Lightning

a state-accredited tutor. Her name was Ida Palomar, and she reminded Laura of Marjorie Main, the late actress in the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Ida was a big woman, a bit gruff, but with a generous heart, and she was a good teacher.

By the Thanksgiving school break, instead of feeling as if they were imprisoned, both she and Chris had accommodated to the relative isolation in which they lived. In fact they had actually come to enjoy the special closeness that developed between them as a result of having so few other people in their lives.

On Thanksgiving Day Thelma called from Beverly Hills to wish them a happy holiday. Laura took the call in the kitchen, which was full of the aroma of roasting turkey. Chris was in the family room, reading Shel Silverstein.

'Besides wishing you a happy holiday,' Thelma said, 'I'm calling to invite you down here to spend Christmas week with me and Jason.'

'Jason?' Laura said.

'Jason Gaines, the director,' Thelma said. 'He's the guy who's directing this film I'm making. I've moved in with him.'

'Does he know it yet?'

'Listen, Shane, I make the wisecracks.'

'Sorry.'

'He says he loves me. Is that crazy or what? I mean, Jeez, here's this decent-looking guy, only five years older than me, with no visible mutations, who's a hugely successful film director, worth many millions, who could just about have any stacked little starlet he wanted, and the only one he wants is me. Now obviously he's brain-damaged, but you wouldn't know it to talk to him, he could pass for normal. He says what he loves about me is I've got a brain—'

'Does he know how diseased it is?'

'There you go again, Shane. He says he loves my brain and sense of humor, and he's even excited by my body — or if he isn't excited then he's the first guy in history who could fake an erection.'

'You've got a perfectly lovely body.'

'Well, I'm beginning to consider the possibility that it's not as bad as I always thought. That is, if you consider boniness to be the sine qua non of feminine beauty. But even if I am able to look at my bod in a mirror now, it's still got this face perched atop it.'

'You've got a perfectly lovely face — especially now that it's not surrounded by green and purple hair.'

'It's not your face, Shane. Which means I'm mad for inviting you here for Christmas week. Jason will see you, and the next thing I'll be sitting in a Glad trash bag at the curb. But what about it? Will you come? We're shooting the film in and around LA, and we'll finish principal photography December tenth. Then Jason's got a lot of work to do, what with the editing, the whole schmear, but Christmas week we're just stopping. We'd like you to be here. Say you will.'

'I'd sure like to meet the man smart enough to fall for you, Thelma, but I don't know. I feel… safe here.'

'What do you think — we're dangerous?'

'You know what I mean.'

'You can bring an Uzi.'

'What will Jason think of that?'

'I'll tell him you're a radical leftist, save-the-sperm-whale, get-toxic-preservatives-out-of-Spam, parakeet liberationist and that you keep an Uzi with you at all times in case the revolution comes without warning. He'll buy it. This is Hollywood, kid. Most of the actors he works with are politically crazier than that.'

Through the family-room archway, Laura could see Chris curled up in the armchair with his book.

She sighed. 'Maybe it is time we got out in the world once in a while. And it's going to be a difficult Christmas if it's just Chris and me, this being the first without Danny. But I feel uneasy…'

'It's been over ten months, Laura,' Thelma said gently.

'But I'm not going to let down my guard.'

'You don't have to. I'm serious about the Uzi. Bring your whole arsenal if that'll make you feel better. Just come.'

'Well… all right.'

'Fantastic! I can't wait for you to meet Jason.'

'Do I detect that the love this brain-damaged Hollywood maven feels for you is reciprocated?'

'I'm crazy about him,' Thelma admitted.

'I'm happy for you, Thelma. In fact I'm standing here now with a grin that won't stop, and nothing's made me feel so good in months.'

Everything she said was true. But after she hung up, she missed Danny more than ever.

8

As soon as he set the timer behind the filing cabinet, Stefan left his third-floor office and went to the main lab on the ground floor. It was 12:14, and because the scheduled jaunt was not until two o'clock, the main lab was deserted. The windows were sealed, and most of the overhead lights were still off, as they had been little more than an hour ago, when he had returned from the San Bernardinos. The multitude of dials, gauges, and lighted graphs of the support machinery glowed green and orange. More in shadow than in the light, the gate awaited him.

Four minutes till detonation.

He went directly to the primary programming board and carefully adjusted the dials and switches and levers, setting the gate for the desired destination: southern California, near Big Bear, at eight-o'clock on the night of January 10, 1988, just a few hours after Danny Packard had been killed. He had done the necessary calculations days ago and had them on a sheet of paper to which he referred, so he was able to program the machinery in only a minute.

If he could have traveled to the afternoon of the tenth, prior to the accident and the shoot-out with Kokoschka, he would have done so in the hope of saving Danny. However, they had learned that a time traveler could not revisit a place if he scheduled his second arrival shortly before his previous jaunt; there was a natural mechanism that prevented a traveler from being in a place where he might encounter himself on a previous jaunt. He could return to Big Bear after he had left Laura that January night, for having already departed from the highway, he was no longer at risk of encountering himself there. But if he set the gate for an arrival time that would make it possible for him to meet himself, he would simply bounce back to the institute without going anywhere. That was one of many mysterious aspects of time travel which they had learned, around which they worked, but which they did not understand.

When he finished programming the gate, he glanced at the latitude and longitude indicator to confirm that he would arrive in the general area of Big Bear. Then he looked at the clock that noted his arrival time, and he was startled to see that it showed 8:00 p.m., January 10, 1989, instead of 1988. The gate was now set to deliver him to Big Bear not hours after Danny's death but a full year later.

He was sure that his calculations were correct; he'd had plenty of time to make them and recheck them over the past couple of weeks. Evidently, nervous as he was, he had made a mistake when entering the numbers. He would have to reprogram the gate.

Less than three minutes until detonation.

He blinked sweat out of his eyes and studied the numbers on the paper, the end product of his extensive calculations. As he reached for a control knob to cancel out the current program and re-enter the first of the figures again, a shout of alarm went up in the ground-floor corridor. The cries sounded as if they were coming from the north end of the building, in the general area of the document room.

Someone had found the bodies of Januskaya and Volkaw. He heard more shouting. People running. Glancing nervously at the closed door to the hall, he decided he had no time to reprogram. He would have to settle for