Newsgroups: alt.tv.quantum-leap.creative From: khaight@netcom.com (Kyle Haight) Subject: STORY: Circles (QL/Equalizer crossover) 1/2 Message-Id: Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 04:31:01 GMT Dedicated to the late Robert Lansing (1929-1994), a fine actor, may he be the recipient of much good karma. (c) 1995 Anne Huff (aka Kukulcan) all rights reserved. Please feel free to distribute as long as original source and author are credited. Please also include this header. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CIRCLES This story takes place between the Quantum Leap episodes "Blood Moon" and "Return: Evil Leaper II", and within an Equalizer universe that is independent. New York City, 24 Feb 1990, 9:41pm: Control let out a deep breath, gently kneeling down on the soft fleece rug in front of the fire that blazed to fill the room with unearthly orange and gold light. The house was dark and quiet except for the steady patter of rain outside, the sound of it very gently overcome by the crackle and snap of the fire. He was naked, the heat on his body delicious and soothing. This ritual was old to him, ancient in some corner of his being, and yet it renewed him each time, because it always drew upon the fresh and wild earnestness of his sexuality. He blocked out the day's tiresome events, blocked out the anguish of his relationship with Robert, blocked out -- yet again -- the memory of a single night almost five months ago; a night that had torn his friendship with Robert into jagged fragments and which threatened to tear his very soul into dust. He focused on the rain outside, the fire in front of him, the soft comfort of the sheepskin fur under his legs and the aching desire of his own body. His cock ached, his belly ached...all with some leaden intensity that made him tremble. Each time it was so, and each time it was a wholly new heaven, a place of peace/violence, of hate/love, of gentleman/satyr. It surrendered to the soft wonder of his own touch on himself, the quiet amazement at how his body responded to the strokes and caresses of his own hands. And within the depths of his surrender, all repressed longings came to swell up and engulf him, until it was Robert himself who engaged the fantasy and brought the orgasm close and bright... His reality shifted, bringing his awareness into the sharp focus of rage and agony as the orgasm was suddenly deprived him and he was thrust into a body that was not his own, into a room that stared back at him with the utilitarian, metal elegance that marked his mind somewhere; the future. He gasped, let down from the primal fury of the sexual release denied him, and put his hands down on cool metal; a bed of some kind; a platform raised from the floor and which sported a mirror on the center half of its surface. He was sitting on it, staring down at the floor. And when he raised his eyes up to look at the place he was in, he recognized it. //The facility at Stallions Gate,// he thought. //Project Quantum Leap.// For Control had been one of a few to be in a position to fund such a project. Although he had not been approached by the Project Team (because of his secretive and clandestine profession as World Control, clandestine enough that even the CIA had declined to inform the Project of the Company's existence), he had gotten wind of it. Curious, he had visited Dr. Beckett and realized in short order that the man was not only not a crackpot, but was probably a pioneer of the kind humankind had never seen and might never see again for many millennia to come. He had liked the man easily and completely, Beckett's charm and sincerity at once childlike and innocent, but with such a wisdom that Control found himself in awe of the man. Beckett's close friend and Project Administrative Manager, Admiral Albert Calavicci, was a singularly unlikely-seeming person for the intellectual and puritan Beckett to develop a close friendship with. One bawdy, the other modest; one flashy and extroverted, the other conservative and deeply internalized. It reminded him in some ways of his own relationship with McCall...except that it had always been McCall who was the bawdier of the two of them, and Control who tended to avoid intimacies. He did not know precisely what had happened. But he knew what Project Quantum Leap was designed to accomplish, and he knew what he was experiencing now as he looked down at his hands and realized they were not his own. The Project had been...would be...successful. The Leaping process was not altogether instantaneous; it was not a sort of blending from one person into another. There was a transitional period, a sort of comfortable, slightly unsteady limbo in which Sam was aware, distantly, that everything was OK. He was never sure how else to phrase it...even though he never had any real knowledge of the limbo at all except when he was actually there. Whatever power guided this journey of his, it was somehow always communicated to him that everything was OK, and for those moments he was at peace with it. And then the new body formed around him, securing him gently, and the peace was gone, replaced by disorientation and doubt and worry as he returned to some physical place, in some physical time. And this one, while not violent or painful, carried a flame and an urgency all its own. It was somehow familiar and yet not. He gasped, struck by it he became slave to the demand being made on him, flooding his senses with a single overpowering signal: pleasure! He'd Leapt in at the moment Control had left, only a few precious heartbeats away from a delightful, sensuous, utterly wonderful orgasm. Tense and shivering, he was too close to it, too overcome by the feeling to do anything but submit to it. His body responded helplessly to the fire of the soul that he now shared a resonance with, and his hands instinctively completed the ritual that someone before him had started. He came in a rush, a fiery, anguished, release of warm wetness over his hands and belly and a cry of unknowing shame from his throat. The shame was not his own; neither was the anguish, nor the tears on his face as the release let him go, drifting gently down to the ground, in the house, on the floor and white rug. He could only wonder: //What could happen to a man that the resonance I feel with him is this powerful? I've sometimes shared an empathy with the people I Leap into, but this strongly..?