Orion

CHAPTER 1

I am not superhuman.

I do have abilities that are far beyond those of any normal man’s, but I am just as human and mortal as anyone on Earth.

The core of my abilities is apparently in the structure of my nervous system. I can take completely conscious control of my entire body. I can direct my will along the chain of synapses instantly to make any part of my body do exactly what I wish it to do.

Last year I learned to play the piano in two hours. My teacher, a mild, gray little man, absolutely refused to believe that I had never touched a keyboard before that day. Earlier this year I stunned a Tae Kwan Do master by learning in less than a week everything he had absorbed in a lifetime of unceasing work. He tried to be humble and polite about it, but it was clear that he was furious with me and deeply ashamed of himself for being so. I left his class.

My powers are growing. I have always been able to control my heartbeat and breathing. I thought everyone could until I began reading about yogis and their “mystical” abilities. For me, their tricks are child’s play.

Two months ago I found myself sitting in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. I tend to be a solitary man, so I often take my lunch hour late enough to avoid the noisy crowds. It was after3:00 p.m. and the restaurant was almost empty. A few couples were sitting at scattered tables, speaking in hushed tones. A middle-aged pair of tourists were studying the French menu warily, suspicious of food they had never heard of before. A couple of secret lovers sat well toward the rear, holding hands furtively, glancing up toward the door every few seconds. One young woman sat alone, not far from my own table near the front of the restaurant. She was beautiful, with dark hair curling at her shoulders and the strong, classic facial features that marked her as a photographer’s model.

She happened to glance in my direction, and her calm, intelligent eyes penetrated to my soul. Her eyes were large, gray as a polar sea, and seemed to hold all the knowledge of the world. Suddenly I realized that I was not merely a solitary man; I was a lonely man. Like a love-struck puppy, I wanted desperately to go over to her table and introduce myself.

But her gaze shifted to the door. I turned to see a man enter, a strikingly handsome, gold-maned man of that indeterminate age between thirty and fifty. He stood by the door for a moment, then went to the bar up by the curtained plate glass window and took a stool. Even though he was wearing a conservative gray business suit, he looked more like a movie idol or an ancient Greek god than a Manhattan executive who was getting an early start on the cocktail hour.

My gray-eyed beauty stared at him, as if unable to pull herself free of his spell. There was an aura about him, a golden radiance. The air almost seemed to glow where he was sitting. Deep inside me, a long-buried memory began to nag at me. I felt that I knew him, that I had met him long ago. But I could not remember where or when or under what circumstances.

I looked back at the young woman. With a visible effort, she tore her gaze away from the golden man and looked toward me. The corners of her lips curled upward slightly in a smile that might have been an invitation. But the door opened again and she looked away from me once more.

Another man entered the restaurant and went directly to the bar, sitting around its curve so that his back faced the curtained window. If the first man was a golden angel, this one had the look of amidnight netherworld about him. His face was heavy and grim; his muscular body bulged his clothing. His hair was jet black and his eyes burned angrily under heavy, bushy brows. Even his voice seemed heavy and dark with fury when he ordered a brandy.

I finished my coffee and decided to ask for my check, then stop at the model’s table on my way out. I started to look for my waiter among the four of them loafing by the kitchen doors in the rear of the restaurant, conversing in a mixture of French and Italian. That is what saved me.

A bald little man in a black coat popped out of the kitchen’s swinging door and tossed a black egg-shaped object the length of the restaurant. A hand grenade.

I saw it all as if it were happening in slow motion. I realize now that my reflexes must have suddenly gone into overdrive, operating at a fantastically fast rate. I saw the man ducking back inside the kitchen, the waiters stiffening with surprise, the couples at the other tables still talking, not realizing that death was a second or two away. The young beauty a few tables away from me had her back to the grenade, but the bartender stared straight at it as it clunked on the carpet and rolled lumpily along to within five feet of me.

I shouted a warning and leaped across the intervening tables to knock the young model out of the way of the blast. We thudded to the floor, me on top of her. The clatter of dishes and glassware was lost in the roar of the explosion. The room flashed and thundered. It shook. Then — smoke, screams, the heat of flames, the acrid smell of the explosive.

I got to my feet unharmed. Her table was splintered and the wall behind us shredded by shrapnel. Smoke filled the room. I got to my knees and saw that the young woman was unconscious. There was a gash on her forehead, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. I turned and saw through the smoke the other people in the restaurant mangled and bleeding, sprawled on the floor, slumped against the walls. Some were moaning. A woman sobbed.

I took the young model in my arms and carried her out to the sidewalk. Then I went back in and brought out another couple. As I stretched them out on the pavement among the shards of glass from the blown-out window, the police and firemen began to arrive, sirens shrieking. An ambulance was right behind them. I stood aside and let the professionals take over.

There was no sign of either of the two men who had been sitting at the bar. Both the golden one and the dark man seemed to have disappeared the instant the grenade went off. They were gone by the time I had pulled myself up off the floor. The bartender had been cut in half by the blast. His two customers had vanished.

As the firemen extinguished the smoldering blaze, the police laid out four dead bodies on the sidewalk and covered them with blankets. The medics were treating the wounded. They lifted the model, still unconscious, onto a stretcher. More ambulances arrived, and a crowd gathered around the scene, buzzing.

“Goddamned I.R.A.,” grumbled one of the cops.

“Cheez, they’re tossin’ bombs around here, too, now?”

“Coulda been the Puerto Ricans,” another cop suggested, his voice weary, exasperated.

“Or the Serbo-Croatians. They set that bomb off in the Statue of Liberty, remember?”

They questioned me for several minutes, then turned me over to the medics for a quick checkup at the back of one of the ambulances.

“You’re lucky, mister,” said the white-jacketed medic. “You didn’t even get your hair mussed.”

Lucky. I felt numb, as if my whole body had been immersed in a thick enveloping fog. I could see and move and breathe and think. But I could not feel. I wanted to be angry, or grief-stricken, or even frightened. But I was as calm as a stupid cow, staring at the world with placid eyes. I thought about the young woman who was being taken off to a hospital. What made me try to save her? Who was responsible for the bombing? Were they trying to kill her? Or one of the men at the bar?

Or me?

Two TV vans had arrived by now, and the news reporters were speaking to the police captain in charge of the scene while their crews unlimbered their mini-cameras. One of the reporters, a sharpfaced woman with a penetratingly nasal voice, interviewed me for a few minutes. I responded to her questions automatically, my mind dull and slow.

Once the police let me leave, I pushed my way through the milling crowd that had been drawn by the excitement and walked the three blocks back to my office. I told no one about the explosion. I went straight to my private cubicle and shut the door.

As evening fell, I was still sitting at my desk — wondering why the grenade had been thrown and how I had escaped being killed by it. Which led me to wondering why I have such physical abilities and whether those two strangers who disappeared from the bar had the same powers. I thought again about the young woman. Closing my eyes, I recalled from my memory the image of the ambulance that had taken her away. St. Mercy Hospital was printed along its side paneling. A quick check with my desktop computer gave me the hospital’s address. I got up from my desk and left the office, the lights turning off automatically behind me.

CHAPTER 2

It wasn’t until I pushed through the revolving door of St. Mercy’s main entrance that I realized I had no idea of the name of the woman I had come to see. And as I stood there in the middle of the frenetic, crowded, bustling lobby, I saw the foolishness of asking any of the harried-looking receptionists for help. For a few moments I was at a loss; then I spotted a uniformed policeman.

Step by step I went from one police officer to another, asking for information about the people brought in from the bombing earlier that day. I told them I was from the restaurant’s insurance company. Only one of the policemen, a burly black man with a handsome mustache, eyed me suspiciously and asked for identification. I showed him my group insurance card; he barely glanced at it, but it looked official enough to satisfy him. Perhaps my air of utter confidence also helped to convince him.

In less than a half-hour I entered a ward that contained sixteen beds, half of them empty. The nurse in charge led me to the bed where the young model lay, eyes closed, a flesh-toned plastic bandage taped to her forehead.

“Only a few minutes,” the nurse whispered to me.

I nodded.

“Miss Promachos,” the nurse called softly, leaning over the bed. “You have a visitor.”

The young woman’s eyes opened. Those lustrous gray eyes that seemed as deep as eternity.

“Only a few minutes,” the nurse repeated. Then she walked away, her soft-soled shoes squeaking on the tiled floor.

“You… you’re the one who saved me, in the restaurant.”

I could feel my heart throbbing wildly, and I made no effort to slow it. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yes, thanks to you. Only this cut on my forehead; they said I won’t need plastic surgery, it won’t leave a scar.”

“That’s good.”

Her lips curled upward slightly. “And a few bruises on my body and legs from being knocked down.”

“Oh. I’m sorry…”

She laughed. “Don’t be! If you hadn’t knocked me over…” The laughter faded. Her lovely face grew serious.

I stepped closer to the bed. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt seriously. I… I don’t even know your name.”

“Aretha,” she said. “Call me Aretha.” Her voice was a low, soft purr, totally feminine without being high-pitched or shrill.

She didn’t ask me my name, but instead looked at me with a gaze that seemed perfectly calm, yet expectant, as if she were waiting for me to tell her something. Something important. I began to feel uneasy, confused.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked.

My mouth felt dry. “Should I know?”

“You don’t remember?”

Remember what?I wanted to ask her. Instead, I merely shook my head.

She reached out and took my hand. Her fingers felt cool and calming on my skin. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll help you. That’s why I’m here.”

“To help me?” My mind was whirling now. What did she mean?

“Do you remember the two men who were sitting at the bar this afternoon?”

