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.