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 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.

INTERLUDE.

To mortal eyes the place might have looked like an impressionist's view of Olympus, or Valhalla, or the Heaven that Christians prayed to reach.

There were no visible limits to it; soft clouds and calm, sweet blue sky extended toward infinity in every direction. Straight overhead the sky darkened just enough to show a few scattered stars, unblinking pinpoints of light that never moved from zenith. Time itself was meaningless here. No planet rotated underfoot. No sun or moon swung across the changeless sky. Yet the air was bright, suffused with a soft light that had no visible source.

If a human being ever saw this place, it would remind him or her of being at the peak of a high mountain, above the cares and needs of the world, above the clouds that bring storm and turmoil, looking out across the clean, still air of a realm of endless calm and beauty. A domain far beyond the world of ephemeral mortals who are born in pain, struggle all their brief years, and then are snuffed out like the flickering flame of a candle.

Somewhere in this trackless realm of clouds and sky, a pinpoint star of light detached itself from the high heavens and moved downward, swelling into a globe of golden radiance until it almost touched the upper swirls of the clouds. It glowed brilliantly, but without heat, as it moved swiftly across the cloud tops and finally came to rest, for no outwardly discernible reason. Slowly the globe wavered, shimmered, contracted until it had formed the image of a man, a youthful, yet fully adult human being, handsome as a god, tall and broad-shouldered, with a thick mane of golden hair and eyes the color of a lion's tawny coat. His robe was golden, trimmed with an intricate tracery of thin red lines, like a pattern of blood vessels.

He sat on a billowing cloud, reclining like an emperor of old against cushions of cumulus, his majestic face set in intense concentration, as if he were watching something that no mortal eye could follow. How long he sat that way, it is impossible to say, for time had no meaning here...

Presently a smaller glowing sphere appeared near him, shining silver and pulsating slowly. It contracted to form a human female, a woman of lustrous dark hair and deep gray eyes, as beautiful as the golden man was handsome. Her robe was of silver mesh, metallic and glittering.

"You are becoming fond of the human form?" she asked.

The man looked up at her, unsmiling. "It seems to help me to understand them, to feel the way they feel."

"You enjoy being a god."

The man said nothing.

"Shall I call you by the name you have chosen to have them call you?" She seemed amused, almost. But beneath her words there was irony. Her lips smiled, but her gray eyes probed him coldly.

He turned away from her unblinking gaze. "You will call me whatever you wish to, won't you?"

"Ormazd," she said. "The God of Light. How modest you are with your toys."

"And what should I call you?"

She thought a moment. "Anya. That's a pretty name. As long as we are being human, you may call me Anya."

"You're taking this all very lightly," Ormazd said.

"Not at all," replied Anya, her bantering tone gone. "I know how serious it is. I have felt what they they feel. The terror. The pain. The incredible fear of dying-of becoming... feel. The terror. The pain. The incredible fear of dying-of becoming... nothing nothing."

"You didn't have to go. I didn't want you to go."

"No, you would have activated your warrior and flung him against the Dark One by himself, without a friend, without a hope, without even memories."

"None of them understand. Why should he have been different?"

"But they do do understand!" Anya said. "In their own dim way they perceive that a struggle is going on, that they are caught as pawns between powers far greater than they are." understand!" Anya said. "In their own dim way they perceive that a struggle is going on, that they are caught as pawns between powers far greater than they are."

Ormazd shook his golden-maned head. "They understand only what I want them to understand."

"Not so," she insisted. "Look at their scientists, how they are organizing knowledge of the universe. They are on the verge of learning the true nature of space-time..."

"Never. They still think of time as sequential. They still believe that cause must always precede effect."

She laughed. "Look more closely, O God of Light. Your toys are beginning to penetrate the mysteries that surround them."

"Then I'll have to change things. They mustn't learn too much. Not yet."

"No! Don't! Let them learn. You can't treat them so callously."

He stared at her. "I can treat them in whatever manner I like. I created them. They are mine."

"But you cannot control them."

"Nonsense."

"Admit it," Anya insisted. "They are slipping beyond your grasp."

"I control them."

"You built curiosity into them. The thirst for knowledge."

"That was necessary," Ormazd said. "But I balanced it with fear of the unknown."

Anya's eyes glittered angrily. "Balanced? Not so, my godlike one. You have created a terrible tension within them. They are driven by curiosity, yet afraid of anything unfamiliar. They live their lives in torment, in agony."