The Beasts Of Valhalla m-4

by George C. Chesbro

"You'll have to excuse the somewhat blurred picture," Loge continued. "The cameras we sunk down there are state-of-the-art and highly heat-resistant, but they've never really worked properly. What you're looking at is the bottom of a waste chute extending up through the escarpment to the laboratories above. Obie, let the tape run."

  The younger Loge released the pause button on the machine; something blurred and unrecognizable plummeted out of the chute, fell onto the mound of bones. Instantly, dozens of dark shapes darted from the surrounding darkness, converging on the hapless creature that had fallen down the chute, swarming over it, tearing it apart.

  "Too bad the microphones down there don't work," Obie Loge said to his father. "I'll bet we'd really hear some crunching and munching."

  "As you see," Siegfried Loge said to Garth and me, "some things have survived. Now, it's the survival of the fittest down there. Nothing Obie threw down there was ever more than barely alive, yet something in Mount Doom not only arrested the process of their dying, but changed them into creatures that probably exist nowhere else. Most interesting. It's too bad we don't have the time or resources to investigate what's happening." He paused, turned to his son. "Obie, that's enough of this crunchy-munchy shit. Skip ahead to six-eighty-nine."

  Keeping his eye on the machine's tape counter, Obie Loge pushed the fast-forward control, held it down for a half minute, released it.

  On the monitor, two large, black spots floated in toward the camera, hit it; the screen went blank.

  Garth yawned.

  "That's it?" I asked. "Some fucking dragon. Frankly, I was more impressed with your key trick."

  For a time, I wasn't sure Loge was going to answer. When he did, his voice was distant. "There's something very big down there," he said, gazing out over the chasm. "That camera was sunk into a mine some distance from here, to the south. It was suspended from the ceiling, and as far as we could tell it was at least five feet off the ground, with a lighting system that was sensor-activated. Whatever passed in front of that camera broke it. Nothing even approaching that size was ever thrown down the chute; it grew to that size while it was down there. It's mutated into something huge, and-from what we know about that section of the mines-it chooses to live in total darkness. I wouldn't care to run into it."

  "Oh, I don't know; I think I'd take a dragon over the Loges any time."

  Loge continued to stare out over the chasm, as if in a trance, for more than a minute. Then he abruptly turned and walked across the Treasure Room to what appeared to be the door to an elevator. "Come," he said tersely. He seemed distracted now, oddly subdued, as if his bizarre personality were suddenly shifting gears on him. "Next stop on the tour, and I think it will interest you. However, if you don't wish to see it, Gollum will take you back to the dungeon. Suit yourselves."

  Garth and I exchanged glances. "We'll see it all," Garth said.

  "Fine. Then let's go; I have other work to do today."

  "Dad?"

  "Be quiet, Obie. I'm all right." Loge pressed a button, and the elevator door sighed open. Loge pushed his son past him to the back of the elevator. "Let's go, fucking Gollum."

  The gorilla was hanging back; her shoulders were slumped, and she was holding her cassette player cradled against her chest like a baby.

  "Leave her alone," I said to Loge. "She's been upset all through this tour of yours, and she's obviously very upset by whatever you've got upstairs. Let her go. You and your kid can handle us with the boxes easily enough."

  "Fucking Gollum!"

  Golly scampered across the room, fairly leaped into the elevator, and cringed in a corner. Garth and I followed, but Loge kept the door propped open with his hand. He was staring at me, and his eyes seemed slightly out of focus.

  "Gollum impresses the hell out of you, doesn't she, Frederickson?" Loge continued.

  "Yeah, she does."

  "Then I'll let you and your brother in on a little secret; most of it's a trick, computer-enhanced communications using random-sorting circuit boards you can buy off the shelf in any good hobby store. Oh, I've worked on her cognitive brain centers, to be sure, and she sure as hell is smarter than the average gorilla, but she has nowhere near the capacities for thought, communication, and feeling that you think she does. Most of the work is done by the computer behind the keyboard."

  "You're wrong," I said flatly. "Christ, look at her."

