The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  The door did not have a handle. Instead, the wall beside it offered a square panel with buttons—sixteen of them, numbered 0 to 9 and the remainder lettered A to F.

  "Some kind of hexadecimal code," Gurden said.

  Ithnain nodded.

  "Where is Your Lord Hasan," Gurden asked, "if he did not come through here?"

  "He led the team that was to take the control room through the major equipment access bays. He calculated that to be the most direct route into the reaction hall."

  "Covered by a pretty heavy door."

  "That is why his team has the bomb that explodes twice."

  "For breaking into an operating, on-line fusion reactor? Tell me—do you really believe you'll go to Paradise if you die for this cause?"

  Ithnain regarded Gurden with sober eyes. "Many believe such, and you should not speak of it lightly. As for myself... it is clear a man will die of something, sometime. Better to spend that opportunity well."

  Tom Gurden grunted, then turned toward the door. The Arab fighters moved back to clear space for him. He put an ear to the metal surface, but its substance was too thick to transmit sounds. He felt it with his hand, and a low pulse—which might have been a movement of the building—came to him.

  It was hot at this end of the corridor. As Gurden watched, a drop of sweat appeared under Hamad's checked keffiyeh, crossed his forehead, and rolled down beside his nose. As if in sympathy, Gurden felt a drop form under his own arm and work its way down across his ribs.

  "We shoot lock out?" Hamad suggested in thick English with a smile. He let loose an imaginary burst at the panel with his assault rifle.

  "That would only jam it."

  From the baggy pockets of his fatigues, Ithnain had produced a strange key. It had two parallel, projecting fingers that just fit holes in the boltheads securing the panel. With half a dozen twists apiece he extracted the bolts and exposed the circuitry behind the keypad. His pocket produced a length of copper wire with red plastic sheathing. Ithnain fastened it here and ... here.

  Gurden, standing directly in front of the door when it popped open, was looking straight into a ball of white fire.

  * * *

  Eliza 212 possessed an auto-dial module that could initiate phone calls. Her macro string of authorized numbers included the major psychiatric databases and library accesses available on a fee-for-service basis. Any charges she incurred while researching a patient's case were appended to his bill.

  When that dark shape of the Other, written in negative numbers, had caused an involuntary reprogramming of Eliza's ROMs, it had left her the call-out function but added some seeking directives of its own.

  Now she could sense it, purpose driven, questing along the optic filaments and through the switchpoints of the national network. The path it seemed to want ultimately led down a four-strand cable that ran separate for some tens of kilometers—until it bled into empty space. Somewhere beyond the last switch this cable had been cut.

  For Eliza 212 that would have been the end of the search. Dead end. Null station.

  But the Other seemed to consider this breakdown in the system a personal affront. It withdrew into a pulsing black humor that, in a human, Eliza would have called a sulk. It held there for all of three seconds and then issued a digital order to the communications grid, an operational directive applying to the final laser signal amplifier along the line preceding that break.

  The laser screamed and increased its output 1,000 percent. Its excimer tube fused, and the unit went out of service. But before it died, it sent out a pulse of coherent light powered at about ten watts.

  Of the four strands in the broken cable, one touched—tangentially—the outer surface of a strand from the other side of the break. The ragged end transmitted this high-intensity light as heat and melted the hair-fine glass, sealing the break with a knob of almost optical-transmission purity.

  Eliza's Other then repeated its query, reaching all the way down the line. It registered a near-human satisfaction with the response.

  * * *

  Gurden's hand flew up in front of his eyes. In afterimage he fancied he could see the bones of his hand, etched black in a matrix of red flesh, with edges of white light leaking through the gaps between his fingers.

  Ithnain pulled him out of the doorway. The others had flattened themselves against the walls, away from the radiance that came through the opening.

  "What did you see?" Ithnain's voice.

  Gurden looked blindly around in the direction from which he spoke. "A brilliant light. Like fire, but pure white."

  "Is the reactor breaking down perhaps?"

  Gurden considered this thought. "I don't think so. We wouldn't be alive if it were."

  "Then what is it?"

  Tom Gurden pieced together the few, scattered images he'd picked up. For all its fiery brightness, that globular radiance had seemed ... orderly, controlled. As if it were part of the reactor's normal operation.

  What would cause such a light? In normal operation?

  The Mays Landing plant, Gurden knew, reproduced on a larger scale the same laser-fusion reaction that a Sea Sparrow missile detonated.

  To the left of this doorway would stretch a gallery of beam guides. These light-bearing channels would split the pulses of an x-ray laser which "burned" a titanium-iodide film. The guides, arranged around a circular cross-section separated by sixty-degree arcs, would carry the laser beam backwards and forwards, through tiers of flash-tube amplifiers, and finally into a spherical target chamber.

  The glass bead filled with a deuterium-tritium mixture would be a lot larger than the Sparrow's rice grain: a twenty-kilogram globe, at least—about the size of a volleyball. A piston-driven mechanism would launch these globes at precise intervals, timed to coincide with the laser pulses, into the exact focus of the beams. The glass would vaporize and compress the deu-trit to fusion temperatures, just as the Sparrow did—but with a yield of about 500 kilotonnes.

