Al left the Imaging Chamber, and Sam waited for that shift that meant he'd slipped back to the other parallel. He was fairly sure that he wouldn't have been able to have had a conversation with Al without the Doctor's help. He wanted to quiz him, to find out precisely how he had 'boosted the signal', as he had put it, but Sam knew there were more pressing matters at hand. He'd leaped here for a reason, and he needed to find out what that reason was.
This parallel was ending, the Doctor had said. And he could prevent that. But Sam couldn't see how he could play a part in that, especially when the Doctor hadn't even properly explained the situation to him. And he had already determined that he hadn't leaped into the Doctor so that the man could fix the retrieval system to bring him home.
Working alongside the leapee—even at a time in the man's life after he'd been the leapee—was confusing enough for Sam. It had been fine when he'd leaped into Al. At least, it had been fine eventually. But Al had still been in the present, whenever that was. The Doctor was here, with him, in 1983. And he didn't belong in 1983 any more than Sam did. But he was here. Because he was a time traveller.
How he'd managed to get through a leap working with the Doctor baffled Sam at the moment. The man's very presence threw history out of balance. They didn't even have any information on this leap, and he was fairly sure they wouldn't have had much last time, even if he hadn't landed on a different parallel. As far as things went this time, everything seemed to point to the fact that he shouldn't have leaped here in the first place. At least, that's the impression the Doctor gave him.
He wasn't sure what to make of the Doctor. Part of him wanted to trust, but another part was telling him to hold back, just until he had learned a little more about the man. But he was intensely curious. A time traveller. An alien, according to Martha. With a sentient ship. And one that was transdimensional at that. Alive, and…just a little bit run down. Meaning that the Doctor had been travelling for a long time. Far longer than someone would guess at a glance. But Sam had gleaned more from the Doctor than what he would learn from a passing glance, and he could guess at the man's wisdom. And his pain, the burdens he had borne over the years. And the wonder he had for the world around him. Sam could see a bit of his own curiosity mirrored in the Doctor.
It was enough to terrify him. If he truly marshalled all he knew…. But he couldn't. The Doctor was right; he didn't remember. He could tell that there was something missing now, but he wouldn't let that prey on him. He couldn't let something cloud his judgement, not now. Every time he did, something went wrong. Maybe not immediately, or perhaps they were able to rectify it, but something always went wrong.
He'd been leaping for a long time. He wasn't sure how long, exactly. The time didn't matter when it came down to it. He was tired, yes. He couldn't rest. He went from one life to another, always changing, always helping. But he'd learned to think on his feet. He'd learned to read people. He'd learned the best ways to quickly assess a situation and act accordingly. He'd learned about people, and in learning about people, he'd learned how important the average and the ordinary truly were, and he was reminded of what had kindled the desire to begin Project Quantum Leap in the first place.
He would get through this. Perhaps he couldn't reason why he'd leaped here, but they'd figure it out. And he would leap on. Maybe not home, not immediately, but…but he had to hope he'd get back eventually. He sometimes felt he was missing something, and he wanted to find out what that was. He had never asked Al because, even if Al would tell him, he couldn't explain it well enough to ask. It was just a feeling. Only…only he'd learned to trust his feelings, after all his leaps. So he couldn't forget about it all the time. He might forget for a spell, but something would trigger it, and he'd remember. There was some absence. He was missing something, but he didn't know what, and he didn't even know whether it was important or silly. Perhaps it was both.
Sam pulled a key out of his pocket. No more moping about. No more despair. No more worrying about things he had no control over. He needed to do something, and in the meantime, the Doctor needed help. Sam was good at helping people, whoever and whenever they were. He could help here.
Al entered the Control Room and was treated to one glare and two pairs of anxious eyes. No, strike that. Donna looked anxious, but Gooshie just looked nervous. They'd been through enough together for him to be able to tell the difference.
As for Tina? He didn't need to ask what was wrong with the Project's pulse communication technician. She was still sour at him. As if he could have pulled off a joke like this. As if he would even try. He loved her to bits—some bits of her more than others, he would admit—but sometimes, the things she got in her head…. Like the time she'd thought he'd been cheating on her, and she hadn't spoken to him for weeks afterwards. He wouldn't have minded so much if he had been cheating on her, but he hadn't; it had all been because of a simple misunderstanding. But had she believed him? No. His reputation, she'd declared, was against him. Well, he couldn't find fault with that, but they did have a relatively loose relationship, each with their own flings on occasion….
"Let me guess," Al said dryly. "Handlink on the blink, like the intercom?"
"There appears to be some sort of…system malfunction, Admiral," Gooshie allowed.
"Al, make him fix it." Tina skipped the preamble, cutting right to the chase. "If you've got the Doctor in the Waiting Room, make him fix whatever he did to Ziggy. Because he did do something, and we all know that."
