The Beasts Of Valhalla

40

"Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

"Ally-ally-in-free!"

Loge had always done things, or gotten others to do things, in a big way, and the underground complex in Greenland was no exception. We had no idea how many levels there were, and after forty-five minutes Garth and I had not even finished exploring the level we were on, which contained apartments of varying sizes which we assumed were for the technical and manufacturing personnel scheduled to come in.

"Do you suppose he knows we're looking for him?" Garth asked.

"Sure. He must have been watching the whole show on television."

An intercom in the corridor we were passing through buzzed, and a button marked "General" lit. Garth pressed the button.

"Yeah, Leviticus?"

"I found the guts of this place. I'm down on the fourth level, in the Pressure Control Room. I'm going to bust it up."

"Wait, Mike! Don't do anything until we-!"

But the intercom had gone dead and the light had winked out. A few seconds later we heard and felt the ratta-tatta-tatta of machine gun fire, the vibrations carrying clearly through the massive steel magma-flow pipes overhead and the ventilating shafts.

"Shit!" I said as we raced down the corridor and stepped into the first elevator we came to. Garth hit the button marked 4, the elevator doors closed, and we descended.

On the fourth level, the doors opened and we sprinted down the corridor to our left, toward the sound of machine gun fire. We almost ran over Siegmund Loge, who was just stepping out of an office. He was holding an open cardboard carton in his hands; in the carton was a gallon container of some amber-colored fluid. Garth grabbed the scientist by the front of his sweater, while I took the carton from his hands and gently set it on the floor.

"It's my work!" Loge cried. "It must be saved!"

The magma-flow pipes overhead were starting to make funny noises, and the temperature in the corridor was definitely rising. "Garth, take the banana back and wait by the elevator!" I shouted as I sprinted ahead down the corridor. "I'll see how much damage Leviticus has done!"

"You have to hurry!" Loge called after me. "That man has done something he shouldn't have done!"

Mike Leviticus had indeed done something he shouldn't have done; he'd shot off most of the pressure gauges from the control pipes. One steam pipe had ruptured while he was about it, and when I found him I wished I hadn't. He'd taken a blast of live, superheated steam full in the face and was now lying on the floor of the Pressure Control Room, well done and very dead.

rrrrrrrrr

The walls of the room began to shake. I made a hasty departure from the Pressure Control Room and sprinted back along the corridor toward the elevator at the far end. The pipes overhead had begun to glow cherry red and were doing some serious banging. What I suspected had happened was that, with the pressure control valves on all the pipes suddenly blown away, the giant main conduits, stretching perhaps as much as half a mile underground directly into the magma pools of the surrounding ring of volcanoes, were acting as monstrous siphons, out of control, sucking hundreds of tons of magma-here. In a very short time, the entire underground complex was going to be just one more pool of molten rock.

That was for openers. With all the displacement that was going on, there was one hell of a lot of geography moving beneath my fast-running feet.

rrrrruummmmm

Blurp.

The seam of a pipe twenty feet ahead of me ruptured, and a great bubble of steaming, flaming magma began to ooze out. I dove and rolled, feeling the flames singe my hair and burn my back, heard the mass plop behind me. Sulphur gas burned my eyes and clogged my lungs. Coughing, gasping for breath, I grabbed Garth's outstretched hand and let him yank me into the elevator. The doors sighed shut and we began to ascend-much too slowly, as far as I was concerned. I had a distinctly unpleasant sense of having been here before.

Rrrrrruuummmmmmmmble.

"Loge!" I gasped as fumes began to fill the elevator. "What's the fastest fucking way out of here?!"

"I already got that out of him," Garth said, brushing ashes and shreds of burned fabric off my back. "You've got a pretty good burn there, brother."

"You ain't seen nothin' yet unless we get out of here! I mean, like ten minutes ago! This place is gone!"

"There's an access tunnel a hundred yards to our left," Garth said, stopping the elevator on the second level. Garth slapped Loge-hard. "Is that right, you son-of-a-bitch?"

Loge, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, nodded, swallowed hard. "It's twenty degrees below zero up on the surface. We'll freeze to death without coats."

"Go, jerk-off!" I said, goosing Loge as the door opened and Garth sprinted off down the corridor. I wasn't about to let our resident mad scientist entertain any suicidal thoughts; he was too important to our future-assuming we had one.

We reached the huge mouth of a tunnel of corrugated steel sloping upwards. Garth slapped a button on the wall, and a door slid back far up at the opposite end to reveal a square of pale, ice-blue sky. A blast of frigid air blew into our faces, a rather unpleasant complement to the burning at our backs. I felt I knew what a minute steak feels like just before it's dropped on the grill.

"You know how to fly a plane?!" Garth shouted at me as we ran up the tunnel.

"Nope! You?!"

"Nope! Loge?!"

The old man, staggering along in Garth's firm grasp, merely shook his head.

"Garth, does this mean we're going to have to wing it?!"

