Most strange of all, in the opening of that pit floated a twenty-foot disk of white metal, with a squat, thick standard of metal rising from its center. It poised in the radiation, apparently without support, rocking gently as the fierce green rays from below streamed up through it.
"What in the world is that?" I asked startledly.
"That is the chariot on which you and Thor will ride down the road to deep Muspelheim," Odin explained. "And yon pit in which the disk floats is the road itself."
Odin looked somberly about the dusty room and its looming, enigmatic mechanisms.
"This is the very heart of Asgard, Jarl Keith. Up that pit-road the Aesir came long ago, fleeing from disaster-stricken Muspelheim. Over the opening of this road I caused Valhalla castle to be built. And secretly, from this chamber, Loki came and went to Muspelheim in the perilous researches that caused his exile, using the floating disk which he had devised to come and go easily."
Thor was looking in obvious dislike at the metal disk that was rocking eerily in empty air at the edge of the pit.
"I've not ridden that disk since we caught Loki in his secret researches," rumbled the bearded giant. "I've not much desire to repeat the trip, but I suppose it has to be done."
"Here are the lead suits, Jarl Keith," called Odin.
I went to the side of the chamber to which the Aesir king had gone. He had reached down, from hooks on which they hung, two of the four strange garments which had hung there, gathering dust for long. The garments were stiff robes of heavy but oddly flexible lead, falling to the ankles, with leaden boots for the feet and leaden gloves for the hands. A hood-like cowl of the same material went over the head, and had two eye-holes of heavily leaded glass for vision.
"These are the suits which Loki and the thralls he forced to help him used in the fiendish researches below," Odin said. "When Loki was forced to flee Asgard, he had to leave these behind him."
I examined the heavy garments.
"They ought to be proof against any ordinary radiation," I muttered. "But we've got to have something in which to bring back the mass of radioactive matter."
Odin nodded understandingly. "Yon crucible should serve the purpose. Put it on the disk, Thor."
The crucible was a big one of lead, and so heavy that even huge Thor grunted as he lifted it. He staggered with it to the floating disk. It rocked a little as he put the crucible on it, then quieted. Thor and I each donned one of the protective suits. The lead garments were so heavy that I felt crushed, and I could see only dimly through the dark glass of the eye-holes. Odin handed each of us a stout iron staff.
"Thor, you know from long ago how to operate the disk," he told his huge son. "While you are gone, I shall begin converting one of these mechanisms into a generator whose energy may screen us from Loki's storm-cones in the coming battle."
"We'll get the stuff to operate that generator, or not come back," I promised.
The Aesir king's iron-strong face was anxious.
"I pray the Norns that you return with it, Jarl Keith."
Thor had stepped out onto the floating disk. I followed, moving stiffly in my hampering garments, and feeling more than a little uneasy as I boarded the disk which floated in empty air.
"Crouch by the standard with me, Jarl Keith," came Thor's muffled voice. "Cling to the hand-grips."
I followed his example and crouched down beside the squat pillar which rose from the center of the disk. Upon that pillar was a single lever, movable in a graduated slot, which seemed to be the only control of the strange vehicle. There were protecting hand-grips on the pillar and across the whole disk, for passengers to cling to. Thor's lead-gloved hand clutched the lever and moved it slightly. It operated a simple mechanical device which slid open scores of tiny doors in the disk, which until now had been half — open.
At once the disk began to fall into the pit. Faster and faster we fell, the air whistling around us, and the blazing green radiation streaming violently up through the many tiny openings in the disk.
"How in the world does this thing operate?" I shouted to Thor over the roar of air. "Is it by radiation-pressure?"
I heard his muffled answer.
"You have guessed it, Jarl Keith. The metal of this disk is one that is extremely light and opaque to radiation. The pressure of the radiation from below is so terrifically powerful as to drive the disk upward. By opening the little doors and controlling the radiation through the disk, the vehicle can be poised motionless against the pressure, or caused to fall."
