Lightning

fist.

Instead of dinner she wanted answers to her questions, but she'd led a life that had taught her patience — among other things. When they had checked into the motel shortly after eleven that morning, Laura had noticed a Chinese restaurant across the street. Now, though reluctant to leave Stefan and Chris, she went out into the rain to get some take-out food.

She carried the.38 under her jacket and left the Uzi on the bed with Stefan. Though the carbine was too big and powerful for Chris to handle, Stefan might be able to brace himself against the headboard and trigger a burst even with just his right hand, though the shock of recoil would shatter through his wound.

When she returned, dripping rain, they put the waxed-cardboard containers of food on the bed — except for the two orders of egg-flower soup, which were for Stefan, and which she put on the nightstand near him. Upon walking into the aromatic restaurant, she had found her own appetite, and naturally she had ordered far too much food: lemon chicken, beef with orange flavor, brown-pepper shrimp, moo goo gai pan, moo shu pork, and two containers of rice.

As she and Chris sampled all of the dishes with plastic forks and washed the food down with Cokes that she had gotten from the motel's soda machine, Stefan drank his soup. He had thought he could not hold down more solid food, but with the soup disposed of, he cautiously began to try the moo goo gai pan and the lemon chicken.

At Laura's request he told them about himself while they ate. He had been born in 1909 in the German town of Gittelde in the Harz Mountains, which made him thirty-five years old. ('Well,' Chris said, 'on the other hand, if you count the forty-five years you skipped when you traveled in time from '44 to '89, you're actually eighty years old!' He laughed, pleased with himself. 'Boy, you sure look good for an eighty-year-old geezer!') After moving the family to Munich following the First World War, Stefan's father, Franz Krieger, had been an early supporter of Hitler in 1919, a member of the German Workers' Party from the very week that Hitler began his political career in that organization. He even worked with Hitler and Anton Drexler to write the platform with which that group, essentially a debating society, was eventually transformed into a true political party, later to become the National Socialists.

'I was one of the first members of the Hitler Youth in 1926, when I was seventeen,' he said. 'Less than a year later I joined the Sturmabteilung or the SA, the brown shirts, the enforcement arm of the party, virtually a private army. By 1928, however, I was a member of the Schutzstaffel—'

'The SS!' Chris said, speaking in the same tone of horror mixed with strange attraction that he would have used if he had been talking of vampires or werewolves. 'You were a member of the SS? You wore the black uniform and the silver death's-head, carried the dagger?'

'I'm not proud of it,' Stefan Krieger said. 'Oh, at the time I was proud, of course. I was a fool. My father's fool. In the early days the SS was a small group, the essence of elitism, and our purpose was to protect der Fuhrer with our own lives if that was necessary. We were all eighteen to twenty-two, young and ignorant and hotheaded. In my own defense I'll say that I was not particularly hotheaded, not as committed as those around me. I was doing what my father wanted, but of ignorance I'll admit to having more than my fair share.'

Windblown rain rattled against the window and gurgled noisily in a downspout beyond the outside wall against which the bed stood.

Since awakening from his nap, Stefan had looked healthier, and he had perked up even more with the hot soup. But now, as he recalled a youth spent in a cauldron of hatred and death, he paled again, and his eyes seemed to sink deeper into the darkness under his brow. 'I never left the SS because it was such a desired position and there was no way to leave without arousing suspicion that I'd lost my faith in our revered leader. But year by year, month by month, then day by day I became sickened by what I saw, by the madness and murder and terror.'

Neither the brown-pepper shrimp nor the lemon chicken tasted too good any longer, and Laura's mouth was so dry that the rice stuck to the roof of it. She pushed the food aside, sipped her Coke. 'But if you never left the SS… when did you go to college, when did you get involved in scientific research?'

'Oh,' he said, 'I wasn't at the institute as a researcher. I've no university education. Except… for two years I received intensive instruction in English, trying to learn to speak with an acceptable American accent. I was part of a project that dropped hundreds of deep-cover agents into Britain and the United States. But I never could quite cast off the accent, so I was never sent overseas; besides, because my father was an early supporter of Hitler, they felt I was trustworthy, so they found other uses for me. I was on special assignment to der Fuhrer's staff, where I was given sensitive jobs, usually as a liaison between squabbling factions of the government. It was an excellent position from which to obtain information useful to the British, which I did from 1938 on.'

'You were a spy?' Chris asked excitedly.

'Of a sort. I had to do what little I could to bring down the Reich, to make up for ever having been a willing part of it. I had to atone — though atoning seemed impossible. And then, in the autumn of 1943, when Penlovski began to have some success with his time gate, sending animals off to God-knew-where and bringing them back, I was assigned to the institute as an observer, as der Fuhrer's personal representative. Also as a guinea pig, as the first human to be sent forward in time. You see, when they were ready to send a man into the future, they did not want to risk Penlovski or Januskaya or Helmut Vblkaw or Mitter or Shenck or one of the other scientists whose loss would damage the project. No one knew if a man would come back as reliably as the animals did — or if he would come back sane and whole.'

Chris nodded solemnly. 'It's possible time travel might've been painful or mentally unbalancing or something, yeah. Who could know?'

Who could know indeed? Laura thought.

Stefan said, 'They also wanted whomever they sent to be reliable and capable of keeping his mission a secret. I was the ideal choice.'

'An SS officer, a spy, and the first chrononaut,' Chris said. 'Wow, what a fascinating life.'

'May God give you a life far less eventful,' Stefan Krieger said. Then he looked at Laura more directly than previously. His eyes were a beautiful, pure blue, yet they revealed a tortured soul. 'Laura… what do you think of your guardian now? Not an angel but an aide to Hitler, an SS thug.'

'No thug,' she said. 'Your father, your time, and your society may have tried to make a thug of you, but there was an inner core they couldn't bend. Not a thug, Stefan Krieger. Never. Not you.'

'No angel, though,' he said. 'Far from an angel, Laura. Upon my death, when the stains on my soul are read by He who sits in judgment, I'll be given my own small space in hell.'

The rain drumming on the roof seemed like time flowing away, many millions of precious minutes, hours and days and years pouring through gutters and downspouts, draining away, wasted.

After she had gathered up the unfinished food and thrown it in a dumpster behind the motel office, after she'd gotten three more Cokes from the machine, one for each of them, she at last asked her guardian the question she had wanted to ask him from the moment he had come out of his coma: 'Why? Why did you focus on me, on my life, and why did you want to help me along, to save my butt now and then? For God's sake, how does my fate tie up with Nazis, time travelers, the fate of the world?'

On his third trip into the future, he explained, he had traveled to California in 1984. California because his previous two trips — two weeks in 1954, two weeks in 1964—had shown him that California was perhaps the coming cultural and current scientific center of the most advanced nation on earth. Nineteen eighty-four because it was a neat forty years from his own time. He was not the only man going through the gate by then; four others began making jaunts as soon as it was proved safe. On that third trip Stefan had still been scouting the future, learning in detail what had happened to the world during and after the war. He was also learning what scientific developments of the intervening forty years would most likely be taken back to Berlin in '44 to win the war for Hitler, not because he intended to help in that design but because he hoped to sabotage it. His researches involved reading newspapers, watching television, and just circulating in American society, getting a feel for the late twentieth century.

Leaning back on his pillows now, recalling that third journey in a voice utterly different from the gloom with which he had described his grim life up to 1944, he said, 'You can't imagine what it was like for me to walk the streets of Los Angeles for the first time. If I had traveled one thousand years into the future instead of forty, it