From: BEWalton17@aol.com
Message-ID: <6604f47.36718a56@aol.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 16:10:46 EST
Subject: QL: The Enemy (chapter 1)


                          PART ONE: SAM

I arose swiftly that night, for I heard a
knock at my door.
"Who's that?" I asked.
And there answered on the outside:
"The Future"
"What do you want?" I asked.
"Your life," he said, "your service, your
agonies and toiling...
I demand all."
"And what is the pay?" I asked.
"Death..."
We two were silent; the snow fell in the 
the streets;
The night was still.
"And is that all?" I asked.
"Yes, that is all..."
"And who shall gain by my travail?"
He did not answer; I started out.
--James Oppenheim, "The Future"


                           CHAPTER ONE
_Chicago, Illinois.  November 25, 1984._
     His first thought was: My God, she's beautiful, but that
wasn't exactly right.
     The woman to his right wasn't beautiful, not in the classic
sense of the word.  She was short and thin, only a step away from
tiny, yet she didn't give any impression of fragility.  Her face
was fresh and open beneath her make-up, the porcelain face of an
elfin princess, straight from the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien.
     Then again, to the best of Sam Beckett's knowledge, no Tolkien
elf had ever worn her hair like this, or dressed so... colorfully. 
The woman's hair seemed naturally blond, but she had streaked it
with platinum, then moussed and sprayed it until it nearly stood on
end behind the bright blue scarf she had twisted and wrapped around
her head.  She was wearing patterned purple leggings and a long
blue sweater with sequins in a starburst pattern around the yoke. 
Matching blue leg warmers were crumpled around her ankles.
     She was cute, maybe even pretty, but not beautiful.  What she
was, was sharp, as if the world were a photograph, and she was
somewhat more in focus than anything around her.  It was her eyes,
Sam thought, that caught a man's attention, and made her seem a
part of some other world, a mythical place where dragons battled
dwarves and magic rings held the fate of the land.  They were a
bright sapphire blue, ringed with full lashes that needed no
adornment.  They had a life of their own, a flash of light despite
the grey sky.
     He liked her instinctively.
     His second thought was: If I don't keep my eyes on the road,
I'm going to end up killing both of us.
     With some difficulty, he forced himself to look away from her.
     He was on an expressway, driving through what looked like a
major city.  The skyline was dominated by tall, bright buildings,
set against an expanse of blue-grey water to the left.  A looming
sign overhead advertised an upcoming exit for O'Hare International
Airport.  On the radio, Madonna was asking if he could hear her
heart beat, for the very first time.
     Chicago, then, and probably the eighties, unless this is an
oldies station; her clothes suggest that it isn't.  But as who? 
And, why?  And, while we're at it, where am I going?
     But there was no way to ask those questions without raising
the woman's suspicions -- and she didn't look like she was in any
kind of mood for suspicious questions.
     She'd been talking when he Leaped in, a loud, nervous
monologue punctuated by fluttering hand gestures.  He'd caught
something in the quick staccato speech about a gift she hoped
"he'd" like.  She opened a shopping bag that was on her lap, and
pulled out a colorful box with nervous aplomb.  The side panel
showed a picture of a small child happily playing with the paint
set that was apparently inside.  "Ta-da!"  She looked at Sam
desperately.  "Do you think he'll like it?"
     Sam had no idea who "he" was -- a child, obviously, judging
from the gift, but beyond that he was unwilling to guess -- but she
obviously needed to be reassured.  "Sure," he said.  "I'm sure he
will."
     She looked out the window, and hugged the box against her
chest.  "I suppose it's silly," she said.  "To have stage fright
about seeing my own son."
     Sam didn't say anything.  There were still too many possible
patterns here, and if he picked the wrong one, he could do serious
damage.  In the brief silence, the disc jockey let Madonna fade
out, then announced manically that Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper
were coming right up.  The station jingle ran, then a pizza
commercial came on.
     The woman wasn't really waiting for Sam's answer.  She bit her
lip.  "It's just that I'm always so nervous when Nate comes back
from his father's.  It's so hard to measure up."