"Certainly Loki is a clever scientist, to have devised such a thing," I declared.
Thor growled an answer, but I could not hear, the whistling wind and din, thunderous roaring from far below were growing louder. We were falling at an appalling speed, straight down the pit. It was a ride wild beyond imagination, with the air shrieking like fiends, and the fierce green rays streaming up around us. Through every fiber of my body, even though I wore the protective lead suit, tingled stronger vibrations of the stimulating force I had felt since entering this land. It was wildly exhilarating and intoxicating.
Thor's big, lead-clothed figure crouched, his gloved hand on the control lever. His cowled head was bent as he peered tautly down through a square quartz plate in the bottom of the disk. A giddy sensation akin to nausea shook me, so swift now was our fall.
"We approach Muspelheim!" came Thor's bellow over I the roar and shriek. "Hold tightly, Jarl Keith!"
His hand moved the lever in its slot. The tiny doors in the bottom of the disk closed a little. Our fall began to slow. Pressed hard against the disk, crushed by the deceleration, I peered down through the quartz view-plate with Thor. The end of the vertical pit was close below. I saw, beneath it, a vast, fiery space.
The disk slowed further, as Thor moved the lever. Finally it hung motionless again, its weight just balanced by the pressure of radiation from below. It had halted just where the vertical pit debouched into the roof of an inconceivably vast, blazing space. An underworld of terrible atomic radiance stretched away for miles from the rock wall beside which the pit entered.
"You look upon deep Muspelheim." Thor's voice reached me muffledly. "Once the home of the Aesir, it is the home now of the atomic fires and the creatures of the fires."
The scene before me was indescribably awe-inspiring. The vast dimensions of this mighty space beneath Earth's crust were enough to stagger the mind. This was no mere cavern, but an enormous hollow such as many have believed was left under the planet's surface by the hurling forth of the Moon.
The rocky roof was a mile above the floor. Our disk had halted just where the vertical pit entered the roof, close beside one rock wall of the great space. From the spot where Thor and I gazed, the subterranean world stretched off out of sight, to right and left and ahead.
Many miles away from us there shone a dazzling thing that dominated the whole vast, blazing fane with its brilliance. It was a colossal fountain of cold, white fire that gushed from a chasm in the floor. Hundreds of feet into the air it rose, falling back on itself in continual blinding spray. From it shot beams and banners of blinding light and force, a shaking, shuddering radiance.
All across the underworld rose similar but smaller geysers of white fire, gushing jets of radiance like that mighty distant one. Wherever the eye turned, it encountered such fiery fountains. They filled the underworld with a roaring that was deafening, and a terrific green-white radiance.
"Can your people ever have lived here?" I cried shakenly to Thor, as I gazed stupedfiedly from the floating disk.
"Aye, Jarl Keith. Centuries ago we dwelt here, where we had evolved and lived for ages. But then this was a fair world. There was no fire except that one great atomic fountain which you see far away. It was smaller then than now, yet its radiations were sufficient to keep this whole underworld warm and habitable.
"Then accursed Loki tampered with our fire fountain. He sought to stimulate it to greater activity, so that its increased radiations would make us almost immorta
l. He so disturbed and aroused the fountain that its fires shot up and fell here and there, all across the underworld. Eventually it set masses of radioactive matter everywhere to blazing up in atomic flame themselves.
"Thus we had to flee from disaster-smitten Muspelheim. We managed to pierce the pit up to the upper world, and clambered up it by a toilsome stair carved in its side. And since then Muspelheim has been a world of fire, forsaken by men."
I was so stunned by the awesome spectacle that I had almost forgotten our mission here. But Thor recalled it to me.
"We must not stay here long, Jarl Keith!" he warned. "The awful radiation here would slay us if it penetrated our leaden suits."
I glanced down.
"There must be plenty of radioactive matter here, all right," I said. "But how do we get down to the floor?"
"By this stair. It's part of the ancient way by which my people escaped to the upper world."