  Loge smiled thinly. "You stick to criminology, Professor, and leave the hard science to me. Artificially enhanced intelligence, yes, but she's still basically just a clever tame gorilla. I'm telling you this because I thought you'd be interested; it's part of the tour."

  "I still say you're wrong."

  "I know what Gollum is; I made her, and Obie designed the computer."

  "I think she's your most remarkable creation, Loge."

  "No. That distinction belongs to you and your brother."

  "Your old man had a lot to do with making us."

  Loge shrugged. "Of course."

  "What'd you do to enhance her intelligence?"

  "There's less than a one-percent difference between the DNA structures of man and great apes; lay slides of the structures next to each other, and you need a very powerful microscope to discern the difference. That tiny percentage accounts for all the differences between apes and us. My father and I were able to isolate a gene chain that's responsible for much of primate cognitive intelligence. There are also enzyme pairs involved, and those chains and enzyme pairs can be stimulated and reorganized if you find the right catalyst. I used massive doses of ionizing radiation on the appropriate brain centers, specifically on what passes for a cerebral cortex in a gorilla."

  Obie Loge laughed. "If you want to see something really funny, you should see a puking gorilla without fur."

  I had a sudden vision of Golly with radiation sickness, naked and cold, her mind lost and whirling in a foggy world of torment between beast and something else. I badly wanted to cripple Loge, but knew that if I hit the scientist the animal he'd hurt so badly would choke-and perhaps kill-me.

  "… and pain," Loge was saying.

  "Huh? What?"

  "Operant conditioning. Reorganizing the gene chains was one thing, but you might say that we also had to get her attention in order to teach her-as well as the one you ran across in Nebraska-what to do with this new sense of awareness."

  "Torture."

  "I got her attention, and I must say that she performs quite nicely. But it's still basically tricks, totally beside the point. You and your brother are the point."

  There was absolutely nothing I could think of to say. I was astonished, dumbfounded, by Loge's apparently total blindness to what had happened with Golly. The man had penetrated the most mysterious of all worlds, the spiritual, had ignited the flame of a soul in a beast, and didn't know it. He wouldn't-or couldn't-see it. Nothing seemed to exist for him outside the narrow, intense focus of his interests; he was a man who could casually order up the murder of two teenagers, then appear vaguely distressed when the uncles of one of them appeared less than enthused with his work and hobbies. He was enough to make an institutionalized sociopath look like an emotional overachiever.

  Loge stepped back. The door closed, and the elevator began to rise. The shaft had been sunk through both solid rock and burnt-out mines, some of which were populated by the strange creatures which, like Garth and me, suffered chaos in their genes. The walls of the elevator were transparent; although the trip to the building at the top of the escarpment lasted less than a minute, it became a protracted, nightmare journey through black rock and backlit mines where things skittered away as we passed. It was worse than anything dreamed up by Hieronymus Bosch.

  I had a pretty good idea of what we were going to see when the door opened, but that still didn't prepare me for the panorama of agony-unidentifiable creatures in various stages of devolution, all lined up in rows inside glassed-in, soundproofed cages atop steel pedestals inside a large laboratory that was all gleaming white til
e. Wires from monitoring devices inside the cages snaked to the ceiling, were bundled into cables that ran along the ceiling to a central monitoring and control panel that filled half of one wall to the left of the elevator. Garth, a tough New York City cop, was green, and I turned away as I felt my stomach turn.

  What was in the cages were all variations of the things Lippitt had splashed over a fender to show us what we were up against, and why we might want him to kill us; Loge's laboratory was Lippitt's horror show multiplied a hundredfold. All of the creatures, to various extents, were "melting" into bizarre combinations of fur and feathers, fangs and beaks, claws and flippers, hide and scales.

  Every living thing in the room, except for the two Loges, was dying like that.

  "This is a terrible thing" was all I could think of to say, and I delivered the line rather feebly.

  "So are nuclear weapons," Loge declared flatly as he stared at the cages where the creatures mewled, coughed, barked, and screamed in-to us-silent agony.

  "Then it is a weapon you're developing."

