Since Jerry was going to have to blow off his party anyway, to wait for the guy to come board up the window, he invited them all to stay for a late dinner...
"...But I'm afraid all I've got in the fridge is a cheap 'O' positive," he quipped.
"That's all right, I had a big lunch," Angel tossed back without missing a beat.
It turned out all Jerry really *did* have in the fridge was large amounts of not much that didn't require serious prepwork, so he ordered Chinese. "You like Chinese, right?" he said to Lochley with a gleam in his eye that the Captain neither understood nor trusted.
While waiting for the delivery person (or someone like him), they finally got down to the brass tacks of the whole time-travel/TV show dilemna.
"Okay, the theory is," said Jerry, perching on the corner of the couch, "every time there's a decision point, whether it's a person making a decision or some other kind of random event, the universe actually splits in two -- or three, or whatever -- and the people in each timeline go merrily along their own way...there's all sorts of quantum physics stuff to explain it, that Captain Lochley here undoubtedly knows more about than I do..." He grinned at the Captain, and was struck by a thought.
"Oh, yeah, speaking of which, did anyone ever tell you about the time everybody except m...*Garibaldi* went out to Sector 14 to send Babylon 4 back in time?" He snapped his fingers. "Oops, that's right, that was supposed to be a deep dark secret, wasn't it? Never mind, forget I said anything.
"Anyway, the idea is, you get these *branches*, and the timelines get farther and farther apart -- or maybe sometimes they loop back together, who knows? Maybe that's where deja vu comes from..."
"Sure, fine, that's all classic textbook stuff," cut in Lochley, in an attempt to rein in the actor's flow of verbiage, "but how does it account for a...*television* show??"
"Now just follow me on this one -- it's pretty far out there, but... look, the Universe is supposed to be infinite, right? I mean, what else *is* there?"
"Other universes?" suggested Cordelia.
"Well, yeah, sure, but in order for it to be the *universe*, all those other universes have to be kinda...packed into it, see? All of them, and more splitting off every nanosecond -- fortunately, space is infinite too, so it's not a problem. But the point is, if it's *infinite*, that means *everything* that possibly can be, *is* -- it's just a matter of getting to it. So conceivably, if somebody, say, writes a story, or pulls together a TV show that is internally consistent, then who's to say it doesn't exist somewhere...out there ...more or less? Especially if a lot of people get to believing in it...but there you're getting off into serious la-la land, philosophically speaking."
The others were looking at him with varying degrees of incomprehension and disbelief.
"Yeah, yeah, it sounded pretty goofy to me, too -- as I recall I came up with a couple pretty good slams on the guy that was going on about it, too. Damn shame I don't remember 'em now. But anyway, between you three going on about magic and demons and whatnot, and Cap'n Lizzie here, all of a sudden it seems like as good an explanation as any."
Lochley blinked, taken aback as much by the speaker as by the concept. Then she looked thoughtful. "You know, you may just have something there," she admitted. "In fact, there was some sort of incident just before I came to B5, back in '62...something about some woman and..." she looked up at Jerry searchingly, then shook her head. "What with all the *other* craziness going on, I never got around to checking it out, though."
"Trouble is," Doyle pointed out, "All this theorizing doesn't do us any actual *good*, in terms of getting the Captain home...or even finding out what those goons were really after."
They all sat and pondered that for a few minutes, until the food showed up.
* * *
Cordelia poked around with her fork, looking for that last elusive snow pea. Jerry had teased her for not using chopsticks -- just because the guy had a nice house and an actual resume, he seemed to think he had the right to get all jolly and...what was that word Giles the hypereducated geek-man had used...uncle-oid, anyway...at her. And that was definitely what it was, too -- she could tell. Maybe it was because the "Captain" was closer to his own age -- *much* -- and still made a respectable showing on the hot scale, or maybe he was just a doofus, but Cordelia wasn't used to being treated like a little kid by men. Even if the guy *was* just a cheap Bruce Willis knockoff.
And now he was talking about himself again. Great. Her teeth snapped shut on the snow pea.
"Yeah, I used to be an investment banker before I took up acting," he was saying. "And a pilot before that. And a few other things..."
"Oooh, a real playboy of the western world," crooned Cordelia with a brilliant, barbed smile.
The older man looked at her suspiciously, but she showed even more teeth and fluttered her mascara'd lashes over starlet-wide, chocolatey-brown eyes.
"Something like that," he laughed, gesturing expansively. "It keeps me out of trouble, anyway."
