Chapter 6
Quantum Effect
The words sent Bogg's heart rocketing into his throat, and he started to rise, but was restrained by Garth's hand on his arm. "They'll find him," the Chief Elder assured him.
"How, without that file?" Bogg demanded.
"Remember, he's somewhere down in the simulators, not lost in the timestream. If they have to check each and every holochamber, they'll find him."
The reminder quieted his nerves somewhat, even as he watched Will murmuring into the whisker-mike of his headset. A moment later, profound relief settled over the former Marine's features, and he said, "Just for that, I'm swearing off calling you Howie! Thanks, Miller; I owe you. Carrie, new Omni serial number: Kilo-Golf-seven-one-five, on live channel."
"Copy Kilo-Golf-seven-one-five on live channel. I have a lock."
At the front of the room, the screen came to life at last, showing a dimly lit alley, where Jeffrey was checking his Guidebook. His face was eerily highlighted by the screen's backlighting. "It's July 16, 1960," he was saying. "The only event listed is the test-firing of the first ballistic missile, but that was in the Atlantic Missile Test Range, and I'm in Minneapolis."
"I thought you were going to give him something after 1982," Bogg said.
Will looked up from his remote, consternation showing on his face. "Somebody switched Omnis on him," he reported. "The one we assigned him had an entirely different serial number, and its auto-mode randomizer was preset to holochamber sixteen. What he's got now is a field Omni; he's on a real assignment. And to make matters worse, our pet event just went critical."
"Is this connected?" Garth wanted to know.
"Unknown, but probable," Will replied.
Garth turned to Bogg. "It's your call, Phineas," he said.
Every nerve he owned was screaming Get him back here! It took his last ounce of control to swallow the words and think it through. Whatever this "pet event" of theirs was, it very well might be something the kid was supposed to do, and, judging from the thinly veiled excitement on both Will's and Garth's faces, it was something far more important than the usual historical fix. "Let him try," he said at last. Sometimes a Voyager had to bite the bullet—and so did a Voyager's dad.
"You heard the man, William," Garth said, smiling now.
"Yes, sir," Will replied, flashing a grin and a thumbs-up at his friend.
Minneapolis, Minnesota; July 16, 1960
Jeffrey closed the Guidebook and replaced it and the Omni on his belt, then got up and started to look around as he picked his way through the trash that had overflowed the barrels. Against one wall, a middle-aged man was sleeping, wrapped up in newspapers. He wrinkled his nose; the man obviously hadn't had a bath in quite some time, and, to top it off, he positively reeked of alcohol. He started to walk past him, then paused. The Omni had a habit of dropping them where they needed to be.
The man groaned and grabbed his head, then lurched to his feet and staggered down the alley toward the street, oblivious to the boy following him.
Jeffrey had no idea of the time, but it must be late at night; all the tenement windows were dark, and the street was empty of pedestrians and vehicular traffic, except for a single truck rumbling up the street, its stack belching thick black diesel exhaust. The probable reason for the red light became evident as the drunk, never slowing his pace, approached the curb. "Hey, mister, look out!" Jeffrey cried. He broke into a run and darted in front of him, hoping either to stop him, or even to trip him, anything to keep him from walking in front of that truck.
The man snarled incoherently and swept him out of the way; Jeffrey stumbled backward and fell, and he could only watch helplessly as the man met his end. He got to his feet and darted over to check his pulse as he lay there, but he needn't have bothered; with the amount of blood rapidly spreading in the street under the twisted body, it was clear he was dead even before Jeff noted the absence of pulse. He spared a glance toward the truck and could just make out the form of the trucker talking urgently into a microphone, probably calling for help; while he was thus occupied, Jeffrey approached the fallen man and started going through his pockets. He had to know who he was. He'd just found the wallet when the driver got out of the truck, shouting at him, obviously thinking he was trying to rob the victim; after a quick glance inside, Jeffrey tossed the wallet down and Omni'ed out.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 13, 1967
"Hey, are you all right? That was one heck of a fall!" a voice said, and Jeffrey looked up to see a young teen extending a hand to help him up.
