He stared at the Uzi and wondered if he could send
But maybe he could send her something else, something that came from this room, something he had not been carrying with him and that would not, therefore, create a paradox.
He pushed the guns aside, picked up a pencil, and wrote a brief message on a sheet of tablet paper: THE SS WILL KILL YOU AND CHRIS IF YOU STAY AT THE CAR. GET AWAY, HIDE, He paused, thinking. Where could they hide on that flat desert plain? He wrote: maybe in THE ARROYO. He tore the sheet of paper from the tablet. Then as an afterthought he hastily added: THE SECOND CANISTER OF VEXXON. IT'S A WEAPON TOO.
He searched the drawers of the lab bench for a glass beaker with a narrow top, but there were no such vessels in that lab, where all of the research had been related to electromagnetism rather than to chemistry. He went down the hall, searching through other labs, until he found what he needed.
Back in the main lab, carrying the beaker with the note inside it, he entered the gate and approached the point of transmission. He threw the object through the energy field as if he were a man stranded on an island, throwing a bottled message into the sea.
It did not bounce back to him.
— but the brief vacuum was followed by a blustery inrush of hot wind tainted by the faintly alkaline smell of the desert.
Standing close at her side, holding fast to her, delighted by Stefan's magical departure, Chris said, 'Wow! Wasn't that something, Mom, wasn't that great?'
She did not answer because she noticed a white car driving off state route 111, onto the desert floor.
Lightning flared, thunder shook the day, startling her, and a glass bottle appeared in midair, fell at her feet, shattering on the shale, and she saw that there had been a paper inside.
Chris snatched the paper from among the shards of glass. With his usual aplomb in these matters, he said, 'It must be from Stefan!'
She took it from him, read the words, aware that the white car had turned toward them. She did not understand how and why this message had been sent, but she believed it implicitly. Even as she finished reading, with the lightning and thunder still flickering and rumbling through the sky, she heard the engine of the white car roar.
She looked up and saw the vehicle leap toward them as its driver accelerated. They were almost three hundred yards away, but were closing as fast as the rough desert terrain permitted.
'Chris, get both Uzis from the car and meet me at the edge of the arroyo. Hurry!'
As the boy sprinted to the open door of the nearby Buick, Laura raced to the open trunk. She grabbed the canister of Vexxon, lifted it out, and caught up with Chris before he had reached the brink of the deep, naturally carved water channel, which was a raging river during a flash flood but dry now.
The white car was less than a hundred and fifty yards away.
'Come on,' she said, leading him eastward along the brink, 'we've got to find a way down into the arroyo.'
The walls of the channel sloped slightly to the bottom thirty feet below, but only slightly. They were carved by erosion, filled with miniature vertical channels leading down to the main channel, some as narrow as a few inches, some as wide as three and four feet; during a rainstorm, water poured off the surface of the desert, down those gulleys to the floor of the arroyo, where it was carried away in great, surging torrents. In some of the down- sloping drains the soil had washed away to reveal rocks here and there that would impede a swift descent, while others were partially blocked by hardy mesquite bushes that had taken root in the very wall of the arroyo.
Little more than a hundred yards away, the car strayed off the shale into sand that pulled at the tires and slowed it down.
When Laura had gone only twenty yards along the edge of the arroyo, she discovered a wide channel leading straight down to the floor of that dry river, unobstructed by rocks or mesquite. What lay before her was essentially a four-foot-wide, thirty-foot-long, water-smoothed, dirt slide.
She dropped the canister of Vexxon into that natural run, and it slipped down halfway before halting.
She took one of the Uzis from Chris, turned to the approaching car, which was now about seventy-five yards away, and opened fire. She saw bullets punch at least two holes in the windshield. The rest of the tempered glass instantly crazed.
The car — she could see now that it was a Toyota — spun out, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees, then ninety degrees more, throwing up clouds of dust, tearing through a couple of still green tumbleweeds. It came to rest about forty yards from the Buick, sixty yards from her and Chris, the front end pointed north. Doors flew open on the far side. Laura knew the occupants were scrambling out of the car where she would not see them, staying low.
She took the other Uzi from Chris and said, 'Into the slide, kiddo. When you reach the canister of gas, push it ahead of you all the way to the bottom.'
He went down the wall of the arroyo, pulled most of the way by the force of gravity but having to scoot along a couple of times when friction stopped him. It was exactly the kind of daredevil stunt that would have raised a mother's ire under other circumstances, but now she cheered him on.
She pumped at least a hundred rounds into the Toyota, hoping to pierce the fuel tank and set off the gasoline with a bullet-made spark, roasting the bastards as they huddled against the far side. But she emptied the magazine without the desired result.
When she stopped shooting, they took a crack at her. She did not stay long enough to give them a target. With the second Uzi held before her in both hands, she sat on the edge of the arroyo and shoved off into the slide that Chris had already used. In seconds she was at the bottom.
Dry tumbleweeds had blown down to the floor of the gulch from the desert above. Gnarled driftwood, some time-grayed lumber washed from the distant ruins of an old desert shack, and a few stones littered the powder-soft soil that formed the bed of the arroyo. None of those things offered a place to hide or protection from the gunfire that would soon be directed down at them. 'Mom?' Chris said, Meaning: What now? The arroyo would have scores of tributaries spread out across the desert, and many of those tributaries would have tributaries of their own. The drainage network was like a maze. They could not hide in it forever, but perhaps by putting a few branches of the system between themselves and their pursuers, they would gain time to plan an ambush.
She said, 'Run, baby. Follow the main arroyo, take the first right-hand branch you come to, and wait there for me.'
'What're you going to do?'
'I'll wait for them to look over the edge up there,' she said, pointing to the top of the palisades, 'then pick them off if I can. Now go,
To the east, Chris vanished around a turn into a tributary of the main channel.
A moment later she heard voices. She waited, waited, giving them time to feel confident that both she and Chris were gone. Then she stepped out from the erosion channel in the arroyo wall, turned, and swept the top of the cliff with bullets.
Four men were there, peering down, and she killed the first two, but the third and fourth leaped backward, out of sight before the arc of fire reached them. One of the bodies lay at the top of the arroyo wall, one arm and leg over the brink. The other fell all the way to the floor of the channel, losing his sunglasses on the way.
March 16, 1944. The institute.
When the bottle with the message did not bounce back to him, Stefan was reasonably confident that it had reached Laura before she had been killed, only seconds after he had first departed for 1944.
Now he returned to the programmer's desk and set to work on the calculations that would return him to the desert a few minutes