"Didn't I hear you were thinking about running for Congress?" asked Doyle, obviously irked at her apparent dismissal of his childhood hero. But honestly -- an actor *and* a politician? Thinking of the others who had gone that route -- from Sonny Bono through her dad's hero, Ronald Reagan -- Cordelia barely repressed a shudder. Doyle was looking like a puppy whose chewtoy had been taken away, though. She supposed she ought to at least *try* to be nice.
"My father thought about running for Congress once," she said politely. "His lawyer talked him out of it, though -- I guess he figured Dad's business practices wouldn't stand the exposure. Which *I* thought was ridiculous, since you hear about politicians getting caught doing *much* worse things than Daddy ever did. Well, worse than *I* ever found out about, anyway."
Everybody was looking at her in *that* way, and Cordelia realized that she had once again talked herself into a very uncomfortable corner. She laughed self-deprecatingly, and sighed when the conversation turned away from her. Sometimes she longed to be sixteen again, and reigning in blissfully ignorant splendor as undisputed queen of Sunnydale High. In her opinion, maturity was grossly overrated.
* * *
Lochley wandered over to a desk in the corner, where an antique (to her) computer was running what turned out to be a stock market analysis. As she was watching, a familiar name scrolled onto the screen. Intrigued, she bent to examine the data, making a note of the identifying code.
Suddenly that extremely disconcerting actor appeared at her elbow.
"So...when exactly did you, ah, drop in from?" he asked.
"What? Oh, 2264. I'm not sure when your...'show' ended..."
"*Our* show ended when Sheridan left the station, in late '62," he supplied, half his attention on the scrolling screen. "But then there were the TV movies: 'River of Souls' and, uh..." he stopped, and turned to look at her. "2264, huh?" he turned back to the monitor thoughtfully, dropping whatever else he had been going to say.
She thought. Remembering streams of golden light circling through the station's corridors, she made an educated guess --
"That would have been about the Soul Hunters' stolen globe? The Ralga?"
"Got it in one," he beamed proudly. "Hey," he went on, waving at the computer with studied nonchalance, "you wouldn't happen to have any hot tips for me?" He grinned, but was obviously at least half serious.
She stared him down.
"Oh, come on, it's not like you have to worry about messing with the timeline -- it's not even your timeline, remember?" he tried again.
She shook her head, torn between annoyance and laughter. "It's not that. It's just that I'm pretty confident you can fend for yourself," she said, indicating a piece of scratch paper with some fairly large numbers scribbled on it. "You seem to know what you're doing, here."
"I should, after nine years...hey, where do you think Garibaldi's sudden, mysterious ability to run a business like Edgars Industries came from? Or that conference call to the Board of Directors -- believe me, a LOT of those nine years went into that scene!"
"Too bad I missed it," she said wryly.
"That's right, you did, didn't you?" he said cheerfully. "You know, That's one of the really interesting things about this situation: me knowing stuff about B5, and about the Alliance, that even *you* don't." He perched on the corner of the desk with that insufferably smug look on his face. "I think I like that."
"You *would*," Lochley groused, glaring at him. His mouth quirked. Then hers did. Before long they were both grinning at each other like idiots over the complete absurdity of the situation.
"Oh, hey, that reminds me, did Garibaldi ever tell you...no, of course, he wouldn't have -- what am I thinking? But he's a guy who can't resist a challenge, you know what I mean? And the fact of the matter is, under all that antagonistic crap, the whole 'crawling up each others' butt' thing..." Lochley ducked her head, remembering *that* conversation all too well -- "underneath all that, the poor paranoid pathetic sonuvabitch actually found you *very* attractive."
Oh, for heaven's sake! Lochley rolled her eyes and started to move back toward the others.
"Hey, I mean it! And I oughtta know, right? Seriously, if he hadn't been so committed to Lise, there would definitely have been something goin' on, there."
"On *his* side, maybe," said Lochley, coming back to wander restlessly around the desk. "But even if I were inclined to reciprocate -- which I'm not saying I would have been," she added emphatically, "but even if I *did*, I learned a long time ago not to get involved with people I had to work with."
"Yeah, especially your ex-husband's best friend," put in Jerry.
"That had *nothing* to do with it," she snapped. "I just don't believe in allowing...primitive emotional hardwiring to interfere with the performance of one's duty."
Jerry sniggered. Lochley glared. "Sorry, just thinking about another show," he explained obliquely.