“The golden one…” His image was burning in my memory.

“And the other. The dark one.” Aretha’s face was somber now. “You remember the other one?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t remember who they are, do you?”

“Should I?”

“You must,” she said, gripping my hand tightly. “It is imperative.”

“But I don’t know who they are. I never saw them before today.”

She let her head sink back on the pillows. “You have seen them. We both have. But you can’t remember any of it.”

I heard the squeak-squeak of the nurse’s footsteps approaching. “This is all very confusing,” I said to Aretha. “Why was the restaurant bombed? Who’s behind it all?”

“That’s not important. I’m here to help you recall your mission. What happened this afternoon is trivial.”

“Trivial? Four people were killed!”

The nurse’s hissing whisper cut through our conversation, “That’s all, sir. She needs her rest.”

“But…”

“She needs her rest!”

Aretha smiled at me. “It’s all right. You can come back tomorrow. I’ll tell you about it then.”

Reluctantly, I bade her good-bye and left the hospital.

As I walked slowly through the hospital’s busy maze of corridors, I paid no attention to the people rushing along beside me. Their individual tales of grief and pain were as far from me as the most distant star. My mind was boiling, seething, from the tantalizing scraps of information that Aretha had given me.

She knew me! We had met before. I should have remembered her, and the two men who had been at the bar. But my memory was as blank as a darkened, empty computer screen.

By the time I was walking down the front stairs of St. Mercy’s, looking up the street for a taxi, I decided not to go home. Instead, I gave the cabbie the address of my office building — where my personnel record was on file.

The externals are easy. My name is John G. O’Ryan. That had always made me feel slightly uneasy, as though it wasn’t the proper name for me, not my real name at all. John O’Ryan. It didn’t feel right. I am the chief of marketing research for Continental Electronics Corporation, a multinational firm that manufactures lasers and other high-technology equipment. My personnel file, as I searched through it on my desktop computer, said that I was thirty-six years old, but I’ve always felt younger…

Always?

I tried to remember back to my thirtieth birthday and found with a shock that I could not. My thirty-third birthday was clear in my mind: that was the night I had spent with Adrienna, the boss’ private secretary. It was a memorable occasion. Adrienna was transferred to the company’s London office a few weeks later, and ever since then I seem to have spent all my time with the computers and my work. I tried to recall Adrienna’s face and could not. Nothing came to my mind except the hazy recollection of dark hair, a strong, lithe body, and lustrous gray eyes.

Beyond my thirty-third birthday my mind was a blank. I frowned in concentration so hard that my jaw muscles started to ache, but I still could not remember anything more than three years back. No knowledge of who my parents were. No memories of childhood. I did not even have any friends outside the small circle of acquaintances here at the office.

Cold sweat broke out all over my body. Who am I? Why am I?

I sat in my little office for hours as evening deepened into darkness, alone in my quiet, climate controlled, chrome-and-leather cubicle, behind my sleek desk of Brazilian mahogany, and stared at my own personnel file on the desktop computer screen. There was not very much in it. Names. Dates. Schools. None of them made sense to me or touched the faintest wisp of memory.

I looked up at the polished chrome mirror on the wall across from my desk. John G. O’Ryan looked back at me: a stranger with thick, dark hair, an undistinguished face that had a slightly Mediterranean cast to it (why the O’Ryan, then?), just under six feet tall, with a trim build dressed in an executive’s uniform of dark blue three-piece suit, off-white shirt and carefully knotted maroon tie.

The personnel file said that I had been a good athlete at school. I still felt strong and solid. But totally “average.” I could fade into a crowd and become invisible quite easily.

Who am I?I could not escape the feeling that I had been put here, placed into this life, only three years ago by some power or agency that had wiped clean all memory of my earlier life.

I realized that I had to find out who, or what, had put me here. And Aretha was the key to my past; she knew, and she wanted me to know. My heart was pounding now, my breath fast, almost panting. I was feeling some emotion now, and for several minutes I reveled in it. But then, with a deliberate effort I lowered the adrenaline level in my blood, slowed my heartbeat and breathing rate.

Somehow I knew that the grenade had been meant for me. Not Aretha or anyone else. Me. Someone had tried to kill me. With the total certainty of truly in-built instinct, I realized that to try to discover my origins would mean mortal danger for me. Death. But I could not turn back. I had to know. And I realized that whoever I was, whatever my past had been, it must have involved not only Aretha but those two men as well — the angel and the dark spirit. One of them, perhaps both of them, had tried to kill me.

CHAPTER 3

The morning after the restaurant bombing I strode into my office exactly at nine, a bit later than usual for me. I had to brush aside questions from my secretary and several co-workers who had either seen the story on the evening TV news or were brandishing morning newspapers with a front-page photograph of me standing amid the injured and the dead.

I slid behind my desk and told my computer to phone St. Mercy’s Hospital. The hospital’s answering computer told me, in the warm tones of a trained human actress, that visiting hours were from two to four p.m.and six to eight in the evening. Ms. Promachos was listed in good condition. She could not come to the phone; the doctor was examining her at the moment.

I left a message saying that I would be there at two. Then I did a day’s work, and more, that morning. For some foolish reason I felt wonderful. It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes or a window had suddenly opened to reveal a lovely landscape to me. Yes, I was aware that my memory was virtually a blank, that I did not know who I was or why I was here. I realized that my life was probably in the gravest sort of danger. But even that knowledge was wonderfully exhilarating. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been an emotionless automaton; I hadn’t even guessed that most of my memory had been erased. I was merely going through the motions of being alive. I breathed, but I didn’t feel. Now it was like coming up to the beautifully sunlit surface of the sea after spending much too long in the murky darkness of the depths.

I worked right through the nominal lunch hour; I was much too excited to eat. Like a teen-ager running eagerly to his first date, I left the office just beforetwo o’clockand hailed a taxi down on the crowded, rushing avenue and fidgeted impatiently as the cab wormed its way through the afternoon traffic to St. Mercy’s Hospital.

“Ms. Promachos,” said the nurse behind the desk at the entrance to Aretha’s ward, “checked out about half an hour ago.”

I felt stunned. As if someone had clubbed me between the eyes. “Checked out…?”

“Yes. Are you Mr. O’Ryan?”

I nodded mutely.

“She left a message for you.” The nurse handed me a folded scrap of paper. My name was penciled on it, in what looked like swift, rushing strokes. She had misspelled O’Ryan. I opened the tablet sheet and read: No time. The dark one … Then, in an almost undecipherable scribble, Underground.

I crumpled the sheet in my hand.

“When did you say she left?”

The nurse was an experienced old bird. The look in her narrow eyes told me that she did not want to get involved in a lover’s triangle.

“When?” I repeated.

She glanced at the digital clock on the panel in front of her seat. “Twenty-eight minutes ago, to be exact.”

“Who was with her?”

“I didn’t get his name. She signed herself out.”

“What did he look like?”

She hesitated. I could see a struggle going on inside her head. Then: “A big man. Not quite as tall as you, but… big. Y’know? Wide as a bus. Like a Mafia hit man, only worse. He looked… threatening. Scared you just to see him.”

“Dark complexion, black hair, bushy brows.”

“That’s him.” She nodded. “Only… Ms. Promachos didn’t seem to be afraid of him. I was, but she didn’t look scared at all. Acted like she knew him, like he was a member of her family.”

“Some family.”

The nurse had no idea where they had gone. It was against hospital rules for her to give me Aretha’s home address, but she did it anyway, with only the slightest urging from me. The dark one had truly frightened her.

I took another taxi to the address the nurse had given me, far downtown, near the Brooklyn Bridge. The driver, a Latino from Central America, was quickly lost in the maze of Lower East Sidestreets. I paid him off and walked several blocks, searching for Aretha’s apartment.

There was no such address. The information was fake. I stopped on a street corner, beginning to feel conspicuous in my business suit where everyone else was wearing jeans, fatigues, tee shirts, even shawls that had once been tablecloths. I wasn’t afraid of being mugged; I suppose I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure out why Aretha had given the hospital a phony address. I was certain that the nurse had told me the truth; it was Aretha herself who had falsified her address.

Underground. What did she mean by that? Underground. I looked at the time. She had left the hospital nearly an hour ago. In an hour they could have gone anywhere in this vast, teeming city.

“Hey, that’s a nice watch you got, man.”

I felt the prick of a knifepoint against my back as the foul breath of the man who held it warmed my neck.

“I really like that watch, man,” he said, low, trying to sound menacing.

I was in no mood to be mugged on a busy street corner in broad daylight. This fool was standing close behind me, pressing his knife into the small of my back, trying to rip me off without letting anyone walking past know what was happening.

“Just gimme the watch, shitface, and keep your mouth shut.”

I lifted my hands as if to slip the watch off my wrist, then whirled and gave him an elbow in the abdomen and a backhand chop across the bridge of his nose. The knife clattered to the pavement. The blow to his middle had cut off his wind so he couldn’t even yelp. He sank to his feet, nose broken, blood gushing over his ragged clothes and spattering the cement. I grabbed a handful of his filthy hair and jerked his head back. His face was covered with blood.

“Get out of here before I lose my temper,” I told him. With my left foot I kicked his knife into the gutter.

Gagging, wide-eyed with pain and shock, he staggered to his feet and limped away. A few passersby glanced at me, but no one said a word or lifted a hand to intervene. The city at its finest.

