wade echoed as they walked slowly to Quinn's side, staring down at the unconscious mugger in shock. She'd *never* seen Quinn move like that. "Usually you just punch them."

Quinn tried to answer, but was panting too hard. Arturo chose that moment to catch up to them, breathing almost as hard as Quinn.

"All of us have been forced to learn things we would rather not, Miss Welles," Arturo gasped. "Considering how often we've had to force our way out of unfortunate situations, it's a wonder we don't all qualify as black belts by now."

"I guess." It sounded logical enough for the moment, and the sound of sirens in the distance cut the conversation short anyway. "Oh great, the police. We're in for it now. Another morning in a police station."

Rembrandt shook his head and walked over to the unconscious mugger, carefully shoving the knife away with his foot. "It could be a lot worse, sweetheart."

The light twinkled off the sharp edge of the knife and Wade swallowed hard, then moved to Quinn's side, rubbing his back as he gasped for breath and assuring herself he wasn't bleeding. He felt warm and solid and familiar -- but she couldn't quite get rid of a sudden suspicion.

Chapter 3

"So, Dr. Beckett was trying for time travel." Quinn tapped his fingertips together restlessly, thinking so intensely Al expected to see balloons appear above his head. It always bothered Al to see Sam's body performing other people's twitches, which was one reason he rarely spent much time with Visitors. He wished for the thousandth time that he could see through the Visitor's aura like he could see through Sam's in the Imaging Chamber.

Sam -- Quinn, Al reminded himself harshly -- was still talking, more or less to himself. "But he started the project prematurely and somehow got trapped into random Leaps through his own lifetime." He grinned crookedly. "Funny how that kind of thing happens."

Al found nothing amusing about the situation. "We don't know how random it is," he answered, still banking his impatience; it was getting harder as more time passed. "All we know is that Sam can't Leap until he figures out what went wrong and fixes it. Then he Leaps again. This time, he Leaped into you."

"So, he's wandering around in my body with my friends." Quinn's eyes darkened fiercely. "If anything happens to them...."

"Sam's not going to hurt them!" Al exploded. "But *he* could get hurt unless I can find him and tell him what's going on! It's already been too long!"

"Admiral!" Dr. Beeks intervened again, but this time, Quinn waved her off.

"It's okay," he said, looking at Al. "Look, you're worried about your friend, and I'm worried about mine, all of them. I understand that, believe me. But what we need to focus on is getting out of this mess. How do I get back to my own body as quickly as possible? It's... kind of time sensitive."

Al ran a hand over his face; he had been able to deal with the kid's -- Quinn said he was 23 -- suspicion. But his switch to sympathy drained away a lot of Al's righteous anger. "When Sam Leaps, you'll return to your own body, and someone new will come to the Waiting Room."

"So, we have to figure out what went wrong during our slide, make it right, and then I can go back to my friends." Quinn thought again, then nodded. "All right, I'll help all I can. But really, I can't tell you much more about where we were -- I'm not sure myself. My friends probably know by now...."

Al sighed. "Well, it's more than we had to begin with." He got up and started to leave, fighting his growing worry.

"Al," Quinn said behind him, "Can I get a look at the comp--, um, Ziggy? I might be able to...."

"Sorry, Quinn," Al interrupted him with genuine regret. The kid was smart as hell, and had picked up on the concept of Leaping quicker than Al himself had the first time Sam had explained it. "You're a Visitor; every rule Sam ever laid down said no one should know too much about the future. You have to stay in here."

"It's only two years!"

"It's still the future. I'll keep you up to date, though, I promise."

Quinn looked as if he would say something, then stopped. Al didn't have time to try to decipher the look on the kid's face, he had to tell Gooshie what he'd found out.

"Welcome back to the Dominion Hotel." Wade threw herself on the couch the instant the door closed behind the group. "Did you ever wonder why the Dominion exists everywhere? Even when there's no other hotel in San Francisco, there's the Dominion."

"I've given up wondering, Miss Welles," Arturo said gruffly, "and simply become grateful for small favors."

"Amen to that, Professor," Rembrandt smiled broadly. "It's pretty nice this time around, too. No roaches, no water permits, no surveillance cameras and... one serious mini-bar!"

"It certainly should be nice for the amount we were forced to pay. Highway robbery," Arturo grumbled. Irritable seemed to be his usual mode, judging by the way the other two grinned indulgently at him, Sam thought. He already liked these people, with their humor and obvious rough affection for each other, but he was seriously beginning to doubt their sanity.

Occasional confusion aside, they had navigated the streets of San Francisco as if they'd been there a hundred times before, but they'd also argued constantly about how things were different 'on this world'. That seemed to be their favorite phrase -- aside from 'on this slide' -- as if they were comparing Earth to someplace else. Some *world* else.

*But that's ridiculous,* he told himself firmly. *Would aliens be arguing about where Lombard Street begins, as if they've seen it somewhere else? That doesn't make any sense.*

He leaned idly against the wall as his mind started to turn the problem over and over. *If they're not aliens, but they still talk about other worlds, what could they...?*

"Hey, we can afford it, thanks to Bruce Lee here." Rembrandt gestured at Sam over his shoulder as he studied the inside of the refrigerator in the mini-bar, interrupting Sam's train of thought. "Mm-mm-mmm. We got cheese and crackers, wine, bottled water -- this'll do 'til we find dinner. You want any, Wade?"

She shook her head without otherwise moving from her sprawl. "Ask Quinn, he used up enough energy chasing down that purse snatcher. Not to mention taking him down with one kick!" Her forehead creased a little, and Sam tried to ignore it. He *really* had to stop using the tae kwon do in public, but the instincts were too firmly ingrained, and the mugger *had* had a knife.

"Yes, well done, Mr. Mallory," Arturo agreed, "and the reward money will be most helpful on this over-inflated world." He cocked an eyebrow in Sam's direction. "However, in the future, we might want to make such confrontations less private, to avoid involving the local constabulary. The less attention we draw, the better off we are."

"I didn't even think about it," Sam shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. "I just heard the woman screaming and..."

"And the famous 'Quinn Mallory, Knight in Shining Armor' complex kicked in again." Wade smiled again and got up to hug him around the waist. "Don't worry about it, Quinn; I thought it was very sweet."

Sam accepted the hug. "Well, thank you," he returned in the same half-serious, half-bantering tone Wade had used. It seemed to be the correct response, since she hugged him again, then went to stare over Rembrandt's shoulder at the contents of the mini-bar.

Rembrandt put an arm around her absently. "You'd better think it's sweet, girl," he teased, without looking away from the food. "You've got the same complex."

Wade looked offended. "I do not."

"Yes, you do," Arturo and Rembrandt said at the same time. Sam started laughing again. The bonds of friendship between the three -- which extended to cover him, the impostor fourth -- were strong enough to be almost visible. They could, and did, finish each others' sentences, which was working to Sam's advantage in the short run. Wade, especially, talked enough for any three people.

In the long run, though, it was going to be hard to fool them, especially if he didn't figure out what the heck 'sliding' was. Fast.

Arturo sat down on the couch Wade had vacated, and shook out the three newspapers they'd bought at the street vender. "Well, let us see what sort of world has landed on us this time." Looking over the top of half-glasses, he perused the headlines. Sam had already taken a look at them and found out when he was -- 1997, one of the latest Leap dates he'd ever landed in.

"Well, we know it's not our world," Wade sighed, breaking off her quiet conversation with Rembrandt and moving back across the room to fumble with the screen on the wall. The evening news flickered into life. "I've never seen buildings or cars -- or a television! -- like this, and did you see the way the women are dressed? But at least we're still in San Francisco." She looked sideways at Sam. "Quinn, aren't you going to look at the timer?"

"Wha-- Oh, right. The timer. Um, sure." He fumbled in his pocket for the 'remote control'. The digital display hadn't settled, he noticed; so much for that hope. Now he was going to have to try to figure out how to fix it. "Um, I'll just... have a look at it."

"Would you like some help, my boy?" Arturo looked up over the newspapers.

"Ah...." *No, I want *you* to fix it so I don't blow this whole Leap.* "Yeah, help would be good."

"Very well. Miss Welles, if you would take over the chore of research?" Wade took the papers as Arturo lumbered to his feet and cleared the small table by the window. Sam started to sit down across from him, and stood against quickly as he was poked in the rear by the spine of the paperback book Quinn had been carrying around in his back pocket. Pulling it out, Sam glanced at it, then tossed it towards the couch next to Wade, promising himself he'd pick it up later.

She picked the book up and looked from it to him, then to Arturo, as Rembrandt put an armload of cheese and crackers and two bottles of Perrier on the edge of the table. "Eat, drink and be merry, man," Rembrandt said cheerfully when Sam looked up, "for tomorrow we may slide to another world where nothing's edible."

"That may be the most sensible thing I've ever heard you say, Mr. Brown," Arturo chuckled, assembling a tower of alternating crackers and pre-sliced cheese. "Now, Mr. Mallory, the last time the timer behaved this way, it was due to the magnetic influences of the world we found ourselves on. Do you think the same could have happened here?"

Sam studied the timer, then groped for the seam and split the back off carefully. Whatever it was for, it seemed to be fairly straightforward device. Inspecting the parts, he realized he'd been closer than he thought with the remote control analogy. It was a remote hookup, but he couldn't quite figure out how the signal was being carried, or to what. Intrigued, he bent closer and began tracing the circuits.

Arturo watched silently, absently crunching crackers.

"Hey guys, Bill Clinton's still President," Wade called from the couch, "but Paul Tsongas isn't Speaker of the House."

"And the TV Guide doesn't list 'Baywatch'," Rembrandt added.

"I could get to like this world," Arturo muttered under his breath. "Mr. Mallory, have you located anything wrong?"

Sam swallowed hard and looked down at the timer. "Well, I doubt any serious magnetic problems could happen in California, so that's probably not it," he said absently, feeling his way.

Arturo leaned over closer to the device, sniffing. "Do you smell that? Some sort of ozone effect. A short circuit, perhaps?"

Sam sniffed and nodded. "You're right, there may be some kind of short here, near the, um, power source...."

With enormous relief, he heard the sound of the Imaging Chamber before he could get himself in too deeply. A rectangle of light opened on the wall, obscuring the TV screen, and Al stepped through, smiling so widely Sam thought his face would break.

"At last! I'm sorry it took so long, Sam, but Ziggy got hit with a power surge and the guy you Leaped into wanted explanations before he'd tell us any--" Al caught sight of Wade and abruptly broke off, looking her up and down in an almost automatic lech. "Well, you seem to have wound up in pretty good company. What a fox!"

Sam resisted the temptation to snap at Al, and instead shoved his chair away from the table, telling Arturo, "I'll be right back, I need to, ah--"

He gestured towards the bathroom and Arturo nodded instantly. "Of course. I'll see if I can locate that short."

"Good idea," Sam said hastily, making for the bathroom.

Inside, he locked the door, then whirled to face Al. "Where have you been?" he hissed, mindful of the three people outside. "These people are...."

"Professor Maximillian Arturo, Wade Welles, and Rembrandt Brown, your friends," Al finished smoothly, waving the handlink. "Well, actually, they're the friends of Quinn Mallory -- that's you -- and let me tell you, I wouldn't mind being friends with her!" He poked his head back through the door, presumably to take another look at Wade.

"Knock it off, Al, she's too young for you." Sam roamed the room restlessly, but there wasn't much space to pace.

"She's over eighteen." Al didn't seem to have noticed Sam's slightly sarcastic tone, as usual, but he did pull his head back into the room. "Let's see, it's January 27, 1997 -- hey, that's only two years ago by Project Time -- and from what Quinn says, the four of you have been traveling together for almost two years. You're currently in San Francisco and Ziggy has no idea why yet."

"Now there's a surprise," Sam grumbled half-heartedly, "and traveling from where is the real question." He started pacing again and caught sight of himself in the mirror for the first time. Quinn Mallory was a tall, clean-cut kid in his early twenties, with brown hair and straightforward blue eyes. "You've been talking like Mallory is awake. Is he?"

"Well, yeah, he is." Al looked startled, as if he'd forgotten he hadn't already passed that information on. Sam ignored the look, as he had many times before. "He's been awake almost from the time he Leaped into the Waiting Room, as near as we can tell -- real worried about his friends, too. We, ah, had to explain to him about the project before he'd tell us much of anything."

"Great," Sam groaned. "Just great."

"Hey, once we got Ziggy back on line, we located you pretty quickly, thanks to what we got from him," Al said defensively. He punched something into the handlink, and didn't look happy at the answer he received. "Huh. He never did mention where they were from."

"Well, maybe there's a reason for that." Sam looked away from his reflection to face Al. "There's something strange going on here. They talk like.... Well, like they're from another planet. But they seem to be looking for variations on this one, as if they've been to similar places. Something about sliding and wormholes.... You know," he forced a chuckle, "if I didn't know better, I'd think they figured out how to do a sideways Leap."

He looked at Al to judge his reaction, and found Al looking back at him. "A sideways Leap?" Al asked politely, in the tone that meant he was worried for *Sam's* sanity.

"Yes, sideways. " The possibility had sounded silly the first time it had occurred to him, but began to sound better and better as he thought about it. "Look, we've established that time is like a piece of string. You can ball it up, make it touch, and go from place to place on it, up and down."

"Right," Al agreed. "*Forwards* and *backwards*. How does anyone go sideways?"

"Well, I don't know," Sam admitted. "But maybe, just maybe, there are pieces of string crossing ours -- other dimensions, other universes, other worlds. If these people figured out a way to Leap -- to slide, they call it -- sideways along *those* strings? Instead of going to different places on the same timeline, they go to the same place on parallel timelines, in parallel worlds!"

Sam almost forgot to keep his voice down; he couldn't believe he hadn't thought of this before. It probably even worked on similar principles to Leaping. In fact, hadn't someone written a paper about just that in his time? He tried to remember, and grimaced as his swiss- cheese memory refused to come up with the name or the theory.

Al still looked less impressed with Sam's logic. "Or maybe they're all just loony tunes," he said carefully, making a circular gesture next to his head with the handlink.

Sam started to give him a stern look, then stopped. "Or maybe they're all just crazy," he admitted reluctantly. Then added, more enthusiastically, "But I don't think so."

"Mallory didn't say anything about any of this," Al persisted, obviously trying to talk some sense into Sam.

"And how many people have we told about Leaping? He probably doesn't want you to think *he's* insane." Al looked ready to keep arguing, but Sam didn't give him the chance. "Look, has Ziggy figured out yet why I'm here?"

Al punched the handlink a few more times. "No, not yet. But we're going to, soon," he assured Sam as he looked up.

"Good," Sam nodded. "Then you go and try to figure it out, and ask Quinn Mallory about sliding. Then come back and tell me everything you find. I'm going to try to stall fixing their timer until I know what I'm dealing with."

"Timer? What's a --?"

"Just go," Sam said firmly.

Al huffed. "All right, but I still think this is all nuts." With a flourish, he opened the Imaging Chamber door and vanished. Sam shook his head, then opened the door and left the bathroom, almost forgetting to flush the toilet before he left.

It didn't matter; he knew it as soon as he stepped out of the bathroom, and found Quinn Mallory's friends clustered around the door. Their faces were grim and determined, and anything but friendly.

"Who are you?" Wade demanded first. "And where is our Quinn Mallory?"

Chapter 4

"Gooshie, what have you got?" Al bellowed as the door to the Imaging Chamber slid closed behind him. "Ziggy, talk to me!"

Gooshie appeared from somewhere beneath Ziggy's multi-colored 'body'. "We've managed to get Ziggy's database back on line," he said as he scuttled towards Al, "but we're finding some interesting information that you really should--"

"Those four people should not be there, Admiral," Ziggy's calm alto interrupted Gooshie's stutters. "At least, three of them should not."

Al stalked past Gooshie to the computer. "What are you talking about? They *are* there, I saw them myself."

Ziggy was, as usual, unperturbed. Her voice bore a startling resemblance to Sam's when he knew he was right, Al thought, not for the first time. "Admiral, Professor Maximillian Arturo does teach at the University of California at Berkeley. However, Rembrandt Brown, a musician, was on tour at the beginning of 1997 -- in Europe."

"Hey, wait a minute." The name finally clicked for Al, bringing back memories of old LPs. "Rembrandt Brown, he's with that Motown group, the Spinning Tops. Yeah, the Cryin' Man. If he was on tour, what the hell is he doing in San Francisco?"

"Precisely, Admiral. If I may continue?" she asked prissily. Al grunted and pulled out a cigar; he was going to need all the help he could get. "As for Wade Welles, she was killed in a car accident in 1995 -- I have confirmed her identity from the obituary which ran the next day. Mr. and Mrs. Michael Mallory died in the same crash -- they were listed as the parents of Quinn Mallory."

Al chewed thoughtfully on his cigar. "So Sam's talking to a ghost? Come on, Ziggy, the newspaper must have gotten it wrong, or your banks are still scrambled!"

"Doubtful, Admiral," Ziggy said quellingly. "I have also confirmed the location of Quinn Mallory at this time."

"Which is?" Al prompted when she drew out the suspense, tempted to kick her someplace vulnerable, like a memory bank or something. Why did Sam have to give the damn machine so *much* personality?

"From 1995 to the present time, Quinn Mallory has been employed first as an intern, then a technician and programmer, with Project Quantum Leap. His duty roster shows that he had a double shift all day January 27, 1997, and that he went off duty today one hour ago. He is currently asleep in his assigned quarters in dormitory 3C."

"Where's our Quinn?" Wade demanded again, when the only reaction to their accusation that Sam could manage was blinking. "When did you switch with him? Who are you?"

The only solution seemed to be bluffing, but he didn't hold out much hope it would work. "Wade, what are you talking about? *I'm* Quinn. What's going on?"

He took a step towards her, holding his hand out in a peaceful gesture, but Rembrandt moved smoothly between them, blocking Wade behind his body. His affable face was hard, his eyes and jaw set.

"You may look like Q-Ball, but you're not him," he said, with no trace of doubt. "Quinn couldn't have kicked that mugger like that without hurting himself, no way. He's a brain, not a brawler."

"And he almost missed the slide because he was trying to finish that mystery novel you casually tossed away," Wade contributed from behind Rembrandt, trying to shove her way back in front of him to get at Sam, and simmering as Rembrandt remained stubbornly in place. "He was only two pages from the end. I expected him to sit down and finish right after the slide, but you didn't even remember it was there."

"I was worried about the timer!" From their teasing earlier, Sam was pretty sure that was a Quinn Mallory-type response. "I was trying to figure out how to fix it!"

"Right," Wade sneered. The expression didn't quite work on her pretty face, but the venom behind it was visible enough. "That's why you were in the room for almost five minutes before you took it out. My Quinn wouldn't have waited five seconds."

"And our Quinn," Arturo continued calmly, although his eyes were no friendlier than the other two, "would have known that the timer was previously affected by the magnetic disturbances on a world we encountered several slides ago -- in an alternate California. You did not."

"Which," he continued, crossing his arms and glaring impressively at Sam, "brings us back to Miss Welles' question. You are obviously Mr. Mallory's double from this world. What do you want here, and what have you done with Quinn?"

People had had their suspicions about Sam when he was Leaping before. It was impossible to impersonate a complete stranger without making some mistakes, no matter how good your information was. But most people, Sam had discovered, saw what they wanted to see, and trusted their eyes above anything else, glossing over any little faults.

