The Beasts Of Valhalla m-4

by George C. Chesbro

  My mother's dream…

  All the world…

  Then Garth could go on no longer. Swaying, he held me very close, kissed me good-bye, then toppled sideways with me into the snow.

  Something furry and very heavy fell on top of me, driving me even farther down into the snow. I wriggled, pushed at Golly, and she raised herself just enough so that I could see her display screen.

  GOLLY LOVE MONGO

  GOLLY KEEP MONGO WARM

  While there's life, there really is hope. Ho ho, ho.

  Alive, Golly and her sacrifice might keep me alive for a few more minutes, at most.

  Dead, her sacrifice might keep both Garth and me alive for a considerably longer time.

  Shhh.

  "I love you, Golly. Thank you for your life."

  I sliced open her throat, killing her instantly. Hot blood gushed forth into my face, momentarily clearing my senses, melting down the snow around my head. I wriggled the upper part of my body free, wiped the blood off my glasses, then buried Whisper in the base of Golly's throat and ripped down through bone and flesh, spilling her steaming guts into the snow.

  Garth saw and understood what I was trying to do, and he helped me stretch and break open Golly's rib cage. Covered with warm, life-sustaining gore, we squeezed together into more gore, huddled together with our bodies wrapped around one another inside Golly's carcass.

  Dripping blood and strands of gut hanging from the ripped rib cage almost immediately began to freeze, forming a bloody, intricate, lacelike barrier of strange and unlikely beauty between us and the storm outside.

  Gestures, even empty ones, can mean something. Now there was absolutely nothing left to do. But we had fought to the best of our ability to the very end, and I believed that our mother and father would be proud of our struggle, no matter what kind of world they ended living in.

  Garth and I, two beasts of Valhalla, lay inside the body of another, waiting to die behind a wall of tears and curtains of ice.

  37

  Knock-knock .

  Who's that tapping at my door?

  Knock-knock.

  Only death and nothing more?

  The knocking continued, and as I opened my eyes and squinted I could see booted feet moving in clear sunlight outside the curtain of frozen blood.

  Somebody was chopping away at Golly's frozen carcass, trying to get at us.

  I tried to grope for Whisper, but everything around me seemed frozen solid, and I couldn't move. I could feel Garth's bulk next to mine, but he seemed so very still; I tried to speak, couldn't.

  Then the prison of frozen flesh around us cracked open, and I found myself looking up into the faces of three Warriors, the fur around the hoods of their parkas being whipped about by the wash of helicopter rotors.

  Thwop-thwop-thwop.

  A fourth Warrior came into my field of vision, bent down over me. He was a big man, and his left sleeve was empty. His eyes were set wide apart, and he had a lantern jaw.

  "They're alive!" Mike Leviticus shouted.

  They're alive. Garth was alive. If there had been any tears left in me, I would have cried once again.

  By helicopter, it was only a five-minute ride to the Institute, where we were taken. I could still barely stay awake, much less speak, so I didn't bother to try.

  My initial elation at our surviving the storm had been dampened somewhat by my memory of the steel table and surgical instruments that had been set up beside Garth's cage.

  It occurred to me that we were being thawed out simply so that the scalpels wouldn't break when they dissected us.

  We weren't dissected.

  Groggy most of the time, I existed in a kind of dopy torpor as teams of men and women in white coats ministered to us. I had completely lost track of any sense of time; minutes, days, or weeks could have gone by, and I wouldn't have known the difference.

  Once, in one of my more alert periods, I lifted my head off my pillow and saw Garth, asleep, lying in another bed. He appeared strange to me. Or didn't appear strange. I wasn't sure which.

  Mike Leviticus never spoke, but he did a lot of staring at me; there was a strange look in his eyes which I found impossible to read. Often, he absently touched the stump of his left wrist.

  If, finally, Garth and I were to be killed, I strongly suspected that Mike Leviticus would be highly pleased to be chosen as our executioner.

  More time passed, still impossible to measure, and I continued to float groggily through it all. Now I suspected that Garth and I were being tranquilized, but I wasn't sure.