"I'm okay," he answered, accepting the assistance. He noticed the other boy gazing at the items riding on his belt and tugged his shirt down to cover them.
"Sam Beckett," the older boy introduced himself.
"Jeffrey Bogg." It still sent a thrill through him.
"Are you taking classes here too?"
Jeff looked around and realized he was on a college campus. "Are you kidding?! I'm only twelve!"
Sam shrugged; did he look a little disappointed? "I'm just fifteen," he pointed out, "and there's a kid your age in one of the CUNY (1) colleges." He glanced at his watch. "Oh, hey, I gotta go; my class starts in five minutes. See ya." With that, he took off at a jog.
Jeffrey found a secluded area behind one of the buildings and settled to the ground, where he checked the Omni. It was green.
Thinking for a moment to recall the name he'd briefly seen on the card in the dead man's wallet, he entered it on the Guidebook's keypad.
Voyager Headquarters, Training Control Center
They watched as Jeff perused his Guidebook, then looked up, a look of intense concentration on his face. "This is weird," he muttered. "That guy that just got killed, his name's Frank MacKenzie; the Guidebook just lists him as a civilian, but he wasn't supposed to die for another twenty-seven years. That means that somebody was supposed to save him back there, but wasn't around to do it, and that guy's probably the important one, but I've got no idea who, or how to find out. The only clue I've got is that the Omni dropped me in front of that other kid just now, but this is seven years after MacKenzie." He shrugged. "I guess I might as well just follow the lead I've got," he said with a resigned sigh.
Will whistled. "Remember your question a few minutes ago, Professor? The answer just went from 'probable' to 'definite.'"
Jeffrey's voice drew their attention once more. "It says here that Dr. Sam Beckett's seventh PhD was in quantum physics, and get this: His dissertation was on time travel! He and another guy started something called Project Quantum Leapin 1995, but then the government threatened to cut off their funding, so Dr. Beckett used a 'quantum accelerator,' whatever that is, and disappeared. He was never found. It was never revealed what the purpose of the Project was, but I bet he was trying to travel through time. I think he succeeded, and that's why they never found him!" He was talking faster now. "And that means he's the one who was supposed to rescue Mr. MacKenzie!"
Will came over to Bogg. "We're likely to lose track of him for a while, Phin," he said softly. "Uhmmm..." He looked at Garth, an eyebrow raised, and the professor nodded. "Okay. Before I go any further, what I'm about to tell you is classified. Not to leave this room." When Bogg nodded, Will went on, "The reason we're likely to lose track of him is something called 'quantum effect,' which is the particular kind of interference a quantum accelerator—or its nimbus—causes in close proximity to an Omni."
What in the world was a 'quantum accelerator,' anyway? "Because they're similar in function?" Bogg guessed.
"That's only part of it. Y'see, the accelerator is a primitive form of the system that powers our Omnis. Or, to put it more accurately, it's the ancestor of that system."
Bogg felt the color drain from his face as the significance registered. "Are you telling me that Sam Beckett is the Founder?!" he blurted.
Will nodded. "That kid of yours has our very existence in his hands right now—not to mention his own. And from what I've seen so far," he grinned now, "he'll figure it out when his Omni starts going wonky on him."
Stallion's Gate, New Mexico; May 5, 1995
He landed in a room holding a supercomputer that dwarfed the Cray at his father's university. Alarms began blaring while he was still falling; upon landing, he immediately began looking for a place to hide. The short man at the console was too quick, however, shooting out of his chair to grab his arm. "How'd you get in here?" he demanded in a high tenor, blasting the boy with a wave of bad breath that nearly turned his stomach.
