“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 ofIran.”

It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. I had to smile at his mention ofIran — modern-dayPersia.

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.”

He was a happy engineer. His machines were working. The world was fine.

But I saw that there were pickets marching along the wire fence in front of the lab. Most of them were young, students and the like, although there was a sprinkling of older men and more than a dozen women who looked like housewives.

The placards they carried were professionally printed:

Our car slowed as we approached the gate. The driver, a company chauffeur, said over his shoulder to Dempsey and me, “The lab security guards don’t wanna open the gate. They’re afraid the pickets’ll rush inside.”

There were only a few dozen of them, but as our car stopped before the gate, they seemed like a larger mob. They swarmed around the car, shouting at us.

“Go back where you came from!”

“Stop poisoning us!”

In a flash they all started chanting, “People yes! Technology no! Fusion power’s got to go!” They began pounding the car with their placards and rocking it.

“Where are the police?” I asked the driver.

He merely shrugged.

“But they’ve got it all wrong,” Dempsey said, his face showing that he felt personally hurt by the crowd’s lack of appreciation for his machines. “Fusion power won’t produce enough radiation to hurt anybody.”

Before I thought to restrain him, he pushed open the car door on his side and wormed out among the demonstrators shouting, “There’s no radiation coming out of the reactor! The major waste product of fusion is just plain old helium. You can give it to your kids so they can blow up their balloons with it.”

They wouldn’t listen. They clustered around Dempsey, screaming in his face, drowning out his words. A couple of youths, big enough to be varsity football players, pushed him against the side of the car and pinned him there.

I began to get out as our driver, muttering to himself, swung his door open hard enough to hit somebody and produce a yelp of pain. As I ducked out on the other side of the car, somebody swung a fist at me. I blocked it automatically and pushed the youngster away from me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the housewives bring her placard down squarely on Dempsey’s head. He sagged, and then one of the football players punched him in the midsection. Dempsey went down facefirst on the blacktop. The chauffeur tried to wrestle the placard away from one of the women demonstrators while she yelled and tried to squirm out of his grasp. Several of the students swarmed over the chauffeur and began to pummel him.

“Let’s teach ’em a lesson!”

I raced around the back of the car and dove into the crowd, yanking bodies out of my way until I was straddling Dempsey’s prostrate body, next to the wobbly-kneed chauffeur. His nose was bleeding, his mouth open wide, lips pulled back over his teeth in rage. I took a punch on the side of my face. Before the snarling young man who threw it could pull his arm back, I had him by the wrist and elbow and flung him against the others, knocking them down like ten pins. Everything happened very quickly. Suddenly the crowd melted back and started running away from us, except for the five on the ground with concussions or fractures. The others dropped their placards and fled down the street.

The security guards opened the front gate, almost falling over themselves to apologize for not moving more swiftly. In the distance I could hear the wail of a police siren approaching — too late.

The guards took us to the lab’s infirmary, where I met their security chief, a waspish little man named Mangino. His skin was the color of cigarette tobacco; his eyes narrow and crafty.

“I just don’t get it,” he grumbled as Dempsey’s head was being bandaged. “We never had a speck of trouble before today. This bunch of nuts just pops up out of nowhere and starts parading up and down in front of the main gate.”

They were meant for me, I knew. A welcoming committee from Ahriman. But I said nothing.

“Our public relations people have been telling the media for years that this reactor won’t be like the old uranium fission power plants,” Mangino went on. “There’s no radioactive waste. No radiation gets outside the reactor shell. The thing can’t melt down.”

Dempsey, sitting atop the infirmary table while a doctor and a pretty young nurse wrapped his head, spoke up. “You can’t talk sense to people like that. They get themselves all worked up and they don’t listen to the facts.”

“No,” I corrected him. “They don’t get themselves all worked up. Somebody works them up.”

Mangino’s eyes widened for the barest flash of a second. Then he nodded. “You’re right.”

“It would be a good idea to find out who that somebody is,” I said.

Mangino agreed. “And where he comes from. Could be the Arabs, or the oil companies, or any one of a dozen nut groups.”

No matter who it was, I knew, Ahriman was behind it.

It was not difficult to find the headquarters of the demonstrators. They belonged to an organization that called itself STOPP, an acronym for Stop Technology from Over Powering People.

STOPP’s headquarters was an old four-story frame house across the main avenue from the university campus. I parked my rented car in front of the house and sat watching it awhile. Plenty of students went walking by, and more of them congregated around the pizza and hamburger shops down the street. This side of the avenue had once been a row of stately Victorian houses. Now, with the growth of the university across the way, the homes had been turned into apartments and offices. Many of the houses’ street fronts had been converted into stores.

Across the avenue was academia: a lovely campus of gracious buildings, neatly tended hedges, and tall trees that reached bare branches toward the gray winter sky. This side of the street was dedicated to the greed of landlords: seedy, bustling, noisy, lucrative. And all along the avenue there was the constant rush of traffic: cars honking, growling, moving endlessly; trucks, buses, motorbikes, even a few electrically powered bicycles.

I got out of the car, convinced that the best approach was the direct one. I walked up the wooden steps and across the porch that fronted the house, pushed the antique, rusting bell button. I heard nothing, so I opened the front door and stepped inside.