"Believe me, I'd like to," Al told her sincerely, "but I don't know if that one can. And the other one's gone. He's with Sam."
"How is Sam?" Donna asked.
"He's fine," Al reported. "But, once he got over his fascination of the entire situation, he seemed to be about as frustrated as we were that we can't figure out why he's there. Well, he would have been if we'd been able to talk that long."
"The precise location of Dr. Beckett was slipping, Admiral," Ziggy informed him in her irritatingly smooth voice. "You would not have been able to remain there for longer than two point three minutes before the lock would have begun failing again."
"Whaddaya mean, slipping?" Al asked, thinking that, inhibitor or not, Ziggy still seemed to know more about the situation than he did.
"Dr. Beckett's location was not stable."
"You mean he was moving?" Tina asked suspiciously.
"His location was not temporally stable, Dr. Martinez," Ziggy clarified. "You could therefore say that Dr. Beckett was moving in time."
"What?" The blood had drained from Donna's face, and for a moment, Al thought she might faint. "Ziggy, is he safe?"
"The data is inconclusive, Dr. Eleese."
"Ziggy," Al scolded, "don't. Donna, Sam was fine. It was just a bit of interference."
"Temporal interference," she corrected, staring at something no one else could see. "Once Ziggy was operating at full capacity, she was able to determine that it was temporal interference." She closed her eyes. "Al, I'm willing to trust the Doctor. Really. Even…even this one, the one Sam hadn't met. Let him help. Please." She opened her eyes. "Ziggy won't be able to fix this one on her own."
When the egotistical parallel-hybrid computer did not dispute the point, Al had to concede it. "We have to involve him anyway," Al informed them. "Gooshie, pass on that information I had you write down. It's from the Doctor, Sam says. And apparently only he will understand it. But I'm fairly sure it's meant to help, and I'm willing to take anything I can get." Turning back to Tina and Donna, he said, "Sam was talking about parallels, and about all he knows for sure is that he's not on the same one as we are."
"Then how could we pick him up?" Tina demanded.
"He said something about bridging gaps." Al shook his head. "I can't tell you verbatim; just the gist. But the Doctor's with him, and apparently he's trying to make it so Sam's signal is stronger so we can keep a lock on him, but they don't know why Sam is there any more than we do."
"I'll record what you can remember, Al," Donna finally said, breaking the awkward silence before it could stretch out any longer. "We'll see if we can fill in any of those gaps."
"Yeah." Al sighed; at least the Doctor couldn't destroy their paper records. "And we'd bet—"
"Admiral," came Gooshie's voice as Ziggy patched him through from the Waiting Room—why, why did only certain things cause it to go on the blink? Al would almost have preferred it if the Doctor had made it so that Ziggy couldn't record anything. Then they'd at least know. "It, er, seems that Dr. Smith insists on leaving the Waiting Room. He says he needs to check something in our Control Room."
"Al," Tina warned. "We have rules."
"And we've broken them before," Al responded dully, thinking of Bingo. At least when he'd had the Doctor out earlier, he hadn't let him near anything important. "Okay, Gooshie. But don't let him out of your sight."
A scant few moments later, the door to the Control Room opened to admit the leapee, who looked for all the world like Sam Beckett, grinning away as they hadn't seen him do since the day before the announcement that their funding would be cut because they had no substantial evidence that their experiment would actually work.
"Right, now, first things first." The Doctor grinned at everyone, even glowering Tina. He settled back against Ziggy's controls, and Al was relieved to see Gooshie's flare of anxiety pass—apparently, the Doctor was being careful enough not to touch anything. That was a change.
"I'd like to confirm that it is a Type LXXVI parallel. Not that I doubt myself. I just…well…." The Doctor stopped. "Let's just say I can't see how it's…." He stopped again. "Continuous enantiomeric pocket's a bit of a bother, but it's actually probably what saved Sam. That, and drawn him close enough to bridge the parallels in the first place. Y'see," the Doctor began, making gestures with his hands, "it's like…." He paused briefly, a slight frown creasing his forehead before he shook his head and continued. "You lot call it the string theory, right? Well, that's not exactly correct, but I don't expect you to come up with anything better, really. But, based on that, to put it in terms you'd understand, your string has unwound into two identical strands. It frayed. Some of the frayed bits were just…lost. Shaved off. Unimportant. So the two strands look identical, and in most ways they are, but they aren't completely identical, and therein lies the problem in the parallel." He grinned.
Al had a sinking feeling that he knew what was coming. He did remember that much from the last time Sam had crossed paths with the time traveller. The Doctor's pauses were nearly always followed by lengthy speeches, all too often nonsensical explanations or vague generalities or some tangent or another that really didn't pertain to the situation as much as it could. Judging by the look of childlike glee that currently graced the Doctor's face, Al doubted this time was an exception.
