LIGHTNING - Part 2 (Dean Koontz)

PART II

Pursuit

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE

Five

AN ARMY OF SHADOWS

Laura switched on a lamp and shook Chris awake. "Get dressed, honey. Quickly."
"What's happening?" he asked sleepily, rubbing his eyes with his small fists.
"Some bad men are coming, and we've got to get out of here before they arrive. Now hurry."
Chris had spent a year not only mourning his father but preparing for the moment when the deceptively placid
events of daily life would be disrupted by another unexpected explosion of the chaos that lay at the heart of human
existence, the chaos that from time to time erupted like an active volcano, as it had done the night his father had
been murdered. Chris had watched his mother become a first-rate shot with a handgun, had seen her collect an
arsenal, had taken self-defense classes with her, and through it all he had retained the point of view and attitudes
of a child, had seemed pretty much like any other child, if understandably melancholy since the death of his father.
But now in a moment of crisis he did not react like an eight-year-old; he did not whine or ask unneces sary
questions; he was not quarrelsome or stubborn or slow to obey. He threw back the covers, got out of bed at once,
and hurried to the closet.
"Meet me in the kitchen," Laura said.
"Okay, Mom."
She was proud of his responsible reaction and relieved that he would not delay them, but she was also saddened
that at eight years of age he understood enough about the brevity and harshness of life to respond to a crisis with
the swiftness and equanimity of an adult.
She was wearing jeans and a blue-plaid, flannel shirt. When she went to her bedroom, she only had to slip into a
wool sweater, pull off her Rockport walking shoes, and put on a pair of rubberized hiking boots with lace-up tops.
She had gotten rid of Danny's clothes, so she had no coat for the wounded man in the kitchen. She had plenty of
blankets, however, and she grabbed two of those from the linen closet in the hall.
As an afterthought, she went to her office, opened the safe, and removed the strange black belt with copper fittings
that her guardian had given her a year ago. She jammed it in her satchel-like purse.
Downstairs she stopped at the front foyer closet for a blue ski jacket and the Uzi carbine that hung on the back of
the door. As she moved she was alert for unusual noises —voices in the night beyond the house or the sound of a
car engine—but all remained silent.
In the kitchen she put the submachine gun on the table with the other one, then knelt beside her guardian, who was
unconscious again. She unbuttoned his snow-wet lab coat, then his shirt, and looked at the gunshot wound in his
chest. It was high in his left shoulder, well above the heart, which was good, but he had lost a lot of blood; his
clothes were soaked with it.


"Mom?" Chris was in the doorway, dressed for a winter night.
"Take one of those Uzis from the table, get the third one from the back of the pantry/floor, and put them in the
Jeep."
"It's him," Chris said, wide-eyed with surprise.
"Yes, it is. He showed up like this, hurt bad. Besides the Uzis, get two of the revolvers —the one in the drawer over
there and the one in the dining room. And be careful not to accidentally—"
"Don't worry, Mom," he said, setting off on the errands.
As gently as possible she rolled her guardian onto his right side—he groaned but did not awaken—to see if there
was an exit wound in his back. Yes. The bullet had gone through him, exiting under the scapula. His back was
soaked with blood, too, but neither the entry nor exit point was bleeding heavily any longer; if there was serious
bleeding, it was internal, and she could not detect or treat it.
Under his clothing he wore one of the belts. She unbuckled it. The belt wouldn't fit in the center compartment of her
purse, so she had to stuff it into a zippered side compartment after dumping out the items she usually kept in there.
She rebuttoned his shirt and debated whether she should take off his damp lab coat. She decided it would be too
difficult to wrestle the sleeves down his arms. Rolling him gently from side to side, she worked a gray wool blanket
under and around him.
While Laura bundled up the wounded man, Chris made a couple of trips to the Jeep with the guns, using the inner
door that connected the laundry room to the garage. Then he came in with a two-foot -wide, four-foot -long, flat
dolly—essentially a wooden platform on casters—that had accidentally been left behind by some furniture
deliverymen almost a year and a half ago. Riding it like a skateboard toward the pantry, he said, "We gotta take the
ammo box, but it's too heavy for me to carry. I'll put it on this."
Pleased by his initiative and cleverness, she said, "We have twelve rounds in the two revolvers and twelve hundred
rounds in the three Uzis, so I don't think we'll need more than that, no matter what happens. Bring the board here.
Quick now. I've been trying to figure how we can get him to the Jeep without shaking him up too bad. That looks
like the ticket."
They were moving fast, as if they had drilled for just this particular emergency, yet Laura felt that they were taking
too much time. Her hands were shaking, and her belly fluttered cont inuously. She expected someone to hammer
on the door at any moment.
Chris held the dolly still while Laura heaved the wounded man onto it. When she got the board under his head,
shoulders, back, and buttocks, she was able to lift his legs and push him as if he were a wheelbarrow. Chris
scooted along at a crouch by the front wheels, one hand on the unconscious man's right shoulder to keep him from
sliding off and to prevent the board from rolling out from beneath him. They had a little trouble easing across the
door sill at the end of the laundry room, but they got him into the three-car garage.
The Mercedes was on the left, the Jeep wagon on the right, with the middle slot empty. They wheeled her guardian
to the Jeep.
Chris had opened the tailgate. He had also unrolled a small gym mat in there for a mattress.
"You're a great kid," she told him.
Together they managed to transfer the wounded man from the dolly into the cargo bed by way of the open tailgate.
"Bring the other blanket and his shoes from the kitchen," she told Chris.
By the time the boy returned with those items, Laura had gotten her guardian stretched out flat on his back on the
gym mat. They covered his bare feet with the second blanket and put his soggy shoes beside him.
As Laura shut the tailgat e, she said, "Chris, get in the front seat and buckle up."
She hurried back into the house. Her purse, which contained all of her credit cards, was on the table; she slipped
the straps over her shoulder. She picked up the third Uzi and headed back toward the laundry room, but before she
had taken three steps, something hit the rear door with tremendous force. She whirled, bringing up the gun.
Something slammed into the door again, but the steel core and Schlage deadbolts could not be defeated easily.
Then the nightmare began in earnest.
A submachine gun chattered, and Laura threw herself against the side of the refrigerator, sheltering there. They
were trying to blow open the back door, but the heavy steel core held against that assault too. The door shook,
however, and bullets pierced the wall on both sides of the reinforced frame, tearing holes in the dry wall. Family-
room and kitchen windows exploded as a second submachine gun opened fire. The metal Levelors danced on their
mountings. Metal slats twanged as slugs passed between them, and some slats bent, but most of the shattered
window glass was contained behind the blinds, where it rained on sills and from there to the floor. Cabinet doors
splintered and cracked as bullets pierced them, and chips of brick flew off one wall, and bullets ricocheted off the
copper range hood, leaving it dented, creased. Hanging from ceiling hooks, the copper pots and pans took a lot of
hits, producing a variety of clinks and ponks. One overhead light blew out. The Levelor at the window above the
writing desk was torn off its mountings at last, and half a dozen slugs plowed into the refrigerator door just inches
from her.
Her heart was racing, and a flood of adrenaline had made her senses almost painfully sharp. She wanted to run for
the Jeep in the garage and try to get out before they realized she was in the process of leaving, but a primal warrior


instinct told her to stay put. She pressed flat against the side of the refrigerator, out of the direct line of fire, hoping
that she would not be hit by a ricochet. Who the hell are you people? she wondered angrily. The firing stopped, and
her instinct proved true: The barrage was followed by the gunmen themselves. They stormed the house. The first
one clambered through the imploded window above the kitchen desk. She stepped away from the refrigerator and
opened fire, blowing him back out onto the patio. A second man, dressed in black like the first, entered by the
shattered sliding door in the family room—she saw him through the archway a second before he saw her—and she
swung the Uzi in that direction, spraying bullets, destroying the Mr. Coffee machine, tearing the hell out of the
kitchen wall beside the archway, then cutting him down as he brought his weapon around toward her. She had
practiced with the Uzi but not recently, and she was surprised at how controllable it was. She was also surprised at
how sickened she was by the need to kill them, though they were trying to slaughter her and her child; like a wave
of oily sludge, nausea washed through her, but she choked down the gorge that rose in her throat. A third man
started into the family room, and she was ready to kill him, too, and a hundred like him, no matter how sick the
killing made her, but he threw himself backward, out of the line of fire, when he saw his companion blown away.
Now the Jeep.
She didn't know how many killers were outside, maybe only the three, two dead and one still living, maybe four or
ten or a hundred, but regardless of how many there were, they would not have expected to be met with such a bold
response and certainly not with so much firepower, no way, not from a woman and a small boy, and they had
known that her guardian was wounded and unarmed. So right now they were stunned, and they'd be taking cover,
assessing the situation, planning their next move. This might be her first and last chance to get away in the Jeep
wagon. She sprinted through the laundry room into the garage.
She saw that Chris had started the Jeep's engine when he'd heard the gunfire; bluish exhaust fumes billowed from
the tailpipes. As she ran to the Jeep, the garage door started up; Chris had evidently used the Genie remote-control
unit the moment he saw her.
By the time she got behind the wheel, the garage door was a third open. She shifted into gear. "Get down!"
As Chris instantly obeyed, sliding down in his seat below window level, Laura let up on the brakes. She rammed
the accelerator against the floorboards, peeled rubber on the concrete, and roared out into the night, clearing the
still rising garage door by only an inch or two, ripping off the radio antenna.
The Jeep's big tires, though not swaddled in chains, had heavy winter tread. They dug into the frozen slush and
gravel that formed the surface of the driveway, finding traction with no trouble, spewing shrapnel of stone and ice.
From off to her left came a dark figure, a man in black, running across the front lawn, kicking up snow, forty or fifty
feet away, and he was such a featureless shape that he might have been just a shadow, except that over the
screaming of the engine she heard the rattle of automatic gunfire. Slugs slammed into the side of the Jeep, and the
window behind her blew in, but the window beside her remained intact, and then she was speeding away, heading
out of range, a few seconds from safety now, with wind shrieking at the broken window. She prayed none of the
tires would be hit, and she heard more rounds striking sheet metal, or maybe it was gravel and ice churned up by
the Jeep.
When she reached the state route at the end of the driveway, she was certain that she was out of range. As she
braked hard for the left turn, she glanced into the rearview mirror and saw, far back, a pair of headlights at the open
garage. The killers had arrived at her house without a vehicle—God only knew how they had traveled, perhaps with
the use of those strange belts—and they were using her Mercedes to pursue her.
She had intended to turn left on the state route, head down past Running Springs, past the turnoff to Lake
Arrowhead, on to the superhighway and into the city of San Bernardino, where there were people and safety in
numbers, where men dressed in black and toting automatic weapons would not stalk her so boldly, and where she
could get medical treatment for her guardian. But when she saw the headlights behind her, she responded to an
innate proclivity for survival, turning right instead, heading east-northeast toward Big Bear Lake.
If she had gone left they would have come to that fateful half mile of inclined highway on which Danny had been
murdered a year ago; and Laura felt intuitively—almost superstitiously—that the most dangerous place in the world
for them at the moment was that sloping length of two-lane blacktop. She and Chris had been meant to die twice on
that hill: first, when the Robertsons' pickup slid out of control; second, when Kokoschka opened fire on them.
Sometimes she perceived that there were both benign and ominous patterns in life and that, once thwarted, fate
strove to reassert those predestined designs. Though she had no intellectually sound reason for believing that they
would die if they headed down toward Running Springs, she knew in her heart that death in fact awaited them
there.
As they pulled onto the state route and headed for Big Bear, tall evergreens rising darkly on both sides, Chris sat
up and looked back.
"They're coming," Laura told him, "but we'll outrun them."
"Are they the ones that got Daddy?"
"Yes, I think so. But we didn't know about them then, and we weren't prepared."
The Mercedes was on the state route now, out of sight most of the time because the roadway rose and fell and
twisted, putting hills and turns between the two vehicles. The car seemed to be about two hundred yards behind,


but it was probably closing because it had a bigger engine and a lot more power than the Jeep.
"Who are they?" Chris asked.
"I'm not sure, honey. And I don't know why they want to hurt us, either. But I know what they are. They're thugs,
they're scum, I learned all about their type a long time ago at Caswell Hall, and I know the only thing you can do
with people like them is stand up to them, fight back, because they only respect toughness."
"You were terrific back there, Mom."
"You were darned good yourself, kiddo. That was very smart of you to start the Jeep when you heard the gunfire,
and to have the garage door on the way up by the time I got behind the wheel. That probably saved us."
Behind them the Mercedes had closed the distance to about one hundred yards. It was a road-hugger, a 420 SEL,
which handled as well as anything on the highway, much better than the Jeep.
"They're coming fast, Mom."
"I know."
"Real fast."
Approaching the eastern point of the lake, Laura pulled up behind a rattletrap Dodge pickup with one broken
taillight and a rusted bumper that appeared to be held together by stickers with supposedly funny sayings—I
BRAKE FOR BLONDES, MAFIA STAFF CAR. It chugged along at thirty miles an hour, below the speed limit. If
Laura hesitated, the Mercedes would close the gap; when they were near enough the killers might use their guns
again. They were in a no-passing zone, but she could see enough clear road ahead to risk the maneuver; she
swung around the pickup, tramped the accelerator hard, got in front of the truck, and returned to the right lane.
Immediately ahead was a Buick doing about forty, and she passed that, too, just before the road got too twisty to
allow the Mercedes to get around the old truck.
"They're hung up back there!" Chris said.
Laura put the Jeep up to fifty-five, which was too fast for some of the turns, though she held it on the road and
began to think they were going to escape. But the highway split at the lake, and neither the Buick nor the old Ford
pickup followed her along the south shore toward Big Bear City; they both turned toward Fawnskin and the north
shore, leaving the road empty between her and the Mercedes, which at once began to close the distance between
them.
Houses were everywhere now, both on the high ground to the right and on the lower ground down toward the lake
on her left. Some of them were dark, probably vacation homes used only on winter weekends and in the summers,
but the lights of other places were visible among the trees.
She knew she could follow any of those lanes and driveways to a hundred different houses where she and Chris
would have been taken in. People would open their doors without hesitation. This was not the city; in the small-town
atmosphere of the mountains, people were not instantly suspicious of unannounced night visitors.
The Mercedes closed to within a hundred yards, and the driver flicked the headlights from low beam to high beam
again and again, as if gleefully saying, Hey, here we come, Laura, we're gonna get you, we're the boogeymen, the
real thing, and nobody can run from us forever, here we come, here we come.
If she tried to take refuge in one of the nearby houses, the killers probably would follow, murdering not only her and
Chris but the people who sheltered them. The bastards might be reluctant to chase her to ground in the heart of
San Bernardino or Riverside or even Redlands, where they were likely to encounter police response, but they
would not be intimidated by a mere handful of bystanders because no matter how many people they slaughtered,
they could no doubt elude capture by pushing the yellow buttons on their belts and vanishing as her guardian had
vanished one year ago. She had no idea where they would be vanishing to, but she suspected that it was a place
where the police could never touch them. She would not risk innocent lives, so she passed house after house
without slowing.
The Mercedes was about fifty yards back, closing fast.
"Mom—"
"I see them, honey."
She was headed toward Big Bear City, but unfortunately the place was inaptly named. It was not only less than a
city but not even much of a village, hardly a hamlet. There were not enough streets for her to hope to lose their
pursuers, and the police presence was inadequate to deal with a couple of fanatics armed with submachine guns.
Light traffic passed them going the other way, and she got behind another car in their lane, a gray Volvo, around
which she whipped on an almost blind stretch of road, but she had no choice because the Mercedes was within
forty yards. The killers passed the Volvo with equal recklessness.
"How's our passenger?" she asked.
Without unfastening his safety harness, Chris turned to look into the back of the Jeep wagon. "He looks okay, I
guess. He's getting bounced around a lot."
"I can't help that."
"Who is he, Mom?"
"I don't know much about him," she said. "But when we get out of this fix, I'm going to tell you what I do know. I
haven't told you before because ... I guess because I didn't know what was going on, and I was afraid it might be


dangerous somehow for you to know anything about him at all. But it can't get more dangerous than this, huh? So
I'll tell you later."
Assuming there was going to be a later.
When she was two-thirds of the way along the south shore of the take, pushing the Jeep as fast as she dared, with
the Mercedes just thirty-five yards behind, she saw the ridge-road turnoff ahead. It led up through the mountains
past Dark's Summit, a ten-mile county road that cut off the thirty- or thirty-five-mile eastern loop of state
Route 38 rejoining that two-lane highway south near Barton Flats As she recalled, the ridge road was paved for a
couple of miles but was only an upgraded dirt lane for six or seven miles in the meantime. Unlike the Jeep, the Mercedes did
not have four-wheel drive. It had winter tires, but they were not currently equipped with chains The men driving the
Mercedes were unlikely to know that the ridge road's pavement would give way to a rutted dirt surface patched with
ice and in some places drifted over with snow.
"Hold on!" she told Chris.
She didn't use the brakes until the last moment, taking the right turn onto the ridge road so fast that the Jeep slid
sideways with a tortured squeal of tires. It shuddered, too, as if it were an old horse that had been forced to make a
frightening jump.
The Mercedes cornered better, though the driver had not known what she was going to do. As they headed into
higher elevations and greater wilderness, the car closed the gap to about thirty yards.
Twenty-five. Twenty.
Thorny branches of lightning abruptly grew across the sky to the south. It was not as near to them as the lightning
at the house but near enough to turn night to day around them. Even above the sound of the engine she could hear
the roar of thunder.
Gaping at the stormy display, Chris said, "Mommy, what's going on? What's happening?"
"I don't know," she said, and she had to shout to be heard above the cacophony of the racing engine and clashing
heavens.
She did not hear the gunfire itself but heard bullets smacking into the Jeep, and a slug punched a hole through the
tailgate window and thudded into the back of the seat in which she and Chris were riding; she felt as well as heard
its solid impact. She began to turn the wheel back and forth, weaving from one side of the road to the other, making
as difficult a target as possible, which made her dizzy in the flickering light. Either the gunman stopped firing or
missed them with every shot, because she did not hear any more incoming rounds. However, the weaving slowed
her, and the Mercedes closed even faster.
She had to use the side mirrors instead of the rearview. Though most of the tailgate window was intact, the safety
glass was webbed with thousands of tiny cracks that left it translucent and useless.
Fifteen yards, ten.
In the southern sky the lightning and thunder passed, as before. She topped a rise, and the pavement ended
halfway down the hill ahead of them. She stopped weaving, accelerated. When the Jeep left the blacktop, it
shimmied for a moment, as if surprised by the change in road surface, but then streaked forward on the snow-
spotted, ice-crusted, frozen dirt. They jolted across a series of ruts, through a short hollow where trees arched over
them, and up the next hill.
In the side mirrors she saw the Mercedes cross the hollow on the dirt lane and start up the slope behind her. But as
she reached the crest, the car began to founder in her wake. It slid sideways, its headlights swinging away from
her. The driver overcorrected instead of turning the wheel into the slide, as he should have done. The
car's tires began to spin uselessly. It slid not only off to the side, but backward twenty yards, until the right rear
wheel jolted into the drainage ditch that flanked the road; the headlight beams were canted up and angled across
the dirt track. "They're stuck!" Chris said.
"They'll need half an hour to get out of that mess." Laura continued over the crest, down the next slope of the dark
ridge road. Although she should have been exultant over their escape, or at least relieved, her fear was
undiminished. She had a hunch that they were not yet safe, and she had learned to trust her hunches more than
twenty years ago, when she had suspected the White Eel was going to come for her the night that she would have
been alone in the end room by the stairs at McIlroy , the night when in fact he had left a Tootsie Roll under her
pillow. After all, hunches were just messages from the subconscious, which was thinking furiously all the time and
processing information she had not consciously noted. Something was wrong. But what?
They made less than twenty miles an hour on that narrow, winding, potholed, rutted, frozen dirt track. For a while
the road followed the rocky spine of a ridge where there were no trees, then traced the course of a declivity in the
ridge wall, all the way to the floor of the parallel ravine, where trees were so thick on both sides that the headlights
bouncing back from their trunks seemed to reveal phalanxes of pines as solid as board walls.
In the back of the wagon, her guardian murmured wordles sly in his fevered sleep. She was worried about him, and
she wished that she could go faster, but she dared not.
For the first two miles after they lost their pursuers, Chris was silent. Finally he said, "At the house ... did you kill
any of them?"
She hesitated. "Yes. Two." "Good."


Disturbed by the grim pleasure in the single word that he spoke, Laura said, "No, Chris, it isn't good to kill. It made
me sick." "But they deserved to be killed," he said. "Yes, they did. But that doesn't mean it's pleasant to kill them.
It's not. There's no satisfaction in it. Just . . . disgust at the necessity of it. And sadness."
"I wish I could've killed one of them," he said with tight, cold anger that was disturbing in a boy his age.
She glanced at him. With his face carved by shadows and the pale yellow light from the dashboard, he looked older
than he was, and she had a glimpse of the man he would become.
When the ravine floor became too rocky to provide passage, the road rose again, following a shelf on the ridge wall.
She kept her eyes on the rude track. "Honey, we'll have to talk about this later at more length. Right now I just want
you to listen carefully and try to understand something. There are a lot of bad philosophies in the world. You know
what a philosophy is?"
"Sorta. No . . . not really."
"Then let's just say people believe in a lot of things that are bad for them to believe. But there are two things that
different kinds of people believe that are the worst, most dangerous, wrongest of all. Some people believe the best
way to solve a problem is with violence: they beat up or kill anyone who disagrees with them." "Like these guys
who're after us."
"Yes. Evidently that's the kind of people they are. That's a real bad way of thinking because violence leads to more
violence. Besides, if you settle differences with a gun, there's no justice, no moment of peace, no hope. You follow
me?" "I guess so. But what's the other worst kind of bad thinking?" "Pacifism," she said. "That's just the opposite
of the first kind of bad thinking. Pacifists believe you should never lift a hand against another human being, no
matter what he has done or what you know he's going to do. If a pacifist was standing beside his brother, and if he
saw a man coming to kill his brother, he'd urge his brother to run, but he wouldn't pick up a gun and stop the killer."
"He'd let the guy go after his brother?" Chris asked, astonished.
"Yes. If worse came to worst, he'd let his brother be murdered rather than violate his own principles and bec ome a
killer himself. "That's whacko."
They rounded the point of the ridge, and the road descended into another valley. The branches of overhanging
pines were so low they scraped the roof; clumps of snow fell onto the hood and windshield. Laura turned on the
wipers and hunched over the steering wheel, using the change in terrain as an excuse not to talk until she had time
to think how to make her point most clearly. They had endured a lot of violence in the past hour; much more
violence no doubt lay ahead of them, and she was concerned that Chris develop a proper attitude toward it. She did
not want him to get the idea that guns and muscle were acceptable substitutes for reason. On the other hand she
did not want him to be traumatized by violence and learn to fear it at the cost of personal dignity and ultimate
survival. At last she said, "Some pacifists are cowards in disguise, but some really believe it's right to permit the
murder of an innocent person rather than kill to stop it. They're wrong because by not fighting evil, they've become
part of it. They're as bad as the guy who pulls the trigger. Maybe this is above your head right now, and maybe
you'll have to do a lot of thinking before you understand, but it's important you realize there's a way to live that's in
the middle, between killers and pacifists. You try to avoid violence. You never start it. But if someone else starts it,
you defend yourself, friends, family, anyone who's in trouble. When I had to shoot those men at the house, it made
me sick. I'm no hero. I'm not proud of having shot them, but I'm not ashamed of it, either. I don't want you to be
proud of me for it, or think that killing them was satisfying, that revenge in any way makes me feel better about your
dad's murder. It doesn't." He was silent.
She said, "Did I dump too much on you?" "No. I just gotta think about it a while," he said. "Right now, I'm thinking
bad, I guess. 'Cause I want them all dead, all of them who had anything to do with . . . what happened to Dad. But
I'll work on it, Mom. I'll try to be a better person." She smiled. "I know you will, Chris."
During her conversation with Chris and for the few minutes of mutual silence that followed it, Laura continued to be
plagued by the feeling that they were not yet out of imminent danger. They had gone about seven miles on the
ridge road, with perhaps another mile of dirt track and two miles of pavement ahead before they connected with
state Route 38. The farther she drove, the more certain she became that she was overlooking something and that
more trouble was drawing near.
She suddenly stopped on the spine of another ridge, just before the road dipped down again—and for the last
time—toward lower land. She switched off the engine and the lights.
"What's wrong?" Chris asked.
"Nothing. I just need to think, have a look at our passenger."
She got out and went around to the back of the Jeep. She opened the tailgate, where a bullet had punched through
the window. Chunks of safety glass broke out and fell on the ground at her feet. She climbed into the cargo bed
and, lying next to her guardian, checked the wounded man's pulse. It was still weak, perhaps even slightly weaker
than before, but it was regular. She put a hand to his head and found he was no longer cold; he seemed to be afire
within. At her request Chris gave her the flashlight from the glove compartment. She pulled back the blankets to
see if the man was bleeding worse than when they had loaded him into the Jeep. His wound looked bad, but there
was not much fresh blood in spite of the bouncing that he had endured. She replaced the blankets, returned the
flashlight to Chris, got out of the Jeep, and closed the tailgate.


She broke all of the remaining glass out of the tailgate window and out of the smaller rear window on the driver's
side. With the glass missing completely, the damage was less conspicuous and less likely to draw the attention of a
cop or anyone else.
For a while she stood in the cold air beside the wagon, staring out at the lightless wilderness, trying to force a
connection between instinct and reason. Why was she so sure that she was heading for trouble and that the night's
violence was not yet at an end?
The clouds were shredding in a high-altitude wind that harried them eastward, a wind that had not yet reached the
ground, where the air was almost peculiarly still. Moonlight found its way through those ragged holes and eerily
illuminated the snow-cloaked landscape of rising and falling hills, evergreens leeched of their color by the night, and
clustered rock formations.
Laura looked south where in a few miles the ridge road led to state Route 38, and everything in that direction
seemed serene. She looked east, west, then back to the north from which they had come, and on all sides the San
Bernardino Mountains were without a sign of human habitation, without a single light, and seemed to exist in
primeval purity and peace.
She asked herself the same questions and gave the same answers that had been part of an interior dialogue for
the past year. Where did the men with the belts come from? Another planet, another galaxy? No. They were as
human as she was. So maybe they came from Russia. Maybe the belts acted like matter transmitters, devices akin
to the teleportation chamber in that old movie, The Fly. That might explain her guardian's accent—if he'd teleported
from Russia—but it didn't explain why he had not aged in a quarter of a century; besides, she did not seriously
believe that the Soviet Union or anyone else had been perfecting matter transmitters since she was eight years old.
Which left time travel.
She had been considering that possibility for some months, though she'd not even felt confident enough about her
analysis to mention it to Thelma. But if her guardian had been entering her life at crucial points by time travel, he
could have made all of his journeys in the space of a single month or week in his own era while many years had
passed for her, so he would have appeared not to have aged. Until she could question him and learn the truth, the
time-travel theory was the only one on which she could operate: Her guardian had traveled to her from some future
world; and evidently it was an unpleasant future, because when speaking of the belt he had said, "You don't want to go
where it'll take you," and there had been a bleak, haunted look in his eyes. She had no idea why a time traveler
would come back from the future to protect her, of all people, from armed junkies and runaway pickup trucks, and
she had no time to ponder the possibilities.
The night was quiet, dark, and cold .
They were heading straight into trouble.
She knew it, but she didn't know what it was or where it would come from. When she got back into the Jeep, Chris
said, "What's wrong now?"
"You're crazy about Star Trek, Star Wars, Batteries Not Included, all that stuff, so maybe what I've got here is the
kind of background expert I seek out when I'm writing a novel. You're my resident expert in the weird."
The engine was switched off, and the interior of the Jeep was brightened only by the cloud-cloaked moonlight. But
she was able to see Chris's face reasonably well because, during the few minutes she had been outside, her eyes
had adapted to the night. He blinked at her and looked puzzled. "What're you talking about?"
"Chris, like I said earlier, I'm going to tell you all about the man lying back there, about the other strange
appearances he's made in my life, but we don't have time for that now. So don't snow me under with lots of
questions, okay? But just suppose my guardian— that's how I think of him, because he's protected me from terrible
things when he could—suppose he was a time traveler from the future. Suppose he doesn't come in a big clumsy
time machine. Suppose the whole machine is in a belt that he wears around his waist. under his clothes, and he
just materializes out of thin air when he arrives here from the future. Are you with me so far?" Chris was staring
wide-eyed. "Is that what he is?"
"He might be, yes."
The boy freed himself from his safety harness, scrambled onto his knees on the seat, and looked back at the man
lying in the compartment behind them. "Holy shit."
"Given the unusual circumstances," she said, "I'll overlook the foul language."
He glanced at her sheepishly. "Sorry. But a time traveler!" If she had been angry with him, the anger would not
have held, for she now saw in him a sudden rush of that boyish excitement and a capacity for wonder that he
had not exhibited in a year, not even at Christmas when he had enjoyed himself immensely with Jason Gaines. The
prospect of an encounter with a time traveler instantly filled him with a sense of adventure and joy. That was the
splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise: sometimes
the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent
person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly
wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy.
She said, "Okay, suppose that when he wants to leave our time and return to his own, he presses a button on the
special belt he wears."


"Can I see the belt?"
"Later. Remember, you promised not to ask a lot of questions just now."
"Okay." He looked again at the guardian, then turned and sat down, focusing his attention on his mother. "When he
presses the button—what happens?"
"He just vanishes."
"Wow! And when he arrives from the future, does he just appear out of thin air?"
"I don't know. I've never seen him arrive. Though I think for some reason there's lightning and thunder—"
"The lightning tonight!"
"Yes, but there's not always lightning. All right. Suppose that he came back in time to help us, to protect us from
certain dangers —"
"Like the runaway pickup."
"We don't know why he wants to protect us, can't know why until he tells us. Anyway, suppose other people from
the future don't want us to be protected. We can't understand their motivations, either. But one of them was
Kokoschka, the man who shot your father—"
"And the guys who showed up tonight at the house," Chris said, "they're from the future, too."
"I think so. They were planning to kill my guardian, you, and me. But we killed some of them instead and left two of
them stranded in the Mercedes. So ... what are they going to do next, kiddo? You're the resident expert on the
weird. Do you have any ideas?"
"Let me think."
Moonlight gleamed dully on the dirty hood of the Jeep. The interior of the station wagon was growing cold; their
breath issued in frosty plumes, and the windows were beginning to fog. Laura switched on the engine, heater,
defroster, but not the lights.
Chris said, "Well, see, their mission failed, so they won't hang around. They'll go back to the future where they
came from." "Those two guys in our car?"
"Yeah. They probably already pushed the buttons on the belts of the guys you killed, sent the bodies back to the
future, so there're no dead men at the house, no proof time travelers were ever there. Except maybe some blood.
So when the last two or three guys got stuck in the ditch, they probably gave up and went home."
"So they aren't back there any more? They wouldn't walk back to Big Bear maybe, steal a car, and try to find us?"
"Nope. That would be too hard. I mean, they have an easier way to find us than to just drive around looking for us
like regular bad guys would have to do." "What way?"
The boy screwed up his face and squinted through the windshield at the snow and moon glow and darkness ahead.
"See, Mom, as soon as they lost us, they'd push the buttons on their belts, go home to the future, and then make a
new trip back to our time to set another trap for us. They knew we took this road. So what they probably did was
make another trip back to our time, but earlier tonight, and they set a trap at the other end of this road, and now
they're waiting there for us. Yeah, that's where they are! I'll just bet , that's where they are."
"But why couldn't they come back even earlier tonight, earlier than they came the first time, back to the house, and
attack us before my guardian ever showed up to warn us?"
"Paradox," the boy said. "You know what that means?" The word seemed too complex for a boy his age, but she
said, "Yes, I know what a paradox is. Anything that's self-contradictory but possibly true."
"See. Mom, the neat thing is that time travel is full of all kinds of possible paradoxes. Things that couldn't be true,
shouldn't be true—but then might be." Now he was talking in that excited voice with which he described scenes
in his favorite fantastic films and comic books, but with more intensity than she had ever heard before, probably
because this was not a story but reality even more amazing than fiction. "Like suppose you went back in time and
married your own grandfather. See, then you'd be your own grandmother. If time travel was possible, maybe you
could do that—but then how could you have ever been born if your real grandmother had never married your
grandfather in the first place? Paradox! Or what if you went back in time and met up with your mom when she was
a kid and accidentally killed her? Would you just cease to exist—pop!—like you'd never been born? But if you
ceased to exist—then how could you have gone back in time in the first place? Paradox! Paradox!"
Staring at him in the moon-painted darkness of the Jeep, Laura felt as though she was looking at a different boy
from the one she had always known. Of course, she had been aware of his great fascination with space-age tales,
which seemed to preoccupy most kids these days, regardless of age. But until now she hadn't gotten a deep look
inside the mind shaped by those influences. Evidently the American children of the late twentieth century not only
lived interior fantasy lives richer than those of children at any other time in history, but they seemed to have gotten
from their fantasies something not provided by the elves and fairies and ghosts with which earlier generations of
kids had entertained themselves: the ability to think about abstract concepts like space and time in a manner far
beyond their intellectual and emotional age. She had the peculiar feeling that she was speaking to a little boy and a
rocket scientist coexisting in one body.
Disconcerted, she said, "So . . . when these men failed to kill us on their first trip tonight, why wouldn't they make a
second trip earlier than the first, to kill us before my guardian warned us that they were coming?"
"See, your guardian already showed up in the time stream to warn us. So if they came back before he warned us —


then how could he have warned us in the first place, and how could we be here where we are now, alive?
Paradox!"
He laughed and clapped his hands like a gnome chortling over some particularly amusing side-effect of a magical
spell.
In contrast to his good humor, Laura was getting a headache from trying to sort out the complexities of this thing.
Chris said, "Some people believe time travel isn't even possible 'cause of all the paradoxes. But some believe it's
possible so long as the trip you make into the past doesn't create a paradox. Now if that’s true, see, then the killers
couldn't come back on a second, earlier trip 'cause two of them had already been killed on the first trip. They
couldn't do it because they were already dead, and it was a paradox. But the guys you didn't kill and maybe some
new time travelers could make another trip to cut us off at the end of this road." He leaned forward to peer through
the streaked windshield again. "That's what all that lightning was off to the south when we were weaving to keep
them from shooting us —more guys from the future were arriving. Yeah, I'll bet they're waiting for us down there
somewhere, down there in the dark."
Rubbing her temples with her fingertips, Laura said, "But if we turn around and go back, if we don't drive into the
trap ahead, then they'll realize we've outthought them. And so they'll make a third trip back in time and return to the
Mercedes and shoot us when we try to drive back that way. They'll get us no matter which way we go."
He shook his head vigorously. "No. Because by the time they realize we're on to them, maybe half an hour from
now, we'll already have turned around and driven back past the Mercedes." The boy was bouncing up and down in
his seat with excitement now. "So if they try to make a third trip in time to go back to the beginning of this road and
trap us there, they can't do it, because we'll already have driven back that way and out, we'll already be safe.
Paradox! See, they got to play by the rules, Mom. They're not magical. They got to play by the rules, and they can
be beat!"
In thirty-three years she had never had a headache that had gone from a mild throb to a pounding skull-splitter as
quickly as this one. The more she tried to puzzle out the difficulties of avoiding a pack of time-traveling hitmen, the
deeper rooted the pain became. Finally she said, ''I give up. I guess I should've been watching Star Trek and
reading Robert Heinlein all these years instead of being a serious adult, because I'm just not able to cope with this.
So I'll tell you what: I'm going to rely on you to outsmart them. You'll have to try to keep one step ahead of them.
They want us dead. So how can they try to kill us without creating one of these paradoxes? Where will they show
up next . . . and next? Right now, we're going to go back the way we came, past the Mercedes, and if you're right,
no one will be waiting there for us. So where will they show up after that? Will we see them again tonight? Think
about those things, and when you have any ideas, let me know what they are."
"I will, Mom." He slumped down in his seat, grinning broadly for a moment , then chewing on his lip as he settled
deeper into the game.
Except it was not a game, of course. Their lives were really at stake. They had to elude killers with nearly
superhuman abilities, and they were pinning their hopes of survival on nothing more than the richness of an eight-
year-old boy's imagination.
Laura started the Jeep, put it in reverse, and backed up a couple of hundred yards until she found a place in the
road wide enough to turn around. Then they headed back the way they had come, toward the Mercedes in the
ditch, toward Big Bear.
She was beyond terror. Their situation contained such a large element of the unknown—and unknowable—that
terror could not be sustained. Terror was not like happiness or depression; it was an acute condition that by its very
nature had to be of a short term. Terror wilted fast. Or it escalated until you passed out or until you died of it,
frightened to death; you screamed until a blood vessel burst in your brain. She wasn't screaming, and in spite of her
headache she didn't think any vessels were going to burst. She settled into a low-key, chronic fear, hardly more
than anxiety.
What a day this had been. What a year. What a life.
Exotic news.
They passed the stranded Mercedes and drove all the way to the north end of the ridge road without encountering
men with submachine guns. At the intersection with the lakeside highway, Laura stopped and looked at Chris.
"Well?"
"As long as we're driving around," he said, "and as long as we go to a place where we've never been and don't
usually go, we're pretty safe. They can't find us if they don't have any idea where we might be. Just like your
regular-type scumbags."
Scumbags? she thought. What is this—H. G. Wells meets Hill Street Blues'?
He said, "See, now that we've given them the slip, these guys are going to go back to the future and look over the
records they've got about you, Mom, your history, and they're going to see where you show up next—like when you
want to go live in the house again. Or if you hid out for a year and wrote another book and then went on a tour for it,
they'd show up at a store where you're signing books because, see, there'd be a record of that in the future; they'd
know you could be found in that store at a certain time on a certain day."
She frowned. "You mean the only way to avoid them for the rest of my life is to change my name, go on the run


