Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  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, blun
t 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 walk
ed 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.