4

The sky was a beautiful red-orange glow as the sun started descending into sunset. There was a gingerly eastward wind as Jason Danvers checked the readings and did the log. Sam was watching impressed. He was glad Jason was a pilot, and on that same note, Jason wished he had Sam around for all the times he had to be a doctor. Joe's wife rapped the window by him.

"Joe, honey…" Helen was on the tarmac outside the main building talking to a man she thought was her husband. "Are you going to be home for dinner?"

"I promise!" Jason spoke for Joe Hackett.

"You can fly a plane?" Sam was in the other seat as Brian Hackett.

"Yeah…" Jason waited for tower instructions and Helen left the tarmac to run back in to her lunch counter. There were two others in the plane she did not see: two holographic companions to the men posing as her husband and brother-in-law.

"Sam, can you trust this guy?" Al was still skeptical of anyone who could leap since his and Sam's experience with Ilia.

"Dude, ALEX is now saying you both die today." Max was criticizing his buddy. "Please don't do this. You know I hate flying. Do you want to see a hologram barf? I'll do it. I swear I'll do it!"

"Sandpiper One, ready to taxi…" Jason looked to Sam and back to Max as he talked to the tower over his headset.

"Sam," Al paced up and down between the seats brushing in and out with Max pacing with him. "Ziggy says you both die now. You've got to stop him!"

"Al, I think I know what we're doing." Sam looked back to him. The plane started to taxi out.

"Your hologram having a conniption?" Jason asked.

"Yep…" Sam watched as the ground started speeding by him. The plane was speeding out toward the end of the island and the waters of Nantucket Sound. The plane was handling perfectly, just as it was meant to. Jason adjusted for speed and thrust and kept the wings steady as the plane acquired thrust. As the air currents moved in different speeds under and over the wings, the tiny Cessna gained lift and took to the sky. It was a wonderful feeling. Sam was grinning ear to ear.

"Have we crashed yet? Have we crashed yet?!" Max was sitting behind Jason and hugging his comlink.

"Max…" Jason spoke as he controlled the plane in the air. "Get ALEX to start scanning for anything out of the ordinary like birds, updrafts or unusual weather phenomenon."

"Al, you do the same thing!" Sam gave the same request to Al.

"Sam, I have a bad feeling about this." He computed the holographic design linking him to Sam to keep them in constant distance as the plane moved at three hundred miles an hour through the air. "I bet I locate something before the other guy."

"Dude, I hate to be an I told you so, but if you get killed, I told you so!!!" He changed the elevation of the simulation of Jason in the past so that he rode outside the plane descended over nothing but a floor turned into moving seas below. In tune to Sam's brainwaves, Al hovered in the same way with the plane in a synchronous lock with them. "I bet I get something before the other guy!"

"He's just like a kid in the back seat on a long trip." Sam mentioned as he flew next to Jason.

"Al?" Jason made conversation as he held the wheel. "Yeah, Max gets funny too, but…he's still my best friend. He's saved my life a lot."

"Al has saved me a lot too." Sam liked this ability to connect with someone like him. "I don't know what I'd do without him."

"Hey, I'm the black Superman!!!" Linked with a holographic plane, Max was in a visual simulation of being high in the atmosphere and moving with the plane, flying on one leg with his arms out stretched. "Here I am to save the day!!!" He was grinning and laughing at himself over this holographic flight. Right next to him, Al couldn't see him. He was looking around and over and behind him for something that might bring down the Cessna.

"Sam, there is nothing out here…" Al looked around once and twice. Maybe he spoke too soon, as he looked round under the plane and around him, he saw something dash under him. He thought it was a bird, but it was too fast, and too… red.

"What the heck was that?" He mumbled under his breath. "Gooshie, what was that?"

"I haven't an idea…" Gooshie, the Quantum Leap project analyzer was trying to analyze the object. "Less that six feet in size, red, moving at 120 miles an hour…"

ALEX had detected it as well.

"120 miles an hour!" Max was screaming. "What moves that fast?"

"There is nothing in my databank to account for an object over Cape Cod at that speed." ALEX spoke in male voice to Zoe Bouchard, the project director monitoring Jason's leaps.

"Max," Zoe was running diagnostics. "Whatever it was created a sonic boom. That's what must have hit the plane!"

"Jason!!!" Max was losing it.

"Sam!!!" Al reappeared in the plane. "Ziggy is detecting a sonic boom! Rear up!!!"