  Except for mealtimes, when we were assisted by nurses, we were allowed simply to rest. There were no needles, no X-rays, no sonograms, no biosamples taken. There was no cutting. Garth continued to appear strange to me. Or not strange.

  An airplane. Now I was convinced that Garth and I were being doped up, for I continued to segue in and out of sleep, soothed by the engines' steady drone.

  Garth, also asleep, was in a seat across the aisle, accompanied by a Warrior guard. My guard was Mike Leviticus, who kept staring at me and touching his stump.

  Once, when I woke up and glanced out the window, I saw water. Lots of water. An ocean.

  The next time I woke up we were over a vast, barren land mass, which I assumed was Greenland.

  Greenland, I thought, was a perfect site for Siegmund Loge's main base of operations. It was a vast land, thinly populated, midway between Russia and the United States, and beneath a nexus of dozens of communications satellites. When the time came to deliver "Father's Treasure" to the test subjects in the ring of communes around the world, cargo planes, flying at low levels, could fly in and out with minimal risk of detection.

  Another feature of the continent had also enabled Loge, using what I assumed was the latest "burnout" technology-massive steel conduits lined with reflective brick and sunk directly into a volcano's underground magma pool-to solve the problem of finding a source of energy, in this case heat transfer.

  Loge certainly had plenty of power, I thought as the plane descended toward his headquarters, of which only a huge, transparent, sunlight-collecting dome was visible aboveground. He was situated on a vast, barren plain inside a massive ring of volcanoes which I estimated to be at least ten miles in diameter.

  The plane landed on the tundra, taxied toward a spot where a massive, radio-operated panel was sliding back to reveal an equally massive elevator platform.

  It was only after the plane stopped on the platform and the elevator began to descend that it struck me that I had been seeing in sunlight, without pain, without my glasses-and had been ever since the Warriors had taken us out of the steppes. The smoked glasses, like Whisper, had been lost inside Golly's frozen carcass.

  38

  For three days we were kept in obviously impromptu but effective confinement inside a locked and reinforced storeroom with an adjoining toilet. We had no contact with anyone, and our meals were delivered to us through a narrow opening cut out at the bottom of the door.

  On the evening of the third day we got a special surprise for dinner, a hose instead of food trays. We were gassed.

  We awoke in separate beds, in a rather cheerful and tastefully decorated bedroom illuminated by recessed lights.

  "Shit, I'm shedding again," Garth said as he rose, stripped, then shook out his pajamas and brushed hair off his sheets and pillow. As his body continued its rapid transmutation back to normal size and appearance, his fur kept falling off in thick, matted chunks.

  My own pajamas even fit me, which attested to the fact that someone-presumably Siegmund Loge-had gone to a lot of trouble to see that we were comfortable. On dressers next to each of our beds had been laid out several changes of underwear, three pale blue overalls which looked appropriately sized, fine leather boots, and Adidas sneakers.

  I grunted. "It always amazes me how you find exactly the right thing to say in any given situation. Here we wake up in a Louis the Fourteenth bedroom, original Picassos on the walls, a
nd the first thing you worry about is grooming. This is the Magic Kingdom, m'boy."

  "What can I tell you? I'm anal-compulsive." Garth pulled a handful of fur off his buttocks, dropped it into the large metal wastebasket next to his bed. "Sorry I'm messing up the place. Let's hope our host has provided us with a vacuum cleaner."

  There wasn't a vacuum cleaner, but we weren't missing too many other things. There was a large bathroom with separate tub and shower stall-most welcome, since we were a bit gamy after sitting around in the storeroom for three days-and two sets of toilet articles. The refrigerator in the kitchen was well stocked, and there was a freezer filled with meat and frozen fresh vegetables. There was even a wet bar in the living room, also well stocked; it sat next to a Plexiglas shield, similar to the one in Siegfried Loge's Treasure Room, which cut us off from what appeared to be a very expensively equipped media room and a rather long, narrow corridor with a door at the end.

