The Long Way Home

by Blue Fenix

Time traveler Sam Beckett and New York detective Diana Bennett may be able to spend the rest of their lives together -- if they can catch a brutal serial killer.

The Long Way Home
by Blue Fenix

It may well be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

--Edna St. Vincent Milay

May 29, 1990

They stood close together on Diana Bennett's rooftop, Vincent's cloak around both of them against the chilly night air. Diana ran a hand up the burly chest of the man beside her, to the catlike face. "What do you really look like?" she said wistfully.

Sam Beckett smiled down at her. He hadn't quite mastered Vincent's facial expressions, in the last six days, but the meaning was clear enough. "I'm about a hundred years old, I limp, I smell bad, and my eyes are crossed. Still interested?"

She didn't smile. "As long as it's YOU," Diana said.

Sam squeezed her hard, tears stinging his eyes. Sam had been 'leaping' -- bouncing around randomly in time, occupying the bodies and lives of other people for short periods -- ever since he'd recklessly decided to test his own time machine early, but he'd never felt so reluctant to leave a borrowed life. "God, just let this work." He stroked her red hair, its fire muted to chestnut brown by the dim lights on the roof. "I'll write you, I swear. I should have thought of this idea ages ago ... I just never wanted to stay in touch with someone so badly. Al's all for it, he'll help us. And if I ever get home ..."

"WHEN you get home." Diana's fingers tightened in Vincent's long hair.

"When I get home, we'll be just about the same physical age and everything will be wonderful." His eyes darkened. "If you still want me. Diana, this will be hardest on you. Years, at best. I can't ask you to promise anything ... I won't let you. If you meet somebody else in all that time ..."

She nodded soberly. Diana loved the world of fairy-tale romance -- she felt she was in one this instant -- but she knew the real world, too. "Tempus fugit. But ... I don't think it will happen that way."

They shared a silence for a few seconds, then "He's not here, is he?" Diana asked. "Your invisible friend."

Sam gawked at her. "You ARE psychic."

She shook her head. "No. You're good at pretending he's not there, but not perfect. I can see it in your body language when he's with you."

Sam's best friend, Al, maintained contact with the time traveler in holographic form; with rare exceptions, only Sam could see or hear him. "Al said we deserved some time alone. He's a good friend. God, I don't know why I've got so many loving people to lean on." His eyes caressed her for a second, then Sam leaned down into a tender kiss.

Diana felt him leap out, or at least felt the sudden startle when Vincent leaped in and found himself kissing someone. Her friend backed away in shock and disorientation. "Diana. I ... what ..."

"Time travel," she said. Diana crossed her arms across her chest, trying to compress away the sudden feeling of emptiness. "You've been gone five and a half days. What do you remember, Vincent?"

"A hospital room, and a man in strange clothes asking me questions. He wasn't afraid of me, of my appearance ..." Vincent broke off suddenly, staring at his furred and clawed hands. "My appearance. Diana, I was human! I never saw a mirror, but I had normal hands and a normal body."

Vincent's appearance no longer startled Diana, but she knew what he meant. Her friend had a face more lion-like than human. Vincent lived in hiding with a small community of outcasts who had made a near-utopia in some of the tunnels under New York City. Diana, a police detective, had met Vincent while investigating the murder of Catherine Chandler, the woman Vincent had loved. "You ARE human, Vincent, but I know what you mean. The man you talked to was named Al, wasn't he?" Sam had told her that "leapees" rarely remembered anything of their experiences, but Vincent was the exception to many rules.

"Al. Albert." Vincent nodded. "He said it was a time-travel experiment, that his friend and I had switched bodies but that I'd be sent safely home in a short time. I gathered they had little control over things."

"You gathered right." Diana nodded. "Don't blame them, Vincent. If they could stop the experiment, they would. And they're doing good. If Sam hadn't been here in your place, a whole neighborhood around one of the Helper's apartments would have been firebombed. Gang activity." The 'Helpers' were a loosely organized group of ordinary people who helped Vincent's underground community. "Sam's both a physicist and an engineer. He defused the bombs, when you couldn't have."

Vincent closed his eyes. "I'm glad, then." Diana wondered how many people would have thought first about lives saved instead of the sudden invasion of their own privacy. He looked up again and watched Diana's face. "You've given him your heart, haven't you?" Vincent asked simply.

She wiped at suddenly bright eyes. "Empaths. I'm surrounded by the blasted things." Diana smiled a little, her face still moist. "I figured out who he was -- at least, that he wasn't really you -- by the end of the first day. Once I confronted Sam with it, he was so trusting ... like a little boy. 'Here's my secret, do what you want with it.' I think we both knew what was happening the second we saw each other." She sat on a cinder-block bench, beside a potted rosebush that had belonged to Catherine Chandler. "I haven't slept six hours in the last four nights; we couldn't stop talking. Ah, Vincent. He's smart, he's gentle, he's loving ... you'd like him so much. You're a lot like him."

"I sense that's now your ultimate compliment," Vincent said with a slight smile. He put his hands on Diana's shoulders. "But if he's lost in time, how can you see this man again? Catherine and I at least had a city we could share."

"It won't be easy." She laid her hands on Vincent's forearms, gave them a companionable squeeze. "Sam believes that one day he'll get home, to his own body and his own time. That can't be any sooner than the middle of 1996 -- but that's only six years, Vincent! And I can write to him."

Vincent still looked troubled. "You can't receive his answers."

"Want to bet?" Her eyes sparkled. "We worked it out. Sam bounces around randomly in time, all over the country, between 1953 and the present. The next time he's anywhere near the mid-fifties, he'll send a letter to a legal firm here in town paying them to act as a mail drop. Anything they get from Dr. Sam Beckett, they'll hold until 1990 and deliver to me when I come asking for it. He'll number the envelopes so I can read his letters in the order he wrote them.

"As for me," Diana grinned, "I'll do the same thing; numbered responses, to be left until called for by an Admiral Albert Calavicci in 1996. You met Al. He can read the letters to Sam in the right sequence. It shouldn't do too much damage to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- and we can keep in touch."

Vincent's education had concentrated more on poetry than physics, but he nodded understanding. "I see only one question. Will you wait six years -- or twenty, or your lifetime -- for a man you've known less than a week?"

Her eyes met Vincent's. "I finally understand how you felt about Catherine," Diana said.

"Then I rejoice for you." Vincent reached down and hugged his friend.

---------------------

Vincent and Catherine's son Jacob was suffering from colic, not uncommon for a rapidly-growing baby of ten months. Vincent walked back and forth with the baby the next morning, rumbling off-key lullabies. He felt a sharp pang of outside distress. Most of his empathic gift concentrated on his son, now, but Vincent was able to identify the pained soul as Diana Bennett. Vincent returned the half-asleep baby to his cradle. When Diana walked in, still wearing street clothes suitable for the World Above, he was waiting for her. "What's troubled you?" Vincent asked, touching her shoulder.

Diana rubbed fiercely at her eyes. "I was at Chandler and Proskin first thing this morning -- I knew we'd never forget the name of THAT law firm -- and there was no message for me. Not from 1953 or any other year; not one."

"You may have visited too soon," Vincent said. "If your young man needs more time ..."

"Time is exactly the point. It should have taken no time at all, from my standpoint. All the messages would be there as soon as Sam leaped out. Sam and Al know, they've made little changes in history before." Diana chewed her lower lip, her face even paler than her usual fire-and-ivory coloring. "He should have had years to write me. Since he didn't do that, he either didn't want to ... or couldn't."

Vincent bowed his head. He remembered the anguish of six helpless months after Catherine's kidnapping, more months after her murder. "You say these people know their business. They've traveled in time before," Vincent reminded her. "And the Albert I met seemed the last person in the world to abandon a friend. The way he spoke to me about this Sam ... I think your friend is very well guarded."

"Guards can fail. Ask Gabriel." Diana sat down miserably at Vincent's desk. "He could have died on the very next leap after I met him. He could be dead NOW, if 'now' means anything to a time traveler." She swallowed. "He may have reconsidered the whole plan, maybe met someone else. I would have thought he'd send that much news, though. Maybe he forgot me."

"You are not an easy woman to forget," Vincent said softly.

She half-smiled at the gallantry. "Leaping can cause partial amnesia. He forgot his own name the first time he traveled in time. But I would have thought Al would remind him; Sam said he liked me." She went back to staring at her interlaced hands, and a heavy gold and black opal ring on her left forefinger. She'd taken the ring from the dead body of a man called Gabriel, the crime lord who'd murdered Catherine and held Vincent's son prisoner until she and Vincent rescued the baby by force.

Vincent moved closer and placed his hand on her shoulder again. "Brave heart," Diana looked up momentarily, "what can you do to help him?"

Momentary frown lines showed in her forehead. "I can warn Al. Not yet -- I'll have to time it right -- but in time for him to be extra vigilant on Sam's next trip. I have the dates. And maybe he's safe after all."

Vincent patted her shoulder. This extraordinary woman reminded him so much of Catherine. "Your friend is a lucky man."

------------------

April 1996

Six years had brought Diana Bennett good friends, professional satisfaction, and a minor measure of fame, but no love to match the one she'd felt for a man wearing Vincent's face. The fear she'd suppressed over the years returned full force as she waited in a rental car in bright New Mexico sunlight.

Diana had contacted Project Quantum Leap indirectly three months earlier; almost the only way she could prove her bona fides was to predict the results of Sam's leap into her life before (from his friends' point of view) the leap happened. She had yet to meet any of the project's key personnel -- they'd been careful -- and she knew her background had been investigated extensively. Diana already had a certain amount of security clearance through cases she'd investigated in cooperation with the FBI and, once, the CIA. They'd agreed to let her visit the project in person, at least; that was probably a good sign. Based on what Sam had told her, his leap into her life had ended yesterday from the Project's point of view.

Two layers of wire fence with a sign reading "Starbright Project," and a guardhouse full of security men who looked deadly to her detective's eye, stood between her and the bunker-like concrete buildings. After what seemed like another six years, a jeep drove up inside the wire. A lean man in impeccable Naval uniform got out of it. He walked toward her car with barely a glance at the security guards. "Miss Bennett?"

"Detective Lieutenant Bennett." She showed her New York City badge. She recognized him; six years had given her plenty of time to follow the careers of Sam Beckett and the people around him.

The Navy man studied her as if matching Diana to a previously seen photo. "All right. Leave the keys in the car. Someone else will get it; I'll drive you in." Diana slid out of her car. "I'm Captain Tom Beckett, project security chief."