// He let the tears fall, let the sobs choke him as he cried for a man that he seemed to know was incapable of it. Project Quantum Leap, Stallions Gate, New Mexico, 11 Jul 1998: The minutes had gone by, perhaps five or ten to his reckoning, and Control had gotten up to explore the room he was in; the Waiting Room. It had been modified, he saw, to encompass a suite of two other rooms in order to create living quarters. It was easy to get used to the face that stared back at him in the mirrored table. It didn't seem so bizarre, on the whole, since he'd always had so much trouble associating his own features with the man he was inside that someone else's face was scarcely more difficult to adapt to. Control had ignored the mirrored table after only a minute or two of studying the face of the physicist and doctor he knew. The features were only a little older than the ones he remembered, which reassured him he was not too far into the future. His mind, working on the problem unceasingly, kept reminding him that being placed in someone else's body should make him feel like he was in someone else's body, but nothing about it seemed awkward or unfamiliar. Yet there were differences. Beckett's body was lithe like his own, but a little smoother, a little easier in moving. It was, after all, a younger body. The restless urge of his sexual arousal was not easy leaving him. It kept him strung taut even as his mind struggled to analyze his presence in the Project facility. His reptile brain kept trying to get angry at the frustration of it, trying to rage against a nonexistent enemy for taking away the vital and necessary release of orgasm. He controlled it with almost subconscious effort, clearing his mind for more cerebral concentrations. Dr. Verbina Beeks, the Project's chief psychiatrist and general sounding wall, put her hand to the dark plate beside the Waiting Room door. The computer scanned her handprint, then confirmed her authorization to enter with a soft tone and a green bar of light on the panel. The door opened quietly on hydraulics. The new person in Sam's body turned to face her quickly, with caution and intense deliberateness in his body language and in his brown, Dr. Sam Beckett eyes. Male, she decided, having learned to recognize gender very rapidly. The differences were subtle; posture, distribution of weight, angle of the hips, shoulders...something, too, about the eyes. They stared at each other for a few seconds, two strangers trying to see into the mind of the other. The look the man was giving her was penetrating and focused; very different from the confusion, fear and amazement that she usually saw when she first met new Leapees. He was very calm, even seeming to be mildly disinterested in the strangeness of his surroundings. That was not a reaction she had ever seen from any of the dozens of people that came through this room. She had caught him in the mid-motion of looking at his own hands. That was not so unusual. Leapees usually exhibited one of two reactions to their new body; indifference or fascination. She watched him react to her unorthodox attire, which was a brightly colored caftan in mind-numbing patterns that swirled and danced. Control stared at her, trying to identify her. He did not recall meeting this woman during his association with the Project. She was beautiful, her age ambiguous, and she looked remarkably at home in a lab coat holding a clipboard. "My name's Verbina Beeks," the woman said warmly, coming toward him. He shook her hand curiously, his mind clicking. //The Project psychiatrist,// Control remembered. //Al mentioned her once. She was hired as the facility neared completion; after I had finished my direct association with the Project.// "What's your name?" she asked him. The tone was almost neutral, with a hint of genuine and compassionate interest. Control smiled at her, wondering which name he should give. "John," he said finally. "John Smith." His tone of voice, combined with the banality of the name itself, caused Beeks to quirk one eyebrow at him. She didn't believe for a second that he was telling the truth, and he wasn't, to be technical about it. But the reasons for the deception were much more convoluted than she knew. "I know all of this must be very unexpected, and I'm here to help you adjust to this new situation," she said. Control gave her a wry look. "Unexpected as hell, yes," he agreed. "But not as strange to me as you might think. I know you don't believe that my name really is John Smith, but if you were to check my driver's license you'd find that it is, in fact, my legal name." "Why do you say this is not as strange as I might think?" she asked. "What do you think I expect?" Control let out a soft groan. Psychologists were all the same, really. Okay. Level with her. "I am employed by the United States government," Control said. "I am from the year 1990, and in the late 1980's I helped fund a government operation called Project Starbright. My codename is Control, and I provided funds that will help -- that helped -- the Project become Project Quantum Leap, and to eventually come online. I oversaw the construction of the Stallions Gate facility we are presently