Sam leaned, arms folded, against the kitchenette counter in the suite, wondering where Maggie and Rembrandt could have gone.
After watching Quinn disappear into a cab in a very dramatic fashion, there wasn’t much left for him to do but come back here and prepare for the afternoon busking session. But his duet partner was nowhere to be found, and worse was that neither was Maggie, who really should not have been going anywhere in her state.
There were two new butts in the ash tray, which seemed to suggest either Maggie had been in a bad enough way to smoke them both, or maybe she and Rembrandt had lit up together. That seemed irresponsible.
He let his shoulders sag, and turned to the minibar to see what snacks might be available.
As he surveyed the selection in the fridge, which was mostly small glass bottles of soda and Reese’s Pieces, he heard a noise he was afraid he might never hear again: the Imaging Chamber door.
Completely forgetting his peckishness, he stood and spun around in the direction of the noise.
Nothing.
“Al?” Sam called out weakly. “Ya there, buddy?”
Was he just hearing things? He couldn’t say he’d ever had an auditory hallucination of that sound before, but considering how frequently he heard it, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that his brain might try to manifest it here, now that he hadn’t heard it in a few days.
But, maybe…
The detector that Quinn had built was sitting on his nightstand, and Sam grabbed it. After turning it on, he moved the wand around the room.
Towards the middle of the room, he heard the faintest clicking sound, but that was it. Still, that was more than nothing. Maybe, just maybe, Al was closing in on his location in spacetime. He prayed this was the case.
As he returned the device to where he’d found it, the door of the room swung open, revealing Quinn, Colin, and the man Quinn had approached on the street when last he’d seen him.
“Oh… hello?” Sam said, looking at the stranger. Quinn took a deep breath, and gestured to him.
“Uh, Sam, this is our Dad, Michael Mallory.” His hand moved out toward Sam as he turned to Michael. “Dad, this is Doctor Sam Beckett.”
Sam moved forward to shake the man’s hand, and looked questioningly at the brothers.
“Last I heard he wouldn’t even talk to you,” he said.
“Different father,” Colin said matter-of-factly.
“We have a lot to explain,” Quinn said.
* * *
Sam’s eyes were narrow, shaded by a tightly furrowed brow, as he worked through the information he’d just heard from Quinn and Colin. His mind raced.
“Okay, so… this really is the Earth where you grew up, Quinn?”
The four of them were sitting on the couches by the TV in the suite, with Sam alone on one, and the other three huddled on the other, Michael flanked on either side by his sons.
“And this is your birth father, who left you–” he pointed at Quinn, “–here as a child to protect you from a war, while leaving you–” he pointed at Colin, “–on a different Earth? Using the same technology you–” he pointed back to Quinn, “–would go on to independently invent completely by accident?”
Sam bit his lip. “Have I got all that straight?”
Quinn had an expression that, to Sam, read as somewhere between sheepish and amused. “Pretty much,” was all he said.
Michael was sitting there, in silent awe of his sons.
Sam leaned back in his seat, looking Quinn in the eye. “Seems awful coincidental, wouldn’t you say?”
Quinn narrowed his eyes.
“Yeah, a real blessing,” he said slowly. “Except for the fact I may have sabotaged my own future by messing around in the past like this.”
Sam stroked his chin. “It may not have changed so much, if you’re still here. But I sure wish I had Ziggy around to tell us…”
Michael leaned forward, and put his face in his hands.
“This is certainly a predicament,” he said. “I set out to bring home my boys, and instead I find adult versions of them who never knew me. Does this mean I must now let all those years go by, knowing they’re alive and well, but never bringing them home, so that they still grow up to be the same people I’ve met now?”
“I wouldn’t give up my childhood for the world,” Quinn said, with a sad look at his father. “I’m sorry.”
Michael took his hand. “Then I’ll respect your wishes.”
Quinn smiled. “At least you know we’re alive, and we’re going to find you one day, right?”
