Ken Grimwood - Replay

"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."