a vacuum cleaner.'
There wasn't a vacuum cleaner, but we weren't missing too many other things. There was a large bathroom with separate tub and shower stall-most welcome, since we were a bit gamy after sitting around in the storeroom for three days-and two sets of toilet articles. The refrigerator in the kitchen was well stocked, and there was a freezer filled with meat and frozen fresh vegetables. There was even a wet bar in the living room, also well stocked; it sat next to a Plexiglas shield, similar to the one in Siegfried Loge's Treasure Room, which cut us off from what appeared to be a very expensively equipped media room and a rather long, narrow corridor with a door at the end.
What we didn't have in our section of the apartment, besides a vacuum cleaner, was an exit.
The man standing on the other side of the shield was two or three inches taller than Garth. He was gangling and rawboned, had large, gentle-looking hands, and appeared remarkably fit for someone who had to be in his mid-eighties. His full head of snow-white hair was longer than in his pictures or on his posters, and fell across his shoulders. His face was full, free of wrinkles, and he had eyes of the deepest blue I had ever seen; the eyes were limpid, swimming with compassion and glinting with intelligence. He was wearing a loosely belted white cardigan sweater over a blue silk shirt, finely tailored charcoal slacks, and looked like a physically fit Santa Claus, or a Sunday school God, out of costume, smoking a pipe. Simply standing still and silent, his personal magnetism was enormous; he was a man who'd successfully lied to tens of millions of people, yet I knew he was a man whose words I would trust instinctively. If I didn't know better.
'I'm Siegmund Loge,' the scientist said, removing his pipe from his mouth and stepping closer to the shield. His voice, slightly amplified through hidden speakers in the apartment, was deep, rich and resonant, slightly hypnotic, the kind of voice a person can listen to for long periods of time without growing tired. 'I'm most pleased to meet you at last, Garth and Dr. Robert Frederickson.'
Garth and Dr. Robert Frederickson would have been most pleased to meet Dr. Siegmund Loge on more intimate terms, and we both hurled our bodies at the Plexiglas, again and again. The shield was remarkably resilient, and all we did was manage to bruise our shoulders. I sorely missed Whisper.
'Please don't,' Loge said, looking genuinely concerned as Garth and I, panting, sat down on the thick carpet for a breather. 'You'll hurt yourselves.'
The thought that Siegmund Loge should be so solicitous of our health gave both Garth and me a good chuckle, and caused us to redouble our efforts to get at him. This time all we managed to do was break up most of the living room furniture, and snap three steak knives from the kitchen.
Loge had waited patiently through our little tantrum. Now, as we stood and glared at him, he relit his pipe, puffed on it thoughtfully as he stared back at us, then sighed and shook his head. 'This is very disturbing,' he said in his sonorous voice.
Garth and I looked at each other, puzzled. It took a while, but I finally realized that Loge was referring to our recovery. 'You didn't know the process could be reversed, did you?' I asked.
Loge grunted his affirmation. 'Apparently severe trauma will do, precisely that, which may mean that even less severe trauma could arrest the process. I believe the problem can be solved, but I should have anticipated it.'
Severe trauma, indeed, I thought-like almost freezing to death. 'Don't feel bad,' I said. 'All the clues were right under the noses of your crazy son and grandson, in their Mount Doom, but they were too busy jerking off with their toys, games, and fantasies to see the implications of the fact that many of the animals they threw into that heat and cold not only survived, but multiplied. Is there a chemical antidote?'
Loge slowly blinked, shook his head. 'What would be the point of having an antidote?'
'What's the point of the Valhalla Project?'
Loge simply stared at us. Once he removed his pipe from his mouth and seemed about to speak, then thought better of it; he put his pipe back in his mouth and puffed.
Garth tapped on the Plexiglas in front of Loge's nose. 'Mongo wants to know why a nice senior citizen like yourself wants to risk destroying the world.'
Loge just continued to puff and stare; he seemed lost in thought.
'I'd say it doesn't make any difference, Loge,' I said. 'The whole thing looks like a bust to me. You may do a lot of damage and cause a lot of suffering, but doctors and scientists will certainly discover the temperature factor before too long. The shit you want to make may not even work anywhere outside the temperate zones, which excludes most of Russia. What do you say we all go home and forget this thing? You gave it the old college try.'
Loge grunted, took a pencil and small note pad out of the pocket of his sweater, and began doodling; before our eyes, he was apparently solving the problem. 'No,' he mumbled. 'The problem can be solved. It's in the reverse transcriptase.'
'Just where I thought it was,' I said, and looked at my Chief Researcher.
'It's a genetic substance that can read RNA into DNA,' Garth said. 'You can inject new material into genetic programs, cause those programs to run backwards along evolutionary lines. Controlling the reaction from the reverse transcriptase is the key to this thing.'
'I'm sorry I asked,' I replied, and turned back to Loge. 'Where are Mike Leviticus and the other Warriors who brought us here?'
Loge finished a series of equations, gave a smile of satisfaction which I found maddening, put the pencil and pad back in his pocket. 'They were sent back after they wired your apartment for sound and constructed this shield.'
'You didn't want us to talk to them, did you?'
'No,' Loge answered simply.
'Because what we had to say might contradict some of the things they believe about you and Project Valhalla. In fact, each one of them may believe something different. No wonder you kept us drugged. Warriors are trained to be close-mouthed, even with each other. You certainly didn't want us to start them debating with each other.'
'Correct. The two of you happen to be the most dangerous men on the face of the earth; yet, you may still end as the saviors of humankind.'
'Oh, you're just saying that because you like us-you're going to give us delusions of grandeur. I assume you're referring to our reaction to the shit Jake Bolesh put in us?'
'Of course. Without the two of you, and your unique reaction to that particular formulation, I might never have found the correct formulation.'
'You have it now?' Garth asked quietly.
'Yes,' Loge answered with a saintly smile of gratitude. 'It is done, thanks to the information I was able to gain from your bodies. Also-thanks to your remarkable wills to survive, your resourcefulness and resilience-I discovered, and was able to correct, this problem of reversal outside certain temperature parameters. You are, or were, the most dangerous men on the planet because you would not stop coming at me, and I must confess that on a number of occasions I was afraid that you might actually be able to stop me from completing the project. That would have been a tragedy with dimensions you can't imagine-yet.'
'Oh, woe. When do we get to know what you're really up to, so that we can try to imagine the dimensions of the tragedy we would have caused if we'd been able to stop you? Garth and I are really into tragedy.'
'Soon. Not yet. When you do understand the reason for Project Valhalla, Dr. Frederickson, I don't believe you'll find things so amusing.'
'Listen, Dr. Loge, Garth and I aren't exactly splitting our sides now; a lot of people find our sense of humor somewhat bizarre.' To my mind, Project Valhalla, whatever it really was, still had one major flaw. But I couldn't recall ever winning a single Nobel Prize, and I wasn't about to argue with a double laureate. Also, after watching him casually doodle through the problem of reversal with a pencil and paper, I wasn't about to stimulate him with any hints. 'Who else is here?' I asked.
'Nobody. We're alone.'
'Bullshit.'
Loge simply shrugged. 'Why should I lie about something like that? It's true; we are alone.'
'No security?'
'Security against what? The only threat against us in this place would be from a Greenland or NATO force,
