Replay

FIFTEEN

"I grew up in Cincinnati," Stuart McCowan told them. "My father was a construction worker, but he was an alcoholic, so he wasn’t always able to find work. Then, when I was fifteen, he got drunk on a job and let a cable slip. He lost a leg, and after that the only money we had coming in was from my mother—she did piecework for a company that made police uniforms—and what I could pick up in tips as a bag boy at Kroger’s.

"My father always got after me about being so skinny and not very strong physically; he was a big, powerful man himself, had forearms half again as thick as Mike’s, there. After he lost the leg everything got even worse between us. He couldn’t stand the fact that, puny as I was, I was at least whole. I had to carry things for him sometimes, when he couldn’t manage both an armload of packages and his crutches. He hated that. He really got to despise me after a while, and the drinking got worse …

"I left home when I was eighteen; that was in 1954. Went west, out to Seattle. I wasn’t very strong, but my eyes and my hands were steady. I managed to find work at Boeing, learned to machine-tool some of the lighter aircraft parts, trim tabs and such. I met a girl out there, got married, had a couple of kids. It wasn’t so bad.

"Then I had my accident in the spring of '63, the one I told you about. I’d been drinking a little myself, not like my dad used to, but a few beers on the way home from work, and a shot or two once I got home, you know … and I was drunk when I hit that tree. Didn’t come to for eight weeks, and nothing was ever really the same after that. The concussion had screwed up my hand-eye coordination, so I couldn’t hack it at work anymore. It seemed like everything was happening to me just the way it had to my dad. I started drinking more, and yelling at my wife and kids … Finally she just packed up and moved out, took the children with her.

"I lost the house not long after that; the bank foreclosed. I went back out on the road, started drifting, drinking. Did that for almost twenty-five years. One of the homeless, as they call it in the eighties. But I always knew what I was—just a bum, a wino. I died in an alley in Detroit; didn’t even know how old I was then. I figured it out later, though; I was fifty-two.

"And then I woke up, back in that same hospital bed, coming out of my coma. Like I’d just dreamed all those bad years, and for the longest time I believed I actually had—I didn’t remember much of them, anyway. But I remembered enough, and pretty soon I could tell something really strange was going on."

McCowan looked at Jeff with a sudden sparkle in those eyes that had gone weary with telling the story of his first life. "You a baseball fan?" he asked. "Did you bet on the Series that year?"

Jeff grinned back at him. "I sure did."

"How much?"

"A lot. I’d bet on Chateaugay in the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont first, ran up a good stake."

"How much did you bet?" Stuart persisted.

"I had a partner then—not another replayer, just somebody I knew from school—and between us, we bet almost a hundred and a quarter."

"K?"

Jeff nodded, and McCowan let out a long, low whistle. "You hit the big time early," Stuart said. "Me, all I could scrape up was a couple hundred bucks, and my wife damn near left home early when she found out—but not after I got back twenty thousand; she wasn’t going anyplace then.

"So I kept on betting—just the big things, the obvious ones—heavyweight championships, Super Bowls, presidential elections, all the things that even a lifelong drunk couldn’t have forgotten how they came out. I stopped drinking, gave it up for good. Never have had so much as a beer since, not in all the repeats I’ve been through.

"We moved into a big house in Alderwood Manor, up in Snohomish County, north of Seattle. Bought a nice boat, kept it in the Shilshole Bay Marina; used to cruise up and down Puget Sound every summer, sometimes over to Victoria, B.C. Life of Riley, you know how it is. And then—then I started hearing from them."

"From … ?" Jeff left the question hanging. McCowan leaned forward in his chair, lowered his voice. "From the Antareans, the ones that are doing this."

"How did … they get in touch with you?" Pamela asked tentatively.

"Through the television set, at first. Usually during the news. That’s how I came to find out it was all a performance."

Jeff was growing increasingly edgy. "What was a performance?"

"Everything, all the stuff on the news. And the Antareans liked it so much, they just kept running it over and over again."

"What was it that they liked?" Pamela asked, frowning. "The gory stuff, the shooting and killing, all that. Vietnam; Richard Speck, who did those nurses in in Chicago; the Manson thing; Jonestown … and the terrorists—Jesus, yes, they really get off on the terrorists: Lod Airport, all the IRA bombings, the truck bomb at Marine headquarters in Beirut, on and on. They can’t get enough of it."