     Divorced?  
     That would fit the facts.  Divorced, and about to welcome her
son home from a stay with her ex.  Sam had witnessed the strange,
competitive relationships that developed between divorced parents
before, and he hated to see it here.  It wasn't good for anyone
involved.  He patted her knee.  "I'm sure he isn't keeping score."
     She turned around, her eyes wide and sincere, child-like
despite the faint lines at the corners.  "He is, though.  They say
the kids always keep score.  I read it in the Trib last week."
     "And I'm sure they said something else the week before, and
they'll say something completely different next week."
     "Do you really think so?"
     "Yes."  If Sam remembered correctly, the conflicting reports
about the effects of parental divorce were still raging in his own
time; if he was right about the era he'd landed in, things were
only starting to heat up.
     She looked out the window, apparently satisfied -- at least
temporarily -- with the answer.  Sam noticed another driver glance
over at her quickly, look away, look back, then finally put his
foot on the gas and accelerate ahead of them.  
     Sam hoped she didn't harbor any dreams of being a secret
agent.
     She squinted her eyes at a sign.  "Don't you think you'd
better change lanes pretty soon, Sid?  You'll miss the airport."
     Not bad, Sam thought.  My name is Sid Something and I'm going
to the airport.  What will Al have left to tell me when he gets
here?
     "Oh, yeah," he said, and eased into the center lane.  The
signs gave him another three-quarters of a mile to the airport
exit, so he didn't need to rush all the way across.
     "It's just that when he's there, it's a vacation."  She was
sitting back in her seat, looking at the ceiling of the car.  Her
arms were crossed over her chest, her hands resting lightly on
opposite elbows.  "They go to air shows, and look at rocks out in
the desert, and go to the races... "  She shook her head.  "Then he
comes home, and it's just school and Temple and eating his
vegetables."
     "Well, vacations are great," Sam said.  "But coming home is
even better."
     He knew it was weak, even as he said it, and she didn't miss
it.  "Not to a five-year-old boy," she said.  "Especially when
Pop's not at home.  No offense, Sid."
     "None taken."
     She sighed deeply.  "Sometimes I wonder if I did it right."
     The child-like look had returned to her face, where it mixed
uneasily with an almost ancient expression of regret.  Sam was
reminded powerfully of Al Calavicci; it was an expression he had
seen on his friend's face many times.  Explanations were rarely
offered and never asked for, but Sam thought he had come to
understand that look anyway.  It was the look of someone who was
trying desperately to hold on to a sense of justice and good, but
had been betrayed too often and too deeply to really believe it. 
It was a look of lost faith and broken dreams.  This woman, whoever
she was and whatever mistakes she had made (or -- probably more to
the point in a Leap -- was about to make), needed someone to help
her trust the world again.  Sam smiled as reassuringly as he could,
and gently said, "Everybody does."
     She offered a perfunctory smile, more an automatic
acknowledgement of his concern than an acceptance of it.  It didn't
reach her eyes.  "I just hate these visits," she said.  "I hate
them."
     "I can tell."
     "Hannah Fox says I could cut down on them if I took him back
to court, and pushed that he isn't Nate's real father.  That he
just adopted him because we were married."
     Whoever Hannah Fox was, Sam thought she was right about the
legalities of it -- a natural mother could pretty much write her
own custody agreement against an adoptive father -- but dead wrong
on the morality.  There was no ethical justification for denying an
adoptive father any right that a natural father (or mother, for
that matter) would have.  The woman's face suggested that he didn't
need to tell her this.
     "I actually thought about it," she said.  "I'm ashamed to
admit it, but I did."
     "What made you decide not to?"
     "He is Nate's father.  In any way that really counts, he is. 
He was there when Nate was born.  He taught him to walk.  He read
to him.  He's the only Papa the kid has."  She gave Sam an
apologetic smile.  "I'm sorry, Sid."
     "Don't worry about it," Sam said.