Underground. I heard a subway train rumble beneath my feet, its wheels screeching on the iron rails. Underground is a British word for subway. There was a subway station just outside the hospital’s main entrance. Looking across the street from where I was standing, I saw the entrance to another station. I dashed across the street, leaving a chorus of bleating horns and cursing drivers behind me, and raced down the steps. In the grimy, urine-stinking underground station, I went from one map of the subway system to another until I found one that was readable beneath the spraycan graffiti. Sure enough, a red line connected the station at the hospital with this station downtown.

Underground. They had come down here on the subway and gotten off at this station. I was certain of it. That’s what Aretha’s hastily scribbled message meant.

Now what? Where had they gone from here? A four-car train pulled in, roaring and squealing to a stop. The cars were decorated with bright graffiti paintings, cartoons and names of the “artists.” I found myself scanning the words on the sides of the cars, looking for a message. Foolish desperation. The doors hissed open and everyone got out. I started toward the first car, but a black man in a Transit Authority uniform called out to me:

“End of the line. This train’s goin’ t’ the lay-up. Next train uptown in five minutes. Next train over th’ bridge on the other level.”

The doors hissed shut and the train, empty of passengers, lumbered away from the platform and screeched around a bend in the track. I listened as carefully as I could, filtering out the other echoing noises in the station: the conversations, some kid’s radio blaring rock music, high-pitched laughter from a trio of teen-aged girls. The train went around that curve, out of sight, and then stopped. “The lay-up,” the Transit man had said. Trains taken out of service are kept there, down the track, until they are needed again.

I looked around. No one was paying attention to me. I walked to the end of the platform, vaulted easily over the padlocked, heavy wire gate that barred entry to the tracks, and went down the steps that led to the floor of the tunnel. The steps, the tunnel walls, the railing I touched were coated with years of filth, of grease and accumulated grime. The floor of the tunnel was like a sewer with tracks. In the dim lighting I saw that the electrified third rail, which carried enough current to drive the trains and kill anyone who touched it, was covered by wooden planking. I stepped up onto that; my shoes were already dank from the foul-smelling wetness of the tunnel floor.

In the distance I heard a train approaching. The walls were scalloped with niches for a man to stand in, and as the train’s headlamp glared at me and its whistle hooted, I pressed myself against the grimy wall and let the juggernaut whoosh past. Despite myself, it took my breath away to have the train roar past just a few inches from me.

I pulled myself together and headed along the track after the train had passed. Sure enough, around the bend there were a dozen or more trains standing quiet and idle, side by side. Each of them was decorated with graffiti from one end to another. The overhead lights were spaced far apart; they threw weak pools of dim light into the grimy darkness that enveloped the layup.

They’re here, I told myself. They’re in here somewhere. I stopped and held my breath, listening. Eyesight was of little use in this darkness.

A scampering, slithering sound. The scrape of something hard sliding across the metal tracks. Then a squeaking, cluttering noise. Something brushed against my ankle and I jerked my foot away involuntarily, almost losing my balance on the sagging planks above the electrified rail.

Rats. I peered into the darkness and saw baleful red eyes glaring back at me. Rats. Many of them.

But then I heard voices. I couldn’t make out the words at first, but I could hear that one voice was a woman’s and the other the harsh, ugly, menacing kind of voice that I instantly knew belonged to the dark man I had seen so briefly in the restaurant.

I followed the voices, moving as silently as a wraith, ignoring the evil red eyes of the rats that hovered in the darkness around me.

“What did you tell him?” the man’s voice insisted.

“Nothing.”

“I want to know how much you told him.”

“I didn’t tell him anything.” It was Aretha’s voice, no doubt of it. But then I heard her gasp and give out a painful, frightened sob.

“Tell me!”

I abandoned all attempts at stealth and ran along the warped, loose planks toward their voices. Aretha screamed, a strangled, agonized cry, as I dashed between two of the idle trains and finally saw them in a circle of light.

They were at the end of the tunnel. Aretha was sitting in the filth of the floor, her arms pinned behind her back, the bandage still on her forehead. The dark one stood off to one side, half in shadows, staring down at her. She was surrounded by dozens of rats. Her feet and legs were bare and bleeding. Her blouse was ripped open and a huge rat, malevolent as hell itself, was standing on its hind legs, reaching for her beautiful face.

I gave a wordless roar and charged straight for them. I saw the dark one turn toward me, his eyes as red and vicious as the rats’ own. He seemed to recognize me as I charged down the tunnel toward him, and he backed away into the shadows.

Weaponless, I kicked wildly at the swarm of rats around Aretha, bent down and grabbed one of them in each hand and threw them with all my might against the walls. Turning, wheeling, kicking, flailing, I scattered them in every direction. They fled, screeching, into the protective darkness.

Suddenly they were all gone, and the man with them. I looked down at Aretha. Her eyes stared up at me blindly. Her throat had been ripped out. Her bright red blood spattered my grimy shoes and trousers.

I dropped to my knees and lifted her from the filth. But I was too late. She was dead.

CHAPTER 4

I spent the next two days in a sort of rage induced state of shock, clamping down on my emotions so hard that I felt nothing. Police interrogations, lie detector tests, medical examinations, psychiatric tests — I went through them all like a robot, responding to questions and stimuli without an outward trace of emotion.

For some reason I told no one about the dark man who had killed Aretha. He had murdered her, somehow controlling the rats that had torn out her jugular vein, using them the way another man would use a gun. But I made no mention of him. I merely told the police and the doctors that I had followed Aretha from the hospital and found her as the rats attacked her in the subway lay-up. I was too late to save her. At least that last statement was the truth.

Something buried deep inside my consciousness warned me not to mention the darkly evil man. Far down within me, where the fires of fury lay banked and smoldering, I knew that it would cause me more trouble with the police and the psychiatrists if I mentioned his existence. But more than that, I wanted to track him down and find him myself. I wanted to deal with him with my own hands.

So I withheld the facts. The police detectives I spoke to were no fools. They knew that a woman does not wander into the subways to be attacked by rats and followed by a stranger who had met her only the day before — when they had both been victims of a terrorist bombing. They made it clear that they didn’t believe me and that they wanted to use the lie detector on me. I agreed, as coldly indifferent to their questions as if they had been asking me the time of day or the color of the sky. The lie detector told them what I wanted it to, of course; controlling my pulse rate and perspiration was no great feat for me.

After an overnight atBellevuefor psychiatric observation, the police reluctantly released me. I went home to my apartment and telephoned my employer that I would be in for work at the normal time the following morning. He sounded surprised, asked me how I was feeling after two ordeals in the same week.

“I’m all right,” I said.

It was the truth. I was physically unharmed and emotionally under tight control. Perhaps too tight.

“You sure you don’t want to take the rest of the week off?” my boss asked me. His normally gruff features looked quite solicitous in the telephone’s small picture screen.

“No. I’m fine. I’ll be in tomorrow morning. I hope my being away hasn’t fouled things up too badly around the office.”

He attempted to lighten the situation. “Oh, we can get along without you — for a while. We’ll all look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

By the time I had replaced the phone in its cradle, my mind was away from the office and onto the problem of finding Aretha’s murderer. The dark one. He and the golden man. The two of them were part of — what? My own life, from what Aretha had hinted at.

I tried to remember how they had behaved at the restaurant. They had not said a single word to each other; I was certain of that. They had barely looked at each other, now that I thought of it. But the one glance they had exchanged was not in friendship. Their eyes had locked for the briefest fraction of a second in a link forged by pure hate.

They knew each other. They hated each other. I realized that if I could find one of them, I would certainly find the other close by.

How do you find two individual men in a city of seven and a half million? And what if my conclusions were wrong? Was I insane? Had I caused Aretha’s death, as the police detectives had insinuated during their long interrogation of me? Why couldn’t I remember anything further back than three years ago? Was I an amnesia victim, a paranoid, a madman building murderous fantasies in his mind? Had I invented the two men, created imaginary creatures of light and darkness within the tortured pathways of my own brain?

There was one answer to all these questions. It took me a sleepless night of thinking to find that single, simple answer, but I have never been much of a sleeper. An hour or two has always been sufficient for me; often I have gone several nights in a row with nothing but occasional catnaps. My fellow workers have sometimes complained, jokingly, about the amount of work I take home with me. Once in a while the jokes have been bitter.

The next morning, once I said hello to the office staff and fended off their questions and wondering stares, I went to my cubicle and immediately phoned the company physician. I asked him to recommend a good psychiatrist. On the phone’s small picture screen the doctor looked slightly alarmed.

“Is this about the trouble with the police you’ve been caught in for the past few days?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said to him. “I’m feeling… a little shaky about it.”

Which was no lie.

He peered at me through his bifocals. “Shaky? You? The imperturbable Mr. O’Ryan?”

I said nothing.

“H’mm. Well, I suppose having a hand grenade go off in your soup would shake up anybody. And then that girl dying that way. Pretty grisly.”

I said nothing and kept my face expressionless. He waited a few seconds for me to add something to the conversation, but when he saw that I wasn’t going to, he muttered something to himself and turned aside slightly to check his files.

He gave me the name of a psychiatrist. I called the man and made an appointment for that afternoon. He tried to put me off, but I used the company’s name and our doctor’s, and told him that I wanted only a few minutes for a preliminary talk.

Our meeting was quite brief. I outlined my lack of memory and he quickly referred me to another psychiatrist, a woman who specialized in such problems.

It took several weeks, going from one recommended psychiatrist to another, but finally I reached the one I wanted. He was the only specialist who agreed to see me at once, without hesitation, the day I phoned. He sounded as if he had been expecting me to call. His phone had no picture screen, but I didn’t need one. I knew what he looked like.

“My schedule is very full,” his rich tenor voice said, “but if you could drop into my office around nine tonight, I could see you then.”