These 'sliders' were, apparently, different, and they had him dead to rights. The only satisfaction Sam could take in the situation was that Arturo's words had proven his theory about their sliding was more or less correct. Alternate Earths.... Unless they really were crazy, they might be able to deal with the concept of Leaping. Maybe.

"All right," he said, slowly and calmly, holding his hands out to the side as peacefully as possible. "You're right, I'm not your Quinn Mallory. I'm... a traveler, just sort of, ah, borrowing his body."

They looked at him with total disbelief. "Right," Wade said again, finally. "You're borrowing Quinn's body. Of course." Her brown eyes flashed angry sparks. "How stupid do you think we are?"

Sam took a deep breath; this was not going well. "Look, I know this is difficult to believe, but I'm not here to hurt anyone; in fact, I'm here to help someone."

"Help who? Using Quinn's body?" Rembrandt took a threatening step towards him. "You'd better come up with a better story, 'cause this one ain't gonna do it."

"Look, what if I could prove this is your Quinn's body?" Sam scrambled. This was not the kind of disbelief he was used to -- what were they talking about, doubles? Alternate versions of 'their' Quinn. Could that be it? "Does he have any birthmarks, scars, anything only he'd have?"

Wade started to snap something, but Arturo stopped her with a brief, thoughtful gesture. "Our Quinn possesses a scar on the back of his left shoulder."

"Okay." Sam dropped his hands and stripped off his T-shirt, turning his back on them. From Wade's gasp, he knew the scar was there -- not that he'd doubted it. He was going to try to avoid explaining about using the Leapee's aura rather than their body, if he could; this would do for proof.

Wade's hand touched his back gently, poking near the shoulder blade. Then she stepped back. "It's real," she said slowly, wonderingly. "Could one of Quinn's doubles gotten shot the same way?"

"All things are possible," Arturo said slowly, "but it would seem to be stretching the bounds of coincidence a bit far. We must concede the likelihood that this is, in fact, our Mr. Mallory -- his body, at least. But how the devil could this happen?"

"It's called Leaping." Sam turned around, carefully keeping his hands at his side. "My name is Sam Beckett, and I'm a physicist. I discovered a way to time travel within my own lifetime, but now I'm trapped doing just that. I Leap from point to point on my timeline, into other people's bodies, to try and fix things that went wrong in the past." He shrugged slightly. "Maybe, one of these days, I'll Leap back into my body, back home."

Something in his words affected the other three deeply, he saw with confusion. Wade bit her lip and looked away from him, while Rembrandt rubbed at his eyes.

"Beckett, Beckett." Arturo stroked his beard thoughtfully, his eyes far away. "I seem to recall hearing about a rather brilliant theoretical physicist by that name on our world. If we accept your story as true, then I suspect we have a great deal in common."

"*If* we accept it." Wade suddenly spun back around, her face intense again. "Even if you're telling the truth, that doesn't explain what you've done with Quinn!"

"Wade's got a good point there," Rembrandt said, his jaw tightening again. "If you're in Quinn's body, where is he?"

"In my body," Sam admitted reluctantly. "In, um, I think it's 1999 now. There's a facility there which monitors my Leaps and watches over the people I Leap into. Al -- he's my Observer -- says Quinn is there and awake, and as worried about the three of you as you are about him."

"That's who you were talking to in the bathroom?" Rembrandt asked. "What, have you got some kind of futuristic radio or something."

"Um, not exactly. He comes to me, you might say." The familiar hiss came from behind him and he grinned with relief. The cavalry was back. "As a matter of fact, he just decided to show up."

The three looked around automatically. "Where?" Arturo demanded.

"Um, you can't see him. He's a hologram." Before they could react to that, Sam turned to Al, who was looking upset.

"Sam, we've got to talk!" he said urgently, completely ignoring the sliders. "These people aren't who Mallory told me they were. I don't know why he lied, but he sure told us a whopper!"

"No, Al," Sam said calmly. "They're who Quinn said they were, they're just not who Ziggy thought they were."

Al paused, mouth open. "Run that by me again? Except not in front of an audience," he added as an afterthought, "or they're gonna think you're as crazy as they are."

"No, they're not. Al, meet Wade, Rembrandt, and Professor Arturo." He gestured towards the sliders with an easy sweep of his arm. They were staring past him, obviously trying to see Al.

Al looked as if he was about to have a heart attack. "Sam, knock it off! I'm telling you, these people are phonies! Wade Welles is dead...."

"Dead?" Sam interrupted, barely seeing the other three flinch at the word.

"Yes, dead! As in car crash, as in buried in Fort Point Cemetery!" Al waved his handlink for emphasis. "And Brown is supposed to be on tour in Europe and--"

"Who's dead?" Wade asked, her face white. "Quinn? Has something happened to him?"

"No," Sam assured her quickly. "No, Quinn's fine, right, Al?"

"What? Oh, yeah, the kid's fine; stubborn, but fine. But Sam, I'm telling you--!"

"Al, calm down," Sam told him firmly, before turning to the sliders. "I'm talking to Al and no, I'm not going crazy. He's a hologram, attuned to my brainwaves, which is why none of you can see him."

Wade and Rembrandt blinked. "Of course," Rembrandt said, "I would have guessed that."

Al looked ill. "Sam, why are you telling them all this?"

"Come now, Mr. Brown," Arturo said with something resembling a smile. "Young Gillian was also in the habit of talking to nothing, as I recall -- except she was, at the time, talking to Quinn. And we have met holograms before."

"Yeah, but we could see them, and neither of them just claimed they'd taken over Quinn's body," Wade shot back.

"You admitted what?" Al howled. "Sam, you told them about Leaping?"

"I don't care who's talking to who," Rembrandt said loudly, "I just want to know where Q-Ball is!"

"Can everyone just be quiet for a minute!" Sam shouted above the noise. Everyone shut up instantly, turning surprised looks at him. "Thank you," Sam breathed as the assault on his ears stopped. "Look, from what the three of you have told me, you're something called sliders. You 'slide' between parallel timelines the way I Leap up and down mine. Right?"

Arturo lifted an eyebrow in surprise, but nodded. "That is essentially correct."

"Good. Great." Sam took another deep breath, trying to force his shoulders to loosen up. "And in some of these parallel timelines -- these other worlds -- there are alternate versions of yourselves, which is why you thought I was another Quinn, the Quinn from this world. Right?"

"Yeah," Rembrandt said, a little less belligerently. "Except you're not, not with that scar."

"Right. See, Al, it's a very simple explanation. The people in Ziggy's database are the alternate versions of these people."

Al's face was a study between annoyance, worry and blankness. "Oh, yeah, that's very simple, Sam. Easiest thing I've ever heard. Alternate versions, right."

Sam ignored his friend's mutters and looked at the sliders, spreading his hands out. "So, now you understand what's going on."

"What we understand," Arturo rumbled, "is that you are truly in Quinn's body, and have a habit of talking to thin air, which may or may not contain a person." The amusement was gone from the big man's eyes; he was now deadly serious. "You have not, however, proven to my satisfaction that Quinn is safe. Nor have you informed us how and when, or even if, you intend to return Quinn to his own body."

Sam winced. "Well, you see, that's tricky part. What happens is...."

"I believe before there are any additional explanations," Arturo interrupted, "we should confirm the first part of your story -- that Quinn is safe. We wish to speak with him."

Sam thought about it, then sighed. They might as well, they'd already broken every other rule this Leap. "Al? Can you bring Quinn into the Imaging chamber with you?"

Al was looking back and forth from Sam to Arturo, obviously wondering when he'd lost control. "I don't know. Sam, you want me to bring a Visitor--?"

"Al," Sam said through his teeth, cutting Al's protests off. "Can you bring Quinn into the Imaging Chamber?"

"Lemme check." Al punched something into the handlink, then shook his head. "Gooshie still hasn't tracked down why Ziggy's surge protectors went off-line. He says the power strain of bringing the kid into the hologram so you can see him might blow the circuits again, and he doesn't want to risk it unless he has to."

"All right." Sam thought fast. "How about just bringing him into the chamber so he can see and hear what's going on. The two of us can relay what he says to his friends."

"All right, Sam," Al sighed, finally. "I hope you know what you're doing." With a couple of quick clicks and another suspicious look at the sliders, he left the chamber.

With a nervous grin, Sam turned to the others. "Al is going to bring Quinn. You won't be able to see him, but he'll be able to see you, and talk through me and Al."

Wade looked as if she wanted to protest, but Arturo shook his head. "That's nothing we haven't done before," he said calmly, walking back to the sofa and sitting down. "We'll wait. But we are on a deadline, Mr. Beckett, and our patience has its limits."

Sam swallowed, and hoped Al hurried.

Chapter 5

"What's taking so long?" Quinn demanded the second Al stepped back into the Waiting Room.

"It's been less than an hour," Dr. Beeks reminded Quinn calmly. It didn't calm the kid down noticeably -- he was so tense he seemed to be vibrating.

"We finally found Sam," Al said shortly, "and we also found out that you left some interesting things out of your information. Like something called sliding?"

He watched the impact his words had on Quinn with the almost guilty satisfaction of finally finding someone to take his frustration out on. "How did you find out about that?" Quinn nearly whispered.

"Your, whatdycallem, doubles, on this world aren't in California. One of 'em's dead, and one's in Europe. Not San Francisco," Al finished edgily. "With that and what your friends let slip in front of Sam, he figured it out."

His satisfaction veered further towards guilt when he saw that the blood had drained from Quinn's face. "Who-- who's dead here?"

So much for satisfaction. Al sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Wade Welles was killed in a car accident in 1995, along with your... *her* Quinn's parents."

Quinn swallowed hard and looked away, his jaw working in a visible effort to control his emotions. "Are you all right, Quinn?" Dr. Beeks asked, with a dirty look at Al, who winced.

Quinn nodded once, shortly. "Yeah, I'm fine. I just... never get used to knowing one of my friends is dead, on any world. And... my father was killed in a car accident, too, but my mother is still alive. I think."

Al now felt literally sick. It wasn't the kid's fault he'd gotten stuck in this, after all. "I'm sorry, Quinn, I shouldn't have told you like that."

"It's all right." Quinn shrugged Dr. Beeks away lightly, turning back to Al. "Like I said, it's happened before. Are my friends okay?"

"Yeah, they're fine. They want to talk to you, though."

Quinn's eyebrows went up. "How long did it take them to figure out what was going on?"

Al felt his cheeks flush, and a return of the frustration. Everything about this Leap was going wrong. "About three hours. They thought Sam was one of your doubles, and he had to explain the whole thing."

Quinn grinned smugly. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Did Wade go for his throat?"

Even Al had to chuckle, remembering the fierce expression in the small woman's eyes. "I think she wanted to, but that Rembrandt guy wouldn't let her get out from behind him long enough to try."

Quinn's grin grew even broader. "That sounds right, too. You said they want to talk to me?"

"Yeah." Al opened the door to the Waiting Room again. "Come on, Quinn, you get your wish. You get to see Project Quantum Leap."

Quinn tried not to rubberneck too much as Al lead him through the halls, but it took a lot of self-control. On the surface, it didn't look too different from any other government installation he'd ever been in -- bare halls, people in uniforms walking briskly from place to place, military police guarding some of the discretely marked doors. But the doors had a tendency to slide open without anyone touching them, like the doors to a grocery store but quieter, and the guns the guards carried looked subtly wrong.

"There's no windows," he observed out loud.

"Kinda hard to put windows inside of a mountain," Al said, without slowing down or turning his head.

"Fun way to live," Quinn muttered. "How do you keep track of days if you never see the sun?"

"We see the sun sometimes," Al objected, then admitted, "But mostly, we ask Ziggy what day it is. It doesn't matter much; I usually don't even know what day of the week it is here, just when it is when Sam is."

When they reached the main project facility, Quinn had to pick his jaw up off the floor. Dimly, he noticed that the walls were the same sterile white as his room, with stairs leading to a wide door on one wall. But the bulk of his attention was reserved for the free-standing computer in the center of the room.

At least, Al said it was a computer. It sure didn't look like one -- more like a child's toy, made with huge, neon-hued Legos. Lights flashed off and on all over the machine, and technicians in lab coats bustled around it as if it held the secrets of the universe. Of course, from what Quinn had picked up so far, it probably did have a significant part of this universe's secrets.

"Quinn Mallory, meet Ziggy." Quinn snapped out of his daze as Al spoke. "Ziggy, this is Quinn Mallory, our latest Visitor."

"I'm pleased to meet you, Quinn," a woman's pleasant alto said from nowhere and everywhere.

"Um, I'm pleased to meet you, too," Quinn responded politely, with only a brief hesitation. "Are you an, um, artificial intelligence?"

"Technically, yes, that is my designation," Ziggy answered, sounding amused. "But my father assures me there is nothing artificial about my intelligence levels."

"Your father?"

"Dr. Beckett, of course."

"Of course." Quinn nodded knowingly. "Sorry, I haven't met an AI quite like you before."

One of the technicians, a heavy-set man with fuzzy hair and slightly protuberant eyes, had been eavesdropping furiously. "Excuse me," he interrupted, licking his lips nervously. He had an odd speaking voice, as if he was pushing every other word out. "You've seen other forms of artificial intelligence?'

"Um, yeah," Quinn answered, preparing for a long explanation. "Some androids, a couple of times, and--"

"Gooshie, we don't have time for this," Al interrupted impatiently. "Is the Imaging Chamber ready?"

"Yes, Admiral," Gooshie said instantly. "But remember, don't try to bring the Visitor into sight; Ziggy's circuits just can't handle the stress right now."

"You still haven't found the source of the power surge?" Quinn asked, his hands almost itching to find out more about this new technology.

"Not yet," Gooshie said unhappily -- and he *really* knew how to look unhappy. "The problem seems to lie within her programming, not the peripherals themselves, but we haven't been able to isolate the bug in the codes yet."

"Have you tried--"

Al cut Quinn off this time. "Can the two of you save the technical stuff for later?" he asked with thinly disguised impatience. "I'd like to get back to Sam before one of your pals gets violent."

"They wouldn't do that," Quinn defended the others automatically. "But you're right, we'd better get going." Then he paused. "Um, where *are* we going?"

Al grinned -- Quinn told himself he was only imagining the evil edge to it. "Back in time. Gooshie, is the chamber ready?"

"All set, Admiral." Gooshie made a few minor adjustments to one of Ziggy's panels, and the door at the top of the stairs slid open.

"After you." Quinn gave Al a suspicious look, but went up the steps, walking through the door into a dark chamber. Al followed, and the door slid closed behind them. The only light came from an object Al was carrying, which glowed and blinked. Al punched several buttons on the device, then said loudly, "All right, Gooshie."

The lights came on and suddenly, Quinn was standing next to Al in a room in a very plush Dominion Hotel. The layout and furnishings were familiar, but instead of a television, a sitcom played on a screen set directly on the wall, and the couch seemed to be made of something metallic. And on the couch sat.... "Professor! Wade!"

Instinctively, he tried to run forward to them, but stopped in shock when his hand went right through Wade's arm. "Oh, no," he groaned. "Not this again. Anything but this."

"Relax, kid," Al said. "You're not a ghost, they're holograms, reflecting what Sam is seeing and hearing. To them, you'd be the hologram, except that they can't see or hear you. Got it?"

"Does it matter?" Quinn asked sullenly, trying once more to touch the Rembrandt's shoulder, with no better results.

"No," Al responded cheerfully. "Sam, I've got him."

"He's here." As the others looked up, Quinn spun so fast he almost lost his balance, and saw a stranger get up from the armchair by the couch. Except that it wasn't a stranger, it was the man Quinn had seen in the mirror.

"Huh?" he asked intelligently. "I thought he was in my body, and I was in his."

"It's complicated," Al said impatiently. "Just accept that you can't always trust your eyes where Leaping is concerned."

"This sounds more and more like sliding," Quinn grumbled.

"Al," Dr. Sam Beckett was saying, "where is he?"

"To my left, Sam."

Sam's eyes instantly focused more or less on Quinn. "Hi, Quinn -- sorry we dragged you into this."

"It doesn't sound like it was your fault," Quinn said reluctantly. Al relayed his words to Sam, who nodded. "Um, can you tell them I'm all right?"

Sam smiled ruefully after the relay. "That's kinda what I've been telling them for half-an-hour." He turned to the others, who were clustered around him, following his eyes. "Quinn's standing right beside the coffee table; he says to tell you he's all right."

"Well, that's real nice," Rembrandt said sarcastically, "but how do we know you're really talking to him?"

Quinn shook his head as the deja vu assailed him. All he needed was for Sam Beckett to be a blond teenage girl.... "Ask Wade if she wants me to tell you about the asteroid world again."

Wade blushed as soon as Sam repeated his words. "Don't you dare," she hissed, as the other two men chuckled involuntarily.

Quinn grinned at the pleasant memories. "I got in trouble for kissing and telling last time, too."

Al looked interested. "Go ahead, kiss and tell."

Quinn shook his head. "Just repeat it."

Al and Sam did so, and Wade's blush turned even deeper, but she still said, determinedly, "That's not good enough."

Quinn groaned. "What do you want, blood? When did you get so paranoid? *Don't* repeat that," he added hastily as Al started to do just that. Al closed his mouth, looking amused. "Um, okay. Tell her the last time we had to do this, it was Gillian talking for me, and Professor Arturo was trying to fix the timer, but the polarities were reversed. I was caught on the astral plane, and we didn't think I was going to be able to slide out, so you slid without me. But the vortex opened on the astral plane, and we all landed next to the naked mailman."

By the time Al and Sam finished relaying that -- Sam's eyebrows had gone up at the mention of the astral plane, Al's at the naked mailman -- the suspicion had faded from even Wade's eyes. "Oh, Quinn," she breathed, then swiped angrily at the tears in her eyes. "When you get back in your body, I'm going to *strangle* you for doing this to us again!"

"I'll hold him down, sweetheart," Rembrandt assured her, gripping her shoulder tightly. Quinn didn't know who he was trying to comfort. "This wasn't real funny the last time, you know?"

"I believe we can save the recriminations for later, Mr. Brown," Arturo said, sending a forced smile in Quinn's general direction. "Now that we have been reunited, however odd the means.... Mr. Mallory, I'm afraid the timer is broken this time around, as well."

"The timer?" Quinn yelped. "What's wrong with it, what happened?"

Al winced. "Not so loud, huh? This is a pretty small room. Sam, the kid wants to know what happened to the timer."

Arturo answered when Sam did nothing more than relay. "We're not sure. It would seem another component shorted out, but I have been unable to locate it at this time. There seems to have been another sort of power surge--"

"Power surge?" Sam, Quinn and Al said at the same time. "That's what affected Ziggy, isn't it?" Quinn demanded.

"It sure is," Al answered, punching something into his handlink. "Sam, Ziggy says there's a 95.7 percent probability that the same power surge that hit her also affected your timer. She also says there's an 89.4 percent chance the surge was actually caused by the Leap crossing the whosicallit, the slide."

Sam nodded, staring to pace. "Right, that makes sense. Quinn, Professor, you call the sliding mechanism a wormhole. Does it flow through normal space or hyperspace?"

"Hyperspace," Arturo and Quinn answered simultaneously. "An Einstein-Rosen-Podowsky Bridge."