He wasn't wrong.
"Problem in the parallel," the Doctor repeated, grinning wider than before. "Potentially pervasive problems posed proportionally to the precise probabilities of the particular parallels at possible points of promising predictabili—" He stopped, catching sight of their faces. "Sorry. Sometimes have this bad tendency to ramble on. Point is, the parallels aren't really parallels, not when it comes down to it. Oh, in ten thousand ways they are, but there're going to be a few things that are anomalies. Like Sam. And me, I'd wager. Thing is, when one part of the string unwound, the other part coiled more tightly. Those parts are more stable. And Sam, well, if he's in a pocket, he's not in a stable part, I'm afraid. But he can clearly use the stable parts as a bridge—tracing back along the string, if you will, to find the point of origin of the division, and using it as a springboard to propel himself to the opposite parallel."
"Meaning we could contact him." Might as well state the obvious, Al figured. He would have much preferred that the Doctor skipped the explanation, but even if Ziggy couldn't record any of the information he spouted off, she might very well be able to pull something from it to research.
"Meaning you could contact him," the Doctor agreed.
"But that doesn't tell us why he's there," Donna said. "And without knowing that, we can't help him leap."
The Doctor sighed. "No. No, it doesn't." He kept his sombre expression for a moment before he broke into a bright grin. "But it can."
"You can help?" Donna asked, eyes brightening a bit. Tina's expression grew just that much darker, and Al figured he'd better say something before the Doctor put his foot in it. Or Donna got her hopes up too high.
"Donna, honey, he might be able to help," Al said gently, "but it's bound to take time. He only has what we do, after all."
"Oi! If you're referring to the fact that I don't happen to have my sonic screwdriver with me, I'll have you know that I didn't spend every waking moment saving the world with it," the Doctor shot back. "Really. You'd be amazed what you can do with a bit of string. Or a teaspoon. Or a kettle. Or some copper wiring overlaid with—"
"Yeah, yeah," Al broke in. "I get it. You're not totally incompetent. But I don't care what you say, I am not letting you near Ziggy again, and that's bound to be one of your conditions."
The Doctor frowned. "Again? But I—oh. Right. I would rather you don't keep telling me these things. I mean, sometimes it's bound to be a great help, sure, but other times…." He trailed off. "Checklist can get lengthy." He paused. "Still, you're right. You will need to let me near Ziggy. Nearer than this, at any rate." The Doctor whipped around, scanning the panels, nose about an inch away from the controls. "Hm. Yes. I see. Yup, no doubt about it, I'll need to get nearer, see how you connected it all." His hand moved to his face and grasped air. He looked at it, frowned, and shook his head, dropping his hand back to his side. "Won't be able to do much otherwise, I'm afraid."
He took in their expressions—Donna's a mix of cautious hope but clear trepidation, Gooshie's increasingly anxious, and Tina's best described as murderous, all of which covered what Al himself was feeling—before heaving a sigh. "Look, I don't know what I'm going to do that's given you reason to look at me like that, but whatever I do, it's for a reason, and it's a good reason, as my standards aren't likely to change. At least not while I'm in the same regeneration. Though, as you pointed out, I'm not armed. I don't have any sophisticated little tools to destroy your technology." He smiled ruefully. "I'd say I don't have anything in my pockets, but that's a given because I don't happen to have pockets at the moment, so I'll simply assure you that I don't have anything up my sleeve."
The room was silent of voices for a moment, but Tina finally spoke up. "It's not just what you did," she informed him, struggling to control her voice, "but what you didn't do. I've forgiven you for everything else, but I don't know if I can forgive you for that. Especially once you understood how much it meant to all of us." She brushed past them, ignoring Al's murmurs, and left the Control Room.
"I'll—I'll keep an eye on her," Donna offered, a catch in her own voice. Al suspected she felt much the same, but was harboured by guilt—guilt for what she'd done, and for the fact that she hadn't been able to forgive the Doctor yet, either, contrary as it was to her nature.
Though, come to think of it, he hadn't been able to forgive the Doctor, either. Al knew that he knew how to fix the retrieval system. And refusing to do it….
But this was a different man. Al could see it. And he knew better than to hold something against someone that they weren't responsible for. This man…this man had seen terrors, yes. He'd seen wars. Terrible wars. Al had no doubt about that. He remembered the Doctor's face when they'd encountered those other aliens. He remembered the pain, the sorrow, the despair. He remembered the guilt. He remembered the grim acceptance. He remembered the pleading looks. And he remembered…he remembered what it had looked like, and how it had felt. And this man, well, he could hide it. He could hide it well. But Al knew what to look for, and he could still see it.
