The Beasts Of Valhalla

26

I'd expected that Garth and I would be killed after our biosamples were taken and safely stored away. Instead, it seemed to be game time; we were getting a tour of Ramdor, personally conducted by Siegfried Loge and his son.

"You two don't seem to be entering into the spirit of things," the hawk-nosed, pale-eyed scientist said as we paused in the middle of a long land bridge that had been constructed over an area of earth that actually glowed from the furnace heat beneath it.

"Fuck you, creep," Garth said, and yawned.

"Garth never liked to go on outings, even as a kid," I added. "Besides, when you've seen one dairy farm you've seen them all."

Loge took a piece of paper from his pocket, crumpled it into a ball and dropped it over the railing; the paper burst into flames even before it hit the ground. "It's better than a thousand degrees Fahrenheit down there on the surface. There are a number of areas like this around Ramdor. You two are lucky you weren't fried on your way in."

It occurred to me that it might have been better for millions of people if we had been fried, or if Lippitt had killed us back in Nebraska. We'd accomplished nothing by chasing after the Loges, except to supply them with what they wanted and needed. It was precisely what Lippitt had feared would happen.

I remembered my mother's dream.

"This place is a regular Disneyland," I said, glancing around to look at Golly, who trailed behind us and held both control boxes. The gorilla had been in a snit ever since I'd tried to run off on her, refusing even to look at me. Throughout the tour she'd been off with Mozart, the thin cables to her earphones snaking out of her canvas shoulder bag. However, on more than one occasion her thumb, as if by accident, had brushed against the joystick on my control box; the tugs of the collar around my neck caused only minor discomfort, but Golly had made it clear that she felt hurt and betrayed. "Where's Hugo?"

"Hugo has chores to do," the scientist said in a tone that sounded evasive. "Gollum can easily handle the two of you in this situation."

"Let's show them the Treasure Room," Obie Loge said to his father. The teenager's face was flushed with excitement.

"Whoopee. How about showing us the exit?"

"Hey, creep," Garth said to Loge. "You've got what you wanted. Why haven't you killed us?"

It was a question to which I'd given some thought, and I thought I knew the answer. "It's because Gramps has to check the results to make certain everything's all right. That's it, isn't it, Loge?"

"Of course," Loge replied evenly. "Also, it would be senseless to dispose of you while the reaction continues in your bodies. We'll simply continue to monitor you."

"Where is the old man?"

"You'll enjoy seeing the Treasure Room. As long as I have absolute power over you, why not relax and enjoy my hospitality? Both of you are intelligent, and there aren't a great many people I can share all of Ramdor's wonders and secrets with."

"I believe that."

"Hey, Loge," Garth said quietly. "What would you think of another fun experiment in which we see if I can break your neck before this collar chokes me to death?"

"I wouldn't do that!" Loge snapped, wheeling on my brother. "Don't even think about it!"

"Why not?" Garth asked in a mild tone that caused me to wince; committing suicide didn't seem to make much sense. "You don't think that would be as much fun as ordering the murder of two boys who'd befriended your fat, ugly son? On second thought, it might be even more fun to throw the two of you over the railing and watch you sizzle."

"Hey, fucking Gollum!" Loge shouted.

Golly jumped, snatched the earphones from her head. Her eyes glittered with terror, and her hand trembled as she fumbled at the keyboard.

?

FUCKING WHAT

"Show them the kill button."

Using the thumbs of both hands, Golly flipped open the tops on the cases of the boxes to reveal bright blue buttons.

"It's true that we want to keep you alive," Loge continued as he glanced back and forth at Garth and me, "but not to the extent of allowing you to attack either Obie or me. There'll be no repetition of what happened in the dungeon. If one of you does attack my son or me, I absolutely guarantee that the button on your box will be pushed; then it's your brains that will sizzle. Do I make myself clear?"

"You're a real spoilsport," Garth said.

"Enough unnecessary unpleasantness," Loge said, turning away. "Come. Obie wants you to see the Treasure Room and Mount Doom."

We went back to the ranch house, walked through it to the rear. Loge opened the door to what I thought was a closet; it turned out to be the entrance to a long, unlighted tunnel that had been carved out of the rock. He removed two gasoline-soaked torches from brackets on the wall, lit them with a cigarette lighter, handed one to his son. Then they led us down the tunnel, with Golly bringing up the rear.

At the end of the tunnel was a door with its edges set flush to the rock; like the door in the black cell, there was no keyhole.

Loge, his eyes glassy in the torchlight, turned to face us. "Behold," he intoned as he removed the ring medallion from around his neck and slowly passed it back and forth over the flame.

The metal of the medallion slowly changed its configuration to the shape of a key. Garth yawned loudly.

His spirits undampened, Loge turned and passed the flame across the surface of the door; a section of metal appeared to melt and flow apart to form a keyhole. Garth yawned again.

Loge turned the key in the lock, pushed open the door. Instantly, the air was filled with the music of Siegfried's Funeral March, from Gotterdammerung, and the darkness beyond the door began to glow like sunrise. The torches were extinguished and cast aside as the light came up, and we followed the Loges into the room.

This time Garth didn't yawn.