Jeff and Pamela exchanged a quick look, a brief nod. "Why?" Jeff asked McCowan. "Why do the extraterrestrials like violence here on earth so much?"

"Because they’ve grown weak themselves. They’re the first to admit it. For all their power, controlling space and time, they’re weak!" He slammed a thin fist down hard on the table, rattling the saucers and cups. Mike, the hefty attendant, looked over with raised eyebrows for a moment, but Jeff waved an O.K. signal, and the man went back to his jigsaw puzzle.

"None of them ever dies anymore," Stuart went on impassionedly, "and they’ve lost the killing genes, so there’s no more war or murder where they come from. But the animal part of their brains still needs all that, at least vicariously. That’s where we come in.

"We’re their entertainment, like television or movies. And this segment of the twentieth century is the best part, the most randomly bloody time of them all, so they keep playing it again and again. But the only people who know all this are the performers, the ones on stage: the repeaters. Manson is one of us, I know; I can see it in his eyes, and the Antareans have told me. Lee Harvey Oswald, too, and Nelson Bennett that time he got to Kennedy first. Oh, there’s a lot of us now."

Jeff kept his voice as calm, as kind, as possible when he spoke again. "But what about you and me and Pamela?" he asked, looking to evoke some remnant of rationality in the man. "We haven’t done all those terrible things; so why are we replaying, or repeating?"

"I’ve done my share of appeasement," McCowan stated proudly. "Nobody can accuse me of slacking off there."

Jeff felt suddenly ill, and didn’t want to ask the next question, the one that had to be asked. "… You’ve used that word before: appeasement. What do you mean by it?"

"Why, it’s our duty. All of us repeaters, we have to keep the Antareans from getting bored. Or else they’ll shut it all off, and then the world will be over. We have to appease them, entertain them, so they’ll keep watching."

"And—how have you done that yourself? Appeased them?"

"I always start off with the little girl in Tacoma. I do her with a knife. That one’s easy, and I never get caught. Then I move on, do a couple of hookers in Portland, maybe Vancouver … never too many close to home, but I travel a lot. Overseas, sometimes, but mostly I do them here in the states: hitchhikers in Texas, street kids in L.A. and San Francisco … Don’t think I’ll try Wisconsin again; I got caught here pretty early this time. But I’ll be out in four or five years. They always say I’m crazy, and I end up in one of these places, but I’ve gotten real good at fooling doctors and parole boards. I always get out eventually, and then I can go back to performing the appeasement."

Pamela leaned against the doorframe of the car, sobbing, as they drove through the swirling snow.

"It’s my fault!" she cried, the tears flowing unchecked down her face. "He said it was Starsea that—that gave him a sense of purpose. With everything I’d hoped to accomplish through that film, all I ended up doing was encouraging a mass murderer!" Jeff kept his hands tight on the wheel of the rented Plymouth, negotiating the icy road. "It wasn’t just the movie. He’d started killing long before that, from the very first replay. He was insane to begin with; I don’t know if it was that accident he had, or the shock of replaying, or a combination of the two. Maybe a lot of different factors; there’s no way to tell. But for God’s sake, don’t blame yourself for what he’s done."

"He killed a little girl! He keeps on killing her, stabbing her, every time!"

"I know. But it’s not your fault, understand?"

"I don’t care whose fault it is. We’ve got to stop him."

"How?" Jeff asked, squinting to see the road through the enveloping sheets of snow.

"Make sure he never gets out this time. Get to him next time before he starts killing."

"If they decide he’s cured, they’re going to release him no matter what we say. Why should the doctors, or the courts, listen to us? Do we tell them we’re replayers, just like McCowan, only we’re sane and he isn’t? You know how far that would get us."

"Then next time…"

"We go to the police in Seattle, or Tacoma, and tell them this solid citizen, with his expensive suburban house and his yacht, is about to start roaming the country, murdering people at random. It wouldn’t work, Pamela; you know it wouldn’t."

"But we’ve got to do something!" she pleaded.

"What should we do? Kill him? I couldn’t do that; neither could you."

She wept quietly, her eyes closed against the deathly whiteness of the winter storm. "We can’t just sit back and let it happen," she whispered at last.

