Lightning

Danny?"
    "Yes. Why didn't you?"
    "Because… 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."

    "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."
    "I know. But if we live through this.........well, there's always time."
    "Yes," she said, "I suppose there's always time."

Six
NIGHT'S COMPANION
• 1 •
    On Saturday, March 18, 1944, in the main, ground-floor lab of the institute, SS
Obersturmführer
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