"What he said," Al said, pointing at the Professor. Quinn gave him a look and Al shrugged innocently.

"So, you slide outside the normal space-time continuum, just like I Leap," Sam thought out loud. "Quinn, what if your wormhole did accidentally cross paths with my Leap?"

"If that happened," Quinn said slowly, juggling theories in his head, "then that *might* explain the power surge, and why you Leaped into someone who's not even part of your world's timeline. I don't know what the math would look like, but... It could mean you weren't supposed to Leap into me at all, that something went wrong."

Sam and Arturo both nodded after the relay. "If that is true," Arturo said slowly, "then we may have a problem."

"May?" Al and Rembrandt muttered sarcastically. Quinn grinned at them, and was surprised to see Sam do the same.

Arturo continued without noticing the interruption. "Dr. Beckett, if your Leap into Quinn is not part of whatever cosmic plan seems to be driving you, then there would seem to be a rather grave problem indeed -- how to make you Leap out of this point in time and, therefore, out of Quinn."

Sam looked grim. "Exactly. If I'm not supposed to be here, how can I fix something and Leap again? Or, if I'm supposed to be here, but in a different person, how am I supposed to find out what I should fix?"

"Oh, I'm getting a headache," Al said miserably, punching buttons on the handlink again. It squawked loudly and he hit it several times with his palm. "Sam, Ziggy says she can't even begin to figure the odds either way."

"Great," Sam and Quinn groaned together. Everyone else started talking at once, but Quinn barely heard them; his stomach sank as something else occurred to him. "Al? Ask Sam if he thinks he can Leap sideways."

Al gave him a funny look, then relayed the question to Sam, who looked startled, then even grimmer as he thought it over. "Theoretically," he said quietly, taking a step closer to Al so the others couldn't hear; Quinn thanked him mentally. "I... don't think so."

Quinn had really wanted Sam to lie, to say of course he'd be able to Leap sideways, but wasn't actually surprised at the answer. His lips tightened. "Look, don't tell them that, all right?" he asked, gesturing with his head at the others, forgetting Sam couldn't see. "I don't want to give them anything else to worry about."

Sam nodded reluctantly as Al finished repeating. "I won't."

"Won't what?" Arturo demanded, apparently just realizing he was being left out of something. "What are the three of you nattering about over there?"

"Just... exchanging some theories on sliding versus Leaping." Sam didn't even seem comfortable with the half-truth, but no one else was in any shape to see through him.

"Well, why don't you share them with the rest of us?" Arturo returned irritably. "Since I'm the one who's going to have to fix the damned timer again!"

Al made a rude gesture, Sam started trying to cover, and Rembrandt and Arturo started talking on top of each other. Quinn let his chin sink to his chest and desperately tried to pretend he was anywhere but here.

Wade stared, wide-eyed, as everything degenerated again into chaos. Sam and Arturo were loudly debating quantum mechanics and, judging from the slightly crazed look in Sam's eyes, Quinn was also putting in his two cents worth through the hologram, Al. Meanwhile, Rembrandt had gotten tired of listening to technobabble and was demanding explanations in plain English.

Wade actually would have appreciated the same explanation -- she was an amateur computer hacker and a Lit major, not a physicist, for God's sake! -- but she knew from experience how worked up the guys could get if someone didn't sit on them. And that someone, as usual, was going to have to be her.

She forced back her rampaging confusion and fear and tried to think rationally. "Everybody just calm down!"

To her minor surprise, everyone actually shut up and looked at her. "Look," she continued, when she had the attention of everyone she could see, "panicking isn't going to help anyone. It seems to me like we have three things to do here. We have to fix the timer, we have to figure out what's wrong with your computer Ziggy, and we have to figure out what Sam has to fix so he can Leap. Right?"

"Right," the other three said after a short, surprised pause.

Wade rolled her eyes and started composing a speech about chauvinism in technical situations. It was easier on her nerves than dealing with the idea that Quinn was here, but wasn't, and there *was* an invisible hologram and a time-traveling body-snatcher. "So, instead of getting all worked up, we need fix the things we can fix. If we fix Ziggy, it can figure out what you're supposed to make right here, right, um, Sam?"

"*If* this is where I'm supposed to be, right," Quinn -- no, Sam, she corrected herself again -- said.

"We can't think like that," Wade responded grimly. "If you're not supposed to be here, you and Quinn are both stuck, so we're not even going to deal with it. Right here and now, though, we *can* fix the timer and Ziggy. Let's start from there, and work forward, instead of flipping out all over the place."

*Boy, talk about the pot calling the kettle black,* she thought wildly. *Me telling someone else not to flip out. Weird. Who's going to keep *me* from flipping?*

The three men stared at her in utter silence. Then Sam started, and chuckled. "Quinn says to tell you you're absolutely right, and he'd kiss you if he could. And I," he added, smiling broadly, "agree with him. About you being right, that is." Then he frowned at the empty air next to him; Wade wondered what the two invisible members of their party had said.

"Well put indeed, Miss Welles." Arturo gave her a brief, one-armed hug, and she colored slightly at his unusual display of affection. "Dr... ah, Beckett, if you would be so good as to relay for Mr. Mallory, we can attempt to trace the short circuit in the timer and begin those repairs. And I believe Mr. Mallory might be able to lend you the same assistance with your computer, if you like."

"That sounds like a plan." Sam crossed the room to stare over Arturo's shoulder at the timer. After a few moments of awkwardness, they started talking quietly back and forth, poking into the open back of the timer.

Despite the fact that they were doing exactly what she just finished saying they ought to do, Wade looked at the two with something ugly making holes in her stomach. "Someone needs to do a paper on scientific bonding, instead of male bonding," she told Rembrandt. "Look at those two; they'll be best friends by the time the timer is fixed."

"The professor hasn't forgotten about Quinn, sweetheart," Rembrandt said softly, "or anything else. It's just easier to concentrate on fixing the timer than on the weirdness we've gotten into this time."

Wade knew he was right, but it didn't make her feel any better. She sighed heavily. "Some days, I wish I had studied physics instead of Lit."

"I hear you, girl," Rembrandt nodded, his smile a little lopsided. He was conscientiously avoiding looking at Quinn -- or Quinn's body. "But then you might not have learned how to kick us in the butt when we need it."

Wade shook her head sadly. "That's Quinn's job. I'm just filling in."

Rembrandt patted her shoulder. "Your job, too, sweetheart. Come on."

"What?" She followed as he lead her back to the couch.

"Well, we might not be a big-time super-computer," Rembrandt said, gathering up the scattered newspapers, "but maybe if we check these papers, we can find some people who need saving, you know? Give ol' Ziggy a place to start once Quinn gets it working, and get things back to normal as quick as we can."

It was a slim chance, Wade knew, but it was infinitely better than sitting around doing nothing. She sat next to him and grabbed the Post from his lap. "No fair reading the comics."

Rembrandt actually chuckled as he buried his nose in the Mercury- News.

Wade tried to do the same, but something else occurred to her. "Remmy? You know how Dr. Beckett said he thinks something -- or someone -- is controlling his Leaps?"

"Yeah?" Rembrandt didn't look up from his paper.

"Do you ever think... well, that someone....."

"Might be controlling us? Where we slide?" Rembrandt finished. He let the paper drop from one hand and rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes closed tiredly. "I've asked myself that before, girl. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't; truth is, I just don't know. And I don't guess that it matters much anyway."

Wade didn't like the answer, but she knew it was the best any of them were ever going to have. As Rembrandt went back to his newspaper, she opened her own, after one last look over her shoulder. Quinn sat there with the professor, like so many times before, but it wasn't him. Her Quinn was trapped somewhere far away, with strangers, all alone....

She shuddered and bent over the newspaper. It was time to follow her own advice, and deal with what she could.

Chapter 6

Al paced back in forth beside Arturo, Sam and Quinn, listening as they systematically dissected the timer -- which wasn't an easy job.

It would have been bad enough if they'd just stuck to figuring out the timer; Al had enough of an electronics background to handle that. But the conversation kept degenerating into abstruse discussions about Einsteinian physics, quantum mathematics and hyperspace wormhole variants, which left Al completely in the dark and, therefore, bored. Normally, he would have left Sam to the technical stuff and headed back to check on Ziggy's progress, but he was stuck hanging around this time to relay Quinn's comments.

"Quinn?" Sam said suddenly, pointing inside the gadget. "What's this?"

"What's what?" The kid perked up, forgetting his discomfort with holograms long enough to actually lean *through* Arturo to get a better look at his gadget. He realized what he was doing and pulled back with a shudder. "That's the primary relay, under the power regulator. If that goes, the whole wiring system could overload."

Al impatiently repeated Quinn's description as he'd been doing for the last half-hour. Arturo's big hands worked with surprising deftness to pop a small, blocky component out of place.

"Bravo, Dr. Beckett," Arturo nodded, leaning so close to the timer his nose almost touched it. "Yes, the capacitor is indeed burned out, and there's considerable carbon scoring on the contacts. We'll have to clean them and replace the power supply. Tell me, does your world possess a Radio Shack?"

"Yes, we do. I haven't seen anything quite like this," Sam said thoughtfully, as Arturo extracted another, tinier, component and handed it to him, "but we might be able to find substitutes. How much of a charge is it designed to take?"

Quinn looked embarrassed. "I originally designed it for 3,000 volts, but this is the second time it's overloaded. We'd better hike the capacity if we can."

"I think so," Sam nodded. "We'll need to--"

Whatever he was going to say was abruptly cut off as the world flickered in and out, then came back once more, without sound. "Gooshie!" Al shouted instantly, "what's going on?"

"What's happening?" Quinn shouted at the same time.

"There's got another problem with Ziggy, Admiral," Gooshie said over the chamber loudspeaker. "I'm trying to compensate now." The images flickered again, then the sound abruptly came back, but flitting in and out as badly as the visuals.

"--at's happening!" Sam was asking insistently. "Al, where... you?"

"Right here, Sam," Al said quickly. "But Ziggy's not doing so hot, we're getting more power fluctuations."

"Dr. B...," Arturo demanded, "what's going on? Is Quinn... right?" From the corner of his eye, Al saw that Wade and Rembrandt were both on their feet, staring wide-eyed at Sam over the back of the couch.

"... fine," Sam answered tersely, "except Ziggy. Look, Al... got the problem... timer figured out.... Go fix Zigg... get back to us... can. Tell Gooshie... problem with... command file... -er grid... check *every*...."

Quinn jumped involuntarily towards Arturo as the chamber went entirely black. "No, wait!" he shouted into the darkness. "Professor, Remmy! Wade!"

"Calm down, kid," Al ordered, fighting back his own fear as he pushed hastily at the handlink. "They're still there, we just can't talk to 'em until we fix Ziggy. Gooshie, get us out of here!"

"But--" Quinn started to protest as the door finally slid open.

"Come on," Al insisted, "before whatever's gone ca-ca with Ziggy cuts power to the door, too and we get stuck in here."

Quinn's face was a mask of restrained emotion, but he went.

They emerged into the main room, blinking in the white light. Al strode over to Gooshie, who was frantically passing orders to the technicians around him. "Admiral," he blinked rapidly as Al grabbed him. "I have no idea what's happening! The power fluctuations suddenly started increasing exponentially! It finally stabilized, but Ziggy is almost completely off-line!"

"Sam had some ideas, but we couldn't hear half of what he was saying," Al told him with considerable frustration. "I caught something about command files."

"The command files?" Gooshie's forehead creased. "But we reloaded the command files already and the problems just increased."

"Sam said something else, too. Quinn?" Quinn didn't answer and Al swung to look back at the kid. He was staring at the inside of the Imaging Chamber, his jaw and fists clenched, his eyes miserable. Al sympathized -- he *hated* being out of contact with Sam, especially when a Leap had gone this strange --but they just didn't have time. "Quinn!"

The shout finally got the kid's attention back. "You're the computer geek," Al demanded as gently as he could, "what else did Sam say back there?"

Quinn visibly forced his emotions back; his voice was deep and steady when he answered, "I'm a physicist, Wade does the computers. But he said something about the command files and a grid.... Has anyone checked the main power grid for this place?"

"Not yet," Gooshie answered Al's questioning glare. "I'll send someone down right away."

"And you might want to check the command files themselves for corruption." Quinn was starting to look more human, less like a robot, as he came over to inspect Ziggy's main access panel. "If the back-up was corrupted as well as the mainframe, reloading wouldn't have done any good, and it might affect a self-diagnostic, if Ziggy can do one of those."

Gooshie nodded instantly. "You're right. We'll have to inspect the code by eye -- do you read C3+?"

"Um, C++."

"They're not that different, although Dr. Beckett did create a rather unusual variant; any corruption should, ah, jump right out at you. We need all the eyes we can find." Gooshie pushed Quinn firmly towards a terminal on a blast of bad breath. "I'll send help over to you as soon as someone starts with the power grid."

"I'll go," Al snapped.

He stalked out the door, praying it really was a simple problem like the power grid, and that Quinn Mallory knew more about computers than he was claiming. It was going to take more than luck to get them out of this, it was going to take an act of genius -- or an act of God.

He went through the halls like a guided missile, barely noticing the high activity level; Gooshie must have rousted the entire staff of the project out of bed. A group of engineering techs, several of them rumpled and half-asleep, met him at the main power station, where their immediate boss, a big black man known to one and all as simply Louie, was already belting out orders. Al snapped a quick salute at the Marines guarding the door and stepped in.

"You, you, and you," Louie snapped, pointed at the three who looked most awake, "go check the secondary stations on 3, 6 and 9. The rest of you, I want every conduit, every wire, every line of code -- every *inch* of this place gone over with a microscope. If *anything* looks hinky, I want to know about it! Get to it!"

The techs jumped to work like Louie was standing over them with whips. "I could have used you on a couple of ships," Al tried to joke.

Louie shrugged the attempted compliment off. "How's Dr. Beckett doing?"

Al shook his head. "We won't know until we get Ziggy back."

"Then let's get to work." In unspoken accord, the two men started cruising the power room themselves, not quite trusting anyone else in the world to do the job right.

Sam called Al's name several times, before giving up and staring in frustration at the empty space where Al had flicked out of sight. "What's gone wrong now?" he asked the universe through gritted teeth.

Arturo and the other two sliders were all on their feet. "What's happened?" Arturo demanded.

Sam tried to think of a soothing way to tell them he'd just been cut off from their friend and his lifeline. "They, ah, ran into some more problems with Ziggy," he finally admitted. "The power fluctuations got bad enough that the Imaging Chamber shut down."

"Which means?" Wade prompted, her eyes wide with worry.

Sam sighed. "Which means, we can't talk to Al or Quinn until they get Ziggy fixed."

"Wonderful." Arturo slammed his hand down on the desk. "Just. Bloody. Wonderful. What the devil else can go wrong with this slide?"

"Don't ask," Rembrandt warned. "Or sure as anything, something else will."

Wade bit her lip. "So what are we supposed to do now?"

"Fix the timer," Arturo said immediately. "There's nothing else we can do. Unfortunately, returning to us is now in Mr. Mallory's hands."

"And Al and Gooshie's," Sam reminded them. "This isn't the first time they've had to fix Ziggy, and they've always pulled it off before."

"But Quinn doesn't know anything about Leaping," Wade fretted. "Without your help...."

Sam half-laughed ruefully, rubbing the back of his neck. "Honey, my memory is so swiss-cheesed from Leaping, I sometimes have trouble remembering I even created Ziggy, much less how to fix her." The endearment slipped out before he realized it; some of Quinn's personality must have been rubbing off on him. "And I think sliding is close enough to Leaping that Quinn will pick it up pretty fast, and there are going to be a lot more people working on it, too. Let's just have a little faith here, and work forward."

He caught her eye as he threw her own words back at her, and she grinned slightly. "All right," she sighed. "Then why don't we go find one of those Radio Shacks and get the parts?"

"Yes, and I'll remain here to clean the carbon scoring so we can install them," Arturo nodded, resuming his seat and bending over the timer again.

"Guess that leaves the three of us." Rembrandt gestured towards the door. "Ladies first."

Wade looked back over her shoulder at the space Al and Quinn had last occupied. "Will they come back if we're not here?"

"Al will show up wherever I am," Sam assured her. "Come on, let's go."

It was afternoon outside now, and the last of the fog had burned off, leaving behind a bright sun and a chilly wind. Wade huddled further into Quinn's shirt and walked close to Rembrandt, using him as a windbreak. Rembrandt put his arm around her to make it easier.

"The phone book said there was a Radio Shack a couple of blocks that way," she said, gesturing west. "At least, if the streets are the same here."

"Lead on." Sam followed the other two as they headed down the street, trying not to feel like the intruder he was. He didn't think either of them was actually angry with him, but they wouldn't have been human if they didn't resent him, and he didn't blame them a bit.

So he was surprised when Wade slowed down to let him catch up. "Sam," she said quietly, "back in the hotel room, the first time Al, um, came in, you said something about someone being dead. What were you talking about?"

Sam winced; that was one thing he'd been really glad she hadn't pursued earlier. He *really* didn't want to tell her the truth, but he was also an exceptionally bad liar, as they'd already proven. "Wade, I don't think...."

"It was one of us, wasn't it," she pressed. "One of us is dead on this world. Who?"

"Come on, Wade," Rembrandt groaned. "You don't want to know stuff like that; it's not gonna do anyone any good to know."

"I know," she shrugged, "but I can't help wondering about our doubles on this world, what they're like. How may parents are, if Quinn is inventing sliding here, or if you're a famous rock star." She grinned impishly up at Rembrandt, who just shook his head.

"Girl, the last few times Rembrandt Brown's been anything special, it's gotten me into nothing but trouble," he said wryly. "The Cryin' Man's gonna have to take care of himself on this world."

"That shouldn't be a problem," Sam said. "He's on tour in Europe, Al said."

Protests aside, Rembrandt puffed up a little on hearing that. "Well, sounds like the people of this world have pretty good taste in music after all."

Wade rolled her eyes at her friend. "What else did Al tell you about our doubles?" she persisted.

"You seem really comfortable with this whole idea of alternate versions of yourselves," Sam evaded the question desperately. "Is that how you figured out that I was.. um, wasn't Quinn?"

Her eyes narrowed and he knew she wasn't giving up, but she did answer. "Yeah, I guess it is. On one world, they tried to replace me with my double, and it took a while for the guys to figure out who it was. Since then, we've just been really careful. It's hard to pretend to be someone you've never met, even if you do have their face."

"Tell me about it."

She grinned slightly at Sam's comment. "It was weird on the first few worlds; it still is, sometimes. You realize just how many ways your life could have gone, how different you could have been." Her eyes darkened slightly with an unpleasant memory. "How much less you could have been."

"But eventually, you just get used to it," Rembrandt contributed, visibly trying to lift the mood. "It's either that or go crazy, you know? The worst is when we get mistaken for our doubles, and get pulled into their trouble."

"And you wind up in the middle of a bad movie without knowing who any of the characters are, or why they're so upset with you." Sam started laughing; he could definitely relate to that concept. "I keep getting punched by complete strangers."

Rembrandt chuckled appreciatively. "Yeah, but how often do you get shot at?"

Sam thought back to the Leaps he could more or less remember. "More than I like. Of course, once was more than I liked."

