Asgard's Secret

24

There was, of course, another dispute once we’d rigged up our scaffold and were ready to start lowering Earth’s first ambassador to the heartland of Asgard. I wanted to be the first one down, but I was overruled. After some argument, Serne was given the job. Apparently, the star-captain was worried in case Myrlin was lying in wait at the foot of the shaft, waiting to pick us off one by one. She graciously agreed that I could go third, after her and before Khalekhan.

I was not entirely out of sympathy with her logic, but I found the waiting well-nigh unbearable. It took a long time to lower Serne into the depths, and even longer to haul the cradle back up again once he was down. I wasn’t able to calculate the exact depth of the shaft, but it seemed to be several thousand metres—just a pinprick with respect to the actual radius of the planet, but pretty deep; deep enough to be a dozen or a hundred levels down, if there were caveworlds all the way.

“Why isn’t there an elevator in the shaft?” asked Crucero, when we had wound the cradle all the way back up to the top again.

“Good question,” I said. “Maybe what’s left of it is a tangled heap of scrap at the bottom.” We couldn’t ask Serne, because the shaft was no good for radio communication—all we could get from him was fuzzy static. But there was no cable already in the shaft, and no sign of any fitment in the ceiling from which a cable might once have been suspended. There were ridged grooves on each side-wall, though, into which a car could have slotted. It wasn’t immediately obvious how it might have been secured or powered.

“Even if there’s no way past the floor where Serne is,” I said, more to myself than to my companions, “this shaft could give us access to two hundred levels, each one containing a cave-system as big as a world. It would take centuries to explore. You could lose the entire human race down there, let alone one android.”

And when the Tetrax get here, I added, silently, we’ll have skychain number two, built inside the world instead of outside. And all the galactics on Asgard will be setting forth on voyages of exploration. Things will never be the same again. Never.

I was getting a bit ahead of myself. There was a murderous android up ahead of me, who posed some mysterious threat to my entire species. There was a gang of bad-tempered humanoid crocodiles behind me, eager to claim this momentous discovery for their own loathsome kind. And there were the heroes of the Star Force all about me, lusty with genocidal fervour and their own brand of paranoia. These were not circumstances which were conducive to a sense of security, and if I had paused to reflect on my predicament I could hardly have faced the future with joyous confidence; nevertheless, I felt that I was entitled to a certain frisson of triumph and exultation, and I indulged myself as far as I was able.

When the star-captain was halfway down, we discovered that it was possible for her to hear Serne while still being able to hear us, so that communication of a sort became possible.

“He says that there’s mould, or something like it, growing all over the walls,” she reported. “No sign of the android—he cut his way through the door without much difficulty… zzz… There’s dim light outside—not electric bulbs… maybe the artificial bioluminescence you talked about. Some kind of corridor… no sign of present use… zzz… zzz… beyond the shaft… no wreckage of any elevator-car… zzz… zzzzz…”

The exchange didn’t last long, and was more frustrating than informative. The star-captain’s voice faded into a mist of static, and the trial of my patience began again.

“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” said Crucero cheerfully.

“If I had to face Amara Guur’s hatchet-men on my own,” I informed him unkindly, “I’d be a very worried man.”

“I’m trained in guerrilla tactics,” he assured me. “I don’t have to kill them all—I just have to stop them setting an ambush. If I can blow them to hell and gone, that’s fine. If I can’t, I’ll let them come down the shaft, so that the star-captain can take care of them. All I have to do is make sure that they can’t set a trap here… and stay alive. Don’t worry about me, Trooper. I’ll hold my ground—just see that you hold yours.”

I didn’t say anything more. I figured I’d asked for what I got.

“Do you want to take a gun?” asked the lieutenant, after a pause. He was offering me a flame-pistol.

“I don’t have room in my belt,” I replied drily. It wasn’t a joke. I was carrying a varied assortment of tools.

Eventually, the cradle came back and it was my turn to take the drop. I was glad to climb into it, figuring that this was the real business at hand. Military manoeuvres, I decided, were inherently uninteresting. All the years of my life had been aimed at this moment, even though I hadn’t realised it for the first twenty or twenty-five of them.

It hadn’t even been my idea to come to Asgard—my friend Mickey Finn had worked hard to convince me, just as he’d worked hard to convince the others who’d come with us. But I knew now that Mickey Finn had been doing destiny’s work. Everything that Mike Rousseau had ever done or thought had been nothing more than preparation for this descent… this penetration… and I was determined to savour it to the full.

While I dropped through the darkness, turning back and forth through sixty degrees as the cradle swung, I pictured myself as the very archetype of Faustian man, claiming the knowledge and the wealth for which I had laid my very soul on the line.

The sweet taste of the illusion was not in the least soured by my awareness that in most of the old versions of the story, Faust had ended up in hell.

The room—if you can call it a room—into which the elevator-shaft opened at the bottom was a sad disappointment. It was quite bare, and as Seme had said, the walls were covered with something very much like ordinary mould. He wasn’t just being uncommunicative when he’d talked about the mould—when he’d mentioned that he’d run through the entire inventory of what there was to be seen. But there was light—a faint radiance, perhaps bioluminescent, emanating from the ceiling and the walls.

There was another door. It had been cut away to open up a space where a man could get through—a very big man—but the edges of the cut had been folded back again, to leave a gap that wasn’t much more than a thin crack. Susarma Lear and Serne hadn’t tried to open it out fully. They were waiting inside it, peering out.

I wanted to go through, but the star-captain held me back. She wanted to wait until Khalekhan was with us, so that we could all go on together. I had been waiting so long that a little more time didn’t matter that much, but I was still annoyed.

I played the beam of my head-light over the mouldy walls, and then looked more closely at the bottom of the elevator-shaft. The floor seemed solid enough; the grooves disappeared straight into it.

“That’s where the elevator went,” I said, softly. I was only talking to myself, but Serne overheard.

“Where?” he asked.

I pointed downwards, and said: “There.”

“It’s solid,” he said. “This is the bottom.”

“It’s solid now,” I agreed. “But you can see that it’s a seal of some kind—look at the meniscus where the plug meets the wall. It must have been a hard-setting liquid which they just pumped in. Naturally they took the elevator car down below the seal, so they could still use it.”

“So?” he said.

“So,” I said, tiredly, “there are other levels further down. Lots of other levels. We’re nowhere near the real centre—yet.”

As usual, my mind was working faster than my speech. Here, they’d sealed the shaft. Why? Because this was the last of the abandoned levels? Was the civilization of Asgard still flourishing, just beneath our feet? It had to be. I felt it in my bones. Valhalla was there—the home of the gods, to which heroes went when they had proved themselves worthy. I was tempted to get down on my hands and knees, to put my ear to the ground, in case I could catch the distant thrum of mighty engines, or the murmur of happy crowds.

“It’s not very bright out there,” said the star-captain, her cool voice cutting through my reverie like a knife. “The temperature is above the freezing-point of water, but it’s only a tunnel. Looks pretty bleak. Not much wildlife about.”

I wanted to join her, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to have to stand there, peeping through a crack, when I ought to be forcing my way through. They had already assured me that there was nothing much to be seen.

Even when Khalekhan had arrived there was a further pause for military ritual, as the starship troopers checked their guns and confirmed with empty gestures their readiness for whatever was to come. My participation was, to say the least, half-hearted. But in the end, we were ready.

“I’ll go first,” I said, hopefully.

Susarma Lear probably figured that if there was going to be an ambush, I might as well be the one to walk into it. I was expendable now.

For whatever reason, she waved me on.

And I went.