Replay

FOURTEEN

Pamela adjusted the tassel on her mortarboard, looked out into the crowded auditorium, and spotted Jeff, sitting alongside her parents. Her mother beamed with happy pride. Pamela caught Jeff’s eye, winked, and got a wry smile in return. They were both aware of the comic irony in this ceremony: She, a woman who had been a practicing physician, a successful artist, and a celebrated motion-picture producer, was at last being awarded her high-school diploma. For the third time.

It had required considerable tenacity, and she was glad Jeff had understood how tedious the past three years had been for her. He’d had his own experience of reentering the academic world, at the college level, during his second replay; but going through high school again, this many times, was a unique subcircle of Hell.

Her perseverance had paid off, though, as she’d known it would. Her family had relented somewhat when she turned sixteen, a well-behaved A student who exhibited no interest in going out with the boys in her supposed peer group, and she was allowed to see Jeff two nights a week. He took an apartment in Bridgeport for their weekend use, and was scrupulously punctual about having her back at her parents' home by midnight every Friday and Saturday night. As far as her mother and father were concerned, the young couple saw a lot of movies; and if there were ever any question of that, they could easily recite the plots of such films as Morgan!, Georgy Girl, or A Man for All Seasons, having seen them all at least twice in the years past.

The arrangement had been kind of fun, in an odd way, once the negative parental pressure had begun to ease. There’d been a delicious erotic tension arising out of the limitations on their time together and the necessary furtiveness of their passion. They’d loved each other with their fresh young bodies as if they had never been intimate before, never given or received such libidinous delight with each other—or indeed with anyone.

If her parents had ever suspected anything about her sexual involvement with Jeff—and they must have, certainly by now—they’d been admirably silent about it. Their initial cautious tolerance of Jeff had soon given way to acceptance, then approval, and eventually an outright fondness. The four-year chasm of age that had loomed so disturbingly in her parents' eyes when he was eighteen and she fourteen had become a thoroughly conventional discrepancy by the time they were twenty-two and eighteen. Besides, in this era of LSD and promiscuous nonconformity, her mother and father were obviously relieved that she had developed a stable relationship with such a clean-cut, well-mannered, and prosperous young man.

The last of the diplomas was handed out, and the fledgling graduates who surrounded her raced from the stage with boisterous cheers. Pamela made her way calmly toward where Jeff waited with her parents.

"Oh, Pam," her mother said, "you looked so lovely up there! You just put all the rest of them to shame."

"Congratulations, honey," her father said, embracing her. "I have to turn in the cap and the gown," Pamela told Jeff. "Then we can get going."

"Do you really have to leave so soon?" her mother asked, chagrined. "You could stay for dinner, get an early start in the morning."

"Jeff’s family is expecting us Thursday evening, Mom; we really ought to get as far as Washington tonight. Here, hold this," she said to Jeff, handing him the scrolled diploma. "I’ll be right back."

In the girls' locker room she took off the black cotton robe, changed into a blue skirt and white blouse. A few of the other girls shyly congratulated her, and she them, but she was subtly excluded from their general camaraderie, the excited talk of boyfriends and summer plans and the various colleges they’d be going to in the fall. These girls had been her friends in her original existence; she’d fully shared in all their shenanigans and banter and tentative first steps to womanhood. But this time, as when she’d repeated her high-school years at the beginning of her first replay, there was a gulf between them that the girls somehow recognized, incapable though they were of understanding what it was. Pamela had kept her distance from them, ignored the social aspects of adolescence, had done what she had to do to fulfill her promise to her parents that she would finish school before leaving home to be with Jeff. Now that day had come, and she hoped the awkwardness of her departure could be kept to a minimum.

She finished changing, went back into the gradually emptying auditorium to rejoin her parents and the man with whom she would share the remainder of this life.

"So," her father was saying to Jeff, "you really do think I ought to hang on to those quarters, do you?"

"Yes, sir," Jeff replied. "As a long-term investment, most definitely. I’d say in ten to twelve years you’ll see a very healthy return on it."