"Amen, brother." Rembrandt held out his palm and Sam slapped it cheerfully. It was fun, for once, being able to talk about Leaping with someone besides Al. "I guess you do understand, jumping into other people's lives and all."

"So what do we have to expect from our doubles here?" Wade persisted.

"The only other one I'm sure of is you," Sam answered automatically. "That is, your double," he corrected himself quickly, then realized he'd made an even bigger mistake.

Wade was fast in the uptake; her face went white. "My double's the one who's dead?" she asked hollowly. Sam nodded reluctantly, kicking himself. "How? When?"

"A car crash, I think; Al wasn't exactly being coherent. He, ah, said that you're... *she's* buried in Fort Point Cemetery."

That silenced her entirely. Sam groped frantically for something to say. "I... ah, I'm sorry."

She shook her head, without looking at him. "It's okay. You get used to finding out about your doubles, and there've been worse things that have happened. It's just hard, sometimes, when it's bad news." She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her skirt, half-hidden under Quinn's hugely oversized shirt. "I wonder how her family took it. How this Quinn took it."

"I might be able to find out, when Al comes back," Sam offered desperately.

She smiled slightly. "Maybe. I don't know if I really want to know."

"Hey, sweetheart--" Rembrandt started, trying to pull her under his arm. She stepped deliberately away and he stepped back, hurt and worry written across his expressive face.

"Sorry, Remmy," she apologized immediately. "I just... need a little time alone." She quickened her steps until she was far out in front of them. Rembrandt sighed and shook his head again.

"Sorry," Sam offered again, feeling about as low as a cockroach.

"Not your fault, man," Rembrandt told him, looking after Wade sadly. "Wade just doesn't give up; she would have gotten it out of you eventually. We've been through this before, it'll just take her a while to get used to the idea."

"I still feel lousy."

"Yeah." Rembrandt breathed out hard, looking at the back of Wade's head. "Yeah, I know just what you mean."

The terminal screen blurred in front of Quinn's eyes and he rubbed at them yet again, cursing the hours he'd spent reading his book instead of sleeping the night before the slide. He'd been awake for almost 36 hours now, and his body was emphatically telling him it wanted to shut down.

It didn't help that he'd been scrolling through page after page of unfamiliar programmers code. Gooshie was right, he was able to recognize a good bit of what he was reading, and his respect for Sam Beckett was growing by leaps and bounds -- he winced at the phrase. But programming was far from his first love; he'd only learned what he needed to know to make sliding work. And the Dvorak keyboard, with its alphabetical key arrangement, didn't help.

He stretched and sprawled back in his chair, keeping his mind studiously blank; his head rolled back and he closed his eyes to rest them for just a second. Behind him, he could hear Gooshie consulting with the other techs who were bustling around Ziggy, checking code and circuits, and talking to people all over the complex. For all the man's strange appearance and stranger way of speaking, he could sure get things done.

"You look like you could use this." Quinn opened his eyes and looked up, then almost fell off the chair. His tired mind wasn't quite up to coping with the sight of himself holding out a steaming mug.

"Sorry," the other Quinn Mallory apologized quickly, stepping back to avoid spilling the contents of the cup. "I didn't meant to scare you."

"That's -- that's all right," Quinn stuttered, reaching for the coffee cup and downing half of it in one gulp. It was exactly the way he liked it, black and strong with a couple of sugars, what Wade referred to as Jolt Coffee. The caffeine hit his system in a rush, and he tried to remember the last time he'd eaten. "Thanks, I did need that."

His double grinned, snagging a chair from the next workstation over and sitting down. "I figured. Just like Dr. Beckett -- when you get working, you forget about everything else."

"And you don't?" Quinn shot back automatically, knowing his own habits.

His double grinned again. "You got me." He was slightly older than Quinn -- well, they were two years in the future, that was to be expected -- and his hair was shorter, and currently rumpled from sleep, but everything else looked about the same; no surprises there. "I'm Quinn Mallory, by the way. Gooshie said you might need some help checking the codes, so I figured I'd help out."

"Please," Quinn said gratefully. "I'm terrified I'm going to miss something here."

The other Quinn pulled his chair closer to the workstation and brought up the next screen. "Gooshie wouldn't have trusted you to do it if he thought you'd mess up. He may be kinda weird, but no one knows this system better, except Dr. Beckett."

Quinn leaned his elbows on the desk and took another swallow of coffee, studying the code with half his mind. The other half thought up creative ways of getting back at Al for not mentioning his double's presence (talk about leaving out important information!), as the other Quinn commented, "It was strange walking in here and seeing Dr. Beckett; felt just like old times for a minute."

"I'm not--" Quinn started to explain automatically.

His double waved him off. "I know, you're the Visitor. What's your real name anyway?" Quinn groped for an answer that wouldn't freak his double out, but the other Quinn took the pause differently. "I know, we're not supposed to even talk to you, but you're the first Visitor I've ever seen. Still, if you don't want to tell me, that's okay."

Quinn felt a stab of sympathy for his double; in the other Quinn's shoes, he would have been dying of curiosity. But the same instincts that had made him keep sliding back from Al told him to keep his mouth shut here, as well. "Sorry," he mumbled, finishing the coffee. "But I think enough rules have been broken around here."

His double shrugged again, pretending he didn't care, and leaned forward to watch the screen more closely. "Well, you've already made it halfway through the power regulation command files. Seen anything yet?"

"Not yet," Quinn put his empty mug down and pulled his mind off worrying about his friends and back to the job at hand. "Dr. Beckett's coding is a little odd, but I haven't seen anything that could cause the kind of power fluctuations we've seen, much less have taken those surge suppressers off-line."

He tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the desk. "Maybe we should concentrate on the surge suppressers -- it seems like they must have gone off-line first, or that power surge wouldn't have done so much damage."

The other Quinn shook his head. "No way. The regulator codes are my pet project; they're the first thing Gooshie had me check after we got Ziggy back up. I reinstalled that code clean and I've read it five times since. There's nothing wrong there, and the engineering techs say the hardware is fine, too."

Someone shouted with excitement behind them. "They found two burnt-out sections in power relay grid 3, and four more in the main power grid. They're patching them now!"

"We've almost finished Ziggy's internal reroutes," someone else called.

A ragged cheer went up, but no one stopped working. "There, you see," Quinn turned to his alternate. "The wires got burned out in the power surge -- the problem *has* to be there."

"They might have just overloaded," the other Quinn protested mildly. "It's been almost four years; Dr. Beckett might not have anticipated what a power hog Ziggy is. The system might just not be able to handle it anymore. But if you want to take one more look, let's give it a shot." He paged down rapidly through the coding; Quinn rubbed his eyes again and started scanning.

Wade and Rembrandt wandered among the high-tech toys that seemed to be a staple of Radio Shacks everywhere, as Sam poked around the shelves of electronic components and consulted enthusiastically with two of the salesmen.

Rembrandt had found a small toy piano that sounded more like a concert grand when he touched the keys; pretty soon, he was singing 'Tears in My 'Fro' under his breath. Wade carefully stayed out of earshot, since she had a tendency to start laughing every time she heard the lyrics to Rembrandt's big hit. She didn't feel much like laughing right now.

Instead, she leaned against a pile of remote control cars and tried to pay attention to CNN, playing on one of the wallscreens that were probably cheap no-name brands on this world, but would have been the most modern possible on hers. Some things never changed, though -- the news was full of peace talks and broken cease-fires and fighting. Violence and death.

She tried to shake her dark thoughts -- she wasn't generally this morbid -- but couldn't make herself forget that the Wade Welles of this world had already been a victim of that death and violence. A car crash, Sam had said. A stupid car crash. "It's not fair."

"What's not fair?" She jumped as Sam came up behind her, looking at her quizzically. He was carrying a plastic bag that didn't look big enough to be carrying anything important, much less the key to letting them slide again.

Rembrandt was only a step behind him, tucking away his wallet. "Man, when we slide again, we have *got* to find a cheaper world," he complained. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Wade. "What's wrong, sweetheart?"

She forced a smile to her face, not wanting to upset her friend. "Nothing," she lied. "Did you find what we need?"

"I hope so." Sam opened the bag and looked inside, as if to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything. "Some of this has got to work."

"I sure hope you're right," Rembrandt said, holding the door for Wade as they left the store and turned back towards the Dominion. "Wonder what Q-Ball's up to?"

"Oh, he and Al are probably fixing Ziggy right now," Sam said breezily. "I'll bet they show up any minute, wanting to know why we haven't fixed the timer yet. Why do you call him Q-Ball, anyway?"

Wade listened to Rembrandt spin out his weird logic behind the nickname with only one ear; the other part of her mind was still dwelling on her double. She wasn't even aware when she made the decision, she simply stepped to the curb and hailed a cab.

"Wade?" Rembrandt asked behind her. "We can get back to the hotel without a cab, girl. It's not that long a walk."

Wade didn't look at him, just opened the door of the cab that stopped in front of her. "I want to go to the cemetery," she told him. "I want to see my double."

"Oh, no." Rembrandt's arm came across the door before she could get in. "I don't think that's a very good idea, sweetheart."

"Remmy!" She caught his arm, tried to shove it away. "I have to do this! She can't have been very old; she's never going to get to see her own world, much less other worlds. I just... something of her should get to go, too, even if it's just a memory. "

Wade stopped and tried to get her voice back under control, looking up at him and begging for understanding of something she didn't quite understand herself. "I have to do this. There might not be anyone else *to* do it, on this world."

Rembrandt took a deep breath, then let his arm drop.

"Looks like we're going to the cemetery," he told Sam. Wade took his hand and smiled up at him, grateful for his support, however reluctantly it came.

He helped her into the cab, then slid in beside her; to her surprise, Sam joined them after only a moment. "I, ah, don't remember how to get back to the hotel," he said with a sheepish smile.

Quinn couldn't tell a lie to save his life; she was oddly pleased to find that Sam in Quinn's body couldn't do it either. "Fort Point Cemetery," she told the driver, giving Sam a small smile. It got bigger when she saw the driver's face.

"Fort Point, da," Pavel Kurlienko agreed, pulling out into traffic.

Rembrandt started chuckling. "Some things, you can always count on, I guess."

"How did you get involved in the project, anyway?" Quinn asked his double idly, his eyes moving rhythmically from one line of code to the next.

His double was doing the same. "I wrote a paper my freshman year of college on the Einstein-Rosen-Podowsky mathematics of hyperspace; my theory was that those equations could be used to build a way to sort of slide between Einstein space and hyperspace, to travel to other timestrings, parallel to ours. I was hoping to get a government grant to pay some of the bills so I could work on making the theory practical; instead, they offered me the chance to work with Dr. Beckett here at Project Quantum Leap." The other Quinn lifted one shoulder, then let it drop. "Guess they didn't have enough funding for two wildly theoretical hyperspatial travel projects."

"Must've been a disappointment," Quinn offered, trying to think what his reaction would have been. Even after the trouble it had caused him, he still couldn't even imagine life without sliding. "Couldn't you have built a prototype, oh, in your basement or something?"

The other Quinn didn't even look away from the terminal. "I'd been trying, but there was no money. I'd been in a car crash with my folks and my girlfriend a couple of months before, and the insurance company wouldn't pay up. I was the only one who walked away, and Wade's mother just didn't have much left by then. Paying the hospital and the funeral home pretty much wiped me out, so...." He shrugged again, the shadows in his half-hidden eyes deepening.

Quinn shuddered. "I'm sorry."

"Guess I was just meant to do something, is all." His double looked over finally, grinning crookedly. "Hey, my fault. I don't normally dump my life story on strangers, you know?"

"Maybe I'm not as strange as you think," Quinn muttered. Then something on the screen caught his eyes. "Quinn, check this out."

"What?" The other leaned forward to see what Quinn was pointing at.

"Well, this coding is pretty specialized, but isn't that some kind of goto command?"

"Yeah." *And?* his voice clearly implied.

"Well, instead of going forward, it seems to repeat back to the beginning of this section, like a Moebius strip. Wouldn't that be enough to knock the power regulators out of the loop?"

The other Quinn studied the code, then his jaw slowly dropped. "You're right. The coding is corrupted -- it lost the object. One stupid little data glitch caused all this! Man, you're a genius!"

Quinn shrugged uncomfortably as his double's voice kept rising. "Just giving it a pair of fresh eyes," he mumbled, secretly pleased. Now they were finally getting somewhere.

"What did you find?" Gooshie came bustling over.

"The solution to all our problems," the other Quinn said, shoving Quinn out of the way so he could reach the keyboard. "I'll have Ziggy baby up and running in five minutes."

The rest of the techs started cheering and Quinn got out of the way, backing across the chamber until he ran into Ziggy. He stopped there, watching the bustle of activity around him, and waited for the Imaging Chamber door to open again. Maybe now he could go home.

As soon as Gooshie's call came down to the main power room, Al was out the door. He made it back to the main chamber in minutes, and almost got run over by three techs who were trying to replace panels on Ziggy's side. "Talk to me, Gooshie!" he yelled over the chaos.

"We've located the software glitch that caused everything, and Louie reports that all patches should be applied within five minutes, which should bring Ziggy back on-line." Gooshie smiled widely, nearly vibrating in place with enthusiasm. "Then we'll finally be able to start working on, um, Dr. Beckett's Leap."

"Outstanding!" Al shouted. "Who found it?"

"Our, um, Visitor and one of the techs." Gooshie gestured towards a terminal on the other side of the room, and Al blinked when he saw the body Sam was currently inhabiting bent over a keyboard. He was tired enough that it took a second to realize it was Quinn's double.

"Thanks for warning me."

Al winced. "Sorry, kid," he told Quinn, who had come up behind him. "It slipped my mind."

"Great." Quinn rolled his eyes to the ceiling, but there was the trace of humor on his face.

Al realized he was being hassled and swung a mock punch at Quinn. "Good job, kid. We'll get you out of here yet."

The smile faded from Quinn's face and he looked grimly towards the Imaging Chamber. "I just hope it's in time," he sighed almost inaudibly.

Somehow, Al had the feeling the kid wasn't talking about the Leap. "What do you mean?"

Quinn rubbed the back of his neck, and tried to check his pockets in the habitual gesture Al had already noticed; probably looking for the timer. "Remember when I asked Dr. Beckett if he thought he could Leap sideways?"

"Yeah. Pretty strange question." But Al had a sinking feeling he knew what Quinn was going to say.

"Not really." Quinn rubbed tiredly at his eyes. "See, we don't think Dr. Beckett *can* Leap sideways, only back and forth. Which means, if he doesn't Leap out of my body in time, we'll have two choices. He can slide with the others, and almost certainly be trapped in my body more or less forever, leaving me stuck here, or he can stay behind and finish whatever he was supposed to make right, then Leap out--"

"Leaving you and your crew trapped on our world in 1997," Al finished hollowly. "Oh, those are not good choices."

"Not really, no."

"But waitaminute," Al burst out, "can't you just wait to slide until after the Leap?"

Quinn shook his head. "It doesn't work that way. See, on our first slide, we landed on an ice planet, too cold for anyone to survive on, even if ice tornadoes didn't keep popping out. We had to leave early, before the timer was set to return us to our world, and by sliding early, we corrupted the data in the timer -- including the coordinates for home. Now, we're stuck sliding at random, and the timer isn't much more than a countdown device to the window for the next slide. If we miss a slide, we're trapped on whatever world we've landed on for 29 years before we can open the wormhole again."

"So you're lost, too," Al said thoughtfully. "Just like Sam."

Quinn nodded, staring down at the floor. His eyes suddenly seemed to suit Sam's body; they were older at that moment than the eyes of any 23-year-old kid should be. "Yeah. We wanted to explore other worlds -- well, Wade, the Professor and I did. Now, all we want is to go home."

"Just like Sam." Al was quiet for a long moment. Even the bustle of the room seemed to have faded into a buzz in the background. "You feel responsible, don't you?"

Quinn's jaw tightened, and Al knew he'd guessed right. "It was my fault. I invented the machine, I took Wade and the Professor through with me, without making sure of how anything *worked*. And poor Rembrandt just got sucked in by accident, driving by at the wrong time. Because of me, they're stuck sliding, almost getting killed on every other world. Yeah, I feel responsible."

Al chose his next words carefully, all too aware that he was going to have to tread very softly to keep Quinn from losing it then and there. "You know, Sam did pretty much the same thing -- jumped into the accelerator before we really knew what it would do. He wants to come home, too, but he's doing a lot of good out there until he can. He's changed a lot of things, brought some bad guys to justice, saved some lives, made things better for a lot of people." He laid a hand on Quinn's shoulder. "Can you tell me that *nothing* good has come out of sliding?"

Quinn thought for a long second, then his lips twitched slightly. "There was a world with a plague and the professor gave them penicillin. It cured everyone."

"What else?" Al pressed.

"We've caught a couple of murderers -- Wade's double once, after she killed my double -- and I guess we've made a couple of worlds better." His smile got a little wider. "Rembrandt kept an unborn baby prince alive, and we saved a whole world from an asteroid strike. Brought down a couple of pretty lousy governments along the way."

"Not a bad track record," Al said consideringly, staring deliberately down at his unlit cigar. "Sounds like you're up there with Sam for putting things right, and he's a tough act to follow."

"Sure," Quinn said bleakly. "If you don't count the four or five times Wade's almost died, or how many times Remmy and the Professor have been put in danger. At least Dr. Beckett didn't drag other people along with him."

Al tightened his grip on Quinn's shoulder, forcing the kid to look at him. "Do you think they'd change it?"

"It doesn't matter..." Quinn started.

"Yes, it does," Al said firmly. "Now, I've had some pretty rough times since Sam Leaped that first time, trying to keep things together back here, losing sleep every damn time he lands in the middle of trouble. A couple of times, I was sure we were gonna lose him and let me tell you, I still have some pretty vivid nightmares." He very deliberately blocked out the memory of the mental institution. "But there's no way I would have missed this; if Sam had to Leap, I'm glad I was around to help.

"I've seen your friends together, heard them talking to you and about you. Every one of them thinks you're about the greatest thing since... mozzarella cheese on pizza. Heck, they were ready to take Sam on to get you back! Do you honestly think they'd change any of this?"

"They... say they wouldn't," Quinn admitted reluctantly. "But--"

"There you go." Al interrupted ruthlessly, letting go of Quinn's shoulder so he could spread his arms in triumph. "I rest my case. Now stop beating yourself up and get ready to go back to your buddies, okay?"

He settled his cigar back in his mouth, relieved to see Quinn smile slightly, his eyes lightening. "So who died and made you Dear Abby, anyway?"

Al polished his handlink on the sleeve of his jacket. "It's a god-given gift," he said smugly. "And let me tell you, it's not easy, always being right."

That startled an honest-to-god laugh out of the kid, and Al patted himself on proudly on the back. At the same time, Ziggy's lights flickered and began to glow, and the Imaging Chamber lit up.

"Admiral," Ziggy said calmly, "I appear to functioning at full capability again. Would you like to return to Dr. Beckett?"

"You betcha!" Al whooped. He and Quinn raced each other for the door as the techs exploded into cheers and whistles of success.

Chapter 8

Wade crouched silently beside the small headstone, tracing the letters with one hand.

'Wade Welles
Forever Loved, Never Forgotten
2/8/74 -- 1/27/95'

"Looks like someone must have loved you an awful lot," she said to her double, as if the other woman could hear her. "Did your Quinn put this up, or your mom? I wonder what she's like on this world."

