Lightning

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 motel's 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 eighty years old!" He laughed, pleased with himself. "Boy, you sure look
good
for an eighty-year-old geezer!") After moving the family to Munich following the First World War, Stefan's father, Franz Krieger, had been an early supporter of Hitler in 1919, a member of 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 Führer
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