The Beasts Of Valhalla

the looniest Loge of all had been able to accomplish in my absence. Posters of Siegmund Loge, looking like a Norman Rockwell rendering of God, were everywhere, along with announcements of rallies and prayer meetings. Outside the isolated communes, where the members believed they possessed secret knowledge of Father's real intentions, Father's message, as proclaimed in ubiquitous radio, television, and print ads, was nothing if not general, benign, and banal; everybody would kind of make nice with each other after April 1, when Father would deliver his 'Treasure.'

Not if we could help it.

'It doesn't make any sense,' I said to Lippitt as we drove in our stolen car over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. 'When's the last time anybody publicly announced the delivery of a weapons system that could turn out to be a doomsday device?'

'You're assuming 'Father's Treasure' is a weapons system. How's your heating unit working'

'It's working fine; if I suddenly fall asleep, check it out fast. I'm not assuming that everything about the Valhalla Project has been kept secret. In fact, you're convinced it's a renegade operation.'

'I am.'

'You agree that 'Father's Treasure' has to be Lot Fifty-Seven-the juice that's finally going to do whatever Siegmund Loge wants it to do?'

'Yes.'

'Then why announce it to the world, for Christ's sake? Are they preparing to issue an ultimatum, or are they looking for public acceptance?'

'I don't know.'

'A psychological ploy for recruiting hard-core commune members to experiment on? Come April first, Loge may deliver a lovely homily to the rest of the world while Warriors are shooting up commune members with Lot Fifty-Seven.'

'I don't know, Frederickson,' the D.I.A. operative said with uncharacteristic weariness in his voice. 'You have to remember that everyone believes what he or she wants to about Siegmund Loge. This is February; if we don't get to him soon, it won't make any difference what he's planning to do in April. He'll have solved all the major problems, and other people will be able to carry on for him. Let's just hope Victor Rafferty is where he's supposed to be.'

All Victor Rafferty did was read minds like other people read newspapers, and the existence of a bona fide telepath-only one, and an American at that-tended to create delicate problems and a crushing dilemma in all the world's espionage agencies.

Good intelligence wins wars-hot, cold, and lukewarm wars; declared and undeclared wars; military, political, and economic wars; ideological wars. All wars. Brain damage almost always debilitates; in Rafferty's case, it had somehow transformed the neurological circuitry in his brain to enable him to pick up other's thoughts, and the fact that this facility, when used, cost Rafferty dearly in terms of psychic and physical pain mattered not at all to the various intelligence agencies which viewed him as a kind of ultimate weapon, a human vacuum cleaner of the mind who, after plastic surgery and with a new identity, could assume various diplomatic posts, attend various cocktail parties, chat up various generals, ambassadors and politicians, and emerge in an hour with more ultrasensitive information than ten teams of conventional agents could gather in a year at considerable risk to their lives.

As he was recovering from an automobile accident, a bewildered and frightened Rafferty had shared the discovery of his growing powers with his surgeon, who had in turn brought in a psychologist. The psychologist had felt it her patriotic duty to inform certain government officials of the existence of this 'perfect telepath.' The information had leaked, and before long every intelligence agency that knew the secret had assigned people to carry out a single mission: enlist the services of Victor Rafferty. Recruit him at any cost-through money or promises of power, if possible; through threats or torture, if necessary-or kill him, to prevent him from being recruited by anybody else.

Mr. Lippitt, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, had been America's man on the job.

Victor Rafferty had wanted simply to be free. He had won that freedom, finally, by giving up everything-his wife, his career as a very successful architect, his identity; everything. He'd faked his own death in a manner that was sufficiently spectacular to convince his pursuers-including Mr. Lippitt-that he was no longer available, or a threat, to anyone. Then, after the necessary surgery and with a new identity, he had gone to work for an old and trusted friend-the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

International diplomacy had never been the same since.

Enter a certain dwarf private detective. Working on a case involving the question of who had really designed a certain building in New York City, I started uncovering certain curious facts and questions concerning a dead architect by the name of Victor Rafferty-who might not be so dead. I picked up Rafferty's scent, and other people started picking up my scent. Very heavy people started dropping in on me. One of these people had been Lippitt, who had assured me that Rafferty was very dead, and that people would be hurt and killed if I kept running around asking questions that suggested otherwise. I was, he'd said, acting as a kind of siren whose wail could be heard around the world. I must, Lippitt had insisted, stop my investigation.

I did not stop my investigation. People were hurt. People were killed. I was tortured to a point where I didn't want to live any longer, even after my physical wounds had healed. Rafferty, whom by this time I had flushed, had healed me-as he had earlier healed a curious but devastating psychological malady from which the D.I.A. operative had suffered most of his life. Both of us owed more than we could ever repay to the telepath, and when both Lippitt and I caught Rafferty trying to stage a second, even more spectacular, death on New York's waterfront, I had managed to broker an agreement. Lippitt certainly did not want to kill Rafferty or me. On the other hand, since Rafferty was still adamant in his refusal to work for the government, Lippitt considered it his duty to make certain that Rafferty wasn't running around loose; if Rafferty were loose, than Lippitt also had to worry about me, since I would be in a position to sell Rafferty to the highest bidder. All of this had led to a certain atmosphere of tension in the smoky, bullet-riddled boathouse where the three of us had ended up.

I'd offered a simple suggestion; since the three of us rather liked each other, why not try trusting each other? A pact of secrecy would never be broken by anyone without the consent of the other two; Victor Rafferty would, as 'Ronald Tal,' continue his work at the U.N., and would always be where Lippitt could reach and check on him. Years had passed, and the agreement had held. Now we needed the telepath's help.

Victor Rafferty was, indeed, a man who could tell the good guys from the bad guys. In Washington or anywhere else.

Except for streaks of gray in his otherwise jet black hair, Rafferty hadn't changed very much since I'd last seen him. He still looked exceptionally fit, his black eyes still glinted with intelligence, and his somewhat brooding appearance was offset by a friendly and casual manner.

'Gentlemen,' Rafferty said, swinging around in his leather swivel chair as Lippitt and I entered the office suite of Ronald Tal, Special

Assistant to the Secretary-General. 'I've been expecting you.'

'Can we be overheard?' Lippitt asked in a low voice as he closed the door behind us.

'No,' Rafferty said as he rose and shook my hand warmly. 'The walls are soundproofed, and the offices are electronically swept every morning. We can talk here.'

'You've been expecting us?'

'Yes, my friend,' Rafferty said to me as he motioned for Lippitt and me to sit on the divan beside his desk. 'You know I don't use my-talent-just to invade people's privacy; for one thing, it hurts too much. When I do scan, it's to serve some useful purpose. One gentleman I scan regularly is a certain diplomat from South Africa. By international agreement, only two facilities on earth are authorized to store live smallpox virus; one is operated by the U.N. in Geneva, and the other is the Disease Control Center in Atlanta. South Africa keeps live smallpox virus, and it isn't too hard to figure out why they keep it. I figure it behooves the millions of blacks in South Africa for me to know how nervous their white rulers are at any given moment. Anyway, a couple of months ago I scanned this joker and plugged into quite a fantasy-except that, to him, it wasn't a fantasy. He was smugly congratulating himself and his government for secretly funding our latest media guru, Siegmund Loge, in work to produce a biochemical agent that will render all so-called colored peoples happy with their lot, totally docile, and totally content to be ruled by the white peoples of the world, no questions asked. This agent would be released into the