She sighed softly, barely more than a breath. "I wish I knew more about you, that I'd been able to meet you. I bet you'd love sliding, just like me. You wouldn't believe some of the things we've seen...."

Sam listened silently, standing a few feet behind Wade. He hadn't known her for long, but he was already beginning to understand how deeply she felt, for everyone. Even a woman she'd never met, who just happened to bear her name and her face. He couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't be an intrusion into her very real grief.

Rembrandt just behind her, hands tucked in his pockets and his head bent. He'd knelt beside Wade for a long moment when they'd first found the grave, placing a small bouquet of roses on the grass before the headstone. They'd joined another of bright daffodils, and several older bouquets; someone had been taking very good care of the other Wade's grave.

Sam hadn't had any words, but he had seen the deep regret in the other man's eyes before Rembrandt had stood to allow Wade some privacy. Still, he hovered close, offering comfort just by his presence, and Sam felt more like an intruder than ever.

He wandered away, down another row of headstones, fighting a sudden surge of loneliness. How long had it been since he'd been able to visit his dad's grave? He wondered if anyone had, lately.

It was a nice cemetery, at least, quiet and well-kept, set off the edge of what had been the Presidio, before budget cuts had shut it down around the time of Sam's first Leap. He chuckled ruefully at the random bits of trivia his swiss-cheesed memory chose to retain. The ocean crashed just beyond the treeline, and the Golden Gate stretched across the bay behind them, almost close enough to touch. It seemed like a small stretch of paradise, hidden from the city. But what a use for paradise.

He read the names on headstones as he walked slowly past them, wondering who cried for them, who had brought the flowers that dotted the grass with bright spots of color. Albrecht, Steele, Lewis, Gawne, Vera, Mallory.... He stopped as the last name registered, backing up to look at the headstones. Michael Mallory, 1/27/95, and another Mallory beside him. Quinn's parents? The date of death was the same as that of the other Wade, which was a bigger coincidence than he was willing to accept.

"They died two years ago today," he murmured to himself, kneeling to respectfully straighten the small bunches of daffodils laid in front of each marker. Just like the ones at the other Wade's.

"Kinda spooky, huh?" Sam looked up to see Rembrandt standing next to him, looking down at the stones. He hadn't heard the other man walk up. "Quinn's dad just never had all that much time on the world. Almost makes a man believe in fate."

"These are his parents, then?" Sam straightened, brushing his hands off on his pants absently.

Rembrandt nodded, his hands still shoved deep into the pockets of the black windbreaker he'd bought to cover up his Day-Glo shirt. "Yeah. Yeah, those were his parents, on this world anyway. It's a damn shame. I wonder how the Quinn on this world took it, losing both Wade and his parents on the same day?"

Sam didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't say anything, just bowed his head in the same silent respect Rembrandt showed to his friend's parents.

"Sam!" Sam jumped at the shout, a rude intrusion in the silence of the cemetery, and turned around, ready to yell at whoever had disturbed the peace. The words caught in his throat as he saw Al standing just a few feet away.

"Al!" He barely kept himself from shouting the name, forced his voice down with an effort. Rembrandt looked up and scanned the air around them, looking for the hologram. "Where have you been? How's Ziggy?"

"Ziggy's fine," Al said, grinning widely. "Up and running, thanks to the boy genius here." He gestured to his side; Quinn was apparently along for the ride again. Without conscious thought, Sam took a sideways step that put him directly in front of Michael Mallory's headstone; Rembrandt did the same in front of the other marker and Sam nodded in grim agreement. Quinn didn't need to see these graves.

"He spotted some stupid little glitch in the codes that took the surge suppressers off-line," Al continued, oblivious to his surroundings. "We fixed those, patched the wiring that blew, and bingo-bango-bongo, here we are."

"That's great, Al," Sam said on a huge sigh of relief, feeling muscles loosen up and down his back. "Has Ziggy found out yet why I'm here?"

He wondered if he imagined Al's wince. "No, not yet, but she's working on it, honest."

"Well, I guess we can't get everything at once," Sam said reassuringly, trying to cover his disappointment. At least Al was back; he wasn't stuck here all alone any more.

"Hey, I hate to interrupt the reunion," Rembrandt interrupted, "but is Q-Ball back with your friend?"

Sam blinked. He kept forgetting none of the others could see Al, they'd all been spending so much time talking back and forth to each other. "Yes, they're both here. Ziggy is fixed and she's working on finding out about this Leap."

"Well, that's great to hear and all, but if we've got Quinn, we probably should be getting back to the hotel," Rembrandt pointed out. "If we don't get that timer fixed before the slide...."

"Good point." Sam turned to Al. "We've got to get Wade, then we'll go back to the hotel. I think I may have what we need to get the timer working."

"Hey, that's great news." Al's smile faded slightly as he finally took in their surroundings. "Oh, Sam. A cemetery? You're hanging around in a cemetery?"

Sam raised his eyes to the heavens. "Don't get all superstitious on me now, Al. Wade wanted to visit her double's grave."

Al shuddered. "Man, that's just spooky. Ah, Quinn wants to know what you two are trying to hide from him."

Sam blinked again, then tried to look innocent. "Hide?"

"Yeah, hide. Quinn, you might not want to...." Al sighed and put his hand over his eyes. "Too late. He just went and looked. Are those graves what I think they are?"

"Yeah, they are." Sam looked over at Rembrandt ruefully. "You can move now, Quinn just saw."

Rembrandt shook his head sadly, but didn't budge. "How's he taking it?"

"Well, he's kind of...." Al stopped to listen, then said, "Quinn says to say you can talk directly to him, Rembrandt. He also says he's fine, he just wants to, ah, 'get Wade and get the hell out of here.'" The last part was obviously a direct quote.

"Sounds like a plan to me, Q-Ball," Rembrandt said, already turning away from the graves. "The sooner we're away from this whole world, the happier I'll be."

"Quinn agrees with that," Al relayed, trailing along behind Sam. "And so do I."

He muttered the last part, and Sam decided not to hear him. He was right, anyway.

Wade was kneeling in front of a small headstone a few rows away, fussing with the flowers in front of it and talking too quietly for Quinn to make out the words. As he walked up to her, he realized she was softly crying.

The one thing in the universes he'd never been able to stand was a woman's tears; Wade's, in particular, brought him down every time. "Oh, Wade, why do you do this to yourself?" he groaned, kneeling next to her and looking at the name on the marker. "Who told her about her double?"

"I only told Sam," Al said defensively. "But, ah, he might have accidentally told her."

"I slipped," Sam admitted, following the one-sided conversation pretty accurately. "They overheard me talking to Al about one of your doubles being, well, gone and she got the rest of it out of me."

"Not his fault, Quinn," Rembrandt inserted, apparently also following the conversation; they were getting too good at this, Quinn reflected. "You know Wade; she decided she had to know what was going on..."

"...And she didn't give up until she did," Quinn finished more or less along with Rembrandt. "Why'd you let her come here?"

Rembrandt looked surprised when Sam relayed the question. "Stop Wade? From doing anything? Man, you *have* been stuck out there too long."

Quinn couldn't bring himself to smile at the long-standing joke. Wade didn't seem to have noticed anyone, yet; she was still staring at the headstone, still murmuring under her breath. Instinctively, Quinn reached out to her, trying to brush her tears away, but his hand went right through her cheek. He swore and slammed his useless fist into the ground.

"Take it easy, kid." Al reached out to put a restraining hand on his shoulder, but stopped before they could touch. Power drains, right. "Beating up on Sam's body isn't going to help anyone."

Rembrandt had also moved closer, and was kneeling on Wade's other side. "Wade?" he said softly. "Quinn's back, sweetheart. They fixed the computer; we might be able to figure a way to slide out of here now."

Wade looked up at him, hastily scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand and leaving a smudge of dirt across her cheek. "He's back? Really?" The sadness in her voice was lightened by an odd kind of relief. "Where is he?"

"I'm right here, Wade," Quinn said. He had to clear his throat before he could get the words out. It was easier not to deal with how much Wade cared about him, even though he knew.

"He's right beside you, Wade," Sam repeated, not quite looking at them.

Wade smiled shakily, and looked one more time at the headstone, trailing her fingers along her name. "It's not fair, Quinn. She died two years ago. When I was just beginning to slide, just beginning to live, she was dying."

"I know, Wade." Quinn flinched away from the inscription; something about the date bothered him, but, already shaken by seeing his parents' graves, he refused to think about it. "Come on, we have go. Let her rest; let them all rest."

Sam repeated Quinn's words quietly and she finally nodded, letting Rembrandt help her to her feet. "I'm okay, guys," she reassured all of them, although she didn't let go of Rembrandt's arm. "And I'm glad you're back, Quinn. I, um, guess we should head back to the hotel, huh?"

"Yeah." Rembrandt started to lead her away. "The Professor's going to be worried about us."

Wade followed after one last look back over her shoulder, whispering "Good-bye," under her breath. Quinn took his own last look, sending a silent prayer to whoever watched over this world for his parents and this Wade. Then he raced to catch up with Wade and Rembrandt, who were already halfway to the gates.

A half-familiar voice caught his attention before he made it to them. "Quinn?"

He turned automatically, and saw a dark-haired woman walking, not to him, but to Sam in his body. His blood froze as he realized what was about to happen.

"Remmy, grab her!" Quinn yelled, forgetting Rembrandt couldn't hear him, just as Wade turned and saw the woman. Her breath sucked in with a painful gasp.

"Mom?" she whispered, her eyes wide. "Mom, is that you?"

"Rembrandt!" Quinn yelled again in frustration. Fortunately, while Rembrandt might have been deaf to Quinn, he was fast enough on his own. His hand closed around Wade's arm before she could take more than a step towards her mother, and he swung her against him, walking her quickly through the gate and muffling her protests against his chest.

Quinn breathed a sigh of relief and ran back to help the other two.

"That's Wade's mother, Mrs. Welles!" he shouted to Al, who spoke urgently to Sam, passing the information on. By the time Quinn panted up, Mrs. Welles was already speaking to Sam.

"...thought you were at your project, out in the desert," she was saying, with a wan smile. "I'm so glad you were able to come home for...."

Her voice trailed off as her eyes filled with tears, and Quinn's eyes narrowed as he took in the changes this world's Mrs. Welles had seen. The woman he remembered from a few casual meetings was as pretty as Wade, with an easy smile and a self-confidence that almost glowed from her.

This Mrs. Welles looked like hell. Her clothing didn't fit quite right, as if she'd lost weight, and her eyes had circles under them and wrinkles around them, the kind that came from weeks and months of frowns. There was an aura around her of soul-deep sadness and loneliness.

Sam apparently saw it, too; his hands came up to encase hers in a firm grip. "I had to come," he said carefully. "I got some time away from the project so I could."

Well, Quinn thought, it wasn't exactly a lie. Actually, it might not be a lie at all; he wondered if it had been this world's Quinn who had left the daffodils.

Mrs. Welles had taken Sam's hands gratefully; she shook her head slowly, obviously doing her best not to cry on him. "She'd like knowing you'd come." Her smile was shaky. "It's been two years, but I still...."

"You still expect to see her," Sam completed gently. "Expect to be able to call her and talk to her. I know. Believe me, I do know."

"Of course you do, Quinn." Mrs. Welles extracted one of her hands from his so she could pat his shoulder. "And I know how hard this day is for you. Your parents were my friends, but... You lost all three of them in one day. But you can't blame yourself, honey," she rushed forward, obviously expecting an interruption. "No matter what that insurance company said, it wasn't your fault; that drunk would have hit you no matter who was driving. It wasn't your fault."

Quinn's stomach lurched as he realized the implication of her words. His double had been driving the car that killed his parents and his Wade. "Oh, Christ."

He wasn't aware he'd said it out loud until Al swung around to look at him. "Calm down, Quinn," he said quickly, trying not to disturb Sam, who was saying calm, soothing things to Mrs. Welles. "It wasn't you. None of this was you."

Quinn nodded at Al's words, swallowing hard. He had to get out of there; for the first time, he was grateful someone else was in his body. He wouldn't have been able to deal with Mrs. Welles's grief on top of his own confused emotions.

Fortunately, Sam was already gently turning down an invitation to accompany Mrs. Welles home, telling another half-lie about not being able to miss travel plans.

Mrs. Welles accepted his words at face value. "I know they keep you awfully busy," she said with an overly-bright smile. "I'm so glad you were able to come, that I could see you again, Quinn honey. I don't seem to see anyone anymore; with Wade gone, there's really no one to see.... You'll take care of yourself, Quinn? Promise me?"

"I will," Sam promised gently, leaning forward to brush a kiss over Mrs. Welles' cheek. "And you take care of yourself."

"Oh... don't worry about me," she told him, her smile wavering. "I'm just going to talk to my Wade for a little while. Just for a little while longer."

Sam nodded and kissed her again before releasing her hands and walking away. Quinn and Al followed silently, Quinn looking over his shoulder at Mrs. Welles until his eyes were too blurred to focus.

He was aware of Al studying him with worry and a little too much perceptiveness. "You okay, Quinn?"

Quinn scrubbed impatiently at the wet film covering his eyes. "No."

Al accepted the blunt answer with only a nod, and Sam didn't say anything at all until they left the cemetery and met Rembrandt and Wade, who were sitting a bench next to the cab. Once again, Quinn knelt in front of Wade; she was leaning forward, her elbows on her knees and her head bowed. Next to her, Rembrandt was rubbing her back, his face tangled with sympathy and helplessness.

"Wade?" Sam said softly.

She looked up at him, her face tear-stained but under control. "Guess this was a pretty bad idea, huh?" Sam shrugged slightly, and she looked back down. "That *was* my mother, wasn't it?"

Sam groped helplessly for something to say; Quinn supplied it. "She's not your mother, Wade," he said, hearing Al and Sam repeat him word for word and tone for tone. He stared at her, trying to get her to feel his sympathy and his concern through sheer willpower. "She's this Wade's mother, and you can't help her. Seeing you couldn't do anything but hurt her more, and you know that."

He shoved a hand through his hair, praying he was saying the right things. "I know it's hard, Wade, but you have to let this go."

"She was crying, wasn't she?" Wade's voice was matter-of-fact; Quinn didn't want to know how much that cost her. "She's hurting."

"Yes, she is," he answered quietly. "But there's nothing we can do."

Wade stared at him for a long moment, as if she could actually see him, then abruptly stood, dragging her hand across her eyes again. "Let's just go," she said in a muffled voice, opening the door to the cab and stepping in without a backwards glance. "Let's just get out of here."

The four men exchanged helpless looks, then obeyed. As he entered the cab, Quinn couldn't resist one more look backwards. He could just see Mrs. Welles standing over Wade's grave, her head and shoulders bent as if under the weight of the world. A chill touched his spine, and he tried to convince himself he'd just imagined the desperation in Mrs. Welles's eyes as the cab started moving away.

Chapter 9

Fitting them all into the cab might have been entertaining under other circumstances. As it was, Al had no trouble resisting his usual comments about sitting on a subdued Wade's lap. He and Quinn wound up sharing the front seat, sitting in it more than on it. The ride to the Dominion was silent, and seemed to take forever. He could have just had Ziggy center them back on the Dominion, but something in Quinn's eyes suggested he wasn't going to leave Wade.

"There you are!" Arturo looked up at them in irritation as they trooped through the door to the room. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and towels and a bottle of alcohol were scattered over the table in front of him. "I finished cleaning the damn timer an hour ago, where the devil have you been?"

"Visiting cemeteries," Rembrandt answered with a significant look at Wade. She still hadn't spoken a word, just sat down on the couch and huddled into herself. Quinn sat next to her, trying once again to touch her; Al winced in sympathy at the look on Quinn's face when he failed again.

Arturo looked from Rembrandt to Wade and back, and sighed, taking his glasses off and wiping them absently. "Perhaps not the best of notions."

"You have no idea," Quinn mumbled from the couch. Al didn't feel the need to relay it.

Sam upended his shopping bag, spilling the contents onto the table. "Al and Quinn fixed Ziggy, so they're back," he said calmly, but Al knew his friend well enough to see the troubled expression in his eyes. This wasn't turning out to be an easy Leap for anyone. "Let's see what we can do about the timer."

"They're back? Oh, well done." Arturo's voice perked up at the news. "Have they discovered anything more about why you might have Leaped here?"

"Not yet," Sam admitted. "But they're working on it."

"Then we also need to start 'working on it'," Arturo said firmly. "Let's get down to business, shall we?" After another searching look at Wade, he bent over the disassembled timer. "Now, the power relay must be able to carry at least 5,000 volts...."

Wade seemed to force herself back to reality and got off the couch, walking around it and sitting at the table next to Arturo, watching him tinker with sad but focused eyes. Quinn followed her, although he was distracted enough to walk straight through the couch, and Al resignedly prepared himself for relay duty again.

No one but Sam would have thought of using the replacement engine for a remote control car as a power relay, Al thought almost an hour later, as Sam and Arturo finished wiring the small part in place.

"Tell them to make sure it's secure." Quinn hovered over the two, passing back and forth between (and through) them anxiously. "If it falls out in the middle of the wormhole, we might not be able to replace it on the next world. And make sure the grounding wire is in place so it doesn't short out again."

"Yes, yes," Arturo said irritably before Al was halfway through the relay. "We have accounted for the stress of the wormhole passage, Mr. Mallory. Don't attempt to teach a physicist about Einstein."

Quinn gave Arturo a look which Al was very glad he didn't have to pass on and went back to pacing around the perimeter of the table.

The air had gotten more and more tense as they'd tried and discarded part after part, the conversations more terse and biting. This miniature engine was, judging from Sam's carefully not-worried expression, the last thing left in his bag of tricks. If it didn't work....

Al pulled the handlink out and checked with Ziggy again, just to have something to do. According to Gooshie, Ziggy had found several possibilities for what Sam needed to fix, but none of them had a probability higher than 23.7 percent. Without any hint of who they were there to help, it was like trying to find a needle in a decades-long haystack.

On a hunch, he told Ziggy to check the backgrounds of the sliders' doubles, just in case, concentrating on Quinn Mallory and Maximillian Arturo, the two based in San Francisco. He got back a snide assurance that Ziggy was already investigating all four of them.

Resisting the temptation to throw the handlink against a wall, Al strode back to the table just as Arturo finished with the soldering iron. "And there we have it," he said, setting the iron down very deliberately. "The battery pack please, Dr. Beckett."

"Here you go." Sam handed the small pack over and Arturo slipped it into place, then closed the back of the timer. Taking a deep breath, he looked at the other men, then turned the timer over.

Nothing. The readout was completely blank.

Sam slumped back in his chair as Arturo sighed and leaned forward, his elbows resting heavily on the table. Rembrandt stared at the timer with incredulous eyes, then abruptly turned away, leaning his forearm against the window and staring blindly out over the city.

Quinn's eyes were frantic, his head shaking as he tried to deny what he was seeing. "Come on, this can't be happening," he groaned, trying to pick the timer up. As Al expected, his hands went straight through it and the table. "Come on, guys, you can't give up, we'll figure something out!"

Al elected to only relay the second part, adding, "He's right, Sam, you've got to keep trying."

