The Beasts Of Valhalla m-4

by George C. Chesbro

  "Jesus Christ," Garth said with a snort of disgust. "You don't think you're insane?!"

  Loge said nothing. He continued to stare at us with his sad eyes.

  "Damn it, Loge," I said, "don't do it. Even if you're right, there must be some answer besides the Valhalla Project."

  "No," Loge replied softly. "There is no other answer."

  "You didn't need us anymore," Garth said. "You still haven't explained why we were thawed out and brought here. If you consider us so dangerous, why didn't you just let us die?"

  Loge sighed, shrugged his shoulders. "But I have explained. I've explained everything, only to you. I wanted to meet you. I needed to explain to someone, and I needed someone to understand. I'd even entertained the hope that the two of you would help me."

  "Help you do what?" I asked. "Manufacture and distribute 'Father's Treasure'?"

  "No. I have hundreds of people to do that. The first of the manufacturing technicians will begin arriving tomorrow."

  "Then what?"

  "I wanted you to help me bear witness," Loge said softly. "I believe the two of you are now immune to the formulation; you are the only two people on the planet who will not change. I can take steps to protect myself against infection, and I will. I'd hoped that until our natural deaths, the three of us could travel over the face of the earth, safeguarding treasures when we can, but primarily bearing witness, as the last humans, to the goodness and beauty that was in our genes. Our existence, and our passage among the beasts, would serve as a kind of prayer for human salvation in the future."

  "It sounds like a good idea to me," I said as Garth and I exchanged quick glances. "My brother and I are honored by your invitation, and we accept."

  Loge didn't speak for some time, and I didn't like the look of the shadows that moved in his eyes. "You mock me, Dr. Frederickson," he said at last. "You do believe I am nothing more than a mad scientist, perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic, like my son-or simply morally corrupt, like my grandson. Do you believe I haven't seen into your hearts? You are both transparent. You believe that you can trick me into releasing you, so that you can stop the Valhalla Project-perhaps by killing me. Incredibly-despite all you have seen, and all I have told you-you still have hope. That is your insanity."

  Loge abruptly moved to one side of the shield, disappeared from sight. There was a soft click, and then an even more ominous sound in the apartment.

  hissssssssss

  "I've taken great care in preparing this gas," Loge said kindly as he stepped back into view. "It is a gentle death; indeed, I think you will find it delightful. The two of you have suffered enough, and now I hope to give you considerable pleasure as you die. It's the least I can do."

  hissssssssss

  The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere inside the apartment, and there was the strong smell of lilacs.

  My mother's dream.

  "Loge, shut off the gas," I said, making a desperate effort to keep my voice even. "We have to talk to you. You still need us, because there's still one drawback to your plan, which you don't seem to understand. The rest of the body changes, but the brain cells don't. Somehow, the brain protects itself-like in the infant diving reflex, when the brain in a drowning person conserves its own oxygen. Your stuff won't work, because the membrane of the brain filters it out. Memory, self-awareness, instinct, prejudice, love, hate-all remain. You may have a planet filled with monkey people, but their human consciousness will remain the same. You'll accomplish nothing- nothing, Loge, except to inflict unimaginable suffering on the species you profess to love so much. You still need us if you hope to solve that problem. Shut off the gas."

  Loge smiled gently, brushed a lock of silver hair away from his face. "I'm aware of what you just told me, Dr. Frederickson. I discovered this phenomenon when Garth was examined for the last time at the Institute. The adjustment in the formulation has already been made. All of the things you mentioned will be erased. Humankind will be able to start anew on its evolutionary path with a clean slate."

  Oh-oh.

  hissssssssss

  My mother's dream!

  "Loge, you have no right to decide alone what's best for four billion people!"

  "Of course not," Siegmund Loge replied evenly. "I hope you don't think I would be so presumptuous as to take on such an awesome responsibility alone, without guidance."

  "But you said nobody else knows what you're doing."

  "God knows."

  Loge's eyes teared, shimmered with gentleness and love.

  "What?"

  "I must confess that I haven't been totally forthcoming with the two of you," the old man said in a voice that was suddenly vibrant with ecstasy. "I said there were no gods, but there is God-the God of the universe, the God of us all. He first spoke to me when I was twelve years old, told me to begin collecting the pictures and film clips you saw. He has been speaking to me on a regular basis ever since, guiding me in my work. It was God who gave me the mathematical system I needed to apply the Triage Parabola to humankind, God who urged me to take responsibility for developing the Valhalla Project. I am doing God's will. You see, gentlemen, I am the Messiah. Good-bye, now."