I saw now that the disk had halted beside the landing of a stair which was chiseled from the rock wall of the underworld. The stair climbed up from the floor and disappeared into the pit-shaft by which we had descended.
Hastily, fully awakening to the peril of remaining long in this hell of fierce radiation, I helped Thor pick up the leaden crucible we had brought. We stepped from the disk to the landing, and started down the stair. It was hard walking in our stiff lead garments, and with the weight of the crucible to carry. Moreover, the stair was without any protective rail, and perilously narrow.
Chapter XVI
The Flame Creatures
When we reached the floor of the underworld, we stood within a hundred yards of one of the many geysers of atomic fire. Though half-blinded by its brilliance, I was able to see that it jetted from a mass of radioactive mineral whose normally slow disintegration had been tremendously accelerated. It had been kindled to this faster disintegration, I knew, by the flame that had fallen from the central fountain.
"We shall have to find a radioactive deposit unkindled as yet," I called to Thor.
He nodded his lead-cowled head vigorously.
"Let us try this direction, Jarl Keith."
We stumbled with the crucible between the geysers of atomic flame. Sometimes we were forced to go so near one of the jets that its inconceivable radiation seemed bound to penetrate our suits. Dazzled even through my lead-glass eyeholes by the raging brilliance, every fiber of my body tingling, I searched desperately for such a deposit as we required. If our suits should be penetrated, we would die horrible deaths.
"This way, Thor!" I called suddenly as I found a mass of mineral in a niche in the broken rock floor.
It was glowing with a soft light that seemed feeble in comparison with the flaming atomic fountains. I recognized it as an isotope of radium itself, never found in a natural state in my own upper world.
"There's more than enough of the stuff here, if we can dig it out!" I exclaimed. "We'll have to use our staffs."
The iron pikes we carried were ill-adapted to digging out the hard, glowing mineral. But we set to work, prying out chunks of the stuff and tossing them into the crucible. As I straightened once, panting for breath, I glimpsed an amazing sight in the middle distance.
Around one of the geysers were circling and flitting a dozen things that looked like swirling spheres of flame, with coiling, brilliant tentacles of light.
"Those things look as though they were alive!" I yelled in horror.
Thor straightened to see.
"Flame-children!" he exclaimed, his muffled voice suddenly anxious. He turned to me hastily. "They are alive, in a way. But it is not life like ours. They are creatures evolved somehow from the flaming radiation of this underworld of atomic fires. We believe they consist of force currents that cohere in a permanent pattern, which possess powers of movement and perhaps dim intelligence. We don't know much about them, for they've evolved here since the Aesir left poor Muspelheim."
"They look beautiful, like flame-winged birds of light," I said, staring in awe and fascination.
"They're dangerous, Jarl Keith — pure concentrated atomic energy!" warned the Hammerer. "We must be gone before they find us."
I redoubled my toil of helping to dig out the radioactive chunks. We had the crucible half-full of the precious mineral when I felt a terrific shock of force against my back. I whirled around, uttered a cry. One of the dazzling flame-children was poised behind me, had just touched my suit. The mere touch of the weird creature had burned almost through the thick lead!
"We've got to get out!" Thor bellowed. "The thing has almost pierced your suit. The radiation will penetrate it in a few minutes, and you'll die horribly."
"But we haven't all the radioactive matter that Odin will need," I protested.
"We have most of it. If you perish here, we'll never get even this much back to him. Quick, up the stair to the disk!"
He grabbed the crucible's handle. Reluctantly I took the other handle and started with him toward the stair. As we hastened with our heavy load between the roaring geysers of atomic fire, I looked back. The one of the flame-children that had touched me experimentally was now joining several other dazzling creatures like itself, and drifting after us.
Hastily we started up the stair. With some relief, I saw that the flame-children did not follow us, but drifted on and started circling and flitting around another of the fire fountains. Apparently the dim intelligence of the creatures, if indeed they possessed any, had lost interest in us.