Colin shifted uncomfortably.
“My childhood was not so nice,” he said in a morose tone. “Nor my adulthood, for that matter. Why did you put me on that primitive world?”
Michael’s face buried further into his hands.
“At the time, we had no control of the worlds we would end up in, so we took you both to the first two politically and ecologically stable ones with living doubles of your mother and I that we found.”
Quinn interjected: “And you split us up, because…”
“Your mother and I each kept the coordinates to one of you. As you can see, I had yours, Quinn. That way if one of us ever had them coaxed out of us through some mind game or another, we couldn’t give them both up and at least one of you would be safe.”
“The parents you put me with had died by the time you came to collect me,” Colin said, “and I languished in an orphanage. I grew up to be shunned for inventing technologies which I later discovered were commonplace on most other Earths.”
“I’m sorry, son. Elizabeth and I… we made a real mess of things, didn’t we?”
“It’s not too late to change things,” Sam said, causing all three men to look at him.
Sam looked pointedly at Michael. “Little Colin’s still in that orphanage, waiting for you.”
A wave of incredulity passed over the family. Quinn was the first to react.
“What happened to creating a paradox? If Colin’s not where he was when I found him…”
“When I first started leaping, my brother had died in Vietnam. Now, he has a daughter named Maggie. Big changes can happen, if they’re meant to. I’ve found that the universe is largely, well… self-correcting.”
“So all that talk in front of the Professor earlier?” Quinn was looking at him, searching.
“That’s the rational endpoint, but…” He looked up at the ceiling. “Sometimes… we have to trust that we’re doing the right thing. Even if Ziggy disagrees.”
I’m talking like some sort of preacher, he thought with distaste.
‘You just gotta have faith’ was never a satisfactory answer when he went to church as a kid, but it seemed like the words he lived by, these days.
Colin stood, looking troubled.
Michael looked up at him. “I’ll let you make the final decision on this, Colin. It’s your life.”
He nodded with uncertainty, and laid back on his bed, apparently deep in thought.
As Sam was trying to think of what to say next, Rembrandt burst into the suite, a pale Maggie holding on to him tightly.
“Gotta get this girl to bed,” he said in lieu of greeting, as he helped her get to her bedside.
Maggie’s red eyes were barely open, as she let herself fall onto the bed, before burying her head under a pillow.
Rembrandt turned back towards them, and Sam watched his similarly bloodshot eyes stop dead on Michael.
“Mister M?” he said, startled.
“Remy, it’s our birth Dad,” Quinn told him excitedly.
The rest of the conversation went unnoticed by Sam as he approached Maggie.
“Are you alright?” he asked her, taking a hold of her hand. She squeezed it, and moved the pillow so that her mouth was uncovered.
“I… I was fine, but I don’t know. We were just reminiscing, having a nice time, and then boom, pain comes back with a vengeance.”
“Reminiscing…” Sam frowned. “What about?”
“How I first met Remy, and… ow!” She winced.
Sam was silent for a moment, piecing together the evidence.
“So it hurts the most when you try to dredge up memories? Is that it?”
“I don’t know…”
From what Sam had observed, Maggie had seemed to be in the highest spirits when she was just relaxing and letting thoughts and memories pop into her head, instead of seeking them out. That might have been an added benefit to the medicinal marijuana; lending her the ability to be more passive about her thoughts. Though, it clearly hadn’t been entirely reliable in that regard.
Sam patted her hand. “Okay, I want you to try something for me… don’t think too hard about anything. Don’t chase memories, just let your mind wander wherever.”
He saw Maggie nod under the pillow.
“Okay.” Her hand felt around for him, and she grasped his arm. “I love you, Uncle.”
Sam felt his heart melt, and he gave her a warm pat on the shoulder. “I love you too.”
He looked over towards the others, and his heart warmed even more to see Quinn leaning on his father, as they watched TV together.