Lightning

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 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. If 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 Heinrich 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.
    "For 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