Jeff cautiously turned left onto the highway heading back toward Madison. "I’m afraid we have to," he said. "We have to just accept it."

"How can you accept something like that!" she snapped. "Innocent people dying, being murdered by this maniac, when we know in advance that he’s going to do it!"

"We’ve always accepted it, from the very beginning: Manson, Berkowitz, Gacey, Buono and Bianchi … that sort of aimless savagery is part of this time period. We’ve become inured to it. I don’t even remember half the names of all the serial killers who’ll crop up over the next twenty years, do you?"

Pamela was silent, her eyes red from crying, her teeth tightly clenched.

"We haven’t tried to intervene in all those other murders, have we?" Jeff asked. "It’s never even occurred to us to do so, except that first time when I tried to stop the Kennedy assassination, and that was something of a very different order. We—not just you and me, but everyone in this society—we live with brutality, with haphazard death. We almost ignore it, except when it seems to threaten us directly. Worse, some people even find it entertaining, a vicarious thrill. That’s eighty percent, at least, of what the news business is all about: supplying America with its daily fix of tragedy, of other people’s blood and torment.

"We are the Antareans of Stuart McCowan’s demented fantasies. He and all the other subhuman butchers out there are indeed performers on a stage, but the gore-hungry audience is right here, not somewhere in outer space. And there’s nothing you or I can ever do to change that or to stem even the smallest trickle of that blood tide. We simply do what we’ve always done and always will: accept it, put it out of our minds as best we can, and go on with the rest of life. Get used to it, just as we do with all the other hopeless, inescapable pain."

The ad continued to draw responses, though none bore fruit. In 1970, they cut back on the number of publications in which it appeared; by the middle of the decade it was being printed only once a month, in fewer than a dozen of the largest-circulation newspapers and magazines.

Their apartment on Bank Street, in the west Village, came to be dominated by rows of filing cabinets. Jeff and Pamela saved even the most vaguely promising replies to the ad, along with clippings from the voluminous stacks of periodicals they pored over daily in search of potential anachronisms that might indicate the handiwork of another replayer somewhere in the world. It was frequently hard to be certain, one way or the other, about whether some minor event or product or artwork had or had not existed in the previous replays; they had never before focused so intently on such minutiae. Many times they contacted inventors or entrepreneurs whose indifferently publicized creations were unfamiliar to them; without exception, the apparent leads proved false.

In March of 1979, Jeff and Pamela found this story in the Chicago Tribune:

Pamela pulled the rubber tubing tighter around Jeff’s arm, showed him which vein to hit and how to slide the hypodermic needle in with the bevel upward and the slender shaft parallel and lateral to the vein.

"What about psychological addiction, though?" he asked. "I know our bodies will be free of it when we come back, but won’t we still crave the sensation?"

She shook her head as she watched him make the practice injection, the harmless saline solution flowing smoothly into the bulging blue vein in the crook of his elbow. "Not if we only use it a couple of times," she said. "Wait until the morning of the eighteenth; just do enough to keep you sedated. Then double the dosage to the amount I showed you and inject that a few minutes before one o’clock. You should be unconscious by the time … cardiac arrest occurs."

Jeff emptied the syringe into his arm, waited a beat before he withdrew the needle. He tossed the hypodermic into the wastebasket, swabbed the injection site with a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol. Two matching leather kits lay on the coffee table; each contained a supply of fresh sterile needles and syringes, a coiled length of rubber tubing, a small bottle of alcohol, a box of cotton wads, and four glass vials filled with pharmaceutical-quality heroin. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain the drug and the equipment with which to use it; Jeff’s stockbroker had recommended a reliable cocaine dealer, and the dealer was equally well stocked for the growing upper-middle-class heroin trade.

Jeff stared at the expensively tooled death kits, looked up at Pamela’s face. There was a delicate tracery of fine lines across her forehead. The last time he’d known her at this age, the tiny wrinkles had been at the corners of her mouth and eyes; her forehead had been as smooth as when she was a girl. The difference between a lifetime of happiness and one of almost unrelieved anxiety was etched into the patterns of her skin.

"We didn’t do a very good job of it, did we?" he said glumly.

She tried to smile, faltered, gave it up. "No. I guess we didn’t."

"Next time…" he began, and his voice trailed off. Pamela reached out to him, and they squeezed each other’s hand.

"Next time," she said, "we’ll pay more attention to our own needs, day to day."

