Churchill’s bombers may beat you to the punch, Stefan thought.
“We will win, Stefan, and we’ll do so by retaining faith in our
great destiny, not by playing fortune teller. We will win because it is our fate to win.”
“It’s our destiny,” Stefan agreed. “We’re on the side of truth.” Finally the madman smiled. Overcome by a sentimentality that was strange because of the extremely sudden change of mood, Hitler spoke of Stefan’s father, Franz, and the early days in Munich: the secret meetings in Anton Drexler’s apartment, the public meetings at the beer halls—the Hofbrauhaus and Eberlbrdu. Stefan listened for a while, pretending to be enthralled, but when Hitler expressed his continued and unshakable faith in the son of Franz Krieger, Stefan seized the opportunity to leave. “And I, my Furhrer, have undying faith in you and will be, forever, your loyal disciple.” He stood, saluted the dictator, put one hand under his shirt to the button on the belt, and said, “Now I must return to the future, for I’ve more work to do in your behalf.”
“Go?” Hitler said, rising from the desk chair. “But I thought you’d stay now in your own time? Why go there now that you’ve cleared your name with me?”
“I think I may know where the traitor Kokoschka has gone, in what corner of the future he’s taken refuge. I’ve got to find him, bring him back, for perhaps only Kokoschka knows the names of the traitors at the institute and can be made to reveal them.”
He saluted quickly, pushed the button on the belt, and left the bunker before Hitler could respond.
He returned to the institute on the night of March 16, the night that Kokoschka had set out for the San Bernardinos in pursuit of him, never to return. To the best of his ability, he had arranged for the destruction of the institute and had almost ensured Hitler’s distrust of any information that came from it. He would have been exhilarated if he had not been so worried about the SS squad that apparently was stalking Laura in 1989.
At the programming board, he entered the computer-derived numbers for the last jaunt that he would ever make: to the desert outside of Palm Springs, where Laura and Chris waited for him on the morning of January 25, 1989.
Even as she fell to the ground, Laura knew that her spinal column had been severed or shattered by one of the bullets, for she felt no pain whatsoever—nor any sensation of any kind in any part of her body below the neck.
Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.
The gunfire ceased.
She could move only her head, and only enough to turn and see Chris on his feet in front of the Buick, as paralyzed by terror as she was by the bullet that had cracked her spine. Beyond the boy, hurrying toward them from the north, only fifteen yards away, was a man in sunglasses, a white shirt, and black slacks, carrying a submachine gun.
“Chris,” she said thickly, “run! Run!”
His face twisted with an expression of purest grief, as if he knew he was leaving her to die. Then he ran as fast as his small legs would carry him, east into the desert, and he was smart enough to weave back and forth as he ran, making as difficult a target of himself as possible.
Laura saw the killer raise the submachine gun.
In the main lab, Stefan opened the hinged panel that covered the automatic jaunt-recorder.
A spool of two-inch-wide paper indicated that tonight’s uses of the gate had included a jaunt to January 10, 1988, which was the trip Heinrich Kokoschka had made to the San Bernardinos, when he had killed Danny Packard. The tape additionally recorded eight trips to the year A.D. 6,000,000,000—the five men and three bundles of lab animals. Also noted were Stefan’s own jaunts: to March 20, 1944, with the latitudes and longitudes of the bombproof underground facility near St. James’s Park in London; to March 21, 1944, with the precise latitudes and longitudes of Hitler’s bunker; and the destination of the jaunt that he had just programmed but not yet made—Palm Springs, January 25, 1989. He tore the tape, pocketed the evidence, and respooled the blank paper. He’d already set the programming-board clocks to clear themselves and reset to zero when he passed through the gate. They would know someone had tampered with the records, but they would think it had been Kokoschka and the other defectors covering their trail.