"Of course. You're his brother." Diana climbed into the jeep.

Tom Beckett stared right back, then unbent a little with a likable grin. "Yeah. I ought to make that my legal name, 'his brother,'" Tom said. "I don't look that much like him. Poor kid's got our dad's nose." He reached into a shirt pocket, handed her a photo and put the vehicle in drive. "Al said you'd never seen Sam in the flesh, so to speak."

Diana looked at the picture of Sam and another man, both wearing formal dark suits. "This was taken in Sweden, when he got his Nobel Prize." "You HAVE done your homework."

Tom drove them straight into an underground garage, then led Diana through a maze of high-security halls. They took a tiny elevator down, not up, for what seemed like hundreds of feet. "The facility is mostly underground," Tom said.

She smiled a little. "Believe it or not, I've gotten used to that sort of thing." The elevator stopped and opened.

One more short corridor left them in a sterile white conference room with a big computer console at one end. A short, wiry man glanced up sharply when they walked in. "Admiral. Diana Bennett," she greeted him.

Admiral Al Calavicci's eyebrows came together. "Sam described me?"

"Just the cigar," Diana said. Tom grinned. "But I had both your full names. Astronauts and Nobel Prize winners are easy to research. I've even seen the photo of you that won somebody a Pulitzer."

Al frowned. "You're still cagey."

"Still?"

"Don't forget, miss -- you may never've seen me before, but I saw you in action quite a bit while I was a hologram. If I didn't think you were playing it straight, you wouldn't be here no matter how clean your record is. The FBI says you're trustworthy, and what I saw on that leap says you'd do just about anything to help Sam." He gestured toward a chair; Diana took it. "You think we may lose him on this one."

"I may be the only one who loses him." She played with her black opal ring. "I've got just one fact, Admiral, but I don't like its implications. The message system he and I set up was never used. I've checked back periodically over the years. It seems to me that if he sent letters I'd have gotten them, at least the first one. I'm no quantum physicist ..."

"But I am or close enough, and I agree with you." Al couldn't stand still. "That leap was yesterday for us here on the project, six years ago for you. You waited that long on the off chance of helping Sam." He stopped pacing a moment, eyes bright, staring at her. "You're one hell of a lady."

She'd tapped into some deep vein of emotion in Al. Diana didn't know for certain which one, but she sensed that much. "You've cared for Sam longer than I have," she answered.

Al moved sharply, as if shaking off the self-revelatory mood. "Okay. You think he got in serious trouble -- will get in it -- before he had a chance to write you. Probably in this next leap. We've just got to figure out when and where. He's still in transit now ... how much did Sam tell you about leap mechanics?"

Diana spread her hands. "Not the term 'transit'."

"Transit is the period between leaps, lasts anywhere from a week to an hour on this end. Sam's body is comatose but stable during transit," Al said. "We can't do anything for him right now; God runs that part of the project to suit Himself." It didn't sound like a metaphor. "Once he leaps in somewhere again, I'll stick to him like glue."

"Good." Diana rubbed at tired eyes. "I could be wrong, you know. He may simply have decided not to contact me again, even to say goodbye."

Al shook his head. "Not Sam."

"I hope he DID reject me. If the letters stopped because he's dead or incapacitated, we can't do much, can we?" Diana clenched her hands together. "If he's going to die on the next leap, but we prevent it, then I WOULD get the letters. So I'd never have gotten concerned and come here to give you the information to protect him. That sounds like we can't prevent it. Temporal paradox."

Tom walked over silently and leaned close to her chair. "You've been watching too much 'Time Tunnel,' Miss Bennett. It doesn't work that way. I ought to know; I'm a temporal paradox myself." Diana looked up at him. "In the original time line I got fragged in Vietnam in 1970," Tom said. "Sam lived his whole adult life with me dead, then leaped into my unit during the war and saved me. The least I can do is help save him back."

They showed her the Waiting Room, as they called it, a mini-hospital which protected Sam's body while his mind wandered in time. Diana caught her breath. She'd seen Dr. Beckett in photos, and even a few pieces of videotape, but seeing him in the flesh still moved her. Sam's real face reminded her of Vincent's, if her old friend had looked fully human. Strong bones, hints of smile lines around the mouth and eyes, sandy hair with one incongruous streak of white left of center just above his forehead. She started to reach for his hair, stopped herself and instead touched the padded leather cuff around one motionless wrist. "Restraints."

"We never know who's going to show up," Al said quietly.

Tom grimaced. "My friend here understates things. Our first leapee was an Air Force pilot from the Fifties; a combat veteran. He gave Al a couple of broken ribs before we got him tranquilized. This is safer."

Diana wondered if the restraints were all that necessary, any more. She looked down at a face she could love -- but it was pale, too pale. A tube fed oxygen through his nose. Other tubes connected his arms to IV bags, or disappeared under the sheets. "He's sick. He's getting weaker." It was not a question.

Al's face tightened. "Bein' in a coma isn't good for you. It's not so bad when there's somebody halfway stable living in his body. We can almost always get them to exercise, or at least move around some. But these days, anything but the shortest transits make him worse."

"Sam's been like this about half the time for over a year," Tom put in quietly. "The medical staff does everything they can, turning him in bed and so on. But he's been at the edge of pneumonia a half a dozen times. Doc Wade says he'll probably get it, the next time he's unconscious too long, and then the odds aren't good."

"Maybe we ought to do this outside," Al said hoarsely. He glanced at Sam's comatose body as if his friend could hear them, then looked sharply away. Diana had seen the body language before, a horror of illness and death that had nothing to do with personal courage. By his slight, sympathetic nod, Tom Beckett either knew the look also or shared the sensation. They went back to the morgue-like conference room next door.

"Could be that's exactly why you never heard from Sam again." Al fumbled with a fresh cigar. "We might lose him on this transit. The best brain in the last damn fifty years, taken out by some flu bug." He hadn't given up on his friend, Al's eyes told Diana that much, but he looked war-weary to the edge of endurance. Tom rubbed his own forehead, but it did nothing for the worry lines. They'd kept up their guard duty day after day for more than a year. Diana had known about this crisis for five times as long, but she hadn't had to watch Sam dying.

"I won't accept that." She grasped Al's shoulder and all but shook him. "Listen to me. I put myself into other people's lives all the time, as surely as Sam does. The NYPD gives me a salary and a free hand because my methods work. When you can reconstruct a murder victim's life, you learn who killed him. Half the precinct captains mutter about woman's intuition, and the other half think I'm a witch." She almost smiled. "I'm not, of course, but my hunches pay off."

Al glared at her, not so much cynical as afraid to hope. "And you've got a hunch on this one?"

"Not even as concrete as a hunch; a feeling. He's not supposed to die, not like this."

"People die every day, when it's not right." Al's voice cracked.

"Not this time." Diana couldn't explain her certainty, but she couldn't escape it either. "These last six years, it's been like he was with me."

"Six years." Tom Beckett sounded bleak. "You could have called Al in '95, before Sam leaped the first time -- stopped this before it started."

"Sam and I talked about that," Diana said. "He didn't want all his work undone. He saved your life, for one thing." Tom just nodded; he'd known that when he said it.

"That chance is gone, anyway," Al said. "We just know that *something* bad is going to happen to Sam, in this leap or the next few. We don't even know if we can stop it."

------------------

Sam didn't waste any time on pedestrian labels like "out of body experience." One moment he'd been in New York, 1990, holding a marvelous woman. The next, he was here ... wherever here was. He knew he'd been here before, though.

*Between each leap,* said a gentle voice. *You can stay now, if you wish.*

Staying anywhere, let alone somewhere this pleasant, had become Sam's image of Heaven. He didn't know where he was, or how he could experience anything with no body, but he felt totally safe. Sam was ready to rest, himself, but he'd made promises to other people. To Diana, for one. And what would happen to Al if Sam just disappeared?

The peaceful void dissolved; Sam found himself looking down at his own body in a hospital bed. Al and Diana and his brother Tom waited in the next room. They were hurting, worried for him; Sam could feel it. The voice asked him a question.

*Please,* Sam answered. He felt himself falling.

----------------------

An alarm went off. "End of transit," Al said. "Somebody's in there, anyway." He sighed, the burden temporarily lightened. "I'll go find out who this guy is and start him moving around. The more he exercises, the better for Sam." Al stood up.

Tom reached for a telephone. "I'll get Gooshie down here." He glanced across. "Nothing you can do right now, Miss Bennett." She nodded dully.

Al disappeared into the waiting room, shutting the door carefully behind him. A second later, they heard a muffled yell. Tom sprang for the door. Diana fumbled for a gun she wasn't wearing, and followed him. Tom opened the door fast enough to warp the hinges, and charged inside.

"Sam, thank God!" The words and the voice -- Al's -- made sense this time. They found Al bent over the hospital bed, undoing the restraints on Sam's body in hysterical haste. He was conscious, trying to sit up, eyes on Al.

"Crazy," Tom whispered. "Al, that can't really be him. He..." The brown-hazel eyes focused on Tom's face, and lit up like a sunrise. Tom stared. "Little brother!" He began pulling frantically at the straps, too. As soon as Sam had an arm free, he started hugging Al and Tom with it. They hugged back hard, ignoring all the tubes. Diana saw tears on all three faces; none of them cared.

"God, kid, I almost gave up." Al was crying openly. He had Sam's head on his shoulder, clinging tight as if afraid Sam would slip away again. Tom, with the longest arms, twined them around Sam and Al indiscriminately.

Diana had never seen Sam Beckett as himself, but she didn't need to ask if Tom and Al had the right man. The mind animating Sam's face could only be the one that had put the smile lines there in the first place. She knew him herself, even in a different body; the deep-rooted emotional strength, the childlike openness of the way he showed love, the way he warmed the room by being in it.

His brother -- his brothers -- were welcoming Sam home, and they'd earned that right a hundred times more than Diana had. She was grateful to see him home and safe, but she wished she'd never come here. Diana looked away from their private moment. She edged toward the Waiting Room door. Sam broke into a convulsive fit of coughing and tried to stand up.

"Easy, kid, those tubes ..."

"Dammit, Sam, you'll hurt yourself!"

He got up anyway, using Tom and Al as unwilling crutches. A hoarse, almost inaudible croak. "Diana ... Ought to give you one of my doctorates ... you did it."

Diana shook her head sharply. "I scared hell out of your family and friends the day before you got home anyway."

"No. You solved our retrieval problem." Sam nearly fell over. Two sets of arms bore him up.