in, and I am responsible for the fact that the main terminal room is a bitch of a place to get into even when Ziggy is in a good mood. To tell you the truth, I'm glad to see that this damned black hole of a project actually works. I hated the idea of throwing billions of dollars down the drain on yet another far-fetched idea." Beeks looked at him like he'd just said Lyndon LaRouche was a double agent for Boris Yeltsin and that Willie Horton was his underworld contact. She would normally have assumed he was delusional, or simply lying, except that he knew too much about the Project. But she didn't know him. The two names he had given were not familiar to her. "Ziggy, please tell Al that I need him in the Waiting Room right away." "Admiral Calavicci is presently engaged in a grep search concerning back issues of Playboy magazine," Ziggy said. "He will be quite peeved." "Just do it, Ziggy." "All right." Control chuckled. "Still the same old Ziggy. Since she's online, I could save you the trouble of wondering if I'm crazy. Do you have a terminal or something I could enter a character code into?" "You should be able to do that through the Admiral's handlink," Beeks said. "We don't have a terminal in here, and I can't allow you to leave the Waiting Room. He should be here soon." Control nodded. "You said you are employed by the US government," Beeks said after a moment, still taken aback by the conversation. "Which agency?" Control sighed. "It's one you would not have heard of, and I am not presently at liberty to elaborate on its nature. I am, however, one of the senior officers, and my involvement with this project caused me to become well acquainted with Dr. Beckett and Admiral Calavicci, as you will learn when he gets here." With this, Control looked down at himself in the mirrored table. Beeks noted distantly that the image did not shock him, as it did most people, even after repeated looks. It was after about five minutes that the Waiting Room door finally opened, to admit a casually (if loudly) dressed Al Calavicci. The man was wearing a striking black shirt with large, white letters splattered over it at random, with white suspenders holding up a pair of neatly matched, black pants. He wore no jacket, but the tie was a rich, Christmas red, with a single gold tie tack on it in the shape of the letter "A". "This better be good," Al said. "I just found a JPEG of Miss July, nineteen eighty-two." He made an appreciative noise and put a hand to his chest. "Oh, God, she was great." Control laughed quietly. "You haven't changed." Al looked at him penetratingly. "Have we met?" He glanced at Beeks. "Who've we got here?" "I never heard of him," Beeks said with a shrug. "Says he was involved with the Project under the codename 'Control.'" "Control!" Al blurted, staring at him. "No way!" "I can prove it of course," Control said. "That's one of the reasons Dr. Beeks wanted you here. Ziggy can verify my access code, if I can just type it in. You understand I didn't want to say it aloud through the voice interface." Al nodded, working on the handlink, which blooped and wheezed. "Here," he said, showing Control which keys to use. "Ah. Thank you." He glanced up to address the ceiling. "Ziggy," Control said. "I am World Control. My access code is incoming through your link channel. Please verify." There was a very short, but noticeable, pause. "That code is confirmed," Ziggy said. "World Control authorization acknowledged. I'm disappointed in you, Control. We had expected to receive permission to expand the facility grounds this year and your organization has been ignoring us. I have made an analysis and the danger presented poses only a three point eight two nine percent chance of causing a structural cave in over the next two centuries." "Don't make your case to me," Control said. "Take it up with my present-time self if you have to." "Intellect 404 won't allow me access," Ziggy said peevishly. "Not much I can do about that at this point," Control said. "Do me a favor and don't talk unless I tell you to." Ziggy was petulantly silent. "We should've had you give a seminar in talking to Ziggy," Beeks muttered. "You really don't know him?" Al said. "We never met before now," Control said. "I left before she was assigned. I recall seeing her name on the hire list." "Oh, well, no wonder," Al said. "I see you got Ziggy working the way you wanted." "I have never functioned in any manner other than the one programmed," came Ziggy's feminine, slightly piqued voice from the ceiling. Al made a gruff noise. "Tell that to Gooshie, you big, quantum bit bucket," Al groused. "At least with you I don't have to go through the routine," he said to Control. "The routine?" Control repeated. "Yeah, you know," Al said, gesturing with his cigar. "I'm not God, I'm not the Devil, I'm not a space alien; I'm just an ordinary guy who helped build a project on time travel. Can you imagine what people think when they get bounced in here?" "It's generally very stressful for everyone involved," Beeks injected, looking at Control sternly. "Even though you are in a position to understand and accept where you are and who we are, the displacement was still abrupt and you are being forced to cope with the aura of Dr. Beckett's body, as well as the awareness that you are now not in total control of the life you left in 1990." "I'm a little confused by some of this," Control said. "I had understood that Project Quantum Leap was meant to allow Sam to travel through time. But what it looks like is that he travels into other people's lives and trades bodies with them. I assume this is his body." "Yeah," Al said. "Originally we were shooting to have Sam travel in his body without the transposition; that was totally unexpected. On Sam's end, everyone sees you, including Sam when he looks