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
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.
SIXTEEN
This time there was no need for the global-saturation coverage they had employed with their previous ad, the small one with which they had hoped to attract the attention only of other replayers. Also, both the ambiguity and anonymity of that first notice were unnecessary for their present purpose.
The New York Times refused to carry the one-time-only, full-page ad, but it ran in the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times.
• The U.S. nuclear submarine Scorpion will be lost at sea in late May.
• A major tragedy will disrupt the American presidential campaign in June.
• The assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., will be arrested outside the United States.
• Chief Justice Earl Warren will resign on June 26th, and will be succeeded by Justice Abe Portas.
• The Soviet Union will lead a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21st.
• Fifteen thousand people will be killed in an earthquake in Iran on the first of September.
• An unmanned Soviet spacecraft will circle the moon and be recovered in the Indian Ocean on September 22nd.
• In October, there will be military coups in both Peru and Panama.
• Richard Nixon will narrowly defeat Hubert Humphrey for the presidency.
• Three American astronauts will orbit the moon and return safely to earth during Christmas week.
• In January 1969, there will be an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
• A massive oil spill will contaminate the beaches of Southern California in February.
• French President Charles de Gaulle will resign at the end of next April.
We will have no further comment to make on these statements until May 1, 1969. We will meet with the news media on that date, at a location to be announced one year from today.
Jeff Winston & Pamela Phillips
New York, N.Y., April 19, 1968
Every seat of the large conference room they had rented at the New York Hilton was occupied, and those who could not find a chair milled impatiently in the aisles or at the sides of the room, trying to keep their feet from becoming entangled in the snaking microphone and television cables.
At 3:00 P.M. precisely, Jeff and Pamela came into the room and stood together on the speaker’s platform. She smiled nervously as the blinding lights for the TV cameras came on, and Jeff gave her hand