"At least sit down," Al urged. "You've got no strength. And you're wrong. She's a great kid, but she didn't do thing one to the control circuits."

Sam let them settle him back on the edge of the bed. He held out a hand to Diana; she took it as if hypnotized. "Not the controls," he said. "They never had anything to do with it. I asked, and I really meant it this time, and I got sent home. I needed another reason to come back to my own life."

Al looked hurt. "You've always wanted to come back."

"Wanted, but not needed." He squeezed with the arm around Al's shoulders. "You were always there for me, whenever and whoever I was. I could handle leaping as long as you came with me. And Tom ..." Sam looked across at his brother in wonder. "Just knowing you were alive was so much more than I'd ever hoped for ... I didn't have the nerve to ask for anything more. I knew I couldn't lose you and Al, no matter how far I leaped." He looked back at Diana, squeezed her hand. "But I would have lost you."

"Don't be so sure of that." But Diana knew what he meant. The attraction she'd felt when Sam was in Vincent's body, the connection she'd felt since, were far stronger now that they could touch. Part of that was spiritual, part was very carnal indeed. "I admit I wouldn't have been happy just seeing you as a hologram."

Diana was starting to love that smile already. "I know I didn't write, but I came home as fast as I could," Sam said.

"I'll let you get away with it this time." Diana moved into the group hug.

-----------------------

Diana had requested a week of personal leave from her job when she went to visit Project Quantum Leap. Three days into that leave, the New York Police Department called and demanded that she return to deal with a murder case. The response -- routed through the Department of Defense, over an Admiral's signature -- informed the NYPD that she'd been detached indefinitely to work with a government project. By the time the reply reached a puzzled Joe Maxwell, Diana Bennett was in Washington D.C. staring across a table at more political power than she'd ever expected to see in one place.

Sam had walked into the committee hearing under his own power, but that and sitting upright were about all the activities he had the strength for at the moment. Al and Diana sat on either side of him, not only for moral support but to catch him if he started to collapse.

The Senate committee opposite them was also made up of three people, two men and a woman. The younger male senator looked slightly bored. The fiftyish woman, on the far right end of the table, gave them all a genuine smile before looking down at her briefing books again. The older male senator, in the center seat, looked like he'd been drinking pickle juice.

Al leaned toward Diana a little, his hand over the table microphone. "The new committee head's Senator Mack Robinson, Utah. And I thought Weitzman was hard to deal with; we didn't know when we had it good." The jailhouse whisper seemed strange, coming from a man in an Admiral's full-dress uniform.

Sam frowned and nodded at the woman across from them. "I thought Diane ... Senator McBride was in charge of our committee."

"Her party lost its majority at the last election, and Robinson took it. Mrs. McBride had to do some heavy dealing to stay on the committee at all; Robinson hates her guts." Al grimaced. "He's old-fashioned; can't stand seein' a woman in charge of anything."

Diana nodded slightly. "Is that why he's hostile to your project, because you got me involved?"

"Worse than that," Al said. "Apparently he thinks me 'n Sam are gay together."

Sam managed to keep a straight face, almost. Diana disguised her giggles as a coughing fit until she got back in control of herself. "You've got ... quite a cover, both of you," she choked.

"Yeah. I should have sicced all my ex-wives on him." Al kept his grin down to a twitch. "Rumor got going for about a week six months ago; Robinson's the only damn idiot in D.C. who bought it. But he's the idiot we have to deal with."

A gavel pounded the committee table. "Would you care to share the humor with the rest of us, Admiral?" Senator Robinson intoned.

Al straightened up hastily and leaned toward the mike. "Yes ... I mean no, Senator. It was nothing."

"Are you prepared to give your project report?"

Sam leaned forward this time. "Yes, sir, we are."

This almost had to be like one more leap for him, Diana thought. A few days ago of his time Sam had been with her in 1990, and here he was dealing with an entirely different problem. Perhaps the practice helped; Sam made a good showing. Ms. McBride and the youngest senator (Diana still hadn't caught his name) seemed familiar with the explanation of Project Quantum Leap in their briefing books. It was Robinson who asked all the questions, mostly stupid ones, and put a hostile slant on every inquiry. Sam's patience seemed endless, but his energy was not. On the third explanation of his string theory of time, Sam suddenly turned paler and sank back in his chair.

Diana half-supported Sam with an arm around his shoulders. Al only put a hand on his friend's arm, but Diana saw the knuckles go white. Al leaned in close to Sam, glaring up at the senator with the defensive anger of a mother tiger. Diana saw Robinson's face change. *Great work, Al. I know you can't help showing that you love Sam ... but this repressed moron thinks love equals sex. He thinks he's just seen proof of that rumor.*

"Begging the committee's pardon." Al's voice had gone low, smooth, infinitely hostile. "Dr. Beckett's health is not good at the moment. If we might ask for a recess ..."

"We've been in session for under an hour, Admiral Calavicci; I have no intention of letting these hearings drag on day after day," Robinson said. "If your ... friend ... is not well enough to testify, surely you as project administrator can give us the information we need."

Sam pulled strength from some reserve and sat up a little more. "I'm fine, Senator."

"A great deal of this has been covered at past hearings," Senator Diane McBride put in, glancing coldly at Robinson. "Perhaps we should skip ahead. The point of this session, after all, is that we learn how Dr. Beckett was able to complete his experiment." Diana remembered Al mentioning that the female Senator was completely on their side because she had been involved in one of Sam's leaps in the early 1960's, and had later been briefed about that leap. "I don't believe I know this young lady from any previous hearings," Senator McBride said.

The red-haired woman leaned in to the microphone. "Detective Lieutenant Diana Elizabeth Bennett, ma'am. I'm a plainclothes investigator attached to the Special Crimes Squad, New York City Police Department. I became involved with the project in 1990, when Dr. Beckett leaped into a friend of mine. I was able to give him some assistance on his last leap, in stopping a gang-related firebombing that would have killed fifteen people."

"So Dr. Beckett gave you classified information about the project?" Robinson said sharply.

"No, sir. I'm a detective; I figured it out on my own. You're welcome to consult the FBI or any of my superiors about my record." Diana looked levelly at him. "I'm good at my job, Senator."

That last had been an open challenge, woman to chauvinist, but Diana was getting as tired of the man as Al was. Senator McBride seemed to share her feelings. "I believe that phase of the experiment, and Miss Bennett's clearance, is appendix B of our briefing materials," McBride said with a sharp glance at Robinson. "You say this was Dr. Beckett's last leap. Cutting to the core of the matter, all of you, how was he suddenly enabled to come home?"

Sam braced his elbows on the table. "That part's complicated. I understand that the last time the committee held hearings, Al ... Admiral Calavicci ... explained that God had taken control of Project Quantum Leap."

"Maybe God ought to be funding it then," the younger male senator said in a stage whisper. McBride gave him a dirty look.

"This was not our original theory, obviously." Sam stuck to the main point. "But the more a branch of science has to do with individual human beings, the less ... technical, I guess ... it becomes. State of mind begins to have more and more effect on the result; any doctor or psychiatrist will tell you that about his own science. We have come to the conclusion that the limited success we achieved had less to do with the details of the equipment -- though our equipment was certainly necessary -- and more to do with the human beings involved. The fact that I retained my sanity during this experiment had less to do with the settings on the Imaging Chamber than with the fact that my observer was a close personal friend." He glanced at Al with undisguised affection.

Senator Robinson looked sour. "We can only assume that you *did* retain it."

Sam met his eyes. "I'll take any test you'd like, Senator."

Robinson looked down. "Please keep to the point, Doctor."

"Yes, sir. That emotional connection kept me alive, but by its nature it didn't pull me back toward my own time. I wasn't losing anything real in that friendship because the Admiral and I could only talk, not touch." Sam's eyes went a little colder, looking at Robinson.

Diana translated Robinson's sour look as *yeah, right.* "By that argument, you should still be caught in your experiment," the Senator said coolly.

"My meeting with Miss Bennett in 1990 put a new factor into the equation. Not to beat around the bush, we fell in love." Sam made it sound like the simplest thing in the world. "I've gotten emotionally attached to people on leaps before, as the committee knows." He focused on Diane McBride; she almost seemed to blush. "But that was always with the knowledge that nothing permanent could come of it. The relatively short gap between Diana's time line and mine meant that I had a real chance ... if I could get home. Apparently that subconscious motivation was the deciding factor," he concluded.

"The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing," Senator McBride quoted softly. "I gather your hopes were realized in that regard ... let me congratulate you. Both of you."

"Very pleasant, I'm sure," Robinson said coolly. "But are we simply to assume that this ... mass of sentimentality ... qualifies as science? You are hardly on stable ground with this committee, Doctor. You still have not done what was asked of your project the last time this committee met, by making significant changes in the past."

"If Dr. Beckett had not intervened in my personal past, I would either be dead now or wish very heartily that I was," Senator McBride said with ice in her voice. "And you would not now be in charge of this committee."

Robinson cleared his throat, trying to regain momentum. "You're asking for continued funding, Dr. Beckett; what do you propose to spend this money on?"

"Testing the revised theory, just as you've asked us to." Sam looked guileless. "We've incorporated Miss Bennett's brain wave patterns into the Imaging Chamber as associate project observer -- you'll find a list of those expenses on page 356. If I'm right, when I leap again I should be drawn back to our own time at the end of each leap. This will give us far more control over the experiment, and reduce the risks considerably. You want fully controlled time travel; this is a necessary next step toward that goal."

"If it works," Robinson stated.

"Yes sir, if it works."

Al leaned into the microphone. "Dr. Beckett's physical health has been damaged by the previous phase of this project. We have no intention of allowing him to leap again until he has regained full health and can stand the strain." The determination in his voice was aimed half at Robinson, half at Sam himself; the scientist hadn't lost any of his reckless enthusiasm for his life's work. "We're estimating six months."

"That is simply inadequate," Senator Robinson said coldly. "I propose that the committee suspend further funding of the project until such time as Dr. Beckett is willing to get back to work."

"That's not possible!" Al sprung to his feet. "There's no way we can maintain our equipment without further funding until ..."

"Then perhaps you should revise your estimate, Admiral? I call the question."

"Aye," said the younger male senator.

"No," Diane McBride said firmly.

"Aye. The ayes have it." Robinson allowed himself a small smile. "I won't have money wasted on this sort of blue-sky, pork-barrel project -- which is assuming no fraud has been committed here. Take all the time you need, Doctor ... at least, all the time you can afford." He pounded the gavel hard and breezed out of the chamber.