in the mirror. On this end, everybody sees Sam's body. It turns out that Sam is Leaping only within the time frame of his own life. That much we counted on. But we can't control it as we'd planned to. We never know where he'll Leap next, or what he'll have to do there." "'Have to do'?" Control said. "We think there's a living, sentient force controlling Dr. Beckett's Leaps," Beeks said quietly. "There's a rhyme and a reason to it, a kind of order and elegance. He Leaps into someone's life in order to fix something that went wrong in the original history, maybe save someone's life...or let someone die. Maybe fix a relationship, heal a family. We never know beforehand." Al nodded. "Ziggy's been patched up to help us dig into history," Al said, "finding out all we can about the newest place Sam Leaps into. She helps us figure out what Sam's supposed to do by analyzing the situations and putting probabilities on everything. But sometimes the real reason for Sam's Leap is something Ziggy didn't come up with, something that Sam just knows by instinct. We've been at it for so long, it's become more than just a second-nature to him..." "How long has the Project been operating?" Control asked. "What year is it now?" "It's 1998," Al said. "We've been up for five years." "I came in from 1990," Control said thoughtfully, almost to himself. "The Project won't take off for another three years yet." He looked up, his expression reminding Al of a thousand things he had thought forgotten, things from the early days of the Project, when Control was more directly involved and Al had been close enough to him to begin seeing the deeper facets of Control's soul. "What have you got on file about my history?" Al punched away at the handlink, whacked it a few times, and then stared at it. "Nothing," he said finally. "You're still alive in 1998 and the best I can do is get stuff about what you did under your alias; John Smith. It isn't a lot to go on." "And certainly not enough to allow Sam to pass himself off as me for any length of time," Control said warningly. "It's the weekend, so he probably won't have to go into the office, but he'll probably run into people that know me well, like McCall and Doris, and if they get suspicious that something's wrong, it could get hairy really fast." "I'll tell him that," Al said. "He's pretty good at handling that sort of thing. I think that maybe the people not only see the body of the person Sam Leaps into, but some of the mannerisms, too, the voice and stuff. I gotta go find him, give him some direction to go in. Uh, what date am I looking at?" "Um..February twenty-fourth...about nine-thirty at night," Control said, smiling as he considered the state in which Sam must have Leapt into his body. "Okay, great." Al looked at him for a moment. "You okay? You look kinda strung out." Control smiled again, rubbing at his face tiredly. He glanced at Beeks. "I'm okay. Just a little edgy, I guess. By the way, if I'm in someone else's body, why does it feel natural? I'd expect it to be awkward since the proportions have all changed." "Muscle memory," Beeks said. "It's still Dr. Beckett's brain, in a physical sense. A lot of motor skills are not conscious, not all the time. When you try thinking too hard about your coordination, it'll go to hell." "Great," Control smiled tiredly, looking down at another man's hands again. New York City, 24 Feb 1990, 9:59pm: "Sam, you are never gonna guess who's sitting in the Waiting Room -- " Al broke off as he got a good look at Sam, who was sitting on the floor against a sofa in what was presumably Control's house. The fire flickered golden across the room, casting dusky shadows. Sam was shirtless, a pair of black sweatpants on the bottom half of him, and he was crying. Sam rubbed at his eyes and swallowed to clear his throat. "Yeah, what is it, Al?" he asked quietly. He hadn't looked for a mirror; hadn't really looked at his new body at all. He'd found the clothes and returned to the living room for the warmth and comfort of the fire. The pain of his body was deep and close to the surface, and he had no choice but to acknowledge it. He grieved for the man who endured this agony, this deep guilt and regret. He felt like he might never find the end of the abyss of it. "Sam, what happened? Are you okay?" Al knelt down next to him, wishing he could put a reassuring hand on his friend's shoulder. "He's...in so much pain," Sam breathed, his chest trying to choke the words away. "So much grief, I...Leaped in while he was...masturbating. It was fine for a while...it felt good, but the release was agony, like a dam bursting; a flood of sadness and shame. I think it's...feelings he couldn't express somehow, and I had to do it for him..." Al went silent, thinking about the man he had spoken to just moments ago in the Waiting Room. The contrast seemed too extreme to believe, but Sam was never wrong about things like that; he was too sensitive and too compassionate. "The resonance is really strong. I have this...memory...of all the stuff he's been through," Sam went on. "It's incredible...the sheer depth of it, like I could drown in his grief and never come out of it..." "Do you know who you've Leapt into?" Al asked him gently. "No, I...didn't look to see..." "It's Control. The guy who helped fund the Project back in 1987," Al said. Sam wiped more tears away from his cheek. "Control?" he said, taking a moment to comprehend this. He got up suddenly, heading for the back bedroom where he knew there was a bathroom. Al changed coordinates to follow him, vanishing and reappearing in the bedroom as Sam arrived to turn on the bathroom light, and see himself -- see Control -- reflected in the mirror over the sink. "Oh, my God," Sam whispered. "He recognized where he was," Al said. "He took it upon