Before Jeffrey could even begin to answer, a door opened and another man came in, this one tall and slender, with brown hair and green eyes, wearing what appeared to be a set of longjohns, and the boy recognized him as the grown-up version of the teenager he'd met just a little while ago. "What happened, Gooshie?" Sam Beckett asked in a voice that didn't seem to have changed much since he'd been fifteen.
Gooshie? Jeffrey thought incredulously. Boy, and I thought Bogg's name was weird!
The shorter man pulled Jeffrey forward. "We have an intruder," he said simply.
"How'd he get in here?"
"Damned if I know; I could swear he just fell through the ceiling. And get this," Gooshie went on, holding up a hand to forestall the imminent protest. "Just before he did, Ziggy started going nuts; I mean, the readouts were all over the map!"
Sam's eyebrows tried to merge with his hairline. "So I didn't imagine it."
Gooshie released Jeffrey's arm and picked up a remote that made the boy's jaw drop. It was identical to the one Will Parker used at Mission Control! With both men momentarily occupied with whatever Gooshie was doing, Jeffrey opened the Omni. The lights were flashing back and forth, and, worse, the globe was gyrating madly.
The alarms went off again. "There it goes again!" Gooshie cried; if anything, his fingers flew faster on the keypad.
Jeffrey immediately snapped the Omni shut. It didn't take a genius to figure out that, somehow, the Omni and the equipment in here were affecting each other, he thought as he clipped the device to his belt once more.
Sam apparently heard the soft "click" of the lid, however, for he turned and looked at Jeffrey suspiciously. "What did you just do?" he demanded.
"Nothing!" Jeffrey protested, with all the innocence he could muster.
"What's your name?" Sam asked next, his tone making Jeffrey a little nervous. Was it possible he had identified him as the boy he'd met on the college campus?
"Jeffrey Bogg."
Gooshie did something else with his remote, then shook his head. "There are only three or four people with that name in the database, and he's either too old or too young to be any of them."
But Sam was regarding the boy thoughtfully. "Adopted?" he asked.
Jeffrey nodded.
"What's your birth name, then?"
"Jeffrey Jones."
"I'm gonna need more than that," Gooshie said. "That's got to be one of the most common names in the book! I suppose I ought to be grateful your first name isn't John."
"You heard him," Sam said. "Birth date, place, and your parents' names. And your address, too, just for extra confirmation."
Jeffrey balked for a moment. That was information no Voyager was supposed to divulge to historical figures, unless it was necessary to complete the mission. Deciding that it was indeed necessary, he reluctantly told them.
Gooshie nearly dropped his remote. "1970?!" he repeated the year attached to Jeffrey's birth date. "That's impossible; you'd have to be twenty-five years old by now!"
Sam looked thoughtful for a long moment, gazing at the boy before him. "I know you," he said, puzzled. That face, the name, the objects on his belt—Hell, even the clothes were familiar. Then another image flashed before his mind's eye, the boy's face on a television screen, and he experienced a wave of something akin to déjà vu as he tried without success to recall where he'd seen that face before. It was the first time his photographic memory had failed him, and that puzzled him even further.
"Dr. Beckett?" Gooshie's voice brought him back to the present.
"Run what he gave you," Sam instructed.
With a shrug, Gooshie complied, then stared incredulously at what he saw. He looked from the face on the handlink's screen to the young intruder and back, then turned flabbergasted eyes to Sam. "You're probably not going to believe this, but he's the kid that disappeared in 1982 in New York City, the one that apparently fell out his window, but no body was ever found. Made every headline in the nation."
Sam nodded; that was when he'd seen the boy's picture on TV. So Jeffrey had somehow come from 1982 to 1995 without aging—with a stop in 1967 between, he realized, remembering at last where he'd seen him before. His memory hadn't failed him; it had simply refused to accept the possibility after so many years. "You're the kid I met at MIT," he said. "You fell...I never was able to figure out where from; it seemed like you dropped right out of the sky..." His voice softened to little more than a murmur; it sounded more as if he were muttering to himself now. "And Gooshie says you came through the ceiling..." With a speed that made Bogg look like a snail, he snatched the Omni from Jeffrey's belt. Noting the peculiar markings on the lid (2), he opened it.