Sam tried to stand and go after him, couldn't make it. Al grasped his arm. "Easy, kid. We'll find a way." He didn't sound as if he believed it himself. "It's my fault for not seeing it coming. He had that other vote sewed up from the start, damned if I know how."

"I don't know either, but you're right." Diane McBride, walking up to them. "I'm sorry, Dr. Beckett. I wish I could have done more for you."

Sam gave her a tired smile. "You're the only help we DID get, Dia... Senator." Diana Bennett raised one eyebrow.

"Sam leaped into the Senator's honeymoon trip," Al told her. "He not only saved her husband's life, but he was a perfect gentleman ... the idiot."

Diane McBride smiled. "From a ladies' man with your track record, Admiral, I'll take that as a compliment." She laid a hand on Sam's shoulder. "Do you have any idea of your next move, Doctor?"

Sam nodded. "I've got to leap again."

Diana Bennett stared. "Good God, you can't ..."

"FORGET it, Sam! That shithead ..."

They both cut themselves off, Al blushing a little at swearing in front of a lady. "I'd break both your legs myself before I'd let you near that accelerator again," Al stated.

"Your friends are right," Senator McBride said. "You could die."

"Not from one leap," Sam said. "Another week in the Waiting Room at most; it won't do me any harm."

"That's only if your new theory is right, kid. If it's wrong ..." Al shivered. "We'll find another way." He glanced across at the Senator. "You may not want to hear this part."

She nodded. "I'm a lawyer; I know all about deniability. Best of luck to all of you." McBride shook hands with all three of them and walked away.

Al watched her go. "Still one hell of a lady. Anyway, there's got to be some way to pry Dirtbreath Robinson off our case. Just a question of finding it. You two go back to the hotel and get a little rest; I'll see what my political connections have to say about him."

Sam shrugged. "In that case, we should go back to the Project. Doc Wade can look after me if I need any medical help, and Tom will be there."

Al looked him in the eye, then turned the same intense stare on Diana. "Can you take care of him?"

"I'm not a child, Al," Sam put in.

"No, you're a damn hero. That's worse. Can you keep him from leaping, Diana?"

Her wide blue-green eyes met Al's without blinking. "I can. I'll keep him safe."

Al nodded. "I'll take your word. Shoot him in the leg if you have to." His voice held absolutely no humor.

----------------------

Sam was a good traveling companion, but too quiet. He didn't make any chivalrous objections when Diana handled all their luggage at the airport; she was by far the stronger and healthier of the two at the moment. He slept on the airplane, while Diana kept watch over him. She and Al and Tom had hardly left Sam alone for five minutes since he came home, except at his own request. Part of that was to soothe their own nerves, but it had practical uses. Sam had begun having nightmares, now that he no longer had to repress his built-up fears or risk ruining a leap.

They reached the Project headquarters about nine that night, local time. Sam spent a few minutes with his brother Tom, then excused himself on the grounds that he needed more rest. Sam had an apartment-like suite of rooms inside the project building. Diana watched him disappear into the suite, then drew Tom aside. "He's planning to leap again," she said.

"The hell he is." Tom's face contorted with worry. "If I have to tie him up to stop him ..."

"Al suggested breaking his legs, actually." Diana didn't smile at her own joke. "We can keep him safe, working together, but you've got to trust me. Just stay around the building for a while; don't go home."

"You've got it, lady."

Diana let herself into Sam's rooms. He was half-undressed, but not to go to bed; he had a silky white jumpsuit spread out on the couch. Diana recognized it from descriptions she'd heard. The suit was lined with telemetry gear; he'd worn it into the accelerator on his first leap. "Al's right. You could die," she said.

Sam spotted her and jumped a little. "Diana. I ..."

She just kept watching him. "Okay, okay." Sam spread his hands. "I have to, Diana. Everything I've learned, everything I've worked for all my life has led up to this project. And I'll be safe, I can feel it. One more leap, and the funding crunch will be off for good and you and I can be together."

"We're together now." Diana ran a hand along his bare collarbone. "Give Al a chance to solve this his way. You can always leap later, when you're stronger, if he fails. And even if you never leap again ... would it really be so bad, just being a run-of-the-mill Nobel Prize winner? Do you have to be the world's only time traveler?"

"God, that does sound arrogant." Sam put his arms around her waist. "It's not the money or the committee or any of that, Diana. The job needs doing, and I'm the only one who can do it. You of all people should understand that."

"I do understand." Diana leaned against him. "Damn. One word from me, and Tom will throw you in the brig until you come to your senses."

"Don't." Sam's lips teased the side of her hair. "Anyway, you don't have to lock me up to stop me. Just tell me -- and mean it -- that you won't be my observer until Al can get back. Tell me that you won't love if I do this, and I'll stop."

"Oh, Lord, I can't." Diana could no more stop loving him than stop breathing. He'd never looked more appealing, with the dim light from the lamp putting color back into his skin. "You win, Sam. But you owe me something, too." Diana smiled a little. "If you're counting on the bond with me to pull you home, we need a little tighter bond. Don't you think?"

Sam steered her into the bedroom, nuzzling at her neck; he probably would have picked her up bodily if he'd had the strength for it. "Diana..." he murmured into her hair.

"Mmm?"

"Nothing ... just that the name's so perfect for you. The virgin hunter-goddess." Sam's hands slipped under her blouse.

"Well ... *hunter,* anyway. One out of three." She got her hands buried in Sam's hair. "Hunter enough to find you again, no matter how much time separates us." Her voice grew urgent. "I will find you. Promise me you'll remember that."

"I do. I mean, I will." Their last coherent words for a long time.

-----------------

She left him deeply asleep, exhausted, looking innocent. Diana would have cried if she'd had the time to spare. She'd had to take the lead in everything that required any strength or endurance, but Sam in a "passive" role was more giving than most men bursting with energy. Diana cat-footed down the hall to Tom's office and found him pacing up and down in front of his desk.

He looked up sharply, then kept staring. "Oh, shit. I should have seen this coming."

The white jumpsuit hung like an old sock on Diana, but she'd put the sensors against her skin in the right places. "It's the only thing that will stop Sam from taking the leap himself. Ziggy has my mental patterns; I can communicate through the Imaging Chamber just as well as Sam can," she said. "Will you run the controls for me, or do I have to browbeat Gooshie into it?"

"Sam will kill me, and Al will take care of any leftovers." Tom shook his head. "Forget it, Diana. This isn't for you. It's too dangerous."

"It's safer for me than for Sam," she retorted. "If he's wrong and I get stuck in a chain of leaps after all, my body's starting out in top shape. I'm still younger than he is."

"It's not this side of the leap I'm worried about," Tom said. "You'd be jumping blind; all we know is that you'll hit danger on the far end. No chance, lady."

"I'm no lady, I'm a New York cop. Think about it, Tom. I'm no SEAL, but I'm no porcelain doll, either. I hunt murderers for a living, smart ones." Diana let that sink in. "I've walked a beat with no backup within fifteen blocks. I've crawled half the sewers under Manhattan. I've tracked down the biggest crime lord the city's seen in this century. I've shot three men in the line of duty, one in cold blood -- and the ones I shot to kill, are dead. Don't tell me about leaping; it's safe compared to my ordinary life."

"Maybe." Tom clearly didn't like it; 'protect the women and children' was the core of the military code he'd trained under. "But there's got to be a better way. I could go instead."

A sharp head shake. "Not physically possible, Tom. I know you aren't programmed into the circuits."

He grimaced. "Sam leaped early that first time; we didn't know we were going to need more than one observer. Once he got back, everybody was so excited about you as a new factor in the project that you naturally got programmed in first. I told Sam he needed to put me on the roster, too; we just didn't get around to it."

"We can't add you now without both Sam and Al here to help do it," Diana said. "Either you help me leap tonight, or we keep Sam under lock and key until the project goes bankrupt and crashes around our ears. Or until Sam gets loose and leaps anyway -- and he's smarter than you and me put together."

Tom sighed. "You leave me no choice."

Diana nodded. "I didn't intend to."

----------------

Blue light ... one bright instant of being nowhere, in no body, but perfectly at rest ... ground rushing up at her ...

New York City, it had to be. No other place in the world smelled quite like a Manhattan alley. She sat up, brushing garbage from her clothes with sudden distaste. It didn't help much. She was wearing layers of grimy clothes that looked salvaged. Holes in the sweatshirt, buttons missing from the torn flannel shirt over it, scabby knees staring at her from holes in the too-loose jeans. Everything stank, or maybe that was the alley in general. She scrambled to her feet, instinctively afraid to stay in one place too long.

Early morning, or late evening; the sky was russet where she could see it, between the bombed-out tenements. She couldn't find north to decide on that point, but she could *always* find north. A built-in compass, some friend had called it. She could hear his voice complimenting her, but her spoken name was lost in the roaring inside her head. She suddenly realized that she couldn't remember her name at all.

The building across the alley still had half a pane of glass dangling from a frame; she fought down panic and looked at herself. Red hair, that seemed right, but short and dirty in irregular bangs over half her face. She pushed back the filthy hair. Blue eyes, yes; but half the left iris was a light brown. She stared at the two half-circles of color, but the image of her left eye refused to resolve into normality. *That's not right. My eyes are blue, HIS are light brown. But who's HE?* She pushed her hair up further. An ugly scar, sealed over but still dark red on her pale skin, ran up half her forehead and left a irregular bald strip two inches long on her scalp.

*Head injury ... hell, brain injury. But I'm not dead and I can walk and see and hear, that's a miracle. I've got brain damage and I don't know who I am, but I've lived long enough for this wound to sort of heal. I can keep right on living. I have places to go for help, if I can remember them. So brave heart, Diana ...*

"DIANA!!!" She screamed it out loud, jumping up and down. "That's me! I'm Diana!" A head raised up behind the next pile of garbage cans, looked blearily at her and disappeared again.

She didn't care. "Diana," she repeated, hugging the rediscovered bit of information to her. But who the blazes was Diana? *The virgin hunter-goddess.* A man's voice in her memory; she loved it and she had no idea of its identity. Could she really be a Greek goddess? The gods could be injured, she knew that from the Iliad; could a brain-injured immortal be trapped in human form? She scratched a flea bite and reflected that if so, it was quite a trap. Better to take this as reality until proven otherwise; the alternative was just too risky.

"Diana." The voice from her memory. She whirled around and saw a tall man in a bathrobe. He had the eyes of a damned soul, but their pain lightened a little when she responded to him. She ran over to hug him, but he slipped through her grasp like a sunbeam.