The Treasure Room, bathed in soft blue fluorescent light, was a huge circular chamber blasted out of the rock. On the wall opposite the door was an enormous, Cinerama-size panel of some material on which was projected a photomural of scenes from Wagner's Ring. The chamber was filled with an astonishing array of Wagnerian memorabilia. There was gold, of course, but even more impressive were other artifacts-special, undoubtedly rare, musical instruments, bejeweled swords and daggers, antique costumes, opera posters with Richard Wagner's distinctive signature scrawled across them.

"This is from a practice room at Bayreuth," Loge announced proudly as he walked across the room and sat down at an old, scarred upright piano. "Wagner himself played on it. The page on the stand here is from the original manuscript of Das Rheingold. Here; listen."

And he began to play. He was actually quite good, and I might have enjoyed it if not for the fact that the recital was being given by the man responsible for the fact that Garth and I were standing around there dying. Impulsively, I marched across the room and slammed my fists down on the keys. The collar around my neck tightened, but did not choke.

"You don't like my playing?" Loge continued sardonically as he smiled at me. "I'm told I have some talent."

"Save it for somebody else, Loge."

"You understand, of course, why there aren't too many people I can bring in here."

"Oh, I understand perfectly." It struck me that the medallion, which he had replaced around his neck, had returned to its original shape.

"You and your brother should feel honored that Obie and I choose to share it with you."

"Once, everything in this room was rare, intriguing and beautiful; in your hands, they're just pieces for death and silence."

"I understand that you have one of my pieces," Loge said as he rose from the piano stool. "I'm told it's an exquisite knife-which, incidentally, you used to lop off the hand of one of Stryder's men."

"It was lost in the car crash and fire."

"Too bad. I understand it was made of Damascus steel; truly one of a kind. It would have made a nice addition to my collection."

"Hey, pimple nose," Garth said to Obie Loge. "What do you play with in here? This is all Wagner. No Tolkien?"

The boy flushed angrily, but Siegfried Loge just laughed. "Relax, Obie. Remember what they say about sticks and stones. Show the gentlemen Mount Doom. It will make you feel better."

The boy hesitated, then shrugged and walked over to a panel of switches that appeared to be part of a console controlling lights, a videotape machine, and a bank of six large television monitors. Obie Loge flipped a switch. The lights dimmed, and for a few moments my eyes had trouble making the transition. I started to remove my smoked glasses, then saw a reddish glow building where the photomural had been. Garth, sensing my difficulty, put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the red glow.

"Behold Mount Doom," Obie Loge said, and he sounded almost as spooky as his father until he ruined it all with a giggle.

With the lights out, the projected photomural had disappeared, leaving a huge, transparent panel of what was probably Plexiglas. Standing next to Garth in front of the panel, I found myself staring out over what looked like a miniature Grand Canyon which wasn't so miniature. It was a great, stone-bounded cathedral or amphitheater with dimensions I could only guess at. The reddish glow emanated from fire somewhere far below the Treasure Room, and was swallowed up by darkness far above. On the great stone wall across the chasm, perhaps two hundred yards away, three different series of steps running in different directions from a central point high to the right had been carved out of the stone, which was pockmarked with caves. There were bones-bare, polished bones-and scraps of clothing strewn over the steps at three different sites. Even at that distance and without the evidence of the clothes, I'd have been able to tell that the skulls were unmistakably human.

"How quaint," I muttered. "I don't know why you don't show this to Hugo. He's really into clinics."

"What the hell is that?!" Garth said, shying as something big and brown flapped down out of the darkness, banged against the Plexiglas by his head, then soared on hot air currents up out of sight.

The Loges looked at each other, laughed. "We don't know," the elder Loge said. "We haven't been able to figure out a way to capture one."

I turned to look at the scientist. "You don't know what it is?"

"No," Loge said, grinning. "As a matter of fact, there are a great many curious things in Mount Doom. Obie likes to put things in there to see what happens. The results, as you see, have been totally unexpected; serendipity in science. What's become of the things he drops in there isn't a question that's likely to be answered soon. We've never known a man to go in there and come out again."

Wheeling around, I fixed my gaze on the apex of the three sets of steps; I could just barely make out the outlines of a door cut into the rock. "The black cell," I whispered in horror as two more of the things swooped past; the flying things were leathery, looked something like bloated pterodactyls with hair and teeth.

"Right," Obie Loge said with obvious satisfaction. "Man, you should see those fuckers attack."

"Totally unexpected," Siegfried Loge repeated in a somewhat distant tone. "There was no way to predict… I really should have paid more attention to what you threw in there, Obie."

"Aw, shit," Garth drawled. "This is really a bummer. What you need in there is a dragon. What's a Mount Doom without a dragon?"

Once again the Loges looked at each other and tittered; this time, I thought I detected more than a hint of nervousness in their looks and laughter.

"Where did they come from originally?" I asked, watching one of the leathery beasts drop down out of sight toward the furnace glow below.

"You'll see on the exit leg of the tour," Siegfried Loge replied. "Right now, I'm sure Obie wants to show your wisecracking big brother a dragon."

Obie Loge nodded enthusiastically, turned on the videotape machine. One of the monitors on the wall came alive with fast-moving, fuzzy images. The images slowed, became what looked like a large metal pipe suspended over a mound of bones.

"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 tile. 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.