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Kokoschka’s belt returned Stefan to the institute in a blink, and he entered the gate with the nozzle on the Vexxon cylinder wide open He was squeezing the handle and trigger so hard that his hand ached, and the pain already was beginning to travel up his arloom of the barrel, he could see only a sli in the far end of the gate They very ents-all of the bastards looked as if they’d been cloned froenerates and fanatics-and he was relieved to know that they could not see him as clearly as he could see them; for a moment at least they would think he was Kokoschka

Hecanister of Vexxon held before hiht hand, and before the as hit theate, and by the ti in agony They had vo fros and clawing at his throat; the other was curled fetally on his side and, with fingers hooked like claas ripping horribly at his eyes Near the gate-progra board three men in lab coats- Stefan knew them: Hoepner, Eicke, Schmauser-had collapsed They tore at the to scream, but their throats had swollen shut in an instant; they were able toof s them, physically unaffected but appalled, horrified, and in thirty to forty seconds they were dead

A cruel justice was served in the use of Vexxon against these men, for it had been Nazi-sponsored researchers who had synthesized the first nerve gas in 1936, an organophosphorous ester called tabun Virtually all subsequent nerve gases-which killed by interfering with the transmission of electrical nerve iinal che Vexxon These men in 1944 had been killed by a futuristic weapon, >et it was a substance that had its origins in their oisted, death-centered society

Nevertheless Stefan took no satisfaction fro in his life that even the exteruilty to protect the innocent, even murder in the service of justice, repulsed him But he could do what he had to do

He put the pistol on a lab bench He shrugged the Uzi off his shoulder and put that aside as well

From a pocket of his jeans, he withdrew a few inches of wire, which he used to lock open the trigger on the Vexxon He stepped into the ground-floor corridor and put the canister in the center of that hallway In a fewby way of stairwells, elevator shafts, and ventilation ducts

He was surprised to see that only the night lights illuround floor appeared to be deserted Leaving the gas to disperse, he returned to the gate-progra board in the main lab to learn the date and tiht hiht of March 16

This was a piece of singularly good luck Stefan had expected to return to the institute at an hour when an work as early as six in the ht o’clock-would be in residence That would have hout the four-floor building; and when they were discovered, it would be known that only Stefan Krieger, using Kokoschka’s belt and penetrating the institute froate, could have been responsible They would realize that he had not come back merely to kill as many of the staff as were on the pre else, and they would launch a f ation to discover the nature of his schee he had done But nowif the building was ht be able to dispose of the few bodies in a fashion that would cover his presence and direct all suspicion to these dead as had spread throughout the structure, with the exception of the two guard foyers at the front and back entrances, which did not share even ventilation ducts with the rest of the building Stefan went fro for more victims The only bodies he found were those of the aniht of their pathetic corpses disturbed hiassed men

Stefan returned to the main lab, took five of the special belts from a white cabinet, and buckled the devices on the dead ate to send the bodies roughly six billion years into the future He had read soone nova or would have died in six billion years, and he wanted to dispose of the five men in a place where no one would exist to notice the with the dead in that silent, deserted building was an eerie business Repeatedly he froze, certain that he’d heard stealthy o in search of the i Once he looked at one of the deadhad started to rise, that the soft scrape he’d heard had been its cool hand clawing for a grip on theitself erect That hen he realized how deeply disturbed he had been by bearing witness to so ed the reeking corpses into the gate, shoved the to the point of trans through the invisible doorway in tiinably distant point they would reappear-either on an earth long cold and dead, where not even one plant or insect lived, or in the airless and e consuly careful not to venture across the transmission point If he was suddenly transported to the vacuum of deep space, six billion years hence, he would be dead before he had a chance to press the button on his ho belt and return to the lab

By the time he disposed of the five cadavers and cleaned up all traces of their as left no apparent residue; there was no need to wipe down every surface in the institute His wounded shoulder throbbed as badly as in the days immediately after he had been shot

But at least he had cleverly covered his trail In the ht appear as if Kokoschka, Hoepner, Eicke, Schents had decided that the Third Reich was doomed and had defected to a future in which peace and plenty could be found

He remembered the anies, tests would be run to discover what had killed them, and perhaps the results would cast doubt on the theory that Kokoschka and the others had defected through the gate Then once again the prier Better the animals should disappear That would be a mystery, but it would not point directly toward the truth, as would the condition of their carcasses

The hot, pounding pain in his shoulder became hotter, as he used clean lab coats for burial shrouds, bundling groups of ani them up with cord Without belts he sent them six billion years into the future He retrieved the eas canister from the hall and sent that to the far end of time as well

At last he was ready to make the two crucial jaunts that he hoped would lead to the utter destruction of the institute and the certain defeat of Nazi Gerain, he took a folded sheet of paper from the hip pocket of his jeans; it contained the results of days of calculations that he and Laura had done on the IBM PC in the house in Pals

If he had been able to return froh explosives to reduce the institute to sht here, right noever, in addition to the heavy canister of Vexxon, the rucksack filled with six books, the pistol, and the Uzi, he would have been unable to carry more than forty or fifty pounds of plastique, which was insufficient to the task The explosives he had planted in the attic and baseo, of course, in local tiht have coht have atteround; but many research documents were locked in fireproof file cabinets to which even he did not have access, and only a devastating explosion would split theer destroy the institute alone

But he kneho could help hi to the nuraate to take hiht of March 16 Geographically, he would be arriving on British soil in the heart of the extensive underground shelters beneath the govern St James’s Park by Storey’s Gate, where bombproof offices and quarters for the pri the Blitz, and where the War Room was still located Specifically, Stefan hoped to arrive in a particular conference room at 7:30 AM, a jaunt of such precision that only the knowledge and computers available in 1989 could allow the complex calculations to deter no weapons, taking with hiate, crossed the point of transed conference rooe table encircled by twelve chairs

Ten of the chairs were empty Only two men were present The first was a male secretary in a British army uniform, a pen in one hand and a pad of paper in the other The second e, was Winston Churchill