Her father’s question had been designed to ease the tension, Pamela recognized, and she was grateful. The exchange reaffirmed that he had come to personally respect Jeff as an astute, creative investor and that he was aware his daughter would be well taken care of. Jeff himself had purchased several thousand dollars' worth of the phased-out ninety-percent-silver dimes and quarters before the coins disappeared, and had recommended that her father do the same. It was a logical, conservative-seeming financial move that would not startle her father by skyrocketing with suspicious swiftness or trouble him by appearing too obscurely risky. It would certainly pay off in its time, however; specifically, in January of 1980, when the Hunt brothers' illegal secret manipulations of the silver market would drive the price of the precious metal up to fifty dollars an ounce. Jeff had told Pamela he would contact her father that month, make sure he unloaded the coins before the precipitous crash that would soon follow.

"Will you be staying in Orlando long, darling?" her mother asked.

"Just a few days," Pamela said. "Then we’re going to drive down to the Keys, maybe rent a boat for a couple of weeks."

"Have you decided yet where you’ll be going when … the summer’s over?"

That was still a sore point between them; even though her parents knew that she and Jeff would lack for nothing materially, they lamented her refusal to go on to college.

"No, Mom. We might get a place in New York; we’re just not sure yet."

"It’s not too late to register at NYU; you know they gave you an automatic acceptance on your National Merit scores."

"I’ll think about it. Is everything in the car, Jeff?"

"All packed, gassed up, and ready to go."

Pamela hugged her mother and father, couldn’t stop the tears that came to her eyes. They’d only wanted what was best for her, hadn’t known their loving guidance and discipline had been long since unnecessary; she couldn’t fault them for that. But now, at last, she and Jeff were truly free: free to be themselves, to strike out into this familiar world as the independent adults—and more—that they had always been beneath their deceptively juvenile exteriors. It was an auspicious day, after all they had been through.

She pulled herself out of the water with one graceful move, climbed the short ladder at the stern of the boat, and caught the towel Jeff tossed to her as she hoisted herself aboard.

"Beer?" he asked, reaching into the cooler. "Sure," Pamela said, wrapping the big blue towel around her naked body and giving her hair a vigorous shake.

Jeff opened two bottles of Dos Equis, handed her one, and sprawled into a canvas deck chair. "Good swim." He grinned.

"Mmm," she agreed contentedly, pressing the icy bottle to her face. "That water’s almost like a Jacuzzi."

"Gulf Stream. Warm current carries all the way across the Atlantic from here. We’re sitting right on top of the heating vent that keeps Europe from having another Ice Age."

Pamela raised her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and inhaled the fresh salt air. A sudden sound roused her from her reverie, and she looked up to see a great white heron swoop elegantly above the boat, its long legs and tapered bill extended in aerodynamic symmetry as it dived toward the shoreline of the nameless key off which they’d anchored that morning.

"God." She sighed. "I don’t ever want to leave this spot."

Jeff smiled, raised his bottle of Dos Equis in a silent toast of concurrence.

Pamela walked to the side of the boat, leaned against the railing, and stared into the sparkling blue-green sea from which she had just emerged. In the distance, to the west, the tranquil water churned with the playful antics of a passing school of dolphins. She watched them for several moments, then turned to Jeff.

"There’s something we’ve been avoiding," she said. "Something we’ve needed to discuss, and haven’t."

"What’s that?"

"Why it took me so long to start replaying this time. Why I lost a year and a half. We’ve ignored all that for too long."

It was true. They’d never discussed the troublesome deviation from the cyclical pattern that had grown so familiar to each of them. Jeff had seemed so grateful just to have her back again, and she’d put her own worries in the back of her mind as she concentrated on the laborious task of finishing school and the delicate diplomacy of convincing her parents to accept her need to be with him.

"Why bring it up now?" he asked, a frown creasing his sun-browned forehead.

She shrugged. "We have to, sooner or later."

His eyes met hers, imploring. "But we don’t have to be concerned about it for another twenty years. Can’t we just enjoy ourselves until then? Savor the present?"

"We’d never be able to ignore it," she said gently, "not completely. You know that."

"What makes you think we can figure out why it happened, any more than we can decipher anything else about the replays? I thought we’d settled that."

"I don’t necessarily mean why it happened, or how; but I’ve been considering it, and I think it may be part of an overall pattern, not just some one-time abberation."

"How so? I know I came back three months later than usual myself this time, but that’s never happened before, to either of us."

"I’m not so sure; never to that extent, certainly, but there’s been a … a skew developing in the replays, almost from the very start. Now it’s simply begun to accelerate."

