Love them, feed them and leave them alone – Doctor Spock


Prologue


Blue-white neon light flashing, an eerie sound in his ears.

Another leap, another face, another wrong to right, another life to change…

In the split second it took between the Leaps, Sam felt his mind swirling just like the light around him. And the hope that maybe this time he'd Leap back home surged in his mind, overwhelming and desperate. But somehow he knew this wasn't the time yet. Someday, but not yet. Not today…

When would he get to do the last change and go back to his own body? Stop living for others and start his own life again… Look at a mirror and see his real face. Had he changed? Had any wrinkle appeared on his face? Had his hair turned white with time and stress?

Suspended in time, Sam wondered, not for the first time, where he was and why he never remembered the jump between the Leaps. In this time that didn't exist, his mind came back to him, with all of his memories, his different Leaps but his real life too. Well, most of it anyway… Every time, he couldn't shake that nagging feeling that something desperately important wasn't coming back to him. It was just there at the tip of his fingers, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't reach it. This time he didn't even try to find out. If he couldn't get to it, there was probably a reason, and maybe that reason was that there just wasn't anything to be remembered. It just seemed that there was to be something…

Why did he have to forget everything, or almost everything, and surely the things he needed most, the moment he entered his new host? Why bother thinking about it when he wouldn't remember he had been thinking about it? This was crazy. Thinking, wondering, but not knowing, not remembering that you did. All input, all data, everything just forgotten, as wiped out from a computer. An erased disk ready to be used again. And everything stored somewhere he could not access to, or could for a too brief moment only to be forgotten again.

Stop! Stop thinking about this. He forced his mind to let go this maddening train of thoughts, and come back to the usual question.

Where am I?

Was there a tunnel between life to life? People back from death used to talk about a tunnel and a light. He saw light, although he could not tell if it was real or only in his mind; and from what Al had told him generally several days elapsed between one Leap and the other, even though for him it never seemed to stop. So, if the time that went by could be seen as a tunnel, there was a tunnel and a light. Then maybe he just died between each Leap, to be brought back again to somebody else's body. And right now he was dead. Part of him anyway. His aura was at the project. And as he wasn't replacing anyone in that brief moment, maybe his body was back there too. Maybe he was home right now.

Home… he didn't remember much about it, but is sounded like a good place to be. A place with faces, friends, warmth… But there was no home for him now. Only a cool white room where is body laid. He wondered briefly if the part of his body left at the project was being monitored. And the physician in him suddenly wished he could get a look at the brain waves… What did a brain scan of an empty body show?

Maybe he was dead then, and this Leaping business was reincarnation. But he did not believe in reincarnation. When you were dead your body was eaten by worms and your soul… Well, something should happen to the soul. As a scientist he assumed that when the body died everything in it died. But as a man, a human being, accepting that you would simply, completely, disappear… And this is a different kind of death; my body is not rotten but in a secret underground complex in New Mexico and my soul keeps jumping from one person to the other. Maybe these people will think they have been visited by their guardian angel. Assuming the experience is not driving them nuts. Am I an angel then?

"Please God, I'd like to go back home now…"