The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

'Just herbs. It's a recipe I picked up in Laos, from the Hmong. Very good for whatever ails you. I'll give you the recipe, if you'd like.'

'No, thanks. I'm not sure I could handle it.'

Veil selected a jagged wood stick from the pile he was leaning against, gripped it tightly in his left hand and began helping me dig. 'How's Garth?' he asked quietly.

I paused in my digging, leaned on my pole, sighed, and shook my head. 'No change from the way you saw him three days ago at Langley. He's just. . gone away. His eyes are open, but there's no life in them; they look like dull marbles. He blinks, breathes, pisses down a tube into a bag, shits through another tube into another bag, gets fed through tubes in his nose, and doesn't object to being massaged and rolled into another position four times in every twenty-four hours.'

'EEG?'

'Damn near normal, which is what's so frustrating. Maybe I could accept the fact that my brother's become a zombie if there were some sign of brain damage, but there isn't. All of his organs seem to be functioning quite normally, considering the fact that he's totally sedentary, but there's nothing going on with him. He reminds me of the way I found your loft that night; all the lights are on, but there's nobody home.'

'Are you satisfied with his care?'

'Lippitt says it's the best, and I have no reason not to believe him. You know, the clinic is at Rockland Psychiatric Center, but it's a secret Defense Intelligence Agency facility, staffed by their people and under their control. I don't know enough about what's required in Garth's case to be in a position to evaluate the care, but all of the equipment looks like state-of-the-art, there are plenty of nurses who really seem to care running about most of the time, the food is good, and the rooms comfortable. There's a shrink for every three patients. The place is run by a shrink named Charles Slycke, who doesn't seem to care for me very much.'

'What's his problem?'

'Beats me. I only met him this afternoon, before I headed down here, but I sensed a lot of hostility. Actually, I don't give a shit what he thinks of me just as long as he sees that Garth gets the best care.'

'I'm sorry, Mongo.'

'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