Dean Koontz - Lightning

As she dropped down below the line of fire again, she found that she was grinning fiercely. She was intensely pleased by the pain and horror that the wounded man's screams conveyed. Her savage reaction, the primitive power of her thirst for blood and revenge, startled her, but she held fast to it because she sensed that she would be a better and more clever fighter while in the spell of that primal rage.

One down. Perhaps only two more to go.

And soon Stefan would be here. No matter how long his work required in 1944, Stefan would program the gate to bring him back here shortly after he had left. He would rejoin her — and enter the fight — in only two or three minutes.

The prime minister happened to be looking directly at Stefan when he materialized, but the man in uniform — a sergeant — became aware of him because of the discharge of electrical energy that accompanied his arrival. Thousands of bright snakes of blue-white light wriggled away from Stefan, as if his very flesh had generated them. Perhaps deep crashes of thunder and bolts of lightning shattered the sky in the world above these underground rooms, but some of the displaced energy of time travel was expended here, as well, in a sizzling display that brought the uniformed man straight to his feet in surprise and fear. The hissing serpents of electricity streaked across the floor, up the walls, coalesced briefly on the ceiling, then dissipated, leaving everyone unharmed; the only damage was to a large wall map of Europe, which had been seared in several places but not set aflame.

"Guards!" the sergeant shouted. He was unarmed but evidently quite sure that his cry would be heard and answered swiftly, for he repeated it only once and made no move toward the door. "Guards!"

"Mr. Churchill, please," Stefan said, ignoring the sergeant, "I'm not here to do you any harm."

The door flew open and two British soldiers entered the room, one holding a revolver, the other an automatic carbine.

Speaking hastily, afraid he was about to be shot, Stefan said, "The future of the world depends on your hearing me out, sir, please."

Throughout the excitement, the prime minister had remained seated in the armchair at the end of the table. Stefan believed that he had seen a brief flash of surprise and perhaps even a glimmer of fear on the great man's face, but he would not have bet on it. Now the prime minister looked as bemused and implacable as in every photograph that Stefan had ever seen of him. He raised one hand to the guards: "Hold a moment." When the sergeant began to protest, the prime minister said, "If he had meant to kill me, certainly he would have done so already, on arrival." To Stefan he said, "And that was some entrance, sir. As dramatic as any that young Olivier has ever made."

Stefan could not help but smile. He stepped out of the corner, but when he moved toward the table, he saw the guards stiffen, so he stopped and spoke from a distance. "Sir, by the very manner that I've arrived here, you know I'm no ordinary messenger and that what I have to tell you must be… unusual. It's also highly sensitive, and you may not wish to have my information conveyed to any ears but yours."

"If you expect us to leave you alone with the PM," the sergeant said, "you're. you're mad!"

"He may be mad," the prime minister said, "but he's got flair. You must admit that much, Sergeant. If the guards search him and find no weapons, I'll give the gentleman a bit of my time, as he asks."

"But, sir, you don't know who he is. You don't know what he is. The way he exploded into—"

Churchill cut him off. "I know how he arrived, Sergeant. And please remember that only you and I do know. I will expect you to remain as tight-lipped about what you've seen here as you would about any other bit of war information that might be considered classified."

Chastened, the sergeant stood to one side and glowered at Stefan while the guards conducted a body search.

They found no weapons, only the books in the rucksack and a few papers in Stefan's pockets. They returned the papers and stacked the books in the middle of the long table, and Stefan was amused to see that they had not noticed the nature of the volumes they'd handled.

Reluctantly, carrying his pencil and dictation pad, the sergeant accompanied the guards out of the room, as the prime minister had instructed. When the door closed, Churchill motioned Stefan to the chair that the sergeant had vacated. They sat in silence a moment, regarding each other with interest. Then the prime minister pointed to a steaming pot that stood on a serving tray. "Tea?"

Twenty minutes later, when Stefan had told only half of the condensed version of his story, the prime minister called for the sergeant in the corridor. "We'll be here a while yet, Sergeant. I will have to delay the War Cabinet meeting by an hour, I'm afraid. Please see that everyone is informed — and with my apologies."

Twenty-five minutes after that, Stefan finished.

The prime minister asked a few more questions — surprisingly few but well-thought and to the heart of the matter. Finally he sighed and said, "It's terribly early for a cigar, I suppose, but I'm in the mood to have one. Will you join me?"

"No, thank you, sir."

As he prepared the cigar for smoking, Churchill said, "Aside from your spectacular entrance — which really proves nothing but the existence of a revolutionary means of travel, which might or might not be time travel — what evidence do you have to convince a reasonable man that the particulars of your story are true?"

Stefan had expected such a test and was prepared for it. "Sir, because I have been to the future and read portions of your account of the war, I knew you would be in this room at this hour on this day. Furthermore I knew what you would be doing here in the hour before your meeting with the War Cabinet."

Drawing on his cigar, the prime minister raised his eyebrows.

"You were dictating a message to General Alexander in Italy, expressing your concerns about the conduct of the battle for the town of Cassino, which has been dragging on at a terrible cost of life."

Churchill remained inscrutable. He must have been surprised by Stefan's knowledge, but he would not provide encouragement even with a nod or a narrowing of his eyes.

Stefan needed no encouragement because he knew that what he said was correct. "From the account of the war that you will eventually write, I memorized the opening of that message to General Alexander — which you had not even finished dictating to the sergeant when I arrived a short while ago: 'I wish you would explain to me why this passage by Cassino Monastery Hill, et cetera, all on a front of two or three miles, is the only place which you must keep butting at.' "

The prime minister drew on his cigar again, blew out smoke, and studied Stefan intensely. Their chairs were only a few feet apart, and being the object of Churchill's thoughtful scrutiny was more unnerving than Stefan would have expected.

At last the prime minister said, "And you got that information from something I will write in the future?"

Stefan rose from his chair, retrieved the six thick books that the guards had taken from his rucksack — Houghton Mifflin Company's trade-paperback reprints published at $9.95 each — and spread them out on the end of the table in front of Winston Churchill. "This, sir, is your six-volume history of the Second World War, which will stand as the definitive account of that conflict and be hailed as both a great work of history and literature." He was going to add that those books were largely responsible for Churchill's being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953, but decided not to make that revelation. Life would be less interesting if robbed of such grand surprises.

The prime minister examined the covers of all six books, front and back, and permitted himself a smile when he read the three-line excerpt from the review that had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. He opened one volume and swiftly riffled the pages, not pausing to read anything.