forever, and leave no trace of myself on any public records, just vanish from recorded history from here on out?"
"Yeah, I think maybe that's what you'll have to do," he said excitedly.
He was smart enough to have figured out how to defeat a pack of time-traveling hitmen but not adult enough to
perceive how hard it would be for them to forsake everything they owned and start with only the cash in their
pockets. In a way he was like an idiot savant, tremendously insightful and gifted in one narrow area, but naive and
severely limited in all other ways. In matters of time-travel theory, he was a thousand years old, but otherwise he
was going on nine.
She said, "I can never write another book because I'd have to have contact with editors, agents, even if by phone.
So there'd be phone records that could be traced. And I can't collect royalties because no matter how many blinds I
use, no matter how many different bank accounts I shift the money through, sooner or later I have to collect the
funds personally, which would leave a public record. So then they'd have that record in the future, and they'd travel
back to the bank to wipe me out when I showed up. How am I supposed to get my hands on the money we already
have? How can I cash a check anywhere without leaving a record that they would have in the future?" She blinked
at him. "Good God, Chris, we're in a box!"
Now it was the boy's turn to be baffled. He looked at her with little understanding of where money came from, how it
was put aside for future use, or how difficult it was to obtain. "Well, for a couple of days, we can just drive around,
sleep in motels—"
"We can only sleep in motels if I pay cash. A credit card record might be all they need to find us. Then they'd come
back in time to the night I used the credit card, and they'd kill us at the motel."
"Yeah, so we use cash. Hey, we can eat at McDonald's all the time! That doesn't take much money, and it's good."
They drove down from the mountains, out of the snow, into San Bernardino, a city of about 300,000, without encountering
assassins . She needed to get their guardian to a doctor, not only because she owed him a debt of life, but also
because without him she might never learn the truth of what was happening and might never find a may out of the
box they were in.
She could not take him to a hospital because hospitals kept records, which might give her enemies from the future
a way of finding her. She would have to obtain medical care secretly, from someone who would not have to be told
her name or any thing about one patient.
Shortly before midnight she stopped at a telephone booth near a Shell service station. The phone was at the corner
of the property, away from the station itself, which was ideal because she could not risk an attendant noticing the
Jeep's broken windows or the unconscious man.
In spite of the hour-long nap the boy had gotten earlier and in spite of the excitement, Chris had dozed off. In the
compartment behind the front seat, their guardian was sleeping, too, but his sleep was neither restful nor natural.
He was not mumbling much any more, but for minutes at a stretch he drew breath with a dismaying wheeze and
rattle.
She left the Jeep in park, the engine running, and went into the telephone booth to look through the directory. She
tore out the Yellow Pages' listings for physicians.
After obtaining a street map of San Bernardino from the attendant in the service station, she began searching for a
doctor who did not operate out of a clinic or medical office building but from an office attached to his home, which
was how most doctors in small towns and cities had worked in years gone by, though these days few continued to
keep home and office together. She was acutely aware that the longer she took to find help, the smaller the chance
that their guardian would survive.
At a quarter past one, in a quiet residential neighborhood of older homes, she pulled in front of a two-story, white,
Victorian house built in another era, in a lost California, before everything had been constructed of stuc co. It stood
on a corner lot, with a two-car garage, shaded by alders that were leafless in the middle of winter, a touch that
made it seem like a place transported entirely, landscaping and all, from the East. According to the pages she had
torn from the telephone directory, this was the address for Dr. Carter Brenkshaw, and beside the driveway a small
sign suspended between two wrought-iron posts confirmed the directory's accuracy.
She drove to the end of the block and parked at the curb. She got out of the Jeep, scooped a handful of damp earth
from a flowerbed in front of a nearby house, and smeared the dirt over the front and back license plates as best she
could.
By the time she wiped her hand in the grass and got back in the Jeep, Chris had awakened but was groggy and
confused after being asleep for more than two hours. She patted his face and pushed his hair back from his
forehead and rapidly talked him awake. The cold night air, flowing through the broken windows, helped too.
"Okay," she said when she was sure he was awake, "listen closely, partner. I've found a doctor. Can you act sick?"
"Sure." He made a face as if he was going to puke, then gagged and moaned.
"Don't overplay it." She explained what they were going to do.
"Good plan, Mom."
"No, it's nuts. But it's the only plan I've got."
She swung the car around and drove back to Brenkshaw's, where she parked in the driveway in front of the closed
garage, which was set back from the house. Chris slid out by the driver's door, and she picked him up and held him


against her left side, his head against her shoulder. He held on to her, so she only needed her left arm to keep him
in place, though he was quite heavy; her baby was not a baby any more. In her free hand she gripped the revolver.
As she carried Chris along the walk, past the stark alders, with no light except a purplish glow from one of the
widely spaced mercury -vapor streetlamps out at the curb, she hoped no one was at a window in any of the nearby
houses. On the other hand it probably wasn't unusual for someone to visit a doctor's house in the middle of the
night, needing treatment.
She went up the front steps, across the porch, and rang the bell three times, quick, as a frantic mother might do.
She waited only a few seconds before ringing it three more times.
In a couple of minutes, after she had rung the bell again and was beginning to think that no one was home, the
porch lights came on. She saw a man studying her through the three-pane, fan-shaped window in the top third of
the door.
"Please," she said urgently, holding the revolver at her side where it could not be seen, "my boy, poison, he's swallowed
poison!"
The man opened the door inward, and there was an outward-opening glass storm door, as well, so Laura stepped
out of its way.
He was about sixty-five, white-haired, with a face that was Irish except for a strong Roman nose and dark brown
eyes. He was dressed in a brown robe, white pajamas, and slippers. Peering at her over the rims of tortoiseshell
glasses, he said, "What's wrong?"
"I live two blocks down, you're so close, and my boy — poison." At the height of her hysteria, she let go of Chris,
and he got out of her way as she shoved the muzzle of the .38 against the man's belly. "I'll blow your guts out if you
call for help."
She had no intention of shooting him, but she apparently sounded convincing, for he nodded and said nothing.
"Are you Dr. Brenkshaw?" He nodded again, and she said, "Who else is in the house, Doctor?"
"No one. I'm alone here."
"Your wife?"
"I'm a widower."
"Children?"
"All grown and gone."
"Don't lie to me."
"I've made a lifetime habit of not lying," he said. "It's gotten me in trouble a few times, but telling the truth generally
makes life simpler. Look, it's chilly, and this robe's thin. You can intimidate me as well if you come inside."
She stepped across the threshold, keeping the gun in his belly and pushing him backward with it. Chris followed
her. "Honey," she whispered, "go check out the house. Quietly. Start upstairs, and don't miss a room. If there's
anyone here, tell them the doctor has an emergency patient and needs their help."
Chris headed for the stairs, and Laura kept Carter Brenkshaw in the foyer at gunpoint. Nearby a grandfather clock
was ticking softly.
"You know," he said, "I've been a lifelong reader of thrillers."
She frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I've often read a scene in which a gorgeous villainess held the hero against his will. As often as not, when he
finally turned the tables on her, she surrendered to the inevitability of masculine triumph, and they made wild,
passionate love. So when it happens to me, why do I have to be too old to enjoy the prospect of the second half of
this little showdown?"
Laura held back a smile because she could not continue to pretend to be dangerous once she allowed herself to
smile. "Shut up."
"Surely you can do better than that."
"Just shut up, all right? Shut up."
He did not go pale or begin to tremble. He smiled.
Chris returned from upstairs. "Nobody, Mom."
Brenkshaw said, "I wonder how many dangerous thugs have pint-size accomplices who call them Mom?"
"Don't misjudge me, Doctor. I'm desperate."
Chris disappeared into the downstairs rooms, turning on lights as he went.
To Brenkshaw, Laura said, "I've got a wounded man in the car—"
"Of course, a gunshot."
"— I Want you to treat him and keep your mouth shut about it, 'cause if you don't, we'll come back some night and
blow you away."
"This," he said almost merrily, "is perfectly delicious."
As Chris returned, he switched off the lights he had switched on
moments ago. "Nobody, Mom."
"You have a stretcher?" Laura asked the physician. Brenkshaw stared at her. "You really do have a wounded
man?" "What the hell else would I be doing here?" "How peculiar. Well, all right, how badly is he bleeding?" "A lot


earlier, not so much now. But he's unconscious." "If he's not bleeding badly now, we can roll him in. I've got a
collapsible wheelchair in my office. Can I get an overcoat," he said, pointing to the foyer closet, "or do tough molls
like you get a thrill out of making old men shiver in their peejays?"
"Get your coat, Doctor, but damn it, don't underestimate me." "Yeah," Chris said. "She shot two guys already
tonight." He imitated the sound of an Uzi. "She just cut 'em down, and they never had a chance to lay a hand on
her." The boy sounded so sincere that Brenkshaw looked at Laura with new concern. "There's nothing but coats in
the closet. Umbrellas. A pair of galoshes. I don't keep a gun in there."
"Just be careful, Doctor. No fast moves."
"No fast moves —yes, I knew you'd say that." Though he still seemed to find the situation to some degree amusing,
he was not quite as lighthearted about it as he had been.
When he had pulled on his overcoat, they went with him through a door to the left of the foyer. Without snapping on
a light, relying on the glow from the foyer and on his familiarity with the place, Dr. Brenkshaw led them through a
patients' waiting room that contained straight -backed chairs and a couple of end tables. Another door led into his
office—a desk, three chairs, medical books— where he did turn on a light, and a door from the office led farther
back in the house to his examination room.
Laura had expected to see an examination table and equipment that had been in use and well maintained for thirty-
odd years, a homely den of medicine straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but everything looked new. There
was even an EKG machine, and at the far end of the room was a door with a sign that warned X-RAY: KEEP
CLOSED IN USE.
"You have X-ray equipment here?" she asked.
"Sure. It's not as expensive as it once was. Every clinic has X-ray equipment these days."
"Every clinic, yes, but this is just a one-man—"
"I may look like Barry Fitzgerald playing at being a doctor in an old movie, and I may prefer the old-fashioned
convenience of an office in my home, but I don't give patients outdated care just to be quaint. I dare say, I'm a more
serious physician than you are a desperado."
"Don't bet on that," she said harshly, though she was getting tired of pretending to be cold-blooded.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'll play along. Seems like it'll be more fun if I do." To Chris, he said, "When we came
through my office, did you notice a big, red-ceramic jar on the desk? It's full of orange-slice candies and Tootsie
Pops if you want some."
"Wow, thanks!" Chris said. "Uh . . . can I have a piece, Mom?"
"A piece or two," she said, "but don't make yourself sick."
Brenkshaw said, "When it comes to giving sweet treats to young patients, I'm old-fashioned, I guess. No sugar-free
gum here. What the hell fun is that stuff? Tastes like plastic. If their teeth rot out after they visit me, that's their
dentists' problem."
While he talked, he got a folding wheelchair from the corner, unfolded it, and rolled it to the middle of the room.
Laura said, "Honey, you stay here while we go out to the
Jeep."
"Okay," Chris said from the next room, where he was peering into the red-ceramic jar, selecting his treat.
"Your Jeep in the driveway?" Brenkshaw asked. "Then let's go out the back. Less conspicuous , I think."
Pointing the revolver at the physician but feeling foolish, Laura followed him out of a side door in the examination
room, which opened onto a ramp, so there was no need to descend stairs.
"Handicapped entrance," Brenkshaw said quietly over his shoulder as he pushed the wheelchair along a walk
toward the back of the house. His bedroom slippers made a crisp sound on the
concrete.
The physician had a large property, so the neighboring house did not loom over them. Instead of being planted with
alders as was the front lawn, the side yard was graced with ficus and pines, which were green all year. In spite of
the screening branches and the darkness, however, Laura could see the blank windows of the neighboring place,
so she supposed that she could be seen, as well, if anyone looked.
The world had the hushed quality that it possessed only between midnight and dawn. Even if she had not known, it
was going on two in the morning, she would have been able to guess the time within half an hour. Though faint city
noises echoed in the distance, there was a cemeterial stillness that would have made her feel like a woman on a
secret mission even if she had only been taking out the garbage.
The walk led around the house, crossing another walk that extended to the back of the property. They went past
the rear porch, through an areaway between house and garage, into the driveway.
Brenkshaw halted at the back of the Jeep and chuckled. "Mud on the license plates," he whispered. "Convincing
touch."
After she put the tailgate down, he got into the back of the Jeep to have a look at the wounded man.
She looked out toward the street. All was silent. Still.
But if a San Bernardino Police cruiser happened to drive by now on a routine patrol, the officer would surely stop to
see what was up at kindly old Doc Brenkshaw's place. . . .


Brenkshaw was already crawling out of the Jeep. "By God, you do have a wounded man in there."
"Why the hell do you keep being surprised? Would I pull this kind of stunt for laughs?"
"Let's get him inside. Quickly," Brenkshaw said.
He could not handle her guardian by himself. In order to help him, Laura had to stick the .38 in the waistband of her
jeans.
Brenkshaw made no attempt to run or to knock her down and get the weapon away from her. Instead, as soon as
he had the wounded man in the wheelchair, he rolled him out of the drive, through the areaway, and around the
house to the handicapped entrance at the far side.
She grabbed one of the Uzis from the front seat and followed Brenkshaw. She didn't think she'd have any use for
the automatic carbine, but she felt better with it in her hands.
Fifteen minutes later, Brenkshaw turned from the developed X-rays that hung on a lightboard in a corner of his
examination room. "The bullet didn't fragment, made a clean exit. Didn't nick any bones, so we don't have chips to
worry about."
"Terrific," Chris said from a corner chair, happily sucking on a Tootsie Pop. In spite of the warm air in the house,
Chris was still wearing his jacket, as was Laura, because she wanted them to be ready to get out on short notice.
"Is he in a coma or what?" Laura asked the doctor.
"Yes, he's comatose. Not from any fever associated with a bad infection of the wound. Too early for that. And now
that he's gotten treatment, there probably won't be an infection. It's traumatic coma from being shot, the loss of
blood, the shock and all. He shouldn't have been moved, you know."
"I had no choice. Will he come out of it?"
"Probably. In this case a coma is the body's way of shutting down to conserve energy, facilitate healing. He's not
lost as much blood as it appears; he's got a good pulse, so this probably won't last long. When you see his shirt
and lab coat soaked like that, you think he's bled quarts, but he hasn't. Not that it was a spoonful, either. He's had a
bad time of it. But no major blood vessels were torn, or he'd be in worse shape. Still, he should be in a hospital."
"We've already been through that," Laura said impatiently. "We can't go to a hospital."
"What bank did you rob?" the physician asked teasingly, but with noticeably less twinkle in his eyes than there had
been when he had made his other little jokes.
While he waited for the pictures to develop, he had cleaned the wound, flooded it with iodine, dusted it with
antibiotic powder, and prepared a bandage. Now he got a needle, another implement she could not identify, and
heavy thread from a cabinet and put them on a stainless-steel tray that he had hung on the side of the examination
table. The wounded man lay there, unconscious, propped on his right side with the help of several foam pillows.
"What're you doing?" Laura asked.
"Those holes are fairly large, especially the exit wound. If you insist on endangering his life by keeping him out of a
hospital, then the least I can do is throw a few stitches in him."
"Well, all right, but be quick about it."
"You expect G-men to break down the door any minute?"
"Worse than that," she said. "Far worse than that."
Since they had arrived at Brenkshaw's, she had been expecting a sudden, night -shattering display of lightning,
thunder like the giant hooves of apocalyptic horsemen, and the arrival of more well-armed time travelers. Fifteen
minutes ago, as the doctor had been X-raying her guardian's chest, she'd thought she heard thunder so distant that
it was barely audible. She hurried to the nearest window to search the sky for far-off lightning, but she saw none
through the breaks in the trees, perhaps because the sky over San Bernardino already had a ruddy glow from city
lights or perhaps because she had not heard thunder in the first place. She had finally decided that she might have
heard a jet passing overhead and, in her panic, had misinterpreted it as a more distant sound.
Brenkshaw stitched up his patient, snipped the thread—"sutures will dissolve"—and bound the bandages in place
with wide adhesive tape that he repeatedly wound around the guardian's chest and back.
The air had a pungent, medicinal smell that made Laura slightly nauseous but it did not bother Chris. He sat in the corner,
happily working on another Tootsie Pop.
While waiting for the X-rays, Brenkshaw also had administered an injection of penicillin. Now he went to the tall,
white, metal cabinets along the far wall and poured capsules from a large jar into a pill bottle, then from another
large jar into a second small bottle. “I keep some basic drugs here, sell them to poorer patients at cost so they don't
have to go broke at the pharmacy."
"What're these?" Laura asked when he returned to the examination table, where she stood, and gave her the two
small plastic
"More penicillin in this one. Three a day, with meals — if he can take meals. I think he'll come around soon. If he
doesn't he'll begin to dehydrate, and he'll need intravenous fluid. Can't give him liquid by mouth when he's in a
coma — he'd choke. This other is a painkiller. Only when needed, and no more than two a day."
"Give me more of these. In fact give me your whole supply." She pointed to two quart jars that contained hundreds
of both capsules.
"He won't need that much of either one. He — "


"No, I'm sure he won't," she said, "but I don't know what the hell other problems we're going to have. We may need
both penicillin and painkillers for me — or my boy."
Brenkshaw stared at her for a long moment. "What in the name of God have you gotten into? It's like something in
one of your books."
"Just give me — " Laura stopped, stunned by what he had said. "Like something in one of my books? In one of my
books! Oh, my God, you know who I am."
"Of course. I've known almost from the moment I saw you on the porch. I read thrillers, as I said, and although your
books aren't strictly in that genre, they're very suspenseful, so I read them, too, and your photograph's on the back
of the jacket. Believe me, Ms. Shane, no man would forget your face once he'd seen it, even if he'd seen it only in
pictures and even if he was an old crock like me."
"But why didn't you say — "
"At first I thought it was a joke. After all, the melodramatic way you appeared on my doorstep in the dead of night,
the gun, the corny, hard-boiled dialogue ... it all seemed like a gag. Believe me, I have certain friends who might
think of such an elaborate hoax and, if they knew you, might be able to persuade you to join in the fun."
Pointing to her guardian, she said, "But when you saw him—"
"Then I knew it was no joke," the physician said.
Hurrying to his mother's side, Chris pulled the Tootsie Pop from his mouth. "Mom, if he tells on us . . ."
Laura had drawn the .38 from her waistband. She began to raise it, then lowered her hand as she realized the gun
no longer had any power to intimidate Brenkshaw; in fact it had never frightened him. For one thing she now
realized he was not the kind of man who could be intimidated, and for another thing she could not convincingly
portray a lawless, dangerous woman when he knew who she really was.
On the examination table her guardian groaned and tried to shift in his unnatural sleep, but Brenkshaw put a hand
upon his chest and stilled him.
"Listen, Doctor, if you tell anyone what happened here tonight, if you can't keep my visit a secret for the rest of your
life, it'll be the death of me and my boy."
"Of course the law requires a physician to report any gunshot wounds he treats."
"But this is a special case," Laura said urgently. "I'm not on the run from the law, Doctor."
"Who are you running from?"
"In a sense . . . from the same men who killed my husband, Chris's father."
He looked surprised and pained. "Your husband was killed?"
"You must've read about it in the papers," she said bitterly. "It made a sensational story there for a while, the kind of
thing the press loves."
"I'm afraid I don't read newspapers or watch television news," Brenkshaw said. "It's all fires, accidents, and crazed
terrorists. They don't report real news, just blood and tragedy and politics. I'm sorry about your husband. And if
these people who killed him, whoever they are, want to kill you now, you should go straight to the police."
Laura liked this man and thought they shared more views and sympathies than not. He seemed reasonable, kind.
Yet she had little hope of persuading Brenkshaw to keep his mouth shut. "The police can't protect me, Doctor. No
one can protect me except me—and maybe the man whose wounds you just sewed up. These people who’re after
us ... they're relentless, implacable, and they're beyond the law."
He shook his head. "No one is beyond the law."
"They are, Doctor. It'd take me an hour to explain to you why they are. and then you probably wouldn't believe me.
But I beg of you, unless you want our deaths on your conscience, keep your mouth shut about our being here. Not
just for a few days but forever."
"Well ..."
Studying him, she knew it was no use. She remembered what he had told her in the foyer earlier, when she had
warned him not to lie about the presence of other people in the house: He did not lie. he said, because always
telling the truth made life simpler; telling the truth was a lifelong habit. Hardly forty-five minutes later, she knew him
well enough to believe that he was indeed an unusually truthful man. Even now, as she begged him to keep their
visit secret, he was not able to tell the lie that would placate her and get her out of his office. He stared at her
guiltily and could not tease the falsehood from his tongue. He would do his duty when she left; he would file a police
report. The cops would look for her at her house near Big Bear, where they would discover the blood if not the
bodies of the time travelers, and where they would find hundreds of expended bullets, shattered windows, slug-
pocked walls. By tomorrow or the next day the story would be splashed across the newspapers. . . .
The airliner that had flown overhead more than half an hour ago might not have been a passing jet, after all. It
might well have been what she had first thought it was —very distant thunder, fifteen or twenty miles away.
More thunder on a night without rain.
"Doctor, help me get him dressed," she said, indicating her guardian on the table beside them. "Do at least that
much for me, since you're going to betray me later."
He winced visibly at the word betray.
Earlier she'd sent Chris upstairs to get one each of Brenkshaw's shirts, sweaters, jackets, slacks, a pair of his


socks, and shoes. The physician was not as muscular and trim as her guardian, but they were approximately the
same size.
At the moment the wounded man was wearing only his bloodstained pants, but Laura knew there would not be time
to put all the clothes on him. "Just help me get him into the jacket, Doctor. I'll take the rest and dress him later. The
jacket will be enough to protect him from the cold."
Reluctantly lifting the unconscious man into a sitting position on the examination table, the doctor said, "He
shouldn't be moved." Ignoring Brenkshaw, struggling to pull the wounded man's right arm through the sleeve of the
warmly lined corduroy jacket, Laura said. "Chris, go to the waiting room at the front of the house. It's dark in there.
Don't turn on the lights. Go to the windows and give the street a good looking over, and for God's sake don't let
yourself be seen."
"You think they're here?" the boy asked fearfully. "If not now, they will be soon," she said, working her guardian's
left arm through the other jacket sleeve.
"What're you talking about?" Brenkshaw asked, as Chris dashed into the adjoining office and on into the dark
waiting room. Laura didn't answer. "Come on, let's get him in the wheel-chair.
Together, they lifted the wounded man off the examination table, into the chair, and buckled a restraining strap
around his waist.
As Laura was gathering up the other clothes and the two quart -sized jars of drugs, making a bundle, padding the
clothes around the jars and tying it all together in the shirt, Chris raced back from the waiting room. "Mom, they're
just pulling up outside, it must be them, two cars full of men across the street, six or eight of 'em, anyway. What're
we going to do?"
"Damn," she said, "we can't get to the Jeep now. And we can't go out the side door because they might see us from
the front." Brenkshaw headed toward his office. "I'll call the police—" "No!" She put the bundle of clothes and
drugs on the wheelchair between her guardian's legs, put her purse there, too, and snatched up the Uzi and .38
Chief's Special. "There's no time, damn you. They'll be in here in a couple of minutes, and they'll kill us. You've got
to help me get the wheelchair out the back, down the rear porch steps."
Apparently her terror was at last conveyed to the physician, for he did not hesitate or continue to work at cross
purposes to her. He grabbed the chair and wheeled it swiftly through a door that connected the examination room
to the downstairs hall. Laura and Chris followed him along the gloomy corridor, then across a kitchen lit only by the
illuminated digital clocks on the oven and microwave oven. The chair thumped over the sill between the kitchen and
the back porch, badly jarring the wounded man, but he had been through worse.
Slinging the Uzi over her shoulder and jamming the revolver into her waistband, Laura hurried around Brenkshaw
to the bottom of the porch steps. She took hold of the wheelchair from the front, helping him trundle it to the
concrete walk below.
She glanced at the areaway between the house and garage, half expecting to see an armed man coming through
there already, and she whispered to Brenkshaw, "You'll have to go with us. They'll kill you if you stay here, I'm sure
they will."
Again he offered no argument but followed Chris, as the boy led the way down the walk that struck across the rear
lawn to the gate in the redwood fence at the back of the long property. Having unslung the Uzi from her shoulder,
Laura came last, ready to turn and open fire if she heard a noise from the house behind them.
As Chris reached the gate, it opened in front of him, and a man dressed in black stepped through from the alley,
darker than the night around them except for his moon-pale face and white hands, every bit as surprised by them
as they were by him. He'd come along the street beside the house and into the alley to cover the place from the
back. In his left hand, gleaming darkly, was a submachine gun, not at the ready, but he started to bring it up—Laura
could not blow him away, not without cutting her son down as well—but Chris reacted as Henry Takahami had
spent months teaching him to react. The boy spun and kicked the assassin's right arm, knocking the gun out of his
grasp—it hit the lawn with a thump and soft clatter—then kicked again at his adversary's crotch, and with a grunt of
pain, the man in black fell backward against the gatepost.
By then Laura had stepped around the wheelchair and interposed herself between Chris and the killer. She
reversed the Uzi, raised it overhead, and brought the stock of it down on the assassin's skull, struck him again with
all her might, and he dropped to the lawn, away from the walk, without having had a chance to cry out.
Events were moving fast now, too fast, they were on a downhill ride, and already Chris was going through the gate,
so Laura followed, and they surprised a second man in black, eyes like holes in his white face, a vampiric figure,
but this one was beyond the reach of a karate kick, so she had to open fire before he could use his own weapon.
She shot over Chris's head, a tightly placed burst that pounded into the assassin's chest, throat, and neck, virtually
decapitating him as it catapulted him backward onto the alley pavement.
Brenkshaw had come through the gate behind them, pushing the wheelchair into the alley, and Laura felt bad about
having gotten him into this, but there was no going back now. The back street was narrow, flanked by the fenced
yards of houses on both sides, with a few garages and clusters of garbage cans behind each property, poorly
revealed by the lamps on the intersecting streets at each end of the block, with no lights of its own.
To Brenkshaw, Laura said, "Wheel him across the alley and down a couple of doors. Find a gate that's open and


get him into somebody else's yard, out of sight. Chris, you go with them."
"What about you?"
"I'll follow you in a second."
"Mom—"
"Go, Chris!" she said, for the physician had already rolled the wheelchair fifty feet, angling across the alleyway.
As the boy reluctantly followed the doctor, Laura returned to the open redwood gate at the rear of Brenkshaw's
property. She was just in time to see two dark figures scuttle out of the areaway between the house and garage,
thirty yards from her, barely visible, noticeable only because they were moving. They ran crouched, one of them
heading toward the porch and the other toward the lawn because they didn't yet know exactly where the trouble
was, where the gunfire had come from.
She stepped through the gate, onto the walk, and opened up on them before they saw her, spraying the back of the
house with bullets. Though she was not on top of her targets, she was in range—ninety feet was not far—and they
dove for cover. She could not tell if she hit them, and she didn't continue to fire because even with a magazine of
four hundred rounds expended in short bursts, the Uzi could empty quickly; and now it was the only automatic
weapon she still possessed. She backed out of the gate and ran after Brenkshaw and Chris.
They were just going through a wrought -iron gate at the back of a property on the other side of the alley, two doors
down. When she got there and stepped into the yard, she found that old eugenias were planted along the iron
fence to the left and right of the gate; they had grown into a dense hedge, so no one would spot her easily from the
alley unless they were directly in front of the gate itself.
The physician had pushed the wheelchair all the way to the back of the house. It was Tudor, not Victorian like
Brenkshaw's, but also built at least forty or fifty years ago. The doctor was starting around the side of the place, into
the driveway, heading toward the next major street.
Lights winked on in houses all over the neighborhood. She was sure that faces were pressed to windows, including
those where lights had not appeared, but she didn't think anyone would see much.
She caught up with Brenkshaw and Chris at the front of the house and halted them in shadows near some
overgrown shrubbery. "Doc, I'd like you to wait here with your patient," she whispered.
He was shaking, and she hoped to God he didn't have a heart attack, but he was still game. "I'll be here."
She took Chris out to the next street, where at least a score of cars were parked at the near and far curbs along
that block. In the rain of bluish light from the streetlamps, the boy looked bad but not as awful as she had feared,
not as frightened as the physician; he was growing accustomed to terror. She said, "Okay, let's start trying car
doors. You take this side, I'll take the far side. If the door is open, check the ignition, under the driver's seat, and
behind the sun visor for keys."
"Gotcha."
Having once done research for a book in which a character had been a car thief, she had learned among other
things that on average one out of seventeen drivers left his keys in his car overnight. She hoped the figure might be
even more in their favor in a place like San Bernardino; after all, in New York and Chicago and LA and other big
cities, nobody but masochists left their keys in their cars, so for the average to work out to one in seventeen, there
had to be more trusting people among other Americans.
She attempted to keep an eye on Chris as she tried the doors of the cars along the far side of the street, but she
soon lost track at him. Out of the first eight vehicles, four were unlocked, but no fans were in any of them.
In the distance rose the wail of sirens.
That would probably drive off the men in black. Anyway, they were most likely still searching along the alleyway
behind Brenkshaw's house, moving cautiously, expecting to be fired upon again.
Laura moved boldly, with no caution whatsoever, not concerned about being seen by residents in the flanking
houses. The street was lined with mature but squat, stunted date palms that provided a lot of cover. Anyway, if
anyone had been aroused at this dead hour of the night, they were probably at second-floor windows, not trying to
look down at their own street through the palms but over toward the next street, toward Brenkshaw's place, where
all the shooting had been.
The ninth vehicle was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, and there were keys under the seat. Just as she started the engine
and pulled her door shut, Chris opened the door on the passenger's side and showed her a set of keys that he had
found.
"Brand new Toyota," he said.
"This'll do," she said.
The sirens were closer.
Chris pitched the Toyota's keys away, hopped into the car, and rode with her to the driveway of the house on the
other side of the street, farther up toward the corner, where the doctor was waiting in the shadows along the
driveway of a house in which no lights had yet come on. Maybe they were in luck; maybe no one was home at that
place. They lifted her guardian out of the wheelchair and laid him on the rear seat of the Cutlass.
The sirens were very close now, and in fact a police cruiser shot past at the far end of that block, on the side street,
red beacons flashing, heading toward Brenkshaw's block.


"You'll be okay, Doctor?" she asked, turning to him as she closed the back door of the Cutlass.
He had dropped into the wheelchair. "No apoplexy, if that's what you're afraid of. What the hell is going on with you,
girl?"
"No time, Doc. I have to split."
"Listen," he said, "maybe I won't tell them anything."
"Yes, you will," she said. "You may think you won't, but you'll tell them everything. If you weren't going to tell them,
then there wouldn't have been a police report or a newspaper story, and that record in the future, those gunmen
couldn't have found us."
"What're you jibbering about?"
She leaned down and kissed his cheek. "No time to explain, Doc . Thanks for your help. And, sorry, but I'd better
take that wheelchair too."
He folded it and put it in the trunk for her.
The night was full of sirens now.
She got behind the wheel, slammed her door. "Buckle up, Chris."
"Buckled," he said.
She turned left at the end of the driveway and drove to the far corner of the block, away from Brenkshaw's end of
the neighborhood, to the intersecting street on which a cruiser had flashed by only a moment ago. She figured that
if police were converging in answer to reports of automatic-weapons fire, they would be coming from different areas
of the city, from different patrols, so maybe no other car would approach by that same route. The avenue was
nearly deserted, and the only other vehicles she saw were not fitted with rooftop emergency beacons. She turned
right, heading steadily farther away from the Brenkshaw place, across San Bernardino, wondering where she would
find sanctuary.
Laura reached Riverside at 3:15 in the morning, stole a Buick from a quiet residential street, shifted her guardian to
it with the wheelchair, and abandoned the Cutlass. Chris slept through the entire operation and had to be carried
from one car to the other.
Half an hour later, in another neighborhood, exhausted and in need of sleep, she used a screwdriver from a tool
pouch in the Buick's trunk to steal a set of license plates from a Nissan. She put the Nissan's plates on the Buick
and put the Buick's plates in the trunk because they would eventually turn up on a police hot sheet.
A couple of days might pass before the Nissan's owner noticed his plates were missing, and even when he
reported them stolen, the police would not treat that news with the same attention they gave to stolen cars. Plates
were usually taken by kids playing a stupid prank or vandals, and their recovery was not a high priority for
overworked police laboring under heavy caseloads of major crimes. That was one more useful fact she had learned
while researching the book in which a car thief had played a secondary role.
She also paused long enough to dress her guardian in wool socks, shoes, and a pullover sweater to keep him from
catching a chill. At one point he opened his eyes, blinked at her, and said her name, and she thought he was
coming around, but then he slipped away again, muttering in a language that she could not identify because she
could not hear any of the words clearly.
She drove from Riverside to Yorba Linda in Orange County, where she parked in a corner of a Ralph's
Supermarket lot, behind a Goodwill collection station, at 4:50 in the morning. She killed the engine and lights,
unbuckled her safety harness. Chris was still buckled up, leaning against the door, sound asleep. Lying on the back
seat, her guardian was still unconscious, though his breathing was not quite as wheezy as it had been before they
had visited Carter Brenkshaw. Laura did not think she would be able to doze off; she hoped just to collect her wits
and rest her eyes, but in a minute or two she was asleep.
After killing at least three men, after being shot at repeatedly, after stealing two cars, after surviving a chase that
had harried her through three counties, she might have expected to dream of death, of blasted bodies and blood,
with the cold chatter of automatic-weapons fire as background music to the nightmare. She might have expected to
dream of losing Chris, for he was one of the two remaining lights in her personal darkness, he and Thelma, and she
dreaded the thought of going on without him. But instead she dreamed of Danny, and they were lovely dreams, not
nightmares. Danny was alive again, and they were reliving the sale of Shadrach for more than one million dollars,
but Chris was there, too, and he was eight years old, though in fact Chris had not been born at that time, and they
were celebrating their good fortune by spending the day at Disneyland, where the three of them had their picture
taken with Mickey Mouse, and in the Carnation Pavilion Danny told her he'd love her forever, while Chris pretended
that he could speak in an all-snort pig language that he had learned from Carl Dockweiler, who was sitting at the
next table with Nina and with Laura's father, and at another table the amazing Ackerson twins were eating
strawberry sundaes. . . .
She woke more than three hours later at 8:26, feeling rested as much because of that familial communion,
provided by her subconscious as because of the sleep itself. Sunlight from a cloudless sky sparkled on the car's
chrome and fell in a bright, brassy shaft through the rear window. Chris was still dozing. In the back seat the
wounded man had not regained consciousness.
She risked a quick walk to a telephone booth beside the market, which was within sight of the car. With change she


had in her purse, she called Ida Palomar, Chris's tutor in Lake Arrowhead, to tell her they would be away from
home the rest of the week. She didn't want poor Ida to walk unsuspecting into the bullet-riddled, blood-spattered
house near Big Bear, where police forensic teams were no doubt hard at work. She did not tell Ida where she was
calling from; nevertheless, she did not intend to remain in Yorba Linda much longer.
After she returned to the car, she sat yawning, stretching, and massaging the back of her neck, as she watched
early shoppers entering and leaving the supermarket a couple of hundred feet away. She was hungry. With sleep-
matted eyes and sour breath, Chris woke less than ten minutes later, and she gave him money to go into the
market and buy a package of sweet rolls and two pints of orange juice, not the most nutritional breakfast but energy-
giving.
"What about him?" Chris asked, indicating her guardian.
She remembered Dr. Brenkshaw's warning about the patient's risk of dehydration. But she also knew that she could
not force-feed him liquids when he was comatose; he would choke to death. "Well . . . bring a third orange juice.
Maybe I can coax him awake." As Chris got out of the car, she said, "Might as well get us something for lunch,
something that won't spoil—say a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. And get a can of spray deodorant and a
bottle of shampoo."
He grinned. "Why won't you let me eat this way at home?"
"Because if you don't get good nutrition, you're going to wind up with a brain even more twisted than the one you've
got now, kiddo."
"Even on the lam running from a hired killer I'm surprised you didn't rack a microwave, fresh vegetables, and a bottle of
vitamins."
"Are you saying I'm a good mother but a fussbudget? Compliment noted and point taken. Now go."
He started to close his door.
She said, "And, Chris . . ." "I know," the boy said. "Be careful." While Chris was gone, she started the engine and
switched on the radio to listen to the nine o'clock news. She heard a story about herself: the scene at her house
near Big Bear, the shoot-out in San Bernardino. Like most news stories it was inaccurate, disjointed, and made little
sense. But it confirmed that the police were looking for her throughout southern California. According to the
reporter, the authorities expected to locate her soon, largely because her face was already widely known.
She had been shocked last night when Carter Brenkshaw recognized her as Laura Shane, famous writer. She did
not think of herself as a celebrity; she was only a storyteller, a weaver of tales, who worked with a loom of
language, making a special fabric from words. She had done only one book tour for an early novel, had loathed that
dreary trek, and had not repeated the experience. She was not a regular guest on television talkshows. She had
never endorsed a product in a TV commercial, had never gone public in support of a politician, and had in general
attempted to avoid being part of the media circus. She observed the tradition of having a dust jacket photograph on
her books because it seemed harmless, and by the age of thirty-three she could admit without severe embarrass-
ment that she was an unusually striking woman, but she never imagined, as the police put it, that her face was
widely known.
Now she was dismayed not only because her loss of anonymity made her easier quarry for the police but because
she knew that becoming a celebrity in modern America was tantamount to a loss of one's self-critical faculties and a
severe decline of artistic power. A few managed to be both public figures and worthwhile writers, but most seemed
to be corrupted by the media attention. Laura dreaded that trap almost as much as she dreaded being picked up by
the police.
Suddenly, with some surprise, she realized that if she could worry about becoming a celebrity and losing her artistic
center, she must still believe in a safe future in which she would write more books. At times during the night, she
had vowed to fight to the death, to struggle to a bloody end to protect her son, but throughout she had felt that their
situation was virtually hopeless, their enemy too powerful and unreachable to be destroyed. Now something had
changed her, had brought her around to a dim, guarded optimism.
Maybe it had been the dream.
Chris returned with a large package of pecan-cinnamon rolls, three one-pint containers of orange juice, and the
other items. They ate the rolls and drank the juice, and nothing had ever tasted better.
When she finished her own breakfast, Laura got in the back seat and tried to wake her guardian. He could not be
roused.
She gave the third carton of orange juice to Chris and said, Keep it for him. He'll probably wake up soon."
“If he can't drink, he can't take his penicillin," Chris said.
"He doesn't need to take any for a few hours yet. Dr. Brenkshaw gave him a pretty potent shot last night; it's still
working."
But Laura was worried. If he did not regain consciousness, they might never learn the true nature of the dangerous
maze in which they were now lost—and might never find a way out of it. "What next?" Chris asked.
"We'll find a service station, use the rest rooms, then stop at a shop and buy ammunition for the Uzi and the revolver.
After that we start looking for a motel, just the right kind of motel, a place where we can hide out."
When they settled in somewhere, they would be at least fifty miles from Dr. Brenkshaw's place, where their


