"Penny for your thoughts?" Beth asked as Al parked on the curb in front of Al's Place.

"What? Can't a guy get a moment of silence without his wife coming behind him, wondering what his major malfunction is?" He said this in fun, but he knew what Beth was after. He hadn't said a word since they got in the car. "I mean, really, Beth! Some bum walks into the bar out of thin air, throws Albert for a loop with some Calavicci trivia, and I'm supposed to come over and entertain this nozzle?"

"Oh, gimme a break, Al," Beth nudged him playfully. "You're as curious as I am. Besides, if I have to sit through another one of your Sci-Fi nights..."

"Hey, at least it ain't Extreme Makeover: Orbital Edition," he returned, getting out of the car.

The brass bell jingled as Al opened the door for Beth, drawing Albert's attention. The kid looked tired. Al wasn't the least bit surprised. He'd offered Albert a new car for his graduation present, but true to form, the kid had turned him down. Never was one to accept a handout. Now giving a handout...

He'd asked Al to go in halves with him on this bar. Had some hair-brained idea about being a shelter for the homeless. "The bar will draw them in, then I can help them," Albert had said. Wasn't that bad of an idea, as it turned out. Thanks to some new legislation that had passed at the state level, Al's Place was actually turning a profit. The government was sending grants right and left due to the homeless shelter status, and the nightly regulars were keeping Al's Place stocked with some fair-to-middlin' booze. All in all, it was beginning to look like a wise investment.

Then Al looked at Albert's tired face again. There always seemed to be a price to pay...

Albert caught his eye, and nodded his head to one side, indicating the scroungy young man in the corner. The bum had been nursing a cup of coffee when the doorbell jingled. Now he was looking up at him, mouth agape, eyes wide.

"Al! Oh, my God, Al!"

The bum sprinted across the barroom and wrapped Al in a bear hug. Al was so shocked that he could think of nothing but to hug the guy back! "Ummm... hey, listen. I..."

"Al, you gotta help me. Something happened out at the Project, and now I got some guy named Jacob running the place instead of you—don't ask me how I know that, because I haven't even met him yet—but if you're not at the Project, then I'm never gonna get home, regardless of whether or not I'm Leaping me or not..."

"Whoa, hold on a second there," Al said, pushing the bum back from him. Project? He couldn't be talking about The Project, could he? "How's about we start with my name is...?"

"I can't tell you. Not just yet. You probably wouldn't believe me anyway if I told you the whole story." The hobo said, half to himself. He turned and led Al toward a laptop computer that Albert had set up on the bar for public use. "Bring Beth with you. This involves her too."

Oh ya, this guy's hit granny's cough medicine one too many times, Al thought. By the time he and Beth caught up to the bum, he was already flying over the keyboard of the laptop like a programmer, surfing through a number of different search engines.

"Okay," the bum started, still hammering at the keyboard. "I don't know how much I changed history the last time I Leaped, so I'll explain this as simply as I can. Take a string—this represents your life from beginning to end. If you tie the ends together, you get a loop. This is the conventional understanding of String Theory, in which time loops back on itself. I theorized that if you ball the string up, you could Leap from one day to another within your own lifetime. I designed a machine to do this, but I tried it before it was finished, and things went..."

"...a little ca-ca," Al said, his face turning a queer shade of green.

"You know?" the bum said, not entirely surprised.

"Ya. Project Quantum Leap. But that's all classified information. How do...?"

Just then, the bum opened one of the links in the search engine, bringing up a picture of a distinguished young scientist, an MIT whiz-kid that Al had worked with at an earlier project. Dr. Sam Beckett.

But before he could say anything, Beth gasped and fainted.