“Thank you. Doctor,” I said. “I will.”

The office was quite empty when I got there. I opened the door to the anteroom of his suite. No one was there. It was dark outside, and there were no lights on in the anteroom. Gloomy and dark, lit only by the glow from the city’s lights out on the street below. Old-fashioned furniture. Bookshelves lining the walls. No nurse, no receptionist. No one.

A short hallway led back from the anteroom into a row of offices. A faint glow of light came from the half-open door at the end of the hall. I followed the light and pushed the heavy door fully open.

“Doctor?” I didn’t bother speaking the name that was on the door. I knew it was not the true name of the man in the office.

“O’Ryan,” said that rich tenor voice. “Come right in.”

It was the golden man from the restaurant. The office was small and oppressively overfurnished with two couches, a massive desk, heavy window drapes, thick carpeting. He sat behind the desk, smiling expectantly at me. The only light was from a small floor lamp in a corner of the room, but the man himself seemed to glow, to radiate golden energy.

He wore a simple open-neck shirt. No jacket. He was broad-shouldered, handsome. He looked utterly capable of dealing with anything. His hands were clasped firmly together on the desktop. Instead of casting a shadow, they seemed to make the desktop brighter.

“Sit down, O’Ryan,” he said calmly.

I realized that I was trembling. With an effort I brought my reflexes under control and took the leather armchair in front of his desk. “You said you have a problem with your memory.”

“You know what my problem is,” I told him. “Let’s not waste time.”

He arched an eyebrow and smiled more broadly.

“This isn’t your office. It’s nothing like you. So, since you know my name and yours is not the one on the nameplate on the door, who are you? And who am I?”

“Very businesslike. You have adapted to this culture quite well.” He leaned back in the swivel chair. “You may call me Ormazd. Names really don’t mean that much, you understand, but you may use that one for me.”

“Ormazd.”

“Yes. And now I will tell you something about your own name. You have been misusing it. Your name is Orion… as in the constellation of stars. Orion.”

“The Hunter.”

“Very good! You do understand. Orion the Hunter. That is your name and your mission.”

“Tell me more.”

“There is no need to,” he countered. “You already know what you must know. The information is stored in your memory, but most of it is blocked from your conscious awareness.”

“Why is that?”

His face grew serious. “There is much that I cannot tell you. Not yet. You were sent here on a hunting mission. Your task is to find the Dark One — Ahriman.”

“The man who was in the restaurant with you?”

“Exactly. Ahriman.”

“Ahriman.” So that was his name. “He killed Aretha.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Who was she?” I asked.

Ormazd made a small shrug. “A messenger. Unimportant to the…”

“She was important to me!”

He gazed at me with a new expression in his pale golden eyes. He almost looked surprised. “You only saw her once at the restaurant…”

“And in the hospital that evening,” I added. “And the following day…” My breath caught in my throat. “The following day I saw her die. He killed her.”

“All the more reason for you to find the Dark One,” said Ormazd. “Your task is to find him and destroy him.”

“Why? Who sent me here? From where?”

He sat up straighter in his chair, and something of his self-assured smile returned to his lips. “Why? To save the human race from destruction. Who sent you here? I did. From where? From about fifty thousand years in the future of this present time.”

I should have been shocked, or surprised, or at least skeptical. But instead I felt relieved. It was as if I had known it all along, and hearing the truth from him relaxed my fears. I heard myself mutter, “Fifty thousand years in the future.”

Ormazd nodded solemnly. “That is your time. I sent you back to this so-called twentieth century.”

“To save the human race from destruction.”

“Yes. By finding Ahriman, the Dark One.”

“And once I find him?”

For the first time, he looked surprised. “Why, you must kill him, of course.”

I stared at Ormazd, saying nothing.

“You don’t believe what I have told you?”

I wished I could truthfully say that I didn’t. Instead, I said, “I believe you. But I don’t understand. Why can’t I remember any of this? Why…”

“Temporal shock, perhaps,” he interrupted. “Or maybe Ahriman has already reached your mind and blocked some of its capacities.”

“Some?” I asked.

“Do you know the capacities of your mind? The training we have lavished upon you? Your ability to use each hemisphere of your brain independently?”

“What?”

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

That took me off-guard. “I’m… ambidextrous,” I realized.

“You can write with either hand, can’t you? Play a guitar either way.”

I nodded.

“You have the ability to use both sides of your brain independently of each other,” he said. “You could run a computer and paint a landscape at the same time, using your right hand for one and your left for the other.”

That sounded ridiculous. “I could get a job as a freak in the circus, is that it?”

He smiled again. “More than that, Orion. Far more.”

“What about this Ahriman?” I demanded. “What danger does he pose to the human race?”

“He is evil itself,” Ormazd said, his golden eyes blazing up so brightly that there was no doubt in my mind of his sincerity. “He seeks to destroy the human race. He would scour the Earth clean of human life for all time, if we allow him to.”

Strangely, my mind was accepting all this. It was as if I were re-learning the tales of my childhood. Distant echoes of half-remembered stories stirred within me. But now the stories were real, no longer the legends that elders tell their children.

“If I actually came here from fifty thousand years in the future,” I said slowly, as I worked it out in my mind, “that means that the human race still exists at that time. Which in turns means that the human race was not destroyed here in the Twentieth Century.”

Ormazd sighed petulantly. “Linear thinking.”

“What does that mean?”

Leaning forward and placing his golden-skinned hands on the desktop, he explained patiently, “You did save the human race. It has already happened, in this space-time line. Fifty thousand years in the future, humankind has built a monument to you. It stands in Old Rome, not far from the dome that covers the ancientVatican.”

It was my turn to smile. “Then if I’ve already saved humanity…”

“You must still play your part,” he said. “You must still find Ahriman and stop him.”

“Suppose I refuse?”

“You can’t!” he snapped.

“How do you know?”

The light around him seemed to pulse, as if in anger. “As I told you, it has already happened — in this time line. You have found Ahriman. You have saved the human race. All that you need to do now is to play out the part that our history shows you played.”

“But if I refuse?”

“That is unthinkable.”

“If I refuse?” I insisted.

He glittered like a billion fireflies. His face became grim. “If you do not play out your predestined role — if you do not stop Ahriman — the very fabric of space-time itself will be shattered. This timeline will crack open, releasing enough energy to destroy the universe as we know it. The human race will disappear. All of space-time will be shifted to a different track, a different continuum. The planet Earth will be dissolved. This entire universe of space-time will vanish as though it had never existed.”

He was utterly convincing.

“And if I do cooperate?” I asked.

“You will find Ahriman. You will save the human race from destruction. The space-time continuum will be preserved. The universe will continue.”

“I will kill Ahriman, then?”

He hesitated a long moment before answering slowly, “No. You cannot kill him. You will stop him, prevent him from achieving his goal. But… he will kill you.”

I should have realized that when he’d told me about the monument. I was to be a dead hero. It had already happened that way.

Suddenly it was all too much for me to bear. I shot up from my chair and lunged across the broad desk, reaching for his arm. My hand went completely through Ormazd’s shimmering, gleaming image.

“Fool!” he snapped, as he faded into nothingness.

I was alone in the psychiatrist’s office. I had seen holographic projections before, but never one that looked so convincingly solid and real. My knees were weak from the weight Ormazd had placed upon me. I sank back into the leather chair, totally alone with the knowledge that the fate of all humankind depended on me. And the only human being I really wanted to save was already dead. I could not accept it. My mind refused to think about it.

Instead, I found myself searching the office for the holographic equipment that this trickster had used to project his image. I searched until dawn, but I could not find a laser or any electrovisual equipment of any kind.

CHAPTER 5

For many days I simply refused to consider what Ormazd had told me. It was too fantastic, I kept telling myself. Yet all along, I knew it was true. Every atom of my being knew it was true. I was merely postponing the inevitable.

And deep within me, I burned to find the Dark One, the man who had murdered Aretha. My soul raged to seek him out and destroy him. Not for the cosmic drama that Ormazd had described to me. I wanted my hands around Ahriman’s throat for a very simple, very human reason: justice. Vengeance for my dead love.

Finally, a wisp of memory put me on Ahriman’s trail. I remembered ( remembered!) the origin of the names the golden man used: Ormazd, the god of light and truth; Ahriman, the god of darkness and death. They were from the ancient religion ofPersia, Zoroastrianism, founded by the man the ancient Greeks called Zarathustra.

So the golden one considered himself a god of light and goodness. He was at least a time traveler, if he had been telling me the truth. Was he indeed the same Ormazd who appeared to Zoroaster long millennia ago inPersia? Had he been struggling against Ahriman even then? Of course. Then and now, future and past, the track of time was becoming clear to me.

I brooded about the situation for days, not knowing what to do, waiting for some clue, some indication of how to proceed. Then a new memory stirred me, and I understood why I had been placed in this moment of time, why I had been sent to this particular company and this exact job.

I closed my eyes and recalled Tom Dempsey’s long, serious, hound-dog face. It had been at the office Christmas party last year that he had told me, a bit drunkenly:

“The Sunfire lasers, man. Those goddam’ beautiful high-power lasers. Most important thing th’ company’s doin’. Most important thing goin’ on in th’ whole fuckin’ world!”

The lasers for the thermonuclear fusion reactor. The lasers that would power a man-made sun, which in turn would provide the permanent answer to all the human race’s energy needs. The god of light made real in a world of science and technology. Where else would the Dark One strike?