enemies had last found them. But did distance matter to men who measured their journeys strictly in days and
years rather than miles?
Parts of Santa Ana, neighborhoods on the south side of Anaheim, and adjoining areas offered the greatest
number of motels of the type she was seeking. She did not want a modern, gleaming Red Lion Inn or Howard
Johnson's Motor Lodge with color television sets, deep-pile carpet, and a heated swimming pool because reputable
establishments required valid ID and a major credit card, and she dared not risk leaving a paper trail that would
bring either the police or the assassins down on her. Instead she was seeking a motel that was no longer clean
enough or in good enough repair to attract tourists, a seedy place where they were happy to get the business,
eager to take cash, and reluctant to ask questions that would drive away guests.
She knew she would have a hard time finding a room, and she was not surprised to discover that the first twelve
places she tried were unable or unwilling to accommodate her. The only people that could be seen going from or
coming to those dead-end motels were young Mexican women with babies in their arms or young children in tow,
and young or middle-aged Mexican men in sneakers, chinos, flannel shirts, and lightweight denim or corduroy
jackets, some wearing straw cowboy hats and some baseball caps, and all of them with an air of watchfulness and
suspicion. Most decrepit motels had become boarding houses for illegal immigrant s, hundreds of thousands of
whom had taken up not-so-secret residence in Orange County alone. Whole families lived in a single room, five or
six or seven of them crowded into that cramped space, sharing one ancient bed and two chairs and a bathroom
with minimally functional plumbing, for which they paid a hundred and fifty dollars or more every week, with no linen
or maid service or amenities of any kind, but with cockroaches by the thousands. Yet they were willing to endure
those conditions and let themselves be outrageously exploited as underpaid workers rather than return to their
homeland and live under the rule of the "revolutionary people's government" that for decades had given them no
brotherhood but that of despair.
At the thirteenth motel, The Bluebird of Happiness, the owner-manager still hoped to serve the lower end of the
tourist trade, and he had not yet succumbed to the temptation to squeeze a rich living from the blood of poor
immigrants. A few of the twenty-four units were obviously rented to illegals, but the management still provided fresh
linen daily, maid service, television sets, and two spare pillows in every closet. However the fact that the desk clerk
took cash, did not press her for ID, and avoided meeting her eyes was sad proof that in another year The Bluebird
of Happiness would be one more monument to political stupidity and human avarice in a world as crowded with
such monuments as any old, city cemetery was crowded with tombstones.
The motel had three wings in a U-shape, with parking in the middle, and their unit was in the right rear corner of the
back wing. A big fan palm flourished near the door to their room, not visibly touched by smog or limited by its small
patch of ground amidst so much concrete and blacktop, bristling with new growth even in winter, as if nature had
chosen it as a subtle omen of her intention to seize every corner of the earth again when humankind passed on.
Laura and Chris unfolded the wheelchair and got the wounded man into it, making no effort to conceal what they
were doing, as if they were simply caring for a disabled person. Fully dressed, with his wounds concealed, her
guardian could pass for a paraplegic — except for the way his head lolled against his shoulder.
Their room was small though passably clean. The carpet was worn but recently shampooed, and a pair of dustballs
in one corner the size of tumbleweeds. The maroon-plaid spread on the queen size bed was tattered at the edges,
and its pattern was not quite busy enough to conceal two patches, but the sheets were crisp and smelled faintly of
detergent. They moved her guardian from the wheelchair to the bed and put two pillows under his head.
The seventeen-inch television set was firmly bolted to a table with a scarred, laminated top, and the back legs of
the table were in turn bolted to the floor. Chris sat in one of the two mismatched chairs, switched on the set, and
turned the cracked dial in search of either a cartoon show or reruns of an old sitcom. He settled for Get Smart, but
complained that it was "too stupid to be funny," and wondered how many boys his age would have thought so.
She sat in the other chair. "Why don't you get a shower?"
"Then just get back in these same clothes?" he asked doubtfully
"I know it sounds like purest folly, but try it. I guarantee you'll feel cleaner even without fresh clothes."
""But all that trouble to shower, then get into wrinkled clothes?"
"When did you become such a fashion plate that you're offended by a few wrinkles?"
He grinned, got up from his chair, and pranced to the bathroom as he thought a hopeless fop might prance. "The
king and queen would be shocked to see me such a mess."
"We'll make them put on blindfolds when they visit," she said.
He returned from the bathroom in a minute. "There's a dead bug in the toilet bowl. I think it's a cockroach, but I'm
not really sure."
"Does the species matter? Will we be notifying next of kin?"
Chris laughed. God, she loved to hear him laugh. He said, "What should I do — flush him?"
"Unless you want to fish him out, put him in a matchbox, and bury him in the flowerbed outside."
He laughed again. "Nope. Burial at sea." In the bathroom, he hummed "Taps," then flushed the John.
While the boy was showering, Get Smart ended and a movie came on. The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island.
Laura was not actually watching the set; she left it on for background, but there were limits to what even a woman


on the lam could endure, so she quickly switched to channel eleven and Hour Magazine.
She stared at her guardian for a while, but his unnatural slumber depressed her. From her chair she reached to the
drapes a few times, parting them far enough to scan the motel's parking lot, but no one on earth could know where
she was; she was in no imminent danger. So she stared at the TV screen, uninterested in what it offered, until she
was half hypnotized by it. The Hour Magazine host was interviewing a young actor who droned on about himself,
not always making much sense, and after a while she was vaguely aware that he kept saying something about
water, but now she was beginning to doze off, and his insistent talk of water was both mesmeric and annoying.
"Mom?"
She blinked, sat up, and saw Chris in the bathroom doorway. He'd just gotten out of the shower. His hair was
damp, and he was dressed only in his briefs. The sight of his thin, boyish body —all ribs and elbows and knees —
pulled at her heart, for he looked so innocent and vulnerable. He was so small and fragile that she wondered how
she could ever protect him, and renewed fear rose in her.
"Mom, he's talking," Chris said, pointing to the man on the
bed. "Didn't you hear him? He's talking." "Water," her guardian said thickly. "Water." She went quickly to the bed
and bent over him. He was no longer comatose. He was trying to sit up, but he had no strength. His blue eyes were
open, and although they were bloodshot, they focused on her, alert and observant. "Thirsty," he said. She said,
"Chris—"
He was already there with a glass of water from the bathroom. She sat on the bed beside her guardian, lifted his
head, took the water from Chris, and helped the wounded man drink. She allowed him only small sips; she didn't
want him to choke. His lips were fever-chapped, and his tongue was coated with a white film, as if he had eaten
ashes. He drank more than a third of a glass of water, then indicated that he'd had enough.
After she lowered his head to the pillow, she put a hand to his forehead. "Not so hot as he was."
He rolled his head from side to side, trying to look at the room. In spite of the water, his voice was dry, burnt out.
"Where are we?” he said.
“Safe,” she said.
“Nowhere is safe."
“We may have figured out more of this crazy situation than you realize,” she told him.
“Yeah,” Chris said, sitting on the bed beside his mother. "We know you’re a time traveler!"
The man looked at the boy, managed a weak smile, winced in pain.
“I’ve got drugs," Laura said. "A painkiller.”
"No," he said. "Not now. Later maybe. More water?" Laura lifted him once more, and this time he drank most of
what remained in the glass. She remembered the penicillin and put a capsule between his teeth. He washed it
down with the last two swallows.
"When do you come from?" Chris asked, intensely interested, oblivious of the droplets of bathwater that tracked out
of his damp hair and down his face. "When?"
“Honey," Laura said, "he's very weak, and I don't think we should bother him with too many questions just yet."
“He can tell us that much, anyway, Mom." To the wounded man, Chris said, "When do you come from?" He stared
at Chris, then at Laura, and the haunted look was in his eyes again.
“When do you come from? Huh? The year 2100? 3000?"
In his paper-dry voice, her guardian said, "Nineteen forty-four.
The little bit of activity had clearly tired him already, for his eyelids looked heavy, and his voice was fainter than it
had been, so Laura was certain that he had lapsed into delirium again.
“When?" Chris repeated, baffled by the answer he had been given.
“Ninet een forty-four."
“That’s impossible," Chris said.
“Berlin,” her guardian said.
“He’s delirious,” Laura told Chris.
His voice was slurred now as weariness dragged him down, but what he said was unmistakable: "Berlin."
"Berlin?" Chris said. "You mean—Berlin, Germany?" Sleep claimed the wounded man, not the unnatural sleep of a
coma but restful sleep that was immediately marked by soft snoring, though in the moment before he slipped away,
"Nazi Germany." he said,
One Life to Live was on the television, but neither she nor Chris was paying any attention to the soap opera. They
had drawn the two chairs closer to the bed, where they could watch the sleeping man. Chris was dressed, and his
hair was mostly dry, though it remained damp at the nape of his neck. Laura felt grimy and longed for a shower, but
she was not going to leave her guardian in case he woke again and was able to talk. She and the boy spoke in
whispers:
"Chris, it just occurred to me, if these people were from the future, why wouldn't they have been carrying laser guns
or something futuristic when they came for us?"
"Th ey wouldn't want everyone to know they were from the future," Chris said. "They'd bring weapons and wear
clothes that wouldn't be out of place here. But, Mom, he said he was from—"


"I know what he said. But it doesn't make sense, does it? If they had time travel in 1944, we'd know about it by now,
wouldn't we?"
At one-thirty her guardian woke and seemed briefly confused as to his whereabouts. He asked for more water, and
Laura helped him drink. He said he was feeling a little better, though very weak and still surprisingly sleepy. He
asked to be propped up higher. Chris got the two spare pillows from the closet and helped his mother raise the
wounded man.
"What is your name?" Laura asked. "Stefan. Stefan Krieger."
She repeated the name softly, and it was all right, not melodic but solid, a masculine-sounding name. It was just not
the name of a guardian angel, and she was mildly amused to realize that after so many years, including two
decades during which she had professed to have no belief in him. she still expected his name to be musical and
unearthly.
"And you really come from—"
"Nineteen forty-four," he repeated. Just the effort required to move to a sitting position had wrung fine beads of
perspiration from his brow—or perhaps the sweat resulted in part from thoughts of the time and place where his
long journey had begun. "Berlin, Germany. There was a brilliant Polish scientist, Vladimir Penlovski, considered a
madman by some, and very likely mad in fact — very mad, I think — but also a genius. He was in Warsaw, working
on certain theories about the nature of time for more than twenty-five years before Germany and Russia
collaborated to invade Poland in 1939…”
Penlovski, according to Stefan Krieger, was a Nazi sympathizer and welcomed Hitler's forces. Perhaps he knew
that from Hitler he would receive the kind of financial backing for his researches that he could not get from sources
more rational. Under the personal patronage of Hitler himself, Penlovski and his closest assistant, Wladyslaw
Januskaya, went to Berlin to establish an institute for temporal research, which was so secret that it was given no
name. It was simply called the Institute. There, in association with German scientists no less committed and no less
farsighted than he, financed by a seemingly inexhaustible river of funds from the Third Reich, Penlovski had found
a way to pierce the artery of time and move at will through that bloodstream of days and months and years.”
"Blitzstrasse," Stefan said.
“Blitz—that part of it means lightning," Chris said. "Like Blitzkrieg—lightning war—in all those old movies."
"Lightning Road in this case," Stefan said. "The road to the future."
It literally could have been called Zukunftstrasse, or Future Road, Stefan explained, for Vladimir Penlovski had
been unable to send men backward in time from the gate he had invented. They could travel only forward, into
their future, and automatically return to their own era.
There seems to be some cosmic mechanism that prohibits time travelers from meddling with their own pasts in
order to change their present day circumstances. You see, if they could travel back in time to their own past, there
would develop certain—"
“Paradoxes!" Chris said excitedly.
Stefan looked surprised to hear the boy speak that word.
Smiling, Laura said, "As I told you, we've had rather a long discussion about your possible origins, and time travel
turned out to be the most logical. And in Chris here, you're looking at my resident expert on the weird."
"Paradox," Stefan agreed. "It's the same word in English and German. If a time traveler could go back in time to his
own past and affect some event in history, that change would have tremendous ramifications. It would alter the
future from which he had come. Therefore he wouldn't be able to return to the same world he'd left—"
"Paradox!" Chris said gleefully.
"Paradox," Stefan agreed. "Apparently nature abhors a paradox and generally will not permit a time traveler to
create one. And thank God for that. Because . . . suppose, for example, Hitler sent an assassin back in time to kill
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill long before they rose to high office, which would have resulted in the
election of different men in the U.S. and England, men who might have been less brilliant and more easily dealt
with, leading to Hitler's triumph by '44 or sooner."
He was speaking now with a passion that his physical condition would not allow him to sustain, and Laura could
see it taking a toll of him word by word. The perspiration had almost dried on his brow; but now, although he was
not even gesturing, a new thin film of sweat silvered his pale forehead again. The circles of fatigue around his eyes
appeared to grow darker. But she could not stop him and order him to rest, because she wanted and needed to
hear everything he had to say —and because he would not have allowed her to stop him.
"Suppose der Fuhrer could send back assassins to kill Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Field Marshal
Montgomery, kill them in their cradles, when they were babies, eliminating them and others, all the best military
minds the Allies possessed. Then most of the world would have been his by '44, in which case time travelers would
have been going back in time to kill those men who had already long been dead and posed no threat. Paradox, you
see. And thank God that nature permits no such paradox, no such tampering with the time traveler's own past, for
otherwise Adolf Hitler would have turned the entire world into a concentration camp, a crematorium."
They were silent a while, as the possibility of such hell on earth struck each of them. Even Chris responded to the
picture of an altered world that Stefan painted, for he was a child of the eighties, in which the villains of film and


television melodramas were usually voracious aliens from a distant star or Nazis. The Swastika, the silver death's-
head symbol and black uniforms of the SS, and that strange fanatic with the small mustache were to Chris
especially terrifying because they were part of the media-created mythology on which he had been raised. Laura
knew that real people and events, once subsumed by mythology, were somehow more real to a child than the very
bread he ate.
Stefan said, "So from the institute we could go only forward in time, but that had its uses too. We could leap forward
a few decades to discover if Germany had held on in the dark days of the war and had somehow turned the tide. But
of course we found that Germany had not done any such thing, that the Third Reich had been defeated. Yet with all
the knowledge of the future to draw from, could not that tide be turned, after all? Surely there were things Hitler
could do to save the Reich even as late as '44. And there were things that might be brought back from the future
with which the war might be won—"
"Such as," Chris said, "atomic bombs!" "Or the knowledge of how they were built," Stefan said. "The Reich already
had a nuclear research program, you know, and if they'd had a breakthrough early enough, had split the atom ..."
"They'd have won the war," Chris said. Stefan asked for water and drank half a glass this time. He wanted to hold
the glass in his good hand, but he was shaking too much; water slopped on the bedclothes, and Laura had to help
him. When he spoke again, Stefan's voice wavered at times. "Because the time traveler exists outside of time
during his journey, he is not only able to move in time but geographically, as well. Picture him hanging above the
earth, unmoving, as the globe turns below him. That's not what he does, of course, but it's easier to see that image
than to imagine him hovering in another dimension. Now, as he hangs above the world, it turns below him, and if
his journey to the future is gauged properly, he can travel to a precise time at which he will find himself in Berlin, the
same city he left years before. But if he chooses to travel a few hours more or less, the world will have turned that
much more beneath him, and he will arrive at a different place on its surface. The calculations to achieve a precise
arrival are monumentally difficult in my era, 1944—" "But they'd be easy these days," Chris said, "with computers."
Shifting in discomfort against the pillows that propped him up, putting his trembling right hand against his wounded
left shoulder as if to quell the pain by his own touch, he said, "Teams of German physicists, accompanied by
Gestapo, were sent secretly to various cities in Europe and the United States in the year 1985, to accumulate vital
information on the making of nuclear weapons. The material they were after was not classified or difficult to find.
With what they already knew from their own researches, they could obtain the rest from textbooks and scientific
publications readily available at any major university library in '85. Four days before I departed the Institute for the
last time, those teams returned from '85 to March 1944, with material that would give the Third Reich a nuclear
arsenal before the autumn of that year. They were to spend a few weeks studying the material at the Institute
before deciding how and where to introduce that knowledge into the German nuclear program without revealing
bow it had been obtained. I knew then that I had to destroy the institute and everything it contained, key personnel
as well as files, to prevent a future shaped by Adolf Hitler."
As Laura and Chris listened rapt, Stefan Krieger told them how he had planted explosives in the Institute, how on
the last of his days in '44 he had shot Penlovski, Januskaya, and Volkaw, and had programmed the time gate to
bring him to Laura in present-day America.
But something had gone wrong at the last minute, as Stefan was leaving. The public power supply failed. The RAF
had bombed Berlin for the first time in January that year, and the U.S. bombers had made the first daylight runs on
March 6, so the power supply had been interrupted often, not merely due to bomb damage but also because of the
work of saboteurs. It was to guard against such interruptions that the gate itself was powered by a secure
generator. Stefan heard no bombers that day when, wounded by Kokoschka, he had crawled into the gate, so
apparently the power failed because of saboteurs.
"And the timer on the explosives stopped. The gate was not destroyed. It's still open back there, and they can come
after us. And . . . they can still win the war."
Laura was getting another headache. She put her fingertips to her temples. "But wait. Hitler can't have succeeded
in building atomic weapons and winning World War Two, because we don't live in a world where that happened.
You don't have to worry. Somehow, in spite of all the knowledge they took back through the gate, they obviously
failed to develop a nuclear arsenal."
"No," he said. "They've failed so far, but we can't assume they will continue to fail. To those men at the Institute in
Berlin in 1944, their past is immutable, as I have said. They cannot travel backward in time and change their own
past. But they can change their future and ours, because a time traveler's future is mutable; he can take steps to
alter it."
"But his future is my past," Laura said. "And if the past can't be changed, how can he change mine?" "Yeah," Chris
said. "Paradox."
Laura said, "Listen, I haven't spent the last thirty-four years in a world ruled by Adolf Hitler and his heirs; therefore,
in spite of the gate, Hitler failed."
Stefan's expression was dismal. "If time travel were invented now, in 1989, that past of which you speak —World
War Two and every event since—would be unalterable. You could not change it, for nature's rule against backward
time-travel and time-travel paradoxes would apply to you. But time travel has not been discovered here—or


rediscovered. The time travelers at the institute in Berlin in '44 are free to change their future, apparently, and
though they will simultaneously be changing your past, nothing in the laws of nature will stop them. And there you
have the greatest paradox of all—the only one that for some reason nature seems to allow."
"You're saying they could still build nuclear weapons back then with the information they got in '85," Laura said,
"and win the war?"
"Yes. Unless the institute is destroyed first." "And what then? Suddenly, all around us, we find things changed, find
ourselves living under Nazism?"
"Yes. And you won't even know what's happened, because you will be a different person than you are now. Your
entire past will never have occurred. You will have lived a different past altogether, and you will remember nothing
else, none of what has happened to you in this life because this life will never have existed. You will think the world
has always been as it is, that there was never a world in which Hitler lost." What he was proposing terrified and
appalled her because it made life seem even more fragile than she had always thought it was. The world under her
feet suddenly seemed no more real than the world of a dream; it was apt to dissolve without warning and send her
tumbling into a great, dark void.
With growing horror she said, "If they change the world in which I grew up, I might never have met Danny, never
married."
"I might never have been born." Chris said.
She reached to Chris and put a hand on his arm, not only to reassure him but to reassure herself of his current
solidity. "I might not have been born myself. Everything I've seen, the good and bad of the world that's been since
1944 . . . it'll all wash away like an elaborate sandcastle, and a new reality will exist in its place."
"A new and worse reality," Stefan said, clearly exhausted by the effort he had made to explain what was at stake.
"In that new world, I might never have written my novels."
"Or if you wrote novels,” Stefan said, "they would be different from those you've done in this life, grotesque works
produced by an artist laboring under the rule of an oppressive government, in the iron fist of Nazi censorship.”
"If those guys built the atom bomb in 1944," Chris said, "then we’ll all crumble away into dust and blow away."
"Not literally. But like dust, yes," Stefan Krieger agreed. "Gone, with no trace that we've ever been."
"We've gotta stop them." Chris said.
"If we can," Stefan agreed. "But first we've got to stay alive in this reality, and that might not be easy."
Stefan needed to relieve himself, and Laura helped him into the motel bathroom, handling him as if she were a
nurse accustomed to matter-of-fact dealings with the plumbing of sick men. By the time she returned him to the
bed, she was worried about him again; though he was muscular, he felt limp, clammy, and he was frighteningly
weak.
She told him briefly about the shoot-out at Brenkshaw's, through which he had remained comatose. "If these
assassins are coming from the past instead of the future, how do they know where to find us? How did they know in
1944 that we'd be at Dr. Brenkshaw's when we were, forty-five years later?"
"To find you," Stefan said, "they made two trips. First, they went farther into the future, a couple of days farther, to
this coming weekend perhaps, to see if you had shown up anywhere by then. If you hadn't —and apparently you
had not—then they started checking the public record. Back issues of newspapers, for one thing. They looked for
the stories about the shooting at your house last night, and in those stories they read that you'd taken a wounded
man to Brenkshaw's place in San Bernardino. So they simply returned to '44 and made a second trip—this time to
Dr. Brenkshaw's in the early hours of this morning, January 11."
"They can hopscotch around us," Chris told Laura. "They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then
they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like ... if we were cowboys
and the Indians were all psychic."
"Who was Kokoschka?" Chris wanted to know. "Who was the man who killed my dad?"
"Head of institute security," Stefan said. ".He claimed to be a distant relation of Oskar Kokoschka, the noted
Austrian expressionist painter, but I doubt if it was true because in our Kokoschka there was no hint of an artist's
sensitivity. Standartenfuhrer—which means Colonel—Heinrich Kokoschka was an efficient killer for the Gestapo."
"Gestapo," Chris said, awestruck. "Secret police?"
"State police," Stefan said. "Widely known to exist but allowed to operate in secrecy. When he showed up on that
mountain road in 1988, I was as surprised as you. There'd been no lightning. He must have arrived far away from
us, fifteen or twenty miles, in some other valley of the San Bernardinos, and the lightning had been beyond our
notice." The lightning associated with time travel was in fact a very localized phenomenon, Stefan explained. "After
Kokoschka showed up there, on my trail, I thought I would return to the institute and find all of my colleagues
outraged at my treason, but when I got there, no one took special notice of me. I was confused. Then after I killed
Penlovski and the others, when I was in the main lab preparing for my final jaunt into the future. Heinrich
Kokoschka burst in and shot me. He wasn't dead! Not dead on that highway in 1988. Then I realized that
Kokoschka had obviously only just learned of my treason when he'd found the men I’d shot. He would travel to
1988 and try to kill me—and all of you—at a later time. Which meant that the gate would have to remain open to
allow him to do so, and that I was destined to fail to destroy it. At least at that time."


"God, this headache," Laura said.
Chris seemed to have no trouble whatsoever following the tangled threads of time travel. He said, "So after you
traveled to our house last night, Kokoschka traveled to 1988 and killed my dad. Jeez! In a way, Mr. Krieger, you
killed Kokoschka forty-three years after he shot you in that lab ... yet you had shot him before he shot you. This is
wild stuff, Mom, isn't this wild? Isn't this great?''
"It's something," she agreed. "And how did Kokoschka know to find you on that mountain road?"
"After he discovered I'd shot Penlovski, and after I escaped through the gate, Kokoschka must have found the
explosives in the attic and basement. Then he must have dug into the automatic records the machinery keeps of all
the times the gate is used. That was a bit of data tracking that was my responsibility, so no one previously had
noticed all my jaunts into your life, Laura. Anyway, Kokoschka must have done some time traveling of his own,
must have taken a lot of trips to see where I'd been going, secretly watching me watch you, watching me alter your
destiny for the better. He must have been watching the day I came to the cemetery when your father was buried,
and he must have been watching when I beat Sheener, but I never saw him. So from all the trips I made into your
life, from all the times I just observed you and the times I acted to save you, he picked a place at which to kill us. He
wanted to kill me because I was a traitor, and he wanted to kill you and your family because . . . well because he
realized you were so important to me."
Why? she thought. Why am I so important to you, Stefan Krieger? Why have you intruded in my destiny, trying to
give me a better life?
She would have asked those questions then, but he had more to say about Kokoschka. His strength seemed to be
fading fast, and he was having some difficulty holding on to the thread of his reasoning. She did not want to
interrupt and confuse him.
He said, "From the clocks and graphs on the gate's programming board, Kokoschka could have discovered my final
destination: last night, your house. But, you see, I actually had intended to return to the night that Danny died, as I
promised you I would, and instead I returned one year later only because I made some mistake when entering my
calculations in the machine. After I left through the gate, wounded, Heinrich Kokoschka would have found those
calculations . He would have realized my mistake, and would have known where to find me not only last night but on
the night that Danny died. In a way, by coming to save you from that runaway truck last year, I brought Danny's
killer with me. I feel responsible for that, even though Danny would have died in the accident anyway. At least you
and Chris are alive. For now."
"Why wouldn't Kokoschka have followed you to 1989, to our house last night? He knew you were already wounded,
easy prey."
“But he also knew that I would expect him to follow me, and he was afraid I was armed and would be prepared for
him. So he went to 1988, where I was not expecting him, where he had the advantage of surprise. Also, Kokoschka
probably figured if he followed me to 1988 and killed me there, I would not therefore have ever returned to the
Institute from that mountain highway and would not have had a chance to kill Penlovski. He no doubt thought if he
could pull a trick with time and undo those murders, thereby saving the head of the project. But of course he could
not do so, because then he would be altering his own past, an impossibility. Penlovski and the others were already
dead by then and would stay dead. !f Kokoschka had better understood the laws of time travel, he would have
known that I would kill him in 1988 when he followed me there, because by the time he made that jaunt to avenge
Penlovski, I had already returned to the Institute from that night, safe!”
Chris said, "Are you all right, Mom?"
“Do they make Excedrin in one-pound tablets?" she asked.
“I know it's a lot to absorb," Stefan said. "But that's who Kokoschka is. Or who he was. He removed the explosives
I’d planted. Because of him—and that inconvenient power failure that stopped the timer on the detonator—the
institute still stands, the gate is still open, and Gestapo agents are trying to track us here in our own time—and kill
us."
“Why?” Laura asked.
“Revenge," Chris said.
“They’re crossing forty-five years of time to kill us just for revenge?” Laura said. "Surely there's more than that."
"There is,” Stefan said. "They want to kill us because they believe we are the only people in existence who can find
a way to close the gate before they win the war and alter their future. And in that assumption, they're correct."
"How?" she asked, astounded. "How can we destroy the institute forty-five years ago?"
"I'm not sure yet," he said. "But I'll think about it."
She began to ask more questions, but Stefan shook his head. He pleaded exhaustion and soon drifted off to sleep
again.
Chris made a late lunch of peanut butter sandwiches with the fixings he had bought at the supermarket. Laura had
no appetite. She could see that Stefan was going to sleep for a few hours, so she showered. She felt better
afterward, even in wrinkled clothes.
Throughout the afternoon the television fare was relentlessly idiotic: soap operas, game shows, more soap operas,
reruns of Fantasy Island, The Bold and the Beautiful, and Phil Donahue dashing back and forth through the studio


audience, exhorting them to raise their consciousness about—and find compassion for—the singular plight of
transvestite dentists.
She replenished the Uzi's magazine with the ammunition she had bought at a gunshop that morning.
Outside, as the day waned, clots of dark clouds formed and grew until no blue sky could be seen. The fan palm
beside the stolen Buick seemed to pull its fronds closer together in expectation of a storm.
She sat in one of the chairs, propped her feet up on the edge of the bed, closed her eyes, and dozed for a while.
She woke from a bad dream in which she had discovered she was made of sand and was swiftly dissolving in a
rainstorm. Chris was sleeping in the other chair, and Stefan was still snoring softly on the bed.
Rain was falling, drumming hollowly on the motel roof, pattering in the puddles on the parking lot outside, a sound
like bubbling-hot grease, though the day was cool. It was a typical southern California storm, tropically heavy and
steady but lacking thunder and lightning. Occasionally such pyrotechnics accompanied rain in this part of the world,
but less often than elsewhere. Now Laura had special reason to be thankful for that climatological fact, because if
there had been thunder and lightning, she would not have known whether it was natural or signaled the arrival of
Gestapo agents from another era.
Chris woke at five-fifteen, and Stefan Krieger came around five minutes later. Both said they were hungry, and in
addition to his appetite, Stefan showed other signs of recovery. His eyes had been bloodshot and watery; now they
were clear. He was able to raise himself up in bed with his good arm. His left hand, which had been numb and
virtually useless, was full of feeling now, and he was able to flex it, wriggle his fingers, and make a weak fist.
Instead of dinner she wanted answers to her questions, but she'd led a life that had taught her patience—among
other things. When they had checked into the motel shortly after eleven that morning, Laura had noticed a Chinese
restaurant across the street. Now, though reluctant to leave Stefan and Chris, she went out into the rain to get
some take-out food.
She carried the .38 under her jacket and left the Uzi on the bed with Stefan. Though the carbine was too big and
powerful for Chris to handle, Stefan might be able to brace himself against the headboard and trigger a burst even
with just his right hand, though the shock of recoil would shatter through his wound. When she returned, dripping
rain, they put the waxed-cardboard containers of food on the bed—except for the two orders of egg flower soup,
which were for Stefan, and which she put on the nightstand near him. Upon walking into the aromatic restaurant,
she had found her own appetite, and naturally she had ordered far too much food: lemon chicken, beef with orange
flavor, brown-pepper shrimp, moo goo gai pan, moo shu pork, and two containers of rice.
As she and Chris sampled all of the dishes with plastic forks and washed the food down with Cokes that she had gotten
from the soda machine, Stefan drank his soup. He had thought he could not hold down more solid food, but with
the soup disposed of, he cautiously began to try the moo goo gai pan and the lemon chicken.
At Laura’s request he told them about himself while they ate. He had been born in 1909 in the German town of
Gittelde in the Harz mountains which made him thirty-five years old. ("Well," Chris said, " on the other hand, if you count the
forty-five years you skipped when you traveled in time from '44 to '89, you're actually old!" He laughed, pleased with
himself. "Boy, you sure look good for an eighty-year-old geezer!") After moving following the First World War,
Stefan's father, Franz Krieger, had been an early supporter of Hitler in 1919, a member the German Workers' Party
from the very week that Hitler began his political career in that organization. He even worked with Hitler and Anton
Drexler to write the platform with which that group, essentially a debating society, was eventually transformed into a
true political party, later to become the National Socialists.
"I was one of the first members of the Hitler Youth in 1926, when I was seventeen," he said. "Less than a year later
I joined the Sturmabteilung or the SA, the brown shirts, the enforcement arm of the party, virtually a private army.
By 1928, however, I was a member of the Schutzstaffel—"
"The SS!" Chris said, speaking in the same tone of horror mixed with strange attraction that he would have used if
he had been talking of vampires or werewolves. "You were a member of the SS? You wore the black uniform and
the silver death's-head, carried the dagger?"
"I'm not proud of it," Stefan Krieger said. "Oh, at the time I was proud, of course. I was a fool. My father's fool. In the
early days the SS was a small group- the essence of elitism, and our purpose was to protect der Furer with our own
lives if that was necessary. We were all eighteen to twenty-two, young and ignorant and hotheaded. In my own
defense I'll say that I was not particularly hotheaded, not as committed as those around me. I was doing what my
father wanted, but of ignorance I'll admit to having more than my fair share.*"
Windblown rain rattled against the window and gurgled noisily in a downspout beyond the outside wall against
which the bed stood.
Since awakening from his nap. Stefan had looked healthier, and he had perked up even more with the hot soup.
But now, as he recalled a youth spent in a cauldron of hatred and death, he paled again, and his eyes seemed to
sink deeper into the darkness under his brow. ' 'I never left the SS because it was such a desired position and there
was no way to leave without arousing suspicion that I'd lost my faith in our revered leader. But year by year, month
by month, then day by day I became sickened by what I saw, by the madness and murder and terror."
Neither the brown-pepper shrimp nor the lemon chicken tasted too good any longer, and Laura's mouth was so dry
that the rice stuck to the roof of it. She pushed the food aside, sipped her Coke. "But if you never left the SS . . .