"Mongo, that's the worst joke you've ever laid on me, and I'm never going to let you forget it!"

"What fucking joke?!"

It didn't make any difference that none of us could fly a plane, because nobody was going to be winging it anywhere in Mike Leviticus's plane.

GGGrrruuuuuMMMBLE.

The force of the tremor knocked us to the ground. We got up, stumbled out of the mouth of the tunnel into the freezing air just in time to see the jet lazily topple over and disappear into a quarter-mile-long fissure that had opened in the ground.

Flaming magma was bubbling up in the tunnel behind us, and the huge glass dome was beginning to glow.

"What now?" Garth asked. "You want to stay here and cook, or move out and freeze?"

"I'm not sure it makes a difference. I've got a feeling that one or more of the volcanoes around us is going to blow. If that happens, we could be in serious trouble."

"They will all erupt," Loge said distantly. "My estimate is that we have less than fifteen minutes. We are dead men."

"Garth," I said, "I'm going to see if I can reach Leviticus's plane. There may be some survival gear in it."

I was twenty yards out over the trembling, frozen tundra when Garth's shout stopped me. I turned, then looked toward the west, where his finger was pointing. Just above the horizon, something silver glinted in the sunlight. The plane was flying low and fast, heading directly toward us.

Ah. Rescue.

GGGrrruuuuuMMMBLE.

The problem was that the pilot couldn't land; if he did, the chances were very good that the same thing would happen to his plane that had happened to Leviticus's. The entire area inside the circle of volcanoes was shaking, cracking like glass. The glass dome had burst, and magma was flowing out in uneven, smoking rivers on all sides.

Rescue would have been very nice, I thought, but it made no sense at all to feed one more body into the outraged earth. I staggered across the shaking ground, frantically trying to wave the plane off.

The pilot not only ignored me, but almost decapitated me as he swooped in over my head. Just before I sprawled on the ice, I caught a glimpse in the cockpit of a grimly smiling face that looked familiar.

Getting up unsteadily, shivering, I turned in time to see the plane land, skid, spin around in a couple of circles, then straighten around and taxi toward us. I walked back to Garth and Loge, stood and watched in amazement as the plane stopped and Mr. Lippitt, carrying a huge BAR machine gun over his shoulder, stepped out, hopped over a rivulet of hissing lava that was flowing beneath the training jet, then casually strolled toward us.

"Why did you lie to us about Lippitt?" I asked Loge.

Loge stared at me, his eyes filled with sadness. "I was certain he was going to be dead soon, anyway," the scientist said. "It was only a matter of time. I badly wanted the two of you to commit to me and join me in bearing witness. I knew you wouldn't do that if you maintained any hope of rescue, and so I wanted to destroy that hope."

"What about the other man?"

Loge shrugged sadly. "He escaped too."

RRRRRUUUUUmmmmmmmmmm.

It was one of the volcanoes to the west erupting, throwing flame, smoke and lava a mile into the sky. The earth shook, throwing us all to the ground. Lippitt's plane turned, one of the wings fell off, and it crashed over on its side. Lippitt didn't even bother to look back.

"I think you just lost something," I said as the Defense Intelligence Agency operative came up.

"I see the Fredericksons have everything under control," Lippitt said, dropping the BAR to the ground and hooking his thumbs in the ammunition belts that crossed his chest. "It figures."

"What?!" Garth and I exclaimed in unison.

"Don't worry about the plane; there are others where that came from. There's a U.N. task force on the way, and they have helicopters. Thanks to our mutual friend, Mongo, I was finally able to talk to some good guys… and our friend did a little of his mental nudging. He'd picked up the coordinates for this place from Stryder London, of course."

The horizon was growing dark with smoke and ash, and there were no planes in sight.

"Uh, Lippitt…"

"Not to worry, Mongo. They'll be here. By the way, you two are looking considerably better than you were the last time I saw you. Garth, you seem to have lost a little hair."

"Yeah," Garth said, looking nervously up at the sky.

"Any hostiles around?"

"No," I said tersely. "There's just us chickens-and I don't have to tell you what kind of chickens we're going to be if your people don't get here fast. What are you doing here?"

"You mean before the others? I took that particular plane because it was the fastest one on the base. I figured you might need a little help. Of course, I was wrong. I'm glad I didn't get here any sooner; I'd probably only have gotten in your way."

RRRRRUUUUUUMMMBLE.

"How'd you know we were here?"

"You can't be serious. This is where the action is, right? This is where the evil wizard himself hangs out, right? Where else would Mongo and Garth Frederickson be?"

"You're fucking crazy, Lippitt," Garth said as we stepped aside to avoid a thick stream of lava that flowed past us, to our right. It joined the stream that was flowing to our left, encircling us in a ring of fire. "What if this place had been full of Warriors? Did you think you were going to shoot your way in, blow everybody away, and take us out all by yourself?"

Lippitt smiled thinly. "Hanging around with the Fredericksons must have made me a little soft in the head."

GGGRRROOOOOOOOOORRRRR.