"No ... you might hurt yourself." He held out both hands as she scrambled off the pavement to try again. Diana stopped. "You *are* Diana? Do you know me?"

"I know I know you. I don't remember your name." *Apollo?* No. Diana waved a hand through the man's body; he might be insubstantial, but the pain on his face could only be human. "'Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds ...'"

"'Nor bends with the remover to remove.' If you're remembering Shakespeare, you're ahead of me. The first time I leaped, I didn't know my own best friend. My name is Sam." He smiled a little.

Sam. The perfect name for him, simple and dignified and reliable ... Diana didn't know where these fragments of information were coming from, but she hoarded them. "I'm sorry, Sam. I have amnesia."

"That's right. You got yourself involved in a time-travel experiment, and you've been thrown back in time," Sam said. "It always causes amnesia the first time around; Al calls it the Swiss-cheese effect."

Diana shook her head. "I don't think that's it." She held back the filthy fringe of her hair, exposing the scar. "I've been hurt, Sam."

"Oh, God." He breathed in sharply. Diana wished she hadn't shown it to him. She never wanted to hurt Sam -- that was clear even in her fogged mind -- but she knew she had a right to lean on him for help in her problems. *I'm his project observer ... one of them ... only I did something and now he's MY observer.*

Sam got back some of his composure and looked closely at the old injury. "She wasn't on the street when she got it, or she'd have died; meningitis, a dozen other infections. That had to have cracked the skull. It's at least a year old, maybe more. A car accident, a blow with some irregular object ... no way to tell now. I think she must have been a charity patient. Hurt somehow, given minimal treatment because she didn't have any insurance, then warehoused in a mental institution and finally let loose. God, what a civilization."

"Why are you saying *she*? And if you know me so well, why do you have to guess at what happened to me?" Diana demanded.

He blinked. "I'm telling this all backward. Your mind has been sent back in time to someone else's body, Diana. This," he waved at her clothing, her body, "isn't actually you."

"Then I'm not really a bag lady, and somewhere out there is a bag lady's mind in my real body."

Sam smiled, looking relieved this time. "Exactly. Either your memory is coming back, or your intuitive mind is starting to work on full throttle -- either one is good news. She may be brain-damaged, Diana, but *you're* not. I don't know why it works that way. I quantum leaped into a man once who was blind because of brain damage; *I* could still see. I leaped into a retarded man, but I could think as clearly as ever. Some aspect of the brain/mind interface that we don't understand, because nobody has ever had a chance to study them separately before."

His turn of phrase seemed familiar. "You're a doctor." Diana slipped a hand through his body again. "And a time traveler. But why are you like this?"

"I'm a hologram. I'm in 1996 in New Mexico, communicating with you whenever and wherever this," he waved at the alley, "turns out to be."

More memories fit into place. "And no one else can see you or hear you. But who's 'Al'?"

His smile this time was genuine. "Good association of ideas. Al is the other man who usually has the project observer job. We put you into the system as an observer too, after you and I fell in love."

That much, Diana remembered clearly. "I leaped instead of you. You were in no condition, but you were going to do it anyway."

"You and my brother Tom pulled this. I'm going to kill him." It sounded like less than half a joke. "I'll give Tom this, though; once you were gone, he woke me up right away and let me go down to the Imaging Chamber. He realized you were going to need an observer, and Al can't be here for ten hours at best."

Al was in Washington, Diana couldn't remember why. She had enough memory fragments now to keep the rediscovery process going; she left it alone for the moment. "Okay, then, why am I here?"

"We don't know yet, or even where *here* is. The sooner you can find out when and where you are, the quicker we can recalibrate the system to you," Sam said.

"Consider it done." Diana stood up again, brushing off her verminous clothes. "We just have to find today's newspaper. But as to where, I have a fair idea. It smells like New York. I live here, don't I?" She set off toward the better-lit end of the alley.

Sam kept pace with her. "You've lived there for years. But I think I was convincing to move to New Mexico with me."

Diana wiped filth from her hands onto a slightly cleaner brick wall. "Must be my charm and beauty."

"All that and more," Sam said seriously. The way he looked at Diana made her knees weak. They'd made love tonight, that memory at least was crystal clear.

Diana rounded a corner onto the street, and passed a police car cruising the opposite direction. "Cops. I'm a detective, plainclothes," Diana said suddenly. "And this *is* New York; that's our latest model of prowl car."

Sam stared after it. "What year model?"

"1996; they wear out fast."

"Then you haven't leaped far at all. I think that may be a good sign." Sam looked around. "Maybe you're only months back, maybe less."

Diana was looking down into an areaway. "Nobody litters when you want them to. No newspapers. Dead leaves down there, a little mud by the window ... hang on." She leaned far over the iron railing. "I know I stink, Sam, but do you smell anything else?"

"I'm a hologram; I can't smell at all."

"I can, and I know that smell. Blood." Diana vaulted down into the areaway.

It really was blood, not mud; small drips of it below the area window. The odor was more powerful in close quarters. The basement window had pieces of plywood and cardboard in place of glass, and a broken hasp. Diana broke it more opening it; the bag lady's body was nearly as strong as her own.

Sam hovered behind her, working with a computer remote. "Diana, don't go in there. Do NOT go in there. Diana, just go get that cop car we saw! He's still inside ..." The window gave, and Diana rolled into a blood bath.

A few splashes had gotten on the walls and floor, like the ones at the window, but the mess was largely confined to the big operating table in the center of the room. Someone had taken apart a human body and left the bits lying around. Small arms and legs stacked like cordwood at the end of the table. *Good God, it was a child.* Chunks of pelvic girdle with the meat still attached, fragments of skin here and there. The main part of the body, head and most of the torso, lay on its back on the same table; the whole face and much of the chest skin gone. Tidy metal clamps kept major blood vessels closed, as if the thing was some attempt at real surgery. It was covered loosely by a sort of net.

It tried to move.

Diana recoiled from the still-living object on the table, and a high, hysterical howl started in her throat. *How do you give CPR to half a person?* Sam moved in, insubstantial but blocking her view, speaking urgently. "... have to RUN, Diana! He's here, he killed the bag lady the first time around ..."

She spotted motion behind him, not the half-dead half-body but a grown man opening the basement door. Her police training made a coherent description of the quick glimpse: white male, late twenties, 5'8, about 130 lb., dark hair and eyes, a knife in his right hand ...

Diana grabbed the nearest object, a bucket, and flung it at him. Blood and fragments spread through the air. She was already scrambling out through the window. Diana ran half a block and caught the police car again, on its return circuit, before she hunched over and threw up onto the sidewalk.

----------------------

She had her full name now, Diana Bennett, but she also knew enough not to give it to the police questioning her. She made up an alias, then couldn't remember it ten minutes later. The police looked at her clothes, and the scar, and hardly seemed surprised. They found the slaughterhouse in the basement, but no one was there. Diana, sitting on the stoop outside, looked away when the morgue attendants brought out a too-small bundle covered on a stretcher. "It ... he, she ... it was alive when I first saw it," she mumbled.

An older cop patted her knee paternally. "You're imagining things, Sadie. Nobody could live through being taken apart like that."

"Maybe somebody's invented a new sin," she muttered.

She'd given her statement twice and described the man she'd seen as best she could. The police seemed through with her; evidently they thought her unlikely to show up to testify at any trial. As she wandered toward the edges of the crowd she saw a face she recognized; Joe Maxwell, the district attorney, rumpled as he usually was when working past midnight and growling into a car phone. "What do you mean, she took personal leave? I need the best on this case, Paul; this one's demented. So find out where she went. I need her." Diana let her filthy hair fall over her face and ran away.

Sam followed her. He'd been with her through the whole ordeal, though he hadn't said much except to add details to her description for the police artist. "Did you hear that?" Diana wiped at her eyes. "This is the one. This is the case I couldn't take because I had to be at the Project. You're right that I didn't leap far; it's only a week ago."

"It looks like you'll be working on the case anyway," Sam said.

"Yeah, right. People will really listen to a bag lady." Diana balled up her fists. "If I call the Project right now, talk to Diana Bennett in *this* time, I can get her back to solve the case properly. This guy has to be a serial. Nobody develops that ... intricate ... a method of torture-murder to only use it once. If I don't call the Project, more people will die. But if I do, *you* might die. God, Sam ..."

"You can solve the case in this persona," Sam assured her. "There's an 89.4 percent chance that that's exactly what you're here to do. If you're supposed to do it, that means you *can* do it; God seems to like working that way." Diana grimaced. "Anyway, you've already changed the time line."

Diana's wanderings had taken her out of sight of the police. "How? I'd say all I've done so far was get hysterical at a crime scene."

"That crime scene would have shaken anyone," Sam said. "The murder was discovered six hours earlier than it would have been without you. And in the original timeline ... you were found dead too. The bag lady, I mean. Some of the other homeless said she must have crawled in through that unlocked window, looking for a place to sleep, and gotten caught by the killer."

"Great. I saved a nameless brain-damage case," Diana muttered sourly.

"She has a name; they said she called herself Deeg. She's started talking in the last few months, apparently. If brain injuries *did* that, I'd say she was starting to heal," Sam said. "We tried calling her by name in the Waiting Room, and she's responded a bit."

"Deeg." Diana tugged at a tangle in her hair. "You're right, Sam, her life's as human as anyone else's. I just feel so helpless ... and it sounds low, but I feel so dirty. And I may be smarter than Deeg, but I still have no money and nowhere to go."

"Yes, you do." Sam looked surprised. "Don't you remember?"

-----------------

Sam's knowledge of access points to The Tunnels was six years out of date, but with a little prompting, Diana's Swiss-cheese memory came up with several current ones. The idea of her own apartment was tempting -- it was just as easy a walk as the trip to Central Park -- but Diana had no keys. She couldn't get in without them; she'd improved the security system since the days when Gabriel's men had tried to kidnap her in her own home. She went to the park instead. Diana skirted around a few unsavory types in the darkness -- she had nothing worth stealing, but some people just liked causing pain -- and into a big concrete drainage pipe.

Sam's holographic image glowed a little, from Diana's standpoint, but he couldn't cast light on anything in the real world. She felt her way down the sides of the pipe. "This is the entrance Catherine used most of the time," she whispered. "I found it, when I was investigating her murder, but I couldn't get into the tunnels until they let me."

Sam looked wistful. "You never met Catherine Chandler ... yet you never forget her."