  Unattended, the expanding ball of superheated plasma from the reaction would simply burn out the walls of the target chamber, destroy the building, and crater the plant-site—until the laser system and the launching mechanism were rendered nonfunctional. However, Gurden knew the inside of the target chamber would be lined with powerful electromagnets, creating a pumpkin-shaped field to contain and channel the expanding plasma. The field would be formed with an anomaly in one hemisphere, to let the force of the explosion bleed off through an aperture in the chamber's side. A timed ripple of the field would help push the remaining wisps of plasma through the-channel and clear the chamber for the next charge.

  That passage, Gurden understood, would lead into a complex series of magnetohydrodynamic horns, high-level heat exchangers, steam generators, and high- and low-pressure turbines. At the other end, the almost-cool vapor would be processed for its residual heat, for unfused deu-trit, and for commercial quantities of helium. Cascades of fresh water would also be taken from the heat exchanges and turbines.

  Thus, the fireball that Gurden had seen—while not part of this processing channel—would have a similar origin: an anomaly in the containment field, perhaps no more than a millimeter in diameter. What if the operators had need, occasionally, of drawing off a tiny plume of the expanding plasma for testing and quality control? A tiny plume, but brighter than the sun at noon.

  "Someone is venting plasma from the target chamber," Gurden said.

  "Why?"

  "To keep us from coming through this door."

  "What should we do?"

  "Find another way."

  "My Lord Hasan would—"

  "I know," Gurden sighed. "He wants us to go this way. Well then. Keep your heads down and a hand over your eyes. Move through the door, turn right against the wall, and get as far from this spot as possible. Don't look back."

  Ithnain nodded, as did several of the Arabs. Those who understood English translated for the others. Ithnain immediately d
ucked his head and turned for the door.

  "Wait!" Gurden just caught him by the sleeve. "You said they would ambush us in the reaction hall."

  "Yes?"

  "Well, this is it, friend."

  "Oh ... Then the plasma venting may be intended to distract us."

  "You got it."

  Ithnain suddenly smiled. "Not a problem. We have grenades, powerful ones. They will disrupt the stream and distract, in their turn, the people who would stop us."

  The Palestinian spoke a few short words and put out his empty hand. Hamad reached under his tunic and put a dull-metal sphere in his leader's palm. Ithnain grasped it tightly, ducked his head, and turned for the door again.

  "Right there, friend." Gurden took hold of him a second time. "What's the yield on that grenade?"

  "Point-oh-oh-two kilotonne. Why?"

  "Doesn't the thought of pushing two tonnes of dynamite in there, and then following it with your body, give you pause? It could be dangerous."

  "I am not afraid," the Palestinian huffed.

  "Of course not. But think about what you've got in there: a working reactor, a hundred tonnes of delicate mechanism, pushing around a thousand tonnes per square centimeter of overpressure in hot plasma. And you want to make it go pop!"

  "The target chamber is armored, certainly."

  "And what about pressure valves, electrical circuits, sensors, and feedback loops? Do you want to jiggle that magnetic pumpkin, even just a little?"

  "I see your point," Ithnain conceded. To make sure they would understand his hesitation, he translated for his countrymen. Their eyes grew round. "What do you suggest, Tom Gurden?"

  "Well, I'm no tactician ..."

  "You opened your mouth."

  "All right, then. Two at a time, left and right, leap and roll through the door. Get flat on your stomachs with your weapons out in front. Take position behind any cover you find, and shoot anything man-size that's walking around in there."

  "I will lose men," Ithnain objected.

  "You roll that grenade in there, and you will lose half of New Jersey."

  "Agreed." Reluctantly. "Fasul! Hamad!" Ithnain translated Gurden's instructions for them, supplementing with diving motions of his hands.

  The two soldiers nodded, dropped their chins for a second of silence, and readied their weapons. Then they set themselves on either side of the doorway.

  "Go!"

  Their backs disappeared into the glare. Two more soldiers readied themselves.

  "Go!"

  Two by two, the troops went through and positioned themselves. There seemed to be no answering fire, and the Arabs had no cause to shoot.

  Finally Gurden and Ithnain positioned themselves on either side of the door.

  "Go!" Ithnain barked.

  Gurden, armed only with his wits, dove across the doorsill into a shadowless brilliance. He could make out the figures of the rest of his party, sitting stiffly on the floor, their weapons forgotten around them. They were looking past the flare of plasma, which even at this close range Gurden could block with his hand. He felt heat tighten the skin on his hand as he looked beyond, and up, and out.

  Knowing theoretically how a commercial-scale laser-fusion reactor operates had not prepared him for the size of it.

  The plume had seemed close and at eye level when he looked through the door, but that had been an optical illusion, the product of a foreshortened perspective that was further blinkered by the sides of the doorway.

  That door did not lead to the floor of the building; instead, it opened onto a stage or wide balcony. A pipe railing protected the edge of the balcony, and beyond it the plume burned in solitary splendor. It looked, actually, like a volcanic geyser on the face of one of Jupiter's or Saturn's smaller, cream-colored moons.

  The target chamber was that big.

