Dean Koontz - Lightning

As Laura and Chris listened rapt, Stefan Krieger told them how he had planted explosives in the institute how on the last of his days in '44 he had shot Penlovski, Januskaya, and Volkaw, and had programmed the time gate to bring him to Laura in present-day America.

But something had gone wrong at the last minute, as Stefan was leaving. The public power supply failed. The RAF had bombed Berlin far the first time in January that year, and the U.S. bombers had made die first daylight runs on March 6, so the power supply had been interrupted often, not merely due to bomb damage but also because of die work of saboteurs. It was to guard against such interruptions that the gate itself was powered by a secure generator. Stefan beard no bombers that day when, wounded by Kokoschka, he had crawled into the gate, so apparently the power failed because of saboteurs.

"And the timer on the explosives stopped. The gate was not destroyed. It's still open back there, and they can come after us. And. they can still win the war."

Laura was getting another headache. She put her fingertips to her temples. "But wait. Hitler can't have succeeded in building atomic weapons and winning World War Two, because we don't live in a world where that happened. You don't have to worry. Somehow, in spite of all the knowledge they took back through the gate, they obviously failed to develop a nuclear arsenal."

"No," he said. "They've failed so far, but we can't assume they will continue to fail. To those men at the institute in Berlin in 1944, their past is immutable, as I have said. They cannot travel backward in time and change their own past. But they can change their future and ours, because a time traveler's future is mutable; he can take steps to alter it."

"But his future is my past," Laura said. "And if the past can't be changed, how can he change mine?" "Yeah," Chris said. "Paradox."

Laura said, "Listen, I haven't spent the last thirty-four years in a world ruled by Adolf Hitler and his heirs; therefore, in spite of the gate, Hitler failed."

Stefan's expression was dismal. "If time travel were invented now, in 1989, that past of which you speak — World War Two and every event since — would be unalterable. You could not change it, for nature's rule against backward time-travel and time-travel paradoxes would apply to you. But time travel has not been discovered here — or rediscovered. The time travelers at the institute in Berlin in '44 are free to change their future, apparently, and though they will simultaneously be changing your past, nothing in the laws of nature will stop them. And there you have the greatest paradox of all — the only one that for some reason nature seems to allow."

"You're saying they could still build nuclear weapons back then with the information they got in '85," Laura said, "and win the war?"

"Yes. Unless the institute is destroyed first." "And what then? Suddenly, all around us, we find things changed, find ourselves living under Nazism?"

"Yes. And you won't even know what's happened, because you will be a different person than you are now. Your entire past will never have occurred. You will have lived a different past altogether, and you will remember nothing else, none of what has happened to you in this life because this life will never have existed. You will think the world has always been as it is, that there was never a world in which Hitler lost." What he was proposing terrified and appalled her because it made life seem even more fragile than she had always thought it was. The world under her feet suddenly seemed no more real than the world of a dream; it was apt to dissolve without warning and send her tumbling into a great, dark void.

With growing horror she said, "If they change the world in which I grew up, I might never have met Danny, never married."

"I might never have been born." Chris said.

She reached to Chris and put a hand on his arm, not only to reassure him but to reassure herself of his current solidity. "I might not have been born myself. Everything I've seen, the good and bad of the world that's been since 1944. it'll all wash away like an elaborate sandcastle, and a new reality will exist in its place."

"A new and worse reality," Stefan said, clearly exhausted by the effort he had made to explain what was at stake.

"In that new world, I might never have written my novels."

"Or if you wrote novels,” Stefan said, "they would be different from those you've done in this life, grotesque works produced by an artist laboring under the rule of an oppressive government, in the iron fist of Nazi censorship.”

"If those guys built the atom bomb in 1944," Chris said, "then we’ll all crumble away into dust and blow away."

"Not literally. But like dust, yes," Stefan Krieger agreed. Gone, with no trace that we've ever been."

"We've gotta stop them." Chris said.

"If we can," Stefan agreed. "But first we've got to stay alive in: his reality, and that might not be easy."

Stefan needed to relieve himself, and Laura helped him into the motel bathroom, handling him as if she were a nurse accustomed to matter-of-fact dealings with the plumbing of sick men. By the time she returned him to the bed, she was worried about him again; though he was muscular, he felt limp, clammy, and he was frighteningly weak.

She told him briefly about the shoot-out at Brenkshaw's, through which he had remained comatose. "If these assassins are coming from the past instead of the future, how do they know where to find us? How did they know in 1944 that we'd be at Dr. Brenkshaw's when we were, forty-five years later?"

"To find you," Stefan said, "they made two trips. First, they went farther into the future, a couple of days farther, to this coming weekend perhaps, to see if you had shown up anywhere by then. If you hadn't — and apparently you had not — then they started checking the public record. Back issues of newspapers, for one thing. They looked for the stories about the shooting at your house last night, and in those stories they read that you'd taken a wounded man to Brenkshaw's place in San Bernardino. So they simply returned to '44 and made a second trip — this time to Dr. Brenkshaw's in the early hours of this morning, January 11."

"They can hopscotch around us," Chris told Laura. "They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like… if we were cowboys and the Indians were all psychic."

"Who was Kokoschka?" Chris wanted to know. "Who was the man who killed my dad?"

"Head of institute security," Stefan said.".He claimed to be a distant relation of Oskar Kokoschka, the noted Austrian expressionist painter, but I doubt if it was true because in our Kokoschka there was no hint of an artist's sensitivity. Standartenfuhrer — which means Colonel — Heinrich Kokoschka was an efficient killer for the Gestapo."

"Gestapo," Chris said, awestruck. "Secret police?"

"State police," Stefan said. "Widely known to exist but allowed to operate in secrecy. When he showed up on that mountain road in 1988, I was as surprised as you. There'd been no lightning. He must have arrived far away from us, fifteen or twenty miles, in some other valley of the San Bernardinos, and the lightning had been beyond our notice." The lightning associated with time travel was in fact a very localized phenomenon, Stefan explained. "After Kokoschka showed up there, on my trail, I thought I would return to the institute and find all of my colleagues outraged at my treason, but when I got there, no one took special notice of me. I was confused. Then after I killed Penlovski and the others, when I was in the main lab preparing for my final jaunt into the future. Heinrich Kokoschka burst in and shot me. He wasn't dead! Not dead on that highway in 1988. Then I realized that Kokoschka had obviously only just learned of my treason when he'd found the men I’d shot. He would travel to 1988 and try to kill me — and all of you — at a later time. Which meant that the gate would have to remain open to allow him to do so, and that I was destined to fail to destroy it. At least at that time."