"A skew?"

She nodded. "Think about it. At the beginning of your second replay you weren’t in your dorm room; you were at a movie theater, with Judy."

"It was the same day, though."

"Yes, but … what, eight or nine hours later? And the first time I came back it was early afternoon, but the next time was in the middle of the night. I’d say about twelve hours later."

Jeff grew thoughtful. "The third time—the last time I started replaying before this, when I was in Martin’s car with Judy…"

"Yes?" she prodded.

"I just assumed it was that same night, that we were coming home from having seen The Birds. I was so upset about the loss of my daughter, Gretchen, that I wasn’t really paying that much attention to anything around me. I just got drunk and stayed drunk for a couple of days. But the Kentucky Derby seemed to come up a lot faster that time. I got my bet in through Frank Maddock only the day before it was run. As shaken as I was, I still remember being relieved that at least I hadn’t blown that opportunity. I thought I’d lost track of time because of the binge, but I could have started the replay late, by two or three days. I might have been returning home from a completely different evening with Judy."

Pamela nodded. "I wasn’t focusing on the calendar that time, either," she told him. "But I do remember that both my parents were home when I started replaying that morning, so it must have been a weekend; and the previous one had started on a Tuesday, the last day of April. So the skew was probably up to four days, maybe five."

"How could it jump from a matter of a few days to—months? Over a year, in your case?"

"Maybe it’s a geometric progression. If we knew the exact time differences between each of our replays, I think we could figure it out, possibly even project what the skew will be … next time."

The thought of death, and yet another, possibly longer, separation cast a sudden pall of silence between them. The herons on the remote beach beyond the breakers stalked back and forth on their spindly legs, lonely and aloof. The school of dolphins to the west had moved on, leaving the sea once more untroubled.

"It’s too late for that, though, isn’t it?" Jeff said. It was more a statement than a question. "We’ll never be able to reconstruct those divergences exactly. We weren’t paying any attention to them then."

"We had no reason to be. It was all too new, and the skew was so minor. We each had a lot more on our minds than that."

"Then it’s pointless to speculate. If there is a geometric progression and it’s escalated from hours to days to months, then any rough estimate we might be able to come up with could be off by years."

Pamela gave him a long, steady look. "Maybe someone else was making more careful note of the skew."

"What do you mean, somebody else?"

"You and I discovered each other almost by accident, because you happened to respond to Starsea as something new and you were able to arrange a meeting with me. But there could be other replayers, many of them; we’ve never made a concerted effort to track them down."

"What makes you think they exist?"

"I don’t know that they do, but then, I never expected to encounter you. If there are two of us, there could just as easily be more."

"Don’t you think we would have heard of them by now?"

"Not necessarily. My films were extremely well publicized, and your interference in the Kennedy assassination the first time around caused quite a conspicuous ripple. Other than that, though, how much of a noticeable impact has either of us had on society? Even the existence of your company, Future, Inc., probably wasn’t that well known outside the financial community. I know I wasn’t aware of it when I was busy with med school and then my work in the children’s hospital in Chicago. There may have been all sorts of other minor, localized changes—due to other replayers—that we simply haven’t noticed."

Jeff pondered that for a moment. "I’ve often wondered about that, of course. I was just always too wrapped up in my own experiences to do anything about it—until I saw Starsea and then found you."

"Maybe it’s time we did do something about it. Something more simple, and more direct, than I was trying to accomplish when you first met me. If there are others out there, we could all learn a lot. We’d have a great deal to share among us."

"True," Jeff said, smiling. "But right now the only person I want to share anything with is you. We’ve waited a long time to be together like this again."

"Long enough." She smiled back, undoing the blue terry-cloth towel and letting it drop to the sun-drenched wooden deck.

They placed the small display ad in the New York Times, Post, and Daily News; the Los Angeles Times and Herald-Examiner; Le Monde, L’Express, and Paris-Match; Asahi Shimbun and Yomiyuri Shimbun; the London Times, Evening Standard, and Sun; O Estado de Sâo Paulo and Jornal do Brasil. Taking into account their own specialized areas of interest during various replays, the ad also began appearing regularly in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and Le Concours Médical; the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Le Nouvel Economiste; Daily Variety and Cahiers du Cinéma; Playboy, Penthouse, Mayfair, and Lui.