Gooshie silenced the alarm on the first blat. "Sam, it's..."
"I know. And I think I know why."
Jeffrey's heart sank as Sam examined the object in his hand. He was going to know what it was he was holding.
It had a very strong resemblance to the device in the old movie based on Wells' The Time Machine. The title struck Sam with hurricane force, and his eyes snapped back to Jeffrey. "You're a time traveler." It wasn't a question. "This...device, it's how you travel, and it and my accelerator are interfering with each other." He closed it and handed it back to the boy, a joyous look in his eyes that was almost manic. "They would have to threaten my funding right now. Gooshie, fire up the accelerator!"
"Dr. Beckett, are you sure? Ziggy says..."
"Don't you get it? He's a time traveler, Gooshie! And it's my guess he's here to make sure I Leap. Now fire it up!" He turned to Jeffrey. "Whatever you do, don't open that thing until I'm done; Gooshie'll tell you when it's safe." He grinned. "I think you're going to find the light settles on green when it's all over."
An utterly shocked look crossed the boy's face as he made the connection. "You're...the Omni...Smokin' bat's breath!"
"Yes, I'm going to Leap; that is why you came here, isn't it?" Sam asked with another grin. With that, he went back into the inner room.
Jeffrey watched through the glass. The room beyond was circular, medium-dark blue in color—floor, ceiling, and walls. It was devoid of furniture; in the center, there was a light-blue pad on the floor. Halfway up the wall was some sort of light-blue ring—and then he was blinded by an incredibly bright light. There was a roaring that nearly deafened him; above it, he could hear Gooshie shouting, as if answering a phone, "Control!"
"Yeah; what's happening, Gooshie?" a gravelly voice came over a speaker, barely audible above the noise.
"He's Leaping! Ziggy said no, but Sam's Leaping!"
"He can't Leap; we're not ready," the gravelly voice said in consternation.
"Tell Sam that!"
"Put him on."
"I can't; he's in the accelerator!" Silence greeted this announcement. "Al!" Gooshie cried. "Al! What do I do?"
"Nothing," came Al's answer. "Any interference will kill him. I'll be there in…two minutes."
Squinting through the glare, Jeffrey could barely make out Sam standing on that pad, legs apart, arms straight out from his sides. Then he raised them over his head, looking up at the ceiling, a look of utter joy on his face. (3) A brilliant flash obscured all vision for a moment; then the light and the roaring died, and a stranger lay on the pad. (4)
Gooshie got to his feet. "Okay, it's safe now. You better get out of here before Al gets here; you really don't want to run into him right now." With that, he threw open the door to the accelerator and rushed inside.
Voyager Headquarters, Training Control Center
A blinding nimbus of blue light glared from the Omnitron before the screen went blank for a moment, then came back online to show Jeffrey firmly in the grip of a man who couldn't have been much more than five and a half feet tall, with short, curly red hair and a moustache. Then a second man came into view, and Will and Garth both stared as if transfixed.
For three long minutes they watched events unfold, with the screen blanking out every time the Omni was opened. Phineas couldn't help grinning when Jeffrey made the connection; Will had been right about that.
Then the nimbus appeared again, and the screen went blank once more. Four more minutes passed with agonizing slowness; then, like an old vacuum tube warming up, the image began to fade back in. Jeffrey was staring straight ahead, a look on his face as if he couldn't decide whether to be excited or scared.
"Okay, it's safe now," the short man said to him. "You better get out of here before Al gets here; you really don't want to run into him right now." With that, he got up, threw open a door to another room, and rushed inside.
The boy's expression settled on pure wonder. "I just met the Founder, didn't I?" he whispered to the air. His hands shook as he opened the Omni; at the single chime, all of them, even Professor Garth, started cheering.
But he wasn't done yet.
