Ken Grimwood - Replay

"So?" Jeff asked as they approached the tightly shuttered house, an inviting column of smoke rising from its red brick chimney. "What’s the latest word?"

"Nothing definitive from Bethesda yet," Hedges muttered beneath the upturned collar of his raincoat. "They’d like to do some more tests."

"We’ve had all the medical tests imaginable," Jeff said impatiently, "even before you people got involved. That’s not the crux of it; it’s something beyond us, something on the cosmic level, or the subatomic. What have the physicists come up with?"

Hedges stepped onto the wooden porch, shook the beads of water from his hat and coat like an overgrown dog. "They’re working on it," he told Jeff vaguely. "Berget and Campagna at Gal Tech think it could have to do with pulsars, something about massive neutrino formation … but they need more data."

Pamela was waiting in the oak-beamed living room, curled on the sofa in front of a hearty fire. "Hot cider?" she asked, raising her mug and tilting her head with a questioning look. "Love some," Jeff said, and Hedges nodded his assent. "I’ll get it, Miss Phillips," said one of the dark-suited young men who stood permanent watch over this secluded compound. Pamela shrugged, pulled the sleeves of her bulky sweater up over her wrists, and took a sip from the steaming cup.

"Russell says the physicists may be making some progress," Jeff told her. She brightened, her fire-flushed cheeks radiant against the bunched blue wool of her sweater and the flaxen sheen of her hair.

"What about the skew?" she asked. "Any extrapolation yet?"

Hedges twisted his mouth around a fresh, dry cigarette, lowered his eyelids in a cynical sidelong gaze. Jeff recognized the expression, knew by now that the man held little credence in the notion that they had lived before, would live again. It didn’t matter. Hedges and the rest could think whatever they liked, so long as other minds, perceptive and persistent scientific minds, continued to focus on the phenomenon that Jeff knew to be all too real.

"They say the data points are too uncertain," Hedges said. "Best they can come up with is a probable range."

"And what’s that range?" Pamela asked quietly, her fingers tense and white around the hot mug.

"Two to five years for Jeff; five to ten in your case. Unlikely it would be any lower than that, they tell me, but the high end could be greater if the curve continues to steepen."

"How much greater?" Jeff wanted to know.

"No way to predict."

Pamela sighed, her breath rising and falling with the wind outside. "That’s no better than a guess," she said. "We could have done as well on our own."

"Maybe some of the new tests will—"

"To hell with the new tests!" Jeff barked. "They’ll be just as inconclusive as all the others, won’t they?"

The taciturn young man in the dark suit returned to the living room with two thick mugs. Jeff took his, stirred it angrily with a fragrant cinnamon stick.

"They want some more tissue samples at Bethesda," Hedges said after a careful sip of the hot cider. "One of the teams there thinks the cellular/structure may—"

"We’re not going back to Bethesda," Jeff told him with finality. "They have plenty to work with as it is."

"There’s no need for you to return to the hospital itself," Hedges explained. "All they need is a few simple skin scrapings. They sent a kit; we can do it right here."

"We’re going back to New York. I have a month’s worth of messages I haven’t even seen; there might be something useful among them. Can you get us a plane out of Andrews tonight?"

"I’m sorry…"

"Well, if there’s no government transport available, we’ll just take a commercial flight. Pamela, call Eastern Airlines. Ask them what time—"

The man who had brought the cider took a step forward, one hand poised before his open jacket. A second guard came in through the front door as if silently signaled, and a third appeared on the staircase.

"That’s not what I meant," Hedges said carefully. "I’m afraid we … can’t allow you to leave. At all."

"… attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran but were repulsed by units of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, who have surrounded the American diplomatic outpost since last February. At least a hundred and thirty-two Iranian revolutionaries are believed to have been killed in the fighting, and U.S. casualties stand at seventeen dead, twenty-six wounded. President Reagan has ordered new air strikes against rebel bases in the Mountains east of Tabriz, where the Ayatollah Khomeini is believed to be—"

"Turn the damned thing off," Jeff told Russell Hedges.

"… the revolutionary high command. Here in the United States, the death toll from last week’s terrorist bombing at Madison Square Garden has now reached six hundred and eighty-two, and a communique from the so-called November Squad threatens continued attacks on American soil until all U.S. forces are withdrawn from the Middle East. Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko has declared his nation’s sympathy with the freedom fighters of the Islamic Jihad, and Gromyko says the presence of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Arabian Sea is tantamount to— "

Jeff leaned forward, snapped off the television set. Hedges shrugged, popped a peppermint Life Saver in his mouth, and fiddled with a pencil, holding it the way he had always held his once-ubiquitous cigarettes.

"What about the Soviet buildup in Afghanistan?" Hedges asked. "Are they planning a confrontation with our forces in Iran?"

"I don’t know," Jeff said sullenly.

"How strong are Khomeini’s followers? Can we keep the shah in power, at least until next year’s elections?"

"I don’t fucking know!" Jeff exploded. "How could I? Reagan wasn’t even president before, not in 1979; this was Jimmy Carter’s mess to deal with, and we never sent troops to Iran. Everything’s changed. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen now."

"Surely you must have some idea whether—"

"I don’t. I have no idea at all." He looked at Pamela, who sat glaring at Hedges. Her face was drawn, pale; in these few years it had lost its feminine roundness, become almost as angular as Jeff’s own. He took her hand, pulled her to her feet. "We’re going for a walk," he told Hedges.

"I still have some more questions."

"Stuff your questions. I’m all out of answers."

Hedges sucked at the Life Saver, regarded Jeff with those cold blue eyes. "All right," he said. "We’ll talk more over dinner."

Jeff started to tell him yet again that it wouldn’t do any good, that the world was off on a strange and undefined new course now, about which neither he nor Pamela could offer any advice, but he knew the protestation would be pointless. Hedges still assumed they had some sort of psychic ability, that they could predict future events based on any set of current circumstances. As their foreknowledge had begun to dissipate in the face of drastically altered world events, he’d silently but clearly blamed them for withholding information. Even the sodium pentothal and polygraph sessions they’d been subjected to yielded little useful data these days, but they’d stopped objecting to the drug interrogations; maybe, they thought, as the value of their answers declined they’d be left alone, perhaps someday even be released from this lengthy "protective custody." That was an unlikely hope, they both knew, though they still clung to it; it was better than the alternative, which was to accept the obvious truth that they were here to stay until they died again.

The water was calm and blue today, and as they walked along the dunes they could see the hump of Poplar Island off the Eastern Shore. A clutch of boats trolled among the marker buoys, working the rich Chesapeake Bay oyster beds. Jeff and Pamela took what comfort they could from the deceptive serenity of the familiar scene and did their best to ignore the pairs of dark-suited men who kept pace a steady twenty yards ahead of and behind them.