"Lippitt," I said through lips that already felt half-cooked, "you don't seem to be much worried about all this, but that was another volcano that just went."

"Hell, I'm not worried because I'm with you. I've decided that you and your brother are indestructible; you wouldn't die if somebody threw you out of an airplane. As long as I'm with you two, I'm convinced everything is going to turn out just fine." He paused, glanced at his watch, continued seriously: "Don't worry, Mongo; they'll get here. Five minutes."

"Damn it, Lippitt, I'm not worried about them getting here! I'm worried about us being here when they get here!"

"Mr. Lippitt," Siegmund Loge said, speaking for the first time since the D.I.A. operative had arrived, "we must be rescued. My work can be reconstructed if I'm alive, and that work must be done. When I explain, you'll see why this is so. You can't imagine the danger humanity faces."

Lippitt took a,45-caliber automatic from the pocket of his parka, put the gun to Siegmund Loge's head and shot him through the brain.

EPILOGUE

RAFFERTY, on horseback, waved to us from the hilltop where Hugo and Golly were buried. We waved back.

"You still feel lousy?" Garth asked as he tugged at his fishing line, which had become tangled on an underwater log in the stream that ran through our parents' farm.

"Yeah." Something was nibbling on my hook, but I didn't tug on the line. I didn't feel like killing anything.

"Me, too."

"Well, we spent a lot of time with lousy people, so I guess it's going to take some time for us to stop feeling lousy."

"That's not the reason we feel lousy, and you know it. What if he was right?"

"Shut up, Garth," I said, meaning it.

"He may have been stone fucking crazy, but that doesn't mean he wasn't right. If he was right, and the Valhalla Project was the only way to save the human race, do you know what that makes us?"

"It doesn't make us anything. Even if he was right, he didn't have the right to do what he was doing. Our only responsibility is to live our own lives in the best, most honorable, way possible. Now, I don't want to talk about it anymore."

"We have to talk about it sometime, Mongo."

"Not today."

"Okay. How long have we all been holed up here?"

"Going on four months."

"When do you want to go back to New York?"

"Not today."

"I'll drink to that."

"You drink too much now, Garth. So do I."

"As long as the government is willing to pay for a ring of guards around this place to keep people away from us, we may as well just sit here and wait until we get our heads straight."

"Booze doesn't help."

"So we'll start drying out. Today."

"Today."

"You talk to your people at the university?"

"Once a week. They want me back, but they're not pressing. What about the NYPD?"

"They want me back, but they're not pressing. There are one hell of a lot of people waiting to ask us questions, Mongo."

"What are you going to tell them?"

"I'm not going to tell a damn, fucking thing to anybody. I'm not going to make up stories about where we've been, or what happened. I'm just not going to say anything."

"Agreed. We'll let Lippitt take the responsibility for deciding who should be told what."

"I wonder what the hell is happening in the outside world?"

"I don't know, and I don't give a shit."

"Mongo, we should really start reading newspapers and watching television again."

"Not today."

Our parents and Lippitt, on their daily walk, emerged from the apple orchard across the stream. Their arms linked, they ambled slowly in our direction along the opposite bank. Garth and I might have felt a tad depressed, but our mother and father certainly didn't; they hadn't stopped grinning since the day, four months before, when Lippitt, driving a sleek government limousine, had pulled into their driveway. And they never seemed to tire of Lippitt's company, nor he of theirs. My mother looked radiant, my father looked ten years younger. Lippitt looked… like Lippitt.

"Mongo, just for the sake or argument, let's assume he was right. Maybe, if we told people, it could change the outcome."

"Loge said no. Let Lippitt decide; he's the one with the direct phone lines to the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. Maybe he's already told them."

"No," Garth said. "He may have told them everything else, and he's probably directing the cleanup operation.. but he hasn't told them what the Valhalla Project was really all about. I'm certain of it. He's still mulling it over, trying to decide what to do next. The same with Rafferty. If either had made that decision, there'd be no reason for them to stay holed up here with us. Lippitt talks only on the telephone; he's no more ready to go back than we are."

"Hey, you two fishermen!" my mother called, waving to us from across the stream. "Come on back now and wash up. Lunch is in half an hour, and you're getting your favorite dessert."

"Okay, Mom," I said, starting to reel in my line.

"Xavier just never seems to run out of stories about the two of you." She paused, put on a mock frown. "But he says you curse a great deal."

Garth and I looked at each other, and we both started howling with laughter.

"Xavier?!"

Lippitt's frown was genuine as he stepped to the bank, put his arm gently around my mother's waist and pointed a very menacing forefinger in our direction. "I'll always be Mr. Lippitt to the two of you, and don't you ever forget it!"

"Come on," I said, rising to my feet as our parents and a stiff-backed Lippitt continued on down the bank, toward the house. "Xavier will be cranky if we're late for lunch."

"Okay," Garth said, still chuckling. "Just give me a minute to get this line free."

"The hell with the line."

Shhh.