In all, more than two hundred newspapers and magazines worldwide carried the superficially innocuous announcement, which would be utterly meaningless except to those unknown, and possibly nonexistent, few for whom it was intended:

"Here’s another one with a dollar bill enclosed," Jeff said, tossing the envelope aside. "Why the hell do so many of them think we’re selling something?"

Pamela shrugged. "Most people are."

"What’s even worse are the ones who think we’re running some sort of contest. This could get to be a problem, you know."

"How so?"

"With the postal authorities, unless we’re careful. We’re going to have to come up with a form letter explaining that the ad isn’t any sort of come-on, and send it to all these people. Especially the ones who’ve mailed us money. We have to make sure it’s all returned. We don’t need any complaints."

"But we haven’t offered anyone anything," Pamela protested.

"Even so," Jeff said, "how would you like to try explaining to a postal inspector in 1967 what Watergate means?"

"I suppose you’re right." She opened another envelope, scanned the letter, and laughed. "Listen to this one," she said. " Please send me more information on your memory-training course. I don’t remember any of the things you mentioned in your ad. "

Jeff chuckled along with her, glad she could still keep a sense of humor about all this. He knew how much the search meant to her: The time skew of her replay starting dates was obviously much more advanced than his, and if it was proceeding along a curve that had taken it from four or five days' delay all the way to eighteen months in one jump, the duration of her next repeated life might be severely truncated. They’d never discussed it but were both aware of the possibility that she might even not come back at all.

In the past four months, they’d received hundreds of replies to the ad, most of which assumed it was a contest or a sales pitch for anything from magazine subscriptions to the Rosicrucians. A few were tantalizingly ambiguous, but on follow-up investigation had proven worthless. The most promising, yet maddening, of them all had been a one-line message postmarked Sydney, Australia, with no signature or return address:

"Not this time," it read. "Wait."

Jeff had begun to despair of the whole endeavor. It had made sense to try, and he felt they’d done it in the best way possible, but it hadn’t produced the results they’d hoped. Maybe there really weren’t any other replayers out there, or if they did exist, they had elected not to respond. More than ever before, though, Jeff now believed he and Pamela were alone in this, and would remain so.

He opened another envelope from the day’s stack, ready to dump it with the other worthless, confused replies; but the first line stopped him, and he read the rest of the brief letter in stunned amazement.

Jeff stared at the signature, checked the address against the postmark. They matched. "Pamela…" he said quietly.

"Hmm?" She glanced up from the envelope she was about to tear open. "Another funny one?"

Jeff looked at the pretty, smiling face that he had known and loved so strangely out of sequence: first in maturity, and now in youth. He felt a vague foreboding, as if the closeness they had shared were about to be invaded, their mutual uniqueness shattered by a stranger. They had found what they’d been seeking, but now he wasn’t at all certain they ever should have begun the quest.

"Read this," he said, and handed her the letter.

A light snow began to fall from the iron-drab sky as they drove into Crossfield, about thirty-five miles south of Madison. In the passenger seat of the big Plymouth Fury Pamela tensely ripped a Kleenex into thin strips of tissue, wadding them one by one and depositing them in the dashboard ashtray. Jeff hadn’t seen her display that nervous habit since the night at the restaurant in Malibu when they’d first met, nineteen years ago and five years in the future.

"Do you still think there’ll be just the one man?" she asked, looking out at the barren winter skeletons of the birch trees that lined the streets of the little town.

"Probably," Jeff said, peering through the snow at the black-and-gray street signs. "I don’t think that reference to everybody remembering the Tylenol killings and the Korean plane meant anything. I’m sure he was referring to people in general, after the incidents have happened, not some group of replayers he’s gathered together."

Pamela finished shredding the Kleenex, reached for another. "I don’t know whether I hope that’s true or the other way around," she said in a perplexed tone. "In a way, it would be such an incredible relief to find a whole network of people who understand what we’ve been through. Yet I’m not sure if I’m ready to deal with … that much accumulated pain of such a familiar sort. Or to hear all the things they may have learned about replaying." "I thought that was the whole point."

"It’s just a little frightening, that’s all, now that we’re so close to it. I wish this Stuart McCowan had been listed with information; I’d feel a lot more comfortable if we’d been able to call him, get a better idea of who he is than from just that note. I hate showing up cold like this."

