The light of Ziggy's handlink dazzled Sam and he smeared away sweat and maybe tears, hand shaking with fatigue.

'Sam. Oh God, Sam, are you okay?' Only Al's face and hands showed, shining in Ziggy's glow like a vision, there in the box beside Sam's right arm.

'Get me out.' Sam pounded the lid of the box.

'Just take it easy. Take it easy, okay? We're doing everything we can.'

'Take it easy? Do you know how much air's in this thing?'

'There's a switch.' Al held the handlink so that it showed a toggle switch in the headboard up high and on Sam's left hand side.

Sam twisted and he could see a grille set right in the middle. He reached across and back with his right hand and snapped the toggle on, heard the reassuring hum of the little fan, felt the first cool, fresh air blow across his face. He inhaled, deep and slow, smelling loam and pine, closed his eyes for a moment and felt the sweat cooling and drying on his face.

'Better?' Al asked after a moment.

Sam didn't open his eyes. He was hoping. He was hoping a lot of things, amongst them that there's no place like home, that maybe he'd just dreamt he was in a box, and that if he tried hard enough he should be able to smell Al's cigar and will himself back to reality.

'Sam?'

This time he did open his eyes. 'You have to get me out of here.'

'It's gonna be okay. It is. This leap's gonna be so simple.'

Sam wiped the sweat and grime off his hands, all the way down the Indian cotton dress he was wearing. He eased the wet part of it out from under him in the hope that it might dry.

'Get me out of here and it'll be simple.'

Al nodded. He took a deep, sympathetic breath. 'It's August eighth, nineteen sixty two and you're Susan Dempsey.'

Dempsey? He knew that name. 'From Timbuktu to South-East China,' his voice fell into the rhythm of the jingle. 'Try Dempsey's Pies, there's nothing finer. Apple and rhubarb, peach and raspberry too - they taste just too darn good to be true.'

Al stared down over his cigar, his expression a mixture of awe, pity and sheer disbelief. 'Your brain is made of Swiss cheese, you've forgotten half the Phds you've earned and your Nobel Prize, but you manage to remember that?'

Sam shrugged, not an easy maneuver in the confined space of the box. 'Katie used to drive Mom nuts singing that song. She was always nagging about those pies. With all that home cooking she wanted a frozen pie.'

'Your mom was a good cook, wasn't she?'

Sam nodded. 'She was a great cook.' Was? 'She still is, isn't she?' He gazed at Al, suddenly afraid that something had happened to his mother during one of his leaps, and he'd never been told. Or worse, that something had happened to her years ago, before he'd ever started leaping, and that while he'd remembered the dumb jingle from a frozen food ad, he'd forgotten that.

'Sure, Sam. She's okay. She's fine.'

That part of the world was still working. 'One year Mom gave up and bought one of the pies to have as Katie's birthday cake.'

'Oh yeah?' Al was intent, chin cupped in hand, cigar dangling from his fingers.

Sam wondered how often Al wished his own sister into these stories of Katie. 'Worst birthday cake ever.' He laughed. 'Nobody finished it, not even Tom. We gave it to the chickens.'

'And Katie never sang that song again.'

'Oh, she still sang it. Just used her own words. From Timbuktu, they come in a hearse, try Dempsey's Pies, there's nothing worse. Then there was something about rhyming "apple" with "crappy" but I can't remember.'

'Swiss cheese?' said Al.

'Defensive amnesia,' said Sam. 'There are some things I don't need to remember.' He tried to ease himself away from the wet patch. It made him itch. 'Susan Dempsey.'

Al held his cigar in his mouth while he fingered at the handlink. 'Daughter of the frozen pie king. Sixteen years old. She disappeared on August sixth and was never seen again.'

Suddenly the box felt terribly, terribly small. 'Kidnapped?'

Al nodded, his finger punching at the handlink, the flat of his hand bashing the side of it, his fist threatening. 'Her father, Big Jim Dempsey, got a ransom note. They wanted half a million for her and he got it. He got it in time and delivered it but they never turned up.'

'When's the ransom drop-off supposed to be?'

Al read from the handlink. 'The twelfth. Midday in a supermarket car park.'

'That's four days from now, Al.'

'I know.' Al's eyes were big and sympathetic. He did know. If anyone understood this situation, it had to be Al, who had spent not just four days but four years in captivity.

Sam didn't want to say anything more, didn't want Al to have to hear how damn' scared he was. He sucked in a deep, slow breath, trying to calm himself. 'Four days.' Maybe all he had to do was stay alive. Maybe the kidnappers hadn't come to pick up the ransom because Susan Dempsey was already dead, but if he could stay alive then this could work out. He just needed to keep her safe. 'That's a long time without food or water.'