  Stunned, Garth and I watched Siegmund Loge turn and walk away down the long corridor to the door, which he closed quietly behind him.

  Then Garth and I really got serious about trying to break through the shield.

  hissssssssss

  MY MOTHER'S DREAM!!

  More broken furniture; muscles and bones near to breaking as we hurled ourselves against the Plexiglas, bounced off.

  hissssssssss

  MY MOTHER'S DREAM!!

  … the end of the world, all hope gone…

  MY MOTHER'S DREAM!!

  hissssssssss

  It seemed an appropriate time to panic, so we did-at least to the extent that Loge's happy death gas allowed us, which wasn't much. Actually, we were kind of laughing, singing and prancing around the living room when Mike Leviticus, submachine gun crooked in his one whole arm, yanked open the door at the end of the corridor and sprinted toward us. It was the funniest thing we'd ever seen, and Garth and I stood with our noses pressed against the Plexiglas and howled with laughter. We wouldn't move, even when Leviticus frantically motioned with his stump for us to get down, so he finally fired just over our heads. The shield didn't so much shatter as disintegrate, showering powder, slivers, and shards over us.

  "Fly away home, Mike, m'boy," I cackled. "Poison gas. Get out of here."

  Garth, even though he was in the middle of the Toreador Song from Carmen, nevertheless had the presence of mind to stumble over the rubble of the shield, find the switch and shut off the gas. Leviticus, his face red from the strain of holding his breath, used his machine gun-none too gently, beating the butt and barrel on our backs-to herd the giggling Fredericksons down the corridor and out the door, which he slammed shut behind him. He managed to whack us along another corridor, steered us to the left, and plopped us down on the floor directly beneath a huge ventilator shaft. After twenty minutes, our howls of laughter had dribbled off to an occasional, high-pitched giggle; another twenty minutes, and we managed to hold it down to spasmodic grins.

  "Mongo?"

  "I think I'm all right, Garth. You?"

  "Me, too."

  "Mike," I said, grinning foolishly up at the Warrior, "how can we thank you?"

  Leviticus, his lantern jaw set firmly, shook his head. "I'm the one who has to thank you, Frederickson. If it weren't for you, my soul would have been doomed to eternal damnation."

  "Huh?"

  Leviticus held out his naked stump. "This was a sign, a warning-God at once punishing me for, and trying to rescue me from, my own stupidity. It's taken me all this time to realize it; thank God I realized it in time. I helped install the gas system, so I knew what Satan-when I understood a few hours ago that Loge was Satan-had planned for you."

  "Good thinking," Garth said drily, then hiccuped with laughter.

  "I know w
hat the two of you have been through," Leviticus said, first staring at me intently, then at Garth.

  "Yeah," Garth said with a dreamy smile, "it's been kind of a bummer."

  "I saw what the two of you looked like when you were brought to the Institute… and I watched you both heal before my eyes. Only God could have done that; only God could have helped you survive all your trials, and only God's wonderful Grace could have healed you. Satan made you into beasts, but God made you human again. It was a miracle. That's when I began thinking."

  "Ah," Garth said as we both began giggling again. "And not a moment too soon, dear boy."

  "I realized then that I must be God's Warrior, not Satan's, at peril to my soul. It was up to me to rescue you from Satan. I picked up this machine gun, stole the plane, and came here as fast as I could." The Warrior paused, bowed his head low to us. "Please, please forgive me for my part in your suffering, and for taking so long to understand your true mission, to stop Satan."

  "Right," I said as Garth and I got to our feet, dragged Leviticus to his. "Before we split, we have to figure out a way to blow up this place. Do you know anything about vulcan technology and heat transfer?"

  "No, but I think I'd recognize the main power control source, if that's what you're asking."

  "Right. All of the huge pipes you see running across the ceilings carry magma to someplace where it's converted into steam to run turbines. Look for a wall filled with pressure gauges. We'll separate to save time, and maintain communications through the intercom system. If you stumble across Satan in your travels, bring him along. If he puts up a fuss, shoot the fucker in the knees and carry him. We need him alive to give us all the details of the Valhalla Project and tell us everyone who's involved."

  Leviticus held out his machine gun. "You want this?"

  Garth and I shook our heads. "With Loge," I said, "all we'll need is a butterfly net."

  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.