It took me nearly a week to convince my superiors that the time had come for me to do a new market forecast for the laser fusion project. Continental Electronics was building the lasers for the world’s first commercial CTR — Controlled Thermonuclear Reactor. By the end of that week I was on the company jet, bound forAnn Arbor, where the fusion reactor and its associated power plant were being built. Tom Dempsey sat beside me as we watched the early winter cloudscape forming along theshoreofLake Erie, some thirty thousand feet below our speeding plane.

Tom was grinning happily at me. “First time I’ve seen you take an interest in the fusion project. I always thought you couldn’t care less about this work.”

“You convinced me of its importance,” I said, not untruthfully.

“It is damned important,” he said, unconsciously playing with his seat belt as he spoke. Tom was the kind of engineer who was compulsively neat; yet he could never keep his hands from fiddling with things.

“The fusion reactor is ready for its first test run?” I led him on.

He nodded enthusiastically. “Yep. We’ve had our delays, but by god we’re ready to go now. You put in deuterium — which you can get from ordinary water — zap it with our lasers, and out comes power. Megawatts of power, man. More power in a bucket of water than in all the oil fields ofIran.”

It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. I had to smile at his mention ofIran — modern-dayPersia.

The flight was smooth, and the company had a car waiting for us at the airport. As we drove up to the fusion lab building, I was surprised at its modest size, even though Dempsey had told me that CTRs could eventually be made small enough to fit into the basements of private homes.

“No need for electric utility companies or any other utility except water once we’ve got fusion. Turn on the kitchen tap and filter out enough deuterium in five minutes to run the house for a year.”

He was a happy engineer. His machines were working. The world was fine.

But I saw that there were pickets marching along the wire fence in front of the lab. Most of them were young, students and the like, although there was a sprinkling of older men and more than a dozen women who looked like housewives.

The placards they carried were professionally printed:

Our car slowed as we approached the gate. The driver, a company chauffeur, said over his shoulder to Dempsey and me, “The lab security guards don’t wanna open the gate. They’re afraid the pickets’ll rush inside.”

There were only a few dozen of them, but as our car stopped before the gate, they seemed like a larger mob. They swarmed around the car, shouting at us.

“Go back where you came from!”

“Stop poisoning us!”

In a flash they all started chanting, “People yes! Technology no! Fusion power’s got to go!” They began pounding the car with their placards and rocking it.

“Where are the police?” I asked the driver.

He merely shrugged.

“But they’ve got it all wrong,” Dempsey said, his face showing that he felt personally hurt by the crowd’s lack of appreciation for his machines. “Fusion power won’t produce enough radiation to hurt anybody.”

Before I thought to restrain him, he pushed open the car door on his side and wormed out among the demonstrators shouting, “There’s no radiation coming out of the reactor! The major waste product of fusion is just plain old helium. You can give it to your kids so they can blow up their balloons with it.”

They wouldn’t listen. They clustered around Dempsey, screaming in his face, drowning out his words. A couple of youths, big enough to be varsity football players, pushed him against the side of the car and pinned him there.

I began to get out as our driver, muttering to himself, swung his door open hard enough to hit somebody and produce a yelp of pain. As I ducked out on the other side of the car, somebody swung a fist at me. I blocked it automatically and pushed the youngster away from me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the housewives bring her placard down squarely on Dempsey’s head. He sagged, and then one of the football players punched him in the midsection. Dempsey went down facefirst on the blacktop. The chauffeur tried to wrestle the placard away from one of the women demonstrators while she yelled and tried to squirm out of his grasp. Several of the students swarmed over the chauffeur and began to pummel him.

“Let’s teach ’em a lesson!”

I raced around the back of the car and dove into the crowd, yanking bodies out of my way until I was straddling Dempsey’s prostrate body, next to the wobbly-kneed chauffeur. His nose was bleeding, his mouth open wide, lips pulled back over his teeth in rage. I took a punch on the side of my face. Before the snarling young man who threw it could pull his arm back, I had him by the wrist and elbow and flung him against the others, knocking them down like ten pins. Everything happened very quickly. Suddenly the crowd melted back and started running away from us, except for the five on the ground with concussions or fractures. The others dropped their placards and fled down the street.

The security guards opened the front gate, almost falling over themselves to apologize for not moving more swiftly. In the distance I could hear the wail of a police siren approaching — too late.

The guards took us to the lab’s infirmary, where I met their security chief, a waspish little man named Mangino. His skin was the color of cigarette tobacco; his eyes narrow and crafty.

“I just don’t get it,” he grumbled as Dempsey’s head was being bandaged. “We never had a speck of trouble before today. This bunch of nuts just pops up out of nowhere and starts parading up and down in front of the main gate.”

They were meant for me, I knew. A welcoming committee from Ahriman. But I said nothing.

“Our public relations people have been telling the media for years that this reactor won’t be like the old uranium fission power plants,” Mangino went on. “There’s no radioactive waste. No radiation gets outside the reactor shell. The thing can’t melt down.”

Dempsey, sitting atop the infirmary table while a doctor and a pretty young nurse wrapped his head, spoke up. “You can’t talk sense to people like that. They get themselves all worked up and they don’t listen to the facts.”

“No,” I corrected him. “They don’t get themselves all worked up. Somebody works them up.”

Mangino’s eyes widened for the barest flash of a second. Then he nodded. “You’re right.”

“It would be a good idea to find out who that somebody is,” I said.

Mangino agreed. “And where he comes from. Could be the Arabs, or the oil companies, or any one of a dozen nut groups.”

No matter who it was, I knew, Ahriman was behind it.

CHAPTER 6

It was not difficult to find the headquarters of the demonstrators. They belonged to an organization that called itself STOPP, an acronym for Stop Technology from Over Powering People.

STOPP’s headquarters was an old four-story frame house across the main avenue from the university campus. I parked my rented car in front of the house and sat watching it awhile. Plenty of students went walking by, and more of them congregated around the pizza and hamburger shops down the street. This side of the avenue had once been a row of stately Victorian houses. Now, with the growth of the university across the way, the homes had been turned into apartments and offices. Many of the houses’ street fronts had been converted into stores.

Across the avenue was academia: a lovely campus of gracious buildings, neatly tended hedges, and tall trees that reached bare branches toward the gray winter sky. This side of the street was dedicated to the greed of landlords: seedy, bustling, noisy, lucrative. And all along the avenue there was the constant rush of traffic: cars honking, growling, moving endlessly; trucks, buses, motorbikes, even a few electrically powered bicycles.

I got out of the car, convinced that the best approach was the direct one. I walked up the wooden steps and across the porch that fronted the house, pushed the antique, rusting bell button. I heard nothing, so I opened the front door and stepped inside.

While the outside of the house was Middle American Victorian and rather tasteless, the inside was decorated in Neo-Student-Activist style. Yellowing posters covered most of the walls in the front hallway, featuring personalities as diverse as Martin Luther King and Jane Fonda. The newest of the posters, and it was already fading, demanded U.S. OUT OF BRAZIL! NO MORE EL SALVADORS! A library table stood to one side, heaped high with pamphlets. I glanced at them. Everything from abortion to disarmament, but none of them mentioned the fusion laboratory.

Doors were open on the right and left of the hallway. I looked left first, but the big high-ceilinged room was devoid of people. A couple of old sofas, three tattered Army cots, a big square table with a battered, well-worn word processor on it. But no people.

I tried the room on the right. A bright-looking young woman was sitting behind an ultramodern portable telephone switchboard, which rested incongruously on a heavy-legged, ornate Victorian mahogany table. She had an earphone and pinmike combination clamped over her short-cropped blonde hair. Without breaking her conversation into the microphone, she waved me into the room and pointed to one of the rickety plastic chairs that lined the wall.

I remained standing and waited until she finished her conversation. My mind wandered, my attention shifted, and I saw Aretha’s serious, finely chiseled face once more, her midnight-dark hair, her luminous gray eyes. I shut off the image in my mind and forced myself to concentrate on the gumchewing girl at the switchboard.

The blonde ended her phone conversation and looked up at me. Their phones had no picture screens, I saw.

“Welcome to STOPP,” she said cheerfully. “What can we do for you, Mr… er…?”

“Orion,” I said. “I want to see the chief of this operation.”

Her pert young smile clouded over. “You from the city? Fire Marshal?”

“No. I’m from the CTR facility. The fusion lab.”

“Oh!” That took her by surprise. The enemy in her boudoir.

“I want to see the head person around here.”

“Don Maddox? He’s in class right now.”

“Not him. The one he works for.”

She looked puzzled. “But Don’s the chairperson. He organized STOPP. He’s the…”

“Is he the one who decided to demonstrate against the fusion lab today?”

“Yes…” It was an uncertain answer.

“I want to know who put him up to it.”

“Now wait a minute, mister…” Her hands began to fidget along the keyboard buttons. A barely discernible sheen of perspiration broke out along her upper lip. Her breathing was slightly faster than it had been a few moments earlier.

“All right, then,” I said, easing off the pressure a little. “Who first suggested demonstrating at the fusion lab? It wasn’t one of the students, I know.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Davis.” She sat up straighter. Her voice took on a ring of conviction. “He’s the one who woke us up about your fusion experiments and all the propaganda you’ve been laying on the people.”

There was no point arguing with her.Davis. I had to smile to myself. With just the slightest change in pronunciation it came up Daevas, the gods of evil in the old Zoroastrian religion.

“Mr. Davis,” I agreed. “He’s the one I want to see.”

“Why? Are you trying to arrest him or hassle him?” she asked.

I had to grin at her naïveté. “If I were, would I tell you? No one was arrested at the lab this morning, were they?”

Shaking her head, she replied, “From what I heard, they had a goon squad out there to break heads.”