He nodded. "We kind of lost control this time, just let it slip away."

"I got carried away with the search for other replayers. It was kind of you to indulge me so, but—"

"I wanted to succeed in that as much as you did," he interrupted, bringing her hand to his lips. "It was something we had to do; it’s no one’s fault it turned out the way it did."

"I suppose not … but looking back, those years seem so stagnant, so passive. We seldom even left New York, for fear of missing the contact we kept waiting for."

Jeff pulled her to him, put his arms around her. "Next time we take charge again," he promised. "We’ll be the ones who make things happen—For us."

They rocked together gently on the sofa, neither saying what was most deeply on their minds: that they had no way of knowing how long it would be before Pamela would rejoin him after this new death … or even if the next replay would enable them to be together again at all.

The heroin sleep was interrupted with shocking abruptness. Jeff Found himself surrounded on all sides by cascading sheets of white-hot flame, a cylindrical Niagara of milky fire at whose core he was inexplicably suspended. At the same time, his ears were assaulted by the blaring trumpets and exaggerated harmonies of a mariachi band performing, at excruciating volume, "Feliz Navidad."

Jeff had no memory of having died this time, no recollection of the agony he had always felt with each stopping of his heart. The drug had served its anesthetic purpose, but it allowed him no easy transition from that dullard slumber to this startling and unknown environment. The new young body he now inhabited again had not a trace of the narcotic in its system, and he was forced to come fully awake without a moment’s groggy respite.

The encircling fire-fall, and the music, besieged his battered senses, held him in a terrifying limbo of disorientation. There was no light in this place, save from that burning cataract around him, but against its brilliant phosphorescence he now perceived the silhouettes of other people: sitting, standing, dancing. He himself was seated, at a small table; there was an icy drink in his shaking hand. He sipped it, tasted the salty bite of a margarita.

"Damn!" someone shouted in his ear, above the clamor of the music. "Isn’t that a sight? Wonder what it looks like from outside."

Jeff set the drink down, turned to see who had spoken. In the white glow of the down-rushing flames he could make out the sharp-boned features of Martin Bailey, his roommate from Emory. He looked around again, his eyes growing accustomed to the bizarrely incandescent lighting from all sides of the large room. It was a bar or nightclub; laughing couples sat at dozens of other small tables, the mariachi band next to the dance floor was costumed in outrageous finery, and brightly colored pinatas in the shape of donkeys and bulls hung from the ceiling.

Mexico City. Christmas vacation, 1964; he’d driven down here with Martin that year, on a spur-of-the-moment trip. Desert roads with mangy cattle roaming in the two-lane highway, mountain passes of blind curves, with Pemex gasoline trucks passing the Chevy in the cottony fog. A whorehouse in the Zona Rosa, the long climb up the stone steps of the Pyramid of the Sun.

The tumbling radiance outside the windows of this place was a fireworks show, he realized, streams of liquid pyrotechnics pouring from the roof of the hotel atop which the nightclub perched. Martin was right; it must be spectacular from the streets below. The hotel would look like a fiery needle, blazing thirty or forty stories up into the city’s nighttime sky.

What was this, Christmas Eve, New Year’s? Those were the nights for this sort of display in Mexico. Whichever, it was the end of '64, beginning of '65. He’d lost another fourteen months on this replay; as much, now, as Pamela had on her last one. God knows what that might mean for her this time, and for them.

Martin grinned, gave him an exuberant, friendly punch on the shoulder. Yeah, they’d had a good time on this trip, Jeff remembered. Nothing had gone sour; it didn’t seem then as if anything ever could go wrong in either of their lives. Good times today, good times ahead—that was how they’d seen it. At least Jeff had managed to prevent his old friend’s suicide each replay, whatever his own circumstances. Even though he couldn’t stop Martin from marrying badly and no longer had a multinational corporation where he could offer his old roommate a lifetime position, he’d always helped Martin avert eventual bankruptcy by setting him up with some excellent stocks early on.

Which raised the subject of what Jeff was going to do for immediate cash himself; his old standby, the '63 World Series, was in the record books by now, and there weren’t many other bets even approaching the short-term profitability of that one. The pro football season was already over, and they wouldn’t start playing Super Bowls for another two years. If this were New Year’s Eve, he might or might not have time to arrange a bet from Mexico City on Illinois over Washington in the Rose Bowl tomorrow. It was possible that he’d have to be satisfied for the time being with what he could eke out of the basketball schedule now underway, but he’d never be able to get any decent odds on the Boston Celtics, not in their eighth straight NBA championship season.

