In a laser ray command post on the slope of the hill, Eugene Kenney, the Christo of North Beach, danced a Watusi of joy as the light beam turned the yellow of a jalapeno pepper as the scarab disappeared and the Eye of Horus appeared at the top of the pyramid. He had just succeeded in carrying out a very big no-no.

The no-sayer was the $5 billion Transamerica Corp., which has said in no uncertain terms that it desired to retain the secularity of its pyramid and did not wish Kenney's ancient Egyptian eye to muck up its $32 million corporate symbol.

The conceptual artist spent a year negotiating with Transamerica brass for permission to put the Eye of Horus on the pyramid for the King Tut exhibit. He says Transamerica gave him a runaround. When they finally said no-no, in July, he plotted his revenge.

Yesterday during the closing days of the King Tut show, he struck. His weapon was a $60,000, quarter-ton laser ray machine imported from New York. It projected the eye, the scarab and other scraps of Egyptology in neon brashness on the pyramid for five hours.

In the North Beach night the beam looked remarkably like Batman's bat signal. Art imitates art.

That Kenney pulled this off is unexpected. His biggest disappointment was that he couldn't hustle enough krypton gas.

Krypton is like Superman's kryptonite but for real, on earth, in a gaseous form.

It makes laser beams turn red, but it's very expensive. Kenney, who went several thousand into debt on the project, had to settle for yellow and green and a smidge of laser violet. "It's a low-budget eye." the artist said.

The secret project went almost smoothly until residents of a cooperative apartment on the top of Vallejo Street discovered that Kenney had smuggled the giant laser gun into their building, had tapped their electricity to feed the monster and had plugged into the sprinkler system for the five-gallons-per-minute necessary to cool the laser.

As Kenney and his crew were preparing to test the beam Thursday night, there was a showdown in the laundry room.

"Let's face it, this is a luxury building," said resident Jerry Schwartzman who had discovered the laser men while doing his laundry. "You just can't come in here and do something like this."

Schwartzman, who is in the fruit and vegetable business, looked at the maze of heavy electric cables plugged into the power boxes.

"You could be accused of theft of power," he said.

"If this is a luxury apartment building why are you doing your own laundry?" demanded Kenney.

Ted Schindler, another resident, appeared. "We'll have to have a meeting of the board of directors of the building before you go ahead," he said.

Kenney had not told the residents that the laser ray was aimed at the Transamerica building.

It would be betting against the spread to assume the cooperative bureaucracy might approve the artist's Star Wars revenge beaming from their building. Kenney retreated with a Mel Brooks eyeball roll. "I'll pull out the plugs. We won't use any of your electricity, OK?"

Kenney convened his crew in the apartment of attorney Jerrold Offstein, where the laser and its computer linkages were assembled. Offstein's living room looked like a mad scientist's set in a Japanese monster movie.

Norman Ballard, a laser freak from Rarefied Media in New York, who brought the laser beam to San Francisco had an idea:

If they could get the girl next door to let them use the electrical outlet in her apartment - sort of borrow a cup of electricity - they could run the laser without going to the main power boxes.

It was 11 p.m. Kenney rushed out onto the balcony and began gently throwing pebbles at the woman's window. Romeo and Juliet meets laser technology.

She stuck her head out.

"Could you drop down and talk to us about our laser gun for a minute?" he asked.

Joanne, the neighbor, an attractive brunette speech therapist, sat in Offstein's living room surrounded by the laser technicians in their blue jumpsuits. Red and green lights were flickering on the control panels and the buzz-buzz of computers moaned in the background.

Kenney explained he wanted to plug the thing into her kitchen so he could smite the pyramid.

"We're for real," he assured her.

"I don't doubt you're for real. This is too bizarre to be made up," she said.

Joanne sighed the sigh of the good scout. "What a day. My old boy friend called and said he's going back to his ex-wife. Then they told me they might cancel my department at the hospital. And some guy just stood me up on a date. What else can happen? Go ahead and plug it in."

Thus about 1 a.m. yesterday morning, the bat beam burst through the fog onto the pyramid. Kenney planned to project the beam for five hours last night, and, God willing, plans to repeat the performance tonight, beginning about 7:30 p.m.

There was a long silence on the phone when I told Jane Hall, the Transamerica vp for pr, what Kenney was doing.

"Well, it's not an actionable violation of our air space, I suppose," she said.

Hall said she would be at the Transamerica tennis open tonight and would not, herself, be viewing the big eye on her spire.