George Chesbro - The Beasts Of Valhalla

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.

For three days we were kept in obviously impromptu but effective confinement inside a locked and reinforced storeroom with an adjoining toilet. We had no contact with anyone, and our meals were delivered to us through a narrow opening cut out at the bottom of the door.

On the evening of the third day we got a special surprise for dinner, a hose instead of food trays. We were gassed.

We awoke in separate beds, in a rather cheerful and tastefully decorated bedroom illuminated by recessed lights.

"Shit, I'm shedding again," Garth said as he rose, stripped, then shook out his pajamas and brushed hair off his sheets and pillow. As his body continued its rapid transmutation back to normal size and appearance, his fur kept falling off in thick, matted chunks.

My own pajamas even fit me, which attested to the fact that someone-presumably Siegmund Loge-had gone to a lot of trouble to see that we were comfortable. On dressers next to each of our beds had been laid out several changes of underwear, three pale blue overalls which looked appropriately sized, fine leather boots, and Adidas sneakers.

I grunted. "It always amazes me how you find exactly the right thing to say in any given situation. Here we wake up in a Louis the Fourteenth bedroom, original Picassos on the walls, and the first thing you worry about is grooming. This is the Magic Kingdom, m'boy."

"What can I tell you? I'm anal-compulsive." Garth pulled a handful of fur off his buttocks, dropped it into the large metal wastebasket next to his bed. "Sorry I'm messing up the place. Let's hope our host has provided us with a vacuum cleaner."

There wasn't a vacuum cleaner, but we weren't missing too many other things. There was a large bathroom with separate tub and shower stall-most welcome, since we were a bit gamy after sitting around in the storeroom for three days-and two sets of toilet articles. The refrigerator in the kitchen was well stocked, and there was a freezer filled with meat and frozen fresh vegetables. There was even a wet bar in the living room, also well stocked; it sat next to a Plexiglas shield, similar to the one in Siegfried Loge's Treasure Room, which cut us off from what appeared to be a very expensively equipped media room and a rather long, narrow corridor with a door at the end.

What we didn't have in our section of the apartment, besides a vacuum cleaner, was an exit.

The man standing on the other side of the shield was two or three inches taller than Garth. He was gangling and rawboned, had large, gentle-looking hands, and appeared remarkably fit for someone who had to be in his mid-eighties. His full head of snow-white hair was longer than in his pictures or on his posters, and fell across his shoulders. His face was full, free of wrinkles, and he had eyes of the deepest blue I had ever seen; the eyes were limpid, swimming with compassion and glinting with intelligence. He was wearing a loosely belted white cardigan sweater over a blue silk shirt, finely tailored charcoal slacks, and looked like a physically fit Santa Claus, or a Sunday school God, out of costume, smoking a pipe. Simply standing still and silent, his personal magnetism was enormous; he was a man who'd successfully lied to tens of millions of people, yet I knew he was a man whose words I would trust instinctively. If I didn't know better.

"I'm Siegmund Loge," the scientist said, removing his pipe from his mouth and stepping closer to the shield. His voice, slightly amplified through hidden speakers in the apartment, was deep, rich and resonant, slightly hypnotic, the kind of voice a person can listen to for long periods of time without growing tired. "I'm most pleased to meet you at last, Garth and Dr. Robert Frederickson."

Garth and Dr. Robert Frederickson would have been most pleased to meet Dr. Siegmund Loge on more intimate terms, and we both hurled our bodies at the Plexiglas, again and again. The shield was remarkably resilient, and all we did was manage to bruise our shoulders. I sorely missed Whisper.

"Please don't," Loge said, looking genuinely concerned as Garth and I, panting, sat down on the thick carpet for a breather. "You'll hurt yourselves."

The thought that Siegmund Loge should be so solicitous of our health gave both Garth and me a good chuckle, and caused us to redouble our efforts to get at him. This time all we managed to do was break up most of the living room furniture, and snap three steak knives from the kitchen.

Loge had waited patiently through our little tantrum. Now, as we stood and glared at him, he relit his pipe, puffed on it thoughtfully as he stared back at us, then sighed and shook his head. "This is very disturbing," he said in his sonorous voice.

Garth and I looked at each other, puzzled. It took a while, but I finally realized that Loge was referring to our recovery. "You didn't know the process could be reversed, did you?" I asked.