when did you go to college, when did you get involved in scientific research?"
"Oh," he said, "I wasn't at the Institute as a researcher. I've no university education. Except ... for two years I
received intensive instruction in English, trying to learn to speak with an acceptable American accent. I was part of
a project that dropped hundreds of deep-cover agents into Britain and the United States. But I never could quite
cast off the accent, so I was never sent overseas; besides, because my father was an early supporter of Hitler, they
felt I was trustworthy, so they found other uses for me. I was on special assignment to der Fuhrer's staff, where I
was given sensitive jobs , usually as a liaison between squabbling factions of the government. It was an excellent
position from which to obtain information useful to the British, which I did from 1938 on."
"You were a spy?" Chris asked excitedly.
"Of a sort. I had to do what little I could to bring down the Reich, to make up for ever having been a willing part of it.
I had to atone—though atoning seemed impossible. And then, in the autumn of 1943, when Penlovski began to
have some success with his time gate, sending animals off to God-knew-where and bringing them back, I was
assigned to the institute as an observer, as der Fuhrer's personal representative. Also as a guinea pig, as the first
human to be sent forward in time. You see, when they were ready to send a man into the future, they did not want
to risk Penlovski or Januskaya or Helmut Volkaw or Mitter or Shenck or one of the other scientists whose loss
would damage the project. No one knew if a man would come back as reliably as the animals did—or if he would
come back sane and whole."
Chris nodded solemnly. "It's possible time travel might've been painful or mentally unbalancing or something, yeah.
Who could know?"
Who could know indeed? Laura thought.
Stefan said, "They also wanted whomever they sent to be reliable and capable of keeping his mission a secret. I
was the ideal choice."
"An SS officer, a spy, and the first chrononaut," Chris said. "Wow, what a fascinating life."
"May God give you a life far less eventful," Stefan Krieger said. Then he looked at Laura more directly than
previously. His eyes were a beautiful, pure blue, yet they revealed a tortured soul. "Laura . . . what do you think of
your guardian now? Not an angel but an aide to Hitler, an SS thug."
"No thug," she said. "Your father, your time, and your societ y may have tried to make a thug of you, but there was
an inner core they couldn't bend. Not a thug, Stefan Krieger. Never. Not you."
"No angel, though," he said. "Far from an angel, Laura. Upon my death, when the stains on my soul are read by He
who sits in judgment, I'll be given my own small space in hell."
The rain drumming on the roof seemed like time flowing away, many millions of precious minutes, hours and days
and years pouring through gutters and downspouts, draining away, wasted.
After she had gat hered up the unfinished food and thrown it into dumpster behind the motel office, after she’d
gotten three more Cokes from the machine, one for each of them, she at last asked her guardian the question she
had wanted to ask him from the moment he had come out of his coma: ‘Why? Why did you focus on me, on my
life, and why did you want to help me along, to save my butt now and then? For God's sake, how does my fate tie
up with Nazis, time travelers, the fate of the world?"
On his third trip into the future, he explained, he had traveled to California in 1984. California because his previous
two trips — two weeks in 1954, two weeks in 1964 — had shown him that California was perhaps the coming
cultural and current scientific center of the most advanced nation on earth. Nineteen eighty-four because it was a
neat forty years from his own time. He was not the only man going through the gale by then; four others began
making jaunts as soon as it was proved safe. On that third trip Stefan had still been scouting the future, learning in
detail what had happened to the world during and after the war. He was also learning what scientific developments
of the intervening forty years would most likely be taken back to Berlin in '44 to win the war for Hitler, not because
he intended to help in that design but because he hoped to sabotage it. His researches involved reading
newspapers, watching television, and just circulating in American society, getting a feel for the late twentieth
century.
Leaning back on his pillows now, recalling that third journey in a voice utterly different from the gloom with which he
had described his grim life up to 1944, he said, "You can't imagine what it was like for me to walk the streets of Los
Angeles for the first time. If I had traveled one thousand years into the future instead of forty, it couldn't have
seemed more wondrous. The cars! Cars everywhere —and so many of them German, which seemed to indicate a
certain forgiveness for the war, acceptance of the new Germany, and I was moved by that."
"We have a Mercedes," Chris said. "It's neat, but I like the Jeep better."
"The cars," Stefan said, "the styles, the amazing advancements everywhere: digital watches, home computers,
videotape recorders for watching movies in your own living room! Even after five days of my visit had passed, I was
in a state of pleasant shock, and looked forward each morning to new wonders. On the sixth day, as I passed a
bookstore in Westwood, I saw a line of people waiting to have copies of a novel signed by the aut hor. I went inside
to browse and to see what kind of book was so popular, to help me a bit in understanding American society. And
there you were, Laura, at a table piled with copies of your third novel and your first major success, Ledges."
Laura leaned forward, as if puzzlement were a force drawing her to the edge of her chair. "Ledges'? But I've never


written a book with that title."
Again, Chris understood. "That was a book you wrote in the life you would've lived if Mr. Krieger hadn't meddled in
it."
"You were twenty-nine years old when I saw you for the first time at that book -signing party in Westwood," Stefan
said. "You were in a wheelchair because your legs were twisted, useless. Your left arm was partly paralyzed, as
well."
"Crippled?" Chris said. "Mom was crippled?"
Laura was literally on the edge of her chair now, for though what her guardian said seemed too fantastic to be
believed, she sensed that it was true. On a deep level even more primitive than instinct, she perceived a tightness
to the image of herself in a wheelchair, her legs useless and wasted; perhaps what she apprehended was the faint
echo of destiny thwarted.
"You'd been that way since birth," Stefan said.
“Why?”
“I only learned that much later, after conducting much research The doctor who had delivered you in Denver,
Colorado, in 1955—Markwell was his name—had been an alcoholic. Yours was a difficult birth anyway —"
“My mother died delivering me."
“Yes, in that reality she died too. But in that reality Markwell botched the delivery, and you received a spinal injury
that crippled you for life. "
A shudder passed through her. As if to prove to herself that she had indeed escaped the life that fate had originally
planned for her, she got up and walked to the window, using her legs, her undamaged and blessedly useful legs.
To Chris, Stefan said, "That day I saw her in the wheelchair, your mother was so beautiful. Oh. so very beautiful.
Her face, of course, was the same as it is now. But it wasn't the face alone that made her beautiful. There was such
an aura of courage about her, and she was in such good humor m spite of her handicaps. Each person who came
to her with Ledges was sent away not only with a signature but with a laugh. In spite of being condemned to a life in
a wheelchair, your mother was so amusing, lighthearted. I watched from a distance and was charmed and
profoundly moved, as I'd never been before."
"She's great," Chris said. "Nothing scares my mom."
"Everything scares your mom," Laura said. "This whole crazy conversation is scaring your mom half to death."
"You never run from anything or hide." Chris said, turning to look at her. He blushed; a boy his age was supposed
to be cool, at a stage where he was beginning to wonder if he was not infinitely wiser than his mother. In an
ordinary relationship, such expressions of admiration for one's mother seldom were expressed so directly short of
the child's fortieth birthday or the mother's death, whichever came first. "Maybe you're afraid, but you never act
afraid."
She had learned young that those who showed fear were seen as easy targets.
"I bought a copy of Ledges that day." Stefan said, "and took it back to the hotel where I was staying. I read it
overnight, and it was so beautiful that in places I wept . . . and so amusing that in other places I laughed out loud.
The next day I got your other two books, Silverlock and Fields of Night, which were as fine, as moving, as the book
that made you famous, Ledges."
It was strange to listen to favorable reviews of books that in this life she had never written. But she was less
concerned about learning the storylines of those novels than hearing the answer to a chilling question that had just
occurred to her: "In this life I was meant to live, in this other 1984 . . . was I married?"
"No."
"But I'd met Danny and—"
"No. You had never met Danny. You had never married."
"I'd never been born!" Chris said.
Stefan said, "All of those things happened because I went back to Denver, Colorado, in 1955, and prevented Dr.
Markwell from delivering you. The doctor who took Markwell's place couldn't save your mother, but he brought you
into the world whole and sound. And everything in your life changed from that point on. It was your past that I was
changing, yes, but it was my future, therefore flexible. And thank God for that peculiarity of time travel, for otherwise
I wouldn't have been able to save you from a life as a paraplegic."
The wind gusted, and another barrage of rain rattled against the window at which Laura stood.
She was plagued again by the feeling that the room in which she stood, the earth on which it was built, and the
universe in which it turned were as insubstantial as smoke, subject to sudden change.
"I monitored your life thereafter," Stefan said. "Between mid-January of '44 and mid-March, I made over thirty
secret jaunts to see how you were getting along. On the fourth of those trips, when I went to 1964, I discovered you
had been dead for one year, and your father, killed by that junkie who had held up the grocery store. So I journeyed
to 1963 and killed him before he could kill you."
"Junkie?" Chris said, baffled.
"I'll tell you about it later, honey."
Stefan said, "And until that night that Kokoschka showed up on the mountain road, I was pretty successful, I think,


at making your life easier and better. Yet my interference did not deprive you of your art or result in books that were any
less beautiful than the ones that you'd written in that other life. Different books but not lesser ones, books in the
same voice, in fact, that you write in now."
Feeling weak-kneed, Laura returned to her chair. "But why? Why did you go to such great lengths to improve my
life?"
Stefan Krieger looked at Chris, then at her, then closed his eyes when he finally spoke. "After seeing you in that
wheelchair, signing copies of Ledges, and after reading your books, I fell in love with you . . . deeply in love with
you."
Chris squirmed in his chair, obviously embarrassed to hear such feelings expressed when the object of affection
was his own mother
"Your mind was even more beautiful than your face," Stefan said softly. His eyes were still closed. "I fell in love with
your great courage, perhaps because real courage was something I'd seen none of in my own world of strutting,
uniformed fanatics. They committed atrocities in the name of the people and called that courage. They were willing
to die for a twisted totalitarian ideal, and they called that courage when it was really stupidity, insanity. And I fell in
love with your dignity, for I had none of my own, no self-respect like that I saw shining in you. I fell in love with your
compassion, which was so rich a part of your books, for in my world I had seen little compassion. I fell in love,
Laura, and realized that I could do for you what all men would do for those they loved if they had the power of gods:
I did my best to spare you the worst that fate had planned for you."
He opened his eyes at last.
They were a beautiful blue. And tortured.
She was immeasurably grateful to him. She did not love him in return, for she hardly knew him. But in stating the
depth of his love, a passion that had caused him to transform her destiny and that had driven him to sail across
vast tides of time to be with her. he had to some degree restored the magical aura in which she had once viewed
him. Again he seemed larger than life, a demigod if not a god, elevated from mere mortal status by the degree of
his selfless commitment to her.
That night Chris shared the creaky-springed bed with Stefan Krieger. Laura tried to sleep in one chair with her feet
propped on the other.
Rain fell in ceaseless, lulling rhythms that soon put Chris to sleep. Laura could hear him snoring softly.
After she sat for perhaps an hour in darkness, she said quietly “Are you as leep?"
“No,” Stefan said at once.
"Danny,” she said. "My Danny ..."
“Why didn’t you…”
“Make a second trip to that night in 1988 and kill Kokoschka before he could kill Danny?"
“Yes. Why didn't you?"
“Bec ause . . . you see, Kokoschka was from the world of 1944, so his killing of Danny and his own death were a
part of my past, which I could not undo. If I'd attempted to travel again to that night in ’88, to an earlier point in the
evening, to stop Kokoschka before he killed Danny—I would have bounced immediately back through the gate,
back to the Institute, without going anywhere; nature's law against paradox would have prevented me from going in
the first place.”
Laura was silent.
Stefan said, "Do you understand?"
“Yes.”
“Do you accept it?"
“I’ll never accept his death."
“But.. . do you believe me?"
“I think I do, yes."
“Laura, I know how much you loved Danny Packard. If I could have saved him, even at the cost of my own life, I
would have done so, I would not have hesitated."
“I believe you," she said. "Because without you ... I'd never have had Danny at all." she said.
“The Eel,” she said.
“Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be," Stefan said in the darkness. "When you were eight
years old, I shot that junkie, prevented him from raping and killing you, but inevitably fate brought you to another
pedophile who had the potential to be a murderer. Willy Sheener. The Eel. But fate also determined that you would
be a writer and a successful one, that you would bring the same message to the world in your books regardless of
what I did to change your life. That's a good pattern, There’s something frightening yet reassuring in the way some
power tries to reestablish destiny's broken designs . . . almost as if there's meaning in the universe, something that
in spite of its insistence on our suffering, we might even call God."
For a while they listened to the rain and wind sweep clean the world outside.
She said, "But why didn't you take care of the Eel for me?"
"I waited for him one night in his apartment —"


"You gave him a bad beating. Yes, I knew that was you."
"Beat him and warned him to stay away from you. I told him I'd kill him the next time."
"But the beating only made him more determined to have me. Why didn't you kill him right off?"
"I should have. But ... I don't know. Perhaps I'd seen so much killing and participated in enough of it that ... I just
hoped for once that killing wouldn't be necessary."
She thought of his world of war, concentration camps, genocide, and she could understand why he might have
hoped to avoid murder even though Sheener had hardly deserved to live.
"But when Sheener came after me at the Dockweilers' house, why weren't you there to stop him?"
"The next time I monitored your life was when you were thirteen, after you'd already killed Sheener yourself and
survived, so I decided not to go back and deal with him for you."
"I survived," she said. "But Nina Dockweiler didn't. Maybe if she hadn't come home and seen the blood, the body
..."
"Maybe," he said. "And maybe not. Destiny struggles to restore the ordained pattern as best it can. Maybe she'd
have died anyway. Besides, I couldn't protect you from every trauma, Laura. I would have needed ten thousand
trips through time to have done that. And perhaps that degree of tampering wouldn't have been good for you.
Without any adversity in your life, perhaps you wouldn't have become the woman with whom I fell in love."
Silence settled between them.
She listened to the wind, the rain.
She listened to her heartbeat.
At last she said, "I don't love you."
"I understand."
"Seems like I should—a little."
"You don't even really know me yet."
“Maybe I can never love you."
“I know.”
“In spite of all you've done for me."
“But if we live through this . . . well, there's always time.”
“Yes,” she said, "I suppose there's always time."

Six

NIGHT'S COMPANION

On Saturday, March 18,1944, in the main, ground-floor lab of the institute, SS Obersturmfuhrer Erich Klietmann and
his Squad of three highly trained men were prepared to jump into the future and eliminate Krieger, the woman, and
the boy. They were dressed to pass as young California executives in 1989: pinstripe suits by Yves St. Laurent,
white shirts, dark ties, black Bally loafers, black socks, and Ray-Ban sunglasses if the weather required them; they
had been told that in the future this was called the "power look," and though Klietmann didn't know what that meant
exactly, he liked the sound of it. Their clothes had been purchased in the future by institute researchers on previous
jaunts; nothing about them, down to their underwear, was anachronistic.
Each of the four was carrying a Mark Cross attache case, as well, a smart-looking model made of calfskin with
gold-plated fixtures. The cases had also been brought back from the future, as had the modified Uzi carbine and
spare magazines that were packed in each attached
A team of institute researchers had been on a mission to the U. S. in the year and month when John Hincktey had
attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. While watching the film of the attack on television, they had been
immensely impressed by the compact automatic weapons that the Secret Service agents had been carrying in
attache cases. The agents had been able to withdraw those submachine guns and bring them into firing position in
but a second or two. Now the Uzi was not only the automatic carbine of choice in many of the police agencies and
armies of 1989, but was the preferred weapon of the time-traveling Schutzstaffel commandos.
Klietmann had practiced with the Uzi. He regarded the weapon with as much affection as he had ever lavished
upon a human being. The only thing about it that bothered him was the fact that it was an
Israeli-designed and manufactured gun, the product of a bunch of Jews. On the other hand, within a few days the
new directors of the Institute were likely to approve the integration of the Uzi into the world of 1944, and German
soldiers equipped with it would be better able to drive back the subhuman hordes who would depose der Fuhrer.
He looked at the clock on the gate's programming board and saw that seven minutes had passed since the
research team had left for California on February 15, 1989. They were there to search public records —mostly back
issues of newspapers —to discover if Krieger, the woman, and the boy had been found by police and detained for
questioning in the month following the shoot-outs at Big Bear and San Bernardino. Then they would return to '44
and tell Klietmann the day, time, and place where Krieger and the woman could be found. Because every time
traveler returned from a jaunt exactly eleven minutes after departing, regardless of how long he spent in the future.


Klietmann and his squad had only four more minutes to wait.
Thursday, January 12, 1989, was Laura's thirty-fourth birthday, and they spent it in the same room at The Bluebird
of Happiness Motel. Stefan needed another day of rest to regain his strength and let the penicillin do its work. He
also needed the time to think; he had to devise a plan for destroying the Institute, and that problem was sufficiently
knotty to require hours of intense concentration.
The rain had stopped, but the sky still looked bruised, swollen. The forecast was for another storm to follow the first
by midnight.
They watched the local five o'clock television news and saw a story about her and Chris and the wounded mystery
man they had taken to Dr. Brenkshaw. Police were still look ing for her and the best guess anyone could make
about the situation was that the drug dealers who had killed her husband were after her and her son, either
because they were afraid she would eventually identify them in a police lineup or because she was somehow
involved in drug traffic herself.
"My mom a drug dealer?" Chris said, offended by that insinuation. "What a bunch of bozos!"
Although no bodies had been found at Big Bear or San Bernardino, there had been a sensational development that
guaranteed the media's continued interest. Reporters had learned that considerable blood had been found at both
scenes —and that a man's severed head had been discovered in the alleyway behind the Brenkshaw house,
between two garbage cans.
Laura remembered stepping through the redwood gate behind Carter Brenkshaw's property, seeing the second
surprised gunman, and opening fire on him with the Uzi. The burst had taken him in the throat and head, and at the
time she had thought that the concentrated automatic fire might well have decapitated him.
' 'The surviving SS men pushed the call-home button on the dead man's belt," Stefan said. "and sent his body
back."
"But why not his head?" Laura said, sickened by the subject but too curious not to ask the question.
"It must've rolled away from die body, between the garbage cans," Stefan said, "and they couldn't find it in the few
seconds they had to look. If they'd located it, they could have laid it on the corpse and folded his arms around it.
Anything a time traveler wears or carries is taken with him on a jaunt. But with the sirens approaching and the
darkness in the alley . . . they didn't have time to find the head."
Chris, who might have been expected to revel in these bizarre complications, stumped In his char, legs curled up
under him, and was silent. Perhaps the hideous image of a severed head had made Death's presence more real for
him than had all the gunfire directed at him.
Laura made a special point of hugging him and subtly reassuring him that they were going to come out of this
together and unscathed. The hugs, however, were as much for her as for him, and the pep talks she gave him must
have seemed at least somewhat false, for she had not yet convinced herself that in fact they would triumph.
For lunch and dinner she got take-out from the Chinese restaurant just across the street. The previous night none
of the restaurant's employees recognized her as either the famous author or the fugitive, so she felt reasonably
safe there. It seemed foolish to go elsewhere and risk being spotted.
At the end of dinner, while Laura was cleaning up the cardboard containers, Chris produced two chocolate
cupcakes with a yellow candle on each. He had bought the packet of Hostess pastries and a box of birthday
candles at the Ralph's supermarket yesterday morning and had hidden them until now. With great ceremony he
carried the cupcakes from the bathroom, where he had secretly inserted and lit the candles, and golden reflections
of the two flames shimmered brightly in his eyes. He grinned when he saw that he had surprised and delighted her.
In fact she had to strive to hold back tears. She was moved that even in the thrall of fear, in the midst of danger,
he'd still had the presence of mind to think of her birthday, and the desire to please her; it seemed, to her, to be the
essence of what mothers and children were all about.
The three of them ate wedges of the cupcakes. In addition five fortune cookies had come with the take-out food.
From his pillowed perch upon the bed, Stefan opened his cookie. "If only this were true: 'You'll live in times of peace
and plenty.' "
"It might turn out to be true," Laura said. She cracked her cookie and withdrew the slip of paper. "Oh well, I think
I've had enough of this, thank you: 'Adventure will be your companion.'"
When Chris opened his cookie, there was no slip of paper inside, no fortune.
A flicker of fear passed through Laura, as if the empty cookie actually meant that he had no future. Superstitious
nonsense. But she could not suppress her sudden anxiety.
"Here," she said, quickly handing him both of the remaining cook ies. "Getting none in that one just means you get
two fortunes."
Chris opened the first, read it to himself, laughed, then read it to her: " 'You will achieve fame and fortune.'"
"When you're stinking rich, will you support me in my old age?" Laura asked.
"Sure, Mom. Well ... as long as you'll still cook for me, and especially your vegetable soup."
"Going to make your old mom earn her way, huh?"
Smiling at the interplay between Laura and Chris, Stefan Krieger said, "He's a tough customer, isn't he?"
"He'll probably have me scrubbing his floors when I'm eighty," Laura said.


Chris opened the second cookie. " 'You'll have a good life of pleasures—books, music, art.' "
Neither Chris nor Stefan seemed to notice that the two fortunes made opposed predictions, effectively canceling
each other, which in a way confirmed the ominous meaning of the empty cookie.
Hey, you're losing your mind, Shane, you really are, she thought. They're just fortune cookies. They don't really
predict anything.
Hours later, after the lights were out and Chris was asleep, Stefan spoke to Laura from the darkness. "I've devised
a plan."
"A way to destroy the Institute?"
"Yes. But it's very complicated, and there are many things we'll need. I don't know for sure . . . but I suspect some
of these items can't be purchased by private citizens."
"I can get anything you need," she said confidently. "I have the contacts. Anything."
"We'll have to have quite a lot of money."
"That's thorny. I've only got forty bucks left, and I can't go to the bank and withdraw funds because that would leave
a record—"
"Yes. That would draw them straight to us. Is there someone you can trust and who trusts you, someone who would
give you a lot of their own money and tell no one they'd seen you?"
"You know all about me," Laura said, "so you know about Thelma Ackerson. But, God, I don't want to drag her into
this. If anything happened to Thelma—"
"It can be arranged without risk to her," he insisted.
Outside, the promised rain arrived in a sudden downpour.
Laura said, "No."
"But she's our only hope."
"No."
"Where else can you raise the money?"
"We'll find another way that doesn't require a lot of financing."
"Whether we come up with another plan or not, we'll need money. Your forty dollars won't last another day. And I
have nothing."
"I won't risk Thelma," she said adamantly.
"As I said, we can do it without risk, without—"
"No."
"Then we're defeated," he said dismally.
She listened to the rain, which in her mind became the heavy roar of World War II bombers —and then the sound of
a chanting, maddened crowd.
At last she said, "But even if we could arrange it without any risk to Thelma, what if the SS has a tail on her? They
must know she's my best friend—my only real friend. So why wouldn't they have sent one of their teams forward in
time to just keep a watch on Thelma with the hope she'd lead them to me?"
"Because that's an unnecessarily tedious way to find us," he said. "They can just send research teams into the
future, to February of this year and then March and April, month after month, to check the newspapers until they
find out where we first showed up. Each of those jaunts only takes eleven minutes in their time, remember, so it's
quick; and that method is almost certain to work sooner or later because it's doubtful we could stay in hiding the
rest of our lives."
"Well . . ."
He waited a long time. Then he said, "You're like sisters, you two. And if you can't turn for help to a sister at a
time like this, who can you turn to, Laura?"
"If we can get Thelma's help without putting her at risk ... I guess we have to try."
"First thing in the morning," he said.
That was a night of rain, and rain also filled her dreams, and in those dreams were explosive thunderclaps and
lightning, as well. She woke in terror, but the rainy night in Santa Ana was unmarred by those bright, noisy omens
of death. It was a comparatively peaceful storm, without thunder, lightning, and wind, though she knew that it would
not always be so.
The machinery clicked and hummed.
Erich Klietmann looked at the clock. In just three minutes the research team would return to the institute.
Two scientists, heirs of Penlovski and Januskaya and Volkaw, stood at the programming board, studying the
myriad dials and gauges.
All the light in the room was unnatural, for the windows were not merely blacked out to avoid providing beacons for
night-flying enemy bombers, but were bricked in for security reasons. The air was stuffy.
Standing in one corner of the main lab, near the gate, Lieutenant Klietmann anticipated his trip to 1989 with
excitement, not because that future was filled with wonders but because the mission gave him an opportunity to
serve der Furhrer in a way that few men ever could. If he succeeded in killing Krieger, the woman, and the boy, he
would have earned a personal meeting with Hitler, a chance to see the great man face to face, to know the touc h of


his hand and through that touch to feel the power, the tremendous power of the German state and people and
history and destiny. The lieutenant would have risked death ten times, a thousand times, for the chance to be
brought to the personal attention of der Furhrer, to make Hitler aware of him, not aware of him as just another SS
officer, but aware of him as an individual, as Erich Klietmann, the man who saved the Reich from the dire fate that it
had almost been forced to endure.
Klietmann was not the Aryan ideal, and he was acutely aware of his physical shortcomings. His maternal
grandfather had been Polish, a disgusting slavic mongrel, which made Klietmann only three-quarters German.
Furthermore, though his other three grandparents and both of his parents had been blond, blue-eyed, with Nordic
features, Erich had hazel eyes, dark hair, and the heavier, more sensuous features of his barbarian grandfather. He
loathed the way he looked, and he tried to compensate for his physical shortcomings by being the most vigilant
Nazi, most courageous soldier, and most ardent supporter of Hitler in the entire Schutzstaffel, which was tough
because he had so much competition for that honor. Sometimes he had despaired of ever being singled out for
glory. But he never gave up, and now here he was, on the brink of heroism that would earn him Valhalla.
He wanted to kill Stefan Krieger personally, not only because that would win der Furhrer's favor but because
Krieger was the Aryan ideal, blond and blue-eyed, every feature truly Nordic, and from fine breeding stock. With
every advantage, the hateful Krieger had chosen to betray his Furhrer, and that enraged Klietmann, who had to
labor toward greatness under the burden of mongrel genes.
Now, with little more than two minutes left before the research team would return through the gate from 1989,
Klietmann looked at his three subordinates, all dressed as young executives of another age, and he felt both a
fierce and a sentimental pride in them so strong it almost brought tears to his eyes.
They had all come from humble beginnings. Unterscharfuhrer Felix Hubatsch, Klietmann's sergeant and second in
command of the unit, was the son of an alcoholic lathe operator and a slattern mother, both of whom he despised.
RottenFurhrer Rudolph von Manstein was the son of a poor farmer whose lifetime of failure shamed him, and
RottenFurhrer Martin Bracher was an orphan. In spite of coming from four different corners of Germany, the two
corporals, the sergeant, and lieutenant Klietmann shared one thing that made them as close as brothers: They
understood that a man's truest, deepest, and dearest relationship was not to his family but to the state, to the
fatherland, and to their leader in whom the fatherland was embodied; the state was the only family that mattered;
this single bit of wisdom elevated them and made them worthy fathers of the superrace to come.
Klietmann discreetly dabbed at the corners of his eyes with his thumb, blotting the nascent tears that he was not
able to suppress.
In one minute the research team would return.
The machinery clicked and hummed.
At three o'clock, Friday afternoon, January 13, a white pickup entered the rainswept motel lot, came straight to the
rear wing, and parked next to the Buick that bore a Nissan's license plates. The truck was about five or six years
old. The passenger-side door was dented, and that rocker panel was spotted with rust. The owner was evidently
refinishing the pickup in a patchwork fashion, because some spots had been sanded and primed but not yet
repainted.
Laura watched the truck from behind the barely parted drapes at the motel-room window. She held the Uzi in one
hand at her side.
The truck's headlights blinked off, and its windshield wipers stopped, and a moment later a woman with frizzy blond
hair got out and walked to the door of Laura's unit. She rapped three times.
Chris was standing behind the door, looking at his mother.
Laura nodded.
Chris opened the door and said, "Hi, Aunt Thelma. Jeez, that's an ugly wig."
Stepping inside, hugging Chris fiercely, Thelma said, "Well, thanks a lot. And what would you say if I told you that
was a monumentally ugly nose you were born with, but you're stuck with it, while I'm not stuck with the wig? Huh?
What would you say then?"
Chris giggled. "Nothing. 'Cause I know I've got a cute nose."
"Cute nose? God, kid, you've got an actor's ego." She let go of him, glanced at Stefan Krieger, who was sitting in
one of the chairs near the TV set, then turned to Laura. "Shane, did you see the heap I pulled up in? Am I clever?
As I was getting in my Mercedes, I said to myself, Thelma—I call myself Thelma—I said, Thelma, isn't it going to
draw a hell of a lot of attention at that sleazy motel when you pull up in a sixty-five-thousand-dollar car? So I tried to
borrow the butler's car, but you know what he drives? A Jaguar. Is Beverly Hills the Twilight Zone, or what? So I
had to borrow the gardener's truck. But here I am, and what do you think of this disguise?"
She was wearing a kinky blond wig glittering with droplets of rain, horn-rimmed glasses, and a pair of false dentures
that gave her an overbite.
"You look better this way," Laura said, grinning.
Thelma popped out the fake teeth. "Listen, once I turned up a set of wheels that wouldn't draw attention, I realized
that I'd draw some attention myself, being a major star and everything. And since the media's already dug up the
fact that you and I are friends and have tried to ask me some pointed questions about you, the famous machine-


gun-packing authoress, I decided to come incognito. '' She dropped her purse and the stage teeth on the bed.
'This getup was for a new character I created in my nightclub act, tried it about eight times at Bally's in Vegas. It
was a primo flop, that character. The audience spat at me, Shane, they brought in the casino's security guard and
tried to have me arrested, they questioned my right to share the same planet with them—oh, they were rude,
Shane, they were—"
Suddenly she halted in the middle of her patter and burst into tears. She rushed to Laura, threw her arms around
her. "Oh, Jesus, Laura, I was scared, I was so scared. When I heard the news about San Bernardino, machine
guns, and then the way they found your house at Big Bear, I thought you ... or maybe Chris ... I was so worried . . ."
Holding Thelma as tightly as Thelma was holding her, Laura said, "I'll tell you all about it, but the main thing is we're
all right, and we think maybe we have a way to get out of the hole we're in."
"Why didn't you call me, you silly bitch?"
"I did call you."
"Only this morning! Two days after you're splashed all over the newspapers. I nearly went crazy."
"I'm sorry. I should've called sooner. I just didn't want to get you involved if I could avoid it."
Reluctantly Thelma let go of her. "I'm inevitably, deeply, and hopelessly involved, you idiot, because you're
involved." She pulled a Kleenex from a pocket of her suede jacket and blotted her eyes.
"You have another one of those?" Laura asked.
Thelma gave her a Kleenex, and they both blew their noses.
"We were on the lam, Aunt Thelma," Chris said. "It's hard to stay in touch with people when you're on the lam."
Taking a deep, shuddery breath, Thelma said, "So, Shane, where are you keeping your collection of severed
heads? In the bathroom? I heard you left one behind in San Bernardino. Sloppy. Is this a new hobby of yours, or
have you always had an appreciation for the beauty of the human head unencumbered by all the messy
extremities?"
"I want you to meet someone," Laura said. "Thelma Ackerson, this is Stefan Krieger."
"Pleased to meet you," Thelma said.
"You'll excuse me if I don't get up," Stefan said. "I'm still recuperating."
"If you can excuse this wig, I can excuse anything." To Laura, Thelma said, "Is he who I think he is?"
"Yes."
"Your guardian?"
"Yes."
Thelma went to Stefan and kissed him wetly on both cheeks. "I've no idea where you come from or who the hell
you are, Stefan Krieger, but I love you for all the times you've helped my Laura." She stepped back and sat on the
foot of the bed beside Chris "Shane, this man you have here is gorgeous. Look at him, he's a hunk. I'll bet you shot
him just so he couldn't get away. He looks just like a guardian angel ought to look." Stefan was embarrassed,
but Thelma would not be stopped. "You're a real dish, Krieger. I want to hear all about you. But first, here's the
money you asked for, Shane." She opened her voluminous purse and withdrew a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills.
Examining the money, Laura said, "Thelma, I asked you for four thousand. There's at least twice that here."
"Ten or twelve thousand, I think." Thelma winked at Chris and said, "When my friends are on the lam, I insist they
go first class."
Thelma listened to the story, never expressing disbelief. Stefan was surprised by her open-mindedness, but she
said, "Hey, once you've lived at Mcllroy Home and Caswell Hall, the universe holds no more surprises. Time
travelers from 1944? Pah! At Mcllroy I could've shown you a woman as big as a sofa, who wore clothes made of
bad upholstery fabric, and who was paid a handsome civil-service wage to treat orphaned children like vermin. Now
there is an amazement." She was clearly affected by Stefan's origins, chilled and amazed by the trap they were in,
but even under these circumstances she was Thelma Ackerson, always looking for the laugh in everything.
At six o'clock she put in the stage teeth again and went up the street to get take-out from a Mexican restaurant.
"When you're on the run from the law, you need beans in your belly, tough-guy food." She came back with rain-
dampened bags of tacos, containers of enchiladas, two orders of nachos, burritos, and chimichangas. They spread
the food out on the bottom half of the bed, and Thelma and Chris sat on the top half. Laura and Stefan sat in chairs
at the foot of the bed.
"Thelma," Laura said, "there's enough food here for ten."
"Well, I figured that would feed us and the cockroaches. If we didn't have food for the cockroaches, they might get
mean, might go outside and overturn my gardener's pickup. You do have cockroaches here, don't you? I mean,
after all, a swell place like this without cockroaches would be like the Beverly Hills Hotel without tree rats."
As they ate, Stefan outlined the plan he had devised for closing the gate and destroying the Institute. Thelma
interrupted with wisecracks, but when he was finished, she was solemn. "This is damned dangerous, Stefan. Brave
enough to be foolish, maybe."
"There's no other way."
"I can see that," she said. "So what can I do to help?"
Pausing with a wad of corn chips halfway to his mouth, Chris said, "We need you to buy the computer, Aunt


Thelma."
Laura said, "An IBM PC, their best model, the same one I have at home, so I'll know how to use all the software.
We don't have time to learn the operating procedures of a new machine. I've written it all down for you. I could go
buy it myself, I guess, with money you gave me, but I'm afraid of showing my face too many places."
"And we'll need a place to stay," Stefan said.
"We can't stay here," Chris said, enjoying being a part of the discussion, "not if we're going to be doing stuff with a
computer. The maid would see it no matter how hard we tried to hide it, and she'd talk about it because that would
be weird, people holing up in a place like this with a computer."
Stefan said, "Laura tells me that you and your husband have a second house in Palm Springs."
"We have a house in Palm Springs, a condo in Monterey, another condo in Vegas, and it wouldn't surprise me if we
owned—or at least had time shares in—our very own Hawaiian volcano. My husband is too rich. So take your pick.
My houses are your houses. Just don't use the towels to polish the hubcaps on your car, and if you must chew
tobacco and spit on the floors, try to keep it in the corners."
"I thought the house in Palm Springs would be ideal," Laura said. "You've told me it's fairly secluded."
"It's on a large property with lots of trees, and there're other show-biz people on that block, all of 'em busy, so they
don't tend to drop over for a cup of coffee. No one'll disturb you there."
"All right," Laura said, "there's just a few other things. We need changes of clothes, comfortable shoes, some basic
necessities. I've made a list, sizes and everything. And, of course, when this is all over, I'll pay you back the cash
you gave me and whatever you spend on the computer and these other things."
"Damn right you will, Shane. And forty percent interest. Per week. Compounded hourly. Plus your child. Your child
will be mine."
Chris laughed. "My Aunt Rumpelstiltskin."
"You won't make smart remarks when you're my child, Christopher Robin. Or at least you'll call me Mother
Rumpelstiltskin, Sir."
"Mother Rumpelstiltskin, Sir!" Chris said, and saluted her.
At eight-thirty Thelma prepared to leave with the shopping list that Laura had composed and the information about
the computer. "I'll be back tomorrow afternoon, as soon as I can," she said, giving Laura and then Chris one last
hug. "You'll really be safe here, Shane?"
"I think we will. If they'd discovered we were staying here, they would've shown up sooner."
Stefan said, "Remember, Thelma, they're time travelers; once they discover where we've been hiding, they could
just jaunt forward to the moment when we first arrived here. In fact they could've been waiting for us when we
pulled into the motel on Wednesday. The fact that we've stayed here so long unmolested is almost proof there'll
never be public knowledge that this was our hideout."
"My head spins," Thelma said. "And I thought reading a major studio's contract was complicated!"
She went out into the night and rain, still wearing the wig and the horn-rimmed glasses but carrying her stage teeth
in her pocket, and she drove away in her gardener's truck.
Laura, Chris, and Stefan watched her from the big window, and Stefan said, "She's a special person."
"Very," Laura said. "I hope to God I haven't endangered her."
"Don't worry, Mom," Chris said. "Aunt Thelma's a tough broad. She always says so."
That night at nine o'clock, shortly after Thelma left, Laura drove to Fat Jack's place in Anaheim. The rain was not as
heavy as it had been but fell in a steady drizzle. The macadamized pavement glistened silver-black, and gutters still
overflowed with water that looked like oil in the queer light of the sodium-vapor streetlamps. Fog had crept in, too,
not on little cat feet but slithering like a snake on its belly.
She had been loath to leave Stefan at the motel. But it was not wise for him to spend much time in the chilly, rainy
January night in his debilitated condition. Besides , he could do nothing to help her.
Though Stefan remained behind, Chris accompanied Laura, for she would not be separated from him for the time it
would take to cut a deal for the weapons. The boy had gone with her when she had first visited Fat Jack a year
ago, when she'd bought the illegally modified Uzis, so the fat man would not be surprised to see him. Displeased,
yes, since Fat Jack was no lover of children, but not surprised.
As she drove, Laura looked frequently in the rearview mirror, in the side mirrors, and took the measure of the other
drivers around her with a diligence that gave new meaning to the term defensive driving. She could not afford to be
broadsided by a dunderhead who was driving too fast for the road conditions. Police would put in an appearance at
the scene of the crash, would routinely check out her license plates, and before they even arrested her, men
carrying submachine guns would materialize and kill her and Chris.
She had left her own Uzi with Stefan, although he had protested. However, she was unable to abandon him with no
means of self-defense. She still carried the .38 Chief's Special. And fifty spare rounds were distributed in the
zippered pockets of her ski jacket.
Near Disneyland, when the neon-drenched phantasmagoria of Fat Jack's Pizza Party Palace appeared in the fog
like the starship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind descending from clouds of its own making, Laura was
relieved. She pulled into the crowded parking lot and switched off the engine. The windshield wipers stopped


thumping, and rain washed down the glass in rippling sheets. Orange, red, blue, yellow, green, white, purple, and
pink reflections of neon glimmered in that flowing film of water, so Laura felt curiously as if she were inside one of
those old-fas hioned, gaudy jukeboxes from the 1950s.
Chris said, "Fat Jack's put up more neon since we were here."
"I think you're right," Laura said.
They got out of the car and looked up at the blinking, flashing, rippling, winking, grotesquely flamboyant facade of
Fat Jack's Pizza Party Palace. Neon was not reserved solely for the name of the place. It was also used to outline
the building, the roofline every window, and the front doors. In addition there were a pair of giant neon sunglasses
on one end of the roof, and a huge neon rocketship poised for takeoff on the other end, with neon vapors
perpetually curling and sparkling beneath its exhaust jets. The ten-foot-diameter neon pizza was an old feature, but
the grinning neon clown's face was new.
The quantity of neon was so great that every falling raindrop was brightly tinted, as if it was part of a rainbow that
had broken apart at nightfall. Every puddle shimmered with rainbow fragments.
The effect was disorienting, but it prepared the visitor for the inside of Fat Jack's, which seemed to be a glimpse of
the chaos out of which the universe had formed trillions of years ago. The waiters and waitresses were dressed as
clowns, ghosts, pirates, spacemen, witches, gypsies, and vampires, and a singing trio in bear costumes moved
from table to table, delighting young children with pizza-smeared faces. In alcoves off the main room, older kids
were at banks of videogames, so the beep-zing-zap-bong of that electronic play served as background music to
singing bears and shouting children.
"Asylum," Chris said.
They were met inside the front door by the host, Dominick, who was Fat Jack's minority partner. Dominick was tall,
cadaverous, with mournful eyes, and he seemed out of place amidst the forced hilarity.
Raising her voice to be heard over the din, Laura asked for Fat Jack and said, "I called earlier. I'm an old friend of
his mother's," which was what you were to say to indicate you wanted guns not pizza.
Dominick had learned to project his voice clearly through the cacophony without shouting. "You've been here
before, I believe."
"Good memory," she said. "A year ago."
"Please follow me," Dominick said in a funereal voice.
They did not have to go through the cyclonic commotion of the dining room, which was good because that meant
Laura was less likely to be seen and recognized by one of the customers. A door off the other side of the host's
foyer opened onto a corridor that led past the kitchen and the storeroom to Fat Jack's private office. Dominick
knocked on the door, ushered them inside, and said to Fat Jack, "Old friends of your mother," then left Laura and
Chris with the big man.
Fat Jack took his nickname seriously and tried to live up to it. He was five feet ten and weighed about three
hundred and fifty pounds. Wearing immense gray sweatpants and sweatshirt that fit him almost as tightly as
Spandex, he looked like the fat man in that magnetized photograph that dieters could buy to put on refrigerators to
scare them off food; in fact he looked like the refrigerator.
He sat in a baronial swivel chair behind a desk sized for him, and he did not get up. "Listen to the little beasts." He
spoke to Laura, ignored Chris. "I put my office at the back of the building, had it specially soundproofed, and I can
still hear them out there, shrieking, squealing; it's as if I'm just down the hall from hell."
"They're only children having fun," Laura said, standing with Chris in front of the desk.
"And Mrs. O'Leary was just an old lady with a clumsy cow, but she burned down Chicago," Fat Jack said sourly. He
was eating a Mars bar. In the distance children's voices, insulated by soundproofing, rose in a dull roar, and as if
talking to that unseen multitude, the fat man said, "Ah, choke on it, you little trolls."
"It's a nuthouse out there," Chris said.
"Who asked you?"
"Nobody, sir."
Jack had a grainy complexion with gray eyes nearly buried in a puff-adder face. He focused on Laura and said,
"You see my new neon?"
"The clown is new, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Isn't it a beauty? I designed it, had it made, and then had it erected in the dead of night, so the next morning
it was too late for anybody to get a restraining order to stop me. The damn city council just about croaked, all of
them at once."
Fat Jack had been embroiled in a decade-long legal battle with the Anaheim Zoning Commission and the city
council. The authorities disapproved of his garish neon displays, especially now that the area around Disneyland
was slated for urban renewal. Fat Jack had spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting them in the
courts, paying fines, being sued, countersuing, and he had even spent time in jail for contempt of court. He was a
former libertarian who now claimed to be an anarchist, and he would not tolerate infringement on his rights—real
and imagined—as a free-thinking individual.
He dealt in illegal weapons for the same reason he erected neon signs that violated city codes: as a statement


