Ken Grimwood - Replay

He cleared his throat, blinked away the memories. Maybe it would be best if he did do some chores today, kept himself physically occupied instead of just sitting in the cabin and thinking. There’d be enough of those kind of days ahead, anyway, what with winter—

Jeff cocked his ear, thought he heard an engine. No, couldn’t be. Nobody’d be fool enough to head out this way until spring, not unless Jeff had put out an emergency call on the shortwave. But there it was again, by God, a whine and a roar, louder, sounded as if it were headed right down his road.

He pulled on a down parka and a wool cap, stepped outside. Was there some trouble over at the Mazzinis' place? Somebody sick or hurt, a fire, maybe?

A glimmer of recognition flashed in his mind as the mud-spattered Land Rover made a hard left through his open gate; then he saw the driver’s straight blond hair, and he knew. " 'Morning," Pamela Phillips said, swinging a booted foot onto the running board of the rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle. "Hell of a driveway you’ve got."

"Don’t usually get much traffic."

"I’m not surprised," she said, hopping down from the cab. "Looks like one poor guy’s car hit a land mine back there, a long time ago."

"They tell me that was a man named Hector, George Hector. He had a portable still installed on that Model T during prohibition, kept moving it from place to place so he wouldn’t get caught. It blew up one night."

"What about Hector? Did he blow up with it?"

"He wasn’t hurt, apparently. Had to build another still, but he gave up on the portability idea. At least, that’s what they say."

"So much for innovative thinking, hmm?" She took a deep breath of the clean, cold mountain air, let it out slowly, looking at him. "Well. How have you been?"

"Not too bad. Yourself?"

"Pretty busy since I saw you last. That was … Jesus, three and a half years ago." She rubbed her hands briskly together. "Hey, is there anyplace around here a lady could get warm?"

"Sorry; come on in, I’ve got some coffee. You took me by surprise, that’s all."

She followed him into the cabin, pulled off her jacket, and took a chair by the stove as he poured the coffee. He held up the bottle of Myers’s with a questioning look, and Pamela nodded. He splashed a dollop of the rich gold liquid into her mug, handed it to her. She sipped the mixture, mimed approval with her mouth and eyebrows.

"How’d you find me?" he asked, settling into the chair across from her.

"Well, you told me the place was near Redding; my lawyer spoke to your broker in San Francisco, and he was kind enough to narrow it down a little more. When I got up here I asked around in town; took awhile before I found anybody who was willing to give me directions, though."

"They have a deep respect for privacy around here."

"So I gathered."

"A lot of people don’t like having somebody drive up on their land without warning. Especially if it’s a stranger."

"I’m not a stranger to you."

"Damn near," Jeff said. "I thought that was pretty much how we left it in Los Angeles."

She sighed, absentmindedly stroked the sheepskin collar of the faded denim jacket that she’d folded across her lap. "As much as we had in common, we were coming from opposite directions. We got pretty pissed off at each other, there at the end."

"Yeah, you could put it that way. Or you could say you were just too damned obstinate to see past your own obsessions, to—"

"Hey!" she snapped, setting the coffee mug down sharply next to the shortwave radio. "Don’t make this any harder for me than it is already, O.K.? I drove six hundred miles to see you. Now just hear me out."

"All right. Go ahead."

"Look, I know you’re surprised to see me today. But try to imagine how surprised I was when you showed up. You’d seen Starsea. You’d had time to speculate about me, and had come to the obvious conclusions. You knew I was probably a replayer, too, but I had no idea there was anybody else like me out there. I thought I’d found the only possible explanation for what was happening to me—to the world. I believed I was doing the right thing.

"Well, I still don’t know. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t; it’s a moot point now."

"Why?"

"Could I have another splash of rum in this? And maybe some more coffee?"

"Sure." He freshened both their mugs, sat back to listen.

"I’d already begun working on the screenplay for my next film when you came to L.A.; we had the shooting script ready by October. Naturally, budget wasn’t a problem. I signed Peter Weir to direct; he hadn’t made The Last Wave yet, so everybody thought I was crazy to use him." She smiled wryly, leaned forward with her long hands wrapped around the steaming mug. "The special-effects team I put together was interesting. First I hired John Whitney. By then he’d already done all the groundwork in computer-generated images, and a lot of his short films had focused on mandalas; I wanted that to be the central image in the film. I gave him free rein, set him up with one of the very first prototypes of the Cray supercomputer.

"Then I got hold of Douglas Trumbull, who’d done the special effects for 2001. I nudged him in the direction of inventing Showscan a few years earlier than he would have. We shot the whole film in that process, even though—"

"Wait a minute," Jeff interrupted, "what’s Showscan ?"

Pamela gave him a look of surprise, which contained a touch of wounded pride. "You haven’t seen Continuum?"

He shrugged apologetically. "It never showed in Redding."

"No; in this area, it played only in San Francisco and Sacramento. We had to specially adapt all the theaters."

"Why?"

"The Showscan process produces incredibly realistic images on a movie screen, but to get that effect you need special projection equipment. You know the basic principle of how motion pictures work, right? Twenty-four frames, twenty-four still pictures a second … As one image begins to fade on the retina, the next appears, creating an impression of fluid, unbroken movement. Persistence of vision, it’s called. Actually, there are forty-eight frames a second, because each of the images is repeated once, to help fool the eye. But of course it’s not really the eye that’s being tricked, it’s the brain. Even though we think we’re seeing uninterrupted motion on the screen, at some deeper, unconscious level we’re aware of the stops and starts. That’s one of the reasons video tape has a sharper, realer look than film; it’s recorded at thirty frames per second, so there are fewer gaps.

"Well, Showscan takes that process a step further. It’s shot at a full sixty frames a second, with no redundant frames. Trumbull used EEGs to monitor the brain waves of people watching film shot and projected at various rates, and that’s where the responses peaked. It appears that the visual cortex is programmed to perceive reality at that particular speed, in sixty bursts of visual input each second. So Showscan is like a direct conduit to the brain. It’s not 3-D; the effect is more subtle than that. The images seem to strike deep chords of recognition; they somehow resonate with authenticity.

"So, anyway, we shot the whole movie in Showscan, including all the computer-generated mandalas and Mandelbrot sets and other effects that the Whitneys and their team came up with. We filmed most of it at Pinewood Studios in London. The actors were all talented unknowns, mainly from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I didn’t want any star’s ego or presence to overshadow the theme of the film, its … message."

She finished her coffee, stared at the bottom of the heavy brown mug. "Continuum opened on June eleventh, worldwide. And it was a total failure."

Jeff frowned. "How do you mean that?"