Panting and exhausted, we reached the landing and set the crucible down on the floating disk. Thor hastily adjusted the controls to make up for the increased weight on it. As he crouched down, preparatory to starting up the shaft, I noticed something.
"Thor, what is that door up there, high in the roof?" He turned his gaze to follow my pointing finger. The door looked like a massive sliding sheet of dull metal, set in the roof of the underworld some distance from us. There was a shielded mechanism of some kind set in the rock by the door, obviously controlling it.
"That is the forbidden research upon which Loki was engaged, and which caused us to banish him from Asgard," Thor explained. "Above that door is a tunnel connected with the sea of the upper world. If the door were opened, sea water would rush down into this underworld."
"Good lord!" I cried in horror. "If sea water ever poured down into this world of fire, there'd be an explosion that would shake the planet!"
"Aye, and Odin saw that danger," Thor said. "Loki planned to admit only enough sea water to produce the titanic power of which he had need in his experiments. But Odin pointed out that if anything went wrong — if this door were completely opened and the sea rushed down unchecked into Muspelheim — there would be such an explosion as would rend the whole land above. It was the reason for Loki's banishment."
As Thor spoke, he was moving the control lever. The floating disk began to rise in the vertical shaft, out of the fiery underworld. With all the tiny valve-doors closed, it rose quickly under the pressure of the powerful radiation. We shot up the dark shaft at a speed that almost equaled that of our descent.
We were none too soon. A savage pain in my back told me that the radiation had just been starting to penetrate my weakened protective garment. Already it had scorched my flesh!
Clinging to the rocking, rising disk, I held the crucible to keep it from sliding away. The radioactive matter in it shed a feeble glow upon the dark walls of the pit as they raced downward. Then Thor slowed our rise, and finally the disk came to a halt at the mouth of the shaft. Again we were in the torchlit chamber under Valhalla castle.
Odin was awaiting us. The Aesir uttered an exclamation of relief as Thor and I stumbled off the disk with the crucible and removed our stiff garments.
"Lord Odin, I fear we didn't get all the radioactive fuel you'll need for your mechanism," I said bitterly. "It was my fault that we were forced to leave—"
Odin looked with a shadow of worry in his eye at the half-filled crucible. But he spoke confidently
to me.
"It should be enough, Jarl Keith, to defend us from Loki's storm weapons. See, I have converted another mechanism into such a generator as we will need for that defense."
The mechanism was concealed by a spherical copper cover upon which was mounted a smaller copper ball. There was a hopper in its side, into which we poured the chunks of glowing mineral.
"It should have power enough to maintain a defensive screen against the force of Loki's storm-cones for a short time," Odin said. "If he should use the storm-cones for longer than that—"
He did not finish, but I shared the deep worry that was etched in his strong face.
"I saw Loki's handiwork below," I said, and described the sliding door in the roof of the fire-world, which Loki had designed to admit sea water. "No wonder you cast Loki out for such a terrifically dangerous plan."
"Aye, it was Baldur who discovered that plan, and was slain by Loki for exposing it," Odin said somberly. "Loki had perfected a remote control for that sliding door, operating by tuned vibration. Here it is."
And Odin showed me, among the many dust-covered instruments in the chamber, a small, square silver box. On it was mounted a knob whose pointer could be turned along a semi-circular scale.
"Turning this knob would open the sea-door a bit or wide," the Aesir king said. "When Loki fled from Asgard, he took this control box with him. And when we trapped him in that cave below Midgard, and we were about to kill him, Loki threatened to open the sea-gate wide and destroy us all. That was why we had to agree not to kill him, if he would surrender this control box to us. He did surrender it. We kept our word and did not kill him, but placed him in the suspended animation in which he lay for so long."
Odin went to the door and called up through the corridors for some of his thralls to come. When they came, he bade them carry out the big spherical copper generator.
"We shall place it on Vigrid field, on the mainland across Bifrost Bridge," he said, "and keep it under guard tonight. For it is there that we must make our stand against Loki's forces when they come in all their fury."
A Yank at Valhalla Page 11
