By the time Quinn and Rembrandt returned to Maggie’s house, everyone was completely exhausted. Sunrise was upon them, and the two would-be detectives had turned up nothing.
Sam was still typing furiously through the cramping in his tendons. He was so close. Just a handful of pages. He had to wake up Al every few minutes to get him to hitch up the next batch of pages. Each time, Sam would apologise while Al groaned and grumbled.
The only one who’d had a good sleep was Colin. Despite being able to see Maggie even without her touching Al, he’d eventually had to watch her leave the Imaging Chamber, at which point he turned in for the night. Maggie hadn’t been able to see him back, so it was a disjointed conversation.
Sam was intrigued by this turn of events, but he didn’t have much of an opportunity to puzzle it out, given the task at hand.
There just wasn’t enough time. Soon enough he’d need to sleep, and that would leave him with well under a day to sort all of this out. If Maggie really did run away, and it was certainly looking that way, who was to even say where she was now? She could have been in Mexico by now.
Sam felt his fingers slowing down, and he was catching some mistakes due to his fatigue. He hoped he was noticing all of them.
He stood, stretching. He cracked his knuckles and gave his body a shake.
Come on, just a little longer.
He rubbed his eyes, feeling a yawn overtake him. He slapped himself in the cheek, in a pitiful attempt to raise his adrenaline, then sat back down.
Quinn came into the kitchen and made a beeline for the coffee maker, which was still warming a pot Sam had brewed earlier.
“What are we up to?” Quinn asked, stifling a yawn of his own.
“Really close, but it’ll still need to be checked over for typos.” His voice was hoarse and he didn’t have the energy to make it sound very friendly.
Quinn sidled up to him, carrying his freshly poured mug.
“Any other surprises I should know about in there?” He asked, squinting at the screen.
Sam thought for a moment. “Well, the densitrometry algorithms have been improved; no water, no toxic atmospheres, no crash landings into brick walls inside jail cells like this time around. And I’m getting down to the most recent data.”
He pointed at some lines. “These are coordinates for recent wormhole locations. Ziggy’s provided a more sophisticated database for them.”
He pointed at one that had caught his eye. “This one with the extra formula after it, what is that?”
“That’s an equation to avoid the Slide Cage my father set up; it’s kind of a trap set up to protect their world. I’d thought these coordinates were to my parents’ home world, but it turned out not to be.”
Quinn pointed to a number in the code. “I was told to change this to a nine, instead of the original seven. I think if I change it back, I should be able to get to the right world.”
“Well, let’s do it,” Sam said, and changed the figure, before scrolling back to his most recent line, and glancing at the page hanging from Al’s sleeping shoulder. “Looks like we’re getting to the timestamp for the next slide window…”
Sam looked at it. “Okay, so number of seconds from the base 0 time recorded about forty-five pages up…”
His head flooded with calculations. “Yeah, that’s gonna be Saturday at 10:14am. Right in line with Al’s last recorded sighting of Maggie… or me, as it were.”
Quinn looked pensive. “So it’s got the window time, but the display was flashing zero?”
“Whether Ziggy calculated the window time, or the timer already had that figure, I’m not sure…” Sam said, mind racing. “Either way, it doesn’t explain why it malfunctioned in the first place.”
He looked up at Quinn. “In my line of work, things tend to happen for reasons outside my control. Maybe your timer went funny because of my presence, or maybe…”
“Whatever’s been giving you these cosmic assignments did it? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Quinn was sceptical. “Are you saying you did show up here to help us with something?”
Sam gave a non-committal shrug. “You said it, not me.” He changed the subject. “Anyway, once we check this over and load it back onto the timer, we’ll see what happens. My prediction is, it should be working more efficiently than ever, with improved safety functions.”
He began typing again, and a moment later felt Quinn’s hand on his shoulder.
“I really appreciate this,” he said warmly. “We never have slides where we get this kind of help. There are always ulterior motives.”
“My only ulterior motive is wanting to get out of Maggie before you all gotta leave.”
“Well in that case, I do hope you were here to help us.”
Sam gave a sad smile back. “Honestly, I think maybe I was. But that doesn’t mean I’m not also here for my Maggie. If I don’t leap out when we’re done here, that’ll be the obvious loose end.”
