by Ben Bova
“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 her
o. 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:
WE DON’T WANT H-BOMBS
IN OUR BACK YARD!
PEOPLE YES! TECHNOLOGY NO!
FUSION POWER HAS TO GO!
RADIATION CAUSES CANCER
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, knockin
g 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.