against authority, to champion individual rights. He could talk for hours about the evils of government, any kind of
government, in any degree whatsoever, and on Laura's last visit with Chris, in order to get the modified Uzis she
wanted, she had listened to a lengthy explanation of why the government did not even have the right to pass laws
forbidding murder.
Laura had no great love of big government, whet her the left or right, but she had little sympathy with Fat Jack,
either. He did not acknowledge the legitimacy of any authority whatsoever, not that of proven institutions, not even
that of family.
Now, after she gave Fat Jack her new shopping list, after he quoted a price and counted her money, he led her and
Chris through the hidden door in the back of his office closet, down a narrow stairwell—he seemed in danger of
becoming wedged tight—to the basement where he kept his illegal stock. Though his restaurant was a madhouse,
his arsenal was stored with fetishistic neatness: cartons upon cartons of handguns and automatic weapons were
stacked on metal shelves, arranged according to caliber and also according to price; he kept at least a thousand
guns in the basement of the Pizza Party Palace.
He was able to provide her with two modified Uzis—"An immensely popular gun since the attempt to kill Reagan,"
he said—and another .38 Chief's Special. Stefan had hoped to obtain a Colt Commander 9mm Parabellum with a
nine-round magazine and the barrel machined for a silencer. "Don't have it," Fat Jack said, "but I can let you have a
Colt Commander Mark IV in .38 Super, which has a nine-round magazine, and I've got two of those machined for
silencers. Got the silencers, too, plenty of 'em." She already knew that he wasn't able to provide her with
ammunition, but as he finished his Mars bar, he explained anyway: "Don't stock ammunition or explosives. Look, I
don't believe in authority, but I'm not totally irresponsible. I got a restaurant full of shrieking, snot-faced kids
upstairs, and I can't risk blowing them to bits, even if that'd bring more peace to the world. Besides, I'd destroy all
my pretty neon too."
"All right," Laura said, putting one arm around Chris to keep him at her side, "what about the gas on my list?"
"You sure you don't mean tear gas?"
"No. Vexxon. That's the stuff I want." Stefan had given her the name of the gas. He said it was one of the chemical
weapons that was on the list of items the Institute hoped to bring back to 1944 and introduce into the German
military arsenal. Now perhaps it could be used against the Nazis. "We need something that will kill fast."
Fat Jack leaned his backside against the metal worktable in the middle of the room, where he had laid out the Uzis,
revolvers, pistol, and silencers. The table creaked ominously. "Well, what we're talking about here is army
ordnance, tightly controlled stuff."
"You can't get it?"
"Oh, sure, I can get you some Vexxon," Fat Jack said. He moved away from the table, which creaked in relief as his
weight was lifted from it, and went to a set of metal shelves where he withdrew a couple of Hershey bars from
between boxes of guns, a secret stash. He did not offer one to Chris, but put the second bar in the side pocket of
his sweatpants and began to eat the other. "I don't have that sort of crap here; just as dangerous as explosives. But
I can have it for you late tomorrow, if that's not inconvenient."
"That'll be fine."
"It'll cost you."
"I know."
Fat Jack grinned. Bits of chocolate were stuck between his teeth. "Don't get much call for this kind of thing, not from
someone like yourself, a small buyer. Tickles me to try to figure what you'd be up to with it. Not that I expect you to
tell me. But usually it's big buyers from South America or the Middle East who want these neuroactive and
respiractive gases. Iraq and Iran used plenty the last few years."
"Neuroactive, respiractive? What's the difference?"
"Respiractive —they have to breathe it in; it kills them seconds after it hits the lungs and spreads through the
bloodstream. When you release it, you've got to be wearing a gas mask. Your neuroactive, on the other hand, kills
even quicker, just on touching the skin, and with certain types of it—like Vexxon—you won't need a gas mask or
protective clothing, 'cause you can take a couple of pills before you use it, and they're like an advance antidote."
"Yes, I was supposed to ask for the pills, too," Laura said.
"Vexxon. Easiest-to-use gas on the market. You're a real smart shopper," Fat Jack said.
Already he had finished the candy bar, and he appeared to have grown noticeably since Laura and Chris had
entered his office half an hour ago. She realized that Fat Jack's commitment to political anarchy was reflected not
only in the atmosphere of his pizza parlor but in the condition of his body, for his flesh swelled unrestrained by
social or medical considerations. He seemed to revel in his size, as well, frequently patting his gut or grabbing the
rolls of fat on his sides and kneading them almost affectionately, and he walked with belligerent arrogance, pushing
the world away from him with his belly. She had a vision of Fat Jack growing ever more huge, soaring past four
hundred pounds, past five hundred, even as the wildly pyramiding neon structures on the roof grew ever more
elaborate, until one day the roof collapsed and Fat Jack exploded simultaneously.
"I'll have the gas by five o'clock tomorrow," he said as he put the Uz is, .38 Chiefs Special, Colt Commander, and
silencers in a box labeled BIRTHDAY PARTY FAVORS, which had probably contained paper hats or noisemakers


for the restaurant. He slipped the lid on the box and indicated that Laura was to carry it upstairs; among other
things, Fat Jack did not believe in chivalry.
Back in Fat Jack's office, when Chris opened the door to the hall for his mother, Laura was pleased by the
squealing of the children in the pizza parlor. That sound was the first normal, sane thing she had heard in more
than half an hour.
"Listen to the little cretins," Fat Jack said. "They're not children; they're shaved baboons trying to pass for children."
He slammed his soundproofed office door behind Chris and Laura.
In the car on the way back to the motel, Chris said, "When this is all over . . . what're you going to do about Fat
Jack?"
"Turn his butt into the cops," Laura said. "Anonymously."
"Good. He's a nut."
"He's worse than a nut, honey. He's a fanatic."
"What's a fanatic exactly?"
She thought for a moment, then said, "A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in."
Lieutenant Erich Klietmann, SS, watched the second hand on the programming-board clock, and when it neared
the twelve, he turned and looked at the gate. Inside that twelve -foot-long, gloom-filled tube, something shimmered,
a fuzzy gray -black patch that resolved into the silhouette of a man—then three more men, one behind the other.
The research team came out of the gate, into the room, and were met by the three scientists who had been
monitoring the programming board.
They had returned from February 1989, and were smiling, which made Klietmann's heart pound because they
would not be smiling if they had not located Stefan Krieger, the woman, and the boy. The first two assassination
squads that had been sent into the future—the one that had attacked the house near Big Bear and the one in San
Bernardino—had been composed of Gestapo officers. Their failures had led der Furhrer to insist the third team be
Schutzstaffel, and now Erich judged the researchers' smiles to mean that his squad was going to have a chance to
prove the SS was filled with better men than the Gestapo.
The failures of the two previous squads were not the only black marks on the Gestapo's record in this affair.
Heinrich Kokoschka, the head of the institute's security, had been a Gestapo officer, as well, and he had apparently
turned traitor. Available evidence seemed to support the theory that two days ago, on March 16, he had defected to
the future with five other members of the institute's staff.
On the evening of March 16, Kokoschka had jaunted alone to the San Bernardino Mountains with the claimed
intention of killing Stefan Krieger there in the future before Krieger returned to 1944 and killed Penlovski, thereby
undoing the deaths of the project's best men. But Kokoschka never came back. Some argued that Kokoschka had
been killed up there in 1988, that Krieger had won the confrontation—but that did not explain what had happened to
the five other men in the institute that evening: the two Gestapo agents waiting for Kokoschka's return and the three
scientists monitoring the gate's programming board. All vanished, and five homing belts were missing; so the
evidence pointed to a group of traitors within the institute who had become convinced that Hitler would lose the war
even with the advantage of exotic weapons brought back from the future, and who had defected to another age
rather than stay in a doomed Berlin.
But Berlin was not doomed. Klietmann would not entertain that possibility. Berlin was the new Rome; the Third
Reich would last a thousand years. Now that the SS was being given the chance to find and kill Krieger, der
Furhrer's dream would be protected and fulfilled. Once they had eliminated Krieger, who was the main threat to the
gate and whose execution was the most urgent task before them, they would then focus on finding Kokoschka and
the other traitors. Wherever those swine had gone, in whatever distant year and place they had taken refuge,
Klietmann and his SS brethren would exterminate them with extreme prejudice and great pleasure.
Now Dr. Theodore Juttner—director of the institute since the murders of Penlovski, Januskaya, and Volkaw, and
the disappearances on March 16—turned to Erich and said, "We've perhaps found Krieger, ObersturmFurhrer
Klietmann. Get your men ready to go."
"We're ready, Doctor," Erich said. Ready for the future, he thought, ready for Krieger, ready for glory.
At three-forty on Saturday afternoon, January 14, little more than one day after her first visit, Thelma returned to
The Bluebird of Happiness Motel in her gardener's battered white pickup. She had two changes of clothes for each
of them, suitcases in which to pack all the stuff, and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition for the revolvers
and the Uzis. She also had the IBM PC in the truck, plus a printer, a variety of software, a box of diskettes, and
everything else they would need to make the system work for them.
With the wound in his shoulder only four days old, Stefan was recuperating surprisingly fast, although he was not
ready to do any lifting, heavy or otherwise. He stayed in the motel room with Chris and packed the suitcases while
Laura and Thelma moved the computer boxes to the trunk and back seat of the Buick.
The storm had passed during the night. Shredded gray clouds hung beardlike from the sky. The day had warmed to
sixty-five degrees, and the air smelled clean.
Closing the Buick's trunk on the last of the boxes, Laura said, "You went shopping in that wig and those glasses,
those teeth?"


"Nah," Thelma said, removing the stage teeth and putting them in a jacket pocket because they made her lisp when
she talked.' 'Up close a salesclerk might've recognized me, and being disguised would arouse more attention than if
I shopped as myself. But after I'd bought everything, I drove the truck to the deserted end of another shopping
center's parking lot and made myself look like a cross between Harpo Marx and Bucky Beaver before heading here,
just in case someone in another car looked over at me in traffic. You know, Shane, I sorta like this kind of intrigue.
Maybe I'm the reincarnation of Mata Hari, 'cause when I think about seducing men to learn their secrets and then
selling the secrets to a foreign government, I get delicious chills."
"It's the part about seducing men that gives you chills," Laura said, "not the secret -selling part. You're no spy, just a
lech."
Thelma gave her the keys to the house in Palm Springs. "There's no full-time staff there. We just call a
housekeeping service to spruce the place up a couple of days before we go. I didn't call them this time, of course,
so you're liable to find some dust, but no real filth, and none of the severed heads you tend to leave behind."
"You're a love."
"There's a gardener. Not full-time like the one at our house in Beverly Hills. This guy just comes around once a
week, Tuesday, to mow the lawn, trim the hedges, and trample some flowers so he can charge us to replace them.
I'd advise staying away from windows and keeping a low profile on Tuesday, until he comes and goes."
"We'll hide under the beds."
"You'll notice a lot of whips and chains under the bed, but don't get the idea Jason and I are kinky. The whips and
chains belonged to his mother, and we keep them strictly for sentimental reasons."
They brought the packed suitcases out of the motel room and put those in the back seat with the other packages
that would not fit in the Buick's trunk. After a round of hugs, Thelma said, "Shane, I'm between nightclub
appearances for the next three weeks, so if you need me for anything more, you can get hold of me at the house in
Beverly Hills, night or day. I'll stay by the phone." Reluctantly she left.
Laura was relieved when the truck disappeared in traffic; Thelma was safe, out of it. She dropped the room keys at
the motel office, then drove away in the Buick with Chris in the other front seat and Stefan in the back seat with the
luggage. She regretted leaving The Bluebird of Happiness because they had been safe there for four days, and
there was no guarantee they'd be safe anywhere else in the world.
They stopped at a gunshop first. Because it was best to keep Laura out of sight as much as possible, Stefan went
in to buy a box of ammunition for the pistol. They had not put that item on the shopping list they had given Thelma,
for at that time they had not known whether they would get the 9mm Parabellum that Stefan wanted. And in fact
they had gotten the .38 Colt Commander Mark IV instead.
After the gunshop they drove to Fat Jack's Pizza Party Palace to pick up two canisters of deadly nerve gas. Stefan
and Chris waited in the car, under neon signs that were already burning at twilight, though they would not be in their
full glory until nightfall.
The canisters were on Jack's desk. They were the size of small household fire extinguishers with a stainless-steel
finish instead of fire-red, with a skull-and-crossbones label that said VEXXON/
AEROSOL/WARNING——DEADLY NERVE TOXIN/UNAUTHORIZED POSSESSION IS A FELONY UNDER U.S.
LAW, followed by a lot of fine print.
With a finger as plump as an overstuffed sausage, Jack pointed to a half-dollar-size dial on the top of each cylinder.
"These here are timers, calibrated in minutes, one to sixty. If you set the timer and push the button in the center of
it, you can release the gas remote, sort of like setting off a time bomb. But if you want to release it manually, then
you hold the bottom of the canister in one hand, take this pistol-grip handle in your other hand, and just squeeze
this loop the way you would a trigger. This crap, released under pressure, will disperse through a five-thousand-
square-foot building in a minute and a half, faster if the heating or air conditioning is running. Exposed to light and
air, it breaks down fast into nontoxic components, but it remains deadly for forty to sixty minutes. Just three
milligrams on the skin kills in thirty seconds."
"The antidote?" Laura asked.
Fat Jack smiled and tapped the sealed, four-inch-square, blue-plastic bags that were fixed to the handles of the
cylinders. "Ten capsules in each bag. Two will protect one person. Instruc tions are in the bag, but I was told you
have to take the pills at least one hour before dispersing the gas. Then they'll protect you for three to five hours."
He took her money and put the Vexxon cylinders in a cardboard box labeled MOZZARELLA CHEESE—KEEP
REFRIGERATED. As he put the lid on the box, he laughed and shook his head.
"What's wrong?" Laura asked.
"It just tickles me," Fat Jack said. "A looker like you, clearly well educated, with a little boy ... if someone like you is
involved in shit like this, society must be really coming apart at the seams a lot faster than I ever hoped. Maybe I
will live to see the day when the establishment falls, when anarchy rules, when the only laws are those that
individuals make between themselves and seal with a handshake."
As an afterthought, he lifted the lid on the box, plucked a few green slips of paper from a desk drawer, and dropped
them on top of the cylinders of Vexxon.
"What're those?" Laura asked.


"You're a good customer," Fat Jack said, "so I'm throwing in a few coupons for free pizza.''
Thelma and Jason's house in Palm Springs was indeed secluded. It was a curious but attractive cross between
Spanish and Southwest adobe-style architecture on a one-acre property surrounded by a nine-foot-tall, peach-
colored stucco wall that was interrupted only by the entrance and exit from the circular driveway. The grounds were
heavily planted with olive trees, palms, and ficus, so neighbors were screened out on three sides, with only the front
of the house revealed.
Though they arrived at eight o'clock that Saturday night, after driving into the desert from Fat Jack's place in
Anaheim, the house and grounds were visible in detail because they were illuminated by cunningly designed,
photocell-controlled landscape lighting that provided both security and aesthetic value. Palm and fern shadows
made dramatic patterns on stucco walls.
Thelma had given them the remote garage door opener, so they drove the Buick into the three-car garage and
entered the house through the connecting door to the laundry room—after deactivat ing the alarm system with the
code Thelma had also given them.
It was far smaller than the Gaines's mansion in Beverly Hills, but still sizable, with ten rooms and four baths. The
unique stamp of Steve Chase, the interior designer of choice in Palm Springs, was on every room: dramatic spaces
dramatically lit; simple colors —warm apricot, dusty salmon—accented with turquoise here and there; suede walls,
cedar ceilings; here, copper tables with a rich patina; there, granite tables contrasting interestingly with comfortably
upholstered furniture in a variety of textured fabrics; elegant yet livable.
In the kitchen Laura found most of the pantry bare except for one shelf of canned goods. As they were all too tired
to go grocery shopping, they made a dinner of what was at hand. Even if Laura had broken into the house without a
key and had not known who owned the place, she would have realized it belonged to Thelma and Jason as soon
as she looked in the pantry, for she could not imagine that any other pair of millionaires would still be so childlike at
heart as to stock their larder with Chef Boyardee canned ravioli and spaghetti. Chris was delighted. For dessert
they finished off two boxes of chocolate-covered Klondike ice-cream nuggets that they found in the otherwise
empty freezer.
Laura and Chris shared the king-size bed in the master bedroom, and Stefan bunked across the hall in a guest
room. Though she had reengaged the perimeter alarm system that monitored every door and window, though a
loaded Uzi was on the floor beside her, though a loaded .38 was on the nightstand, and though no one in the world
but Thelma could know where they were, Laura slept only fitfully. Each time she woke, she sat straight up in bed,
listening for noises in the night—stealthy footsteps, whispering voices.
Toward morning, when she could not get back to sleep, she stared at the shadowy ceiling for a long time, thinking
about something that Stefan had said a couple of days ago when explaining some of the fine points of time travel
and the changes that travelers could effect in their futures: Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant
to be. When Stefan had saved her from the junkie in the grocery store in 1963, fate eventually had brought her to
another pedophile, Willy Sheener, in 1967. She had been destined to be an orphan, so when she found a new
home with the Dockweilers, fate had conspired to shock Nina Dockweiler with a fatal heart attack, sending Laura
back to the orphanage again.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
What next?
In the pattern that was meant to be, Chris had never been born. Therefore would fate arrange his death soon, to
bring events back as close as possible to those which had been ordained and with which Stefan Krieger had
meddled? She had been destined to spend her life in a wheelchair before Stefan held Dr. Paul Markwell at gunpoint
and prevented him from delivering her. So perhaps now fate would put her in the way of Gestapo gunfire that would
sever her spine and render her paraplegic in accordance with the original plan.
How long did the forces of destiny strive to reassert the pattern after a change had been made in it? Chris had been
alive for more than eight years. Was that long enough for destiny to decide that his existence was acceptable? She
had lived thirty-four years out of a wheelchair. Was destiny still troubling itself with that unnatural squiggle in the
ordained design?
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
As dawn's light glowed softly at the edges of the drapes, Laura tossed and turned, growing angry but not sure at
whom or what her anger could be directed. What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and
attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God—or begging Him to let her son live and to spare
her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a natural mechanism, a force no different in
origin from gravity or magnetism?
Because there was no logical target at which her emotions could be vented, Laura felt her anger slowly
metamorphosing to fear. They seemed to be safe at the Gaines's Palm Springs house. After pas sing one
uneventful night in the place, they almost could be assured that their presence would never be public knowledge,
for otherwise killers from the past no doubt already would have appeared. Yet Laura was afraid.
Something bad was going to happen. Something very bad.
Trouble was coming, but she did not know from what direction.


Lightning. Soon.
Too bad the old saw wasn't true: In fact lightning did strike twice in the same place, three times, a hundred, and she
was the reliable rod that drew it.
Dr. Juttner entered the last of the numbers in the programming board that controlled the gate. To Erich Klietmann,
he said, "You and your men will be traveling to the vicinity of Palm Springs, California, in January 1989."
"Palm Springs?" Klietmann was surprised.
"Yes. Of course, we had expected you'd have to go somewhere in the Los Angeles or Orange County area, where
you would have found your young-executive dress more appropriate than in a resort town, but you'll still pass
without notice. For one thing, it's winter there, and even in the desert dark suits will be appropriate for the season."
Juttner handed Klietmann a sheet of paper on which he had written directions. "Here's where you'll find the woman
and the boy."
Folding the paper and putting it in an inside coat pocket, the lieutenant said, "What about Krieger?"
"The researchers didn't find mention of him," Juttner said, "but he must be with the woman and the boy. If you don't
see him, then do your best to take the woman and boy captive. If you have to torture them to learn Krieger's
whereabouts, so be it. And if worse comes to worst and they won't give you Krieger—kill them. That might draw him
into the open somewhere down the time line."
"We'll find him, Doctor."
Klietmann, Hubatsch, von Manstein, and Bracher were all wearing their homing belts beneath their Yves St.
Laurent suits. Carrying their Mark Cross attache cases, they walked to the gate, stepped up into that giant barrel,
and moved toward the two-thirds point where they would pass in a wink from 1944 to 1989.
The lieutenant was afraid but also exhilarated. He was the iron fist of Hitler, from which Krieger could not hide even
forty-five years in the future.
On their first full day in the Palm Springs house, Sunday the fifteenth of January, they set up the computer, and
Laura instructed Stefan in its use. IBM's operating program and the software for the tasks they needed to perform
were extremely user-friendly, and though by nightfall Stefan was far from expert at operating the computer, he was
able to understand how it functioned, how it thought. He would not be doing most of the work with the machine,
anyway; that would be left to Laura, who was already experienced with the system. His job would be to explain to
her the calculations that would have to be done, so she would be able to apply the computer to the solution of the
many problems ahead of them.
Stefan's intention was to go back to 1944, using the gate-homing belt he had taken off Kokoschka. The belts were
not time machines. The gate itself was the machine, the vehicle of transport, and it remained always in 1944. The
belts were in tune with the temporal vibrations of the gate, and they simply brought the traveler home when he
pushed the button to activate that link.
"How?" Laura asked when he explained the use of the belt. "How does it take you back?"
"I don't know. Would you know how a microchip functions inside a computer? No. But that doesn't prevent you from
using the computer any more than my ignorance prevents me from using the gate."
Having returned to the institute in 1944, having seized control of the main lab, Stefan would make two crucial
jaunts, each only days into the future from March of '44, to arrange the destruction of the institute. Those two trips
had to be meticulously planned, so he would arrive at each destination in exactly the geographical location and
precisely at the time that he desired. Such refined calculations were impossible to make in 1944, not only because
computer assistance was unavailable but because in those days marginally— but vitally—less was known then
about the angle and rate of rotation of the earth and about other planetary factors that affected a jaunt, which was
why time travelers from the institute frequently arrived off schedule by minutes and out of place by miles. With the
ultimate numbers provided by the IBM, he could program the gate to deliver him within one yard and within a split
second of his desired point of arrival.
They used all of the books that Thelma had bought. These were not merely science and mathematics texts, but
histories of the Second World War, in which they could pinpoint the whereabouts of certain major figures on certain
dates.
In addition to performing complex calculations for the jaunts, they had to allow time for Stefan to heal. When he
returned to 1944, he would be reentering the wolf's lair, and even equipped with nerve gas and a first-rate firearm,
he would have to be quick and agile to avoid being killed. "Two weeks," he said. "I think I'll have enough flexibility in
the shoulder and arm to go back in two more weeks."
It did not matter if he took two weeks or ten, for when he used Kokoschka's homing belt, he would return to the
institute only eleven minutes after Kokoschka had left it. His date of departure from current time would not affect his
date of return in 1944.
The only worry was that the Gestapo would find them first and send a hit squad to 1989 to eliminate them before
Stefan could return to his era to implement his plan. Though it was their only worry —it was worry enough.
With considerable caution, more than half expecting a sudden flash of lightning and a roll of thunder, they took a
break and went grocery shopping Sunday afternoon. Laura, still the object of media attention, remained in the car
while Chris and Stefan went into the market. No lightning struck, and they returned to the house with a trunkful of


groceries.
Unpacking the market bags in the kitchen, Laura discovered that a third of the sacks contained nothing but snack
food: three different kinds of ice-cream bars, plus one quart each of chocolate, rocky road, butter almond, and
almond fudge; family-size bags of M&Ms, Kit Kats, Reese's Cups, and Almond Joys; potato chips, pretzels, tortilla
chips, cheese popcorn, peanuts; four kinds of cookies; one chocolate cake, one cherry pie, one box of doughnuts,
four packages of Ding Dongs.
Stefan was helping her put things away, and she said, "You must have the world's biggest sweet tooth."
"See, this is another thing I find so amazing and wonderful about this future of yours," he said. "Just imagine—
there's no longer any nutritional difference between a chocolate cake and a steak. Just as many vitamins and
minerals in these potato chips as in a green salad. You can eat nothing but desserts and remain as healthy as a
man who eats balanced meals. Incredible! How was this advance achieved?"
Laura turned in time to see Chris slinking out of the kitchen. "Whoa, you little con artist."
Looking sheepish, he said, "Doesn't Mr. Krieger get some funny ideas about our culture?' '
"I know where he got this one," she said. "What a sneaky thing to have done."
Chris sighed and tried to sound mournful. "Yeah. But I figure ... if we're being hunted down by Gestapo agents, we
ought to be able to eat as many Ding Dongs as we want, at least, 'cause every meal could be our last." He looked
at her sideways to see if she was buying his condemned-man routine.
In fact what the boy said contained enough truth to make his trickery understandable if not excusable, and she
could not find the will to punish him.
That night after dinner, Laura changed the dressing on Stefan's wound. The impact of the slug had left an
enormous bruise on his chest with the bullet hole at its approximate center, a smaller bruise around the exit point.
The suture threads and the inside of the old bandage were crusted with fluid that had seeped from him and dried.
After she carefully bathed the wounds, cleaning that material away as much as possible without disturbing the
scab, she gently palpated the flesh, producing a trace of clear seepage, but there was no sign of pus formation that
would indicate a serious infec tion. Of course, he might have an abscess within the wound, draining internally, but
that was not likely because he had no fever.
"Keep taking the penicillin," she said, "and I think you'll be fi ne. Doc Brenkshaw did a good job."
While Laura and Stefan spent long hours at the computer Monday and Tuesday, Chris watched television, looked
through the bookshelves for something to read, and puzzled over a hardcover collection of old Barbarella cartoons —
"Mom, what does orgasm mean?"
"What're you reading? Give me that."
— and generally entertained himself without a fuss. He came to the den once in a while and stood for a minute or
two at a time, watching them use the computer. After about a dozen visits he said, "In Back to the Future they just
had this time-traveling car, and they pushed a few buttons on the dashboard, and they were off—Pow!— like that.
How come nothing in real life's ever as easy as it is in the movies?"
On Tuesday, January 19, they kept a low profile while the gardener mowed the lawn and trimmed some shrubbery.
In four days he was the only person they had seen; no door-to-door salesmen had called, not even a Jehovah's
Witness pushing Watchtower magaz ine.
"We're safe here," Stefan said. "Obviously, our presence in the house never becomes public knowledge. If it did,
the Gestapo would have visited us already."
Nevertheless Laura kept the perimeter alarm system switched on nearly twenty-four hours a day. And at night she
dreamed of destiny reasserting itself, of Chris erased from existence, of waking up to find herself in a wheelchair.
They were supposed to arrive at eight o'clock to give them plenty of time to reach the location at which the
researchers had pinpointed the woman and the boy, if not Krieger. But when Lieutenant Klietmann blinked and
found himself forty-five years beyond his own era, he knew at once that they were a couple of hours late. The sun
was too high above the horizon. The temperature was about seventy-five, too warm for an early, winter morning in
the desert.
Like a white crack in a blue-glazed bowl, lightning splintered down the sky. Other cracks opened, and sparks
flashed above as if struck from the hooves of a bull loose in some celestial china shop.
As the thunder faded, Klietmann turned to see if von Manstein, Hubatsch, and Bracher had made the journey
safely. They were with him, all carrying attache cases, with sunglasses stuck in the breast pockets of their
expensive suits.
The problem was that thirty feet beyond the sergeant and the two corporals, a pair of elderly, white-haired women
in pastel stretch pants and pastel blouses were standing at a white car near the rear door to a church, staring in
astonishment at Klietmann and his squad. They were holding what appeared to be casseroles.
Klietmann glanced around and saw that he and his men had arrived in the parking lot behind the church. There
were two other cars in addition to the one that seemed to belong to the women, but there were no other onlookers.
The lot was encircled by a wall, so the only way out was past the women and along the side of the church.
Deciding that boldness was the best course, Klietmann walked straight toward the women, as if there was nothing
whatsoever unusual about his having materialized out of thin air, and his men followed him. Mesmerized, the


women watched them approach.
"Good morning, ladies." Like Krieger, Klietmann had learned to speak English with an American accent in hopes of
serving as a deep-cover agent, but he'd been unable to lose his accent entirely, no matter how hard he studied and
practiced. Though his own watch was set to local time, he knew he could no longer trust it, so he said, "Could you
please be so kind as to tell me what time it is?"
They stared at him.
"The time?" he repeated.
The woman in yellow pastel twisted her wrist without letting go of the casserole, looked at her watch, and said, "Uh,
it's ten-forty."
They were two hours and forty minutes late. They couldn't waste time searching for a car to hot -wire, especially not
when a perfectly good one was available, with keys, right in front of them. Klietmann was prepared to kill both
women for the car. He could not leave their bodies in the parking lot; an alarm would go up when they were found,
and shortly thereafter the police would be looking for their car—a nasty complication. He'd have to stuff the bodies
in the trunk and take them with him.
The woman in blue pastels said, "Why've you come to us, are you angels?"
Klietmann wondered if she was senile. Angels in pinstripe suits? Then he realized that they were in the vicinity of a
church and had appeared miraculously, so it might be logical for a religious woman to assume they were angels,
regardless of their clothing. Maybe it would not be necessary to waste time killing them, after all. He said, "Yes,
ma'am, we are angels, and God needs your car."
The woman in yellow said, "My Toyota here?"
"Yes, ma'am." The driver's door was standing open, and Klietmann put his attache on the front seat. "We're on an
urgent mission for God, you saw us step through the pearly gate from Heaven right before your eyes, and we must
have transportation."
Von Manstein and Bracher had gone around to the other side of the Toyota, opened those doors, and gotten inside.
The woman in blue said, "Shirley, you've been chosen to give your car.''
"God will return it to you," Klietmann said, "when our work here is done." Remembering the gasoline shortages of
his own war-torn era and not sure how plentiful fuel was in 1989, he added: "Of course, no matter how much gas is
in the tank now, it'll be full when we return it and perpetually full thereafter. The loaves and fishes thing."
"But there's potato salad in there for the church brunch," the woman in yellow said.
Felix Hubatsch had already opened the rear door on the driver's side and had found the potato salad. Now he took
it' out of the car and put it on the macadam at the woman's feet.
Klietmann got in, closed the door, heard Hubatsch slam the door behind him, found the keys in the ignition, started
the car, and drove out of the church lot. When he looked in the rearview mirror just before turning into the street,
the old women were still back there, holding their casseroles, staring after him.
Day by day they refined their calculations, and Stefan exercised his left arm and shoulder as much as he dared,
trying to prevent it from growing stiff as it healed, hoping to maintain as much muscle tone as possible. On
Saturday afternoon, January 21, as their first week in Palm Springs drew to a close, they completed the
calculations and arrived at the precise time and space coordinates that Stefan would require for the jaunts he would
make once he returned to 1944.
"Now I just need a bit more time to heal," he said, as he stood up from the computer and testingly moved his left
arm in circles.
She said, "It's been eleven days since you were shot. Do you still have pain?"
"Some. A deeper, duller pain. And not all the time. But the strength isn't back. I think I'd better wait a few days yet. If
it feels alright by next Wednesday, the twenty-fifth, I'll return to the Institute then. Sooner, if I improve faster, but
certainly no later than next Wednesday."
That night, Laura woke from a nightmare in which she was confined yet again to a wheelchair and in which destiny,
in the form of a faceless man in a black robe, was busily erasing Chris from reality, as if the boy was only a crayon
drawing on a pane of glass. She was soaked in sweat, and for a while she sat up in bed, listening for noises in the
house but hearing nothing other than her son's steady, low breathing on the bed beside her.
Later, unable to get back to sleep, she lay thinking about Stefan Krieger. He was an interesting man, extremely
self-contained and at times hard to figure.
Since Wednesday of the previous week, when he explained that he had become her guardian because he had
fallen in love with her and wanted to improve the life she had been meant to live, he'd said nothing more of love. He
had not restated his feelings for her, had not subjected her to meaningful looks, had not played the part of a pining
suitor. He made his case and was willing to give her time to think about him and get to know him before she
decided what she thought of him. She suspected he would wait years, if necessary, and without complaint. He had
the patience born of extreme adversity, which was something she understood.
He was quiet, pensive a lot of the time, occasionally downright melancholy, which she supposed was a result of the
horrors he had seen in his long-ago Germany. Perhaps that core of sadness had its roots in things he had done
himself and had come to regret, things for which he felt he could never atone. After all, he had said that a place in


hell was reserved for him. He had revealed no more about his past than what he had told her and Chris in the motel
room more than ten days ago. She sensed, however, that he was willing to tell her all the details, those that were a
discredit to him as well as those that reflected well on him; he would not conceal anything from her, he was merely
waiting for her to decide what she thought of him and whether, in any case, she wanted to know more.
In spite of the sorrow in him, deep as marrow and dark as blood. he had a quiet sense of humor. He was good with
Chris and could make the boy laugh, which Laura counted in his favor. His smile was warm and gentle.
She still did not love him, and she did not think that she ever would. She wondered how she could be so sure of
that. In fact she lay in the dark bedroom for a couple of hours, wondering, until at last she began to suspect that the
reason she could not love him was because he was not Danny. Her Danny had been a unique man, and with him
she had known a love as close to perfection as the world allowed. Now, in seeking her affections, Stefan Krieger
would be forever in competition with a ghost.
She recognized the pathos in their situation, and she was glumly aware of the loneliness that her attitude assured.
In her heart she wanted to be loved and to love in return, but in her relationship with Stefan, she saw only his
passion unrequited, her hope unfulfilled.
Beside her, Chris murmured in his sleep, then sighed.
I love you, honey, she thought. I love you so much.
Her son, the only child she could ever have, was the center of her existence now and for the foreseeable future, her
primary reason for going on. If anything happened to Chris, Laura knew she would no longer be able to find relief in
the dark humor of life; this world in which tragedy and comedy were married in all things would become, for her,
exclusively a place of tragedy, too black and bleak to be endured.
Three blocks from the church Erich Klietmann pulled the white Toyota to the curb and parked on a side street off
Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs's main shopping district. Scores of people strolled along the sidewalks,
window-shopping. Some of the younger women were wearing shorts and brief tops that Klietmann found not only
scandalous but embarrassing, casually displaying their bodies in a way unknown in his own age. Under the iron
rule of der Furhrer's National Socialist Workers' Party, such shameless behavior wouldn't be permitted; Hitler's
triumph would result in a different world, where morality would be strictly enforced, where these bare-limbed,
brassiereless women would parade themselves only at the risk of imprisonment and reeducation, where decadent
creatures wouldn't be tolerated. As he watched their buttocks clench and flex beneath their tight shorts, as he
watched unrestrained breasts swaying under the thin fabric of T-shirts, what most disturbed Klietmann was that he
desperately wanted to lay with every one of these women even if they were representatives of the deviant strains of
humanity that Hitler would abolish.
Beside Klietmann, Corporal Rudy von Manstein had unfolded :he map of Palm Springs provided by the team of
researchers that had located the woman and the boy. He said, "Where do we make the hit?"
From an inside pocket of his suit jacket, Klietmann withdrew the folded paper that Dr. Juttner had given him in the
lab. He opened it and read aloud: "On state Route 111, approximately six miles north of the Palm Springs city limits,
the woman will be arrested by an officer of the California Highway Patrol at eleven-twenty. Wednes day morning,
January 25. She will be driving a black Buick Riviera. The boy will be with her and will be taken into protective
custody. Apparently Krieger is there, but we're not sure; apparently he escapes from the police officer, but we don't
know how."
Von Manstein had already traced a route on the map that would take them out of Palm Springs and onto Highway
111.
"We've got thirty-one minutes," Klietmann said, glancing at the dashboard clock.
"We'll make it easily," von Manstein said. "Fifteen minutes at the most."
"If we get there early," Klietmann said, "we can kill Krieger before he slips away from the highway-patrol officer. In
any event we have to get there before the woman and boy are taken into custody because it'll be far more difficult
to get at them once they're in jail." He turned around to look at Bracher and Hubatsch in the back seat.
"Understood?"
They both nodded, but then Sergeant Hubatsch patted the breast rocket of his suit and said, "Sir, what about these
sunglasses?"
"What about them?" Klietmann asked impatiently.
"Should we put them on now? Will that help us blend with the local citizenry? I've been studying the people on the
street, and though a lot of them are wearing dark glasses, many of them aren't."
Kliet mann looked at the pedestrians, trying not to be distracted by scantily clad women, and he saw that Hubatsch
was correct. More to the point, he realized that not even one of the men in sight was dressed in the power look
preferred by young executives. Maybe all young executives were in their offices at this hour. Whatever the reason
for the lack of dark suits and black Bally loafers, Klietmann felt conspicuous even though he and his men were in a
car. Because many pedestrians were wearing sunglasses, he decided that wearing his own would give him one
thing in common with some of the locals.
When the lieutenant put on his Ray-Bans, so did von Manstein, Bracher, and Hubatsch.
"All right, let's go," Klietmann said.