The fire-fall outside the windows trickled to a sputtering halt, and the dim lights of the nightclub came back up as the band broke into "Cielito Lindo." Martin was checking out a svelte blonde a couple of tables over, and he raised an eyebrow to ask if Jeff had any interest in her red-haired friend. The girls were tourists from the Netherlands, Jeff recalled; he and Martin wouldn’t score, but they’d spend—had spent—a pleasant enough evening drinking and dancing with the Dutch girls. Sure, he shrugged to Martin; why not?

As far as the money problem went, well, money didn’t matter that much to him anyway, not at this point. All he needed was enough to keep him going for … however long it took until Pamela showed up. From here on out, it was just a waiting game.

Pam was stoned; she was flat-out wrecked. This was really some killer weed Peter and Ellen had come up with, the best she’d smoked since the stuff that guy had given her at the Electric Circus last month, and that had probably seemed better than it actually was because of all the strobes and the music and the fire eaters on the dance floor and everything. The music was great right now, too, she thought as Clapton started that dynamite riff going into "Sunshine of Your Love"; she just wished the little portable stereo could play it louder, that was all.

She curled her bare feet up under her thighs, leaned back against the big Peter Max poster that covered the wall behind her bed, and got into the back cover of the "Disraeli Gears" album.

That eye was really something, with the flowers growing right out of its lashes, and the names of the songs just barely visible over the white part and the iris … and, God, there was another eye. The more you looked it seemed like there was nothing but eyes; that was all you noticed. Even the flowers looked like they had eyes, slanted, like a cat’s eyes, or an Oriental’s …

"Hey, check this out!" Peter called. She glanced up; he and Ellen were watching Lawrence Welk with the sound turned down. Pam stared at the black-and-white scene of old couples dancing, a polka or something, and sure enough, it looked just like they were moving in time to the record. Then the picture switched to Welk waving his little baton up and down, and she started laughing; Welk was keeping right to the beat, as if the old fart were conducting Cream on "Dance the Night Away."

"Come on, you guys, let’s go down the road," Ellen insisted, bored with the television. "Everybody’s gonna be there tonight." She’d been trying to get them motivated to get out of the room and make the trek to Adolph’s for the past hour. She was right: It would be a good night at the college bar; there was a lot to celebrate. Earlier in the week, Eugene McCarthy had damn near beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, and just today, Bobby Kennedy had announced that he’d changed his mind, he was going to run for the Democratic nomination after all.

Pam put on her boots, grabbed a thick wool scarf and her old navy surplus pea jacket from the hook on the door. Ellen took her time negotiating the circular staircase leading down to the lobby; she’d started tripping off on the old mansion-turned-dorm’s being Tara, from Gone With the Wind. By the time they got outside, Peter had joined in the game. He wandered off into the adjoining formal garden and started declaiming lines real and imagined from the movie in a heavy mock-southern accent. But the March night was too biting to keep up the playful stoned pretense for long, and soon the three of them were crunching through the snow toward the warmly inviting wooden building at the edge of campus, across from the Annandale post office.

Adolph’s was packed with the usual Saturday-night crowd. Everybody who hadn’t gone to New York for the weekend ended up here sooner or later; it was the only bar within walking distance of the school, and the only one on this side of the Hudson where the shaggy, unconventionally dressed Bard students could relax and feel totally welcome. There was a serious town-gown conflict in the generally conservative region north of Poughkeepsie; the permanent residents, young and old, despised the flamboyant nonconformity of the Bard students' appearance and behavior, and told tales—many of them truer than they could ever imagine, Pam thought with amusement—of rampant drug use and sexual promiscuity on campus.

Sometimes the young townie guys would come into Adolph’s, drunk, trying to pick up "hippie chicks." There weren’t any townies in evidence tonight, Pam noted with relief, except for that one weird guy who’d been hanging around campus all year, but he seemed O.K. He was a loner and very quiet; he’d never given anybody any trouble. Sometimes she felt as if he were watching her, not quite following her around or anything, but purposely showing up a couple of times a week in some place where she’d probably be: the library, the gallery at the art department, here … He’d never bothered her, though, never even spoke to her. Sometimes he’d smile and nod, and she’d kind of smile back a little, just enough to acknowledge that they recognized each other. Yeah, he was O.K.; he’d even be attractive if he let his hair grow.