     "And Nate's the only child he has."  She snorted.  "Although
I'll be damned if I know why.  Considering."
     Sam decided to leave the second half of her statement alone. 
"I'm sure that" -- there was a moment when he was sure he'd lost
the child's name somewhere, but it came back to him -- "that Nate
appreciates you not dragging him into court.  And that he doesn't
love his father more than he loves you."
     "It's just that he seems so much happier with -- "  She broke
off, and her voice suddenly rose in volume.  "Sid, the exit!"
     Sam realized, almost too late, that he was practically on top
of the airport exit.  He swung hard to the right, narrowly avoiding
the path of an oncoming car, and peeled onto the ramp.
                               ***
     It took them twenty minutes to find a parking space at the
airport ("It's the Sunday after Thanksgiving," the woman said.  "I
guess we should've expected it."), and by the time the did, the
plane they were waiting for was due to land at any second.  The
woman 
     (where the hell is Al to tell me her name?)
     nearly flew out of the car and ran toward the airport door. 
Sam locked the doors as fast as he could and ran inside after her.
     He caught a glimpse of himself in the crowded airport lobby,
as she rushed him past the glass wall of a gift shop.  He got the
impression of being tall and gangly, all arms and legs, then she
had pulled him down a corridor toward the gate.
     They got to the waiting area just as the door to the boarding
ramp opened.
     "Oh, thank God," she said.  "I was afraid he'd be waiting here
alone."  She put a hand on Sam's arm.  "I'm sorry, Sid.  I didn't
mean to drag you through like that."
     "It's okay," Sam told her.  She had apologized to him three
times in the half-hour he'd been with her, never a good sign.  She
seemed unsure of herself in this relationship, too ready to assume
she had done something wrong.  Sam wondered what was behind it, and
guessed that he would find out before the Leap was over.
     Then she smiled prettily, and ran her finger down his cheek. 
"You're a good man, Sidney," she said.  "Marrying you is the
smartest thing I've ever done."  She turned toward the gate without
saying anything more.
     Sam looked around the gate area for someplace to sit down.  It
didn't look very hopeful; if it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving,
it was hardly surprising.  That was the day that every student in
the country wound up stranded in one airport or another.
     Mine was Indianapolis, then Logan.
     The woman remained on her feet, watching the open door
anxiously as passengers started filing out.
     Sam spotted one of the few remaining chairs along the wall,
and waited for another Door to open.  Until Al came and told him
who, exactly, "Sid" was, and who his wife and stepson were,
everything he could learn would be guesswork.  Intellectually, he
knew that it could be hours before the Project found him in time,
but he always felt that he'd been abandoned until he heard the
Observer's voice, that while he'd been lost in time, someone back
there had pulled the plug, so no matter how early they made
contact, he always felt like they were late.
     They know where you are.
     Sam shook his head.  The thought had come from nowhere, and he
sent it back there easily.  If the Project staff knew where he was,
Al would already be here, filling him in.  They wouldn't leave him
hanging any longer than they needed to.  Al would undoubtedly come
soon; he was, after all, in a large city in a time when records
were computerized enough for easy access.  The only delay he could
foresee was getting an estimate from Ziggy, the hybrid computer
that ran the Project, about what he was here to do.
     In the meantime, he decided to do what he could to find out
what was going on around him.  He checked his pockets for a wallet,
found one, and opened it to the driver's license.  His name was
Sidney Weiss, he was six-one and weighed one-sixty (soaking wet, if
Sam could judge by the way his clothes hung on him), he had brown
hair and eyes, and he had been born on May 9, 1943.  His home
address was in a town called Northbrook, Illinois.
     He flipped through the rest of the wallet.  There was a
faculty I.D. from Beth Israel Elementary School -- Jewish, then
(probably, anyway -- he supposed there might be some non-Jews who
worked there, but the woman had mentioned something about Temple,
and Sid's name sounded Jewish), and either a teacher or an
administrator.  Beside that was a wedding picture of Sidney Weiss
and the woman.  It had apparently been a somewhat informal affair. 