He turned to Al, and saw that there was just two pages left on the floor.
“Al!” he said, waking up the sleeping Observer. “Al, we’re at the end! Pull up the last pages and we’ll be done in ten minutes.”
Al gave a relieved moan. “Sam, that is music to my ears,” he said, and revealed the pages.
* * *
It was midday when Quinn and Sam finally finished reviewing the code, and were satisfied it was error-free.
Quinn refused to go to bed until the timer was ready to go, however, and Sam was just as determined, so the two continued even as they felt dead on their feet.
As the code slowly loaded onto the timer, the two had a moment to relax.
“Is Al still here?” Quinn enquired.
Sam laughed. “Nope. He got out of here the moment I was finished needing the hard copy. I’m sure he’s now sleeping soundly in his bed at home.”
“It’s fascinating the way your leaps run on a parallel timeline to your future time.”
Sam chuckled. The ever-curious kid couldn’t stop trying to puzzle out the intricacies of his leaps.
“It’s simple quantum space-time entanglement. It works based on the aging of my body and my experience of time, which occurs foremost in my present, but takes place on a relative time scale when I’ve leaped into the past.”
He yawned. “I’d show you the math, but I don’t think I’m up for it right now.”
The computer gave a chime to indicate the transfer was complete.
Quinn jumped up, and started picking up pieces of the timer to re-assemble. Sam moved to the computer and exited out of the application. He stretched and rubbed his pained fingers and wrists, then noticed Colin entering the kitchen, seeming to be quite chipper.
“Good–” he began, then checked the wall clock, “–afternoon. How are we doing?”
“Almost there, bro,” Quinn said, his eyes tired, but lit up all the same. “And what about you? Are you doing okay?”
Colin rubbed the back of his head. “It doesn’t hurt so much now.”
Sam wondered if that meant his sixth sense would be fading. Well, that was perhaps for the best.
Quinn delicately put the pieces together, pausing to rub his eyes a few times.
It wasn’t often that Sam was able to use multiple doctorates during his leaps, but it seemed he got lucky this time.
Well, maybe not luck.
It seemed as though this was exactly what God or Fate or Time or whoever had put him here for, knowing that Quinn would need him to assist. It couldn’t be a coincidence that one of the “sliders” in this tight-knit group was an alternate version of his own niece, nor that one of them was a physics genius.
But still, there was his niece, off somewhere trying to find a new start for herself, and there were still no leads on where she might be.
Sam found himself wobbling on his feet, and he clutched the kitchen bench to keep steady.
He felt like his mind was chasing its own tail, running over the same ground again and again and not getting anywhere. It must have been the exhaustion.
“Moment of truth,” said Quinn, as he finished screwing on the back of the timer. He pressed a button on the side, and the timer sprang to life.
On the display, a merciful 00:21:49:09 showed, and it was counting down as it should have been.
“You did it!” Colin said, triumphant, and patted both men on the backs.
“I’m not so sure we did anything that should have changed the display, but I’m glad it’s working now,” Quinn said, his brow furrowed, as he inspected the timer.
“It’s one of life’s mysteries,” Sam said, wishing he had a better explanation. The thing he hated most about dealing with an unknowable force was the ‘unknowable’ part.
The three headed into the living room to tell Rembrandt the good news. The singer was rolling over on the couch, and his sleepy eyes caught sight of Quinn holding the timer.
“Holy smokes, it’s working?”
“This side of twenty-two hours, we slide,” said Quinn, sounding relieved.
“And… what about Maggie? She coming with?” His eyes were set on Sam, who looked back with uncertainty.
“I’m sorry, I don’t control the leaps. All I can do is work to do what I think is my purpose, then I go. Which means if I don’t leap soon, then I’m still here for a reason.”
He yawned.
“But what I have to do now is go to bed. Good night.”
Quinn nodded in agreement, then turned to his friends.
“Maybe you guys could go ask around town, see if anyone’s seen or spoken to Maggie since we last saw her.”
Colin and Rembrandt nodded.
Quinn went into the guest room to sleep, while Sam went to Maggie’s bedroom. And he was asleep before he hit the pillow.