Sly and the Family Stone were on the jukebox, "Dance to the Music," and the dance floor in the front room was packed. Pam and Ellen and Peter squirmed their way through the crowd, looking for a place to sit.

Pam was still stoned. They’d smoked another joint on the walk down from campus, and the colorfully raucous scene in the bar suddenly struck her as a painting, or a series of paintings. To highlight a twirling fringed vest here, a swirl of long black hair there, the faces and the bodies and the music and noise … yes, she’d like to try to capture on canvas the sound of this pleasantly familiar place, translate it visually, the way that synesthetic transformation so often happened in her mind when she was this stoned. She looked around the bar, picking out people and details of scenes, and her eyes focused on that strange guy she was always running into.

"Hey," she said, nudging Ellen, "you know who I’d like to paint?"

"Who?"

"That guy over there."

Ellen looked in the direction Pam had discreetly indicated. "Which one? You don’t mean that straight guy, do you? The townie?"

"Yeah, him. There’s something about his eyes; they’re … I don’t know, it’s like they’re ancient or something, like he’s way older than he really is, and has seen so much…"

"Sure," Ellen said with pointed sarcasm. "He’s probably some ex-Marine, and he’s seen lots of dead babies and women he shot in Vietnam."

"You talking about the Tet offensive again?" Peter asked.

"No, Pam’s got the hots for some townie."

"Kinky." Peter laughed.

Pam blushed angrily. "I never said any such thing. I just said he had interesting eyes and I’d like to paint them."

"Dock of the Bay" came on the jukebox, and most of the dancers found their way back to their tables. Pam wondered who had played the mournfully contemplative Otis Redding tune, such an ironic self-epitaph of the singer, who had died before the record was released. Maybe it was that guy with the strange eyes. It seemed like the kind of music he might be into.

"Wastin' tiiime…" Peter sang along with the record, then grinned mischievously. He took off his watch, dropped it into the half-full pitcher of beer with a theatrical flourish. "We drown time!" he declared, and raised his glass, clinked it against the others'.

"I hear Bobby’s a head," Ellen commented, apropos of nothing, when they had drunk the toast. "Gets his grass from the same dealer who supplies the Stones when they’re over here."

They were on one of Peter’s favorite topics now. "They say R. J. Reynolds has secretly … what’s the word, patented? All the good brand names."

"Trademarked."

"Right, right, trademarked. Acapulco Gold, Panama Red … the cigarette people have got all the good names, just in case." Pam listened to the familiar rumors, nodded with interest. "I wonder what the packs would look like, and the ads."

"Paisley cartons," Ellen said with a smile.

"Get Hendrix to do the TV commercials." Peter put in. They started cracking up, getting into one of those endless communal stoned laughing jags that Pam loved so much. She was laughing so hard the tears were coming to her eyes, she was getting giddy, hyperventilating, she—

Where the hell was she this time, Pamela wondered, and why was she so dizzy? She blinked away an inexplicable film of tears, took in the new environment. Jesus Christ, it was Adolph’s.

"Pam?" Ellen asked, suddenly noticing that her friend had stopped laughing. "You O.K.?"

"I’m fine," Pamela said, taking a long, slow breath. "You’re not freaking out or anything?"

"No." She closed her eyes, tried to concentrate, but her mind wouldn’t stay still; it kept drifting. The music was extremely loud, and this place, even her clothes, reeked of—She was stoned, she realized. Usually had been when she went to Adolph’s, "down the road," they used to call it, ease on down, ease on down …

"Have another beer," Peter said, concern in his voice. "You look weird; you sure you’re all right?"

"I’m positive." She hadn’t become friends with Peter and Ellen until after winter field period of her freshman year. Peter had graduated, and Ellen had dropped out and moved to London with him, when Pamela was a sophomore; that meant this had to be 1968 or 1969.

