communique from the so-called November Squad threatens continued attacks on American soil until all U.S. forces are withdrawn from the Middle East.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
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.
'Why don’t we lie to him?' Pamela asked. 'Tell him there’ll be a war if we maintain our military presence in Iran. Christ, for all we know there may be one.'
Jeff stooped to pick up a slender stick of driftwood. 'They’d see through it, particularly when they put us on the pentothal.'
'We could still try.'
'But who knows what effect a lie like that would have? Reagan might even decide to launch a preemptive strike. We could end up starting a war that may still be avoided.'
Pamela shuddered. 'Stuart McCowan must be happy,' she said bitterly, 'wherever he is.'
'We did what we thought was right. No one could have predicted this sort of outcome. And it hasn’t been all bad; we’ve saved a lot of lives, too.'
'You can’t put human life on a balance sheet like that!'
'No, but—'
'They won’t even do anything about the storms and the plane crashes anymore,' she said with disgust, kicking at a clump of sand. 'They want everybody, particularly the Soviets, to think we just disappeared, so they keep on letting all those people die … needlessly!'
'Just as they’ve always died before.'
She spun toward him, her face full of a rage he had never seen in her. 'That doesn’t cut it, Jeff! We were supposed to be making the world a better, safer place this time—but all we really cared about was ourselves, finding out how much longer our own precious little lives were going to be extended; and we haven’t even been able to do that.'
'It’s still possible that the scientists will come up with a—'
'I don’t give a shit! When I look at the news, all the death we’ve caused by what we’ve told Hedges: the terrorist attacks, the military actions, maybe even a full-scale war corning … When I see that, I wish—I wish I’d never made that goddamned movie, I wish you’d never come to Los Angeles and found me!
Jeff tossed the stick of driftwood away, looked at her in pained disbelief. 'You don’t mean that,' he said.
'Yes I do! I’m sorry I ever met you!'
'Pamela, please—'
Her hands were shaking, her face was red with anger. 'I’m not talking to Hedges anymore. I don’t want to talk to you anymore, either. I’m moving into one of the rooms on the third floor. You can tell them any fucking thing you like; go ahead, get us in a war, blow the whole damned planet up!'
She turned and ran, slipped awkwardly in the sand and found her footing again, dashed toward the house that was their prison. One of the teams of guards raced after her, the other closed in on either side of Jeff. He watched her go, watched the men escort her back inside the house; Hedges was at the door, and Jeff could hear her shouting at him, but a gust of summer wind from off the bay swallowed up her words, drowned out the meaning of her cries.
He awoke in a current of cold, synthetic-smelling air. Sharp, thin rays of brilliant sunlight sliced through half-closed slats of vene-tian blinds on the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely furnished bedroom. A portable stereo sat silent on the floor in front of the bed, and an old cassette recorder and microphone with a WIOD logo lay cushioned on a pile of clothes on the dresser.
Jeff heard a distant chime over the hum of the air conditioner, recognized it as a doorbell; whoever it was would go away if he ignored it. He glanced at the book in his hands: The Algiers Motel Incident, by John Hersey. Jeff tossed it aside, swung his feet off the bed, and went to the window. He lifted one of the white slats of the blinds, peered out, and saw a tall stand of royal palms; beyond them there was nothing but flat marshland, all the way to the horizon.
The doorbell rang again, and then he heard the approaching whine of a jet, saw it glide past a few hundred yards behind the palm trees. Landing at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, Jeff realized. This was his apartment in Dania, a mile from the beach and too close to the airport, but it had been the first place he could really call his own, his first wholly private living quarters as an adult. He’d been working at his first full-time news job, in Miami, beginning his career.
He took a deep breath of the stale, chilled air, sat back down on the rumpled bed. He’d died on schedule, at six minutes past one on October eighteenth, 1988; there’d been no all-out war, not yet, though the world had been—
The doorbell sounded again, a long ring this time, insistent. Goddamn it, why wouldn’t they just go away? It stopped, then rang immediately a fourth time. Jeff pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of denim cut-offs from the heap of clothes on the dresser, stalked angrily from the room to get rid of whoever was at the door. As he walked into the living room a motionless wall of sweltering, humid air hit him; must be