But this Doctor had not been through as much as the other Doctor. The other Doctor had been stripped of something recently, and to say it had been hard on him, well…. The loss of Martha, perhaps, although the Doctor had assured himself that she was safe, and his past self had seemed to believe what his future self had said, and Al figured no one would know if he were lying better than he.
But no matter the cause, the point still stood. They were the same person at different times, caught at different stages in their lives, and between the two times, something had changed. Al didn't know what it was—he didn't want to know—and he wasn't going to let the Doctor he had hanging around the Project know that his future was not necessarily a happy one.
They could ask this one to fix the retrieval system. Donna would certainly try, sometime, Al knew. But he also knew it would almost be better not to ask. He remembered the answer he'd received last time, and he knew the answer wasn't one that would change. It wasn't a recent experience that was the result of the Doctor's stubbornness on that point; it was accumulated wisdom. To make the Doctor give the same answer would only hurt him. He wanted to help, Al figured. He just wished, for Sam's sake, that the Doctor would break his own rules, just once. Just…just so Sam could come home.
But the Doctor wouldn't. Or couldn't. And Al could curse it all he wanted, but that fact wouldn't change. He knew that. He didn't want to accept it, but he knew it. If he didn't ask, he could hope that the Doctor's refusals meant that they would be able to get Sam home sometime by themselves, and that in their experiences, they'd learn exactly what Sam had wanted to learn when they'd begun work on the Project all those years ago.
Al didn't want to think on the alternative too much.
"Hold on, are you sure that I told Sam to say a Type LXXVI parallel and not a Type LXVII parallel?" The Doctor was looking at Gooshie, who looked like he wished he'd made some excuse to leave the Control Room, too. Though Al knew Gooshie well enough to know that he wouldn't dream of leaving the Doctor unsupervised around Ziggy. "Because they're two different things, really, and let's just say I know you lot aren't exactly…." The Doctor swallowed, looking for the right word. "Well, I know you, like me, and everyone else…. Well, maybe not me, not most days, but…. Let's just say you lot are prone to…mistakes," the Doctor finished. Al frowned at him, convinced that he'd been planning on saying something else to begin with.
The Doctor was tugging on his ear now, not looking at either of them. "See, I didn't really want to say it in front of…." The Doctor stopped. "Well, after I heard about Donna, I thought…." He broke off again. "It's just, a Type LXXVI parallel…." He trailed off and looked between Gooshie and Al. "Are you sure it's a Type LXXVI parallel?"
"That's what Sam said," Al confirmed. "I didn't get it wrong, and neither did Gooshie. And I highly doubt Sam did, either."
"I was afraid of that," the Doctor said. He sighed, leaning his head back to look up at the ceiling. "He could have left me a sonic screwdriver," he said, more to himself than to any of them. "I…. Even an old model, it wouldn't have been…."
"Dr. Be—Smith," Gooshie interrupted, "would you... If it's not too much trouble, could you tell us precisely what a Type LXXVI parallel is?"
The Doctor brought his gaze back to meet Gooshie's. "I'd better spare you the details," he said grimly. "Let's just say it's not good."
"If you tell us what it entails," Gooshie persisted, "we will be able to help Sam."
"I don't…." The Doctor trailed off. "Ziggy, ol' girl," he started instead, "what are the chances that Dr. Sam Beckett of Project Quantum Leap is going to leap out of whatever mess he's leaped into?"
"The data is inconclusive, Doctor," Ziggy replied—refraining, Al noted with some surprise, from using the Doctor's pseudonym, as she had last time.
"Oh, no, it's not," the Doctor countered. "Because I'm here. And there. And I'm going to get him out of that mess. And he's going to leap out of there. One hundred percent guarantee, that's me." The Doctor grinned at them. "I promised myself, and I'm going to promise him, and I'm promising you, right here, right now. I am going to get Sam out of there. He's going to be fine."
Al nearly believed the Doctor, but then he added, "Type LXXVI parallel or not." And Gooshie's blanched face convinced Al that, somehow, they'd need to get Sam out, with or without the Doctor, and damn his parallels. He wasn't going to lose his friend.
A/N: A bit of a break in between finals makes excellent writing time for a student who is avoiding studying as long as possible, so this is up a bit earlier than usual. As most of my finals fall next week, however, it may be a slightly longer wait for the next chapter. We'll see. Anyhow, many thanks to anyone who takes the time to review, as I really do appreciate it. It's always encouraging to know that people are reading and especially rewarding if they actually enjoy themselves. As an additional note, if I do, at any point, manage to thoroughly confuse anyone beyond the normal good confusion that goes along with a story, feel free to drop me a note to tell me what makes no sense and I'll see if I can shed any light on the matter.