* * *
The guy from the glass company showed up at last, and Angel and company took it as their cue to leave. Jerry offered to put Lochley up -- "It's a four-bedroom house, for Chrissake..." but she declined, accepting Cordelia's offer of *her* spare room. It seemed...safer, somehow. For her peace of mind, at least. Lochley had to admit to herself that she found this 20th-Century version of Garibaldi even more unsettling than the original.
When they were dropped off at Cordelia's apartment, however, she began to wonder. The place was nice enough, in a retro kind of way, but when Cordelia explained about her 'roommate'...
"A *ghost*?"
"Yeah, this was his room, but that's okay, he doesn't really sleep or anything now, so he won't mind -- *Dennis!* Put that down! -- if you need extra blankets, they're in there," Cordelia said, indicating the cedar chest whose lid had just raised and lowered itself with a thud. She plopped herself on the bed.
"So. Tell me what they're wearing in the 23rd Century!"
* * *
The next morning, Lochley figured out Cordelia's shower -- quaint controls, luxurious water pressure -- and with a little help from Dennis figured out her coffee pot as well. She pulled open the living room curtains to let in the glorious Southern California sunshine, and started her morning workout.
As usual, the stretches, isometrics, and improvised weight routine gave her brain the calm it needed to process the events of the previous evening. Unfortunately, even a good night's sleep and the light of day didn't bring her to any more constructive conclusions than she'd come to then. Angel had promised that today they would research time-travel spells, to try to track down the one that had been used, and find or devise a counterspell. Since Lochley had no clue what all that entailed, there wasn't much she could do to help -- but maybe she could take another approach. She didn't much like the idea of going back to that warehouse district alone, though.
Cordelia, amusing as the girl was -- she'd have made a hell of a soldier if someone had brought her up right -- was *not* the type of companion she had in mind for that mission. Angel was going to be researching, and wasn't exactly a day person anyway. Which left Doyle...or his overly-friendly cousin. Why the hell had they brought him into it, anyway? Oh, right -- because he could identify her. Wonderful.
She suddenly realized what it was that bothered her about Jerry -- it was the fact that he was so damn perky. It was Garibaldi's perkiness, all right, but when Garibaldi was that perky it meant he had something on you, and this guy was like that *all the time*. Definitely unsettling.
Then there was the other thing he had mentioned, which she refused to even dignify by contemplating. What the hell did *he* know, anyway? He was only an actor! If there *had* been anything to the ridiculous notion that only prior commitment had kept Garibaldi from hitting on her, surely she would have picked up on it!
Besides, if the big jerk -- the *other* big jerk -- was so 'committed' to Lise (regarding whom Elizabeth had her own opinions, which she kept strictly to herself on the basis of insufficient evidence and it being none of her damn business), then what the hell had he been doing rolling around on the bed with that redhead during the Day of the Dead? Fortunately, before her treacherous subconscious could get very far enumerating the differences between a live Captain and a dead GROPO, Cordelia came staggering into the light.
"Do you HAVE to do that?" the girl protested. "It sounds like you're killing something in here."
Lochley straightened from her fighting stance and laughed. "You look like you could use a cup of coffee," she said, breathing deeply but not hard.
"You made coffee? With *my* coffeemaker? Wow, it took me a week to learn how to use that thing. And aren't you used to...like...talking to it or something?"
"It's part of being a soldier," Lochley assured her, sliding a steaming mug across the dining table. "One of the first things you learn is how to make coffee anywhere, anytime, under any conditions. This is very good, by the way."
"Starbuck's," Cordelia shrugged.
"You're kidding. *The* Starbuck's?" She looked at her mug with new respect, savoring the aroma. "Oh, that reminds me. Do you have something to write on?" Grabbing the indicated notepad, she printed out a short series of letters.
"Here. Next time 'Angel Investigations' finds itself with some spare credits, pick up as many shares as you can of that."
"We use 'dollars'. What *is* that?" the girl asked, peering at the cryptic letters.
"It's a company -- the way this company is identified in the stock market. This one is going to be the next...oh, what *was* the name of that early computer manufacturer..."
"Microsoft?"
"Whatever. Just do it."
"No, that's Nike," Cordelia responded absently, thinking hard. She looked up.
"Thanks," she said. "Nobody's ever given me an acronym before. Fortunately..."
She flashed that aggressively white smile -- either the coffee had started to kick in, or...
"I know *exactly* how to repay you!"
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