"That's how I solve cases; I put myself into the victim's life." Diana pressed on a rough patch in the wall, shook her head and kept searching. "My bosses have always said I was crazy. I keep my job because I'm *useful* and crazy, I think."

"I think you'll make a great leaper; better than I am, probably," Sam said. "If you still want to. I know your career is important to you."

"My career is stopping murderers. Aside from the fringe benefits," her eyes drank in Sam for a moment, "doing things your way means I can stop crimes before they happen. I wouldn't miss this for the world." Diana pressed at the wall again. A section of it slid out with a grating sound; golden candlelight flooded into the tunnel.

Diana knew the pattern of watchers at the edges of the tunnel world. She'd helped set it up, the last time they changed their security system. She evaded the perimeter guards and took the shortest route to the center of the underground society. She was finally spotted, most of the way to her goal, but not by a guard. "Deeg! How? Don't know doors, don't know passages ..."

"Hello, Mouse," Diana said. The young man wrinkled his nose at her. Diana felt the same way herself. "I need to find Vincent."

"Didn't think you knew Vincent." Mouse frowned.

*And I didn't think Deeg knew any of the tunnel people.* "I need to see him. Message from Diana."

"Okay." That fit Mouse's world view. He escorted Diana the rest of the way to the main part of the tunnels, where Father and Vincent and most of their society kept their cave-like living quarters. Vincent was in Father's chamber, alone for the moment, reading at a big table. "Deeg, Vincent. Street-runner, got a message," Mouse said by way of introduction. He wandered away again.

Vincent stood up, a strange look in his eyes. "You seem familiar."

"I should. We've known each other seven years." Diana scratched an itchy patch in her hair. "It's me, Diana Bennett."

Vincent frowned; Diana could almost feel his empathic sense focusing on her. "You are not lying, but ..."

"I left town earlier tonight to go out to Quantum Leap, right?" Diana said. "Well ... a week from now, I wound up doing some leaping myself. Sam's home and safe, but to keep him there I had to take his place."

Sam shook his head wearily. "We could have found another way. If I'd known you were going to do this ..."

"You would have beaten me to it. I know you too well," Diana retorted.

Vincent watched her; he knew about holograms from Diana's explanations six years ago. "Either you *are* Diana, or you're insane." His taloned hand went to the pouch which hung around his neck. The leather thong that supported it was also threaded through a ring, heavy old gold and black opal. "There are two rings like this in the world; Diana has one and I have the other. The inscription is too worn to read ... but what *would* it say, if you could read it?"

"Veritas te Liberabit. The truth shall make you free," Diana said. "I wear mine -- usually, anyway --" she spread out Deeg's dirty fingers, "to remind me what violence can do to a human soul. You took yours off of Gabriel's trained killer Snow, then gave it to me, then Gabriel took it and gave it back to you to convince you I was dead."

Vincent smiled. "Diana." He squeezed her hands warmly. "What can I do for you?"

She wrinkled up her nose. "Could we start with a hot bath and some clean clothes?"

----------------------

Sam looked exhausted. He suggested that he take a break, now that Diana was safe with friends, and she encouraged the idea. Her immediate priority was the Spa, a recently added bathing room near Vincent's chamber which had the only city-piped hot water in the entire underground. Diana had no objections to bathing in front of Sam, but she suspected her current appearance was something less than titillating. Judging by the wall mirror in the Spa, she was right.

Diana dropped Deeg's clothes straight into the nearest trash can, and hoped she wouldn't introduce too many lice and fleas into the tunnels by doing so. She turned out Deeg's pockets for personal possessions and found almost none. A handful of grimy coins, a few bus tokens, a scrap of paper with the name of a homeless shelter on it. She almost missed one item, a small, tarnished silver cross on a broken chain deep in one pocket. Diana put it carefully aside; it looked like the only candidate for a memento of Deeg's life when the woman had a normal brain.

Diana scrubbed down as if she hadn't bathed in ten years, which might be near the truth. She soaked and soaped her hair, combed through it with alcohol to get rid of Deeg's insect friends, then shampooed it again. Finally satisfied, she toweled off and slipped into the clean clothes Mary had brought. The outfit had less of a homespun look than most of the clothes worn Below. Diana could walk down the street in it and pass for a slightly Bohemian artist or a college student a little low on funds. She couldn't guess her host body's age, but Deeg had no wrinkles and seemed fairly young.

Diana toweled Deeg's hair dry and styled it, using the term loosely. It had evidently been cut with a dull knife. The woman's hair was a shade darker and redder than her own red-gold. Combing the bangs forward hid most of the scar on her forehead, now purplish from the hot bath water. "Not bad, considering what you had to work with," opined a voice behind her.

She whirled around. "Al!" The older man looked jet-lagged, but he was dressed in one of his usual outrageous outfits. Diana waved a hand through him, making sure he was a hologram. Al blinked at her and puffed on his cigar. "You're back," Diana said. "Where's Sam? Has something happened to him?"

"Kid's fine, just dead on his feet," Al said. "Tom and I ganged up on him and made him go to sleep. He'll be back in twelve hours or so."

"That's good." Diana sat back down on the nearest bench.

Al glared at her. "When you get back, lady, I'm gonna turn you over my knee -- this was *not* what I meant when I said keep Sam from leaping."

"It worked." Diana looked up at him. "Who am I, anyway? All Sam could give me was a nickname; I figured out the bag-lady part myself."

"You figured right." Al consulted Ziggy. "Okay, Phyllis Arondeeger -- no wonder you go by Deeg. Registered nurse, licensed in 1989 ... something odd there, no real records prior to that date. Maybe you're an alias. Anyway, you were clipped by a bus in 1992, no family, insurance ran out. You spent six months in a charity ward and almost two years after that in a state mental hospital. Released into a halfway house 1994 with a tested I.Q. in the low sixties ... disappeared six weeks later ... no records since. Would've been murdered last night, which you know about, except that a smart-aleck cop with an I.Q. in the 140's took her place."

Diana smiled ruefully. "You ran *me* through Ziggy?"

"Damn right I did. Had to make sure you were good enough for Sam." Al grinned. "You are."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence. Did the police catch the killer?"

"Not yet. Remember, I'm only a week ahead of you." Al looked queasy. "The tabloids are calling him 'Jack the Stripper.' You know, like those guys who steal spare parts off cars ..."

"I get the picture, Al."

"You want to hear the weird part, about Deeg I mean?" Al said. "We tested her IQ too, and it came out twenty points higher than her records suggest. I don't know if that's significant variance, but it's weird. Maybe her mind is slowly compensating for the damage."

"Sam said something about that. I'm no expert." Diana shrugged. "See if you can find out ... what?" Al was staring fixedly into space.

"Yeah, Gooshie, thanks." Al looked back at her. "There's a guy at the front gate asking for you, Diana. Some secret this project is turning out to be."

"Could be someone from the NYPD, I suppose. They have the telephone number; they could probably get the location," Diana said. "Talk to him for me? I've got to go bring Vincent and the others up to date if they're going to give us any help finding this murderer."

"Okay." Al opened the lighted door of the Imaging Chamber. "Watch your back, kid. I'm getting kind of used to having you around." Diana smiled fondly at him. The door closed.

Diana found her way around the tunnels easily, now that she had the place itself to prompt her Swiss-cheese memory. She could hear Father talking fifty feet before she reached his chamber. "No conception of the risks ... I cannot believe you waited six *years* to inform me that a government agency knows about our society down here!"

"The delay was not dangerous, Father," Vincent said as Diana walked into the chamber. "While I have known about *them* for six years, they have only known about *us* for a few days. As I said, it's a matter of time travel."

"The secret is safe," Diana commented. "Only three people at the Leap know about the tunnels, counting myself. Al's report to Congress sidestepped the whole issue."

Father turned and glared at her. "And you, young woman. You are NOT Diana Bennett."

"I realize I'm not myself today." Diana scratched at the scar on Deeg's forehead. "But I'm Diana Bennett. Vincent must have explained ..."

"You could have tricked Vincent," Father said stubbornly.

Another voice drifted down from the book-filled balcony halfway up Father's chamber. "No, she didn't. That's Aunt Diana."

All three adults watched as Vincent's son, Jacob, climbed nimbly out of the loft. At age seven, the boy looked more like age nine; that almost made sense for a child who was full-term six months into his mother's pregnancy. Jacob looked completely human, unlike his father, but he was an unsettling child. "She's Aunt Diana. She just looks different, like she said," Jacob repeated. "Anybody can see that."

Father rubbed irritably at his beard. "YOU can." He didn't bother asking if Jacob was certain; the child's empathic powers went far beyond Vincent's. Vincent could sense his son's location -- or Catherine Chandler's in the old days -- unerringly anywhere in the city. Jacob could do it with anyone he'd ever met.

Father still looked stubborn. "Young woman ..." He turned abruptly to his desk and picked up a battered steel cash box, firmly locked. "What is in this box, then, if you're Diana?"

"Unless you've moved it, that's Cathy Chandler's gun," Diana said. "And five loose rounds. You gave it to me the night we got Jacob back from Gabriel. I cleaned it later on and gave it back to you." The sixth bullet, most likely, was still in Gabriel's body in a city cemetery.

Father stared at Diana. "Good Lord, you ARE telling the truth." He looked her up and down. "You say you leaped ... that is, you became someone else."

"I'm also back in time, even though it's only a week," Diana said. "Right now, the real me ... let's see, Tuesday morning ... I'm catching my second wind at the biggest party I've ever seen. We had a lot to celebrate; we got Sam back, when we were afraid we'd never see him alive again."

"That was a hell of a bash, all right." Al walked in through a full-length mirror. He left no reflection. "But you'd better cut to the chase, kid. We've got problems."

Father and Vincent, unable to see Al, looked quizzically at Diana. She waved them away and walked toward the hologram. "What's wrong? Is Sam ..."

"In the pink," Al assured her. "It's about the psycho. Did you tell them about the murder yet?"

"I told Vincent. I'm not sure ..."

"So, do it." Al's cigar had gone out; he apparently hadn't noticed.

Diana turned back to her other friends. "I discovered a murder last night -- a very grisly one. As best we can determine, I was sent here to stop the killer from doing it again."

"You haven't done the job yet, because all hell's broken loose in my time," Al said. "The guy who came to the project lookin' for you was a Devin Wells -- Vincent's brother, kinda."

Jacob grinned. "Uncle Devin?" He waved a hand through Al's image and looked delighted at the result.

"Oh, shi..." Al cut himself off. "The kid can see me. We've got to talk out of his earshot, Diana -- trust me."