Minneapolis, Minnesota; July 16, 1960
He landed in the same alley; he guessed it was mere minutes after he had left. He could hear the rumble of that fateful truck fading in the distance, the lingering acrid stench of its exhaust the only remnant of its passing. Of its victim, there was no sign, but there was Sam Beckett, still in the clothes he had been wearing when Jeffrey had last seen him. The man was doing a flawless pantomime of checking nonexistent pockets; he then inspected his empty hands as if they held something. As he turned to regard his reflection in a grimy window, Jeff approached him. "Dr. Beckett?" he asked hesitantly.
Sam whirled. "You can see me?" he demanded. "Me, not this…" he looked at his hands again, "…Frank MacKenzie?" He indicated the window.
Jeffrey glanced at the reflection, then gaped at it. The reflection showed the man Jeffrey had seen killed earlier, in the same rumpled, threadbare suit, disheveled hair, and unkempt beard, holding a battered wallet in his hands. "How?" he blurted. "That's him in the glass, but when I look at you, I just see…well, you."
"And you know me?"
"Don't you remember? I'm the time traveler that landed in your control room just before you Leaped for the first time."
Sam thought a moment, then shook his head and said apologetically. "Leaping plays hob with my memory. Did you Leap with me?—No," he answered his own question, his face clearing as fragments of that night returned. "You came to PQL to make sure I did. And now you're checking up on me, aren't you?" he added with a grin.
"Sort of," Jeffrey admitted. "But how come your reflection doesn't show you?"
"It's a sort of aura," Sam told him. "Everybody here will see me as MacKenzie. I'll even sound like him to them. I'm not sure why you can see me as I really am."
"You said your accelerator and my Omni were interfering with each other," Jeffrey reminded him. "Maybe that has something to do with it?"
Sam thought about that for a moment; he recalled the watch-like device with its flashing lights and gyrating globe. "Yeah, maybe," he finally said. "Did it settle on green after I left?"
"Yeah, it did," Jeffrey grinned, then opened it now, only to find it doing the same mad dance it had done before.
"I think you'll have to move away from me for that to work," Sam said. "You're getting interference from that aura I mentioned."
Jeffrey backed away until the Omni settled down once more. "Green light," he announced, grinning; Sam, smiling himself, nodded his acknowledgment. "I guess I better get going. So long, Dr. Beckett; it was nice meeting you. Good luck," he said, and vanished.
Voyager Headquarters; Training Control Center
The Omnitron showed Jeffrey landing in the alley, and they all saw Dr. Beckett doing what seemed to be some kind of pantomime. As Jeff approached him, the image was gradually overshadowed by a blue light that increased in intensity until the screen went blank.
"Now what?" Bogg wanted to know.
"Quantum effect again," Will said. "The accelerator's nimbus surrounds Sam, the same way the chronofield does us, and they interfere with each other." Two minutes later, the image faded back in just as Jeffrey wished Sam luck; then it abruptly went blank again, just before the boy returned, landing in front of the Omnitron.
He was still shaking as he got to his feet. "Did I just do what I think I did?" he asked, his voice unsteady.
It was Will who answered, "That depends on what it is you think you did."
"I…I think I just saved every Voyager that ever was," he replied, a little hesitant to voice such a claim.
"Young man, that's exactly what you did," a beaming Garth told him.
Jeffrey turned, startled to see him there. "You saw it? The whole thing?"
"Most of it. The Founder's equipment caused some interference, so there were a few places where the screen went blank for a bit." Beckoning everyone to follow him, he led the way through a door in the back of the room that Jeff hadn't noticed before. The room beyond was a small auditorium, with seats for about forty people. In the front of the room was an Omni memory-reader, its holoframe a little larger than the one in the courtroom.
Bogg grinned at the sight of the room. "This is where they critique students' training assignments," he told Jeffrey.
"I rather thought you'd remember this room, Phineas," Garth smiled as he placed Jeff's Omni in the reader's receptacle. To Jeffrey, he explained, "Like most of our computer equipment, the memory readers are connected with the Core."