But before he could pop the emergency brake and put the car in gear, someone knocked on the driver's window
beside him. It was a Palm Springs police officer.
Laura sensed that, one way or the other, their ordeal was soon coming to an end. They would succeed in
destroying the institute or die trying, and she had almost reached the point at which an end to fear was desirable
regardless of how it was achieved.
Wednesday morning, January 25, Stefan still suffered deep-muscle soreness in his shoulder but no sharp pain. No
numbness remained in his hand or arm, which meant the bullet had not damaged any nerves. Because he
cautiously had exercised every day, he had more than half of his usual strength in his left arm and shoulder, just
enough to make him confident that he would be able to implement his plan. But Laura could see that he was afraid
of the trip ahead of him.
He put on Kokoschka's gate-homing belt, which Laura had taken from her safe the night that Stefan had arrived
wounded on her doorstep. His fear remained apparent, but the moment that he put on the belt, his anxiety was
overlaid with a steely determination.
In the kitchen at ten o'clock, each of them, including Chris, took two of the capsules that would render them
impervious to the effects of the nerve gas, Vexxon. They washed down the preventive with glasses of Hi-C orange
drink.
The three Uzis, one of the .38 revolvers, the silencer-equipped Colt Commander Mark IV, and a small nylon
backpack full of books had been loaded into the car.
The two pressurized, stainless-steel bottles of Vexxon were still in the Buick's trunk. After studying the informational
pamphlets in the blue plastic bags attached to the containers, Stefan had decided he would need only one cylinder
for the job. Vexxon was a designer gas tailored primarily for use indoors —to kill the enemy in barracks, shelters,
and bunkers deep underground—rather than against troops in the field. In the open air the stuff dispersed too
fast—and broke down too quickly in sunlight —to be effective beyond a radius of two hundred yards from point of
release. However, when opened full-cock, a single cylinder could contaminate a fifty-thousand-square-foot structure
in a few minutes, which was good enough for his purposes.
At 10:35 they got in the car and left the Gaines's house, heading for the desert off route 111, north of Palm Springs.
Laura made sure Chris's safety harness was buckled, and the boy said, "See, if you had a car that was a time
machine, we'd drive back to 1944 in comfort."
Days ago they had taken a night drive to the open desert to find a spot suitable for Stefan's departure. They needed
to know the exact geographical location in advance in order to do the calculations that would make it possible for
him to return conveniently to them after his work in 1944 was done.
Stefan intended to open the valve on the Vexxon cylinder before he pushed the button on the gate-homing belt, so
the nerve gas would be dispersing even as he returned through the gate to the institute, killing everyone who was in
the lab at the 1944 end of the Lightning Road. Therefore he would be releasing a quantity of the toxin at his point of
departure, too, and it seemed prudent to do so only in an isolated place. The street in front of the Gaines's house
was less than two hundred yards away, within Vexxon's effective range, and they did not want to kill innocent
bystanders.
Besides, though the gas was supposed to remain poisonous only for forty to sixty minutes, Laura was concerned
that the deactivated residue, although not lethal, might have unknown, long-range toxic effects. She did not intend
to leave any such substance in Thelma and Jason's house.
The day was clear, blue, serene.
When they had driven only a couple of blocks and were descending into a hollow where the road was flanked by
huge date palms, Laura thought she saw a strange pulse of light in the fragment of sky that was captured by her
rearview mirror. What would lightning be like in a bright, cloudless sky? Not as dramatic as on a storm-clouded day,
for it would be competing with the brightness of the sun. What it might look like in fact was the very thing she
thought she had seen—a strange, brief pulse of brightness.
Though she braked, the Buick was into the bottom of the hollow, and she could no longer see the sky in the
rearview mirror, just the hill behind them. She thought she heard a rumble, too, like distant thunder, but she could
not be sure because of the roar of the car's air conditioner. She pulled quickly to the side of the road, fumbling with
the ventilation controls.
"What's wrong?" Chris asked as she put the car in park, threw open her door, and got out.
Stefan opened the rear door and got out too. "Laura?"
She was looking at the limited expanse of sky that she could see from the bottom of the hollow, using her flattened
hand as a visor over her eyes. "You hear that, Stefan?"
In the warm, desert -dry day, a faraway rumble slowly died.
He said, "Could be jet noise."
"No. The last time I thought it might be a jet, it was them."
The sky pulsed again, one last time. She did not actually see the lightning itself, not the jagged bolt scored on the
heavens, but just the reflection of it in the upper atmosphere, a faint wave of light flushing across the blue vault
above.


"They're here," she said.
"Yes," he agreed.
"Somewhere on our way out to Route 111, someone's going to stop us, maybe a traffic cop, or maybe we'll be in an
accident, so there'll be a public record, and then they'll show up. Stefan, we've got to turn around, go back to the
house."
"It's no use," he said.
Chris had gotten out of the other side of the car. "He's right, Mom. It doesn't matter what we do. Those time
travelers came here 'cause they've already peeked into the future and know where they're gonna find us maybe
half an hour from now, maybe ten minutes from now. It doesn't matter if we go back to the house or go on ahead;
they've already seen us someplace—maybe even back at the house. See, no matter how much we change our
plans, we'll cross their path."
Destiny.
"Shit!" she said and kicked the side of the car, which didn't do any good, didn't even make her feel better. "I hate
this. How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It's like playing blackjack when the dealer is God."
No more lightning flared.
She said, "Come to think of it, all of life is a blackjack game with God as the dealer, isn't it? So this is no worse. Get
in the car, Chris. Let's get on with it."
As she drove through the western neighborhoods of the resort city, Laura's nerves were as taut as garroting wire.
She was alert for trouble on all sides, though she knew it would come when and where she least expected it.
Without incident they connected with the northern end of Palm Canyon Drive, then state Route 111. Ahead lay
twelve miles of mostly barren desert before 111 intersected Interstate 10.
Hoping to avoid catastrophe, Lieutenant Klietmann lowered the driver's window and smiled up at the Palm Springs
policeman who had rapped on the glass to get his attention and who was now bending down, squinting in at him.
"What is it, officer?" "Didn't you see the red curb when you parked here?" "Red curb?" Klietmann said, smiling,
wondering what the hell the cop was talking about.
"Now, sir," the officer said in a curiously playful tone, "are you telling me you didn't see the red curb?"
"Yes, sir, of course I saw it."
"I didn't think you'd fib," the cop said as if he knew Klietmann and trusted his reputation for honesty, which baffled
the lieutenant. "So if you saw the red curb, sir, why'd you park here?"
"Oh, I see," Klietmann said, "parking is restricted to curbs that aren't red. Yes, of course."
The patrolman blinked at the lieutenant. He shifted his attention to Von Manstein in the passenger's seat, then to
Bracher and Hubatsch in the rear, smiled and nodded at them.
Klietmann did not have to look at his men to know they were on edge. The air in the car was heavy with tension.
When he shifted his gaze to Klietmann, the police officer smiled tentatively and said, "Am I right—you fellas are four
preachers?"
"Preachers?" Klietmann said, disconcerted by the question.
"I've got a bit of a deductive mind," the cop said, his tentative smile still holding. "I'm no Sherlock Holmes. But the
bumper stickers on your car say 'I Love Jesus' and 'Christ Has Risen.' And there's a Baptist convention in town, and
you're all dressed in dark suits."
That was why he had thought he could trust Klietmann not to fib: He believed they were Baptist ministers.
"That's right," Klietmann said at once. "We're with the Baptist convention, officer. Sorry about the illegal parking. We
don't have red curbs where I come from. Now if-—"
"Where do you hail from?" the cop asked, not with suspicion but in an attempt to be friendly.
Klietmann knew a lot about the United States but not enough to carry on a conversation of this sort when he did not
control its direction to any degree whatsoever. He believed that Baptists were from the southern part of the country;
he wasn't sure if there were any of them in the north or west or east, so he tried to think of a southern state. He
said, "I'm from Georgia," before he realized how unlikely that claim seemed when spoken in his German accent.
The smile on the cop's face faltered. Looking past Klietmann to von Manstein, he said, "And where you from, sir?"
Following his lieutenant's lead, but speaking with an even stronger accent, von Manstein said, "Georgia."
From the back seat, before they could be asked, Hubatsch and Bracher said, "Georgia, we're from Georgia," as if
that word was magic and would cast a spell over the patrolman.
The cop's smile had vanished altogether. He frowned at Erich Klietmann and said, "Sir, would you mind stepping
out of the car for a moment?"
"Certainly, officer," Klietmann said, as he opened his door, noticing how the cop backed up a couple of steps and
rested his right hand on the butt of his holstered revolver. "But we're late for * a prayer meeting—"
In the back seat Hubatsch snapped open his attache case and snatched the Uzi from it as quickly as a presidential
bodyguard might have done. He did not roll down the window but put the muzzle against the glass and opened fire
on the cop, giving him no time to draw his revolver. The car window blew out as bullets pounded through it. Struck
by at least twenty rounds at close range, the cop pitched backward into traffic. Brakes squealed as a car made a
hard stop to avoid the body, and across the street display windows shattered as bullets hit a men's clothing shop.


With the cool detachment and quick thinking that made Klietmann proud to be in the Schutzstaffel, Martin Bracher
got out of the Toyota on his side and loosed a wide arc of fire from the Uzi to add to the chaos and give them a
better chance of escaping. Windows imploded in the exclusive shops not only on the side street at the end of which
they were parked but all the way across the intersection on the east flank of Palm Canyon Drive as well. People
screamed, dropped to the pavement, scuttled for the cover of doorways. Klietmann saw passing cars hit by bullets
out on Palm Canyon, and maybe a few drivers were hit or maybe they only panicked, but the vehicles swung wildly
from lane to lane; a tan Mercedes sideswiped a delivery truck, and a sleek, red sportscar jumped the curb, crossed
the sidewalk, grazed the bole of a palm tree, and plowed into the front of a gift shop.
Klietmann got behind the wheel again and released the emergency brake. He heard Bracher and Hubatsch leap
into the car, so he threw the white Toyota in gear and shot forward onto Palm Canyon, hanging a hard left, heading
north. He discovered at once that he was on a one-way street, going in the wrong direction. Cursing, he dodged
oncoming cars. The Toyota rocked wildly on bad springs, and the glove compartment popped open, emptying its
contents in von Manstein's lap. Klietmann turned right at the next intersection. A block later he ran a red light,
narrowly avoiding pedestrians in the crosswalk, and turned left onto another avenue that allowed northbound traffic.
"We only have twenty-one minutes," von Manstein said, pointing at the dashboard clock.
"Tell me where to go," Klietmann said. "I'm lost."
"No, you're not," von Manstein said, brushing the contents of the glove compartment—spare keys, paper napkins, a
pair of white gloves, individual packets of catsup and mustard, documents of various kinds—off the map that he
was still holding open in his lap. "You're not lost. This will connect with Palm Canyon where it becomes a two-way
street. From there we head straight north onto Route 111."
Approximately six miles north of Palm Springs, where the barren land looked particularly empty, Laura pulled to the
shoulder of the highway. She slowly proceeded a few hundred yards until she found the place where the
embankment declined almost to the level of the surrounding desert and sloped sufficiently to allow her to drive out
onto the flat plain. Aside from a little bunchgrass that bristled in dry clumps and a few gnarly mesquite bushes, the
only vegetation was tumbleweed—some green and rooted, some dry and rolling free. The fixed weeds scraped
softly against the Buick, and the loose ones flew away on the wind that the car created.
The hard ground had a shale base over which an alkaline sand was drifted and whorled in places. As she had done
when they found the place a few nights ago, Laura stayed away from the sand, kept to the bare gray -pink shale.
She did not stop until she was three hundred yards from the highway, putting that well-traveled road beyond the
radius of Vexxon's open-air effectiveness. She parked not far from an arroyo, a twenty-foot-wide and thirty-foot-
deep natural drainage channel formed by flash floods during hundreds of the desert's brief rainy seasons;
previously, at night, proceeding with caution but guided only by headlights, they'd been fortunate not to drive into
that enormous ditch.
Though the lightning had not been followed by any sign of armed men, urgency informed the moment; Laura, Chris,
and Stefan moved as if they could hear a clock ticking toward an impending detonation. While Laura removed one
of the thirty-pound Vexxon cylinders from the trunk of the Buick, Stefan put his arms through the straps on the
small, green nylon backpack that was full of books, pulled the chest strap in place, and pressed the Velcro
fasteners together. Chris carried one of the Uzis twenty feet from the car to the center of a circle of utterly barren
shale where not even a tuft of bunchgrass grew, which looked like a good staging area for Stefan's debarkation
from 1989. Laura joined the boy there, and Stefan followed, holding the silencer-fitted Colt Commander in his right
hand.
North of Palm Springs on state Route 111, Klietmann was pushing the Toyota as hard as it would go, which was not
hard enough. The car had forty thousand miles on the odometer, and no doubt the old woman who owned it never
drove faster than fifty, so it wasn't responding well to the demands Klietmann made on it. When he tried to go faster
than sixty, the Toyota began to shimmy and sputter, forcing him to ease up.
Nevertheless, just two miles north of the Palm Springs city limits, they fell in behind a California Highway Patrol
cruiser, and Klietmann knew they must have caught up with the officer who was going to encounter and arrest
Laura Shane and her son. The cop was doing just under fifty-five in a fifty-five -mile-per-hour zone.
"Kill him," Klietmann said over his shoulder to Corporal Martin Bracher, who was in the right rear seat.
Klietmann glanced in the rearview mirror, saw no traffic behind; there was oncoming traffic, but it was in the
southbound lanes. He swung into the northbound passing lane and began to move around the patrol car at sixty.
In the back Bracher rolled down his window. The other rear window was already open because Hubatsch had shot
it out when he had killed the Palm Springs cop, so wind roared noisily through the back of the Toyota and reached
into the front seat to flutter the map that was still in von Manstein's lap. The CHP officer glanced over in surprise, for
motorists probably seldom dared pass a policeman who was already driving within a couple of miles of the speed
limit. When Klietmann pressed the Toyota past sixty, it shimmied and coughed, still accelerating but grudgingly.
The policeman took note of this indication of Klietmann’s determined breaking of the law, and he tapped his siren
lightly, making it whoop and die, which apparently meant Klietmann was to fall back and pull to the shoulder of the
road.
Instead, the lieutenant nursed the protesting Toyota up to sixty-an hour, where it seemed in danger of shaking itself


apart, and that was just fast enough to pull slightly ahead of the startled CHP officer, bringing Bracher's rear
window in line with the patrol car's front window. The corporal opened fire with his Uzi.
The police cruiser's windows imploded, and the officer was dead in an instant. He had to be dead, for he had not
seen the attack coming and surely had taken several rounds in the head and upper body. The patrol car swung
toward the Toyota and brushed it before Klietmann could get out of the way, then veered toward the shoulder of the
road.
Klietmann braked, falling back from the out -of-control cruiser.
The four-lane highway was elevated about ten feet above the desert floor, and the patrol car shot past the
unguarded brink of the shoulder. It was airborne for a few seconds, then came down so hard that some of its tires
no doubt blew out on impact. Two doors popped open, including that on the driver's side.
As Klietmann moved into the right lane and drove slowly by the wreckage, von Manstein said, "I can see him in
there, slumped over the wheel. He's no more trouble to us."
Oncoming drivers had witnessed the patrol car's spectacular flight. They pulled to the verge on their side of Route
111. When Klietmann glanced in his rearview mirror, he saw people getting out of those vehicles, good Samaritans
hurrying across the highway to the CHP officer's rescue. If some of them realized why the cruiser had crashed, they
had decided not to pursue Klietmann and bring him to justice. Which was wise.
He accelerated again, glanced at the odometer, and said, "Three miles from here, that cop would've arrested the
woman and boy. So be on the lookout for a black Buick. Three miles."
Standing in the bright desert sun on the patch of barren shale near the Buick, Laura watched Stefan slip the strap
of the Uzi over his right shoulder. The carbine hung freely and did not interfere with the backpack full of books.
"But now I wonder if I should take it," he said. "If the nerve gas works as well as it ought to, I probably won't even
need the pistol, let alone a submachine gun."
"Take it," Laura said grimly.
He nodded. "You're right. Who knows."
"Too bad you don't have a couple of grenades too," Chris said. "Grenades would be good."
"Let's hope it doesn't get that nasty back there," Stefan said.
He switched off the pistol's safeties and held it ready in his right hand. Gripping the canister of Vexxon by its heavy -
duty, fire-extinguisher-type handle, he picked it up with his left hand and tested its weight to see how his injured
shoulder would react.
"Hurts a little," he said. "Pulls at the wound. But it's not bad, and I'll be able to control it."
They had cut the wire on the canister's trigger, which allowed the manual venting of the Vexxon. He curled his
finger through that release loop.
When he finished his work in 1944, he would make a final jaunt to their time again, 1989, and the plan was for him
to arrive only five minutes after he departed. Now he said, "I'll see you very soon. You'll hardly know I'm gone."
Suddenly Laura was afraid that he would never return. She put a hand to his face and kissed him on the cheek .
"Good luck, Stefan."
It was not a kiss that a lover might have given, nor was there even a promise of passion; it was just the affectionate
kiss of a friend, the kiss of a woman who owed eternal gratitude but who did not owe her heart. She saw an
awareness of that in his eyes. At the core, in spite of flashes of humor, he was a melancholy man, and she wished
that she could make him happy. She regretted that she could not at least pretend to feel more for him; yet she knew
he would see through any such pretense.
"I want you to come back," she said. "I really do. Very much."
"That's enough." He looked at Chris and said, "Take care of your mother while I'm gone."
"I'll try," Chris said. "But she's pretty good at taking care of herself.''
Laura pulled her son to her side.
Stefan lifted the thirty-pound Vexxon cylinder higher, squeezed the release loop.
As the gas vented under high pressure with a sound like a dozen snakes hissing at once, Laura was seized by a
brief panic, certain that the capsules they had tak en would not protect them from the nerve toxin, that they would
drop to the ground, twitching in the grip of muscle spasms and convulsions, where they would die in thirty seconds.
Vexxon was colorless but not odorless or tasteless: even in the open air, where it dispersed quickly, she detected a
sweet odor of apricots and a tart, nauseating taste that seemed half lemon juice and half spoiled milk. But in spite
of what she could smell and taste, she felt no adverse effects.
Holding the pistol across his body, Stefan reached beneath his shirt with a free finger of his gun hand and pressed
the button on the homing belt three times.
Von Manstein was the first to spot the black car standing in that expanse of white sand and pale rock, a few
hundred yards east of the highway. He called it to their attention.
Of course, Lieutenant Klietmann could not see the make of the car from so far away, but he was sure it was the one
for which they were searching. Three people stood together near the car; they were hardly more than stick figures
at that distance, and they appeared to shimmer like mirages in the desert sun, but Klietmann could see that two of
them were adults, the other a child.


Abruptly one of the adults vanished. It was not a trick of the desert air and light. The figure did not shimmer into
view again a moment later. It was gone, and Klietmann knew that it had been Stefan Krieger.
"He went back!" Bracher said, astonished.
"Why would he go back," von Manstein said, "when everyone at the institute wants his ass?"
"Worse," Hubatsch said from behind the lieutenant. "He came to 1989 days before we did. So that belt of his will
have taken him back to the same point, to the day that Kokoschka shot him—to just eleven minutes after
Kokoschka shot him. Yet we know for a fact he never returned that day. What the hell's going on here?"
Klietmann was worried, too, but he didn't have time to figure out what was going on. His job was to kill the woman
and her son if not Krieger. He said, "Get ready," and he slowed the Toyota to look for a way down the embankment.
Hubatsch and Bracher had already withdrawn the Uzis from their attache cases in Palm Springs. Now von
Manstein armed himself with his weapon.
The land rose to meet the highway. Klietmann swung the Toyota off the pavement, down the sloped embankment,
and onto the desert floor, heading toward the woman and the boy.
When Stefan activated the homing belt, the air became heavy, and Laura felt a great, invisible weight pressing on
her. She grimaced at the stench of hot electrical wiring and burnt insulation, overlaid by the scent of ozone,
underlaid by the apricot smell of the Vexxon. The air pressure grew, the blend of odors intensified, and Stefan left
her world with a sudden, loud pop. For an instant there seemed to be no air to breathe, but the brief vacuum was
followed by a blustery inrush of hot wind tainted by the faintly alkaline smell of the desert.
Standing close at her side and holding fast to her, Chris said, "Wow! Wasn't that something, Mom, wasn't that
great?"
She did not answer because she noticed a white car driving off state Route 111, onto the desert floor. It turned
toward them and leaped forward as its driver accelerated.
"Chris, get in front of the Buick. Stay down!"
He saw the oncoming vehicle and obeyed her without question.
She ran to the open door of the Buick and snatched one of the submachine guns off the seat. She stepped to the
rear, standing by the open trunk, and faced the oncoming car.
It was less than two hundred yards away, closing fast. Sunlight starred and flashed off the chrome, coruscated
across the windshield.
She considered the possibility that the occupants were not German agents from 1944 but innocent people.
However that was so unlikely, she could not allow the possibility to inhibit her.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
No. Damn it, no.
When the white car was within one hundred yards, she squeezed off two solid bursts from the Uzi and saw bullets
punch at least two holes in the windshield. The rest of the tempered glass instantly crazed.
The car—she could see now that it was a Toyota—spun out, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees, then
ninety degrees more, throwing up clouds of dust, tearing through a couple of still green tumbleweeds. It came to
rest about sixty yards away, the front end pointed north, the passenger's side toward her.
Doors flew open on the far side, and Laura knew the occupants were scrambling out of the car where she could not
see them, staying low. She opened fire again, not with the hope of hitting them through the Toyota but with the
intention of puncturing the fuel tank; then perhaps a lucky spark, struck by a bullet passing through sheet metal,
might ignite the gasoline and catch some or all of those men in the sudden flames as they huddled against the far
flank of the vehicle. But she emptied the Uzi's extended magazine without igniting a fire, even though she had
almost certainly riddled the fuel tank.
She threw down the gun, pulled open the back door of the Buick, and snatched up the other, fully loaded Uzi. She
got the .38 Chief's Special from the front seat, too, never taking her eyes off the white Toyota for more than a
second or two. She wished that Stefan had left the third submachine gun, after all.
From the other car, sixty yards away, one of the gunmen opened fire with an automatic weapon, and now there was
no doubt who they were. As Laura crouched against the side of the Buick, bullets thudded into the open trunk lid,
blew out the rear window, tore into the rear fenders, ricocheted off the bumper, bounced off surrounding shale with
sharp cracks, and kicked up puffs of powdery, white sand.
She heard a couple of rounds cutting the air close to her head—deadly, high-pitched, whispery whines—and she
began to edge backward toward the front of the Buick, staying close to it, trying to make as small a target of herself
as possible. In a moment she joined Chris where he huddled against the Buick's grille.
The gunman at the Toyota ceased firing.
"Mom?" Chris said fearfully.
"It's all right," she said, trying hard to believe what she told him. "Stefan will be back in less than five minutes,
honey. He's got another Uzi, and that'll even the odds a lot. We'll be okay. We only have to hold them off for a few
minutes. Just a few minutes."
Kokoschka's belt returned Stefan to the Institute in a blink, and he entered the gate with the nozzle on the Vexxon
cylinder wide open. He was squeezing the handle and trigger so hard that his hand ached, and the pain already


was beginning to travel up his arm into his wounded shoulder.
From within the gloom of the barrel, he could see only a small portion of the lab. He glimpsed two men in dark suits,
who were peering in the far end of the gate. They very much resembled Gestapo agents—all of the bastards looked
as if they'd been cloned from the same small group of degenerates and fanatics—and he was relieved to know that
they could not see him as clearly as he could see them; for a moment at least they would think he was Kokoschka.
He moved forward, the noisily hissing canister of Vexxon held before him in his left hand, the pistol in his right
hand, and before the men in the lab realized something was wrong, the nerve gas hit them. They dropped to the
floor, below the elevated gate, and by the time Stefan stepped down into the laboratory, they were writhing in
agony. They had vomited explosively. Blood was running from their nostrils. One of them was on his side, kicking
his legs and clawing at his throat; the other was curled fetally on his side and, with fingers hooked like claws, was
ripping horribly at his eyes. Near the gate-programming board three men in lab coats— Stefan knew them:
Hoepner, Eicke, Schmauser—had collapsed. They tore at themselves as if mad or rabid. All five dying men were
trying to scream, but their throats had swollen shut in an instant; they were able to make only faint, pathetic, chilling
sounds like the mewling of small, tortured animals. Stefan stood among them, physically unaffected but appalled,
horrified, and in thirty to forty seconds they were dead.
A cruel justice was served in the use of Vexxon against these men, for it had been Nazi-sponsored researchers
who had synthesized the first nerve gas in 1936, an organophosphorous ester called tabun. Virtually all subsequent
nerve gases—which killed by interfering with the transmission of electrical nerve impulses —had been related to
that original chemical compound. Including Vexxon. These men in 1944 had been killed by a futuristic weapon, yet
it was a substance that had its origins in their own twisted, death-centered society.
Nevertheless Stefan took no satisfaction from these five deaths. He had seen so much killing in his life that even
the extermination of the guilty to protect the innocent, even murder in the service of justice, repulsed him. But he
could do what he had to do.
He put the pistol on a lab bench. He shrugged the Uzi off his shoulder and put that aside as well.
From a pocket of his jeans, he withdrew a few inches of wire, which he used to lock open the trigger on the Vexxon.
He stepped into the ground-floor corridor and put the canister in the center of that hallway. In a few minutes the gas
would spread through the building by way of stairwells, elevator shafts, and ventilation ducts.
He was surprised to see that only the night lights illuminated the hallway and that the other labs on the ground floor
appeared to be deserted. Leaving the gas to disperse, he returned to the gate-programming board in the main lab
to learn the date and time to which Heinrich Kokoschka's homing device had brought him. It was eleven minutes
past nine o'clock on the night of March 16.
This was a piece of singularly good luck. Stefan had expected to return to the institute at an hour when most of its
staff—some of whom began work as early as six in the morning and some of whom stayed as late as eight
o'clock—would be in residence. That would have meant as many as a hundred bodies scattered throughout the
four-floor building; and when they were discovered, it would be known that only Stefan Krieger, using Kokoschka's
belt and penetrating the institute from the future by way of the gate, could have been responsible. They would
realize that he had not come back merely to kill as many of the staff as were on the premises, that he had been up
to something else, and they would launch a major investigation to discover the nature of his scheme and undo
what damage he had done. But now ... if the building was mostly empty, he might be able to dispose of the few
bodies in a fashion that would cover his presence and direct all suspicion to these dead men.
After five minutes the Vexxon cylinder was empty. The gas had spread throughout the structure, with the exception
of the two guard foyers at the front and back entrances, which did not share even ventilation ducts with the rest of
the building. Stefan went from floor to floor, room to room, looking for more victims. The only bodies he found were
those of the animals in the basement, the first time-travelers, and the sight of their pathetic corpses disturbed him
as much or more than the five gassed men.
Stefan returned to the main lab, took five of the special belts from a white cabinet, and buckled the devices on the
dead men, over their clothes. He quickly reprogrammed the gate to send the bodies roughly six billion years into
the future. He had read somewhere that the sun would have gone nova or would have died in six billion years, and
he wanted to dispose of the five men in a place where no one would exist to notice them or to use their belts to
home in on the gate.
Dealing with the dead in that silent, deserted building was an eerie business. Repeatedly he froze, certain that he'd
heard stealthy movement. A couple of times he even paused in his labors to go in search of the imagined sound but
found nothing. Once he looked at one of the dead men behind him, half convinced that the lifeless thing had started
to rise, that the soft scrape he'd heard had been its cool hand clawing for a grip on the machinery, as it tried to drag
itself erect. That was when he realized how deeply disturbed he had been by bearing witness to so many deaths
over so many years.
One by one he dragged the reeking corpses into the gate, shoved them along to the point of transmission, and
heaved them across that energy field. Tumbling through the invisible doorway in time, they vanished. At an
unimaginably distant point they would reappear—either on an earth long cold and dead, where not even one plant
or insect lived, or in the airless and empty space where the planet had existed before being consumed by the


exploding sun.
He was exceedingly careful not to venture across the transmission point. If he was suddenly transported to the
vacuum of deep space, six billion years hence, he would be dead before he had a chance to press the button on
his homing belt and return to the lab.
By the time he disposed of the five cadavers and cleaned up all traces of their messy deaths, he was weary.
Fortunately the nerve gas left no apparent residue; there was no need to wipe down every surface in the institute.
His wounded shoulder throbbed as badly as in the days immediately after he had been shot.
But at least he had cleverly covered his trail. In the morning it might appear as if Kokoschka, Hoepner, Eicke,
Schmauser, and the two Gestapo agents had decided that the Third Reich was doomed and had defected to a
future in which peace and plenty could be found.
He remembered the animals in the basement. If he left them in their cages, tests would be run to discover what had
killed them, and perhaps the results would cast doubt on the theory that Kokoschka and the others had defected
through the gate. Then once again the primary suspect would be Stefan Krieger. Better the animals should
disappear. That would be a mystery, but it would not point directly toward the truth, as would the condition of their
carcasses.
The hot, pounding pain in his shoulder became hotter, as he used clean lab coats for burial shrouds, bundling
groups of animals together, tying them up with cord. Without belts he sent them six billion years into the future. He
retrieved the empty nerve-gas canister from the hall and sent that to the far end of time as well.
At last he was ready to make the two crucial jaunts that he hoped would lead to the utter destruction of the institute
and the certain defeat of Nazi Germany. Moving to the gate-programming board again, he took a folded sheet of
paper from the hip pocket of his jeans; it contained the results of days of calculations that he and Laura had done
on the IBM PC in the house in Palm Springs.
If he had been able to return from 1989 with enough explosives to reduce the institute to smoldering rubble, he
would have done the job himself, right here, right now. However, in addition to the heavy canister of Vexxon, the
rucksack filled with six books, the pistol, and the Uzi, he would have been unable to carry more than forty or fifty
pounds of plastique, which was insufficient to the task. The explosives he had planted in the attic and basement
had been removed by Kokoschka a couple of days ago, of course, in local time. He might have come back from
1989 with a couple of cans of gasoline, might have attempted to burn the place to the ground; but many research
documents were locked in fireproof file cabinets to which even he did not have access, and only a devastating
explosion would split them open and expose their contents to flames.
He could no longer destroy the institute alone.
But he knew who could help him.
Referring to the numbers arrived at with the aid of the IBM PC, he reprogrammed the gate to take him three and a
half days into the future from that night of March 16. Geographically, he would be arriving on British soil in the heart
of the extensive underground shelters beneath the government offices overlooking St. James's Park by Storey's
Gate, where bombproof offices and quarters for the prime minister and other officials had been constructed during
the Blitz, and where the War Room was still located. Specifically, Stefan hoped to arrive in a particular conference
room at 7:30 A.M., a jaunt of such precision that only the knowledge and computers available in 1989 could allow
the complex calculations to determine the necessary time and space coordinates.
Carrying no weapons, taking with him only the rucksack full of books, he entered the gate, crossed the point of
transmission, and materialized in the corner of a low-ceilinged conference room in the center of which stood a large
table encircled by twelve chairs.
Ten of the chairs were empty. Only two men were present. The first was a male secretary in a British army uniform,
a pen in one hand and a pad of paper in the other. The second man, engaged in the dictation of an urgent
message, was Winston Churchill.
As he crouched against the Toyota, Klietmann decided they could not have been more inappropriately dressed for
their mission if they had been made up as circus clowns. The surrounding desert was mostly white and beige, pale
pink and peach, with little vegetation and only a few rock formations significant enough to provide cover. In their
black suits, as they tried to circle and get behind the woman, they would be as visible as bugs on a wedding cake.
Hubatsch, who had been standing near the front of the Toyota, directing short barrages of automatic fire at the
Buick, dropped down. "She's gone to the front of the car with the boy, out of sight."
"Local authorities will show up soon," Bracher said, looking west toward state Route 111, then southwest in the
general direction of the patrol car they had blown off the road four miles back.
"Remove your coats," Klietmann said, stripping out of his own. "White shirts will blend with the landscape better.
Bracher, you stay here, prevent the bitch from doubling back this way. Von Manstein and Hubatsch, try to circle
around on the right side. Stay well apart and don't move from one point of cover until you've picked out the next. I'll
go north and east, around on the left."
"Do we kill her without trying to find out what Krieger is up to?" Bracher asked.
"Yes," Klietmann said at once. "She's too heavily armed to be taken alive. Anyway, I'd bet my honor that Krieger will
be coming back to them, returning here through the gate in a few minutes, and we'll be better able to deal with him


when he arrives if we've already taken out the woman. Now go. Go."
Hubatsch, followed a few seconds later by von Manstein, left the cover of the Toyota, staying low, moving fast, and
heading south-southeast.
Lieutenant Klietmann went north from the Toyota, holding his submachine gun in one hand, running in a crouch,
making for the meager cover of a sprawling mesquite bush upon which a few tumbleweeds had gotten hung up.
Laura rose slightly and peered around the front fender of the Buick just in time to see two men in white shirts and
black trousers sprint away from the Toyota, heading east toward her but also angling to the south, obviously
intending to circle behind her. She stood and squeezed off a short burst at the first man, who made for the cover of
a toothlike formation of rock, behind which he safely vanished.
At the sound of gunfire, the second man sprawled flat in a shallow depression that did not entirely conceal him, but
the angle of fire and the distance made him a hard target. She did not intend to waste any more rounds.
Besides, even as she saw where the second man had gone to ground, a third gunman opened fire on her from
behind the Toyota. Bullets cracked off the Buick, missing her by inches, and she was forced to drop down again.
Stefan would be back in just three or four minutes. Not long. Not long at all. But an eternity.
Chris was sitting with his back against the front bumper of the Buick, his knees drawn up against his chest, hugging
himself, and shaking visibly.
"Hang on, kiddo," she said.
He looked at her but said nothing. Through all the terrors they had endured in the past couple of weeks, she had
not seen him look so dispirited. His face was pale and slack. He realized that this game of hide and seek had never
been a game at all for anyone but him, that nothing was in fact as easy as in the movies, and this frightening
perception brought to his gaze a bleak detachment that scared Laura.
"Hang on," she repeated, then scrambled past him to the other front fender, on the driver's side, where she
crouched to study the desert to the north of them.
She was worried that other men were circling her on that flank. She could not let them do that because then the
Buick would be of no use as a barricade, and there would be no place to run except into the open desert, where
they would kill her and Chris within fifty yards. The Buick was the only good cover around. She had to keep the
Buick between her and them.
She could see no one out there on her north flank. The land was more uneven in that direction, with a few low
spines of rock, a few drifts of white sand, and no doubt many man-size depressions in the desert floor that were not
visible from her position, places where a stalker might even now be taking cover. But the only things that moved
were three dry tumbleweeds; they rolled slowly, erratically, in the mild, inconstant breeze.
She slipped past Chris and returned to the other fender in time to see that the two men to the south were already
on the move again. They were thirty yards south of her but only twenty yards in front of the Buick, closing with
frightening speed. Though the leader was staying low and weaving as he ran, the follower was bolder; perhaps he
thought Laura's attention would be focused on the front man.
She fooled him, stood up, leaned out from the Buick as far as she had to, using it for cover as best she could, and
squeezed off a two-second burst. The gunman at the Toyota opened fire on her, giving his buddies cover, but she
hit the second running man hard enough to lift him off his feet and pitch him through a bristling manzanita.
Though not dead, he was clearly out of action, for his screams were so shrill and agonized, there could be no doubt
he was mortally wounded.
As she dropped down below the line of fire again, she found that she was grinning fiercely. She was intensely
pleased by the pain and horror that the wounded man's screams conveyed. Her savage reaction, the primitive
power of her thirst for blood and revenge, startled her, but she held fast to it because she sensed that she would be
a better and more clever fighter while in the spell of that primal rage.
One down. Perhaps only two more to go.
And soon Stefan would be here. No matter how long his work required in 1944, Stefan would program the gate to
bring him back here shortly after he had left. He would rejoin her—and enter the fight—in only two or three minutes.
The prime minister happened to be looking directly at Stefan when he materialized, but the man in uniform—a
sergeant —became aware of him because of the discharge of electrical energy that accompanied his arrival.
Thousands of bright snakes of blue-white light wriggled away from Stefan, as if his very flesh had generated them.
Perhaps deep crashes of thunder and bolts of lightning shattered the sky in the world above these underground
rooms, but some of the displaced energy of time travel was expended here, as well, in a sizzling display that
brought the uniformed man straight to his feet in surprise and fear. The hissing serpents of electricity streaked
across the floor, up the walls, coalesced briefly on the ceiling, then dissipated, leaving everyone unharmed; the only
damage was to a large wall map of Europe, which had been seared in several places but not set aflame.
"Guards!" the sergeant shouted. He was unarmed but evidently quite sure that his cry would be heard and
answered swiftly, for he repeated it only once and made no move toward the door. "Guards!"
"Mr. Churchill, please," Stefan said, ignoring the sergeant, "I'm not here to do you any harm."
The door flew open and two British soldiers entered the room, one holding a revolver, the other an automatic
carbine.


