CHAPTER 4

I spent the next two days in a sort of rage induced state of shock, clamping down on my emotions so hard that I felt nothing. Police interrogations, lie detector tests, medical examinations, psychiatric tests—I went through them all like a robot, responding to questions and stimuli without an outward trace of emotion.

For some reason I told no one about the dark man who had killed Aretha. He had murdered her, somehow controlling the rats that had torn out her jugular vein, using them the way another man would use a gun. But I made no mention of him. I merely told the police and the doctors that I had followed Aretha from the hospital and found her as the rats attacked her in the subway lay-up. I was too late to save her. At least that last statement was the truth.

Something buried deep inside my consciousness warned me not to mention the darkly evil man. Far down within me, where the fires of fury lay banked and smoldering, I knew that it would cause me more trouble with the police and the psychiatrists if I mentioned his existence. But more than that, I wanted to track him down and find him myself. I wanted to deal with him with my own hands.

So I withheld the facts. The police detectives I spoke to were no fools. They knew that a woman does not wander into the subways to be attacked by rats and followed by a stranger who had met her only the day before—when they had both been victims of a terrorist bombing. They made it clear that they didn't believe me and that they wanted to use the lie detector on me. I agreed, as coldly indifferent to their questions as if they had been asking me the time of day or the color of the sky. The lie detector told them what I wanted it to, of course; controlling my pulse rate and perspiration was no great feat for me.

After an overnight at Bellevue for psychiatric observation, the police reluctantly released me. I went home to my apartment and telephoned my employer that I would be in for work at the normal time the following morning. He sounded surprised, asked me how I was feeling after two ordeals in the same week.

"I'm all right," I said.

It was the truth. I was physically unharmed and emotionally under tight control. Perhaps too tight.

"You sure you don't want to take the rest of the week off?" my boss asked me. His normally gruff features looked quite solicitous in the telephone's small picture screen.

"No. I'm fine. I'll be in tomorrow morning. I hope my being away hasn't fouled things up too badly around the office."

He attempted to lighten the situation. "Oh, we can get along without you—for a while. We'll all look forward to seeing you tomorrow."

"Thanks."

By the time I had replaced the phone in its cradle, my mind was away from the office and onto the problem of finding Aretha's murderer. The dark one. He and the golden man. The two of them were part of—what? My own life, from what Aretha had hinted at.

I tried to remember how they had behaved at the restaurant. They had not said a single word to each other; I was certain of that. They had barely looked at each other, now that I thought of it. But the one glance they had exchanged was not in friendship. Their eyes had locked for the briefest fraction of a second in a link forged by pure hate.

They knew each other. They hated each other. I realized that if I could find one of them, I would certainly find the other close by.

How do you find two individual men in a city of seven and a half million? And what if my conclusions were wrong? Was I insane? Had I caused Aretha's death, as the police detectives had insinuated during their long interrogation of me? Why couldn't I remember anything further back than three years ago? Was I an amnesia victim, a paranoid, a madman building murderous fantasies in his mind? Had I invented the two men, created imaginary creatures of light and darkness within the tortured pathways of my own brain?

There was one answer to all these questions. It took me a sleepless night of thinking to find that single, simple answer, but I have never been much of a sleeper. An hour or two has always been sufficient for me; often I have gone several nights in a row with nothing but occasional catnaps. My fellow workers have sometimes complained, jokingly, about the amount of work I take home with me. Once in a while the jokes have been bitter.

The next morning, once I said hello to the office staff and fended off their questions and wondering stares, I went to my cubicle and immediately phoned the company physician. I asked him to recommend a good psychiatrist. On the phone's small picture screen the doctor looked slightly alarmed.

"Is this about the trouble with the police you've been caught in for the past few days?" he asked.

"Yes," I said to him. "I'm feeling... a little shaky about it."

Which was no lie.

He peered at me through his bifocals. "Shaky? You? The imperturbable Mr. O'Ryan?"

I said nothing.

"H'mm. Well, I suppose having a hand grenade go off in your soup would shake up anybody. And then that girl dying that way. Pretty grisly."

I said nothing and kept my face expressionless. He waited a few seconds for me to add something to the conversation, but when he saw that I wasn't going to, he muttered something to himself and turned aside slightly to check his files.

He gave me the name of a psychiatrist. I called the man and made an appointment for that afternoon. He tried to put me off, but I used the company's name and our doctor's, and told him that I wanted only a few minutes for a preliminary talk.

Our meeting was quite brief. I outlined my lack of memory and he quickly referred me to another psychiatrist, a woman who specialized in such problems.

It took several weeks, going from one recommended psychiatrist to another, but finally I reached the one I wanted. He was the only specialist who agreed to see me at once, without hesitation, the day I phoned. He sounded as if he had been expecting me to call. His phone had no picture screen, but I didn't need one. I knew what he looked like.

"My schedule is very full," his rich tenor voice said, "but if you could drop into my office around nine tonight, I could see you then."

"Thank you. Doctor," I said. "I will."

The office was quite empty when I got there. I opened the door to the anteroom of his suite. No one was there. It was dark outside, and there were no lights on in the anteroom. Gloomy and dark, lit only by the glow from the city's lights out on the street below. Old-fashioned furniture. Bookshelves lining the walls. No nurse, no receptionist. No one.

A short hallway led back from the anteroom into a row of offices. A faint glow of light came from the half-open door at the end of the hall. I followed the light and pushed the heavy door fully open.

"Doctor?" I didn't bother speaking the name that was on the door. I knew it was not the true name of the man in the office.

"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 ancient Vatican."

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 hero. 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.