Al looked desperate. "All right," Diana said. "Give me a minute please, Father, Vincent ... and keep Jacob here." She withdrew to the steps at the entrance of Father's chamber, some twenty feet from the others. "Bad news?" she whispered.

"Nothin' but." Al rubbed a hand over his face. "The next murder goes down late tonight, this Devin guy said. The city suppressed most of the details because they were so damn bizarre, and it took the Tunnel people days to find a messenger they trusted to send to you. I should have given you more warning on this, but we just didn't know." Diana caught her breath, waiting. Al glanced over at the others. "The killer's next victim was the little guy over there. Jacob Wells, age seven."

Diana stared over at Jacob, who was playing with a kaleidoscope while sitting in his father's lap. "That's impossible," she whispered. "Vincent is emotionally linked to Jacob. He always knows what's happening to his son, if the boy's in danger. Vincent would never let ..."

"That's chapter two. Vincent did something, all right," Al muttered. "Our buddy Jack didn't do a full number on the kid, like the last one ... didn't have time. Devin says that when that psycho started hurting Jacob, Vincent found Jacob through their link and killed the killer. Damn well what I'd have done, if it was *my* kid ... thing is, Vincent got caught by the cops. Patrol car passing by at just the right time heard some of the screaming. Little Jacob died anyway, and his father was caught. Caged up."

Al winced at his own words, and Diana knew why. She'd read the Admiral's military record. But another association with cages was uppermost in her mind. "That's exactly what Vincent has always dreaded. This underground community is so fragile. Everyone's feared that if Vincent became public knowledge, then questions like who raised him and how had he been hidden so long would lead the authorities down here."

"Yeah. The hunt's on, all right. Nobody knows, yet, if the cops will find the Tunnels," Al said. "Vincent did what he could. Another damn hero."

Logic and intuition wove a pattern in Diana's mind. "His son was dead, and his friends were endangered by his very existence." She looked across at Vincent, still oblivious, playing with his child. "'Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt ...' He's dead, Al, isn't he?"

"Yeah." Al sounded hoarse. "They found Vincent in his holding cell a few hours later. Not a mark on him, just dead." He swallowed. "We've gotta stop it, Diana. Don't let that kid stir one foot outside the tunnels until this psycho gets caught."

Diana nodded. Al perked up somewhat. "Hell, don't let him get out of sight of Father or Vincent or both ... shouldn't be too hard on them. They protect Jacob, which means the whole Tunnels will be safe. Meantime, you catch this nut case. You leap, everybody lives, and with any luck you bounce straight back into a clinch with Sam." The horror hadn't entirely left Al's eyes, but he managed a genuine Al-like grin. "I want to be the best man."

"No question about it." Diana smiled back, a little. "If NYPD caught Vincent in the original time line, as you say, they must have found Jack the Stripper's body. Did they ever identify him?"

"That's good thinking." Al poked fiercely at his Ziggy handlink. "Yeah. His chest was ripped to hell, but they got fingerprints and dental records both ... Stephen Andrew Gretz. He crashed and burned two years into medical school in 1993. Several scrapes with the law ... suspected in a child kidnapping last year, but nothing proven ... illegal drug lab involvement; his undergrad major was chemistry. Nobody ever did a psych examination on him the times he was arrested. Must have come across as just a slimeball instead of a nut case."

Al glanced at Diana and worked with Ziggy again. "To answer your next question, no; the cops never were able to trace his movements the few days before he died. They connected him to that basement hellhouse where you found the first one, but only by physical evidence. Gretz had a little bandage on one finger, and there was this one bloodstain in the basement way off from the others. Kitchen area, kind of; must have nicked himself making dinner. Different type from the murder victim, and DNA typing pinned it down for sure that that one bloodstain came from Gretz. So we know for sure he's the right one, but we don't know where to find him here and now."

"Maybe the police can. I'll telephone Joe Maxwell," Diana said.

Al shook his head. "And tell him what? You can't prove anything."

"You've never done police work, Admiral; we play hunches all the time," Diana said. "I'll tell Joe I'm one of Diana Bennett's street sources. He's never known where I get half my information, because I get it through the Helper network. I'll prompt him on the bloodstain and give him Gretz's name; believe me, that lead will be followed." She waved at the ceiling. "I'm sure *He* won't mind if I make a time-change by working within the system instead of doing everything solo."

Al smiled fondly at her. "Lady, if Sam's fool enough to dump you, I'll marry you myself. What's our next move?"

"Get me anything else you can on Gretz; Joe may not be able to access as many sources as Ziggy can," Diana said. "And tell Sam I love him."

"He seems to have picked up on that one himself." Al looked across the room at Father, Vincent, and Jacob. "How are you gonna tell them about this?"

"As gently as I can." Diana crossed the chamber to join her friends. She heard Al's door open and close behind her.

--------------

The explanation went better than Diana would have expected, although Vincent refused to send his son out of the room. She softened the part about Jacob's murder as much as she could. The child readily agreed to stay in the Tunnels and in sight of a trusted adult for the duration. Father suggested extending that prohibition to all the Tunnel children -- hiding and waiting out a problem was his preferred response -- and Diana agreed to the precaution. She made a quick trip to the surface for a telephone call to Joe Maxwell, passed on her information, and returned Below for ten hours of much-needed sleep.

"Bishop takes knight's pawn." Diana knew the voice even in her dreams; she would have known it anywhere. She sat bolt upright, among the layered covers of Vincent's bed. Sam Beckett was standing on the other side of the chamber, bent over a chessboard. Jacob sat by the other side of the board. The child made Sam's move for him and then his own, capturing one of Sam's knights. "Damn," Sam muttered under his breath.

"What's the matter? I thought you were a former child prodigy," Diana teased. She pretended to pat the holographic Sam on the back, and studied the board. "You're losing."

"I think Jacob is a *current* child prodigy." Sam barely glanced at the board; he gave Diana a smile that made her knees weak. "I still can't figure out why he can see Al and me, though. Very small children can see holograms, but he's too old."

"Jacob's a true empath, like his father ... which is probably why he's beating the pants off you." Diana's smile suggested that she liked the mental image. "A stronger empath than Vincent, in fact. As you've noticed, Vincent can't see you."

"Daddy says he knows when there's a hologram in the room," Jacob put in cheerfully. "Like the feeling when somebody's watching you. And he can pick up bits of what you're feeling, but not what you say."

Sam studied the few remaining pieces on the board, then flicked a hand at his own king as if to knock it over. "I surrender. You should make sure someone tests your IQ, Jacob. I think you're several years ahead of your age."

"I go to a regular school, up top, and then Daddy and Father teach me other things," Jacob said. "It's fun. We're doing Chaucer now; how he used his sources, how other writers like Shakespeare used him as a source later, modern criticism, that sort of thing."

"That does sound like fun," Sam agreed. "Why don't you go find Vincent now, Jacob? Diana and I need to talk."

Jacob's light blue eyes moved from Sam to Diana and back. "You can't lie to me, you know. Nobody can lie to me." He turned and disappeared in the direction of Father's chamber.

Sam watched him leave. "The usual metaphor is, 'one weird kid,'" Diana said.

"It's not that. I was thinking that I was a bit like that myself at his age," Sam said. "But only a little bit. It's scary, Diana. I've gotten used to being the smartest person in the room ... and I'm not sure I am, with Jacob around."

Diana knew the comment wasn't arrogance; Sam's measured IQ was safely above the 200 mark. "You may well be right." She shrugged. "Is that what you came here for, the novelty of being beaten at chess?"

"Either that or the pleasure of your company." Sam stopped smiling. "There's been another murder. A little girl's body was found floating in the East River. Most of the body, anyway. Same cause of death. There was nothing you could have done. The police still aren't sure where she was killed."

Diana's face worked for a second. "How long ago?" she muttered.

"They're discovering the body now," he said. "Autopsy will show she was killed this afternoon, early. Gretz had a second ... lab ... set up already. He had to have. Something like that can't be done in just any dark alley."

Sam looked sicker than Diana felt, and she understood why. He was a doctor. Someone with the same training had perverted it into an atrocity; it must feel like having a relative turn killer. "We'll find him," she said. "We'll stop him. If this is anybody's fault it's mine, not yours. I'm the one trained for this, dammit. I should have thought. A killer of opportunity ... he doesn't CARE which child he takes. We kept one potential victim home safe, so he just found another one. There's not even a gender pattern, if he killed a little girl this time." Diana rubbed the puffy scar on her forehead, felt it throb.

Sam hovered close. He almost reached for her hand, then remembered the uselessness of it. "We have resources ... your skills and Ziggy's information net. I might even be some help. Don't give up."

Father's cane clattered on the stone floor; both Sam and Diana looked up, startled. Jacob was all but dragging his grandfather along. Vincent followed them both like a looming shadow. "What's gotten into you?" Father demanded of Diana. "If you think I'll allow you to take my grandson into danger ..."

"Jacob shall not leave the tunnels while this man is running free." Vincent spoke more quietly, but his eyes were equally angry.

Diana stared. "What?"

"He came back," Jacob pointed helpfully at Sam's holographic image, "to tell Aunt Diana that the crazy man killed someone else. He said the police don't know where the crazy man is, but I do. I can lead you to him."

Another explosion of shocked and angry words, this time from all four adults. Diana, with the least powerful set of lungs, finally 'outshouted' the others by slamming a brass pitcher against one stone wall. "Vincent, Father, that was NOT my idea," she said into the momentary silence. "Jacob came up with that one on his own. I agree with you; we can't take a child into danger." Her practical side made her add, "It wouldn't work, anyway. I know you can find the emotional aura of anyone you've ever met, Jacob, but you've never met the killer. Thank God."

Jacob looked up at her with huge eyes. "But YOU saw him. You're halfway to being an empath, like Mama was." The boy's habit of talking about Catherine as if he remembered her was the least startling thing about him at the moment. "You'd know his mind-signature anywhere, if you could feel other people's feelings."

"The hunter-goddess ... he's probably right, you know," Sam muttered.

Jacob nodded. His father and grandfather, blind and deaf to Sam's presence, got no useful information from the gesture. "When you first came in last night, Aunt Diana, I looked at your mind to see who you were," the child said. "And because you're almost an empath, because he scared you so bad, I saw the crazy man through your memory. I can feel him. I can find him." Vincent's hand closed protectively on the boy's shoulder. Jacob touched his father's hand, but kept on speaking. "I can find him, and nobody else can."