"I’m sure he’s expecting us. Obviously, we weren’t about to turn down his invitation, not after the effort we went through to find him."

"There’s Strathmore," Pamela said, pointing to a street that wound up a hill to the left. Jeff had already passed the intersection; he made a U, turned onto the broad, deserted street.

Number 382 was an isolated three-story Victorian home on the other side of the hill. An estate, actually, with spacious, well-kept grounds behind the roughhewn flagstone walls. Pamela began to tear at another Kleenex as they drove through the imposing gate, but Jeff stopped her fitful hand with his and gave her a warm smile of encouragement.

They parked under the wide portico, grateful for the shelter from the steadily increasing snowfall. An ornate brass knocker was mounted on the front door of the house, but Jeff found the doorbell and pressed that instead.

A matronly woman in a severe brown dress with a white bib collar answered the door. "Can I help you?" she asked. "Is Mr. McCowan in, please?"

The woman frowned above her pince-nez bifocals. "Mr…"

"McCowan. Stuart McCowan. Doesn’t he live here?"

"Oh, dear me, Stuart. Of course. Do you have an appointment?"

"No, but I believe he’s expecting us; if you’ll just tell him it’s his friends from New York, I’m sure—"

"Friends?" Her frown deepened. "You’re friends of Stuart’s?"

"Yes, from New York."

The woman seemed flustered. "I’m afraid … Why don’t you come in out of the cold, have a seat for a moment? I’ll be right back."

Jeff and Pamela sat together on an overstuffed, high-backed settee in the musty entrance hall as the woman disappeared down a hallway.

"There is more than one of them," Pamela whispered. "He doesn’t even own this house, apparently. The maid only knew him by his first name. It’s some kind of commune, some—"

A tall, gray-haired man in a tweed suit emerged from the hallway, with the plump woman in the pince-nez glasses behind him. "You say you’re friends of Stuart McCowan’s?" he asked.

"We’re, ah … We’ve been in correspondence with him," Jeff said, standing.

"And who initiated this correspondence?"

"Look, we’re here at Mr. McCowan’s express invitation. We’ve come all the way from New York to see him, so if you could just let him know—"

"What was the nature of your correspondence with Stuart?"

"I don’t see that that’s any of your business. Why don’t you ask him?"

"Everything that concerns Stuart is my business. He is in my care."

Jeff and Pamela exchanged a quick look. "What do you mean, in your care? Are you a doctor? Is he ill?"

"Quite seriously. Why are you interested in his case? Are you journalists? I will not tolerate any invasion of my patients' privacy, and if you’re from some newspaper or magazine, I suggest you leave immediately."

"No, neither of us is a reporter." Jeff handed the man one of the business cards that identified him as a venture-capital consultant, and introduced Pamela as his associate.

The wary tension in the man’s face eased, and he gave an apologetic smile. "I’m so sorry, Mr. Winston; if I’d known it was a business matter … I’m Dr. Joel Pfeiffer. Please understand that I was only trying to protect Stuart’s interests. This is a very exclusive, very discreet facility, and any—"

"This isn’t Stuart McCowan’s home, then? This is some sort of hospital?"

"A treatment center, yes."

"Is it his heart? Are you a cardiologist?" The doctor frowned. "You’re not familiar with his background?"

"No, we’re not. Our connection with him is strictly … business-oriented. Investment matters."

Pfeiffer nodded understandingly. "Whatever his other problems, Stuart retains a tremendous sense of the market. I encourage his ongoing involvement in financial affairs. Of course, all his profits go into a trust now, but perhaps someday, if he continues to make progress…"

"Dr. Pfeiffer, are you saying—Is this a mental hospital?"

"Not a hospital. A private psychiatric unit, yes."

Christ, Jeff thought. So that’s it; McCowan said too much to the wrong people at some point, and they’ve committed him. Jeff glanced at Pamela, saw that she, too, had understood immediately. They’d both recognized the risk that too open an admission of their experiences might lead to an outsider’s assumption that they were insane; now here was living proof of that danger.

The doctor misunderstood their interchange. "I hope you won’t hold Stuart’s problems against him," he said with concern. "I assure you, his financial judgement has been impeccable throughout all this."