  "Don't be stupid, Frederickson," Loge said in the same odd, flat tone of voice. "It's unbecoming. Did you think we were making cheesecake?"

  "I wanted to hear you admit it."

  "This is a unique weapon. When we learn from your bodies how to control the reaction, it will be only a minor step to tailoring it so that it can be targeted against specific populations based upon membership in gene pools."

  "Races?"

  "Oh, it can be targeted to race, certainly. More important, it can be targeted against nationality, as long as the gene pool is sufficiently discrete."

  "It would work better against, say, Icelanders or Georgian Russians than against Americans."

  "Correct, Frederickson."

  "You need to control the reaction so that you can mask what's happening to the people, slow it down, make its source untraceable. The victims might not even know they'd been attacked, much less know what kind of weapon had been used against them."

  "Correct, Frederickson."

  "That makes it an offensive weapon."

  "Right again."

  Obie Loge was checking cages. When he found a dead animal, he would open a side of the cage, don elbow-length rubber gloves, then remove the animal and carry it to our end of the lab where the waste chute was located. He would pull open the large lid, drop the creature down the chute, close the lid. Then he would watch the show down below on a television monitor to the left of the waste chute.

  Garth nudged me. I looked up into the profound sadness of his face and eyes, knew instantly what he wanted to do. I winked, nudged him back. Garth yawned, thrust his hands into his pockets and, under the watchful eye of Golly, began to stroll in and out of the rows of cages.

  "It's illegal."

  "Naivete doesn't become you either, Frederickson. Every nation stockpiles illegal antipersonnel weapons, from mustard gas, to anthrax bombs, to binary nerve gas. Besides, it's arguable whether this research is actually illegal. The United States isn't a signatory to the Geneva protocols outlawing this kind of weaponry."

  "For Christ's sake, Loge, forget what's legal or illegal; forget the question of morality. What if this-whatever it is you're cooking up in here-gets loose into the environment before you have a handle on it? It could change the face of the planet."

  "Trust us."

  "Dad?" Obie Loge called from where he was standing in front of the television monitor. "It's pretty quiet down there now. Can I use live ones to feed the kitty?"

  Siegfried Loge nodded, held up three fingers.

  "You and your father are fucking lunatics, Loge. No; you're beyond lunacy. I don't know what to call you."

  "If we're lunatics, I don't know what that makes all those nice people in Washington who run this country," Loge replied mildly as he watched his son select something that quivered, carry it back and drop it down the chute. "Government people came to my father on this matter, not the other way around. You think we could throw around money like this, or enjoy the protection we do, without government backing?"

  "Where is your father? I would think he'd be anxious to meet his two prize specimens." The cries of the animal Obie Loge had carried across the laboratory still echoed in my mind.

  "He is anxious to meet you, and he will. He's a busy man."

  "He's carrying on direct human experimentation somewhere, isn't he?"

  "He's a busy man."

  "Maybe he's a dead man. Lippitt had him targeted from the beginning. You're a fairly bright man for a lunatic, but you don't have the mind of your old man. Without him, Project Valhalla will never be completed. Lippitt always understood that."

  Loge shook his head. "Mr. Lippitt will never find my father. It's Lippitt who will die-if he's not dead already."

  The next animal spewed fluid all over the floor, screamed as Obie Loge brought it to the chute, dropped it down.

  "Specifically, what's happening to us?" Garth asked in a casual tone as he leaned against one of the pedestals near the waste chute.

  "Your brother, if his cells don't suddenly explode, will become a creature closely resembling a snake," Loge answered matter-of-factly. "Your changes are less dramatic, but in a way more interesting. You seem to be following a very direct evolutionary line back through the humanoids. If you don't explode, I think we'll actually be able to see what the precursor of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon looked like. I really hope you make it; anthropology is a minor interest of mine."

  "I think it might be a good idea for you to tell your boy to call it a day on the live animal thing," I said as I watched Obie Loge looking for another animal, then glanced at Garth.

  Loge shrugged, smiled thinly. "He has to keep Mount Doom populated. Why should I tell him to stop?"