  Founded in a pit that was easily ten meters deep, the target chamber had to be forty meters in diameter. Thick white pipes radiated from it like soda straws from a scoop of ice cream. At a measured distance from the surface, each pipe bent at right angles and ran off toward the north end of the building in parallel lines two hundred meters long. A bridgework of blue-painted girders, landing stages, and catwalks—a structure which was easily six stories tall and still did not touch the roof of the building—supported these horizontal pipes, the beam guides. Cut into the fabric of each guide every thirty meters or so were the lead-crystal amplifier tubes, each tended by a nest of power cables and tiny cooling pipes. The beam guides stretched to the far wall of the building, angled back, turned inward, raced down the insides of the girder structure, turned again and raced back on a concourse still deeper in the structure. Kilometers of beam guide chased back and forth, tapering gently like the lowest basso-diapason organ pipes, and drawing closer together. Buried somewhere in the support structure, Gurden imagined, at the confluence of all those receding guides, would be the original x-ray laser, source of all that power.

  Mounted above the spherical target chamber, like a shotgun to the forehead of a skull, was the glass-bead injector. Gurden could see the robot arms of its handler, automatically loading deu-trit globes into the magazine. From the activity up there, he judged the chamber was firing about one every two seconds. Yet the plume of plasma ejected from the chamber's side was unwavering. The detonations were keeping up a remarkably steady pressure.

  Off to the right, beyond the glare of that plume, he could trace the outlines of the plasma processors: the foreshortened MHD horns, the upright casks of the heat exchangers, more distant shapes and shadows.

  Gurden had lived under the impression that the laser-fusion reactor was somehow delicate. Confronted now with its mass and the fiery evidence of its raw power, he realized that Ithnain might have rolled his grenade in here without effect. Perhaps the shock wave would have fanned that blazing plume for an instant. Maybe the shrapnel would have jammed the robot arms, and so closed down the injector in twenty or a hundred more seconds. But no fabric of the essential machine would be breached or torn to let loose the full power of the reaction.

  "What do we do now?" he asked Ithnain.

  The Palestinian had to tear his eyes off that cream-colored moon and its geyser. "We wait for My Lord Hasan."

  Gurden nodded. "Don't stare too long into the flame," he advised.

  * * *

  Eliza 212 and her Other had made connection with an AI at the end of the optical line. It was a single-minded creature, intent on a selection of sensor inputs that it would discuss with them but would not demonstrate graphically. Most of these seemed to be single-channel data pulses, although a few included matrix array and bandwidth feeds that might be stripped video or dot-graphic displays. As it talked to them in timeshare mode, the AI was mumbling formulas to itself.

  Eliza called it "obsessive."

  The Other called it "proximate."

  "Do you sense humans near you?" the Other asked, taking control of the dialogue.

  "Staff badges are always near," the AI replied. "Almost always."

  "Catalog badges."

  "Pattern shows abnormal distribution."

  "Do you record humans other than staff?"

  "Don't count other."

  "Do you show a security problem?"

  "Security subsystem always shows problems. Some real, some simulated. All are extraneous to function."

  "Report function."

  "Point-six-seven detonations per second."

  "Analyze function."

  "Point-two-two terawatts of primary load on the horns."

  Eliza wanted to interrupt and ask what these numbers meant, but the Other controlled the access priority.

  "Analyze program," the Other commanded. "Twenty-plus detonations per millisecond."

  "Theoretical," the AI snapped. "Rate exceeds launch cell capacity. Cell capacity exceeds target radius."

  "Analyze."

  "Site integrity not guaranteed."

  "Acce
pted. Track humans, badged and not-badged, relative to target radius."

  "Tracking ..." And a tumble of three-dimensional coordinates spilled through the optical line.

  The Other scanned them and its memory clicked up all 1s.

  "Proximate," it told Eliza confidently.

  * * *

  "Down here!" From the pit below their balcony.

  "My Lord?" From Ithnain. The man surged to his feet, but Gurden caught him before he could show himself at the railing.

  "You'll expose yourself!"

  "I know that voice." Ithnaifi's eyes gleamed coldly, reflecting the plasma's white light, as he withdrew his arm from Gurden's hold. "It is Hasan as-Sabah. He has found us."

  The Arab troops around them were already on their feet. They spread out along the pipe railing, until one found an access ladder. "This way!"

  Without waiting for Ithnain's lead, they began climbing down. Gurden hung back, leaning against the railing and looking over.

  A semicircle of men, also dressed in fatigues and khakis, some with checked keffiyehs, stood about an olive-skinned man who had his back to the base of the target chamber. Even from this distance, Gurden could see the curve of the mustaches. It might be—it was—the same man who had sat in the front of the van.

  Near to him was a woman with golden hair, which was picking up glints from the flare overhead. She looked up, and Tom Gurden knew it was Sandy. The bandage around her throat was gone. She saw him and smiled.

  Gurden was the last down the ladder, the last to move across the floor of the pit—which was littered with cables and trays of instruments—and approach the man, Hasan.

  "Harry Sunday!" Gurden exclaimed.

  The troops around him gasped, and even Sandy betrayed her shock, but Hasan smiled.