"That won’t be an issue," Jeff told him. "We understand it must have been … difficult for him, but we’re well aware of the sound management he’s continued to apply to his portfolio." The lie seemed to ease Pfeiffer’s worry. Jeff guessed that the McCowan trust was responsible for a large share of the operating costs of this place, perhaps even its initial endowment.

"Could we see him now?" Pamela asked. "If we’d known the circumstances in advance, naturally we would have arranged an appointment through you, but considering we’ve already come all this distance…"

"Of course," Dr. Pfeiffer assured her. "We have no set visiting hours here; you can see him right away. Marie," he said, turning to the gray-haired woman behind him, "could you have Stuart brought down to the sitting room, please?"

A pretty young woman in a lacy yellow dress sat in a window alcove of the room Dr. Pfeiffer showed them to. She was watching the snowfall, but turned expectantly as they walked in.

"Hello," the girl said. "Are you here to see me?"

"They’re here to see Stuart, Melinda," the doctor told her gently.

"That’s all right," she said with a cheerful smile. "Somebody’s coming to see me on Wednesday, aren’t they?"

"Yes, your sister will be here Wednesday."

"I could bring Stuart’s guests some tea and cake, though, couldn’t I?"

"If they’d like some, certainly."

Melinda descended from her white-backdropped perch. "Would you care for some tea and cake?" she asked politely.

"Yes, thank you," Pamela said. "That would be very thoughtful."

"I’ll go get it, then. The tea is in the kitchen and the cake is in my room. My mother made it. Will you wait?"

"Of course, Melinda. We’ll be right here."

She went out a side door of the room, and they could hear her rushing footsteps on the stairs. Jeff and Pamela examined their surroundings: comfortable leather chairs arranged in a semicircle around the brick fireplace, where two logs burned brightly; muted blue wallpaper dotted with a subtle fleur-de-lis pattern; a Tiffany lamp hanging in the opposite corner of the room, above a mahogany table where someone had half-completed a jigsaw I puzzle of a monarch butterfly. Plush, dark blue drapes were I opened to reveal a snowy hilltop vista.

"This is quite nice," Jeff said. "It doesn’t look at all like—"

"Like what it is?" The doctor smiled. "No, we try to maintain as normal, and as pleasant, an environment as possible. No bars on the windows, as you can see; none of the staff members wear uniforms. I believe the atmosphere speeds the recovery process and makes the transition back to everyday life much easier when a patient is ready to go home."

"What about Stuart? Do you think he’ll be ready to leave here soon?"

Pfeiffer pursed his lips, looked out the window at the steady snow. "He’s made excellent progress since his transfer here. I have high hopes for Stuart. There are complications, naturally, a number of legal hurdles to be—"

A slight, sallow-faced man in his early thirties came into the room, followed by a muscular young man in jeans and a gray wool sweater. The paler man wore blue slacks, well-polished Italian loafers, and an open-necked white dress shirt. His hair had begun to recede and was thinning somewhat on top.

"Stuart," the doctor said expansively. "You have unexpected visitors. Business associates, I believe, from New York. Jeff Winston, Pamela Phillips; Stuart McCowan."

The prematurely balding man smiled pleasantly, extended his hand. "At last," he said, gripping first Jeff’s hand, then Pamela’s. "I’ve waited a long time for this moment."

"I know how you feel," Jeff responded quietly.

"Well," Dr. Pfeiffer said, "I’ll leave you to your meeting. I’m afraid Mike, here, will have to stay. It’s a stipulation imposed on us by the court; I have no choice in the matter. But he won’t be in your way. You can speak as privately as you wish."

The burly attendant nodded, took a seat at the table beneath the Tiffany lamp, and began working on the jigsaw puzzle as the doctor left the room.

"Have a seat," Stuart said, indicating the chairs by the fireplace.

"God," Jeff said with immediate sympathy, "how awful this must be for you."

Stuart frowned. "It’s not so bad. Much, much better than some of the other places."

"I don’t mean the place itself, I mean the fact that this has happened to you at all. We’ll do everything we can to get you out of here as soon as possible. I have an excellent attorney in New York; I’ll see to it that he’s on a plane out here tomorrow morning. He can straighten this out, I know."

"I appreciate your concern. It’ll take awhile, though."

"How did you—"

"Tea and cake," Melinda announced brightly, coming through the door with a silver tray.

