"Yeah; me too. It's a bitch."
"Maybe if I'd handled things a little differently at the end, if I hadn't put that gun down where he could reach it, he wouldn't have snapped the way he did."
"Hell, you were surrendering to him," I said, feeling bitterness well up in me. "How could you have known what was going on in his head? If anyone should have picked up on what was about to happen, it was me."
"Come on, Mongo. It's not your fault."
"You say."
"Lippitt says. If you can't trust the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who can you trust? He says Garth would have died if he hadn't been taken off the case he was working on and assigned to tag along with you."
"He may have been trying to make me feel better."
"No. Lippitt wouldn't do that, Mongo. That old man loves the two of you like sons; he loves you enough, and knows you well enough, not to lie to you."
"There's more to it, Veil," I said distantly as I suddenly heard ghosts from the past whispering, laughing, in my ear. "Something. . very bad happened to Garth and me a few years ago."
"During the time when you disappeared for more than a year?"
I swallowed hard, nodded. "It was a bad thing, Veil; body breaking, mind bending."
"So I gathered from some snippets of conversation between you and Lippitt I picked up," Veil said carefully. "I take it Lippitt was involved."
"I can't talk about it."
"Okay," Veil said easily.
And then, naturally, I began to talk about it. It was time. "It was an act of utter madness called Project Valhalla," I murmured.
Under the vacant, unseeing eyes of a dead ninja, I proceeded to tell Veil about Siegmund Loge, a Nobel-winning scientist, and his plan to save the human race, essentially by destroying it and turning our species into. . something else. This quintessential mad genius had constructed a mathematical model, the Triage Parabola, which had convinced him that humankind's self-destruction, within a time parameter of twenty to three hundred years, was inevitable. We were doomed, because of a propensity to murderous tribalism and religious nonsense that Loge believed was embedded in our genes, to join the thousands of other species that had become extinct over the aeons since life had emerged on earth. Humankind was just one more evolutionary dead end.
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?"