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Armageddon, indeed."
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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 outmy 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 walkedthrough 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?
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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 inAnn 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.
You are only a step away from the house in Ann Arbor, he had said. Was that a lie? A joke? His idea
of a cruel taunt?
"One small step for a man," I muttered to myself. Howis the universe constructed? It's made of atoms.
And atoms are made of smaller particles, tiny bits of frozen energy that can be made to thaw and flow
and surge...
This room had been created by warping the energies of the atoms in the Earth's crust. Those energies
were now reverting back to their natural form; slowly the room was turning back into hot, viscous rock. I
could feel the air congealing, becoming hotter and thicker by the second. I would be imbedded in rock
thirty miles below the surface, rock hot enough to be almost molten.
Yet I was only a step from safety, according to Ahriman. Was he lying? No, he couldn't have been.He
had walked directly through the rock wall of this room. He must have returned to the cellar of the house
inAnn Arbor. If he could do it, so could I. But how?
I already had!I had stepped from the cellar into this underground dungeon. Why couldn't I step back
again?
I tried doing it and got nothing but bumps against solid rock for my efforts. There was more to it than
simply trying it.
But wait. If I had truly traveled thirty miles through solid rock in a single step, it must mean that there is a
connection between that house and this chamber. Not only are the atoms of Earth's crust being warped
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to create this cell, but the geometry of space itself is being warped to bridge the thirty-mile distance.
I sat on the couch again, my mind racing. I had read magazine articles about space warps, speculations
about how someday starships would be able to fly thousands of lightyears almost instantaneously.
Astrophysicists had discovered "black holes" in interstellar space that warped space-time with their titanic
gravitational fields. It was all a matter of geometry, a pattern, like taking a flat sheet of paper and folding
it into the form of a bird or a flower.
And I had seen that pattern! I had gone through it on my way into this chamber. But it had happened so
quickly that I could not consciously remember it in detail.
Or could I?
Data compression. Satellites in orbit can accumulate data on magnetic tapes for days on end, and then [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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