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."