Orion

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 ca

“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.”