  What we didn't have in our section of the apartment, besides a vacuum cleaner, was an exit.

  The man standing on the other side of the shield was two or three inches taller than Garth. He was gangling and rawboned, had large, gentle-looking hands, and appeared remarkably fit for someone who had to be in his mid-eighties. His full head of snow-white hair was longer than in his pictures or on his posters, and fell across his shoulders. His face was full, free of wrinkles, and he had eyes of the deepest blue I had ever seen; the eyes were limpid, swimming with compassion and glinting with intelligence. He was wearing a loosely belted white cardigan sweater over a blue silk shirt, finely tailored charcoal slacks, and looked like a physically fit Santa Claus, or a Sunday school God, out of costume, smoking a pipe. Simply standing still and silent, his personal magnetism was enormous; he was a man who'd successfully lied to tens of millions of people, yet I knew he was a man whose words I would trust instinctively. If I didn't know better.

  "I'm Siegmund Loge," the scientist said, removing his pipe from his mouth and stepping closer to the shield. His voice, slightly amplified through hidden speakers in the apartment, was deep, rich and resonant, slightly hypnotic, the kind of voice a person can listen to for long periods of time without growing tired. "I'm most pleased to meet you at last, Garth and Dr. Robert Frederickson."

  Garth and Dr. Robert Frederickson would have been most pleased to meet Dr. Siegmund Loge on more intimate terms, and we both hurled our bodies at the Plexiglas, again and again. The shield was remarkably resilient, and all we did was manage to bruise our shoulders. I sorely missed Whisper.

  "Please don't," Loge said, looking genuinely concerned as Garth and I, panting, sat down on the thick carpet for a breather. "You'll hurt yourselves."

  The thought that Siegmund Loge should be so solicitous of our health gave both Garth and me a good chuckle, and caused us to redouble our efforts to get at him. This time all we managed to do was break up most of the living room furniture, and snap three steak knives from the kitchen.

  Loge had waited patiently through our little tantrum. Now, as we stood and glared at him, he relit his pipe, puffed on it thoughtfully as he stared back at us, then sighed and shook his head. "This is very disturbing," he said in his sonorous voice.

  Garth and I looked at each other, puzzled. It took a while, but I finally realized that Loge was referring to our recovery. "You didn't know the process could be reversed, did you?" I asked.

  Loge grunted his affirmation. "Apparently severe trauma will do, precisely that, which may mean that even less severe trauma could arrest the process. I believe the problem can be solved, but I should have anticipated it."

  Severe trauma, indeed, I thought-like almost freezing to death. "Don't feel bad," I said. "All the clues were right under the noses of your crazy son and grandson, in their Mount Doom, but they were too busy jerking off with their toys, games, and fantasies to see the implications of the fact that many of the animals they threw into that heat and cold not only survived, but multiplied. Is there a chemical antidote?"

  Loge slowly blinked, shook his head. "What would be the point of having an antidote?"

  "What's the point of the Valhalla Project?"

  Loge simply stared at us. Once he removed his pipe from his mouth and seemed about to speak, then thought better of it; he put his pipe back in his mouth and puffed.

  Garth tapped on the Plexiglas in front of Loge's nose. "Mongo wants to know why a nice senior citizen like yourself wants to risk destroying the world."

  Loge just continued to puff and stare; he seemed lost in thought.

  "I'd say it doesn't make any difference, Loge," I said. "The whole thing looks like a bust to me. You may do a lot of damage and cause a lot of suffering, but doctors and scientists will certainly discover the temperature factor before too long. The shit you want to make may not even work anywhere outside the temperate zones, which excludes most of Russia. What do you say we all go home and forget this thing? You gave it the old college try."

  Loge grunted, took a pencil and small note pad out of the pocket of his sweater, and began doodling; before our eyes, he was apparently solving the problem. "No," he mumbled. "The problem can be solved. It's in the reverse transcriptase."

  "Just where I thought it was," I said, and looked at my Chief Researcher.