"I know, I know," Sam said tiredly. "Just give me a minute to think."

"We may not *have* a minute," Quinn said through gritted teeth. "We may have already missed the slide! There's got to be something we've missed, something we haven't tried."

"Then think of it quickly, Mr. Mallory!" Arturo exploded out of his chair before Sam finished passing the words on. "Because I've run out of ideas!"

Quinn opened his mouth to respond in kind, but Al cut him off quickly. "Yelling at him's not going to help, kid." *When did I get put in charge of calming people down?* he asked himself irritably. *If I'm stopping him from yelling, *I* can't yell!*

Quinn clamped his jaw shut and took two deep breaths, then said, very carefully, "Ask him if he's sure all the carbonization was off the contacts. If there's any left, it could be impeding the power flow to the timer."

"Of course, I'm sure," Arturo snapped, just as Al could have predicted. "I had plenty of time to be damned sure when you were all gallivanting around cemeteries and upsetting Miss Welles!"

"Where is Wade, anyway?" Rembrandt asked, without turning from the window. There was a joint pause as everyone forgot about fighting long enough to look around.

"She's not here," Quinn realized. "Where did she go?"

Sam was already on his feet. "Al, I've got a bad feeling about this. Tell Ziggy to locate Wade, now!"

"Right, Sam. Gooshie, locate Wade Welles!" Al shouted at the loudspeaker in the Imaging Chamber, not trusting the handlink to work fast enough.

"I already know where she went." Rembrandt was halfway across the room before he finished his sentence; Quinn beat him by the door only by going through the furniture. "Her mother," they concluded in unison.

"Damn the girl!" Arturo snarled, with more worry than anger if Al was any judge. "We don't have *time* for her to go on one of her idealistic crusades."

"Well, we're stuck with it now, Professor," Rembrandt said as he opened the door. "All we can do is catch up with her before she does something we'll all regret. Quinn, where does Wade's mom live?"

Quinn reeled off an address, but Al was too busy staring in shock at the handlink to relay it. "Sam! Ziggy says Wade is on her way to her mother's but she's not going to get there in time."

"What?" Sam grabbed Rembrandt's arm before the other man could leave the room. "Get there in time for what? Where is she?"

Al looked up at his friend, knowing he sounded as miserable as he felt. "Ziggy just managed to track down the records for Wade's family. According to police records, Mrs. Welles will be found in her house in two days. She died from a self-administered overdose sometime this afternoon. Ziggy says there's a 91 percent chance Wade won't get there in time to stop her. Sam, you have to hurry!"

Wade caught a cab from the Dominion to her old neighborhood with the last of her cash, and found herself in a suburb which had probably once been fairly prosperous, but was now starting to look run-down. She didn't take any time for sightseeing, but walked up the driveway to her front door, driven by a growing worry she didn't quite understand. She hadn't even been able to see her mother's face, Rembrandt had pulled her away from the cemetery so quickly. But she'd seen how disturbed Sam had looked after he'd talked to her.

The guys were going to be mad at her, she knew, but, just like she'd had to visit the cemetery, she *had* to check on her mother.

*I'll just look in the window, just to see how she's doing,* Wade promised herself. *Just to make sure she's all right.*

The paint on the porch was cracking and just starting to peel; the flower beds, which on her world had been drowned in color, had gone to seed with winter and not been cleared. Wade frowned at the small signs of neglect as she walked carefully to the front window, but the mailbox said 'Welles'.

Shielding the glass from the sun with her hand, she peered into the window, seeing her own darkened living room through the lace curtains. Dimly, she could make out pictures over the mantle, including what looked like her own high school graduation portrait, and a shape gently rocking in the chair in the far corner, almost out of sight.

"Hi, Mom," she said softly, pressing her cheek to the glass for a moment before she backed away. Quinn was right, she knew; introducing herself to this world's version of her mother would just make things worse. But it had been so long.... She just wanted to get one good glimpse of her mother. Then she'd go back and rejoin the guys.

She left the porch and worked her way off the porch to the thin side yard and around to the back. The kitchen and living room shared a hallway; she should be able to look through the back windows straight to her mother's chair, if she was careful.

The back lawn showed the same careless upkeep as the porch and the flower beds; Wade moved through the grass carefully, the niggling worry growing as she noticed the storm windows leaning against the walls, as if someone had lost interest in putting them up halfway through the job. The first signs of rust were starting to show on them. *This place almost looks abandoned. Guess we're divorced on this world, too, or worse. But where's my sister? Isn't she helping out? Does she exist here?*

She cleared a space in the dust on the back window and looked in. The sunlight steaming though the window was the only light in the house, but it was enough to illuminate her mother's face from this angle. She sat slumped in her chair, sound asleep. In the middle of the day.

Wade's breath caught in her throat as her vague fears suddenly crystallized. On the table next to her mother sat a prescription pill bottle, laying empty on its side.

"Mom!" The scream hurt as it burst from her throat, but she didn't feel it, or her fists beating against the window as she tugged frantically at it, then at the back door. They were all locked.

"Mom! No, Mom! Someone help!" It was the middle of the day, and no one heard. Her mother never stirred.

Wade ran blindly back to the front of the house, praying that some Welles traditions would be the same, and thrust her hand frantically under the mailbox. When she found the magnetic keyholder, she almost cried from relief, fumbling the key free and opening the screen door. It took her three tries to get the key in the lock, then the door flew open and she was inside, kneeling beside her mother's chair.

She grabbed her mother's shoulders, shaking her limp body frantically. A picture frame tumbled from her mother's fingers, thumping to the carpet. Wade's own face smiled up at her from the floor, pushing her over the edge into flat panic. "Mom! Mom, wake up! What did you do? Mom! Oh, God, no, please!"

From somewhere in the back of her panic-soaked mind, she remembered watching Rembrandt and Arturo with the victims they'd found before, on other worlds. Her hand groped her mother's neck, and her own heart almost stopped when she found the weak, thready pulse.

"Mom! It'll be all right, Mom, I'm going to get help, you're going to be all right, I promise!" She left her mother just long enough to find the phone, ten long feet away on the oak desk her mother had used to do paperwork at home. As she fumbled with the receiver, searching for 911, some sane part of her mind noticed the pictures, all of Wade herself. None of her sister or her father. Just Wade and her mom, and one of Wade with Quinn, both of them smiling.

"Oh, God, Mom, what did you do? Why?"

911 seemed to be the universal emergency number; she surprised herself with her own coherence as she gasped the story to the woman on the other end of the line. She let the phone drop without taking even an extra second to hang it up, rushing back to her mother's side and cradling her in her arms while she groped for the pulse again.

It fluttered a few times beneath her fingertips, then stopped.

The men heard Wade's scream from the sidewalk. Rembrandt shoved past Sam to bolt up the front walk at a dead run. Sam was close behind, as Al, who had been centered on Wade, appeared in the doorway, shouting, "Sam, get in here, now!"

Sam and Rembrandt burst through the open front door as one, banging the door backwards into the wall. "Over here!" Al shouted.

Sam recovered first and made it around the corner into a small, pretty living room. Wade knelt next to the rocking chair nearest the door, alternately cradling Mrs. Welles's body and shaking it. Whatever she was saying was made incoherent by her racking sobs.

The doctor in Sam took over instantly, removing all of his fear and confusion and shoving them to a back corner of his mind, to be dealt with later. Dimly, he heard Al yelling at Quinn, heard Arturo make his only slightly less noisy entrance; all of his attention was focused on what he had to do.

Kneeling beside the chair, he gently but firmly pried Wade's arms away from her mother; then Arturo was next to them, pulling Wade to her feet. Sam checked Mrs. Welles's pulse, and his heart sank as he realized they might already be too late.

*No, I'm not going to let this happen,* he nearly snarled to himself. A quick glance over his shoulder showed Arturo thoroughly occupied with the distraught Wade. "Rembrandt, help me get her to the floor."

Rembrandt was there in a moment, helping him lower Mrs. Welles from the chair with practiced hands, shoving aside a fallen picture with distracted force. Sam cleared her mouth and started the rhythmic pushes of CPR. As he paused for artificial respiration, Rembrandt beat him to it, tipping Mrs. Welles's head back and giving her two full breaths. Sam didn't have time to wonder where the other man had picked up CPR, he just returned to the job at hand. They fell quickly into the much-too-familiar rhythm.

"Al," he puffed in the short break for AR, "what did she take?"

"Coroner records showed it was some kind of prescription tranquilizer," Al said after a second.

"Ask Wade... what her mom's condition was.... when she got here." The words came out on harsh exhales, as he put all of his weight into the CPR. Sweat soaked his back but he refused to acknowledge it; Rembrandt's face a few feet away was grim and determined.

There was the bass rumble of Arturo's voice, then Wade's choked, but clear, answer. "She was alive! I called the ambulance and came back and then.... Remmy, please don't let her die!"

*In time,* Sam thought vaguely, in time to the movements of his arms. *We might be in time. Please, God, let us be in time.*

Chapter 10

Maybe all he'd had to do was ask, or maybe the CPR just finally worked. Whatever it was, Mrs. Welles's chest suddenly heaved of its own accord and she sucked in a shaky breath. Sam scrambled to find the pulse. It was there, but weak and irregular. "She's alive," he reported to the others. "Where's that blasted ambulance?"

"Wade." The name was only a thin breath of air against his cheek, but it was enough to swing Sam's head around fast. Mrs. Welles's eyes had fluttered open, and were looking at him with confusion, and something horribly like accusation. "Quinn... why? Wade...."

*She thinks I'm Quinn, *her* Quinn, that he stopped her from committing suicide and joining Wade. Oh, man, what a mess. Unless....* His head suddenly jerked up, and he looked over his shoulder. Wade was standing in front of Arturo, her arms crossed hard in front of her, staring at them with desperate intensity. Her face exactly matched the one in the picture he'd shoved away minutes before. *Unless I can get her to mistake another double.*

"Wade, get over here," he snapped. Wade blinked uncomprehendingly up at him and the detached corner of his mind recognized the signs of shock, but the doctor in control didn't have time to deal with it. He stood, grabbing her arm and tugging her over.

"Talk to her," he said, low and intense. "You have to be her Wade and convince her to stay alive, or she's not going to make it until the ambulance comes."

She still stared up at him, breathing harshly. "Come on, girl," Rembrandt urged. "You got to do this."

She blinked once, slowly, then nodded, stepping past Sam to kneel next to her mother. "What do I say?" she asked, her voice small, but steady and determined.

"Anything." Sam stood to make room for her and get out of Mrs. Welles's line of sight. "Anything to make her want to live."

Wade nodded again and took her mother's hand, stroking her cheek with the other. "Mom? Mom, wake up."

Mrs. Welles's eyelashes fluttered again, and she looked up at her daughter through unfocused eyes. "Wade?" she mumbled. "Wade, honey?"

"Yes, Mom, it's me." Wade kept her hand moving in a steady motion over her mother's head, her fingers shaking only slightly. Her voice got stronger as she spoke. "Mom, listen to me, you can't do this. It's not your time to leave, you have to know that."

"So alone... Miss you...."

Wade's face spasmed, but her voice stayed firm. "I know, Mom. I miss you, too, so much." Wade's voice almost broke; she took a deep breath and kept going. "But I don't want this. You have things to do here, you can't leave just yet."

Mrs. Welles shook her head, her eyes drifting closed again. Wade leaned forward, taking her mother's face between both hands and shaking her again. "Mom, listen to me! Promise me you'll stay here, that you'll live. You have to live for both of us, Mom, or it'll all just be wasted. Please, Mom, promise me. Mom!"

Mrs. Welles's eyes were still drifting closed, but finally, Sam saw her nod. Her lips moved, shaping the word, "Promise."

Wade breathed out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, bending forward to hug her mother fiercely. "I love you, Mom," she whispered against her mother's hair. "I love you, on this world and every other."

"Love... you... Wade." Mrs. Welles's arm twitched once as if to reach for her daughter, then fell again to her side, limp. Wade moaned deep in her throat and held on tighter.

"Where's that damn ambulance?" Arturo muttered impatiently. As if in answer, the harsh sounds of sirens began to echo from the street.

"Sam, that's your cue," Al said, without looking away from Wade and her mother. His eyes were suspiciously moist.

Sam knelt again next to Mrs. Welles, moving Wade gently aside so he could check her vital signs. Her pulse was still weak but steadying. "What does Ziggy say?"

"Too soon to know for sure," Al said after a second, "but her chances of survival are up to 73 percent."

"Thank God." Sam closed his eyes for a moment on a very sincere prayer of thanks, before lifting Wade back to her feet. "Come on, everyone, we've got to get out of here before that ambulance comes, or we're going waste a lot of time we don't have answering impossible questions.

"Will she be all right?" Wade whispered, without taking her eyes from her mother. Her eyes were huge in her pale face, but the glazed shock was gone.

"We've done everything we can for her," Sam temporized. "Now, we have to leave it up to the ambulance guys."

He'd thought she would protest, would want to stay, but he underestimated her. She looked around at the living room once, then back at her mother. "I love you, mom," she whispered, brushing a kiss across her mother's cheek. Then she stood and started the long trip away.

Rembrandt took a moment to cover Mrs. Welles with an afghan from the back of the couch. "They're going to know someone was here from the call and the CPR," he explained at Sam's questioning look. "Might as well do what we can if we're already caught."

"Her odds just went up to 78 percent," Al contributed without looking up from the handlink.

Sam smiled at both of them as adrenaline started draining away, leaving him lightheaded. "Nice work, Rembrandt. You too, Al."

Rembrandt tucked the blanket in a little more securely, then stood, holding his hand out towards Sam. "You put on a pretty good show yourself, Doc."

Sam took that as the sincere compliment it was, firmly shaking the offered hand. Rembrandt left with one more look back at Mrs. Welles, and Sam followed behind, not going out the back door until the first footsteps pounded up the front.

"Al," he asked over his shoulder, as he jogged to catch up with the others. A crowd had formed out of nowhere as the ambulance pulled up, and they were losing themselves in it very well. "Al, we just changed history. Could this be what I was here to do?"

Al played with the handlink, his head tilted consideringly. "Ziggy says the odds are about 85.6 percent in favor. If it was, she says there's a 97 percent chance that you were supposed to Leap into the Quinn of this world and save Wade's mother through him."

"But if I've done what I'm supposed to do," Sam asked in confusion, "why haven't I Leaped yet? Why am I still here?"

Al shrugged, looking baffled and still punching buttons for all he was worth. "Ziggy says she doesn't... What the hell? Sam? Gooshie!"

Light suddenly flared from Al's form, swelling instantly to an almost painful brightness that nearly blinded Sam. He flinched back and, just as abruptly, the light disappeared, taking Al with it.

He was dead. He had to be.

One second, he'd been walking behind the others as they'd mingled with the small crowd of onlookers, wishing like hell he could talk to them and having to settle for the faint hope that maybe just knowing he was there would help them. The next second, there had been a intense, blinding flash of light, followed by total, complete darkness. There didn't seem to be any other explanation than death.

"Damn you, Ziggy, what happened to you this time?!" Al shouted.

So much for being dead; the Imaging Chamber had failed again. Mild shock was replaced by (literally) blind rage. "Wade! Professor! Al, what the hell is going on this time?"

"Ask Ziggy!" Al shot back from somewhere across the room. "Gooshie! Ziggy! Dammit, open the door!"

The dancing aftereffect splotches began to fade from Quinn's eyes, and he finally saw what looked like a real point of light hovering about ten feet away. It bounced back and forth in time to the distinct sounds of slaps, which meant it had to be the handlink. But the light was steady, without the constant blinking and flickering he'd gotten used to seeing.

He crossed the room carefully, although he was pretty sure there wasn't anything there to run into. "Al? What happened, where is everyone?"

"You tell me!" Al snapped back impatiently. "The handlink's completely frozen, I can't talk to Ziggy, and no one's answering!" The last was directed in a shout at the ceiling.

Quinn's eye were slowly beginning to adjust, enough, at least, that the dim glow from the handlink illuminated Al's face and hands. Something in the back of his mind screamed at him that Wade needed him, to fight, to rage, to do whatever was necessary to get back to her. He shoved it away with all of his self-control, forcing himself to focus on Al. "That flash, just before it went dark -- it could have been another power surge."

"I thought you fixed that!" Al was pressing buttons at random, shaking the handlink as if that would get it back in touch with Ziggy.

"So did I," Quinn muttered. "At least, I thought Gooshie and my double fixed it. Dammit, what could have gone wrong this time?"

"Whatever it was," Al said through gritted teeth, "it's managed to totally cut us off from the outside. Come on, let's try the door from this side. There's an emergency release, if I can find the damn thing."

Quinn stayed as close as he could to Al as they navigated their way across the chamber towards the wall. There was a soft thump and a sudden stream of curses, and Quinn assumed Al had just found the wall with his nose. "You all right?"

"Oh, just swell." Al's voice dripped poisonous sarcasm. "Get over here and help me find the control panel.

Quinn, for once, kept his mouth shut and obeyed, kneeling beside Al and running his hands over the wall until he found a faint seam, about half a meter off the floor. "Got it, I think."

Al's hands touched his, following his fingers to the seam. "Yeah, that's it." The light was too dim for Quinn to follow his motions, but there was a click and a square section of wall came away in Al's hands. "Here we go."

Al raised the handlink so they could both see, dimly, into the interior of the panel. The manual release lever was located down and to the right, on Al's side; he grabbed it and tried to turn. The door groaned and moved a few centimeters, then stopped again.

"Did it work?" Quinn asked.

Al glared at him. "I don't know yet. Try sliding the door up."

But ten minutes of using flat palms to try to slide the door upwards brought no results. "Why didn't you... build in a handle?" Quinn panted, as he tried heaving upwards one more time. "We can't even... get our fingers... under the door!"

"I'll take it up... with the design committee." Al wasn't doing any better. "Haven't had to..... use it before. Wasn't supposed... to do this."

They finally gave up with a joint gasp of effort and defeat, sliding their backs down the wall until they were sitting side-by-side on the floor. "Next bright idea?" Al asked, pulling out a cigar.

"*Please* don't light that," Quinn groaned. The voice in the back of his head was getting louder, more insistent. *Must get out, must get back, must slide. Wade, Remmy, Arturo, must get back.* He stuffed it back down. "And this is your project -- how am I supposed to figure out what's happening?"

"We must have totally lost power," Al theorized, using the cigar to gesture towards the outside. "We'll just have to wait for Gooshie to get the main generators back on line."

"We can't wait!" Quinn shoved himself to his feet, and would have started pacing if he'd been able to see an inch in front of his face. "Every second we stay here means the timer could have run out and I could be missing the slide!"

"Well, don't yell at me about it!" Al shouted back, waving the handlink in one hand and his cigar in the other. The orange light of the handlink caught Quinn's eyes, and he went motionless as an idea hit.

"Al, why is your handlink still working if the power's out?"

Al looked confused at the sudden switch back to calmness. "It's got its own power supply. So?"

Quinn ducked past Al back to the open panel, hope and inspiration driving away everything else. "So maybe we can jury-rig the power supply to the door and get out of here!"

Al thought about it for a second, then scrambled back to the panel on his hands and knees. "I like the way you think, kid. Try it; what have we got to lose?"

"Don't even ask that," Quinn said grimly, starting the process of tracing wires. "We'd think of something."

