Gestures, even empty ones, can mean something. Now there was absolutely nothing left to do. But we had fought to the best of our ability to the very end, and I believed that our mother and father would be proud of our struggle, no matter what kind of world they ended living in.
Garth and I, two beasts of Valhalla, lay inside the body of another, waiting to die behind a wall of tears and curtains of ice.
37
Who's that tapping at my door?
Only death and nothing more?
The knocking continued, and as I opened my eyes and squinted I could see booted feet moving in clear sunlight outside the curtain of frozen blood.
Somebody was chopping away at Golly's frozen carcass, trying to get at us.
I tried to grope for Whisper, but everything around me seemed frozen solid, and I couldn't move. I could feel Garth's bulk next to mine, but he seemed so very still; I tried to speak, couldn't.
Then the prison of frozen flesh around us cracked open, and I found myself looking up into the faces of three Warriors, the fur around the hoods of their parkas being whipped about by the wash of helicopter rotors.
A fourth Warrior came into my field of vision, bent down over me. He was a big man, and his left sleeve was empty. His eyes were set wide apart, and he had a lantern jaw.
'They're alive!' Mike Leviticus shouted.
By helicopter, it was only a five-minute ride to the Institute, where we were taken. I could still barely stay awake, much less speak, so I didn't bother to try.
My initial elation at our surviving the storm had been dampened somewhat by my memory of the steel table and surgical instruments that had been set up beside Garth's cage.
It occurred to me that we were being thawed out simply so that the scalpels wouldn't break when they dissected us.
We weren't dissected.
Groggy most of the time, I existed in a kind of dopy torpor as teams of men and women in white coats ministered to us. I had completely lost track of any sense of time; minutes, days, or weeks could have gone by, and I wouldn't have known the difference.
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.
38
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
