He backed away from the girl frantically.

She stared up at him, her mouth hanging open.

He pushed out with both hands again.

The fountain—and Nova—receded . . .

Suddenly, his shoulders had touched something.

Huge double doors, abruptly behind him, loomed large and mysterious. Oddly unlocked. Brent’s athletic figure swung the doors open. He forced himself back, over a dim threshold, glad of anything that would keep him from harming the girl. Nova grew smaller in his erratic vision. He stopped, only for a second, to call back to her. For she was taking a hesitant step toward him, slender arms outspread.

“Wait for me—” Brent whispered, still fighting the forces engulfing him. “Nova—!” His brain was on fire. Her figure wavered in his sight. Shouting hysterically, Brent crossed the dark threshold and slammed the double doors behind him to close out the horror in his head. To block off Nova from his violence.

She disappeared from view.

Brent hung exhausted against the curved metal door grips on the inside and fought to catch his breath. For a long moment he wrestled with his inner and outer wills. Then he quietened. The strange fit had momentarily passed. He sucked air into his lungs and shuddered. Then he pulled himself erect once more. Turning, he surveyed the interior of this building he had fled into as a sanctuary from insanity.

The unrealities again ruled.

Even here.

He was in a cathedral.

In direct contrast to the bright white glare without, here was only blessed gloom. Brent’s eyes roved quickly.

He saw a row of wooden pews flanking a great arched nave. There was a threshold up front, past the choir stalls, beyond the pews. He saw a prie-dieu directly below a high altar of some kind. Brent blinked in the occult semidarkness.

There was a man standing on the sacred threshold up front.

A white-robed, white-hooded apparition, kneeling in homage or religious fealty of some kind. A figure as still as any statue. The figure had not moved when the great doors had slammed shut. Brent, for all his dazed condition, recognized in that tiny unimportant fact a universal truth and oddity: why shouldn’t a cathedral door always be open to devotees?

Brent watched the hooded figure, not daring to breathe. Or even speak. The hush of the place was emotionally demoralizing.

The hood lifted upward, the robed arms spread out like bat wings and a sonorous voice suddenly intoned: “I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!” The voice rang with the clarity and persuasion of unshakable faith and belief. Brent found his eyes ranging upward, following the direction of the stentorian declaration.

Slowly, from the space of darkness above the high altar, an eerie light appeared. Growing, expanding, as if on a rheostat; the gloom transformed from dim illumination to a full, blazing intensity. The outflung arms of the hooded figure held in a posture of crucifixion. And utter adoration.

Brent saw what the new light held.

Not a statue of Christ.

Not even some strange unknown pagan god.

The hooded figure’s exhortations were for something else.

The ultimate blasphemy.

Something mounted and enthroned and positioned with all the care and reverence of any highly esteemed religious curio.

A Twentieth-Century Atom Bomb.

Perfectly preserved and slung, like some great inverted cross, between two supporting brackets of hammered gold, it hung from the arched nave in all its illuminated wonder. On one of its impressive steel fins there were stenciled the two Greek letters: ALPHA and OMEGA.

The Beginning and the End.

Brent stared in mounting horror from the depths of the double doors. “In a church—?” His racked whisper was alien to his own ears. It was as if someone else had spoken.

A tiny scratch of sound came on the door behind him. Back to the barrier, Brent suddenly drew taut. The scratching continued. He closed his eyes. “Nova?” The scratching burbled into a flurry of sounds. Brent slid both hands into the door grips, blocking the portals with his body, his muscles congealing into lead. He didn’t budge. “Keep away, Nova,” he whispered urgently to the door. “Keep away from me—and from here . . .”

But the tapping had become almost a crescendo, punctuated with fist-pounding and low moans of appeal. Brent tightened his resolve; perspiration broke out on his forehead. He couldn’t let the girl in here, no matter what happened . . .

The hooded figure on the dais had turned.

An ornate panel at his side, with three jeweled buttons of emerald, topaz and ruby set into the top of the prie-dieu, was pressed. Brent saw the gesture, realizing that the figure had heard Nova’s attempts to get in.

The figure rose to its full height and made another gesture. Brent started. He knew somehow, with some weird sense of comprehension, that what he was seeing was the Sign of the Bomb.

An inverted Sign of the Cross. With the figure making a vertical downward gesture to depict the body of the Bomb and then two lateral gestures to indicate the fins at its base. The supreme sacrilege! A sign from Hell.

The whole cathedral suddenly flooded with new light.

Even as Nova continued to pound away, the hooded figure came down from the dais and stalked toward Brent huddled at the doors of the strange place of worship. And when the pounding stopped, with Brent blinking in the sudden fresh glare of illumination, the hooded figure advanced like a specter. Brent wondered at the silence beyond the door. He started to open it, then checked himself and turned to confront the advancing figure. Nova was forgotten.

The hood framed a face of startling purity.

The man drew closer and halted, staring at Brent.

Brent stared back.

He assumed that the man was the verger of this strange cathedral. But beyond that, the appearance of the face before him was astounding.

The man was tall, of an indecipherable age, but his face was one of great beauty. Unwrinkled skin, as smooth as marble, deep-set luminous eyes in shadowed sockets, with the barest accentuation of lip line, which somehow makes a man or a woman look sexy. The man’s mouth seemed to speak. To say something. But Brent heard nothing, orally.

“What did you say?” Brent asked fiercely, frightened again.

The verger had said nothing.

He merely stood there, regarding Brent.

“What do you mean, there’s no point?” Brent answered the unspoken words he heard in his own brain. “Will they hurt her?”

Again the verger’s lips did not move.

“Maybe not physically,” Brent agreed. “But you can hurt here.” He tapped his own head. “I know.”

The verger spoke his unheard words.

“Yes, it’s gone now,” Brent answered. “But outside—” Suddenly he twitched. A great spasm took hold of him. His eyes leaped. “Your lips don’t move. Your lips don’t move . . . but I can hear . . . no, not hear—I mean I know what you are thinking.”

The fixed grin left the verger’s face.

Brent nodded. “I saw nothing. You were in darkness.”

The verger spoke again, silently.

Brent looked quickly over his shoulder. His mind raced to remain calm, to keep pace with this new-found unreality.

Two men had appeared at the double doors behind him. Unarmed, but strangely alien and enigmatically marble-faced; two more denizens of this strange and terrible city. They touched Brent’s elbows briefly with the fingertips of velvet-textured hands.

“All right, all right,” he muttered, not resisting.

Unable to understand, incapable of assessing anything, he allowed himself to be led out of the cathedral. The verger remained where he was. Shadowy, inscrutable. But now there was a worried gleam in the deep-set luminous eyes.