'Water's here.' Al angled the lights of the handlink so that they shone on a plastic tube on the floor of the box by Sam's right arm. 'It's connected up to a half-gallon bottle, so pace yourself. There's candy bars and stuff here.' Al indicated lower down, by Sam's hips.

He hadn't noticed them before. Some of them were squashed and the foil had come off or the paper soaked through. Taste sensation: melted candy-bar that was tainted with pee. He rescued some of the less-disgusting ones and put them by his head.

'Is this all I have to do? Just stay alive?'

Al puffed on his cigar and consulted the handlink. 'It's a good start. When Susan never came home, her father just gave up, the whole business crashed. Dozens of people lost their jobs. The factories closed down, farmers razed their orchards. It was bad, Sam. Dempsey's Pies might not have been as good as home cooking, but they were bread and butter for a lot of people.' He checked the link again, shook his head in sorrow. 'Her mother died of an overdose of tranquilizers on the second anniversary of her disappearance.' He looked up, suddenly, staring at what to Sam was just the dark wood of the box. 'She what? Geez.' He looked back to Sam. 'Listen, kid, I've gotta go talk to Susan. I'll get back here soon as I can. Hey, don't leave that fan running too long, you'll flatten drain the battery.' He looked down, regretful, at the handlink. 'Wish there was some way I could leave you with some light.' He clicked a button on the handlink and the exit door of the imaging chamber opened beside him.

He stepped through and left Sam in darkness. There was the sound of the fan for company, the water hose, the crumpled paper and foil of the candy bars, the smell of the place for. That was it. Sam reached up for the toggle switch behind his head and thought for a long moment about shutting the fan off. It was all he had for now and he needed it, but maybe he was going to need it more later on. He didn't want to run the battery down. He swallowed against a throat suddenly dry and fingered the smooth plastic of the water hose. Half a gallon. How long would that last him? He could take a sip now, avoid getting dehydrated. Half a gallon was what? Two or three days' worth. More if he rationed it, but he had no way of telling the time. Not without Al in here. He'd have a little, just a mouthful. There would be consequences later. He dragged the damp dress out the other side. It didn't really help, it was still wet and awful, the bottom of the box was padded with cotton wadding or something and the wet spot was right underneath him and eventually he supposed it was going to get even wetter. He would deal with that problem when it came up.

The rubber tube was only about the diameter of a drinking straw. He sucked at it, biting it flat to hold the pressure in place. It was hard work, just getting a drink. The air in the hose tasted stale, and rank but finally the water came. He held it in his mouth and let it trickle down, a little at a time. He closed his eyes against the darkness and opened them to more darkness.

How had Al managed it? In the still and quiet and thick solid black Sam could have been dead. He could have been less than dead, he could have been nothing. He hummed the stupid Dempsey Pie jingle, just so that he could hear something. Was that it? Was that how you kept sane when you were worse than dead? He inhaled deep, shut his eyes hard and watched the scribble of phosgenes across the inside of his eyelids. Stars. They reminded him of stars. He thought of Don Quixote. Sitting with Al in the bare bones of the imaging chamber, blueprints and wiring diagrams before them and the two of them singing. He tried it, just one line of the chorus. 'To dream the impossible dream, to fight the the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow.' He choked on the last word. Not self-pity; fear. The words fell, dead in the suffocating confines of the box.

He closed his eyes and it was dark. He opened them again and it was still dark. He exhaled, letting the air blow softly out through his nostrils, feeling the tickle of it across his upper lip and paused. Was this what it was to be dead? No. There was a sound. He heard something. It might have been his imagination. He held is breath and really listened this time. There, coming from behind his head, a trill of birdsong. Then nothing again. Could it be real or was he having an aural hallucination? He held his breath and listened again. Nothing. But it was possible. That sound had come in through the grille with the fan behind it and that fan had to be connected to the outside. There! Just as he exhaled he heard it again, the sweet rise of birdsong and he knew he was alive.

Surely if he was close enough to the surface to be able to smell the pine needles and hear the birds, then the box wasn't dug too deep into the ground. He hadn't been able to push the lid off using his hands and legs, but if he could turn himself over, into a crouching position, and press his whole back against the lid then surely that would make a difference. He reached out for the lid above him, trying to gauge its distance, would there be room for his shoulders to fit? He thought there would.

He was scared, just being in the box. He didn't remember any claustrophobic tendencies, there had been no incidents that he could recall of being shut into a small place, either by accident or as a result of bullying. No, this was just plain-old grownup fear. Sensible fear. Al had said that Susan Dempsey had never been found. Not that her body had been located twenty years later, or that remains had been dug up by a bunch of kids on a camping trip. Nothing. Never. If this went wrong then he was just going to be dead in a box under the ground somewhere. It had to go right. It really had to go right.