A new record started playing on the jukebox, Linda Ronstadt singing "Different Drum." No, Pamela thought, not just Linda Ronstadt, the Stone Poneys. Keep it all straight, she told herself, reacclimate slowly, don’t let the marijuana in your brain make this more difficult than it already is. Don’t try to make any decisions or even talk too much right now. Wait’ll you come down, wait until—

There he was, my God, sitting not twenty feet away, looking right at her. Pamela gaped in disbelief at the incongruous, impossibly wonderful sight of Jeff Winston sitting quietly amid the youthful din of her old college hangout. She saw him register the change in her eyes, and he smiled a warm, slow smile of welcome and assurance.

"Hey, Pam?" Ellen said. "How come you’re crying? Listen, maybe we better go back to the dorm."

Pamela shook her head, put a reassuring hand on her friend’s arm. Then she stood from the table and walked across the room, across the years, into Jeff’s waiting embrace.

"Tattooed lady." Jeff chuckled, kissing the pink rose on her inner thigh. "I don’t remember that being there before."

"It’s not a tattoo, it’s a decal. They wash off."

"Do they lick off?" he asked, looking up at her with a wicked gleam.

She smiled. "You’re welcome to try."

"Maybe later," he said, sliding up to prop himself beside her on the pillows. "I kind of enjoy you as a flower child."

"You would," she said, and poked him in the ribs. "Pour us some more champagne."

He reached for the bottle of Mumm’s on the bedside table, refilled their glasses.

"How did you know when I’d start replaying?" Pamela asked.

"I didn’t. I’ve been watching you for months; I rented the house here in Rhinebeck at the beginning of the school year, and I’ve been waiting ever since. It was frustrating, and I was starting to get impatient; but the time here helped me come to terms with some old memories. I used to live just up the river, in one of the old estates, when I was with Diane … and my daughter Gretchen. I always thought I’d never be able to come back here, but you gave me a reason to, and I’m glad I did. Besides which, I enjoyed seeing you the way you really were in this time, originally."

She grimaced. "I was a college hippie. Leather fringe and tie dye. I hope you never listened to me talking to my friends; I probably said far out a lot."

Jeff kissed the tip of her nose. "You were cute. Are cute," he corrected, brushing her long, straight hair away from her face. "But I couldn’t help imagining all these kids fifteen years from now, wearing three-piece suits and driving BMW’s to the office."

"Not all of them," she said. "Bard turned out a lot of writers, actors, musicians … and," she added with a rueful grin, "my husband and I didn’t have a BMW; we drove an Audi and a Mazda."

"Point granted." He smiled, and took a sip of champagne. They lay together contentedly, but Jeff could see the gravity beneath her cheerful expression.

"Seventeen months," he said.

"What?"

"I lost seventeen months this time. That’s what you were wondering, wasn’t it?"

"I’d been wanting to ask," she conceded. "I couldn’t help but wonder. My skew is up to … This is March, you said? '68?"

Jeff nodded. "Three and a half years."

"Counting from last time. It’s five years off from the first few replays. Jesus. Next time I could—"

He put a finger to her lips. "We were going to concentrate on this time, remember?"

"Of course I do," she said, snuggling closer to him beneath the covers.

"And I’ve been thinking about that," he told her. "I’ve had awhile to consider it, and I think I’ve come up with a plan, of sorts."

She pulled her head back, looked at him with an interested frown. "What do you mean?"

"Well, first I thought about approaching the scientific community with all this—the National Science Foundation, some private research organization … whatever group might seem most appropriate, maybe the physics department at Princeton or MIT, somebody doing research on the nature of time."

"They’d never believe us."

"Exactly. That’s been the stumbling block all along. And yet we’ve done our part to maintain that obstacle, by remaining so secretive each time."

"We’ve had to be discreet. People would think we were insane. Look at Stuart McCowan; he—"

"McCowan is insane—he’s a killer. But it’s no crime to make predictions of events; nobody would lock us up for doing that. And once the things we predict have actually happened, we’ll have proven our knowledge of the future. They’d have to listen to us. They’d know something real—unexplained, but real—was going on."

"How would we get in the front door to begin with, though?" Pamela objected. "No one at a place like MIT would even bother looking at any list of predictions we gave them. They’d lump us in with the UFO fanatics and the psychics the minute we told them what we had in mind."

"That’s just the point. We don’t approach them; they come to us."

"Why should—You’re not making sense," Pamela said, shaking her head in confusion.

"We go public," Jeff explained.