Speaking hastily, afraid he was about to be shot, Stefan said, "The future of the world depends on your hearing me
out, sir, please."
Throughout the excitement, the prime minister had remained seated in the armchair at the end of the table. Stefan
believed that he had seen a brief flash of surprise and perhaps even a glimmer of fear on the great man's face, but
he would not have bet on it. Now the prime minister looked as bemused and implacable as in every photograph that
Stefan had ever seen of him. He raised one hand to the guards: "Hold a moment." When the sergeant began to
protest, the prime minister said, "If he had meant to kill me, certainly he would have done so already, on arrival." To
Stefan he said, "And that was some entrance, sir. As dramatic as any that young Olivier has ever made."
Stefan could not help but smile. He stepped out of the corner, but when he moved toward the table, he saw the
guards stiffen, so he stopped and spoke from a distance. "Sir, by the very manner that I've arrived here, you know
I'm no ordinary messenger and that what I have to tell you must be ... unusual. It's also highly sensitive, and you
may not wish to have my information conveyed to any ears but yours."
"If you expect us to leave you alone with the PM," the sergeant said, "you're . . . you're mad!"
"He may be mad," the prime minister said, "but he's got flair. You must admit that much, Sergeant. If the guards
search him and find no weapons, I'll give the gent leman a bit of my time, as he asks."
"But, sir, you don't know who he is. You don't know what he is. The way he exploded into—"
Churchill cut him off. "I know how he arrived, Sergeant. And please remember that only you and I do know. I will
expect you to remain as tight-lipped about what you've seen here as you would about any other bit of war
information that might be considered classified."
Chastened, the sergeant stood to one side and glowered at Stefan while the guards conducted a body search.
They found no weapons, only the books in the rucksack and a few papers in Stefan's pockets. They returned the
papers and stacked the books in the middle of the long table, and Stefan was amused to see that they had not
noticed the nature of the volumes they'd handled.
Reluctantly, carrying his pencil and dictation pad, the sergeant accompanied the guards out of the room, as the
prime minister had instructed. When the door closed, Churchill motioned Stefan to the chair that the sergeant had
vacated. They sat in silence a moment, regarding each other with interest. Then the prime minister pointed to a
steaming pot that stood on a serving tray. "Tea?"
Twenty minutes later, when Stefan had told only half of the condensed version of his story, the prime minister
called for the sergeant in the corridor. "We'll be here a while yet, Sergeant. I will have to delay the War Cabinet
meeting by an hour, I'm afraid. Please see that everyone is informed—and with my apologies."
Twenty-five minutes after that, Stefan finished.
The prime minister asked a few more questions —surprisingly few but well-thought and to the heart of the matter.
Finally he sighed and said, "It's terribly early for a cigar, I suppose, but I'm in the mood to have one. Will you join
me?"
"No, thank you, sir."
As he prepared the cigar for smoking, Churchill said, "Aside from your spectacular entrance—which really proves
nothing but the existence of a revolutionary means of travel, which might or might not be time travel—what
evidence do you have to convince a reasonable man that the particulars of your story are true?"
Stefan had expected such a test and was prepared for it. "Sir, because I have been to the future and read portions
of your account of the war, I knew you would be in this room at this hour on this day. Furthermore I knew what you
would be doing here in the hour before your meeting with the War Cabinet."
Drawing on his cigar, the prime minister raised his eyebrows.
"You were dictating a message to General Alexander in Italy, expressing your concerns about the conduct of the
battle for the town of Cassino, which has been dragging on at a terrible cost of life."
Churchill remained inscrutable. He must have been surprised by Stefan's knowledge, but he would not provide
encouragement even with a nod or a narrowing of his eyes.
Stefan needed no encouragement because he knew that what he said was correct. "From the account of the war
that you will eventually write, I memorized the opening of that message to General Alexander—which you had not
even finished dictating to the sergeant when I arrived a short while ago: 'I wish you would explain to me why this
passage by Cassino Monastery Hill, et cetera, all on a front of two or three miles, is the only place which you must
keep butting at.' "
The prime minister drew on his cigar again, blew out smoke, and studied Stefan intensely. Their chairs were only a
few feet apart, and being the object of Churchill's thoughtful scrutiny was more unnerving than Stefan would have
expected.
At last the prime minister said, "And you got that information from something I will write in the future?"
Stefan rose from his chair, retrieved the six thick books that the guards had taken from his rucksack—Houghton
Mifflin Company's trade-paperback reprints published at $9.95 each—and spread them out on the end of the table
in front of Winston Churchill. "This, sir, is your six-volume history of the Second World War, which will stand as the
definitive account of that conflict and be hailed as both a great work of history and literature." He was going to add
that those books were largely responsible for Churchill's being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953, but


decided not to make that revelation. Life would be less interesting if robbed of such grand surprises.
The prime minister examined the covers of all six books, front and back, and permitted himself a smile when he
read the three-line excerpt from the review that had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. He opened one
volume and swiftly riffled the pages, not pausing to read anything.
"They aren't elaborate forgeries," Stefan assured him. "If you will read any page at random, you'll recognize your
own unique and unmistakable voice. You will—"
"I've no need to read them. I believe you, Stefan Krieger." He pushed the books away and leaned back in his chair.
"And I believe I understand why you've come to me. You want me to arrange an aerial bombardment of Berlin,
targeted tightly to the district in which this institute of yours is located."
"Yes, Prime Minister, that's exactly right. It must be done before the scientists working at the institute have finished
studying the material on nuclear weapons that's been brought back from the future, before they agree upon a
means of introducing that information into the German scientific community at large—which they may do any day
now. You must act before they come back from the future with something else that might turn the tide against the
Allies. I'll give you the precise location of the institute. .American and RAF bombers have been making both daylight
and night runs on Berlin since the first of the year, after all—"
"There has been considerable uproar in Parliament about bombing cities, even enemy cities," Churchill noted.
"Yes, but it's not as if Berlin can't be hit. Because of the narrowly defined target, of course, this mission will have to
take place in daylight. But if you strike that district, if you utterly pulverize that block—"
"Several blocks on all sides of it would have to be reduced to rubble," the prime minister said. "We can't strike with
sufficient accuracy to surgically remove the buildings on one block alone."
"Yes, I understand. But you must order it, sir. More tons of explosives must be dropped on that district—and within
the next few days—than will be dropped on any other scrap of land in the entire European theater at any time in the
entire war. Nothing must be left of the institute but dust."
The prime minister was silent for a minute or so, watching the thin, bluish plume of his cigar smoke, thinking.
Finally: "I'll need to consult with my advisers, of course, but I believe the earliest we could prepare and launch the
bombardment would be two days hence, on the twenty-second, but perhaps as late as the twenty-third."
"I think that'll be soon enough," Stefan said with great relief. "But no later. For God's sake, sir, no later."
As the woman crouched by the driver's -side fender of the Buick and surveyed the desert to the north of her
position, Klietmann was watching her from behind a tangle of mesquite and tumbleweed. She did not see him.
When she moved to the other fender and turned her back to Klietmann, he got up at once and ran in a crouch
toward the next bit of cover, a wind-scalloped knob of rock narrower than he was.
The lieutenant silently cursed the Bally loafers he was wearing, because the soles were too slippery for this kind of
action. It now seemed foolish to have come on a mission of assassination dressed like young executives —or
Baptist ministers. At least the Ray-Bans were useful. The bright sun glared off every stone and slope of drifted
sand; without the sunglasses, he would not have been able to see the ground ahead of him as clearly as he could
now, and he certainly would have put a foot wrong and fallen more than once.
He was about to dive for cover again when he heard the woman open fire in the other direction. With this proof that
she was distracted, he kept going. Then he heard screaming so shrill and ululant that it hardly sounded like the
screaming of a man; it was more like the cry of a wild animal gutted by another creature's claws but still alive.
Shaken, he took cover in a long, narrow basin of rock that was below the woman's line of sight. He crawled on his
belly to the end of that trough and lay there, breathing hard. When he raised his head to bring his eyes up to the
level of the surrounding ground, he saw that he was fifteen yards directly north of the Buick's rear door. If he could
move just a few more yards east, he would be behind the woman, in the perfect position to cut her down.
The screaming faded.
Figuring that the other man to the south of her would lie low for a while because he would be spooked by the death
of his partner, Laura shifted again to the other front fender. As she passed Chris, she said, "Two minutes, baby.
Two minutes at most."
Crouching against the corner of the car, she surveyed their north flank. The desert out there still seemed
untenanted. The breeze had died, and not even the tumbleweed moved.
If there were only three of them, they surely would not leave one man at the Toyota while the other two tried to
circle her from the same direction. If there were only three, then the two on her south side would have split, one of
them going north. Which meant there had to be a fourth man, perhaps even a fifth, out there in the shale and sand
and desert scrub to the northwest of the Buick.
But where?
As Stefan expressed his gratitude to the prime minister and got up to leave, Churchill pointed to the books on the
table and said, "I wouldn't want you to forget those. If you left them behind—what a temptation to plagiarize myself!"
"It's a mark of your character," Stefan said, "that you haven't importuned me to leave them with you for that very
purpose."
"Nonsense." Churchill put his cigar in an ashtray and rose from his chair. "If I possessed those books now, all
written, I'd not be content to have them published just as they are. Undoubtedly I would find things needing


improvement, and I'd spend the years immediately after the war tinkering endlessly with them—only to find, upon
completion and publication, that I had destroyed the very elements of them that in your future have made them
classics."
Stefan laughed.
"I'm quite serious," Churchill said. "You've told me that my history will be the definitive one. That's enough
foreknowledge to suit me. I'll write them as I wrote them, so to speak, and not risk second-guessing myself."
"Perhaps that's wise," Stefan agreed.
As Stefan packed the six books in the rucksack, Churchill stood with his hands behind his back, rocking slightly on
his feet. "There are so many things I'd like to ask you about the future that I'm helping to shape. Things that are of
more interest to me than whether I will write successful books or not."
"I really must be going, sir, but—"
"I know, yes," the prime minister said. "I won't detain you. But tell me at least one thing. Curiosity's killing me. Let's
see ... well, for instance, what of the Soviets after the war?"
Stefan hesitated, closed the rucksack, and said, "Prime Minister, I'm sorry to tell you that the Soviets will become
far more powerful than Britain, rivaled only by the United States."
Churchill looked surprised for the first time. "That abominable system of theirs will actually produce economic
success, abundance?"
"No, no. Their system will produce economic ruin—but tremendous military power. The Soviets will relentlessly
militarize their entire society and eliminate all dissidents. Some say their concentration camps rival those of the
Reich."
The expression on the prime minister's face remained inscrutable, but he could not conceal the troubled look in his
eyes. "Yet they are allies of ours now."
"Yes, sir. And without them perhaps the war against the Reich wouldn’t have been won.”
"Oh, it would be won," Churchill said confidently, "just not as quickly." He sighed. "They say politics makes strange
bedfellows, but the alliances necessitated by war make stranger ones yet."
Stefan was ready to depart.
They shook hands.
"Your institute shall be reduced to pebbles, splinters, dust, and ashes," the prime minister said. "You've my word on
that."
"That's all the assurance I need," Stefan said.
He reached beneath his shirt and pushed three times on the button that activated the homing belt's link with the
gate.
In what seemed like the same instant, he was in the Institute in Berlin. He stepped out of the barrel-like gate and
returned to the programming board. Exactly eleven minutes had elapsed on the clock since he had departed for
those bombproof rooms below London.
His shoulder still ached, but the pain had not increased. The relentless throbbing, however, was gradually taking a
toll on him, and he sat in the programmer's chair for a while, resting.
Then, using more numbers provided by the IBM computer in 1989, he programmed the gate for his next-to-last
jaunt. This time he would go five days into the future, arriving at eleven o'clock at night, March 21, in other
bombproof, underground quarters —not in London but in his own city of Berlin.
When the gate was ready, he entered it, taking no weapons. This time he did not take the six volumes of Churchill's
history, either.
When he crossed the point of transmission inside the gate, the familiar unpleasant tingle passed inward from his
skin, through his flesh, into his marrow, then instantly back out again from marrow to flesh to skin.
The windowless, subterranean room in which Stefan arrived was lit by a single lamp on the corner desk and briefly
by the crackling light he brought with him. In that weird glow Hitler was clearly revealed.
One minute.
Laura huddled with Chris against the Buick. Without shifting her position she looked first toward the south where
she knew one man was hiding, then to the north where she suspected that other enemies lay concealed.
A preternatural calm had befallen the desert. Windless, the day had no more breath than a corpse. The sun had
shed so much of itself upon the arid plain that the land seemed as full of light as the sky; at the far edges of the
world, the bright heavens blended into the bright earth with so little demarcation that the horizon effectively
disappeared. Though the temperature was only in the high seventies, everything—every bush and rock and weed
and sweep of sand—appeared to have been welded by the heat to the object beside it.
One minute.
Surely only a minute or less remained until Stefan would return from 1944, and somehow he would be of great help
to them, not only because he had an Uzi but because he was her guardian. Her guardian. Although she understood
his origins now and was aware that he was not supernatural, in some ways he remained for her a figure larger than
life, capable of working wonders.
No movement to the south.


No movement to the north.
"They're coming," Chris said.
"We'll be okay, honey," she said softly. However, her heart not only raced with fear but ached with a sense of loss,
as if she knew on some primitive level that her son—the only child she could ever have, the child who had never
been meant to live—was already dead, not because of her failure to protect him so much as because destiny would
not be thwarted. No. Damn it, no. She would beat fate this time. She would hold on to her boy. She would not lose
him as she had lost so many people she had loved over the years. He was hers. He did not belong to destiny. He
did not belong to fate. He was hers. He was hers. "We'll be okay, honey."
Only half a minute now.
Suddenly she saw movement to the south.
In the private study of Hitler's Berlin bunker, the displaced energy of time travel hissed and squirmed away from
Stefan in snakes of blazing light, tracing hundreds of serpentine paths across the floor and up the concrete walls,
as it had done in the subterranean conference room in London. That bright and noisy phenomenon did not draw
guards from other chambers, however, for at that moment Berlin was enduring another bombing by Allied planes;
the bunker shook with the impact of blockbusters in the city far above, and even at that depth the thunder of the
attack masked the particular sounds of Stefan's arrival.
Hitler turned in his swivel chair to face Stefan. He showed no more surprise than Churchill, though of course he
knew about the work of the Institute, as Churchill had not, and he understood at once how Stefan had materialized
within these private quarters. Furthermore he knew Stefan both as the son of a loyal and early supporter and as an
SS officer who had worked long for the cause.
Though Stefan had not expected to see surprise on Hitler's face, he had hoped to see those vulturine features twist
with fear. After all, if der Furhrer had read Gestapo reports on recent events at the Institute—which he had certainly
done—he knew that Stefan stood accused of having killed Penlovski, Januskaya, and Volkaw six days ago, on
March 15, fleeing thereafter into the future. He probably thought that Stefan had made this trip illicitly just six days
ago, shortly before killing those scientists, and was going to kill him as well. Yet if he was frightened, he controlled
his fear; remaining seated, he calmly opened a desk drawer and withdrew a Luger.
Even as the last of the electricity discharged, Stefan threw his arm forth in the Nazi salute, and said with all the
false passion he could muster, "Heil Hitler!" To prove quickly that his intentions were not hostile, he dropped to one
knee, as if genuflecting before the altar of a church, and bowed his head, making of himself an easy and
unresisting target. "Mein Furhrer, I come to you to clear my name and to alert you to the existence of traitors in the
institute and in the Gestapo contingent responsible for the Institute's security."
For a long moment the dictator did not speak.
From far above, the shockwaves of the night bombardment passed through the earth, through twenty-foot-thick
steel and concrete walls, and filled the bunker with a continuous, low, ominous sound. Each time that a blockbuster
hit nearby, the three paintings—removed from the Louvre following the conquest of France—rattled against the
walls, and on der Furhrer's desk a hollow, vibrant sound rose from a tall copper pot filled with pencils.
"Get up, Stefan," Hitler said. "Sit there." He indicated a maroon leather armchair, one of only five pieces of furniture
in the cramped, windowless study. He put the Luger on his desk—but within easy reach. "Not just for your honor
but for your father's honor and that of the SS, as well, I hope you're as innocent as you claim."
Stefan spoke forcefully because he knew Hitler greatly admired forcefulness. But at all times he also spoke with
feigned reverence, as if he truly believed he was in the presence of the man in whom the very spirit of the German
people, past and present and future, was embodied. Even more than forcefulness, Hitler was pleased by the awe in
which certain of his subordinates held him. It was a thin line to tread, but this was not Stefan's first encounter with
the man; he'd had some practice ingratiating himself with this megalomaniac, this viper cloaked in a human
disguise.
"Mein Furhrer, it was not I who killed Vladimir Penlovski, Januskaya, and Volkaw. It was Kokoschka. He was a
traitor to the Reich, and I caught him in the documents room at the Institute just after he had shot Januskaya and
Volkaw. He shot me there, as well." Stefan put his right hand against the upper left side of his chest. "I can show
you the wound if you wish. Shot, I fled from him to the main lab. I was stunned, not sure how many in the Institute
were involved in his subversion. I didn't know to whom I could safely turn, so there was only one way to save
myself—I fled through the gate to the future before Kokoschka could catch me and finish me off."
"Colonel Kokoschka's report tells a quite different story. He said that he shot you as you fled through the gate, after
you had killed Penlovski and the others."
"If that were so, Mein Furhrer, would I have returned here to attempt to clear my name? If I were a traitor with more
faith in the future than I have in you, would I not have stayed in that future, where I was safe, rather than return to
you?"
"But were you safe there, Stefan?" Hitler said, and smiled slyly. "As I understand, two Gestapo squads and later an
SS squad were sent after you in that distant time."
Stefan was jolted by the mention of an SS squad because he knew it must have been the group that arrived in
Palm Springs less than an hour before he left, the group that had occasioned the lightning in the clear desert sky.


He was suddenly more worried for Laura and Chris than he had been, because his respect for the dedication and
murderous abilities of the SS was far greater than that with which he regarded the Ges tapo.
He also realized Hitler had not been told that the Gestapo squads had been outgunned by a woman; he thought
Stefan had gone up against them himself, not realizing that Stefan had been comatose throughout those
encounters. That played into the lies that Stefan intended to tell, so he said, "My Furhrer, I dealt with those men
when they came after me, yes, and did so in good conscience because I knew they were all traitors to you, intent
on killing me so that I would not be able to return to you and warn you of the nest of subversives who were—and
still are—at work within the Institute. Kokoschka has since vanished—am I correct? And so have five other men at
the Institute, as I understand. They had no faith in the future of the Reich, and fearing that their roles in the murders
of March fifteenth would soon be revealed, they fled to the future, to hide in another era."
Stefan paused to let what he had said sink in.
As the explosions far overhead subsided and a lull developed in the bombardment, Hitler studied him intently. This
man's scrutiny was every bit as direct as that of Winston Churchill, but there was none of the clean, straightforward,
man-to-man assessment in it that had marked the prime minister's attitude. Instead Hitler appraised Stefan from the
perspective of a self-appointed god viewing one of his own creations for indications of a dangerous mutation. And
this was a malign god who had no love for his creatures; he loved only the fact of their obedience.
At last der Furhrer said,' 'If there are traitors at the Institute, what is their goal?"
"To mislead you," Stefan said. "They are presenting you with false information about the future in hopes of
encouraging you to make serious military blunders. They've told you that in the last year and a half of the war,
virtually all of your military decisions will prove to be mistakes, but that's not true. As the future stands now, you will
lose the war by only the thinnest of margins. With but a few changes in your strategies, you can win."
Hitler's face hardened, and his eyes narrowed, not because he was suspicious of Stefan but because suddenly he
was suspicious of all those at the Institute who had told him he would make fatal military misjudgments in the days
ahead. Stefan was encouraging him to believe again in his infallibility, and the madman was only too eager to trust
once more in his genius.
"With a few small changes in my strategies?" Hitler asked. "And what might those changes be?"
Stefan quickly summarized six alterations in military strategy that he claimed would be decisive in certain key
battles to come; in fact those changes would make no difference to the outcome, and , the battles of which he
spoke were not to be the major engagements of the remainder of the war.
But der Furhrer wanted to believe that he had been very nearly a winner rather than a certain loser, and now he
seized upon Stefan's advice as the truth, for it suggested bold strategies only slightly different from those the
dictator would have endorsed himself. He rose from his chair and paced the small room in excitement. "From the
first reports presented to me by the Institute, I've felt there was a wrongness in the future they portrayed. I sensed
that I could not have managed this war as brilliantly as I have—then suddenly be plagued by such a long string of
misjudgments. Oh, yes, we are in a dark period now, but this will not last. When the Allies launch their long-awaited
invasion of Europe, they will fail; we will drive them back into the sea." He spoke almost in a whisper, though with
the mesmerizing passion so familiar from his many public speeches. "In that failed assault they will have expended
most of their reserves; they will have to retreat on a broad front, and they will not be able to regain their strength
and mount a new offensive for many months. During that time we will strengthen our hold on Europe, defeat the
Russian barbarians, and be stronger than we have ever been!" He stopped pacing, blinked as if rising from a self-
induced trance, and said, "Yes, what of the invasion of Europe? D-Day as I'm told it came to be called. Reports
from the Institute tell me that the Allies will land at Normandy."
"Lies," Stefan said. Now they had come to the issue that was the entire purpose behind Stefan's trip to this bunker
on this night in March. Hitler had learned from the Institute that the beaches of Normandy would be the site of the
invasion. In the future that fate had ordained for him, der Furhrer would misjudge the Allies and would prepare for a
landing elsewhere, leaving Normandy inadequately defended. He must be encouraged to stick with the strategy
that he would have followed had the Institute never existed. He must lose the war as fate intended, and it was up to
Stefan to undermine the influence of the Institute and thereby assure the success of the Normandy invasion.
Klietmann had managed to ease a few more yards east, past the Buick, outflanking the woman. He lay prone
behind a low spine of white rock veined with pale blue quartz, waiting for Hubatsch to make a move on the south of
her. When the woman was thus distracted, Klietmann would spring from concealment and close on her, firing the
Uzi as he ran. He would cut her to pieces before she even had a chance to turn and see the face of her execu-
tioner.
Come on, Sergeant, don't huddle out there like a cowardly Jew, Klietmann thought savagely. Show yourself. Draw
her fire.
An instant later Hubatsch broke from cover, and the woman saw him running. As she focused on Hubatsch,
Klietmann leaped up from behind the quartz-veined rock.
Leaning forward in the leather armchair in the bunker, Stefan said, "Lies, all lies, my Furhrer. This attempt to
misdirect you toward Normandy is the key part of the plot by the subversives at the Institute. They want to force you
to make the sort of major mistake that you're not really destined to make. They want you to focus on Normandy,


when the real invasion will come at—"
"Calais!" Hitler said.
"Yes."
"I have believed it will be in the area of Calais, farther north than Normandy. They will cross the Channel where it's
narrowest."
"You're correct, my Furhrer," Stefan said. "Troops will be put ashore at Normandy on June seventh—"
Actually it would be June 6, but the weather would be so bad on the sixth that the German High Command would
not believe the Allies capable of conducting the operation in such rough seas.
"—but that will be a minor force, a diversion, to pull your elite Panzer divisions to the Normandy coast while the real
front subsequently opens near Calais."
This information played to all of the dictator's prejudices and to his belief in his own infallibility. He returned to his
chair and thumped his desk with one fist. "This has the feel of reality, Stefan. But ... I have seen documents,
selected pages from histories of the war that were brought back from the future—"
"Forgeries," Stefan said, counting on the man's paranoia to make the lie seem plausible. "Rather than show you the
real documents from the future, they created forgeries to mislead you."
With luck, Churchill's promised bombardment of the Institute would take place tomorrow, eradicating the gate,
everyone who knew how to re-create the gate, and every scrap of material that had been brought back from the
future. Then der Furhrer would never have the opportunity to conduct a thorough investigation to test Stefan's
truthfulness.
Hitler sat in silence for perhaps a minute, staring at the Luger on his desk, thinking intently.
Overhead the bombing began to escalate once more, rattling the paintings on the walls and the pencils in the
copper pot.
Stefan waited anxiously to discover if he would be believed.
"How have you come to me?" Hitler asked. "How could you use the gate now? I mean, it has been so closely
guarded since the defection of Kokoschka and the other five."
"I didn't come to you by way of the gate," Stefan said. "I came to you straight from the future, using only the time-
travel belt."
This was the boldest lie of all, for the belt was not a time machine, only a homing device that could do nothing but
bring the wearer back to the Institute. He was counting on the ignorance of politicians to save him: They knew a
little bit about everything that was done under their rule, but there were no matters that they understood in depth.
Hitler knew of the gate and of the nature of time travel, of course, but perhaps only in a general sense; he might
lack knowledge of most of the details, such as how the belts actually functioned.
If Hitler realized that Stefan had come from the Institute after returning there with Kokoschka's device, he would
know that Kokoschka and the other five had been dispatched by Stefan and had not been defectors, after all, at
which point the entire elaborate tale of conspiracy would collapse. And Stefan would be a dead man.
Frowning, the dictator said, "You used the belt without the gate? Is that possible?"
Dry-mouthed with fear but speaking with conviction, Stefan

said, "Oh, yes, my Furhrer, it is quite simple to ... adjust the belt and use it not merely to home in on the beacon of
the gate but to skip through time as one wishes. And we are fortunate that such is the case, for otherwise, if I'd had
to return to the gate to get here, I would have been stopped by the Jews who control it."
"Jews?" Hitler said, startled.
"Yes, sir. The conspiracy within the Institute is organized, I believe, by staff members who have Jewish blood but
have concealed their heritage."
The madman's face hardened further in a look of sudden anger. "Jews. Always the same problem. Everywhere, the
same problem. Now in the Institute as well."
Upon hearing that statement, Stefan knew that he had pushed the course of history back toward the proper path.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
Laura said, "Chris, I think you better hide under the car."
Even as she spoke, the gunman to the southwest of her rose from concealment and sprinted along the edge of the
arroyo, angling toward her and toward the meager cover offered by another low dune.
She leaped to her feet, confident that the Buick would shelter her from the man at the Toyota, and opened fire. The
first dozen rounds kicked up sand and chips of shale at the running man's heels, but then the bullets caught up with
him, tearing into his legs. He went down, screaming, and was hit on the ground as well. He rolled twice and fell over
the edge of the arroyo to the floor thirty feet below.
Even as the gunman slipped over that brink, Laura heard automatic fire, not from the Toyota but behind her. Before
she could turn to meet the threat, she took several bullets in the back and was thrown forward, facedown on the
hard shale.
"Jews," Hitler said again, angrily. Then: "What of this nuclear weapon that they say may win the war for us?"
"Another lie, my Furhrer. Though many attempts to develop such a weapon were made in the future, there were


never any successes. This is a fantasy the conspirators have created to further misdirect the resources and
energies of the Reich."
A rumbling came through the walls, as if they were not underground but suspended high in the heavens, in a
thunderstorm.
The heavy frames of the paintings thumped against the concrete.
The pencils jiggled in the copper pot.
Hitler met Stefan's eyes and studied him for a long time. Then: "I suppose that if you were not loyal to me, you'd
simply have come armed and would have killed me the instant you arrived."
He had considered doing just that, for only in killing Adolf Hitler might he expunge some of the stain on his own
soul. But that would have been a selfish act, for by killing Hitler he would have radically changed the course of
history and would have put the future as he knew it at extreme risk. He could not forget that his future was also
Laura's past; if he meddled sufficiently to change the series of events that fate ordained, perhaps he would change
the world for the worse in general and for Laura in particular. What if he killed Hitler here and, upon returning to
1989, found a world so drastically altered that for some reason Laura had never even been born?
He wanted to kill this snake in human skin, but he could not take the responsibility for the world that might follow.
Common sense said that only a better world could result, but he knew that common sense and fate were mutually
exclusive concepts.
"Yes," he said, "had I been a traitor, my Furhrer, I could've done just that. And I worry that the real traitors at the
Institute may sooner or later think of just such a method of assassination."
Hitler paled. "Tomorrow, I shut the Institute down. The gate will be closed until I know the staff is purged of traitors."
Churchill's bombers may beat you to the punch, Stefan thought.
"We will win, Stefan, and we'll do so by retaining faith in our
great destiny, not by playing fortune teller. We will win because it is our fate to win."
"It's our destiny," Stefan agreed. "We're on the side of truth." Finally the madman smiled. Overcome by a
sentimentality that was strange because of the extremely sudden change of mood, Hitler spoke of Stefan's father,
Franz, and the early days in Munich: the secret meetings in Anton Drexler's apartment, the public meetings at the
beer halls—the Hofbrauhaus and Eberlbrdu. Stefan listened for a while, pretending to be enthralled, but when Hitler
expressed his continued and unshakable faith in the son of Franz Krieger, Stefan seized the opportunity to leave.
"And I, my Furhrer, have undying faith in you and will be, forever, your loyal disciple." He stood, saluted the dictator,
put one hand under his shirt to the button on the belt, and said, "Now I must return to the future, for I've more work
to do in your behalf."
"Go?" Hitler said, rising from the desk chair. "But I thought you'd stay now in your own time? Why go there now that
you've cleared your name with me?"
"I think I may know where the traitor Kokoschka has gone, in what corner of the future he's taken refuge. I've got to
find him, bring him back, for perhaps only Kokoschka knows the names of the traitors at the Institute and can be
made to reveal them."
He saluted quickly, pushed the button on the belt, and left the bunker before Hitler could respond.
He returned to the Institute on the night of March 16, the night that Kokoschka had set out for the San Bernardinos
in pursuit of him, never to return. To the best of his ability, he had arranged for the destruction of the Institute and
had almost ensured Hitler's distrust of any information that came from it. He would have been exhilarated if he had
not been so worried about the SS squad that apparently was stalking Laura in 1989.
At the programming board, he entered the computer-derived numbers for the last jaunt that he would ever make: to
the desert outside of Palm Springs, where Laura and Chris waited for him on the morning of January 25, 1989.
Even as she fell to the ground, Laura knew that her spinal column had been severed or shattered by one of the
bullets, for she felt no pain whatsoever—nor any sensation of any kind in any part of her body below the neck.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
The gunfire ceased.
She could move only her head, and only enough to turn and see Chris on his feet in front of the Buick, as paralyzed
by terror as she was by the bullet that had cracked her spine. Beyond the boy, hurrying toward them from the north,
only fifteen yards away, was a man in sunglasses, a white shirt, and black slacks, carrying a submachine gun.
"Chris," she said thickly, "run! Run!"
His face twisted with an expression of purest grief, as if he knew he was leaving her to die. Then he ran as fast as
his small legs would carry him, east into the desert, and he was smart enough to weave back and forth as he ran,
making as difficult a target of himself as possible.
Laura saw the killer raise the submachine gun.
In the main lab, Stefan opened the hinged panel that covered the automatic jaunt-recorder.
A spool of two-inch-wide paper indicated that tonight's uses of the gate had included a jaunt to January 10, 1988,
which was the trip Heinrich Kokoschka had made to the San Bernardinos, when he had killed Danny Packard. The
tape additionally recorded eight trips to the year A.D. 6,000,000,000—the five men and three bundles of lab
animals. Also noted were Stefan's own jaunts: to March 20, 1944, with the latitudes and longitudes of the bomb-


proof underground facility near St. James's Park in London; to March 21, 1944, with the precise latitudes and
longitudes of Hitler's bunker; and the destination of the jaunt that he had just programmed but not yet made—Palm
Springs, January 25, 1989. He tore the tape, pocketed the evidence, and respooled the blank paper. He'd already
set the programming-board clocks to clear themselves and reset to zero when he passed through the gate. They
would know someone had tampered with the records, but they would think it had been Kokoschka and the other
defectors covering their trail.
He closed the panel and strapped on the backpack that was filled with Churchill's books. He slipped the strap of the
Uzi over his shoulder and picked up the silencer-fitted pistol from the lab bench.
He quickly scanned the room to see if he had left anything behind that might betray his presence here tonight. The
IBM printouts were folded away in the pockets of his jeans again. The Vexxon cylinder had long ago been sent into
a future where the sun was dead or dying. As far as he could see, he had overlooked nothing.
He stepped into the gate and approached the point of transmission with more hope than he had dared entertain in
many years. He had been able to assure the destruction of the Institute and the defeat of Nazi Germany through a
series of Machiavellian manipulations of time and people, so surely he and Laura would be able to deal with that
single squad of SS gunmen who were somewhere in Palm Springs in 1989.
Lying paralyzed upon the desert shale, Laura screamed, "No!" The word came out as a whisper, for she didn't have
the strength or lung power to make more of it.
The submachine gun opened fire on Chris, and for a moment she was sure that the boy was going to weave his
way out of range, which was a last desperate fantasy, of course, because he was only a small boy, such a very
small boy, with short legs, and he was well within range when the bullets found him, stitching a pattern across the
center of his frail back, pitching him into the sand where he lay motionless in spreading blood.
All the unfelt pain of her ruined body would have been as a pinprick compared to the anguish that wrenched her at
the sight of her little boy's lifeless body. Through all the tragedies of her life, she had known no pain to equal this. It
was as if all the losses she had experienced—the mother she had never known, her sweet father, Nina Dockweiler,
gentle Ruthie, and Danny, for whom she would gladly have sacrificed herself—were manifested again in this new
brutality that fate insisted she endure, so she felt not only the shattering grief at Chris's death but felt anew the
terrible agony of all the deaths that had come before it. She lay paralyzed and unfeeling but in torment, spiritually
lacerated, at last emotionally broken on the hateful wheel of fate, no longer able to be brave, no longer able to hope
or care. Her boy was dead. She had failed to save him, and with him all prospects of joy had died. She felt horribly
alone in a cold and hostile universe, and all she hoped for now was death, emptiness, infinite nothingness, and at
last an end to all loss and grief.
She saw the gunman approaching her.
She said, "Kill me, please kill me, finish me," but her voice was so faint that he probably did not hear her.
What had been the point of living? What had been the point of enduring all the tragedies that she had endured?
Why had she suffered and gone on with life if it was all to end like this? What cruel consciousness lay behind the
workings of the universe that it could even conceive of forcing her to struggle through a troubled life that turned out,
in the end, to have no apparent meaning or purpose?
Christopher Robin was dead.
She felt hot tears spilling down her face, but that was all she could feel physically—that and the hardness of the
shale against the right side of her face.
In a few steps the gunman reached her, stood over her, and kicked her in the side. She knew he kicked her, for she
was looking back along her own immobile body and saw his foot land in her ribs, but she felt nothing whatsoever.
"Kill me," she murmured.
She was suddenly terrified that destiny would try too faithfully to reassert the pattern that was meant to be, in which
case she might be permitted to live but only in the wheelchair that Stefan had saved her from when he had
meddled with the ordained circumstances of her birth. Chris was the child who had never been a part of destiny's
plans, and now he had been scrubbed from existence. But she might not be erased, for it had been her destiny to
live as a cripple. Now she had a vision of her future: alive, paraplegic or quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair, but
trapped in something else far worse—trapped in a life of tragedy, of bitter memories, of endless sorrow, of
unendurable longing for her son, her husband, her father, and all the others she had lost. "Oh, God, please, please
kill me." Standing over her, the gunman smiled and said, "Well, I must be God's messenger." He laughed
unpleasantly. "Anyway, I'm answering your prayer." Lightning flashed and thunder crashed across the desert.
Thanks to the calculations performed on the computer, Stefan returned to the precise spot in the desert from which
he had departed for 1944, exactly five minutes after he had left. The first thing he saw in the too-bright desert light
was Laura's bloody body and the SS gunman standing over it. Then beyond them, he saw Chris.
The gunman reacted to the thunder and lightning. He began to turn in search of Stefan.
Stefan pushed the button on his homing belt three times. The air pressure instantly increased; the odor of hot
electric wires and ozone filled the day.
The SS thug saw him, brought up the submachine gun, and opened fire, wide of him at first, then bringing the
muzzle around to bear straight on him.


