The Beasts Of Valhalla

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.