Sam had the computer link in his hand. "The pattern seems to be two murders in two days, two days off, then two more murders," he said. "Ziggy says that after the first two killings ... the ones you know about ... there hasn't been one more clue discovered. Gretz is intelligent, he knows medicine and forensics. If he isn't caught before he gets his system perfected, there's no telling how many children will die." His eyes were bright. "I can't give you any odds on the results if we have Jacob helping us, Diana. Ziggy has no data on psychic powers."

Diana nodded wearily, and translated for the others. "Father, Vincent, Jacob's right about one thing. Gretz has killed again today, and the police alone won't be able to find him. Other children will die unless I can come up with something outside the usual investigative procedures. We've seen Jacob's gift in action. He may be the only chance we have of stopping this man."

Vincent gathered his son close. "I will not send him into danger alone."

"No, not alone," Diana said. "Far from it."

--------------

Some Helper had provided a battered car, ten years old but driveable. Diana maneuvered it through traffic, keeping her eye on the gas gauge more than the speedometer; she suspected that both were unreliable. She wore a denim jacket, although the day had turned warm. Underneath the patched material, Cathy Chandler's gun rode in an improvised holster. Diana also had a rusty but serviceable pair of handcuffs in her back pocket. "Left at the next turn, then straight," Jacob said from the front passenger seat.

Diana followed her navigator's directions. They'd followed Jacob's empathic sense for three hours now, frustrated from time to time by the illogic of the road system. At least once, Gretz had apparently moved across town as they were trying to track him. Diana glanced at her rear-view mirror. It showed an empty back seat, but she knew better.

"Nice going, kid. They could have used you in the SEALs," Al said encouragingly. He'd joined Sam in the imaging chamber, as much for moral support as for the value of any advice he could give. "You know, I remember you when you were just a baby. You didn't like it one little bit when Sam leaped in instead of your papa. I never heard a kid cry so much in my whole life. I kept trying to keep you quiet."

"Inchworm," Jacob commented. "Pop Goes the Weasel. You sing funny."

Diana wished she didn't have to keep her eyes on the road; THAT double-take must have been priceless. "You remember us? From the first time we were here?" Al sputtered.

"I told you he was smart," Sam put in. "I'm trying to get him interested in quantum physics. Jacob, how close are we to Gr... to the crazy man?"

"Closer than feels good. Almost close enough."

"How close is Vincent?" Sam persisted. "Is he keeping up?"

"Daddy had to go around some blocked-up tunnels," Jacob responded. "He's catching up with us now."

Diana let the car slow down a bit. The taxi behind her honked in outrage. "Should I keep going straight?"

"Turn right, please." Jacob pointed ahead. "There, maybe. It isn't far now." Diana signaled and turned into the street the child had indicated.

They'd come a long way from the high-rent buildings overlooking Central Park. This area reminded Diana of the one she'd first leaped into; a maze of shabby or half-abandoned buildings. The child had her stop in an alley next to one of the shabbiest buildings on the block. "He's in there. Upstairs, this time," Jacob said. "I think. He fades in and out sometimes."

"Skull full of bad wiring," Al muttered. "You stay here with the kid, Diana; we'll scope out the building." Al raised his Ziggy remote and disappeared. Sam went with him, since the imaging chamber was only designed to focus on one location at a time.

Diana patted Jacob's hand. "Don't they make good backup? We'll wait until Vincent gets here before I try to catch this Gretz. I'm not leaving you alone for a minute until he's past being a threat."

Her friends suddenly reappeared in front of her, intersecting with the car hood. "He saw you drive up, Diana -- and I think he recognized you from the other murder scene," Sam said urgently. "He's making a run for it."

Al was working frantically with Ziggy. "Heading southwest, down that alley ... I think he's got a car ... he'll get away ..."

"Not this time." Diana brought her gun out. "Jacob, lock the car doors and stay down. Sam, Al, stay with him until Vincent can get here."

She slid out the car door; Jacob locked it after her. "Be careful, hunter," Sam said. Diana saluted him with the gun-muzzle and ran off in the right direction.

The alley dead-ended at a broken fence and a salvage yard. Diana climbed through the fence. Caution took priority over speed for her, now. They could track Gretz again, at worst, if they lost him. If he overpowered her, though, the results might be harder to undo. The place had more cover than some jungles. Diana climbed the rusting carcass of a multicolored van and looked around from the higher vantage. She spotted a dark flash of movement, further west but at the edge of the salvage yard nearest the street where she'd parked. Probably a cat, or a very large rat ... but it might be a man, almost completely hidden by the taller wreckage.

Diana picked through the rusty jungle toward the movement. *That wouldn't be him, anyway. Gretz knows someone's after him. If I'd hidden one working car among all these dead ones, I'd head straight for it and get away. I'll sweep this side of the junkyard, then go back to the car and have Sam and Al trace him down with the computer.*

The plan worked all right, as a piece of logic, but it didn't feel right. Diana clambered over half a Corvette and kept working on it. *Upstairs. He saw me drive up. He can't see Sam or Al, that's an advantage. What would make him turn back, if that was him I saw?*

She made the last dozen feet to the other alley entrance. *He saw me drive up. He needs a car to get away. One car's as good as another, probably, and he can't see holograms. He saw me leave Jacob in the car, and he thinks Jacob's alone. For all a hologram could do against him, he might as well be right.* She broke into a run.

Diana shot out of the space between two buildings, made a sharp right turn and bolted back toward the alley entrance where she'd left her car. She heard voices, but not words; a desperate snarl from Al, something quieter but just as threatening in Sam's voice. She rounded the corner. Gretz was jimmying the car door. Sam and Al hovered around him, helpless. "Touch that kid, you scum, and I'll kill you," Al said.

"No, *I* will." Diana went to one knee, the gun braced in both hands.

Gretz actually smiled. "You're that street bum. I don't need you; you're too old." He looked into the car, at Jacob. "But he's just what I want."

Vincent disagreed.

The Tunnel-dweller burst through a boarded-up window and caught up Stephen Gretz like a straw doll. One clawed hand held the man dangling by a handful of shirt. The other set of claws went up and back for more momentum ... Diana fired her .357 over Vincent's head.

Vincent stopped, but his teeth stayed bared. "This one's mine, Vincent," Diana said. "We take him my way." She lowered one hand to her jacket pocket, showed Vincent the pair of handcuffs.

He growled instead of speaking, but he made no move to take Gretz's throat out. "Diana's right. We have him," Sam said soothingly, as if Vincent could hear. "Your son is safe. Jacob, come on out."

The child unlocked the car and climbed out. Vincent relaxed the slightest bit. He changed his grip on Gretz, pulling the man's hands behind his back with a force just short of breaking bones. Al let out a breath as if he'd been holding it for a week.

Diana put the handcuffs on Gretz, patted him down for weapons. The man started to giggle. "You'll never get away with this ... illegal arrest."

She felt like killing the man herself, but restrained the urge. Vincent was calming down, now that he had his son in his arms. Diana opened the car trunk and manhandled Gretz into it. "What arrest? Deeg isn't a cop. I'm sure that when the police get here, they'll read you your rights in proper form." "I'll tell ... I'll tell them everything," he retorted. Vincent looked up with a changed expression.

Diana showed Vincent a 'wait' gesture. "You do that," she told the killer sweetly. "You were captured by two ghosts, a little boy, a talking lion and a bag lady. Even your defense attorney won't believe that one. Besides, it doesn't matter what side of the sanity hearing you come out on; you'll spend the rest of your life behind locks and walls."

"You'd better hope so, anyway," Al added. "If they ever let you out, I'll find you. Or he will." The Admiral gestured at Vincent.

"Sweet dreams," Diana said, and closed the trunk.

They walked away en masse, toward the tunnel entrance Vincent had used. "One of us will have to call Joe Maxwell to pick him up," Diana said. "With the physical evidence you told me about, Al, they can convict him of one or both murders with no trouble. I guess that means I'm about finished here ..." Her voice trailed off. Diana looked up as a tingling began throughout her body. "Sam?"

"She's leaping," Al said quietly. "Home, let's hope."

She could hold it back if she wanted, at least for a few seconds; Diana exerted her full will. "Take care of Deeg, Vincent," she said quickly. "We owe her something. I borrowed her body without asking. Sam thinks she may be regaining some intelligence. If there's any way ..."

"We will keep her safe. If we can teach her and bring her back to herself, we will." Vincent shifted Jacob in his arms, freeing one hand, and laid it on the woman's shoulder. "Travel safely, Diana."

"I hope ..." The blue light surrounded her again, and the world went away.

------------------

Air-conditioned air, cool sheets with the grainy feel of hospital linens. More importantly, a warm pair of hands grasping hers. Diana smiled even before she opened her eyes. "Sam. I made it."

"You made it." Sam Beckett looked down at her, still pale and tired but smiling. Diana sat up. Sam hugged her. "You see, I'd have been fine if you'd let me leap," he teased.

"Okay. It's your turn next time." Diana kept her head on his shoulder.

A raspy cough made them both look up. "I know Sam's cuter, but can I have a hug too?" Al asked.

Diana smiled and squeezed his hand. "Hello, Al. It looks like I got that proof you needed for Senator Robinson. I did one leap and came back, just like Sam's new theory said I would." Sam and Al both smiled at that. They looked mischievous. "What?" Diana asked.

"Our buddy the Senator is having a few problems," Al said with mock seriousness. "He's still in charge of the committee -- on paper -- but if he says one word that we and Diane McBride don't like, he'll be out of office so damn fast his head will spin. I had a little talk with him."

Diana sat fully upright. "What did you talk about?"

"Well ... I wanted to make sure I didn't disturb his routine, you know," Al explained. "So before I had that talk with him, I had a PI follow him around for a couple of days with a camera. The same guy who got the goods on me for my fourth wife when we got divorced. He's real handy with infrared film ... Anyway, I found out why Robinson took so quick to that rumor about me and Sam. Doin' strange things with other guys is one of *his* hobbies."

Diana blinked at him. "You're kidding."

"Dead serious. And 'dead' would describe Robinson's career just right if his constituents and the Mormon Church -- same thing -- ever saw those photos." Al looked innocent. "So we came up with a mutually beneficial agreement."

"I hope I never have you as an enemy." Diana smiled. She stood up, reveling in the feel of her own body, and stretched stiff muscles. "So, what do we do next?"

Sam got her hands. "Next, we both deserve a break from leaping. Even if I have to put a padlock on the acceleration chamber."

"That sounds boring." Diana leaned in close. "How can you and I keep busy if nobody's leaping?" Sam smiled and made a few suggestions.