  "I think you should tell him to stop because Garth is getting aggravated."

  Obie Loge yelped as Garth's fingers closed around his throat; the boy went up on his toes, and his tongue started to protrude from his mouth.

  "Wait!" I shouted, wheeling on Golly and extending both my arms. "He won't kill! Don't you! Just wait!" I tensed, holding my breath. Golly had immediately flipped open the tops on both control boxes, and her thumbs hovered near the blue kill buttons. She looked uncertainly at me, then at Loge.

  "Kill the animals in the cages," I continued as I slowly turned around to face Loge. "Kill them all. Then Garth will release your son."

  Loge had cocked his head to one side and was staring at me intently. "If I nod to that gorilla, your brother dies instantly from electrical shock. You know that."

  "Not quite instantly, Loge. You've seen his reflexes and you know how strong he is; at the instant you're burning his brain, he'll be snapping your kid's neck. Then I go after you, and Golly will have to kill me."

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" He seemed more interested in the answer than he was in whether or not Garth killed his son. Obie Loge's face was turning blue, and Garth was grinning. "I won't let you escape. You try to escape, you die."

  "You're not listening. We have a simple request; put these animals out of their misery. Do it now. Then Garth will let your kid go. We're not trying to escape."

  "What's the point? I'll have a new shipment of test animals trucked in."

  "We'll take whatever victories we can find in small doses, one day at a time. You have a simple choice, Loge; kill the animals, or have your boy die and be forced to kill your two prize specimens."

  "This is insane, Frederickson. You and your brother risk your lives just to make a silly, token gesture? It doesn't make sense."

  "It's like you told Hugo; the shit in us has affected our minds. Do it, Loge. Then your boy can start breathing again, and Garth and I can get back to our nice, cozy dungeon."

  Loge shrugged, turned and walked to the control panel on the wall. He snapped back a protective plate, began pushing a series of small brown buttons. Electric grids in the bottoms of the cages sparked; one by one, the tormented creatures in the cages stiffened and
were still.

  When Loge was finished, Garth pushed Obie Loge away from him.

  "Choke them," Siegfried Loge said casually to Golly, and Golly did.

  27

  Chore time. Garth was put to work shoveling manure, and I got to milk cows. It was lousy busy work, but it beat sitting around in the dungeon.

  Golly, who still seemed upset, had refused even to look at me for two days. On the morning of the third day I felt a leathery hand touch my shoulder. I turned on my milking stool to find Golly standing by me, her earphones draped around her neck.

  MASTER ALMOST MADE FUCKING GOLLY KILL YOU

  "We understand that you have to do what Loge tells you. Don't worry about it."

  GOLLY DON'T WANT TO FUCKING KILL YOU

  "I know."

  ?

  WHY MAKE MASTER KILL FUCKING ANIMALS

  "The animals were suffering a lot of pain."

  PLEASE KILL FUCKING GOLLY

  "Why?" I asked, frowning. "I know Loge hurt you before, but are you in pain now?"

  FUCKING NO

  GOLLY FUCKING WRONG

  I shook my head. "If you know you're wrong, you're not that wrong."

  GOOD THAT YOU KILL FUCKING ANIMALS

  "That's what Garth and I thought."

  MONGO AND GARTH FUCKING GOOD

  "Thank you."

  MONGO AND GARTH FUCKING STUPID

  I laughed. "Loge thinks that it's the machine on your chest that makes you seem so smart. What do you think?"

  GOLLY FUCKING WRONG

  "I'm tired of milking cows, sweetheart," I said, stretching and arching my back. "How about letting me do some gardening for a change of pace?"

  ?

  "Gardening; I want to work on those plants by the house."

  PLANTS FUCKING DEAD

  "No. They're like that because it's cold now, but things should be done so that they'll grow when it's warm again. I like digging around in the dirt. Okay?"

  FUCKING OKAY

  Whisper was where I'd left her.

  Since I'd been such a well-behaved specimen, Loge granted my request for a changing of the guard. Golly was hurt, and Hugo was surprised.