They settled down quickly to the serious matter of tracing and teasing out optic fibers and hooking them to each other with anything that came to hand -- Al's metallic shoelaces served at one point. Despite a certain amount of bickering (arguing over which blue wire went where took five minutes), they discovered they actually worked well together. Al was impressed with Quinn's ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of all else, and how fast he figured out the inner workings of the panel. The kid might actually have deserved the handle of 'boy genius' Al had hung on him.

Finally, they had a connection rigged up within the spaghetti maze of the door panel, three wires trailing out to the disassembled handlink. Two were already in place, the third ready to connect.

Quinn's hand was steady as he started to connect the last wire; then he stopped. "Al, I need a favor."

"Name it. Fast." Al said brusquely, leaning forward to supervise the process.

"If I don't get back before it's time for the others to slide, you have to tell them I said to slide anyway."

Al looked up at the kid in surprise. His face was lit from below with the orange light from the timer, the lights casting shadows that made his face a stranger's, instead of Sam's. "Don't think like that, kid. We're gonna get you out of this."

"I *have* to think like this." Quinn's face tightened and his eyes bored into Al's, intense and determined. "The last time they had to slide without me, I almost couldn't make Wade go. But she can't stay on this world, and neither can the Professor or Rembrandt; I won't let them sacrifice their chance to get home just for me and I know Wade, at least, is stubborn enough to try. I'm not going to be able to talk them out of it, so you and Sam have to. Give me your word you will."

"Maybe Sam can slide with them and Leap from the other world," Al protested weakly.

Quinn shook his head slowly. "The Leap theory doesn't work that way; we can't take the chance. If he slides, both of us might get trapped, him in another world and me here; at least this way, only one of us will be stuck. Promise me."

The sacrifice the kid was willing to make to give his friends a chance staggered him; it shouldn't have, Al thought in the next second. Given the same options, he knew Sam would do exactly the same thing, and he'd already seen how very much alike Sam and Quinn were. Hell, he realized, he would have been surprised if Quinn had wanted anything else.

He dropped his eyes at last, reluctantly accepting the responsibility Quinn was giving him. "All right, Quinn," he promised, his voice echoing hollowly in the room. "We'll tell them to slide without you."

Quinn's entire body seemed to loosen. "Thank you," he breathed.

Al gripped his shoulder, trying to offer the kid what he could; the only thing he could do was try to lighten the moment, to refocus them on what they had to do. "If you're done with all the emotional stuff, can we get out of here now?"

Quinn almost grinned. "Yeah, we can. Here we go."

Slowly, Quinn connected the third wire to the handlink. There was a bright spark, and the handlink abruptly went dead, plunging them into total darkness. But at the same time, the Imaging Chamber door suddenly started moving jerkily upwards, letting pale light flood the room. It stopped two feet above the floor.

"All right, it worked!" Quinn whooped in triumph.

Al used the hand on his shoulder to shove the kid towards the door; pride and triumph aside, he wanted *out*. "Great, kid. Celebrate later."

Wearing a mad scientist's insane smile, Quinn squirmed under the door, Al following close behind.

They emerged into total chaos.

Chapter 11

Rembrandt's voice rolled deep and rich through the room, flowing over and around the three others who sat and listened, for lack of anything better to do. He was singing something old and sweet, a gospel song Sam vaguely remembered from his childhood, although he couldn't have said when or where he'd heard it.

Rembrandt had started singing to calm Wade when they'd forced her to lay down on the couch to rest, after returning to the hotel twenty minutes earlier. She'd protested, saying she was fine and that she wanted to help, but they'd somehow managed to get her horizontal and Rembrandt's voice had done the rest. Sam could just see her face from the table; her eyes had closed in spite of her best efforts, and her breathing had evened out. Seeing the same thing, Rembrandt let the end of his song trail off into silence.

He'd been wandering around the room as he sang, pretending to look busy, but now returned to the table, and sank down into a chair. Sam and Arturo continued to stare into the back of the timer. "Anything yet?" Rembrandt asked quietly, careful not to disturb Wade.

"Not yet," Arturo sighed, taking off his glasses to rub his eyes. "Miss Welles is sleeping?"

"Like a baby. Sure wish I could."

"There's really no reason you can't," Arturo told him. "With all due respect, the only thing we can do now is attempt to puzzle out why the timer still refuses to function, and..."

"I know," Rembrandt finished for him, sounding resigned rather than upset. "The technical stuff ain't my strong point. But I couldn't sleep, not without knowing where Q-Ball is, or what's going to happen next."

He looked over at Wade, then back at Arturo. "Just doesn't seem right, you know, that this should all end because the timer breaks."

Arturo looked as if he wanted to agree. But instead, he reached out and clapped a hand to Rembrandt's arm. "Come now, Mr. Brown, it's not as bad as all that. Remember, 'The next way home's the farthest way about.'"

Rembrandt gave him a 'Who are you trying to fool?' look, which Arturo ignored magnificently. "Mr. Mallory will find his own way back to us; our job has not changed. We simply have to figure out what the devil has gone wrong with the timer."

"Nothing." Sam made his first contribution, without stopping his relentless poking at the inside of the timer. "From everything you and Quinn have said, this *should* be working. I just can't figure out what I missed."

The last part came out carrying a little more of his frustration than he'd intended; the other two men traded glances. "It's not your fault, Dr. Beckett," Arturo said. "It was Mr. Mallory who designed this contraption, and the universe which decided to break it. By supplying us with the means and knowledge to fix the timer, you've more than made up for whatever inconveniences your appearance caused."

"He's right, man." Rembrandt leaned back in his chair, kicking his legs out under the table. "We've been in some pretty tight situations before; having some help with this one's been a pretty nice change."

They had intended to make him feel better; instead, Sam felt worse. He just couldn't fight the steadily-growing conviction that this was all his fault. If he hadn't been Leaping, the timer wouldn't have shorted out, and they wouldn't be stranded here -- and the most technically proficient member of their group wouldn't be trapped in another time altogether. And Sam Beckett, great genius of the world, couldn't figure out how to fix the one thing that could save them. He couldn't even figure out how to Leap out and save himself.

Saving Mrs. Welles should have done it; it was exactly the sort of this whoever was controlling his Leaps usually wanted to see happen. But he hadn't Leaped.

*What do you want from me?* he asked the universe silently. *What else do you want me to do?*

There was no answer, but then, he hadn't really expected one, so he sighed and tried to pull out of his self-pitying guilt trip. He didn't usually indulge in them, and now was a bad time to start.

"Maybe we all just need to come at this from a different angle," Rembrandt was saying. "You've been sweating over this thing for so long, you're just kind of burned out. Start from the beginning and try looking at it another way."

Sam shrugged mentally; it was the best idea anyone had had for a while. "All right," he started again, pulling the timer closer to him and Arturo. "As far as we can tell, the voltage requirements are being met by the new power source, and then some. Maybe it's not the parts, but the connections we rigged."

Arturo nodded thoughtfully, as if they hadn't already gone over this ten times. "Perhaps. It may be as simple as a circuit not being completed, but we'd need some sort of... Wait a moment!" Sam and Rembrandt both jumped as Arturo's hand thudded to the table. "You've done it, Mr. Brown! Burned out, indeed!"

*Uh-oh, we've got a problem,* Sam thought, edging just slightly away from Arturo before he completely lost control. "Um, what do you mean?"

If Arturo knew what Sam was thinking, he ignored it, his face lit with scientific fervor. "Think, Dr. Beckett! It's not the wiring at all! We rigged the power regulator to carry a higher voltage and serve as adapter for the new power source. What if we succeeded too well?"

Sam still wasn't following. "If it succeeded, it should be working. Unless...."

Arturo smiled, leaning forward as if delivering a crucial point in a lecture. "Yes! Unless the system was, in fact, working too well -- and the increased power flow, coming on top of the initial power surge, burned out the bloody displays!"

Sam felt his jaw dropping and knew he looked like an idiot, but he couldn't do anything about it. It was so simple! "I think you're right, Professor," he said slowly. "And if you are... then the timer is already working! All we need to do is replace the digital time readout so we'll know what it's saying!"

"Exactly!" Arturo said triumphantly. Sam had the impression he was resisting the impulse to jump up and down, or break into song, or something equally undignified, and had to fight down the same impulse himself. They both settled for smiling widely at each other.

"But where are you going to find a digital display?" Rembrandt asked. He wasn't slumped anymore -- the other men's excitement seemed to be contagious -- but he also hadn't completely lost his grip on reality.

It was Sam and Arturo who exchanged glances this time. "I... don't know," Sam admitted, his jubilation fading a little. "Almost everything here is LCD, from what I remember, and it would take a while to make a liquid crystal readout compatible with the digital wiring."

"How about using a watch?" Sam had the satisfaction of seeing Arturo's jaw drop this time. As one, all three of them turned to look at Wade, who was sitting up and looking back at them sleepily over the top of the couch. "After all, the timer's pretty much a big complicated watch, anyway," she said through a yawn.

"A bit more than that, Miss Welles," Arturo finally forced out, "but the comparison is not, for our purposes, inaccurate. Do any of us possess a digital watch?"

Wordlessly, deliberately, Rembrandt shoved his shirtsleeve back, and unstrapped a black sports watch, holding it out. "Picked it up on Gillian's world," he said with supernatural calm, "when mine got broken getting into of that warehouse. It was about as high-tech as that world got. I kept meaning to replace it but it sorta had sentimental value, you know?"

Arturo accepted the watch with the same super-controlled composure. "Saved from high-tech by a world of low-tech. I never thought I'd say this, Mr. Brown, but thank God for your sentiments."

"Amen!" Sam echoed fervently, and they got down to business.

*Yeah, the lights went out, all right,* was Al's first thought as he looked around. The emergency lighting cast the room into a surreal orange glow, leaving strange shadows behind the techs who rushed around the room. Three of them had been crouched beside the Imaging Chamber, and were still gaping at the door with open-mouthed surprise. Al ignored them and strode down the stairs towards the dark, dead bulk of Ziggy's body, trying not to let his deep dread at the sight of her show on his face.

"Admiral!" Gooshie's shout came from across the room; he immediately started pushing his way through oblivious workers. "How did you get out? Never mind, it doesn't matter," he said rapidly, his words falling all over themselves. "Ziggy's gone, Admiral, completely off-line, the power surge just came from nowhere, it took out half the mountain, three people were electrocuted, they're all in the infirmary--"

"Gooshie!" Al's roar cut the computer technician off in mid-babble. "What caused the surge? Why is the main generator off-line, and what are we doing to fix it? We're on a deadline here!"

"We're looking, Admiral!" Gooshie said desperately. "Louie has people in every power room and junction, trying to find all the shorts, but we just can't get the power back! Louie wants to talk to you, I just don't understand, we fixed the computer and replaced --"

"All right, all right!" Al shoved his forgotten cigar back into his mouth. "I'm going down to the main power room. Quinn! Stay here!"

Without waiting for an answer from either of them, he was out the door, stalking through the halls once more towards the power room. Without even bothering to salute the guards this time, he went in.

It was even more chaotic there, if possible. The acrid smell of melted plastic and burned wire filled the air, along with the wisps of dull gray smoke that the ventilation system hadn't been able to deal with yet. Louie's voice rose over the loud hum of twenty voices talking at once, barking orders alternately into a radio and at the room at large.

"Louie! Tell me good news!" Al shouted, trying not to trip over any wires or techs as he crossed the room.

"When I find some, I'll tell you," Louie shouted back, reaching out one big hand to pull Al closer. "I've never seen anything like this," he said more quietly, his broad, sweaty face completely baffled. "There was no reason for this, no lightning, no Leap, no nothing. All of a sudden, the whole system just overloaded, for no goddamned reason!"

"That's impossible," Al said flatly. "There has to be a reason and we're damn well gonna find it, *before* we lose track of Sam for good."

There was no way they could have been heard over the noise around them, but Louie dropped his voice still further anyway. "There might be a reason, but you're not going to like it."

"Try me," Al replied, unconsciously repeating Quinn's challenge of that morning.

"Ziggy might not have broken on her own."

The words sounded odd to Al; it seemed to be a long time before they quite made sense in his head. "Are you saying," he said finally, slowly and carefully, "that someone is sabotaging the project? One of Sam's people? You expect me to believe that?"

Louie took a step back at Al's low, fierce tone, his eyes hardening slightly. "Believe what you want, Admiral, after you see this." He turned on his heel and strode away, deeper into the bowels of the power room. Al, his mind still reeling at the idea that *anyone* could deliberately have caused this much damage, followed.

Louie stopped in front of a panel and took the protective grate off of it, setting it aside and shooing away two techs who'd been pretending to work in front of it. "Didn't want anyone else to see," he explained shortly over his shoulder. "Not until I showed it to you. Take a look."

Al found himself on the floor again; it only took a moment to see what Louie was talking about. Where there should have been a solid bundle of covered wires, the cables were spread out, touching the bundles above and below them at several points. And where their plastic cases should have been smooth and impenetrable, the wires were stripped, down low where they were invisible to casual inspection. They hovered only centimeters away from other bare spots.

"I found four, five other spots just like this, the wires melted and fused into each other where power from an overload crossed the gap and caused a major short circuit," Louie said expressionlessly. "Might not have thought anything of it, just defective wires or a power surge that was too high for design specs to handle. Then one of my techs found this. Maybe the wires weren't close enough, maybe this bundle just didn't get enough power shunted through it. Whatever happened, this one didn't short circuit. The rest of them did. Boom. Good-bye generator, good-bye Ziggy."

Al didn't generally spend too much time making up his mind about anything. Sam was the deep-thinker, the one who considered every possible outcome before he did anything -- and they were still paying for the one time he'd Leaped before he'd looked. Al was the impulsive one, the one who jumped blindly ahead, into romances, adventures, and everything else. He'd trusted his instincts every time, and he trusted them now.

"Sonuvabitch." It was a sign of his real anger that, for once, he didn't yell. "Louie, I'm going to send Marines to every one of your work crews. Get those patches put on and no one but your techs touches them this time. And check the duty roster; I want to know everyone who's been through here since the last inspection, stat! Marines!" Now he bellowed, and the two guards from the door of the power room came running. "Tell two of your buddies to meet me in the Leap chamber, now! And no one comes in or out of here without Louie, Gooshie, Sam or me!"

The Marines, bless their obedient little jarheads, nodded and swung into action. Al didn't stop to watch, but ran for the door. "Louie, I owe you a case of beer!" he shouted over his shoulder.

"Two cases!" Louie shouted at his back.

Quinn sat on the steps of the Imaging Chamber feeling helpless; it was a feeling he hated, and always had. He'd been helpless to save his father, years ago, helpless to stop his mother's grieving. And since that first slide, he'd too often been helpless when his friends were in danger -- unable to save them, much less himself.

He was perfectly happy to be in a bad situation, as long as there was something he could do to get out. If there was a problem he knew how to solve, an obstacle he could figure a way over, or just someone could get past with words or fists, then he could deal with that. But when there was nothing he could do but watch and wait -- that was when he went crazy.

And that was all he could do now. There wasn't any busywork, this time; every inch of Ziggy's mainframe was crawling with people who knew more about what was going on than he did. Only a few computer terminals were actually working, and each one had five people clustered around it. His double was swallowed in one such crowd; Quinn had caught a brief glimpse of him across the room. It had been a long time since he'd envied anyone so much.

So he sat on the steps and watched, and tried desperately not to remember Wade's face as Sam and Rembrandt had worked to save her mother's life. He hadn't been able to help with the CPR; he hadn't even been able to touch Wade, to comfort her. He'd just hovered around uselessly as she'd cried. Somehow, that made him more miserable than almost anything else he'd ever slid into.

"Gooshie!" Quinn jumped as Al came slamming through the lab doors -- they slid aside like every other door in this mountain, but the sheer force of Al's entry was a slam in itself. Behind Al were two Marines, complete with sidearms, and Quinn suddenly had a very bad feeling about this. He made it down the stairs in one jump.

Everyone else in the room paused to look as Al shoved his way to Gooshie and pulled the short man into a low-voiced conference. "...messing with the wiring," Al was saying as Quinn got himself into earshot, "so it shorted out as soon as a power surge came through. But the surge suppressers should have kicked in -- why didn't they?"

Gooshie was open-mouthed and blinking rapidly. "I-I don't know Admiral," he stuttered, frustration coating every expelled word. "We replaced those suppressers completely, all of the hardware, and the software glitch was fixed. They *should* have come on-line!"

"Unless someone took them off deliberately."

Al and Gooshie blinked and looked at Quinn, as if they hadn't noticed anyone else was listening. The orange lighting turned Al's suit a frightening shade of brownish-purple; if he'd been paying attention, Quinn might have flinched back from the equally-frightening rage in Al's eyes. But all of his concentration was focused across the room, where his double was extracting himself from the group of techs around his terminal.

Their eyes met across the room, and Quinn suddenly heard his own voice, replaying endlessly in his head.

'The regulator codes are my pet project.... Dr. Beckett might not have anticipated what a power hog Ziggy is..... I was hoping to get a government grant to pay some of the bills so I could work on making the theory practical..... Guess they didn't have enough funding for two wildly theoretical interspatial travel projects.... I was the only one who walked away..... Guess I was just meant to do something....'

The image of three headstones flashed in front of his photographic memory, and he heard Wade's voice as she bent over her mother. 'You have to live for both of us, Mom, or it'll all just be wasted.'

"Al," he asked hollowly, "what day is it?"

From the corner of his eye, he saw Al look confused, then annoyed. "This is a helluva time to get curious about the date, Quinn; in case you hadn't noticed, we've got other problems."

"What day is it?" he repeated, without ever taking his eyes off the other Quinn, who was still standing motionless, his eyes curiously blank.

Al thought for a second, then, obviously unable to come up with the date, turned to Gooshie for a short consultation. Finally, a tech with a Swiss Army watch was dragged in; Al's face went back to confusion as he read the date. "I'll be damned.... Quinn, it's January 27."

Quinn's chest hurt, and he realized he'd forgotten to breathe. It was a wild hunch, so terrifying that he almost tossed it aside; anything would be better than having to deal with this. But it was one too many coincidences -- and he knew, with a bone-deep certainty, just how far he might have been willing to go if anyone had tried to keep him from sliding.

He heard his own voice as if it was a stranger's, echoing with strange clarity in the noisy chamber. "Quinn," he asked himself, standing across the room, "what did you do to Ziggy?"

Chapter 12

The silence seemed to ripple out from the path between Quinn and his double. One by one, the techs stopped moving and talking to listen.

Quinn didn't really notice, couldn't tear his eyes away from his double's face. And as they stared at each other, he knew he was right.

He recognized the expression which crept across the other's face; he'd felt it on his own often enough, at those times when he thought everything was over, just before he gave up. Now, he tried to see past it, into the other's head. "Why, Quinn?" he asked with simple curiosity. "This won't bring them back, you know that. Why attack Quantum Leap?"

The other Quinn tried to appear confused, but looked as if he simply couldn't summon enough energy. "What are you talking about?"

Quinn shook his head. "Al, who was on duty the last three days in the main power room, and the other places that shorted out?"

After a quick conference over the intercom, Al said, super-calmly, "Quinn Mallory volunteered for duty in all of those places in the last week."

Quinn gestured slightly at his double, a 'that's what I'm talking about' motion.

