beneath the hem of her skirt. Her cheeks flushed as he tenderly stroked her inner thigh; she glanced around the dome car to see if anyone was looking at them, but the eyes of the other passengers remained fixed on the passing spectacle outside the train.
Jeff’s hand moved higher, touched moist silk. Pamela let out a tiny groan as he gently pressed her cleft, and she arched back against the leather seat. He slowly pulled his hand away, letting the tips of his fingers trail lightly down her leg.
'Want to take a walk?' he asked, and she nodded. He took her hand, led her out of the observation car and toward the rear of the train. Between the club car and the diner they paused, maintaining a precarious balance together as they stood and kissed on the swaying metal platform. The wind whipping through the open window was at least fifteen degrees cooler than when they’d left Vancouver that morning, and Pamela shivered in his arms. Their sleeping car was empty; everyone else, it seemed, had left to seek the panoramic vistas of the dome car or the diner. Once inside their double roommette, Jeff lowered one of the foldaway beds and Pamela reached to draw the windowshade closed. He stopped her, pulled her to him.
'Let’s let the scenery inspire us,' he said.
She resisted, teasing. 'If we leave it open, we’ll be part of the scenery ourselves.'
'Nobody to watch us except a few birds and deer. I want to see you in the sunlight.'
Pamela stepped back from him. Framed against the changing backdrop of snow-fed rivers and sheer glacial cliffs, she undid her blouse, slipped it offher arms. She plucked at the belt of her skirt, and the garment fell softly to the floor.
'Why aren’t you looking at the scenery?' she asked with a smile.
'I am.'
She slid off the rest, stood nude before the rugged wilderness rushing past outside. Jeff’s eager gaze swept her body as he undressed, and then he moved to her, was joined with her, was pressing her urgently into the soft chair beside the open window as the afternoon sun flickered across their faces and the rumbling wheels on the tracks below rocked them with a steady rhythm.
The train took four days and nights to reach Montreal, and a week later they rode it back west again.
'What about the Middle Ages?' Pamela asked. 'Imagine what that would have been like, the dreadful sameness of it, over and over.'
'The Middle Ages weren’t quite as totally dreary as most people assume. I still think a major war, and the years leading up to it, would have been far worse; picture always coming back to Germany in 1939.'
'At least you could have left, gone to the U.S. and known you’d be safe.'
'Not if you were Jewish. What if you were already in Auschwitz, say?'
It was their favorite topic this month: what the experience of replaying would have been like for someone in another historical period, how best to have dealt with a vastly different set of repeated world events and circumstances than those they knew so well.
Once the floodgates of conversation had been opened between them, it seemed there was no end of things to talk about: speculations, plans, memories … They had gone back over their own varied lives in detail, expanding on the brief personal histories they’d recounted to each other during that first wary meeting in Los Angeles in 1974. Jeff had told her all about the empty madness of his time with Sharla, the healing grace of his years alone in Montgomery Creek. She, in turn, had imparted a vivid sense of the dedication she had given to her medical career, her frustration at knowing she could never again put all that training to full use, and the subsequent creative exhilaration of making Starsea. A tall, bearded young black man roller-skated past them, deftly weaving his way along the crowded East Fifty-ninth Street sidewalk toward the entrance to Central Park. Giorgio Moroder’s pulsating arrangement of Blondie’s 'Call Me' blared from the big Panasonic radio he balanced on his shoulder, drowning out Pamela’s reply to Jeff’s hypothetical question about reliving the hell of Auschwitz.
They’d been in New York for six weeks, after more than a year of alternating their time between Jeff’s cabin in northern California and Pamela’s place in Topanga Canyon. Now that they were together, the isolation of the two retreats suited them even more. There was so much to catch up on, so many intensely private thoughts and emotions to be shared. But they hadn’t withdrawn from the world, not totally. Jeff had begun dabbling in venture capital, backing small companies and products that apparently had been unable to obtain adequate funding in previous replays and whose success or failure he had no way of projecting. One desk-top toy, a Lucite cube with small magnets performing a slow-motion ballet in a suspension of clear viscous fluid, had already caught on in a big way, had been the Christmas 1979 version of the Pet Rock. He hadn’t been as lucky, so far, with a holographic video system that had been proposed by two cinematographer friends of Pamela’s. There were continual technical problems with the camera, and maybe the idea had always failed for those reasons. It didn’t matter, though; the uncertainty of these schemes, their very unpredictability, was precisely what appealed to him.
For her part, Pamela had launched herself back into moviemaking with a new sense of fun and freedom. No longer bound by her self-imposed mission to elevate humanity to new levels of consciousness and being, she had written a lightly poignant romantic comedy about mismatched, mistimed love affairs. A young unknown, Darryl Hannah, had been cast as the female lead, and Pamela had insisted on granting directorial responsibilities to a TV comic actor, Rob Reiner. As always, her associates were aghast at her selection of such untested talent, but as producer and sole financer of the project, she retained final say in those matters. She and Jeff had come to New York so that she could oversee pre-production and location scouting for the new film. Shooting would begin in a few days, the second week of June.
They turned right and walked north on Fifth Avenue, resuming their discussion of historical fantasies.
'Think what Da Vinci might have achieved if he’d had our opportunity,' Pamela said musingly. 'The statues, the paintings he might have done in different lives.'
'Assume he did; maybe the world continued on a different time line for each of his existences, and has for each of ours. In one version of twentieth-century reality he might have been remembered more for his inventions than for his art, if he’d had the time to rework and refine them. In another he might have retreated into his thoughts and left absolutely nothing of note behind. In the same way, there may be one future that will remember you for Starsea, and another in which Future, Inc. has continued as a major corporate presence.'
'
'No,' Jeff said. 'If the flow of time is continuous—uninterrupted as far as the rest of the world is concerned, ignoring this loop you and I keep experiencing, and branching out from each version of the loop into new lines of reality depending on the changes we put into motion each time around—then history should have progressed twenty-five years for each replay we’ve been through.'
She pursed her lips, thinking for a moment. 'If that’s true, though, the individual time lines would be staggered. Each branch would have continued on its path from 1988, when we died, but the preceding one would be twenty-five years ahead of it.'
'That’s right. So in the world of our most recent replay, the one in which you married Dustin Hoffman and I was living in Atlanta, it’s been only seventeen years since we died. The year is 2005; most of the people we knew would still be alive.
'But starting from our first replay, the life in which you were a doctor in Chicago and I built my conglomerate, forty-two years have passed. It would be the year 2029; my daughter Gretchen would be over fifty, probably with grown children of her own.'
Jeff grew silent, sobered by the thought of his only true child still alive, yet objectively a decade older than he himself had ever been.
Pamela finished the projection for him. 'And on the time line of our original lives, sixty-seven years would have gone by. The world we grew up in would be into the second half of the twenty-first century. My own children … they’d be in their seventies. My God.'
Their game of speculation had turned more serious, more troubling than either of them had expected it
