George Chesbro - The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

Loge's solution, his plan to hoodwink Mother Nature, was to loose an epidemic that would affect every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth, playing havoc with the genetic code in human DNA and causing every member of our species to rapidly devolve to something resembling the primitive creatures our prehistoric forebears had been, in the hope-Loge's word-that we could, over a few hundred thousand years, once again evolve into humans, but without the crippling psychological, intellectual, and moral cracks in the human psyche he considered fatal. There would certainly be no more large-scale wars, holy or unholy, since all the guns, tanks, and planes strewn over the planet would be nothing more than objects of curiosity to the creatures we would become, and it would be all we could do to learn once again, through the glacial crawl of millennia, how to manipulate sticks and stones.

The Valhalla Project.

He was a clever one, that Siegmund Loge, with a most curious fantasy. The problem was that he had the intellectual and technological capacity to make the nightmare a reality-if only he could find a way to iron out a few minor kinks that had developed along the way in his chemical formulations.

Alas, the Frederickson brothers, with their decidedly mixed bag of genes, would turn out to be just what the doctor ordered, as it were.

To lay the groundwork for this ultimate experiment in social engineering, Loge had masterfully exploited precisely those pockets of infection in the human spirit he deemed to be the genetically based time bombs that would eventually kill us all if not scraped out. Incredibly, there were individuals and groups all over the world who were helping him, in the remarkably naive-but predictable-belief that whatever it was he was up to would serve to make their particular group or religious faith supreme on earth. Loge had been not only a scientific genius, but a genius at collecting the unquestioning loyalty and aid of true believers all over the world. And it made no difference at all that each group of true believers believed something different about him. Indeed, the seemingly infinite capacity for individuals and groups to be religiously and politically manipulated was a point Loge went to great pains-both literally and figuratively, for both him and us-to make to Garth and me. Loge controlled the fanatical loyalty of dozens of religious communes circling the planet. Each commune was insulated from the others, and each had a radically different theology. The one belief they shared in common was that Siegmund Loge, whom they called Father, was the Messiah, or God incarnate.

What they didn't know was that they were to form the human seedbeds he would use initially to grow and then to spread the genetic holocaust he'd planned.

But the persistent kinks remained, and he could not infect his commune members, his Children of Father, until he had worked out a proper formulation for the serum that was to be the principal agent of the epidemic.

Garth and I had ended up with our systems filled with the stuff as the result of an attempt to kill us. Normally, an organism-animal or human-injected with the imperfect serum died a quick and horrible death as its cells, their genetic code hopelessly short-circuited and confused, almost literally "exploded," resulting in a mass of melted flesh, feathers, scales, claws, fangs. .

But, for some reason, the serum "took" in Garth and me, and a slow, controlled process of devolution began taking place in our bodies. It was just what Loge had been looking to achieve, and thus we became human Petrie dishes, the "keys to Valhalla" Loge could use to solve his problems and launch his holocaust-if we could be caught, dissected, examined. We weren't too eager to be dissected, but neither were we too enthusiastic about completing the transformation into whatever beasts we were slowly but inexorably changing into. He needed us to destroy the world, and we needed the knowledge in his head-or thought we did-to keep from being destroyed. For almost a year, until it came to a cataclysmic end in fire and ice in the Arctic, the Valhalla affair had threatened forever to alter not only the Fredericksons, but our entire species.

It had been a real bummer-not least because the basic premise Loge had gleaned from his Triage Parabola and acted upon, that we were inevitably doomed to extinction within a relatively brief time, remained unrefuted. I was convinced that Garth, who had suffered the most, had never fully recovered from the horrors of Valhalla, and the thought persisted that Valhalla-perhaps residual effects from the serum combined with the poison he had ingested-could very well have something to do with his present condition.

"Jesus Christ," Veil said in a hollow voice when I finished.

"Aside from the people who were involved, you're the first person who knows anything about this. Lippitt feels there are serious national security considerations, and I agree with him. It's hard to know how people would react."

"It won't go beyond me."

"You see my point? Garth remained under a great deal of stress, and the signs that he was ready to come apart were there all the time we were tracking you. I should have seen them, and then done something about it."

"Like what? Take time off? Madison and his men, not to mention this Henry Kitten, were breathing as hard on your ass as they were on mine-harder, since they usually knew where to find you. Kitten had threatened to kill Garth if you stopped looking for me, remember?"

My response was to shrug, and then resume poling away dirt in the deepening trench in which I stood.

"Run the present situation by me again, Mongo," Veil said quietly. "That is, if it doesn't bother you to talk about it. What was Garth poisoned with?"

"A chemical called nitrophenylpentadienal, also known as NPPD or 'spy dust,' " I replied in a flat voice. "Because it bonds very strongly to flesh and clothing, and can be seen under ultraviolet light, it's used by a lot of intelligence services to track people. Most information on the stuff is classified, and they're not even sure what the long-term effects may be for people whose flesh has been exposed to it. It sure as hell isn't meant to be eaten.

"Garth was working undercover on an industrial espionage case in a place called Prolix Pharmaceuticals; it's one of a handful of plants in the United States authorized by the government to manufacture NPPD and conduct classified research projects. The D.I.A. suspected a security leak at Prolix, and Lippitt arranged with the NYPD for Garth to be put on the case. There must have been a leak at the NYPD, or Garth made a mistake, because the spy or spies at Prolix got on to him. They began poisoning him with NPPD."

"How?"

"Lippitt thinks it was done slowly, over an extended period of time. Maybe they dosed his coffee a few times, or sprinkled small amounts on his food."

"Do you suppose whoever did it to him knew what the final effects would be?"

"There's no way of knowing that until they catch the guys. Garth may strongly suspect who did it to him, but we won't know unless-until-he comes around.

"Anyway, I'd just begun pondering the problem of where you'd disappeared to. As you know, Madison sent his men to find out what you might have told me over the years, and then burn me to death. When they succeeded in burning out a whole floor of my apartment and killing five people, that made it a case of arson and murder, and Garth was assigned to tag along with me to try to find you, since you were considered a material witness. The transfer put a stop to the slow poisoning, but he'd already absorbed a lot of shit into his system-his brain. You saw him snap; he killed Madison, and tried to kill you, and then sank into the catatonic trance he's in now."

"What's the prognosis?"