The other Quinn shrugged in return, all secrets suddenly gone. His eyes burned with cold ice. "It's not about bringing them back," he said dispassionately. "It never was. It was just... making it worth it. They couldn't have died for nothing. I couldn't have walked away for nothing."

Quinn shook his head, having to force the movement into muscles that seemed frozen with shock. "You can't walk away from this, Quinn." *We sound like one of those b-grade movies I used to laugh at. Any second now, someone's going to yell 'Cut!'*, he thought crazily. "You'll never be able to get far enough away."

The other Quinn seemed to consider that. "Maybe not," he said eventually, closing his eyes as if in exhaustion. "But I had to try."

"The lead goes to the right contact, the ground to the left."

"Green wire or red wire?"

"Red, Mr. Brown, red. Now hold that steady while I make the connection." A spark jumped the two wires, and everyone flinched. "Blast!"

"One more time, professor," Sam said with a calm he didn't feel. "This time, connect the ground first, then the power supply."

"Yes, of course." Arturo shook his hands out, the weariness beginning to show on his face. Wade lit a lamp as the sunlight through the window began to fade. "Again, gentlemen. Let's try this again."

"Why?" Quinn demanded again, softer this time. It didn't matter; the rest of the room was utterly still. Time itself seemed to be holding its breath.

"It had to be worth something," the other repeated, as if to himself. Then he opened his eyes, focusing them on Quinn's with a kind of manic intensity, a plea for understanding. "If I could have figured out sliding, made it work, then it would have been worth something. There would have been a *reason*."

"A reason for what?" Al demanded. "For playing God with Sam's life? With his?" He made one jerky gesture towards Quinn.

"No!" The denial burst out of the other's mouth as if propelled. "No, I never meant to hurt Dr. Beckett! I just wanted... just needed..."

"To slide," Quinn filled in. His muscles were slowly unfreezing, allowing him to take the first step towards his double. "You needed to slide, to prove you could. To make your mark on this world, no matter what. So that someone would."

The other's face softened. "Exactly," he nodded eagerly, finally finding someone to agree with him. "They wouldn't give me the funding, they only had time for Dr. Beckett, and it was all wrong!" He half-turned, facing the others, arms held out from his side. "Leaping doesn't really work, you can see that! Only for Dr. Beckett -- no one else can ever try, but there'll never be enough funding or attention for any other methods, as long as Project Quantum Leap exists!"

His eyes changed, took on a canny gleam. "But if the project failed... there'd be room. They'd have to listen to me! All I had to do was change the coding and make sure the wires blew, and I could have my chance. I could make it up to them, to all of them. It wouldn't be wasted."

"Green wire, *then* red wire, *then* reconnect the power supply." Sam leaned close. "You'll have to secure it, the next world might not believe in digitals either."

Arturo's hands were steady, though sweat spotted his forehead. The wires touched and clung, then were twisted in place with one deft movement of the jeweler's pliers. "One down."

"Two to go," Rembrandt muttered. "Work, baby, work."

"You need to prove sliding works, to make a name for yourself; and prove there was a reason you walked away from that car crash, that it wasn't just sheer luck." This was between the two Quinns; Al was silent now.

"But what if your theories are wrong?" The distance between Quinn and his double closed; Quinn circled slightly, keeping himself between his double and Ziggy. "What if sliding doesn't work? What if you've done all of this damage, hurt all of these people, including Dr. Beckett, for no reason?"

"It'll work." His double didn't seem to notice Quinn was moving; his eyes still had that manic gleam. "I know it works. I wasn't in San Francisco when Wade's mother tried to kill herself; I wasn't there and Wade wasn't there, no matter what her mother believes. But someone was, other people saw them at the cemetery -- it *had* to have been sliders, like me, there's no other way. It works, I just have to prove it! I'm going to prove it!"

With an abruptness even Quinn hadn't expected, his double suddenly lunged through the crowd of staring techs towards the main chamber door.

"Two down. Where's the blasted power supply?"

"Right here, professor."

"Take your time, professor. If this one blows..."

"I know." They held their breaths and Wade whispered a wordless prayer, as Arturo carefully touched the wire to the power supply.

Quinn didn't know where his other thought he was going, or how he was going to get out of the mountain. He didn't have time to think about any of that, he just moved.

A long time ago, Quinn Mallory had played football. He'd been pretty good at it, too, dreamed of the NFL like all boys on the playing field. But an over-enthusiastic tackle had left him with a scarred-up knee and a new respect for Newton's law, the one about equal and opposite reactions.

His knee didn't bother him as he catapulted across the chamber, landing with his arms wrapped around his double's shoulders. Quinn hit him high and Al, barely a step behind, hit him low, and they tumbled on the ground in a struggling, breathless heap.

The other Quinn fought them for only a moment before he gave in, going utterly limp beneath them. His eyes squeezed shut as the Marine guards raced up, too late. Quinn waved them off -- this was his problem to deal with. "Where's the disk, Quinn? Where is the safe coding for Ziggy's power relay programs?"

The other didn't seem to hear; his eyes were still closed, his head lolling back on his shoulders against the cold tile of the floor. Quinn abruptly lost whatever control he'd been clinging to, grabbing his double's shoulders between his hands and shaking him. "Where are they, damn you!"

"You'd understand." The other Quinn opened his eyes once more, staring past Quinn into nothing. "You'd understand if you were me. I lost them all, you don't understand."

Quinn shook the other again, then lifted his shoulders inches off the floor, forcing him to meet his eyes. "You don't get it," he said through gritted teeth. "I *am* you! And I'll *never* understand."

The double held his gaze for what seemed like a long time. Then he started to smile, then, insanely, to laugh. "Dr. Beckett... Leaped into me," he gasped out, barely able to breath. "Leaped into me... to stop me! No fair. That's just not fair."

"Maybe not," Quinn said grimly, "but that's how it is. Where's the goddamned disk?"

His double never stopped laughing as he told them, even when the guards came to lead him away.

Quinn stood alone as the doors slid shut again, feeling every eye on him. He didn't care; he was too tired to care about anything now and he didn't *want* to care. He wanted to curl up in a corner somewhere and pretend it had never happened. He wanted his friends. He wanted to go home.

Carefully, he opened his double's wallet, and extracted the small cd- rom from behind the picture of Wade, handing it silently to Gooshie.

He barely noticed when the lights flickered back on, he paid no attention to Al, passing out low orders behind him, and he didn't jump when a strong hand landed on his shoulder. "Quinn? You all right?"

For a horrible moment, he felt the laughter bubbling up inside him, and forced it down with an effort that brought tears to his eyes. His head sank forward into his hands. Al seemed to understand; the grip on his shoulder tightened, and Quinn clung to that grip as the only stable thing in a universe gone mad.

"It wasn't you, kid," Al said quietly. "No matter whose face he was wearing, that wasn't you, and you know it."

Quinn wasn't buying it. He understood, now, why Wade had been driven to visit her double's grave, what she'd felt she owed.

"It *could* have been me, Al. If I had lost everything, if everything I love had been stolen from me in a moment, it could have been me. He had to watch Wade and his parents die, and live with the guilt, even if he didn't cause it, and he never had the Professor or Rembrandt to lean on. He didn't even have sliding -- they took that from him, too."

He ran one hand through his hair, then let it fall limply to his side. "I lied, Al. I do understand him. Too damn well."

Al didn't say anything else, but his hand tightened once again on Quinn's shoulder.

A humming noise suddenly filled the chamber, and the lights flickered on overhead. "Admiral?" Ziggy's voice asked. "I have had a most interesting experience. May I ask what it was?"

Her voice was composed and surprised, and Quinn found himself doing what he'd thought for a moment he'd never do again -- laughing. He turned to look at the computer, and saw Al watching him, his face creased with the force of his smile. Their eyes met, gleaming with shared, rueful amusement at the utter absurdity of the universe.

Then the lights flickered again, gradually turning a soft, glowing blue that swelled around Quinn, outlining him with electric light. He was baffled for a moment, terrified, until he saw the surprise and dawning pleasure on Al's face.

Before the haze completely enveloped him, he saw Al mouth something that could have been 'Good job,' or 'Thank you.' Or it might just have been 'Good-bye.'

Then there was nothing.

As the wire touched the power supply, something sparked, and Sam's heart stopped. He was afraid to look.

Arturo stared down at the bottom of the timer, his face frozen. "Dr. Beckett," he said slowly, ponderously. "Would you do the honors?"

Sam nodded, and took the timer from Arturo's hand. He took a deep breath and, in one quick move, turned it over.

Nothing.

Sudden frustration surged through Sam's body; unthinking, he smacked the timer against his hand in anger, as he'd seen Al do so many times with the handlink. The readout flickered.

Then the timer beeped and green numbers flashed on the face of what had been a watch, counting down inexorably downwards.

"It works," he breathed. Then he shouted. "It works!"

Rembrandt's whoop echoed his, Wade's cry of delight breaking over them both. Arturo's hands came down on the table as if to support him; his head bowed forward in exhausted relief. So it was Sam who finally actually saw what the numbers were saying.

'8...7...6....'

"Oh, no. Not yet," he said desperately. "Not yet, it's not time yet! I have to Leap first!" Panic bubbled up in him, replacing exhilaration; they'd come too close to have to make this choice now!

'5...4...3.... '

"Sam?" Wade's eyes, which had been bright with joy, were now wide with fear. She grabbed his arm. "What's happening?"

Sam tried to find the words to tell them, to make them understand that it hadn't been enough to save Quinn. Before he could force the words out, he saw Wade's brown eyes turn to electric blue and felt the familiar tingle begin to rise around him.

'2...1....'

An odd serenity replaced the panic. Whatever had gone wrong, was now right. And it was time to go.

'00:00'

He pushed the correct button, and a stream of colorless something shot out of the front of the timer. As three pairs of astonished eyes turned towards him, he smiled a slightly regretful farewell through the blue haze. "Tell Quinn I said good luck."

There was only enough time to see the wormhole form, only a moment to appreciate the wild beauty of Quinn Mallory's discovery, before his own invention carried him away.

The dizziness hit him first, almost knocking him off his feet. Dimly, Quinn was aware of someone shouting, and a strong wind tugging at his clothes. Looking up, he saw the wormhole, obscuring part of a wall in what looked like the Dominion hotel. *How the hell did I get here?*

"Q-Quinn?"

Something tugged at his sleeve, but it was a bit too much effort to try and figure out what. His head throbbed annoyingly.

"Mr. Mallory?"

He tried to lift his hand to rub at his aching forehead; his body moved oddly, tiredly, and he didn't know why.

"Q-Ball? Come on, we're gonna miss the slide!"

Something in the last shout caught his attention; he tore his gaze away from the wormhole and saw three blessedly familiar faces clustered around him, staring at him with worried, relieved, cautious eyes.

He blinked and tried to focus; a neat trick, since his mind persisted in jumped around quickly enough to make him motion sick. "Um, guys?" he asked cautiously. "Didn't we just do this this morning?"

"He's back!" Wade shouted happily, throwing her arms around him. He returned the hug automatically, dimly aware that something terrible had just been averted, but without a clue as to what it had been.

"Welcome back, Mr. Mallory," Arturo said, with no less sincerity than Wade, but a good deal more impatience. He pried something out of Quinn's hand and Quinn realized he'd had a death grip on the timer -- which looked very odd. "However, as we have only 30 seconds until the wormhole closes, I believe we should save the celebrations for later."

"In other words," Rembrandt said, a huge grin splitting his face as he tousled Quinn's hair roughly, "we are leaving!"

With two running steps, Rembrandt was across the room and into the wormhole. Arturo clapped Quinn once on the back, then made his own sprint, following Rembrandt in. Wade grabbed Quinn's hand and started to pull him along behind her.

As he was dragged, Quinn saw the mess the room was in: electronics all over the table, newspapers covering most of the couch (where they hadn't been blown to the floor) and blackened towels filling one chair.

*I missed something,* he concluded. *Big time.*

He pulled away from Wade just long enough to lunge for the one thing in the room that looked familiar, lying half-hidden under the newspapers on the couch, and shoved it into his pocket on the run. Then he was following Wade into the wormhole, beginning the familiar slide through the universes.

Endless seconds later, he landed with an "oomph!" on soft grass topping hard ground, sprawling on his face in the dirt inches from Wade. It took another long moment to get his breath back, but he finally managed to roll over onto his back, sitting up enough to stare around him and try to figure out just what the hell was going on.

Before he could come to any conclusions, his breath was knocked back out as Wade's flying hug carried them both over backwards again. "Quinn! You're back!"

"I was gone?" he asked on a breathless laugh, holding Wade as close as he could. Dim memories were beginning to surface, a white room and a dark-haired man with kind, impatient eyes. Staring at himself.... Had they run into trouble with another double, like Logan? A cemetery, and standing helplessly as Wade cried....

He lifted his arms enough to cup Wade's face between his palms, staring anxiously into her eyes. "You're all right? Something happened, didn't it?"

She stared at him, her face caught between joy and confused curiosity. "You don't remember?"

For her sake, he tried, he really did. "Just... flashes. I was somewhere else, except I was with you guys at the same time. Then I wasn't."

"Sounds like more than the timer got scrambled." Rembrandt lent a hand to pull both Quinn and Wade to their feet, then enveloped them both in a close bear hug. "That's all right, Q-Ball, long as you remember us!"

"Like I could forget," Quinn laughed, pulling Wade just a little closer so he could bury his face in her hair, and wrapping his other arm more firmly around Rembrandt's neck.

They broke apart before any of them could do anything embarrassing like start to cry; the second Wade's arms were free, she hauled off and punched Quinn's arm.

"Hey!" Quinn protested, rubbing his arm, which was now throbbing to match his head; Wade's left hook was improving. "What was that for?"

"You scared us!" she informed him angrily. "*Never* do that again!"

"As soon as I figure out what I did, I promise not to do it again." That sounded ridiculous even to him; it made Wade start to laugh in spite of herself. She wrapped her hands around his arm, letting her forehead fall against the spot she'd just hit.

"Welcome back, Mr. Mallory." Now that the sloppy sentiment seemed to be over, Arturo got close enough to offer a handshake to Quinn. He accepted it, then, urged on by those same vague feelings of averted disaster, pulled Arturo into the same bearhug Rembrandt had given him. Arturo didn't fight it, but clapped him on the back with both hands.

"Welcome back, indeed, my boy," Arturo smiled broadly as he stepped back. "You were sorely missed. Now, may I suggest we move this reunion to someplace a little less public, so we can begin reminding Mr. Mallory of what he missed? Among other things, we need to do a proper job of fixing the timer before our--" He consulted the timer, which seemed to have, of all things, a digital watch wired to the front. "--37 hours on this world are up."

Quinn started to agree, then remembered something else. He checked his back pocket and grinned widely when he discovered that his last- minute grab was still there. "Just a second, Professor; there's one thing I've got to do first." He pulled out the mystery he'd been reading what seemed like days ago, and flipped towards the end. "I've got to find out how this ends."

Wade started laughing again. "Well, at least we're sure it's him this time."

Arturo and Rembrandt started chuckling as well, but Quinn ignored all three of them, focusing his full attention on the book. A few seconds later, he shouted, "The coroner! I was right!"

"Congratulations." Wade yanked the book out of his hand and tossed it at the nearest trash can, scoring a direct hit, then pulled him along behind her as they started to walk away. "Now let's go!"

Quinn started to object, then thought better of it; grinning crookedly down at Wade, he tightened his grip on her hand and matched her step as they joined the other two, who were staring at the rather incredible sight of three people walking down the street, entirely swaddled in long, Arabic-looking robes and burnooses. A few feet off the pathway stood an electronic billboard, scrolling the words "UV Alert: Extremely High. SPF 300 recommended for all outdoor activities."

"Looks like we could get a pretty good tan on this world," Wade cracked. "Come on, Quinn, let's get inside before we fry."

"I'm coming." For a second, as Quinn joined them, he saw the dark- haired man's face again, split in a broad grin, and felt a quick stab of something like loss. Then the image faded, and he was with his friends again.

*Home,* something in the back of his mind whispered. *Home again.*

Epilogue

Sam's body rested quietly under the hospital sheets, his eyes closed and his face slack. The various monitors attached to it beeped quietly, the only real evidence that the body was still alive.

Al sighed and adjusted the sheet around Sam's chest, unable to stop himself from checking to make sure it was still moving. It had taken two Marines to carry Sam back to the Waiting Room after Quinn had Leaped out, leaving the body empty again.

He missed the kid, Al admitted to himself. For a while there, it had been almost like having Sam back; all that enthusiasm and determination, the quick intelligence and the embattled humor. Yeah, he was going to miss having Quinn around.

The other Quinn Mallory had been turned over to the military police the day before, shortly after the Leap. It was unlikely any charges would ever be pressed, and Al intended to make sure the young man was taken care of, for his Quinn's sake, if nothing else. He'd also told Ziggy to check on Mrs. Welles regularly, and see if she was doing all right since her failed suicide attempt two years before. Just to make sure.

Someday, when Sam was home, maybe they'd sit down and figure out what had happened, just what the universe had really intended. Had saving Mrs. Welles' life turned the trick, after all? Or had Quinn been intended to save Ziggy and Project Quantum Leap from himself? Or maybe it had all somehow been about that damn timer?

Al rubbed his eyes, still tired after ten hours of badly-needed sleep, and accepted that he'd probably never know, just as he'd never know whether Quinn and his friends had ever gotten the timer fixed, if they'd ever made it home.

Sam's body twitched once, and something resembling life seemed to return to it; if he looked just right, Al could almost see the blue aura surrounding his friend's skin. He moved back a step, and waited.

The door swished open behind him right on cue. "Admiral?" Al didn't even turn around at Gooshie's hesitant voice. "Admiral, we've confirmed that Dr. Beckett has completed his Leap; he's somewhere in Missouri, 1974. Ziggy is showing no signs of power strains, and Louie expects to have the final repairs made by this afternoon."

Al nodded in acknowledgment, still without turning around. "Thanks, Gooshie. Get the Imaging Chamber and the new handlink ready; I'll be there in a few minutes."

Gooshie's footsteps started backwards, then paused. Al stared down at Sam's face, impassive, and the door finally closed again. But it was only a few moments before he heard the doctors, alerted by the monitors, begin to cluster outside the other Waiting Room door. He gave the sheets one last twitch, and turned to go.

But, like Gooshie, he paused in the doorway, looking back over his shoulder. "Good luck," he said quietly to the air. "I hope you make it home soon."

The door slid shut behind him, leaving Sam's body alone in the dim light.

Finis

Perri's Notes
Writing 'Slideways Leap' was both the best and worst experience of my life. 225k of story was written in a two-week marathon, where I literally could not eat, sleep or work -- I couldn't do anything but plot and write. Fortunately, I had a boss who was too busy to notice, and friends and family willing to tolerate the whole thing. Jennifer Mingee, in particular, put up with me stalking around her living room plotting out loud for several evenings, which I'm sure was much harder to take than baby Andrew crying at the same time. < g >

Like any other crossover, the best part was trying to make the mythology of the two universes work -- in fact, realizing the parallels between sliding and Leaping was what started this whole thing. Then Wade went off and found her double, and Quinn was brought face to face with his double, and Al started getting lost in technobabble and.. well it was a helluva ride. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I... enjoyed?... writing it.