"Jason! Watch that sonic boom!" Max was screaming, but it was too late. The plane was buffeted hard, rattling through the repercussion in the air. Jason tried to respond, but the concussive force knocked out the engines and shattered the cockpit windows. Sam grabbed his oxygen mask at the same time as Jason. As the experienced flier, Jason felt the plane still gliding on momentum then raced to do a mid-air restart.

"Start… come on, restart…"

"Control tower!" Sam was screaming on the radio. "We got hit by something up here…we're going down thirty miles north of Nantucket over Cape Cod Bay…"

"Really, Brian…" Tod Banning, the Boston radar guy, remained skeptical. "What was it this time? A fat bearded guy and eight tiny reindeer?"

"Listen…" Jason took the radio screaming since Joe Hackett was more reliable. "Something knocked my engines out! They are not restarting!" The plane had glided on inertia about so far, but without thrust to attain any lift, it was starting to descend and fall like a wounded bird. The engines were out, the nose was dipping…

"Dude, you gotta get off this death trap!" Max was screaming.

"Sam, Ziggy says you two have got to get out of here!!!" Al was screaming as the plane went down. "This plane is going to rip apart when it hits the open water! Without either of the brothers, Helen loses her career because of the lawsuits!!!"

"Jason!" Sam was trying to think. "You've got to get the plane restarted!"

"I'm trying! I'm trying!!!" Jason was panicking as the Cessna dived toward the ocean. "Whatever we hit knocked the fuel lines loose, I'm not getting the engines back!!" He felt the plane tilting toward the open bay. "Sam, save yourself!!"

"No!" Sam undid his seatbelts and Jason's. "Brian doesn't have any credibility! It's Joe that needs to survive!!"

"I'll be right behind you!!!" Jason screamed over the squealing wind pouring through the open cockpit. "Trust me!!!"

"Sam!!!" Al was screaming at his buddy, but Sam wasn't taking orders. He struck Jason across the face as the plane came down spiraling… Barely knocked out, Jason's mind went out as Sam grabbed him and started pulling him from the pilot's seat. The entire plane was leaning even more as he dragged Jason through the row of seats past Al watching in disbelief, but as the plane started rearing straight to open water, it suddenly leveled… the floor became flat again as Sam pulled Jason to the exit. Instead of water, the plane was aiming straight for land…

This was going to be an ugly landing. The falling plane screeched over the marina and docks in Plymouth Harbor as witnesses watched. It crashed through the rooftop crow's nest of the Captain D's Restaurant in it's path, it's wake raking up wind and gusts of air along main street as cars screeched to a stop. One wing took out several streetlights and traffic signals… Why wasn't it crashing? Something was keeping it aloft and doing a lot of damage as it took the plane down. The screaming torrents of air could be heard for miles. People were racing for cover. Photographer Dawson Leery from Capeside watched the plane crash through the fence of the schoolyard as it came down lower, but as he shot his picture, he noticed something else. What was that red flapping object clinging to the underside of the fuselage?

Inside the plane, Sam was struggling with the passenger door as he was thrown around on the floor. Too many things were racing by the windows… buildings, rooftops, a church steeple, a chain-link fence being ripped up and a sports car in the Cessna's path that flew up then landed on its tires again. The tail section was left in the schoolyard, but gradually the plane started slowing. Shopping cars were being thrown over the nose of the plane. Cashier Natalie Winston looked up as the plane came closer and closer toward the front of the local Kroger's Food Store then stopped altogether in the parking lot. Customers gasped as the stricken plane came to a rest after nearly a mile of devastation along the ground. The screams of winds were now replaced by the shrill cry of police and rescue vehicles. Lying prostrate on the floor of the small plane, Sam and Jason looked at each other in confusion. How did they survive this?

Amidst the witnesses and would-be rescuers swarming the plane, a few of them snapping photos of the plane, someone got the doorway open from outside. The police were rolling on the scene just as Sam was pulled out and helped to his feet. Jason looked around confused. Half of each wing was gone, the tail section was gone, the nose and cockpit was wrecked, damaged, dented and caved in from the restaurant roof and the entire underside was scarred, mangled and torn to shreds down to the internal fuselage. The plane was totaled, but… it had stayed in piece. Paramedics rushed to the two disoriented pilots.

"What the heck was that?" Jason was looking around. Sam was equally confused. Just how did they survive that?