himself to supervise some of the security design features for the facility when we started the Project. He remembers you and me and Gooshie and everybody else who was on the starting team. He's surprised the Project actually worked." Sam was hearing this, but continued to stare at himself in the mirror, at the fierce, blue eyes that stared back at him and the lithe, handsome musculature of the man's body. It surprised him a little; Control had to be in his late fifties at least, possibly even early sixties. "Why am I here?" Sam asked quietly. "Uh, we don't know yet. Ziggy's working on it. Sam, Control said you have to be careful; you're the highest ranking officer in a clandestine government agency. You have some close friends who know you really well. It's impossible for you to try to do Control's job, so you don't go to the office and you don't call people; you sit tight over the weekend and try to figure out what you're doing here." "Can I get away with that?" Sam wondered. "If Control's so powerful, aren't people going to wonder if I hide for a few days?" "Control tells me that that isn't so unusual for him to do; nobody will wonder. And he also says that there's nothing up in the air at his job right now, and for you to never answer the phone. There's an answering machine and he says to use that to screen everyone who calls and only talk to people you can deal with." Sam sighed. "Okay. Guess I have to start somewhere. I probably don't have to do anything, really. Usually the problems come to me." That was true enough. Sam went back into the bedroom, then out into the living room, where the fire still sparkled. He found the answering machine next to the phone on a table between the living room and the dining room, nestled against the wall. He studied it for a moment before Al stuck his hand through the phone with a gesture. "It's already on. You press that button there to set the answering feature," Al said. "And make sure there's a tape in it." "A tape," Sam mumbled. No one used tapes anymore. Clunky and awkward. "How do you know how to work it?" he asked, doing as Al had instructed. The machine beeped, and a red light came on. "Used to have one just like it," Al replied smugly. He looked down at the answering machine. "You're all set." Sam realized he was extremely tired, and shuffled slowly back over to the fleece rug in front of the fireplace. "Do you have any information on some of the people I'm likely to run into?" he asked, yawning hugely and sitting down on the floor against the sofa. Al used the handlink to access the data Control had supplied to Ziggy. "A man named Robert McCall is your best friend. He and Control have been in the business together almost all their adult lives. McCall's British, born in 1933 to a British military officer for a father and an American nightclub dancer mother. He's a naturalized citizen of the US and he's lived in Manhattan for thirty-one years. He went rogue from government intelligence service in 1985 and has spent the time since then helping ordinary people on the street. He uses a nickname he got while working for the government; calls himself 'The Equalizer', and he's reputed to be _the_ person to avoid earning as an enemy. He lives alone in a posh apartment in TriBeCa. Control describes him as 'fiercely altruistic and honorable, with a streak of elitism that makes him come off a lot more naive than he really is.' They have an uneasy truce; Control doesn't try to assassinate him and McCall doesn't compromise the security of the agency he used to work for." "These guys are best friends?" Sam said, looking up at Al. "I remember when Control used to talk about him," Al mused, letting the handlink fall to his side. "You have to remember how hard it is to trust someone in this line of work. Control can always trust McCall. That's one of the main bonds of their friendship. And they just _like_ each other, Sam. They meshed. Working side by side for so many years and putting their lives in each other's hands creates a bond unlike any other." "Who else?" Sam asked. Al fiddled with the handlink. "Mickey Kostmayer, an independent mercenary on retainer for Control's agency. He used to be a Navy SEAL, and McCall first found him serving hard time in Leavenworth for killing his partner. Turns out Kostmayer was innocent, and McCall got him released. The two of them have a close friendship, closer than Kostmayer's relationship with Control. But Control's his boss, and they've worked together for about ten years now. He lives in a brownstone in TriBeCa. "Doris Feldman, Control's next door neighbor. She's seventy-four and, Control says, 'sharper than a samurai sword.' They've been neighbors for almost twenty years, and Control confides in her on a variety of subjects. They have a custom of sitting outside on Control's porch, drinking coffee until the wee hours when the mood seems to strike. Fortunately for you, the weather's too nasty outside for that. Oh, a bit of trivia Control gave me about his relationship with Doris; she's always pruning his bushes and he's always shooing her away." Al giggled. "She makes fun of him being a 'sourpuss' and he just tolerates it because he likes her so much." "Is there...anything going on between them?" Sam wondered. "Nah, Control says it's strictly platonic. He says she acts like his mother half the time and his fairy godmother the other half." Sam laughed a little. Doris sounded very likable. "Does Control have any family? A wife or girlfriend?" "He says his wife and son were killed a long time ago, and he doesn't have any living relatives except a goddaughter named Evette. She's living in Brazil right now, so Control doesn't expect you to meet her." "No current love interest?" Sam asked. "You know, when I asked him that he got this really weird look, and then he said no..." "What kind of a weird look?" "You know...I'm not sure," Al said quietly. "It was sort of like the kind of look I think I'd get if somebody asked me what had happened to Beth..." //Maybe he loved someone and she was killed or went away,// Sam thought. //Maybe that's why he's hurting so much.