Time Thieves

ever? Of course he didn't.
        
        But he wasn't sure.
        
        He paid his bill and leaving the restaurant, stood on the pavement drawing the summer air deep into his lungs. Across the street, on the park benches, three people sat.
        
        But that was only another attempt to avoid seeing Della, to postpone the agony that he suspected might come as he drew closer to her than ever-while she was simultaneously alienated from him.
        
        It won't be that way, he thought in the taxi on his way home. Besides, I have to tell her. She has to know about all these things, and we have to plan some course of action together. The eight-fingered alien creature would not yet have abandoned his game, whatever it was.
        
        They arrived at the house at a quarter past nine. He paid the man and tipped him, then went inside.
        
        “Della!” he shouted, trying to put warmth and excitement into his voice, concealing his disquiet.
        
        She did not answer him.
        
        He crossed the kitchen, wondering if she could still be asleep. She would have gotten his note, and she wouldn't have gone out until he came home. He thought of reaching out and touching her mind, to see if she were asleep yet, but he decided against that. Somehow, he knew that, until he had talked with her, until he could see, more plainly, what their future was going to be, he should not invade her private realms again.
        
        “Hey sleepyhead!” he called as he passed from the dining room into the front room.
        
        Here, the willows outside cast shadows over the windows and kept out a great deal of the sunlight. Without any lamps burning, the chamber was in semidarkness. He was almost ready to turn for the steps when he saw her. She sat in an easy chair, in her house robe, staring at him. She had the most peculiar expression that he had ever seen, and he could not guess what it meant.
        
        “Are you all right?” he asked her.
        
        She smiled, but made a bad job of it. “Yes,” she said. “I'm all right.”
        
        “But you don't look well.”
        
        “I'm fine!” she said. It was a false bravado-but as if she did not realize, herself, how false.
        
        “But why are you sitting here, in the dark like this?”
        
        “Waiting for you,” she said.
        
        “Della-”
        
        He started toward her, then heard the footsteps on the stairs, behind. He whirled and looked up at the two mechanical men coming toward him. One of them held a weapon of some sort, short-barreled and amber, like a piece of shaped glass.
        
        “It's for your own good,” Della said.
        
        He fell, rolled, and heard something tinkle against the wall above him, at the exact spot where he had been standing only a moment ago.
        
        He came up against a small coffee table, clutched it, and brought it on its side betwen himself and the robots.
        
        A burst of tiny, silver needles studded the wood.
        
        He stood behind cover of the table and heaved it at the mechanicals as they reached the bottom of the staircase. It knocked them off balance and gave him a moment to flee. He turned toward the dining room in time to confront a second pair, their faces expressionless, all wearing identical raincoats and slacks and shoes.
        
        To his right, there was a small, Connecticut window, many-paned with small, thin wooden struts between the sections of the glass. He flung himself sideways, closing his eyes and throwing his arms about his head, smashed through the window and struck the yard with his wounded shoulder. The place where the bullet had grazed him broke open and began to bleed again.
        
        He got up and ran, back along the house to the alleyway behind the garage. Once in the open, where the neighbors might see him, he began to walk, though he kept a steady, brisk pace. Every few hundred feet, he looked back to see if they were following. They weren't.
        
        He had gone two blocks when the white sphere intruded on his mental horizons, drew down on him and tracked along the perimeter of his telepathic shield.
        
        Furious, he directed a blast of psionic power at it. It seemed to yellow, shrink and retreat. When it did not return during the next four blocks of his route, he knew that