"Thank you, Melinda," Stuart said. "That’s very sweet of you. I’d like you to meet some friends of mine, Jeff and Pamela. They’re from my own time, from the 1980s."

"Oh," the girl said happily, "Stuart’s told me all about the future. About Patty Hearst and the SLA, and what happened in Cambodia, and—"

"Let’s not talk about all that now," Jeff interrupted her, glancing over his shoulder at the attendant, who sat obliviously engrossed in the jigsaw puzzle. "Thanks for the refreshments. Here, I’ll take the tray."

"If you want any more, I’ll be in the front room. It was nice to meet you; can we talk about the future later?"

"Maybe," Jeff said tersely. The girl smiled and left the room. "Jesus, Stuart," Jeff said when she had gone. "You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have confided in her at all, let alone told her about us. How’s that going to look if she says anything to anybody?"

"No one really pays any attention to what we say in here. Hey, Mike," he called, and the attendant looked over. "Know who’s going to win the World Series three years running, starting in 1972? Oakland."

The attendant nodded blankly, went back to his puzzle.

"See what I mean?" Stuart grinned. "They don’t even listen. When the A’s start winning, he won’t remember I ever told him they would."

"I still don’t think it’s a good idea. It could make our efforts to get you out of here much more difficult."

The pale man shrugged. "That’s neither here nor there." He turned to Pamela. "You made Starsea, didn’t you?"

"Yes," she said with a smile. "It’s nice to know someone remembers it."

"Very, very well. I almost wrote you a letter after I saw that; I knew right away you must be a repeater, and the movie validated a lot of things I’d learned myself. It renewed my sense of purpose."

"Thank you. You mention the things you’ve learned. I wondered—have you … experienced the skew? The accelerating start dates of the replays, or repeats, as you think of them?"

"Yes," Stuart said. "This last one was almost a year late."

"Mine was a year and a half; Jeff’s was only three months. We’ve been thinking that, if we could plot an exact curve between the various starting times, we might be able to predict … how much time we’ll lose on the next cycle. But it would have to be very precise. Have you kept track of—"

"No, I haven’t been able to."

"If we all three compared notes, maybe it would jog your memory; we could at least start to narrow it down."

He shook his head. "It wouldn’t work. The first three times I began repeating, I was unconscious. In a coma."

"What?"

"I had a car accident in 1963—You did start coming back in 1963, didn’t you?" he asked, looking from Pamela to Jeff and back again.

"Yes," Jeff assured him. "Early May."

"Right. Well, that April I’d been in an accident, totaled my car. I was in a coma for eight weeks, and every time I’d wake up, I’d be repeating. I thought the coma had something to do with it, until this time. So I don’t know whether my—what did you call it? The difference in the start dates?"

"The skew."

"I don’t know whether my skew the first three times was a matter of hours or days or weeks. Or if there was any at all." The disappointment in Pamela’s face was evident, even to McCowan. "I’m sorry," he said. "I wish I could be of more help."

"It’s not your fault," she said. "I’m sure that must have been terrible for you, coming to in a hospital that way, and now—"

"It’s all part of the performance; I accept it."

"Performance? I don’t understand."

Stuart frowned quizzically at her. "You have been in touch with the ship, haven’t you?"

"I don’t know what you mean. What ship?"

"The Antarean ship. Come on, you did Starsea. I’m a repeater, too; you don’t have to play ignorant with me."

"We honestly don’t know what you’re talking about," Jeff told him. "Are you saying you’ve been in touch with the … people, or beings, who are responsible for all this? That they’re extraterrestrials?"

"Of course. My God, I just assumed … Then you haven’t been performing the appeasement?" His already wan face went whiter still.

Jeff and Pamela looked at each other, and at him, in confusion. They’d both considered the possibility that an alien intelligence might somehow be involved in the replays, but had never received the slightest indication that this was in fact the case.

"I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain all this from the beginning," Jeff said.

McCowan glanced at the still-impassive young man, who remained hunched over the jigsaw puzzle in the far corner of the room. He moved his chair closer to Jeff and Pamela, spoke in subdued tones.

"The repeating, or replaying—they don’t care anything about that," he said, jerking his head to indicate the attendant. "It’s the appeasement that gets them upset." He sighed, looked searchingly into Jeff’s eyes. "You really need to hear the whole story? From the start?"