// "I think I'd better go get some sleep," Sam said, getting up to stretch the kinks out of his back. "I'll think better in the morning after I've settled in a little." "Good idea, Sam. I'll go see what else Control thinks you might need to know, and put our heads together about why you might be here." "Goodnight, Al." Project Quantum Leap, Stallions Gate, New Mexico, 11 Jul 1998: "Gooshie told me I'd find you out here," Al said, coming up to stand next to Control on the concrete balcony of the facility's fourth floor. Control was leaning on the wall, looking out over the desert expanse. The sun had set behind the mountains behind them, turning the opposite hills into molten gold. "How'd you get out of the Waiting Room?" "I told Ziggy that if she didn't let me out I'd chop the Project budget in half for the 1992-93 fiscal year. Must've blown a circuit or two getting her to think over the implications of that sort of history change." He smiled. "Plus I gave all the right security codes. I had a hand in the Project, you know." "Yeah, I remember," Al said with a grin. The Project was expensive, upwards of one hundred billion dollars already, with a current annual budget of 4.3 billion dollars. The original approved amount was forty-three billion, which the Senate Budget Committee was unwilling to approve before Control had stepped in to offer the financial backing of The Company. "I remember you practically running the place for eighteen months and getting on Sam's nerves." "Sam's a good man," Control said equably. "He's one of the few people I would trust in the position of virtually taking over my life." "How come you hardly ever talked about McCall, when he was your best friend?" Al asked. Control glanced at him sidelong, then decided he wasn't being attacked. "McCall was one of my most elite agents," Control said. "I was protecting him professionally and personally by giving out as little information as possible about him. At the time I met you, he had also gone rogue; a very dangerous and difficult situation for both of us. I was obligated to conceal the matter entirely, though didn't with you. I liked you and I felt I could trust you with what I did reveal." "You can trust me," Al said seriously. "And what do you mean you liked me? Don't you still?" Control smiled at him enigmatically. "I haven't seen you in nine years." Al rolled his eyes. "Don't start with the time traveling jokes," he implored. "I get confused enough as it is. We decided early on in the Project to allow our end and Sam's end of the Leap to run on synchronized realtime; if I could just jump in anytime during his Leap, we'd never be able to keep the stuff coordinated and all of us on the Project end would go nuts within a few days." "So, for example, while he's sleeping for eight hours, you spend eight hours on this end twiddling your thumbs." "More or less, yeah." "That sounds like it could make for some harrowing close calls," Control said thoughtfully. Al shrugged. "It always works out in the end." "So what's Sam doing now?" "Sleeping," Al said, amused by Control's mild surprise. "I told him what you told Ziggy about McCall, Kostmayer and Doris, and to sit tight and use the answering machine like you said." Control nodded. "Good." He sighed. "I wish there was some way I could talk to him directly...maybe coach him on what to say in certain situations..." Al blinked. "You know, there is a way. You could come into the Imaging Chamber with me. All you'd have to do is be touching me, and Sam'll be able to see and hear you like you're in the room with him. It used to be we had to make a complex neurological link, but Ziggy worked out a way to make the hologram field inclusive. That way now people just have to touch me to be included in the field. We could try it later, when he wakes up." "Excellent, I'd like that," Control said animatedly. "It would be a lot easier if I could be there when he talks to people. I know that I talk differently from him and there are people who would be suspicious of that, particularly McCall and Kostmayer." Al got a wry look on his face. "You know...Sam said that when he Leaped into your body, you were in the middle of jerking off." Control looked away, sheepish and amused. "Yeah...well, close to the end, really." He rubbed at his face. "I left right before orgasm; I didn't even get to come. Urm...that's a terrible thing to do to a man." Al laughed. "No wonder you were so strung out when I met you in the Waiting Room," Al said. "Yeah. Did he enjoy it, I hope?" Al hesitated. "I wanted to ask you about that, actually. When I went to check in on him, he was crying. He told me how he'd come almost right after Leaping in...and that the orgasm let loose a...flood of emotions. He said...pain, and grief and shame. They weren't his feelings. He thinks they were yours. There've been times before when Sam retained a sort of link with the people he Leaped into, an emotional resonance, he calls it. The one with you is real strong for some reason. I have to tell you, I've never seen him that upset. Whatever it was he tapped into in you, it really affected him." Control was staring at him with Sam Beckett's eyes, with the cold, penetrating eyes that Al remembered from years ago, when Control had been a daily, hot wildness in his life. Finally Control looked away. "I don't want to talk about it." "This might have something to do with why Sam Leaped into you," Al said gently. "If you don't help us Sam could do something that will make it