'You'll see on the exit leg of the tour,' Siegfried Loge replied. 'Right now, I'm sure Obie wants to show your wisecracking big brother a dragon.'
Obie Loge nodded enthusiastically, turned on the videotape machine. One of the monitors on the wall came alive with fast-moving, fuzzy images. The images slowed, became what looked like a large metal pipe suspended over a mound of bones.
'You'll have to excuse the somewhat blurred picture,' Loge continued. 'The cameras we sunk down there are state-of-the-art and highly heat-resistant, but they've never really worked properly. What you're looking at is the bottom of a waste chute extending up through the escarpment to the laboratories above. Obie, let the tape run.'
The younger Loge released the pause button on the machine; something blurred and unrecognizable plummeted out of the chute, fell onto the mound of bones. Instantly, dozens of dark shapes darted from the surrounding darkness, converging on the hapless creature that had fallen down the chute, swarming over it, tearing it apart.
'Too bad the microphones down there don't work,' Obie Loge said to his father. 'I'll bet we'd really hear some crunching and munching.'
'As you see,' Siegfried Loge said to Garth and me, 'some things have survived. Now, it's the survival of the fittest down there. Nothing Obie threw down there was ever more than barely alive, yet something in Mount Doom not only arrested the process of their dying, but changed them into creatures that probably exist nowhere else. Most interesting. It's too bad we don't have the time or resources to investigate what's happening.' He paused, turned to his son. 'Obie, that's enough of this crunchy-munchy shit. Skip ahead to six-eighty-nine.'
Keeping his eye on the machine's tape counter, Obie Loge pushed the fast-forward control, held it down for a half minute, released it.
On the monitor, two large, black spots floated in toward the camera, hit it; the screen went blank.
Garth yawned.
'That's it?' I asked. 'Some fucking dragon. Frankly, I was more impressed with your key trick.'
For a time, I wasn't sure Loge was going to answer. When he did, his voice was distant. 'There's something very big down there,' he said, gazing out over the chasm. 'That camera was sunk into a mine some distance from here, to the south. It was suspended from the ceiling, and as far as we could tell it was at least five feet off the ground, with a lighting system that was sensor-activated. Whatever passed in front of that camera broke it. Nothing even approaching that size was ever thrown down the chute; it grew to that size while it was down there. It's mutated into something huge, and-from what we know about that section of the mines-it chooses to live in total darkness. I wouldn't care to run into it.'
'Oh, I don't know; I think I'd take a dragon over the Loges any time.'
Loge continued to stare out over the chasm, as if in a trance, for more than a minute. Then he abruptly turned and walked across the Treasure Room to what appeared to be the door to an elevator. 'Come,' he said tersely. He seemed distracted now, oddly subdued, as if his bizarre personality were suddenly shifting gears on him. 'Next stop on the tour, and I think it will interest you. However, if you don't wish to see it, Gollum will take you back to the dungeon. Suit yourselves.'
Garth and I exchanged glances. 'We'll see it all,' Garth said.
'Fine. Then let's go; I have other work to do today.'
'Dad?'
'Be quiet, Obie. I'm all right.' Loge pressed a button, and the elevator door sighed open. Loge pushed his son past him to the back of the elevator. 'Let's go, fucking Gollum.'
The gorilla was hanging back; her shoulders were slumped, and she was holding her cassette player cradled against her chest like a baby.
'Leave her alone,' I said to Loge. 'She's been upset all through this tour of yours, and she's obviously very upset by whatever you've got upstairs. Let her go. You and your kid can handle us with the boxes easily enough.'
'Fucking Gollum!'
Golly scampered across the room, fairly leaped into the elevator, and cringed in a corner. Garth and I followed, but Loge kept the door propped open with his hand. He was staring at me, and his eyes seemed slightly out of focus.
'Gollum impresses the hell out of you, doesn't she, Frederickson?' Loge continued.
'Yeah, she does.'
'Then I'll let you and your brother in on a little secret; most of it's a trick, computer-enhanced communications using random-sorting circuit boards you can buy off the shelf in any good hobby store. Oh, I've worked on her cognitive brain centers, to be sure, and she sure as hell is smarter than the average gorilla, but she has nowhere near the capacities for thought, communication, and feeling that you think she does. Most of the work is done by the computer behind the keyboard.'
'You're wrong,' I said flatly. 'Christ, look at her.'
Loge smiled thinly. 'You stick to criminology, Professor, and leave the hard science to me. Artificially enhanced intelligence, yes, but she's still basically just a clever tame gorilla. I'm telling you this because I thought you'd be interested; it's part of the tour.'
'I still say you're wrong.'
'I know what Gollum is; I made her, and Obie designed the computer.'
'I think she's your most remarkable creation, Loge.'
'No. That distinction belongs to you and your brother.'
'Your old man had a lot to do with making us.'
Loge shrugged. 'Of course.'
'What'd you do to enhance her intelligence?'
'There's less than a one-percent difference between the DNA structures of man and great apes; lay slides of the structures next to each other, and you need a very powerful microscope to discern the difference. That tiny percentage accounts for all the differences between apes and us. My father and I were able to isolate a gene chain that's responsible for much of primate cognitive intelligence. There are also enzyme pairs involved, and those chains and enzyme pairs can be stimulated and reorganized if you find the right catalyst. I used massive doses of ionizing radiation on the appropriate brain centers, specifically on what passes for a cerebral cortex in a gorilla.'
Obie Loge laughed. 'If you want to see something really funny, you should see a puking gorilla without fur.'
I had a sudden vision of Golly with radiation sickness, naked and cold, her mind lost and whirling in a foggy world of torment between beast and something else. I badly wanted to cripple Loge, but knew that if I hit the scientist the animal he'd hurt so badly would choke-and perhaps kill-me.
'… and pain,' Loge was saying.
'Huh? What?'
'Operant conditioning. Reorganizing the gene chains was one thing, but you might say that we also had to get her attention in order to teach her-as well as the one you ran across in Nebraska-what to do with this new sense of awareness.'
'Torture.'
'I got her attention, and I must say that she performs quite nicely. But it's still basically tricks, totally beside the point. You and your brother are the point.'
There was absolutely nothing I could think of to say. I was astonished, dumbfounded, by Loge's apparently total blindness to what had happened with Golly. The man had penetrated the most mysterious of all worlds, the spiritual, had ignited the flame of a soul in a beast, and didn't know it. He wouldn't-or couldn't-see it. Nothing seemed to exist for him outside the narrow, intense focus of his interests; he was a man who could casually order up the murder of two teenagers, then appear vaguely distressed when the uncles of one of them appeared less than enthused with his work and hobbies. He was enough to make an institutionalized sociopath look like an emotional overachiever.
Loge stepped back. The door closed, and the elevator began to rise. The shaft had been sunk through both solid rock and burnt-out mines, some of which were populated by the strange creatures which, like Garth and me, suffered chaos in their genes. The walls of the elevator were transparent; although the trip to the building at the