"So that's how it knew what to show during the trial," Jeffrey remarked.
"Yes. During a normal critique session, this one simply begins with the first incident meriting comment or discussion—which can be positive as well as negative. When an assignment is being graded, each incident is judged in light of events both leading up to it and flowing from it. For example, Frank MacKenzie's death. On the one hand, under one set of circumstances, a student might lose points for that one, perhaps only a few, or it could be enough for a failing grade on the entire assignment." He looked appraisingly at both of them, then asked Jeffrey, "Can you tell me why?"
Bogg suddenly felt a little apprehensive as he realized that it was his training of the kid that was being evaluated at the moment, as well as the boy's own performance.
Apparently the incident had been bothering Jeffrey enough that he had been thinking it over during the rest of the assignment, for there was no hesitation in his answer. "I should've remembered my limitations," he said, his tone a little subdued. "I probably should've tried to flag down the truck instead of trying to stop MacKenzie."
"Exactly. However, in this case, the man's death was the result of the divergence, rather than the cause of it. It led you to find the real reason for the red light.
Jeffrey's face brightened. "Like the fact that Cuba was losing the Revolution wasn't the real reason for the red light, but the fact that Teddy Roosevelt had been killed earlier by Billy the Kid." (5)
"Yes. So in your mission today, you lose no points for what happened in Minneapolis."
"Points?!" Jeffrey burst out suddenly. "Professor, a man died!"
"Easy, son," Garth soothed, resting a hand on the boy's shoulder. "That timeline no longer exists, remember? Mr. MacKenzie did not die after all, and you're the one who saved him."
Reining in his reaction with a visible effort, he nodded.
With a final pat, Garth released him and continued, "Now let's move on to your arrival at the Founder's project headquarters."
The memory reader obligingly showed a blue screen that quickly resolved to show Gooshie holding Jeffrey by the arm.
"Am I correct in assuming that it was merely your arrival that caused that blackout?" Garth asked.
"That's the only thing that happened there right before this. I could hear the alarms going off while I was just coming through the time portal. I tried to find someplace to hide, but there wasn't any; even if there had been, I don't think I would've made it. That guy was too fast."
They watched as Gooshie entered commands on his remote, with Sam looking over his shoulder; as they followed the events; Jeffrey's gaze strayed momentarily toward Will, who simply held up his own remote and nodded.
The screen went blank again momentarily, and Garth asked, "What happened here?"
"I tried to check the Omni to see where I was, but as soon as I opened it, their alarms started going off, so I closed it right away. It was pretty obvious the Omni was messing up their equipment."
Now the screen showed Sam looking at Jeffrey and asking his name, and Garth frowned as he watched the boy identifying himself.
It was Will who forestalled any comment from him. "Professor, hold off on anything you have to say about this, please," he said. "Just wait a few minutes, and I think you'll understand. Remember the pictures I showed you."
Garth didn't have long to wait; his jaw dropped when Sam snatched the Omni and gazed at it, Jeffrey looking apprehensively at him, precisely the image he had seen on the screen of Will's Core link two months ago. How had he missed that?
Jeffrey looked at the scene himself and finally asked the question that had been bothering him since he'd met the man. "Why is he standing there in his underwear?"
Will couldn't help laughing; it did look like underwear to someone who didn't know what it really was. "It's not underwear," he explained. "It's called a Fermi suit."
"After Enrico Fermi?"
"Yes. A lot of things in physics are named after him."
"What's the suit for?"
"Well, that's a little more complicated. Do you know what a particle accelerator is?"
"Sort of. It does something to atomic particles. Makes them move faster."