“Really? I’d still like to seeDavis. Is he here?”

“No.” I could easily see that it was a lie. “He won’t be around for a while… He comes and goes.”

With a shrug, I said, “Very well. Get in touch with him and tell him that Orion wants to see him. Right away.”

“Mr. O’Ryan?”

“Orion. Just plain Orion. He’ll know who I am. I’ll wait outside in my car. It’s parked right in front of the house.”

She frowned. “He might not be back for a long while. Maybe not even the rest of the week.”

“You just get in touch with him and give him my name. I’ll wait.”

“Okay,” she said, in a tone that implied, but I think you’re crazy.

I waited in the car less than an hour. It was a cold, gray afternoon, but I adjusted easily enough to the chill. Clamp down on the peripheral blood vessels so that body heat isn’t radiated away so fast. Step up the metabolic rate a little, burning off some of the fat stored in the body’s tissues. This keeps the body temperature up despite the cold. I could have accomplished the same result by going to the corner and getting something to eat, but this was easier and I didn’t want to leave the car. Too much could happen while my back was turned. I did get hungry, though. As I said, I’m no superman.

The blonde girl came out on the porch, shivering in the cold despite the light sweater she had thrown over her shoulders. She stared at my car. I got out and she nodded at me. I followed her back into the house. She was waiting in the hallway, her arms clamped tightly across her small bosom.

“It’s really cold out there!” she said, rubbing her arms. “And you don’t even have an overcoat!”

“Did you reach Davis?” I asked.

Nodding, she replied, “Yes. He… came in through the back way. Down at the end of the hall. He’s waiting for you.”

I thanked her and walked to the door at the end of the hall. It opened onto a flight of steps leading down to the cellar of the house. A logical place for him, I thought, wondering how many legends of darkness and evil he had spawned over the span of millennia.

It was dark in the cellar. The only light came from the hallway at the top of the stairs. I could make out a bulky, squat, old-fashioned coal furnace spreading its pipes up and outward like a giant metal Medusa. Boxes, packing crates, odd-shaped things hugged the shadows. I took a few tentative steps into the dimness at the bottom of the stairs and stopped.

“Over here.” The voice was a harsh whisper.

Turning slightly, I saw him, a darker presence among the shadows. He was big, almost my own height, and very broad. Heavy, sloping shoulders; thick, solid body; arms bulging with muscle. I walked toward him. I could not see his face; the shadows were too deep for that. He turned and led me toward the furnace. I ducked under one of the pipes…

And was suddenly in a brightly lit room! I squinted and staggered back half a step, only to bump against a solid wall behind me. The room was warmly carpeted, paneled in rich woods, furnished with comfortable chairs and couches. There were no windows. No decorations on the walls. And no doors. Not one.

“Make yourself comfortable, Orion,” he said, gesturing to one of the couches. His hand was thick fingered, blunt and heavy.

I sat down and studied him as he slowly eased his bulk into a soft leather armchair.

His face was not quite human. Close enough so that you might not look twice at him on the street. But when you examined him carefully, you saw that the cheekbones were too widely spaced, the nose too flat, and the eyes had a reddish cast to them. His eyes! They smoldered; they seethed — they radiated a constant torment of fury — and, looking deeper, I could see other things in his eyes: implacable hatred and, mixed with it, something else, something I could not fathom. It made no difference to me. The hatred was there, burning in his eyes. Just as it was in mine.

His hair was dark and cropped close to his skull. His skin had a grayish pallor. He wore denims and a light shirt, open at the neck. He was as muscular as a professional weightlifter.

“You are Ahriman,” I said at last.

His face was grim, mirthless. “You don’t remember me, of course. We have met before.” His voice was a whisper, like a ghost’s, or like the tortured gasping of a dying man.

“We have?”

With a ponderous nod of his head: “Yes. But we are moving in different directions through time. You are moving back toward The War. I am moving forward toward The End.”

“The War? The End?”

“Back and forth are relative terms in time travel. But the truth is that we have met before. You will come to those places in time and remember that I told you. If you live.”

“You’re trying to destroy the fusion reactor,” I said.

He smiled, and it was not a pleasant thing to see. “I am trying to destroy your entire race.”

“I’m here to stop you.”

“You may succeed.” He placed a slight, ironic stress on may.

“Ormazd says that I will… that I already have succeeded.” I didn’t mention the part about being killed. Somehow, I couldn’t. That would make it true. That would give him strength and rob me of it.

“Ormazd knows many things,” Ahriman said slowly, “but he tells you only a few of them. He knows, for example, that if I prevent you from stopping me this time…”

This time! Then there have been other times!

“…then not only will I destroy your entire race of people, but I will smash the fabric of the space-time continuum and annihilate Ormazd himself.”

“You want to kill us all.”

Those red, pain-wracked eyes bored into me. “Kill every one of you, yes. I want to bring down the pillars of the universe. Everything will die. Stars, planets, galaxies… everything.” His massive fists clenched. He believed what he said. He was making me believe it.

“But why? Why do you want to…”

He silenced me with a stare. “If Ormazd has not told you, why should I?”

I tried to see past his words, but my mind struck an utterly implacable wall.

“I will tell you this much,” Ahriman whispered.

“This fusion reactor of yours is a nexus point in your race’s development. If you make the fusion process work, you will be expanding out to the stars within a generation. I will not allow you to accomplish that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How could you?” He leaned closer to me, and I could smell the odor of ashes and death upon him. “This fusion machine, this CTR as you call it, is the key to your race’s future. If it is successful, fusion will supply limitless energy for you. Wealth and plenty for all. Your people could stop playing with their puny chemical rockets and start building real starships. They could expand throughout the galaxy.”

“They have done so,” I realized.

“Yes they have. But if I can change the nexus here, at this point in time, if I can destroy that fusion reactor…” He smiled again. And I shuddered.

I tried to pull myself together. “The failure of one machine can’t kill the entire human race.”

“Yes, it can, thanks to the maniac nature of your kind. When the fusion reactor explodes…”

“It can’t explode!” I snapped.

“Of course not. Not under ordinary circumstances. But I have access to extraordinary means. I can create a sudden surge of power from the lasers. I can cause a detonation of the lithium shielding that surrounds the reactor’s ignition chamber. Instead of a microgram of deuterium being fused and giving off a puff of energy, a quarter ton of lithium and heavier metals will explode.”

“They can’t…”

“Instead of a tiny, controlled, man-made star radiating energy in a controlled flow, I will create an artificial supernova, a lithium bomb. The explosion will destroy Ann Arbor totally. The fallout will kill millions of people from Detroit to New York.”

I sagged back, stunned.

“Even if your leaders are wise enough to recognize that this is an accident and not a nuclear attack, even if they refrain from launching their missiles at their enemies, your people will react violently against fusion power. Their earlier protests which closed all the uranium fission power plants will seem like child’s play compared to their reaction to this disaster. There will be an end to all nuclear research everywhere. You will never get fusion power. Never.”

“Even so, we will survive.”

“Will you? I have all the time in the world to work with. I can be patient. As the years go by, your growing population will demand more and more energy. Your mighty nations will struggle against each other for possession of petroleum, coal, food resources. There will be war, inevitably. And for war, you have fusion devices that do work — H-bombs.”

“Armageddon,” I said.

He nodded that massive head in triumph. “At the time when you should be expanding outward toward the stars, you will destroy yourselves with nuclear war. This planet will be scoured clean of life. The fabric of space-time itself will be so ruptured that the entire continuum will collapse and die. Armageddon, indeed.”

I wanted to stop him, to silence him. I wanted to kill him just as he had killed Aretha. I leaped for his throat, snarling. He was real, no hologram. And he was incredibly strong. He brushed me aside easily, knocking me to the floor as if I were a child.

Standing over me like the dark force of doom, he said in his harsh, whispering voice, “Despite what Ormazd has told you, I will succeed in this. You will die, Orion. Here. You are trapped in this chamber, while I shall destroy your fusion machine.”

“But why?” I asked, climbing slowly back to the couch. “Why do you want to wipe out the human race?”

He stood for a moment, glaring at me with those burning eyes. “You really don’t know, do you? He never told you… or he erased your memory of it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you hate the human race?”

“Because you wiped out my race,” Ahriman answered, his harsh voice nearly strangling on the words. “Millennia ago, your people killed mine. You annihilated my entire species. I am the only one of my kind left alive, and I will avenge my race by destroying yours — and your masters as well.”

The strength left me. I sat weakly on the couch, unable to challenge him, unable to move.

“And now, good-bye,” Ahriman said. “I have work to do before the first test run of your fusion reactor. You will remain here…” He gestured around the tiny room. It had no doors or windows. No exits or entrances of any kind. How did we get in here? I wondered.

“If I succeed, it will all be over in a few hours,” Ahriman said. “Time itself will begin to falter and the universe will fall in on itself like a collapsing balloon. If I fail, well…” that ghastly smile again, “…you will never know it. This chamber will be your tomb. Or, more properly, your crematorium.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Thirty miles underground, in a temporary bubble of safety and comfort created by warping the energies of the atoms around us. Think about that as you burn — you are only a step away from the house inAnn Arbor. One small step for a man, if he truly understands the way the universe is constructed.” He turned abruptly and walked through the wall and disappeared.

CHAPTER 7

For long minutes I sat on the couch unmoving, my body numb with shock, my mind spinning in turmoil.

You wiped out my race… your people killed mine… and I will avenge my race by destroying yours — and your masters as well.

