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, 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 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 naivete. "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 see Davis. 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 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 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 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 Everything will die. Stars, planets, galaxies... everything." His massive fists clenched. He believed what he said. He was making me believe it. will die. Stars, planets, galaxies... everything." His massive fists clenched. He believed what he said. He was making me believe it.