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Laura saw the killer raise the subed 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 AD 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 boround 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 progras, January 25, 1989 He tore the tape, pocketed the evidence, and respooled the blank paper He’d already set the progra-board clocks to clear theate They would know someone had tampered with the records, but they would think it had been Kokoschka and the other defectors covering their trail

He closed the panel and strapped on the backpack that was filled with Churchill’s books He slipped the strap of the Uzi over his shoulder and picked up the silencer-fitted pistol from the lab bench

He quickly scanned the rooht betray his presence here tonight The IBM printouts were folded away in the pockets of his jeans again The Vexxon cylinder had long ago been sent into a future where the sun was dead or dying As far as he could see, he had overlooked nothing

He stepped into the gate and approached the point of transmission with more hope than he had dared entertain in many years He had been able to assure the destruction of the institute and the defeat of Nazi Gerh a series of Machiavellian manipulations of time and people, so surely he and Laura would be able to deal with that single squad of SS gun paralyzed upon the desert shale, Laura screamed, "No!" The word cath or lung power to un opened fire on Chris, and for ato weave his way out of range, which was a last desperate fantasy, of course, because he was only a ss, and he ithin range when the bullets found hi a pattern across the center of his frail back, pitching hi blood

All the unfelt pain of her ruined body would have been as a pinprick coht of her little boy’s lifeless body Through all the tragedies of her life, she had known no pain to equal this It was as if all the losses she had experienced-the mother she had never known, her sweet rather, Nina Dockweiler, gentle Ruthie, and Danny, for whoain in this new brutality that fate insisted she endure, so she felt not only the shattering grief at Chris’s death but felt anew the terrible agony of all the deaths that had co but in torment, spiritually lacerated, at last eer able to be brave, no longer able to hope or care Her boy was dead She had failed to save him, and with him all prospects of joy had died She felt horribly alone in a cold and hostile universe, and all she hoped for noas death, eness, and at last an end to all loss and grief

She saw the gun her

She said, "Kill me, please kill me, finish me," but her voice was so faint that he probably did not hear her

What had been the point of living? What had been the point of enduring all the tragedies that she had endured? Why had she suffered and gone on with life if it was all to end like this? What cruel consciousness lay behind the workings of the universe that it could even conceive of forcing her to struggle through a troubled life that turned out, in the end, to have no apparentor purpose?

Christopher Robin was dead

She felt hot tears spilling down her face, but that was all she could feel physically-that and the hardness of the shale against the right side of her face

In a few steps the gunman reached her, stood over her, and kicked her in the side She knew he kicked her, for she was looking back along her own immobile body and saw his foot land in her ribs, but she felt nothing whatsoever "Kill me," she murmured

She was suddenly terrified that destiny would try too faithfully to reassert the pattern that was ht be permitted to live but only in the wheelchair that Stefan had saved her from when he had meddled with the ordained circumstances of her birth Chris was the child who had never been a part of destiny’s plans, and now he had been scrubbed froht not be erased, for it had been her destiny to live as a cripple Now she had a vision of her future: alive, paraplegic or quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair, but trapped in soedy, of bitterfor her son, her husband, her father, and all the others she had lost "Oh, God, please, please kill uner" He laughed unpleasantly "Anyway, I’ flashed and thunder crashed across the desert

Thanks to the calculations performed on the computer, Stefan returned to the precise spot in the desert from which he had departed for 1944, exactly fivehe saw in the too-bright desert light was Laura’s bloody body and the SS gununan to turn in search of Stefan

Stefan pushed the button on his ho belt three times The air pressure instantly increased; the odor of hot electric wires and ozone filled the day

The SS thug saw hiun, and opened fire, wide of hiht on him

Before the bullets hit, Stefan popped out of 1989 and back to the institute on the night of March 16, 1944

"Shit!" Klieter slipped into the ti over fro, "That was him! That was him!"

"I knoas him," Klietmann said when Bracher arrived "Who else would it be-Christ on His second co?"

"What’s he up to?" Bracher said "What’s he doing back there, where’s he been, what’s this all about?"

"I don’t know," Klietmann said irritably He looked down at the badly wounded woman and said to her, "All I know is that he saw you and your boy’s dead body, and he didn’t even make an attempt to kill me for what I’d done to you He cut and ran to save his own skin What do you think of your hero now?"

She only continued to beg for death

Stepping back froet out of the way"

Bracher moved, and Klietmann squeezed off a burst of perhaps ten or twenty rounds, all of which pierced the wo her instantly

"We could have questioned her," Corporal Bracher said "About Krieger, about what he was doing here-"

"She was paralyzed," Kliet I kicked her in the side, must’ve broken half her ribs, and she didn’t even cry out You can’t torture information from a woman who can feel no pain"

March 16, 1944 The institute

His heart hae, Stefan ju board He pulled the list of computer-derived nurammer’s desk that filled a niche in the machinery

He sat in the chair, picked up a pencil, pulled a tablet from the drawer His hands shook so badly that he dropped the pencil twice

He already had the numbers that would put him in that desert five minutes after he had first left it He could work backward froures and find a new set that would put him in the same place four minutes and fifty-five seconds earlier, only five seconds after he had originally left Laura and Chris