unfixable, whatever it is. Ziggy can't come up with any theories because your life is so secretive. Sam can only go around blind for so long -- " Control turned away from him to start walking back toward the entrance of the facility. "I said I don't want to talk about it, Al," Control said, and went inside. Control's house, New York City, 25 Feb 1990, 11:44am: Sam was a little surprised to find out what time it was when he awoke. He was still a little dazed that his Leap so far had been so uneventful compared to other Leaps, where he seemed to spend every waking moment on the move, struggling to think, to do the right thing... But the house was quiet, the light outside pale gray because of the rain and cold. He sat up in the bed, letting himself savor the stillness and the calm. The bed was warm under him, the covers soft. The room itself was shadowed in shades of gray except for the digital clock on the nighttable, which had green numbers. The rain pattered gently against the bedroom window. He started slightly as the central heating came on with a low thump, and began to blow warm air into the room. He wondered how long he was going to be in Control's life, considering that nothing had happened so far. Control and Al were pretty good friends. Maybe the Leap had nothing to do with him at all. He wouldn't have even thought of that except for his precedent- setting visit into the rather candid life of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, in which they had ultimately learned that the real reason for the Leap was simply so that Al could benefit from Dr. Ruth's wisdom and advice. Sam got up, determined to take a shower and poke through yet another person's hygiene articles. With men it was worse; shaving what was basically his own face, while seeing someone else's, made for a very slow and careful shave. Having someone else's face to look at in the mirror, with his own personality behind the eyes, was an exercise in identity security. And that it was the face of someone he knew made it no less difficult. It led him into areas of thought he didn't care to go. With most Leaps, he could safely, even productively, speculate about the personal lives and worldly concerns of the people he was trying to help. But Control was something else again. The worldly concerns of this man were probably too vicious to imagine, and the man's personal life was beyond wondering. When he'd met Control eight years ago, he'd been impressed first by the man's intelligence and then by his commitment; it was one thing to promise an advance of five billion dollars, and something else again to actually deliver it. Even had there been no further money from Control's organization, that five billion would have been enough to get the Project operational if the US government hadn't decided to make an ultimatum: Show us that it works or we'll pull the plug. Control was a quiet, thoughtful man who did nothing without thorough consideration and planning. Even though much of the Project's pragmatic application was beyond Control's (and almost anyone's) education, he had shown a ready grasp of the theories and concepts and Sam respected him for his genuine, perhaps even wondering, interest in the Project. But behind all of that, always softly burning in the man's pale blue eyes was something less than admirable. The nature of the beast is always visible, and Sam had known, somewhere deep in his gut, that Control's interest in the Project held aggressive, even violent subtleties. He realized that Control viewed Project Quantum Leap as possessing a potential for almost unfathomable and hideous use as a weapon. He did not see that side often, and was consistently reassured that Control's other, perhaps equally strong, interest was one of pure and simple enchantment. A time traveling machine. Yet the beast was there, and though he had never seen Control express it, he was certain that the man was capable of personal viciousness he could only imagine, and that the other glimmer of sharpness he saw in the diamond eyes was one of sexuality. Sam shivered. Sadism, not only relished but cultivated in some respects. He had been prepared to discover that Control was an evil man. He was not ready to find out that he was human; that he suffered, that he experienced guilt and anguish and shame. He almost wished for something simple like hatred or malice. But he felt none. He had felt the agony locked up in Control's heart and soul. He'd known the slow tearing, the burning misery of an indefinable longing and regret. The trembling fear of shame and guilt so deep it had made him sick to his stomach. The sober, engulfing intensity of a calm, terrible desire to simply die. This was not the life, nor the spirit, of a cold and unfeeling man. It was fire elemental, the water of a thousand seas, the earth of the still mountain and the white rush of wind. He tried to relate this to Al sometime later. "It's unbearable to be so deeply connected to him," Sam said. "I keep wondering what else he knows. Skills and talents...the ability to murder, the knowledge to cause deliberate harm to someone else? Can my hands kill in ways that I can't comprehend? Do my muscles remember torture that I've never endured?" Another question burned, this one more terrifying than the others and also more unspeakable: //Does he know a sexuality, a pleasure, in violence and violation that I'll never understand? Murder? Torture? Rape?