Before the bullets hit, Stefan popped out of 1989 and back to the institute on the night of March 16, 1944.
"Shit!" Klietmann said when Krieger slipped into the time stream and away, unhurt.
Bracher was running over from the Toyota, shouting, "That was him! That was him!"
"I know it was him," Klietmann said when Bracher arrived. "Who else would it be—Christ on His second coming?"
"What's he up to?" Bracher said. "What's he doing back there, where's he been, what's this all about?"
"I don't know," Klietmann said irritably. He looked down at the badly wounded woman and said to her, "All I know is
that he saw you and your boy's dead body, and he didn't even make an attempt to kill me for what I'd done to you.
He cut and ran to save his own skin. What do you think of your hero now?"
She only continued to beg for death.
Stepping back from the woman, Klietmann said, "Bracher, get out of the way."
Bracher moved, and Klietmann squeezed off a burst of perhaps ten or twenty rounds, all of which pierced the
woman, killing her instantly.
"We could have questioned her," Corporal Bracher said. "About Krieger, about what he was doing here—"
"She was paralyzed," Klietmann said impatiently. "She could feel nothing. I kicked her in the side, must've broken
half her ribs, and she didn't even cry out. You can't torture information from a woman who can feel no pain."
March 16, 1944. The Institute.
His heart hammering like a blacksmith's sledge, Stefan jumped down from the gate and ran to the programming
board. He pulled the list of computer-derived numbers from his pocket and spread it out on the small programmer's
desk that filled a niche in the machinery.
He sat in the chair, picked up a pencil, pulled a tablet from the drawer. His hands shook so badly that he dropped
the pencil twice.
He already had the numbers that would put him in that desert five minutes after he had first left it. He could work
backward from those figures and find a new set that would put him in the same place four minutes and fifty-five
seconds earlier, only five seconds after he had originally left Laura and Chris.
If he was gone only five seconds, the SS assassins would not yet have killed her and the boy by the time Stefan
returned. He would be able to add his firepower to the fight, and perhaps that would be enough to change the
outcome.
He had learned the necessary mathematics when first assigned to the Institute in the autumn of 1943. He could do
the calculations. The work was not impossible because he didn't have to begin from scratch; he had only to refine
the computer's numbers, work backward a few minutes.
But he stared at the paper and could not think because Laura was dead and Chris was dead.
Without them he had nothing.
You can get them back, he told himself. Damn it, shape up. You can stop it before it happens.
He bent himself to the task, working for nearly an hour. He knew that no one was likely to come to the Institute so
late at night and discover him, but he repeatedly imagined that he heard footsteps in the ground-floor hall, the click-
click-click of SS boots. Twice he looked toward the gate, half convinced he had heard the five dead men returning
from A.D. 6,000,000,000, somehow revitalized and in search of him.
When he had the numbers and doubled-checked them, he entered them in the board. Carrying the submachine
gun in one hand and the pistol in the other, he climbed into the gate and passed through the point of transmission—
—and returned to the Institute.
He stood for a moment in the gate, surprised, confused. Then he stepped through the energy field again—
—and returned to the Institute.
The explanation hit him with such force that he bent forward as if he actually had been punched in the stomach. He
could not go back earlier now, for he had already showed up at that place five minutes after leaving it; if he went
back now he would be creating a situation in which he would surely be there to see himself arrive the first time.
Paradox! The mechanism of the cosmos would not permit a time traveler to encounter himself anywhere along the
time stream; when such a jaunt was attempted, it invariably failed. Nature despised a paradox.
In memory he could hear Chris in the sleazy motel room where they had first discussed time travel: "Paradox! Isn't
this wild stuff, Mom? Isn't this wild? Isn't this great?" And the charming, excited, boyish laughter.
But there had to be a way.
He returned to the programming board, dropped the guns on the work desk, and sat down.
Sweat was pouring off his brow. He blotted his face on his shirt -sleeves. Think. He stared at the Uzi and wondered
if he could send that back to her at least. Probably not. He had been carrying the machine gun and the pistol when
he had returned to her the first time, so if he sent either of the guns back four minutes and fifty seconds earlier, they
would exist twice in the same place when he showed up just four minutes and fifty seconds later. Paradox.
But maybe he could send her something else, something that came from this room, something he had not been
carrying with him and that would not, therefore, create a paradox. He pushed the guns aside, picked up a pencil,
and wrote a brief message on a sheet of tablet paper: THE SS WILL KILL YOU AND CHRIS
IF YOU STAY AT THE CAR. GET AWAY. HIDE. He paused, thinking.
Where could they hide on that flat desert plain? He wrote: MAYBE IN THE ARROYO. He tore the sheet of paper


from the tablet. Then as an afterthought he hastily added: THE SECOND CANISTER OF VEXXON. IT'S A
WEAPON TOO.
He searched the drawers of the lab bench for a glass beaker with a narrow top, but there were no such vessels in
that lab, where all of the research had been related to electromagnetism rather than to chemistry. He went down
the hall, searching through other labs, until he found what he needed.
Back in the main lab, carrying the beaker with the note inside it, he entered the gate and approached the point of
transmission. He threw the object through the energy field as if he were a man stranded on an island, throwing a
bottled message into the sea.
It did not bounce back to him.
—but the brief vacuum was followed by a blustery inrush of hot wind tainted by the faintly alkaline smell of the
desert.
Standing close at her side, holding fast to her, delighted by Stefan's magical departure, Chris said, "Wow! Wasn't
that something, Mom, wasn't that great?"
She did not answer because she noticed a white car driving off state Route 111, onto the desert floor.
Lightning flared, thunder shook the day, startling her, and a glass bottle appeared in midair, fell at her feet,
shattering on the shale, and she saw that there had been a paper inside.
Chris snatched the paper from among the shards of glass. With his usual aplomb in these matters, he said, "It must
be from Stefan!"
She took it from him, read the words, aware that the white car had turned toward them. She did not understand how
and why this message had been sent, but she believed it implicitly. Even as she finished reading, with the lightning
and thunder still flickering and rumbling through the sky, she heard the engine of the white car roar.
She looked up and saw the vehicle leap toward them as its driver accelerated. They were almost three hundred
yards away, but were closing as fast as the rough desert terrain permitted.
"Chris, get both Uzis from the car and meet me at the edge of the arroyo. Hurry!"
As the boy sprinted to the open door of the nearby Buick, Laura raced to the open trunk. She grabbed the canister
of Vexxon, lifted it out, and caught up with Chris before he had reached the brink of the deep, naturally carved
water channel, which was a raging rivet during a flash flood but dry now. The white car was less than a hundred
and fifty yards away. "Come on," she said, leading him eastward along the brink, "we've got to find a way down into
the arroyo."
The walls of the channel sloped slightly to the bottom thirty feet below, but only slightly. They were carved by
erosion, filled with miniature vertical channels leading down to the main channel, some as narrow as a few inches,
some as wide as three and four feet; during a rainstorm, water poured off the surface of the desert, down those
gulleys to the floor of the arroyo, where it was carried away in great, surging torrents. In some of the down-sloping
drains the soil had washed away to reveal rocks here and there that would impede a swift descent, while others
were partially blocked by hardy mesquite bushes that had taken root in the very wall of the arroyo.
Little more than a hundred yards away, the car strayed off the shale into sand that pulled at the tires and slowed it
down.
When Laura had gone only twenty yards along the edge of the arroyo, she discovered a wide channel leading
straight down to the floor of that dry river, unobstructed by rocks or mesquite. What lay before her was essentially a
four-foot-wide, thirty-foot-long, water-smoothed, dirt slide.
She dropped the canister of Vexxon into that natural run, and it slipped down halfway before halting.
She took one of the Uzis from Chris, turned to the approaching car, which was now about seventy-five yards away,
and opened fire. She saw bullets punch at least two holes in the windshield. The rest of the tempered glass
instantly crazed.
The car—she could see now that it was a Toyota—spun out, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees, then
ninety degrees more, throwing up clouds of dust, tearing through a couple of still green tumbleweeds. It came to
rest about forty yards from the Buick, sixty yards from her and Chris, the front end pointed north. Doors flew open
on the far side. Laura knew the occupants were scrambling out of the car where she would not see them, staying
low.
She took the other Uzi from Chris and said, "Into the slide, kiddo. When you reach the canister of gas, push it
ahead of you all the way to the bottom."
He went down the wall of the arroyo, pulled most of the way by the force of gravity but having to scoot along a
couple of times when friction stopped him. It was exactly the kind of daredevil stunt that would have raised a
mother's ire under other circumstances, but now she cheered him on.
She pumped at least a hundred rounds into the Toyota, hoping to pierce the fuel tank and set off the gasoline with a
bullet-made spark, roasting the bastards as they huddled against the far side. But she emptied the magazine
without the desired result.
When she stopped shooting, they took a crack at her. She did not stay long enough to give them a target. With the
second Uzi held before her in both hands, she sat on the edge of the arroyo and shoved off into the slide that Chris
had already used. In seconds she was at the bottom.


Dry tumbleweeds had blown down to the floor of the gulch from the desert above. Gnarled driftwood, some time-
grayed lumber washed from the distant ruins of an old desert shack, and a few stones littered the powder-soft soil
that formed the bed of the arroyo. None of those things offered a place to hide or protection from the gunfire that
would soon be directed down at them.
"Mom?" Chris said, Meaning: What now?
The arroyo would have scores of tributaries spread out across the desert, and many of those tributaries would have
tributaries of their own. The drainage network was like a maze. They could not hide in it forever, but perhaps by
putting a few branches of the system between themselves and their pursuers, they would gain time to plan an
ambush.
She said, "Run, baby. Follow the main arroyo, take the first right-hand branch you come to, and wait there for me."
"What're you going to do?"
"I'll wait for them to look over the edge up there," she said, pointing to the top of the palisades, "then pick them off if
I can. Now go, go."
He ran.
Leaving the canister of Vexxon in plain sight, Laura returned to the wall of the arroyo down which they'd slid. She
went to a different vertical channel, however, one that was carved deeper into the wall, had less of a slope, and
was half-blocked at its midpoint by a mesquite bush. She stood in the bottom of that deep hollow, confident that the
bush overhead blocked their view of her from the desert above.
To the east, Chris vanished around a turn into a tributary of the main channel.
A moment later she heard voices. She waited, waited, giving them time to feel confident that both she and Chris
were gone. Then she stepped out from the erosion channel in the arroyo wall, turned, and swept the top of the cliff
with bullets.
Four men were there, peering down, and she killed the first two, but the third and fourth leaped backward, out of
sight before the arc of fire reached them. One of the bodies lay at the top of the arroyo wall, one arm and leg over
the brink. The other fell all the way to the floor of the channel, losing his sunglasses on the way.
March 16, 1944. The Institute.
When the bottle with the message did not bounce back to him, Stefan was reasonably confident that it had reached
Laura before she had been killed, only seconds after he had firs t departed for 1944.
Now he returned to the programmer's desk and set to work on the calculations that would return him to the desert a
few minutes after his previous arrival there. He could make that trip because he would be arriving subsequent to his
previous hasty departure, and there would be no possibility of encountering himself, no paradox.
Again the calculations were not terribly difficult because he needed only to work forward from the numbers that the
IBM PC had provided him. Though he knew that the time he spent here was not passing in equal measure in the
desert of 1989, he was eager to rejoin Laura nevertheless. Even if she had taken the advice of the message in the
bottle, even if the future he had seen had been changed and she was still alive, she would have to deal with those
SS gunmen, and she would need help.
In forty minutes he had the numbers that he required, and he reprogrammed the gate.
Again he opened the panel on the jaunt recorder and tore the evidence off that spool of paper.
Carrying the Uzi and the pistol, gritting his teeth as the dull throbbing in his half-healed shoulder grew worse, he
entered the gate.
Lugging both the Vexxon canister and the Uzi, Laura joined Chris in the narrower tributary off the main channel,
about sixty feet from the point at which they had descended into the system. Crouching at the corner formed by the
two earth walls, she looked back into the primary arroyo from which she had come.
On the desert above, one of the surviving assassins shoved the dangling corpse off the brink, into the deep gulch,
apparently to see if she was still immediately below them and if she would be tricked into opening fire. When there
was no fire, the two survivors became bolder. One lay at the brink with a submachine gun, covering the other man
while he slid down. Then the first gunman covered the second's descent.
When the second man joined the first, Laura stepped boldly around the corner and squeezed off a two-second
burst. Both of her pursuers were so startled by her aggressive ness that they did not return fire but threw
themselves toward the deep, vertical erosion channels in the arroyo wall, seeking shelter there as she had
sheltered while waiting for the opportunity to shoot them off the top of the cliff. Only one of them made it to cover.
She blew the other one away.
She stepped back around the corner, picked up the cylinder of nerve gas, and said to Chris, "Come on. Let's
hustle."
As they ran along the tributary, seeking yet another branch in the maze, lightning and thunder split the blue sky
above.
"Mr. Krieger!" Chris said.
He returned to the desert seven minutes after he had originally departed for his meetings with Churchill and Hitler in
1944, just two minutes after his initial return when he had seen Laura and Chris dead at the hands of SS gunmen.
There were no bodies this time, just the Buick—and the bullet-riddled Toyota in a different position.


Daring to hope that his scheme had worked, Stefan hurried to the arroyo and ran along the brink, searching for
someone, anyone, friend or foe. Before long he saw the three dead men on the floor of the channel, thirty feet
below.
There would be a fourth. No SS squad would have been composed of only three men. Somewhere in the network
of zigzagging arroyos that crossed the desert like a chain of jagged lightning bolts, Laura was still on the run from
the last man.
In the arroyo wall Stefan found a vertical channel that appeared to have been used already; he stripped off his
book-filled rucksack, slid to the bottom. On the way down, his back scraped against the earth, and hot pain flared in
the partly healed exit wound. At the end of the slope, when he stood up, a wave of dizziness washed through him,
and bile rose in his throat.
Somewhere in the maze to the east, automatic weapons chat tered.
She halted just inside the mouth of a new tributary and signaled Chris to be quiet.
Breathing through her open mouth, she waited for the last killer to turn the corner into the channel that she had just
left. Even in the soft soil, his running footsteps were audible.
She leaned out to gun him down. But he was extremely cautious now; he entered low and at a dead run. When her
gunfire alerted him to her position, he crossed the channel and hid against the same wall off which her new
tributary opened, so she could get a clear shot at him only if she stepped out into the arroyo where he waited. In
fact she tried that, risking his fire, but when she squeezed off a two-second burst, it ended in less than a second.
The Uzi spat out its last ten or twelve rounds, then failed her.
Klietmann heard her Uzi go empty. He looked out from the crevice in the arroyo wall where he was sheltering and
saw her throw the gun down. She disappeared into the mouth of the tributary where she had been laying for him.
He considered what he had seen in the Buick, up on the desert: a .38 revolver lying on the driver's seat. He
assumed that she had not had time to grab it or, in her haste to get that curious canister from the trunk, had
forgotten about the handgun.
She'd had two Uzis, both discarded now. Could she have had two handguns—and left only one in the car?
He thought not. Two automatic carbines made sense because they were useful at a distance and in a variety of
circumstances. But unless she was an expert marksman, a handgun would be of little use except at close range,
where six shots was about all she would need before she either dealt with her assailant or died at his hands. A
second revolver would be superfluous.
Which meant that for self-defense she had—what? That canister? It had looked like nothing more than a chemical
fire extinguisher.
He went after her.
The new tributary was narrower than the one before it, just as that one had been narrower than the main channel. It
was twenty-five feet deep and only ten feet wide at the mouth, growing shallower and half that narrow as it cut a
crooked path through the desert floor. In a hundred yards, it funneled to an end.
At the terminus, she looked for a way out. On two sides the cliffs were too steep, soft, and crumbly to be easily
climbed, but the wall behind her sloped at a scalable angle and was studded with mesquite that offered handholds.
She knew, however, that they would be only halfway up the slope when their pursuer found them; suspended on
that high ground, they would make easy targets.
This was where she would have to make her last stand.
Cornered at the bottom of this big, natural ditch, she looked up at the rectangular patch of blue sky and thought
they might have been at the bottom of an enormous grave in a cemetery where only giants were buried.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
She pushed Chris behind her, into the point of the dead-end arroyo. Ahead of her, she could see forty feet back the
way they had come, along the five-foot-wide channel, to the point where it angled to the left. He would appear at
that turn within a minute or two.
She dropped to her knees with the canister of Vexxon, intending to strip the safety wire off the manual trigger. But
the wire was not merely looped and braided through the trigger; it was repeatedly wound and then sealed with
solder. It could not be unwound; it had to be cut, and she had nothing with which to cut it.
Maybe a stone. A sharp-edged stone might wear through the wire if scraped across it often enough.
"Get me a stone," she said urgently to the boy behind her. "One with a rough, sharp edge."
As he searched the soft, flood-carried soil that had washed down from the desert floor, looking for a suitable scrap
of slate, she examined the automatic timer on the canister, which provided a second means of releasing the gas. It
was a simple device: a rotating dial was calibrated in minutes; if you wanted to set the timer for twenty minutes, you
twisted the dial until the 20 was lined up with the red mark on the dial frame; when you pushed the button in the
center, the countdown began.
The problem was that the dial could be set for no fewer than five minutes. The gunman would reach them sooner
than that.
Nevertheless she twisted the dial to 5 and pushed the button that started it ticking.
"Here, Mom," Chris said, presenting her with a blade of slate that just might do the job.


Though the timer was ticking, she set to work, frantically sawing at the strong, twined wire that prevented manual
release. Every few seconds she looked up to see if the assassin had found them, but the narrow arroyo ahead of
them remained deserted.
Stefan followed the footprints in the soft soil that formed the bed of the arroyo. He had no idea how far behind them
he might be. They had only a few minutes' head start, but they were probably moving faster than he was because
the pain in his shoulder, exhaustion, and dizziness slowed him.
He had unscrewed the silencer from the pistol, thrown it away, and tucked the handgun under his belt. He carried
the Uzi in both hands, at the ready.
Klietmann had thrown away his Ray -Bans because the floor of the arroyo network was shadow-swaddled in many
places, especially as they moved into narrower tributaries, where the walls closed in and left less of an opening
above for sunlight to enter.
His Bally loafers filled with sand and provided no surer footing here than on the slate of the desert above. Finally he
paused, kicked off the shoes, stripped off the socks, and proceeded barefoot, which was a great improvement.
He was not tracking the woman and the boy as swiftly as he would have liked, partly because of the shoes that he
had discarded, but mainly because he kept a watch on his backside every step of the way. He had heard and seen
the recent display of thunder and lightning; he knew Krieger must have returned. Most likely, as Klietmann stalked
the woman and boy, Krieger was stalking him. He did not intend to be meat for that tiger.
On the timer two minutes had ticked off.
Laura had sawed almost as long at the wire, initially with the blade of slate that Chris had found, then with a second
that he turned up when the first piece crumbled in her fingers. The government could not make a postage stamp
that could be trusted to stay on an envelope, could not build a battle tank that was capable of crossing a river on
every attempt, could not protect the environment or eliminate poverty, but it sure as hell knew how to procure
indestructible wire; this stuff must be some wonder material which they had developed for the space shuttle and for
which they'd eventually found more mundane uses; it was the wire God would use to hold the tilting pillars that held
up the world.
Her fingers were raw, the second chip of slate was slick with her blood, and only half the strands of wire were cut
when the barefoot man in black slacks and a white shirt rounded the bend in the narrow arroyo, forty feet away.
Klietmann edged forward warily, wondering why the hell she was struggling so frantically with the fire extinguisher.
Did she really think a blast of chemical fog would disorient him and protect her from submachine-gun fire?
Or was the extinguisher not what it appeared to be? Since arriving in Palm Springs less than two hours ago, he had
encountered several things that were not what they appeared to be. A red curb, for instance, did not mean
EMERGENCY PARKING, as he had thought, but NO PARKING AT ANY TIME. Who could know? And who could
know for sure about this canister with which she was struggling?
She looked up at him, then went right back to work on the handle of the extinguisher.
Klietmann edged along the narrow arroyo, which was now not even wide enough for two men to walk abreast. He
would not have gone any closer to her except that he could not see the boy. If she had tucked the boy in some
crevice along the way, he would have to force her to reveal the child's whereabouts, for his orders were to kill them
all—Krieger and the woman and the boy. He did not think the boy could be a danger to the Reich, but he was not
one to question orders.
Stefan found a discarded pair of shoes and a tangled pair of black socks caked with sand. Earlier he had found a
pair of sunglasses.
He had never before pursued a man who had undressed during a chase, and at first there seemed to be something
funny about it. But then he thought of the world portrayed in the novels of Laura Shane, a world in which comedy
and terror were intermingled, a world in which tragedy frequently struck in the middle of a laugh, and suddenly the
discarded shoes and socks scared him because they were funny; he had the crazy idea that if he laughed, that
would be the catalyst of Laura and Chris's deaths.
And if they died this time, he would not be able to save them by going back in time and sending them another
message sooner than the one he had sent in the bottle, for the remaining window for such a feat was only five
seconds. Even with an IBM PC, he could not split a hair that fine.
In the silt, the prints of the barefoot man led away to the mouth of a tributary. Although the pain in Stefan's half-
healed shoulder had wrung sweat from him and left him dizzy, he followed that trail as Robinson Crusoe had
followed Friday but with more dread.
With growing despair Laura watched the Nazi assassin approach through the shadows along the earthen corridor.
His Uzi was trained on her, but for some reason he did not immediately blow her away. She used that inexplicable
period of grace to saw relentlessly at the safety wires on the trigger of the Vexxon canister,
Even in those circumstances she held on to hope, largely because of a line from one of her own novels that had
come back to her just a moment ago: In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope
can be found in the realization that the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day,
that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.
Only twenty feet away now, the killer said, "Where is the boy? The boy. Where is the boy?"


She felt Chris against her back, curled in the shadows between her and the wall of the cul-de-sac. She wondered if
her body would protect him from the bullets and that if, after killing her, this man would leave without realizing that
Chris lived in the dark niche at her back.
The timer on the cylinder clicked. Nerve gas erupted from the nozzle with the rich odor of apricots and the
disgusting taste of lemon juice mixed with sour milk.
Klietmann could see nothing escaping the canister, but he could hear it: like a hissing score of serpents.
An instant later he felt as if someone had shoved a hand through his midsection, had seized his stomach in a
viselike grip, and had torn that organ loose of him. He doubled over, vomiting explosively on the ground and on his
bare feet. With a painful flash that seared the backs of his eyes, something seemed to burst in his sinuses, and
blood gushed from his nose. As he fell to the floor of the arroyo, he reflexively triggered the Uzi; aware that he was
dying and losing all control of himself in the process, he tried as a last effort of will to fall on his side, facing the
woman, so the final burst from the submachine gun would take her with him.
Soon after Stefan entered the narrowest of all the tributaries, where the walls seemed to tilt in above him instead of
sloping away toward the sky, as they had in the other channels, he heard a long rattle of submachine-gun fire, very
near, and he hurried forward. He stumbled a lot and bounced off the earthen walls, but he followed the crooked
corridor into the cul-de-sac, where he saw the SS officer dead of Vexxon poisoning.
Beyond the corpse, Laura sat splay -legged, with the canister of nerve gas between her thighs, her bloodied hands
hooked around it. Her head hung down, her chin on her breast; she looked as limp and lifeless as a doll made of
rags.
"Laura, no," he said in a voice that he hardly recognized as his own. "No, no."
She raised her head and blinked at him, shuddered, and finally smiled weakly. Alive.
"Chris," he said, stepping over the dead man. "Where's Chris?"
She pushed the still hissing canister of nerve gas away from her and moved to one side.
Chris looked out from the dark niche behind her and said, "Mr. Krieger, are you all right? You look like shit. Sorry,
Mom, but he really does."
For the first time in more than twenty years —or for the first time in more than sixty-five years if you wanted to count
those over which he had jumped when he had come to live with Laura in her time—Stefan Krieger wept. He was
surprised by his own tears, for he thought that his life under the Third Reich had left him incapable of weeping for
anyone or anything ever again. More surprising still—these first tears in decades were tears of joy.

Seven

EVER AFTER

More than an hour later, when the police moved north from the site of the machine-gun attack on the CHP
patrolman along route 111. when they found the bullet-riddled Toyota and saw blood on the sand and shale near
the brink of the arroyo, when they saw the discarded Uzi, and when they saw Laura and Chris struggling out of the
channel near the Buick with the Nissan plates, they expected to find the immediate area littered with bodies, and
they were not disappointed. The first three were at the bottom of the nearby gulch, and the fourth was in a distant
tributary to which the exhausted woman directed them.
In the days that followed she appeared to cooperate fully with local, state, and federal authorities—yet none of them
was satisfied that she was telling the whole truth. The drug dealers who had killed her husband a year ago had
finally sent hired killers after her. she said, for they had evidently been afraid that she would identify them. They had
attacked with such force at her house near Big Bear and had been so relentless that she'd had to run, and she'd
not gone to the police because she did not believe that the authorities could protect her and her son adequately.
She had been on the move for fifteen days, ever since that submachine-gun assault on the night of January 10, the
first anniversary of her husband's murder; in spite of every precaution she had taken, hitmen found her in Palm
Springs, pursued her on Route 111, forced her off the highway into the desert, and chased her on foot into the
arroyos where she finally got the best of them.
That story —one woman wiping out four experienced hitmen, plus at least the one additional whose head had been
found in the alley behind Brenkshaw's house—would have been unbelievable if
she had not proved to be a superb marksman, the beneficiary of considerable martial-arts training, and the owner
of an illegal arsenal the envy of some third-world countries. During interrogation to determine how she had obtained
illegally modified Uzis and a nerve gas kept under lock and key by the army, she had said, "I write novels. It's part
of my job to do a lot of research. I've learned how to find out anything I want to know, how to obtain anything I
need." Then she gave them Fat Jack, and the raid on his Pizza Party Palace turned up everything she had said it
would.
"I don't hold it against her," Fat Jack told the press at his arraignment. "She owes me nothing. None of us owes
anybody nothing that we don't want to owe them. I'm an anarchist, I love broads like her. Besides, I won't go to
prison. I'm too fat, I'd die, it'd be cruel and unusual punishment."


She would not tell them the name of the man she had brought to Carter Brenkshaw's house in the early morning
hours of January 11, the man whose bullet wounds the physician had treated. She would only say that he was a
good friend who had been staying with her at the house near Big Bear when the hitmen had struck. He was, she
insisted, an innocent bystander whose life would be wrecked if she involved him in this sordid affair, and she
implied that he was a married man with whom she had been having an affair. He was recovering from the bullet
wound quite well, and he had suffered enough.
The authorities pressed her hard on the issue of this nameless lover, but she would not budge, and they were
limited in the pressures that they could apply to her, especially since she could afford the finest legal counsel in the
country. They never believed the claim that the mystery man was her lover. Little investigation was required to learn
that her husband, only one year deceased, had been unusually close to her and that she had not recovered from
the loss of him sufficiently to convince anyone that she was able to conduct an affair in the shadow of Danny
Packard's memory.
No, she could not explain why none of the dead hitmen carried identification or why they were all dressed
identically, or why they had been without their own car and had been forced to steal one from two women at a
church, or why they had panicked in downtown Palm Springs and killed a policeman there. The abdominal flesh on
two of the bodies had borne the marks of what appeared to be tightly fitted trusses of some kind, yet neither had
been wearing such a device, and she knew nothing of that, either. Who knew, she asked, what reasons men like
that had for their antisocial actions? That was a mystery that the finest criminologists and sociologists could not
adequately explain. And if all those experts could not begin to shed light on the deepest and truest reasons for such
sociopathic behavior, how could she be expected to provide an answer to the more mundane but also more bizarre
mystery of the disappearing trusses? Confronted by the woman whose Toyota had been stolen and who claimed
that the hitmen had been angels, Laura Shane listened with evident interest, even fascination, but subsequently
inquired of the police if they were going to subject her to the cuckoo fantasies of every nut who took an interest in
her case.
She was granite.
She was iron.
She was steel.
She could not be broken. The authorities hammered at her as relentlessly and with as much force as the god Thor
had wielded his hammer Mjollnir but with no effect. After several days they were angry with her. After several
weeks they were furious. After three months they loathed her and wanted to punish her for not shivering in awe of
their power. In six months they were weary. In ten months they were bored. In a year they forced themselves to
forget her.
In the meantime, of course, they had seen her son, Chris, as the weak link. They had not pounded at him as they
had at her, choosing instead to use false affection, guile, trickery, and deceit to lure the boy into making the
revelations that his mother refused to make. But when they questioned him about the missing, wounded man, he
told them all about Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker and Han Solo instead. When they tried to pry from him a
few details about the events in the arroyos, he told them all about Sir Tommy Toad, servant of the queen, who
rented quarters in his house. When they sought to elicit at least a hint of where his mother and he had hidden out—
and what they had done—in the sixteen days between January 10 and 25, the boy said, "I slept through it all, I was
in a coma, I think I had malaria or maybe even Mars fever, see, and now I got amnesia like Wile E. Coyote got that
one time when the Road Runner tricked him into dropping a boulder on his own head." Eventually, frustrated with
their inability to get the point, he said, "This is family stuff, see. Don't you know about family stuff? I can only talk
with my mom about this stuff, and it's nobody else's business. If you start talking family stuff with strangers, pretty
soon where do you go when you want to go home?"
To complicate matters for the authorities, Laura Shane publicly apologized to everyone whose property she had
appropriated or damaged during the course of her attempts to escape from the hired killers who had been sent after
her. To the family whose Buick she had stolen, she gave a new Cadillac. To the man whose Nissan plates she had
taken, she gave a new Nissan. In every case she made restitution to excess and won friends at every hand.
Her old books went back to press repeatedly, and some of them reappeared on paperback bestseller lists now,
years after their original successes. Major film studios bid competitively for the few movie rights to her books that
had remained unsold. Rumors, perhaps encouraged by her own agent but very likely true, circulated to the effect
that publishers were standing six deep for a chance to pay her a record advance for her next novel.
During that year Stefan Krieger missed Laura and Chris terribly, but life at the Gaines's mansion in Beverly Hills
was not a hardship. The accommodations were superb; the food was delicious: Jason enjoyed teaching him how
film could be manipulated in his home editing studio; and Thelma was unfailingly amusing.
"Listen, Krieger," she said one summer day by the pool. "Maybe you would rather be with them, maybe you're
getting tired of hiding here, but consider the alternative. You could be stuck back there in your own age, when there
weren't plastic garbage bags, Pop Tarts, Day-Glo underwear, Thelma Ackerson movies, or reruns of Gilligan's
Island. Count your blessings, that you should find yourself in this enlightened era."
"It's just that . . ." He stared for a while at the spangles of sunlight on the chlorine-scented water. "Well, I'm afraid


that during this year of separation, I'm losing any slim chance I might have had to win her."
"You can't win her, anyway, Herr Krieger. She's not a set of cereal containers raffled off at a Tupperware party. A
woman like Laura can't be won. She decides when she wants to give herself, and that's that."
"You're not very encouraging."
"Being encouraging is not my job—"
"I know—"
"—my job—"
"—yes, yes—"
"—is comedy. Although with my devastating looks, I'd probably be just as successful as a traveling slut —-at least in
really remote logging camps."
At Christmas Laura and Chris came to stay at the Gaines's house, and her gift to Stefan was a new identity.
Although rather closely monitored by various authorities for the better part of the year, she had managed through
surrogates to obtain a driver's license, social security card, credit cards, and a passport in the name of Steven
Krieger.
She presented them to him on Christmas morning, wrapped in a box from Neiman-Marcus. "All the documents are
valid. In Endless River, two of my characters are on the run, in need of new identities —"
"Yes," Stefan said, "I read it. Three times."
"The same book three times?" Jason said. They were all sitting around the Christmas tree, eating junk food and
drinking cocoa, and Jason was in his cheeriest mood of the year. "Laura, beware this man. He sounds like an
obsessive-compulsive to me."
"Well, of course," Thelma said, "to you Hollywood types, anyone who reads any book, even once, is viewed either
as an intellectual giant or a psychopath. Now, Laura, how did you come up with all these convincing-looking, phony
papers?"
"They're not phony," Chris said. "They're real."
"That's right," Laura said. "The driver's license and everything else is supported by government files. In researching
Endless River, I had to find out how you go about obtaining a new identity of high quality, and I found this
interesting man in San Francisco who runs a veritable document industry from the basement beneath a topless
nightclub—"
"It doesn't have a roof?" Chris asked.
Laura ruffled the boy's hair and said, "Anyway, Stefan, if you look deeper into that box, you'll find a couple of bank
books as well. I've opened accounts for you under your new identity at Security Pacific Bank and Great Western
Savings."
He was startled. "I can't take money from you. I can't—"
"You save me from a wheelchair, repeatedly save my life, and I can't give you money if I feel like it? Thelma, what's
wrong with him?"
"He's a man," Thelma said.
"I guess that explains it."
"Hairy, Neanderthalic," Thelma said, "perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by
racial memories of the los t glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions —they're all alike."
"Men," Laura said.
"Men," Thelma said.
To his surprise and almost against his will, Stefan Krieger felt some of the darkness fading from within him, and
light began to find a pane through which to shine into his heart.
In late February of the next year, thirteen months after the events in the desert outside Palm Springs, Laura
suggested that he come to stay with her and Chris at the house near Big Bear. He went the next day, driving there
in the sleek new Russian sports car that he had bought with some of the money she had given him.
For the next seven months he slept in the guest room. Every night. He needed nothing more. Just being with them,
day after day, being accepted by them, being included, was all the love he could handle for a while.
In mid-September, twenty months after he had appeared on her doorstep with a bullet hole in his chest, she asked
him into her bed. Three nights later he found the courage to go.
The year that Chris was twelve, Jason and Thelma bought a getaway house in Monterey, overlooking the most
beautiful coastline in the world, and they insisted that Laura, Stefan, and Chris visit them for the month of August,
when they were both between film projects. The mornings on the Monterey peninsula were cool and foggy, the
days warm and clear, the nights downright chilly in spite of the season, and that daily pattern of weather was
invigorat ing.
On the second Friday of the month, Stefan and Chris went for a beach walk with Jason. On the rocks not far from
shore, sea lions were sunning themselves and barking noisily. Tourists were parked bumper to bumper along the
road that served the beach; they ventured onto the sand to take photographs of the sun-worshiping "seals," as they
called them.
"Year by year," Jason said, "there's more foreign tourists. It's a regular invasion. And you notice—they're mostly


either Japanese, Germans, or Russians. Less than half a century ago, we fought the greatest war in history against
all three of them, and now they're all more prosperous than we are. Japanese electronics and cars, Russian cars
and computers, German cars and quality machinery of all kinds . . . Honest to God, Stefan, I think Americans
frequently treat old enemies better than they do old friends."
Stefan paused to watch the sea lions that had drawn the interest of the tourists, and he thought of the mistake that
he had made in his meeting with Winston Churchill.
But tell me at least one thing. Curiosity's killing me. Let's see . . . well, for instance, what of the Soviets after the
war?
The old fox had spoken so casually, as if the question was one that had occurred to him by chance, as if he might
as likely have asked whether the cut of men's suits would change in the future, when in fact his query had been
calculated and the answer of intense interest to him. Operating on what Stefan had told him, Churchill had rallied
the Western Allies to continue fighting in Europe after the Germans were defeated. Using the Soviets' land grab of
Eastern Europe as an excuse to turn against them, the other Allies had fought the Russians, driving them back into
their motherland and ultimately defeating them entirely; in fact, throughout the war with Germany, the Soviets had
been propped up with weapons and supplies from the United States, and when that support was withdrawn they
collapsed in a matter of months. After all, they had been exhausted after the war with their old ally, Hitler. Now the
modern world was far different from what destiny had intended, and all because Stefan had answered Churchill's
one question.
Unlike Jason or Thelma or Laura or Chris, Stefan was a man out of time, a man for whom this era was not his
destined home; the years since the Great Wars were his future, while those same years were in these people's
past; therefore he recalled both the future that had once been and the future that had now come to pass in place of
the old. They, however, could remember no different world but this one in which no great world powers were hostile
toward one another, in which no huge nuclear arsenals awaited launch, in which democracy flourished even in
Russia, in which there were plenty and peace.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be. But sometimes, happily, it fails.
Laura and Thelma remained in rocking chairs on the porch, watching their menfolk walk down to the sea and then
north along the beach, out of sight.
"Are you happy with him, Shane?"
"He's a melancholy man."
"But lovely."
"He'll never be Danny."
"But Danny is gone."
Laura nodded. They rocked.
"He says I redeemed him," Laura said.
"Like grocery coupons, you mean?"
Finally Laura said, "I love him."
"I know," Thelma said.
"I never thought I would . . . again. I mean, love a man that way."
"What way is that, Shane? Are you talking about some kinky new position? You're heading toward middle age,
Shane; you'll be forty before too many moons, so isn't it time you reformed your libidinous ways?"
"You're incorrigible."
"I try to be."
"How about you, Thelma? Are you happy?"
Th elma patted her large belly. She was seven months pregnant.
"Very happy, Shane. Did I tell you—maybe twins?"
"You told me."
"Twins," Thelma said, as if the prospect awed her. "Think how pleased Ruthie would be for me."
Twins.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be, Laura thought. And sometimes, happily, it succeeds.
They sat for a while in companionable silence, breathing the healthful sea air, listening to the wind sough softly in
the Monterey pines and cypress.
After a while Thelma said, "Remember that day I came to your house in the mountains, and you were taking target
practice in the backyard?"
"I remember."
"Blasting away at those human silhouettes. Snarling, daring the world to tackle you, guns hidden everywhere. That
day you told me you'd spent your life enduring what fate threw at you, but you were not just going to endure any
more—you were going to fight to protect your own. You were very angry that day, Shane, and very bitter."
"Yes."
"Now, I know you're still an endurer. And I know you're still a fighter. The world is still full of death and tragedy. In
spite of all that, somehow you just aren't bitter any more."


"No."
"Share the secret?"
"I've learned the third great lesson, that's all. As a kid I learned to endure. After Danny was killed, I learned to fight.
Now I'm still an endurer and a fighter—but I've also learned to accept. Fate is."
"Sounds very Eastern-mystic-transcendental-bullshit, Shane. 'Jeez. 'Fate is.' Next you'll be telling me to chant a
mantra and contemplate my navel."
"Stuffed with twins, as you are," Laura said, "you can't even see your navel."
"Oh, yes, I can—with just the right arrangement of mirrors."
Laura laughed. "I love you, Thelma."
"I love you, Sis."
They rocked and rocked.
Down on the shore, the tide was coming in.