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Someone had found the bodies of Januskaya and Volkaw He heardnervously at the closed door to the hall, he decided he had no ti to Laura one year after he had last left her

With the silencer-fitted Colt Co console and headed toward the gate-that eight-foot-high, twelve-foot-long, polished steel, open-ended barrel resting a foot off the floor on copper-plated blocks He did not even want to risk taking time to recover his peacoat froo The commotion in the corridor was louder When he was only a couple of steps froate, the lab door was thrown open behind hiht there!"

Stefan recognized the voice, but he did not want to believe what he heard He brought up the pistol as he swung around to confront his challenger: The man who had raced into the lab was Kokoschka

Impossible Kokoschka was dead Kokoschka had followed hiht of January 10, 1988, and he had killed Kokoschka on that snoept highway

Stunned, Stefan squeezed off two shots, both wide Kokoschka returned his fire One slug took Stefan in the chest, high on the left side, knocking hiate He stayed on his feet and got off three shots at Kokoschka, forcing the bastard to dive for cover and roll behind a lab bench

There were less than two minutes from detonation Stefan felt no pain because he was in shock But his left ar limply at his side And an insistent, oily blackness seeped in at the edges of his vision

Only a few overhead lights had been left on, but suddenly even they flickered and went out, leaving the roolass-covered dials and gauges

For an instant Stefan thought the dying light was a further surrender of his consciousness, a subjective development, but then he realized the public power supply had failed again, evidently due to the work of saboteurs, for there had been no sirens to warn of an air attack

Kokoschka fired twice fro his position, and Stefan loosed the last three rounds in his pistol, though there was no hope of hitting Kokoschka through the marble lab bench

Thankful that the gate was powered by a secure generator and still functional, Stefan threay the pistol and with his good hand gripped the rim of the barrel-shaped portal He pulled himself inside and crawled frantically toward the three-quarter point, where he would cross the energy field and depart this place for Big Bear, 1989

As he hitched on two knees and one good arloomy interior of the barrel, he abruptly realized that the timer on the detonator in his office was connected to the public power supply The countdown to destruction had been interrupted when the lights had gone out

With dis Bear in 1988 Kokoschka had not made that trip yet Kokoschka had only now learned of Stefan’s perfidy, when he had discovered the bodies of Januskaya and Volkaw Before the public power supply was restored, Kokoschka would search Stefan’s office, find the detonator, and disarm the explosives The institute would not be destroyed

Stefan hesitated, wondering if he should go back

Behind him he heard other voices in the lab, other securityto reinforce Kokoschka He crawled forward

And what of Kokoschka? The security chief evidently would travel to January 10, 1988, trying to kill Stefan on state route 330 But he would onlykilled himself Stefan was pretty sure that Kokoschka’s death was an immutable destiny, but he would need to think more about the paradoxes of time travel, to see if there was any way Kokoschka could escape being gunned down in 1988, a death that Stefan had already witnessed

The co even when one pondered the to res Later He would worry about it later

Behind hi into the entrance of the gate, hoping to hit him before he reached the point of departure

He crawled the last couple of feet Toward Laura Toward a new life in a distant tie between the era he was leaving and that to which he was now pledging hiate would reet himand Laura

Laura and Chris spent Christmas with Thelma at Jason Gaines’s house in Beverly Hills It was a twenty-two-room, Tudor-style e property in an area where the cost per acre had long ago escalated far beyond reason During construction in the ’40s-it had been built by a producer of screwball comedies and war movies-no compromises had been made in quality, and the rooms were marked by beautiful detail work that could not have been duplicated these days at ten tis, sos were elaborately carved; the leaded ere of stained or beveled glass, and they were set so deep in the castle-thick walls that one could comfortably sit on the wide sills; interior lintels were decorated with hand-carved panels-vines and roses, cherubs and banners, leaping deer, birds with ribbons trailing froranite, and in tere set mortared clusters of colorful della Robbia-style ceramic fruits The six-acre property around the house was astone pathways led through a tropical landscape of palms, benjaminas, ficus nidida, azaleas laden with brilliant red blossoms, impatiens, ferns, birds of paradise, and seasonal flowers of so many species that Laura could identify only half of them

When Laura and Chris arrived early on Saturday afternoon, the day before Christrounds, after which they drank hot cocoa and ate miniature pastries prepared by the cook and served by thepool

"Is this a crazy life, Shane? Can you believe that the sairl who spent almost ten years in holes like McIlroy and Caswell could end up living here without first having to be reincarnated as a princess?"

The house was so ied anyone ned it to feel Important with a capital I, and anyone in possession of it would be hard-pressed to avoid sness and pomposity But when Jason Gaines came home at four o’clock, he proved to be as unpretentious as anyone Laura knew, aly so for a man who had spent seventeen years in the ht, five years older than Thelhn, which was a lot better than "decent-looking," as Thelma had referred to him He was home less than half an hour before he and Chris huddled in one of his three hobby roo with an electric train set that covered a fifteen-by-twenty-foot platfor countryside, windht, with Chris asleep in the roo Laura’s, Theled on her bed, as if they were girls again, though they ate roasted pistachios and drank Christne instead of cookies andof all, Shane, is that in spite of where I ca here I don’t feel out of place"