// Al heard the unasked questions; he knew Control's temper better than most. Being who he was, Al was easy to talk to about sex, and Control was open and willing to talk about himself. One night, a conversation had somehow become deadly serious, and Al had listened to Control try to explain the sweetness of killing, the eroticism of tasting blood. The subject had left him cold, but the telling of it was a rapture that stayed in his mind. Control's heat left the words burned into Al's memory. "You're not him," Al said. "You've got your own mind and your own will." "I know...I'm just...not used to Leaping into someone I've met. My brother and you...it was different. You'd both killed people, but you aren't murderers...you didn't enjoy it." "Where are you getting all this?" Al wanted to know. "You don't know that much about Control -- " "I knew it when I met him eight years ago, Al," Sam said softly. "I could see it in his eyes...the way he moved. He's a predator, and he takes all kinds of pleasure in the hunt and the killing." Al glanced over to the side suddenly, as if hearing someone talk to him, and then he sighed. "Yeah, just touch me." Control appeared suddenly, his hand on Al's shoulder. The man's eyes -- Sam's eyes -- were still and calm. But the soul behind the brown eyes, the set of the shoulders... "The world has to have predators," Control said, "or the forces of destruction would be too random. That's being philosophical. I prefer to just acknowledge to myself that I am a sadist and that I have...uncommon desires." Sam looked mortified and angry in the same instant. "Why didn't you tell me he was there?" Sam demanded of Al, who looked slightly uncomfortable. He fidgeted with the handlink. "He wanted to hear what you had to say about him," Al said. "He told me not to tell you." "Your honesty doesn't change my opinion of you," Control said. "On the contrary, I respect your situation." The brown eyes were fierce. "I didn't ask for this to happen." "I didn't either," Sam replied with unexpected venom, "so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't do you justice in imitating your life!" Al felt Control's hand tighten on his shoulder. "I don't ask anyone to bear the responsibility of what I do," Control said. "What about the people you victimize?" Sam asked angrily. "They're not responsible for the fact that I victimize them," Control replied. "Maybe that's why you're here." Sam's anger cooled suddenly in the wake of this statement. He looked up at Control with neutral curiosity. "How do you mean?" "Al and Ziggy tell me that you're here because something's wrong in my life. That implies that I cannot, or will not, fix it myself according to your history of me. I can be a vicious man. I can be emotionally cold, and sexually ravenous in the most obscene manner imaginable. Maybe that's what created my problem. You're almost my opposite; gentle, sensitive, completely incapable of hurting or taking advantage of someone, and you're emotionally open. Perhaps only you can help me because of that..." Sam only gazed at him for a few moments, once again filled with compassion for the man. "You're not insensitive if you can feel the guilt and shame that I've experienced in being connected to you," Sam said quietly. Control lowered his eyes. One of the things that Sam had always noted as one of Control's most respectable traits was his expressive and energetic use of his intelligence. He also respected Control for being able to objectively recognize and evaluate his own personality, even if he chose to avoid changing it. It was a rare display of integrity for Control to be able to acknowledge that his sadism was destructive and wrong, and that no one but himself was to blame for it. More peculiar was Control's acceptance of that situation -- he didn't want to say easy acceptance, since it obviously was not -- even to the degree of enjoying it as part of him. He could, if he chose, seek out psychiatric treatment for it. "Why do you live like this?" Sam asked softly. "Why do you allow yourself to act the way you do when you could get help for it?" Control gave him a piercing look. "As a doctor, I'm sure you're aware of the kind of 'help' that would entail. People of my particular pathology are not rehabilitation candidates. We are incurable. There is no known drug or therapy that could stop what I do and still allow me to do my job. The only recourse would be to imprison or execute me. I cannot allow that. My position in my organization forbids it, and also allows me to avoid it." "You're saying that you do your job most effectively _because_ you're a sadist?" Sam asked. His intellect was intrigued. His heart was saddened. "That it's your viciousness that allows you to be violent where it might be practical for you?" "Yes." //Almost the classic character,// Sam thought. //A man of utter cruelty and perversion who understands and intelligently lives with that side of himself, even to the extent of being able to accept it and integrate it into his conscience, and to avoid prosecution in a legal forum. A Jekyll and Hyde scenario, but with each side having full knowledge of the other's existence.// "As a doctor I also know that no one with a conscience could endure having an uncontrollable monster live inside him," Sam said. "And you have a conscience. No matter how much you try to reconcile or ignore that evil side of you, you'll eventually reach an impasse. You may have already." "You mean I'm going crazy and you have to save me from myself, or what I might do to someone else." Sam hesitated. "I don't know," he said finally. "I can only wonder what goes through your mind when you think about the fact that I kill people and like it," Control commented. "I wonder if what you imagine is at all close to what it's really like." "I'd rather never know," Sam said. Control nodded, his eyes strangely opaque. "I don't blame you." Continued in part 2... Kyle Haight khaight@netcom.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This post was about war, racism, intolerance, | No it wasn't! The heroism, justice, and the inevitable triumph | author got millions in of good over evil. | Frungy endorsements!