It couldn’t be true. And what did he mean by his talk of the two of us moving on different time tracks, of having met before? Your masters? What did he mean by that? Ormazd? But he said masters, plural. Is Ormazd the representative of a different race, an alien race from another world that controls all of humankind? Just as Ahriman is the last survivor of an alien race that we humans battled so long ago?

How many times had we met before? Ahriman said that this point in time, this first test of the fusion reactor, marked a nexus tor the human race. If it succeeds, we will use fusion energy to reach out to the stars. If it fails, we will kill ourselves within a generation. There must have been other nexuses back through time, many of them.

Somewhere back along those eons there was a war, The War, between the human race and Ahriman’s kind. When? Why? How could we fight invaders from another world back in the past, thousands of years ago?

All these thoughts were bubbling through my brain until finally my body asserted itself on my conscious awareness.

“It’s getting hot in here,” I said aloud.

My attention snapped to the present. To this tiny cell. The air was hot and dry. My throat felt raw. The room was now hot enough to make me sweat.

I got up and felt the nearest wall. It was almost too hot to touch. And although it looked like wood paneling, it felt like stone. It was an illusion, all of it.

One small step for a man… if he truly understands the way the universe is constructed.

I understood nothing. I could remember nothing. All I could think of was that Ahriman was back on Earth’s surface, up in Ann Arbor, working to turn the CTR into a mammoth lithium bomb that would trigger the destruction of the human race. And I was trapped here, thirty miles underground, about to be roasted like a sacrificial lamb on a spit.

You are only a step away from the house in Ann Arbor, he had said. Was that a lie? A joke? His idea of a cruel taunt?

“One small step for a man,” I muttered to myself. How is the universe constructed? It’s made of atoms. And atoms are made of smaller particles, tiny bits of frozen energy that can be made to thaw and flow and surge…

This room had been created by warping the energies of the atoms in the Earth’s crust. Those energies were now reverting back to their natural form; slowly the room was turning back into hot, viscous rock. I could feel the air congealing, becoming hotter and thicker by the second. I would be imbedded in rock thirty miles below the surface, rock hot enough to be almost molten.

Yet I was only a step from safety, according to Ahriman. Was he lying? No, he couldn’t have been. He had walked directly through the rock wall of this room. He must have returned to the cellar of the house inAnn Arbor. If he could do it, so could I. But how?

I already had!I had stepped from the cellar into this underground dungeon. Why couldn’t I step back again?

I tried doing it and got nothing but bumps against solid rock for my efforts. There was more to it than simply trying it.

But wait. If I had truly traveled thirty miles through solid rock in a single step, it must mean that there is a connection between that house and this chamber. Not only are the atoms of Earth’s crust being warped to create this cell, but the geometry of space itself is being warped to bridge the thirty-mile distance.

I sat on the couch again, my mind racing. I had read magazine articles about space warps, speculations about how someday starships would be able to fly thousands of lightyears almost instantaneously. Astrophysicists had discovered “black holes” in interstellar space that warped space-time with their titanic gravitational fields. It was all a matter of geometry, a pattern, like taking a flat sheet of paper and folding it into the form of a bird or a flower.

And I had seen that pattern! I had gone through it on my way into this chamber. But it had happened so quickly that I could not consciously remember it in detail.

Or could I?

Data compression. Satellites in orbit can accumulate data on magnetic tapes for days on end, and then spurt it all down to a receiving station on the ground within a few seconds. The compressed data is then played at a much slower speed by the technicians, and all the many days’ worth of information is intact and readable.

Could I slow down my memory to the point where I could recall, miscrosecond by microsecond, what had happened to me during that one brief stride from the house to this underground tomb? I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes. It was getting more and more difficult to breathe, but I tried to ignore the burning in my chest and concentrate on remembering.

A thirty-mile stride. A step through solid rock. I pictured myself in the cellar of that house. I had ducked under a heating pipe and stepped into darkness…

And cold. The first instant of my step I had felt a wave of intense cold, as if I had passed through a curtain of liquefied air. Cryogenic cold. Cold so intense that atoms are frozen almost motionless, at nearly absolute zero temperature.

In those few microseconds of unbearable cold I saw that the crystal structure of the atoms around me had indeed been frozen, almost entirely stilled. All around me the atoms glowed dully like pinpoints of jeweled lights, faint and sullen because nearly all their energies had been leached away from them. The crystal latticework of the atoms had formed a path for me, a tunnel wide enough for my body to take that thirty-mile-long step in a single stride.

I opened my eyes. The tiny room was glowing now; the air itself seemed afire. I held my breath, wondering how long my body could function on the oxygen stored within its cells and in my blood.

I understood how I had gotten here. There was a crystal latticework of energy connecting this crypt with the house in Ann Arbor — a tunnel that connected here with there, using the energies stolen from the atoms in between to create a safe and almost instantaneous path between the two places. But the tunnel was dissolving just as this room was dissolving. The energies of those tortured atoms was returning to normal. In seconds all would be solid rock once again.

How to find the opening into that tunnel? I concentrated again, but no sense of it came through to me. I was sweating, both from the intense heat and from the effort of forcing myself to understand. But it did no good at all. My brain could not comprehend it.

My brain could not… Wrong! I realized that I had so far been using only half my brain to attack the problem. I remembered Ormazd telling me that I could consciously employ both hemispheres simultaneously, something that ordinary human beings cannot do. I had been using one hemisphere to visualize the geometric pattern of the energy warp that connected this underground chamber with the surface. But that half of my brain could only perceive geometrically those relationships involving space and form.

With a conscious effort I forced the other hemisphere of my brain to consider the problem. I could almost hear myself laugh inside my head as the unused portion of my mind said something like, “Well, it’s about time.”

And it was about time. The solution to the problem of finding the gateway to the crystal latticework of atoms was a matter of timing. All those dully glowing atoms were still vibrating slowly, unnaturally slowly, because most of their energies had been drained from them. But still they vibrated. Only when they had all moved to a certain precise formation was their alignment such that the tunnel’s entrance could open. Most of the time they were shifted out of phase, as unaligned and jumbled as a crowd milling through a shopping mall. But once every second they reached precisely the correct arrangement to open the tunnel that led back to safety. The arrangement dissolved within a few microseconds.

Only during that incredibly tiny moment of time was the tunnel open. I had to step into the crystal latticework, through the searing hot wall of the chamber, at precisely the exact moment — or not at all.

I got to my feet and forced myself close to the wall. The heat was enough to singe the hair of my eyebrows and the backs of my hands. I kept my eyes closed, picturing with one side of my brain the crystal pathway itself, while simultaneously calculating with the other side of my brain the precise moment when the lattice would be open for me to step through.

With my eyes still closed I took a step forward. I felt an instant of roasting heat, then cold beyond the most frigid ice fields of Antarctica. Then…

I opened my eyes. I stood in the shadowy cellar of the STOPP house. For the first time in what seemed like years, I let out my breath and took in a double lungful of sweet, cool air.

I found a back door to the cellar and stepped out into the cold night. It felt wonderful. An alley led between the house and its next-door neighbor to the street. My rented car was still there, adorned with a yellow parking ticket affixed to its windshield wiper. I stuffed the ticket into my jacket pocket and got behind the wheel, glad that no one had towed the car away or stolen it.

It took me ten minutes to get back to the fusion lab. Once in the deserted lobby of the building, I phoned for Tom Dempsey, Mangino the security chief, and the lab’s director of research. It was close to midnight, but the tone of my voice must have convinced them that something important was happening. I got no arguments from any of them, although the phone’s computer had to try three different numbers before it located Dr. Wilson, the research director.

They all arrived in the lab within a half-hour — thirty minutes during which I checked personally with every security guard on duty. No one had reported the slightest problem. They were on constant patrol around the laboratory, inside and out, and everything appeared to be quite normal.

Dr. Wilson was a lanky, ruddy-faced, tousle-haired Englishman who spoke softly and seemed totally unflappable. He arrived first. As I was explaining that somebody would try to detonate the fusion reactor — and he smiled tolerantly at the ridiculous idea — Dempsey and the security chief came into the lobby together. Dempsey looked more puzzled than upset. His dark hair was an uncombed, tangled mop; he must have been asleep when I called and pulled his clothes on helter-skelter. Mangino was definitely angry. His narrow brown eyes snapped at me.

“This is a lot of hysterical nonsense,” he growled, when I explained my fears. I didn’t tell them about Ormazd and Ahriman, of course, nor about the underground chamber I’d just escaped from. It was enough to convince them that a real danger existed. I didn’t want them to bundle me off to a psychiatric ward.

Dr. Wilson tried to tell me that the reactor simply could not explode. I let him talk; the longer he explained, the longer we stayed on the scene, available to counter Ahriman’s move.

“There simply is not enough deuterium in the reactor at any given moment to allow an explosion,” Wilson repeated in a his soft, friendly voice. He sat slouched on one of the plastic couches that decorated the lab’s lobby. I stood by the receptionist’s desk. Dempsey had stretched out on another couch and apparently had gone back to sleep. Mangino was behind the desk, checking out his security patrols on the picture phone.

“But suppose,” I stalled for more time, “there was a way to boost the power of the lasers…”

“They’d burn out in a minute,” Wilson said. “We’re running them at top capacity now.”

“…and an extra amount of deuterium was put into the reaction chamber.”

Wilsons hook his head, and a mass of sandy hair flopped down over his eyes. Pushing it back with one hand, he told me, “That simply cannot happen. There are fail-safe circuits to prevent it. And even if it did, all that would happen is that you would get a mild little poof of a detonation — not a hydrogen bomb.”

“What about a lithium bomb?” I asked.

For the first time, his eyebrows knit worriedly. “What do you mean?”