Her dress was knee-length, and her veil was only a puff of lace
clipped into her hair.  Sidney Weiss, who was indeed as gangly as
Sam's brief impression had led him to believe, wore a black tuxedo.

He looked friendly, in an offbeat sort of way, the kind of man who
would tell jokes to talk a suicide off a high ledge, and wind up
with a stand-up partner.  There were no other members of the
wedding party in the picture.  A date was embossed in gold at the
bottom: October 15, 1983.  Sam didn't know exactly how long ago
that had been, but he suspected it was somewhere within a year or
two.  The woman hadn't changed much.  He was starting to pull the
picture out, to see if, by any miracle, there were names on the
back, when a smile -- a genuine one this time -- lit up the woman's
face.  "There he is!"
     A small boy, perhaps five or six years old, holding an adult's
Navy cap on his head with one hand, was running down the ramp to
his mother.  Sam had a moment's fear that he was young enough to
see him as he really was, but the boy's eyes slid over him without
a pause for doubt.  The child shouldn't have looked anything like
the woman; while she was an icy Germanic blond, the boy -- Nate,
she'd called him -- was a Mediterranean brunette, with dark,
darting eyes and tan skin.  But there was a resemblance,
nonetheless, in the same quality Sam had first noticed in the woman
when he Leaped in.  The boy was also sharp, in focus somehow, and
there was no mistaking that he was her son.  He ran to her and
threw his arms around her neck.  "Mama-leh!"
     She held him tight to her and kissed his forehead, her anxiety
draining from her in a moment's joy.
     Sam smiled.  Whatever was lacking in this family, it wasn't
love, and that meant that there was hope to fix it.
     If Al will just show up to tell me what the problem is.
     He shook his head.  There was time for all of that, and he
didn't want to let his impatience get to him.  There was nothing
especially dangerous going on here, anyway.
     He started to return Sid's wallet to his pocket, but it caught
on the edge.  He was looking down to straighten it when he heard Al
say, "Hey, Ruthie.  How are you?"
     He'd almost answered when his mind registered that Al had been
speaking to the woman.
     Al appeared to Sam as a neurological hologram, and except for
animals, very young children, the mentally unstable, and Sam, no
one could see him.  Yet this voice had directly addressed the woman
kneeling beside her son, and she had looked up immediately with a
pleased smile, and said, "Albert!  I didn't know you were coming
back with him."
     "I had a few days leave.  I hope you don't mind."
     "No, no.  It's good to see you.  Where's -- ?"  She searched
for a name, then shrugged in an embarrassed way when she couldn't
find it.  The nervous, insecure woman from the car seemed to have
disappeared completely.  Sam wondered uneasily when she would re-
surface.
     "Sharon," the very visible Al filled in.  "She divorced me."
     "What is this, four now?  I swear, Al, if you collect one more
ex-wife, I'm going to start holding conventions."
     "Don't even joke about that, Ruthie."
     (My fourth wife -- no, I'm sorry, my third wife -- Ruthie, was
Jewish)
     Sam felt his back stiffen.
     "It is a joke, Albert.  It was when you married her."
     (It was a word that Ruthie used to use -- she never used it
about me, though... )
     "Not true," Al insisted.  "I was dead serious when I married
her."
     "Sharon got Chester," Nate said.  "And I can't even go visit
him, 'cause he moved to Arizona with her."
     "I'm going to get him back," Al said.
     "Who's Chester?"
     "Pop's dog."
     "Sounds like he's Sharon's dog, now."
     (A Massage-O-Matic... I remember one time when Ruthie and I
were in Cleveland, we had one of things running for nine hours
straight... )
     "But he was my dog when I went down there, and now I can't see
him," Nate said.
     Ruthie smiled gently.  "Well, we'll just have to get you a dog
of your own."
     "It won't be the same," Al said.  "Chester was family."
     (I never realized how much family meant to me until after
Ruthie was gone... )
     Sam noticed that he hadn't been breathing and forced himself
to start again.