"Dude," Max was looking over the wreckage and aftermath of the destruction. "I have no idea of what happened, but, hey, ALEX says you made it."

"Joe and Brian come out of it with a few scrapes and injuries…" Al was reading the same news from Ziggy.

"The brother's insurance company gets them a new much better rocking plane…" Max added.

"The FAA investigate, but they don't find the Hackett brothers responsible for the crash…" Al continued.

"Helen is so excited that Joe survives, the two of you have a baby girl in nine months…" Max continued reading the new history as Sam and Jason were placed on stretchers. The police were blocking off the area of the parking lot.

"Joe and Helen have a baby girl, and name her Crystal Veronica Hackett…" Al still had more news. "Brian shapes up too… One year from now, he marries and has two boys…" Al caught something else about these events. "This is weird. Some guy named Dawson Leery caught a photo of you two going down. Look at this!!!" He showed Sam the photo. It was the tail section of the plane breaking off as the plane coming down over Main Street. Trapped in the shot for prosperity, there was the image of someone clinging to the underside of the plane. Whoever it was had long blonde hair, a blue outfit and something that looked like a long red overcoat…

"Where the heck did she come from?" Jason looked to the EMTs as he was lifted to the ambulance. Standing beyond the crowd, Maddie Fitzpatrick, that Tipton Hotel candy counter girl from Boston, was watching from the edge of the crowd. She locked eyes on Jason then hurriedly darted behind the ambulance.

"Sam," Jason rolled to his side and reached over to his time-misplaced brother. "Did you see that? Maddie's here…"

"Maddie…" The two of them joined hands out of friendship. "How could she possibly be here?" Sparks flew around their fingers and quantum energies poked through the world as they leaped together as friends, leaving Joe and Brian Hackett being restored confused and in pain from an experience everyone told them they had. Everything was white with brighter sparkles of light, but when it finally dissolved, Sam found himself laying back on a park bench and looking up at stars. No, it wasn't a park bench; it was a bench on board a great luxury liner. It was night and the air was extremely cold. He shivered, pulled his coat a bit tighter and sat up as someone darted past him. She was exquisitely beautiful with perfect white alabaster skin, royal blue eyes and long curly red hair. She stepped on the railing at the bow of the ship and lifted herself up off the deck, swinging her other leg over and hanging off the back of the ship. She was going to be another soul lost at sea if he didn't stop her. Oh god, don't say what he thought she was doing….

"Look, look…" Sam carefully confronted her. "You don't want to do that."

"Why not?"

"Because…" Sam tried to think. "There is nothing so bad that can't be fixed by taking your life. There's always another solution."

"There's no solution to my problem!" The hysterical beauty looked at him. "I'm tired of living the same life… over and over… People telling me what to do, who to marry…"

"Then don't!" Sam implored her. "It's your life. No one has the right to tell you what to do…" Sam looked over the side of the boat. "If you want to live your own life, you must take charge of it. Don't let anyone else tell you what to do."

"It's rather impudent of you to order me about like this." The redhead seemed British by the tone and accent of her voice. Her demeanor was aristocratic. She was related to royalty or at least well off. What could make someone with so much want to take their life? "I mean, what sort of person has the right to order around another person?"

"No one has that right…" Sam came closer to her. "But when someone is so obviously screaming for help, I want to help." He reached out to her. "Let me help you."

The girl found herself trusting him for some reason. She thought about it, and lifted her leg to swing it back over, but her skirt was too taut, her period clothing to restrictive or something and she lost her footing. Sam just barely grabbed her as she screamed. Crewmen on the ship heard her and came running. All they saw was the woman being pulled down by the other passenger. They raced up as the woman regained her bearing and tried standing. They grabbed Sam and pulled him back unaware of what had occurred.

"You!" The Junior Petty Officer screamed at Sam. "Don't move a muscle!" He ordered the confused time traveler. Sam reacted misplaced once more. Where was he? When was he? The young lady seemed okay – embarrassed for him but okay. Trying to collect his bearings, the time-lost doctor took a closer look at those crew uniforms. They were black, but at the center of their badges, he could read the words "White Star Line." Where did he know that company? As he tried recalling, he noticed the lifesaver on the wall several feet away. It read, "S.S. Titanic."

"Titanic?" Sam slowly went into shock. "I'm on the Titanic?! Oh boy…."