“If things worked out the right way, couldn’t the deuterium detonation trigger the lithium in the shielding around the reaction chamber?”

“No, no. That would be impos—” He checked himself, hesitated, then said slowly, “That would be very unlikely. Very unlikely. I’d have to work out the calculations, of course, but the chances against that must be…”

“Twenty-four, report.” Mangino’s razor-sharp voice sliced into our conversation.

I turned and looked at the security chief. He was frowning angrily into the phone’s picture screen. “Dammit, Twenty-four, answer me!”

He looked up at me, as if I were responsible. “One of the guards outside doesn’t respond. He’s supposed to be patrolling the area around the loading dock.”

“The loading dock!” Wilson shot to his feet. I could see that he had started to tremble.

Mangino held up a hand. “Don’t get excited, now. I’ve got the area on one of the outside TV cameras. Everything looks normal. Just no sign of the guard. He might be taking a leak or something.”

I went around the desk and peered at the TV screen. The loading bay was brightly lit. There were no cars or trucks anywhere in sight. All seemed quiet and calm.

“Let’s take a walk down there anyway,” I said.

We roused Dempsey and told him to stand guard over the phones and TV screens. He rubbed his eyes sleepily but nodded okay. Then Dr. Wilson, Mangino and I hurried down the building’s central corridor toward the loading dock. Mangino reached inside his coat and pulled out a slim, flat, dead-black pistol. He flicked the safety off and then slipped it into his jacket pocket.

Lights turned on automatically ahead of us as we hustled along the corridor, and switched off behind us. The loading bay was a miniature warehouse: stacks of cardboard cartons, steel drums, packing cases, strange-looking equipment wrapped in clear plastic.

“You could hide a platoon of men in here,” Mangino grumbled.

“But everything seems to be in order,” Wilson said, glancing around. I started to agree, but felt the slightest trace of a breeze on my face. It came from the direction of the loading dock doors, big metal roll-up doors that were closed and locked tight. Or were they? I walked slowly toward the hangar-like doors and saw that a man-sized doorway had been cut into one of them. A person could slip in or out without needing to raise the entire rig. This smaller door was windowless. And shut. I reached for its handle.

“It’s locked,” Mangino said. “Electronic time lock. If anybody tries to tamper with it…”

I touched the handle and the door swung open effortlessly. Mangino gaped.

Kneeling, I saw that the area around the edge of the lock had been bent slightly, as if massive hands had pried it open, bending the metal until it yielded. I had felt the stray breeze through the bent area.

“Why didn’t the alarm go off?” Mangino wondered aloud.

“Never mind that,” I said. “He’s inside the lab! Quick; we don’t have a second to lose!”

We ran to the fusion reactor area,Wilson protesting all the way that no one could tamper with the lasers or the reactor to cause an explosion.

The doors to the laser control room had been pulled off their hinges. A quick look inside showed that no one was in there. The control boards seemed untouched. While Wilson inspected them, Mangino yelled into his palm-sized radio, “All security guards converge on the reactor area. Apprehend anyone you see. Shoot if they resist. Call the local police and the F.B.I. at once!”

We entered the big double doors that led to the long, cement-walled room where the lasers were housed. Again the overhead lights snapped on automatically as we crossed the doorway.

“Those doors should have been locked,” Dr. Wilson said, an edge of alarm in his voice.

The lasers were long, thin glass rods, dozens of them, mounted on heavy metal stands, one over another like a series of parallel gymnasium bars. Every ten feet or so the glass rods were interrupted by groupings of lenses, Faraday rotators, and diagnostic sensors. The multiple line of lasers marched down the length of the long room and focused on a narrow slit cut into a thick, steel-reinforced cement wall. On the other side of that wall was the reactor itself, where the energy from the lasers was concentrated on micropellets of deuterium fuel.

The three of us stood there uncertainly for a moment. Then suddenly an electrical hum began vibrating through the air. I caught a whiff of ozone, and the laser tubes began to glow with an eerie, uncanny greenish light.

“They’re turning on!” Wilson gasped.

CHAPTER 8

Mangino and I swung our attention to the far end of the room, where the control center was. In the shadows back there, behind thick protective glass, bulked the heavy, dark form of Ahriman.

Mangino pulled out his pistol and fired. The glass starred. He emptied the gun, finally shattering the glass. But in those few seconds Ahriman was gone. The lights went out. All we could see was the brightening glow of the lasers, multiple paths of intensifying energy aimed at the slit and, beyond it, the reactor core. We stumbled out into the hallway. It was dark everywhere. For all I knew, Ahriman had caused a blackout throughout the region to pour power into the blazing lasers.

Over the whining hum of the electric generators I heard running footsteps. Then shots.

“They’ve got him!” Mangino yelled. But to me it sounded as if the running and shooting were going in the direction away from us. The sounds grew fainter. They hadn’t caught Ahriman, I knew.

“I’m going after him,” Mangino said, and he sprinted off into the darkness.

“We’ve got to turn off the lasers,” I told Wilson, “before they build up enough power to set off the lithium.”

In the eerie green light from the open doorway, his eyes looked wide with fright. “That can’t happen!” he insisted.

“Let’s turn them off anyway,” I said.

He didn’t argue. We went to the laser control room, only to find that the equipment was a shambles. The control consoles had been smashed, dials shattered, metal paneling bent out of shape. Wires sagged limply from broken modules. It was as if an elephant had gone berserk inside the tiny room. And through the smashed window, we could see that the lasers were pulsing now, their light growing more intense, feverish.

Wilson’s jaw hung slackly. “How could anyone…”

The electrical whine of the generators suddenly went up in pitch several notches and the lasers began to glow even more fiercely. I heard a glass lens pop somewhere down on the floor of the room. The light was becoming painful to the eye. I pulled Wilson away from the shattered controls and together we staggered down the darkened hallway toward the reactor chamber.

“How do we turn the thing off?” I shouted over the generators’ insane shrieking.

He seemed dazed, bewildered. “The deuterium feed…”

“That’s been tampered with too, I’ll bet. We won’t be able to turn it off any more than we can turn off the lasers.”

He shook his head and ran a hand through his unruly hair. In the garish green light he looked sickly, deathly ill.

“Main power supply,” he mumbled at last. “I could get to the main switches and shut down everything.”

“Good! Do it!”

“But it will take time. Ten minutes. Five, at least.”

“Too long! By then it’ll be too late. It’s going to blow up in another minute or two!”

“I know.”

“What else can we do?” I had to shout to make myself heard over the screaming of the generators.

“Nothing!”

“There’s got to be something…”

“Damper,” he shouted at me. “If we could place a damper inside the reactor chamber to block off the laser light…”

I understood. Cut off the light that the lasers were pouring into the deuterium fuel pellets and the reactor would shut down.

“A damper,” I yelled at Wilson. “All right. You find the main power switches. I’ll find a damper.”

“But there’s no way…”

“Get moving!” I shouted.

“You can’t go inside the reactor! The radiation would kill you in less than a minute!”

“Go!”

I pushed him away from me. He stumbled off, then hesitated as I yanked open the door to the reactor room.

“For god’s sake… don’t!” Wilson screamed.

I ignored him and stepped inside.

The room was round and domed, low and cramped, like a womb made of cement and steel and bathed in the hellish green fury of the laser light. The fetus in its center was a five-foot-wide metal ball surrounded by coiling pipes that carried lithium coolant to the spherical core. It looked like a bathysphere, but it had no portholes in it. There was no way to interrupt the laser beams from outside that sphere; they were linked to it by a thick quartz light pipe. I couldn’t break the pipe without tools, even if I had the time to try.

There was one hatch in the core’s sphere. Without taking the time to think about it, I yanked it open. The overwhelming intensity of light and blazing heat slammed me back against the wall. A man-made star was running amok inside that chamber, getting ready to explode.

My burning eyes squeezed shut, I groped for the searingly hot edges of the metal hatch and forced myself inside the chamber. I put my body in front of the laser beams.

I learned what hell is like.

Pain. Searing agony that blasts through your skull even after your eyes have been burned away. Agony along every nerve, every synapse, every pathway of your entire body and mind. All the memories of my existence stirred into frantic, terrified, gibbering reality. Past and present and future fused together. I saw them all melting and flowing in that single instant of soul-shattering pain, that eternally long, infinitesimal flash of time.

I stood naked and burning, skin flayed from my flesh as my mind saw yesterdays and tomorrows.

A newspaper headline blared ATTEMPT TO SABOTAGE FUSION LABORATORY FAILS.

A puzzled team of F.B.I. agents and scientists searching for some trace of my body as Dr. Wilson is wheeled into an ambulance, catatonic with shock.

Ahriman’s dark presence brooding over my horizon of time, his red eyes glowering with hate as he plans his revenge.

Ormazd shining against the darkness of infinity, glowing in the depths of interstellar space, powerful, commanding, moving the chesspieces of an entire universe of space-time across the landscape of eternity.

And me. Orion. The Hunter. I see all my pasts and futures. At last I know who I am, and what, and why.

I am Orion. I am Prometheus. I am Gilgamesh. I am Zarathustra. I am the Phoenix who dies and is consumed and rises again from his own ashes only to die once more.

From fifty thousand years in Earth’s future I have hunted Ahriman. This time he escaped me although I have thwarted his plans. Humankind will have fusion power. We will reach the stars. That nexus has been passed successfully, just as Ormazd told me it would be. It required my death, but the fabric of the space-time continuum has not been broken.

I have died. Yet still I live. I exist, and my purpose is to hunt down Ahriman wherever and whenever he is.

The hunt continues.