  "It's a genetic substance that can read RNA into DNA," Garth said. "You can inject new material into genetic programs, cause those programs to run backwards along evolutionary lines. Controlling the reaction from the reverse transcriptase is the key to this thing."

  "I'm sorry I asked," I replied, and turned back to Loge. "Where are Mike Leviticus and the other Warriors who brought us here?"

  Loge finished a series of equations, gave a smile of satisfaction which I found maddening, put the pencil and pad back in his pocket. "They were sent back after they wired your apartment for sound and constructed this shield."

  "You didn't want us to talk to them, did you?"

  "No," Loge answered simply.

  "Because what we had to say might contradict some of the things they believe about you and Project Valhalla. In fact, each one of them may believe something different. No wonder you kept us drugged. Warriors are trained to be close-mouthed, even with each other. You certainly didn't want us to start them debating with each other."

  "Correct. The two of you happen to be the most dangerous men on the face of the earth; yet, you may still end as the saviors of humankind."

  "Oh, you're just saying that because you like us-you're going to give us delusions of grandeur. I assume you're referring to our reaction to the shit Jake Bolesh put in us?"

  "Of course. Without the two of you, and your unique reaction to that particular formulation, I might never have found the correct formulation."

  "You have it now?" Garth asked quietly.

  "Yes," Loge answered with a saintly smile of gratitude. "It is done, thanks to the information I was able to gain from your bodies. Also-thanks to your remarkable wills to survive, your resourcefulness and resilience-I discovered, and was able to correct, this problem of reversal outside certain temperature parameters. You are, or were, the most dangerous men on the planet because you would not stop coming at me, and I must confess that on a number of occasions I was afraid that you might actually be able to stop me from completing the project. That would have been a tragedy with dimensions you can't imagine-yet."

  "Oh, woe. When do we get to know what you're really up to, so that we can try to imagine the dimensions of the tragedy we would have caused if we'd been able to stop you? Garth and I are really into tragedy."

  "Soon. Not yet. When you do understand the reason for Project Valhalla, Dr. Frederickson, I don't believe you'll find things so amusing."

  "Listen, Dr. Loge, Garth and I aren't exactly splitting our sides now; a lot of people find our sense of humor somewhat bizarre." To my mind, Project Valhalla, whatever it really was, still had one major flaw. But I couldn't recall ever winning a single Nobel Prize, and I wasn't about to argue with a double laureate. Also
, after watching him casually doodle through the problem of reversal with a pencil and paper, I wasn't about to stimulate him with any hints. "Who else is here?" I asked.

  "Nobody. We're alone."

  "Bullshit."

  Loge simply shrugged. "Why should I lie about something like that? It's true; we are alone."

  "No security?"

  "Security against what? The only threat against us in this place would be from a Greenland or NATO force, and my Warriors couldn't defend against that. Illusion and isolation remain my principal weapons of security, as they have always been. Next week, of course, things will be different. Hundreds of people will begin arriving to prepare for manufacture and distribution."

  "What about the babies who were sent to you?" Garth asked in a low, menacing tone.

  "They were sent back to their parents some time ago-and I would like you to believe that, while they were here, they were expertly cared for by a trained staff. No infant suffered because of its stay here."

  "They weren't… tampered with?"

  "No, Garth. After I learned of your reactions to the last formulation, I knew there was no need for the work I had planned to do with the infants; you two were the work, the human experimental subjects, the living laboratories in which the solution to a correct formulation could be found. Indeed, it's arguable whether I could have produced that reaction in any other humans on earth. You were indispensable in bringing the Valhalla Project to fruition. I believe Mr. Lippitt understood this danger from the beginning. Considering his mind set, I'm surprised he didn't kill the both of you. An unpredictable man, that one."

  "What happened to Mr. Lippitt and the man who was with him at the Institute?" I asked carefully, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  "They're both dead. I'm sorry."

  The news hit both Garth and me like bullets in the stomach. We were alone, without allies, imprisoned and at the mercy of Siegmund Loge while the clock of the world ran down.