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 of Persia, 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 in Persia? 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 for Ann 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 the shore of Lake 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 of Iran.”
It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. I had to smile at his mention of Iran—modern-day Persia.
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.”