     Ruthie.
     Al's first wife, Beth, had been his true love, the Juliet in
his life.  He had lost her to Vietnam, where he'd been held as a
prisoner of war for six years.  She'd thought he was dead and re-
married.  Sam had had a chance to stop it from happening once, when
he'd Leaped into someone near her, but something had stopped him,
some instinct.  He'd known then and he knew now that if he had
simply said, "Beth, your husband is alive" it would have been
enough.  She wouldn't have believed him, not outright, but the seed
would have been planted, and Al would have found her waiting when
he came home.  It would have been against the rules he had set up
for the Project, of course, but he had thrown out the rulebook
before and since.  He'd tried to tell himself that it was better
for Beth in the long run, but he had disliked the man she was going
to marry, and thought she would have been happier waiting for Al. 
He'd even tried to shift the blame to Fate, much as Beth herself
probably had later.  But in the end, it was only that ill-formed
instinct, a sort of idiot sixth sense, that had kept him from doing
what should have been the most natural and most loyal thing he
could have done.  He had never completely forgiven himself for it,
and he had a feeling that Al had not forgiven him either, although
they never spoke of it, or maybe because they had never spoken of
it.  Beth's name was not mentioned, except under extreme duress.
     Ruthie, on the other hand, was a constant.  Al had regaled Sam
with stories about her -- their honeymoon to Niagara Falls, her
great-tasting gefilte fish (an oxymoron, in Sam's opinion), how she
had threatened to divorce him for singing "Volare" in his sleep (Al
had said this with a smile, apparently forgetting the fact that she
really had divorced him for some real reason)... Al didn't have
many nice things to say about his ex-wives, but there was almost
always an affectionate smile on his face when Ruthie's name came
up.
     None of Al's Ruthie stories had included Nate, yet there he
was, as clearly Al's as he was Ruthie's.   Adopted or no, there was
no mistaking his parentage.  Oddly enough, he actually looked more
like Al than Ruthie -- curly brown hair, deepset dark eyes, tan
skin -- but the resemblance was most prominent in other ways.  Nate
punctuated his speech with huge hand-gestures, held his head just
like Al did when he wasn't talking, and showed his excitement
without any reservations whatsoever.
     "How are you holding up, Sid?" Al asked over Ruthie's
shoulder.
     Sam looked at him, startled out of his thoughts by the
question.  "Um, okay, I guess."
     Ruthie smiled.  "Sid's not really with us today.  He almost
missed the airport."
     Al laughed.  "How can you miss O'Hare?"
     "I guess I am a little out of it," Sam managed.  "Would you
mind driving home, Ruthie?"
     "Sure, no problem."
     Nate giggled.  "It'll get us there faster, anyway.  'Less we
get a ticket."
     Al gave her a stern look.  "You've been getting tickets?  How
many times do I have to tell you?  Get a fuzzbuster."
     "Maybe," Ruthie said, "I should get someone else to teach me
to drive.  Someone who's used to being on the ground."
     "What's the fun in that?"  Al laughed.  "It's good to see you,
Ru.  It really is."
     Sam saw a flicker of anxiety in Ruthie's face, then she
smiled, and said, "You, too.  It's been a long time."
     "Too long for mishpocheh," Al said.  He held up his hand, and
offered his pinky finger.
     She linked her pinky around his, then seemed to remember that
she was no longer married to him.  She let go of his hand and
backed away a few steps.  "Let's go home," she said, taking Nate's
carry-on bag from him.
     "I have a better idea," Al announced.  "I'm taking us all out
to dinner."
     There was no opportunity to argue.  Al swung his duffel over
his shoulder and started away from the gate.  Ruthie ran to catch
up with him, and Nate grabbed their hands, looking supremely happy.

None of them took any notice of Sam, who they thought of as Sidney
Weiss, who was, apparently, only Ruthie's current husband.  Sam
didn't meditate long on his exclusion.  He was far more concerned
with the simple fact of the child running along ahead of him,
beaming up at his parents.