"A lot faster than they normally do," Will told him. "They actually get close to the speed of light in one of those things. When subatomic particles move that fast, there's radiation; it can be anything from radio waves, which can cause simple burns, to gamma rays, which can kill you, or a combination of several types. Now when he was inside that accelerator, he was surrounded by a ring of particles moving in a circle around him. While the radiation they emitted was directed toward the outside of the ring by the tremendous centrifugal force, there was a concern that there might be some leakage toward the center. The suit was designed to protect him from that leakage. But because it would only be minimal, if any, it didn't have to be a full radiation suit."(6)
Jeffrey nodded in understanding.
Garth, having regained his composure, asked him, "I take it you know a Voyager is not supposed to give identification information as you did?"
"Except when you have to, in order to complete the mission," the boy answered, his tone this time that of one who knew he was on solid ground. "The way he asked me who I was, I figured he remembered meeting me in 1967. Once he knew I wasn't even born until 1970, I guessed he'd realize I was a time traveler and figure it was his first Leap that made it possible, so he'd go ahead with it the way he was supposed to."
"I certainly can't fault that reasoning," Garth responded a little breathlessly. "Are you sure you're only twelve?" he added with a grin, and Jeffrey reddened a little at the praise and smiled shyly in return. "Now we're missing nearly the entire encounter when you returned to Minneapolis," the old professor went on. "Go ahead and tell us what happened there."
Jeffrey did so; Carrie was amazed when the image faded back in. "The Omni recorded his true appearance," she noted as they beheld Sam Beckett where Frank MacKenzie should have been.
"Quantum effect," Will summed up the reason. "Our chronofield is similar enough to the aura his accelerator projects that the Omni reacts as if it's caught in the actual nimbus."
"Yeah; both lights were flashing, and the globe wouldn't stop moving, until I got farther away from him," Jeffrey added.
"Okay, so don't keep us waiting, Prof," Will prodded. "How'd he do?"
"I can't find any reason to deduct points," Garth finally said after a long silence. "Congratulations, young Voyager Bogg; you've earned a perfect score."
"Hah!" Will whooped. "Phin, you called it! The pool's all yours!"
"You bet I'd ace it?" Jeffrey demanded.
"Of course!" Bogg laughed. "What else would you do?"
"And oh, boy, I'm gonna have to find a really short straw for you!" Will added.
"If all of you will excuse me," Garth cut in, "I wasn't finished."
The little group turned to look at him.
"Jeffrey, because of your score today, when you eventually do come to the Academy, the practical portion of the final exam will be waived."
"Wow! Didja hear that?" the boy whooped. Then, "So I will have to go?"
"Kid, I've told you before: There just isn't time in the field for me to teach you everything you need to know," Bogg told him.
"Oh, and you just wait until I get you in Temporal Math 101," Carrie put in with a wicked grin.
"Don't be too eager, Dragon Lady," Bogg teased. "He'll be ready."
Jeffrey looked at him. "You're good at math?"
Will barked out a laugh. "I think it's the only classroom subject he was good at."
"I guess Susan wasn't in that class, then, was she?" the boy asked with a sly look, and everyone got a good laugh when Bogg went red.
"Actually, she was," the former pirate admitted, and shrugged. "But I liked math. After all, you can't be a navigator without knowing how to figure."
"You were a navigator?"
"Sure was. And I was elected quartermaster on my last ship."
That announcement took even Will by surprise. "No way," he said.
"Hey, you've got Archive access," Bogg grinned at him. "Look it up."
(1) City University of New York, a system of colleges which, until the mid-1970s, were free to residents of the city. The prodigy mentioned here attended the branch called City College of New York when my older brother was there. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the kid's name.
(2) Not having been through either the Leapgate or an Omni's chronofield, he wouldn't be able to read the Omni's markings or the Guidebook.
(3) Scene adapted from Quantum Leap: "Genesis," Part 1.
(4) In the aforementioned episode, Al said that, to those back at PQL, the host looked like Sam. Why Jeff sees a stranger instead is explained later.
(5) Voyagers!: "Billy and Bully"
(6) I couldn't find any information on what QL canon said the Fermi suit was for; this seemed as good an explanation as any. ;D