"The Aesir are my people, now and always, if you will let me claim that privilege!"
Odin's iron face softened, and he laid his great hand on my shoulder.
"Jarl Keith, I welcome you as one of us. Weal or woe, life or death, you are outlander no longer, but jarl and captain of the Aesir."
Hard-headed American scientist or not, I felt pride such as I had never felt before, to be accepted into the company of these mighty men.
"Now go we down to the chamber that holds the mouth of the terrible road to Muspelheim," Odin said. "Come!"
Thor and I followed out of the great hall and through corridors. We descended dark stone stairs until we reached the deepest level of Valhalla castle. We came to a door carved with runes, and with a great lock upon it. Odin touched the runes in a certain combination, and the door swung slowly inward.
By the light of the torch Thor carried, I saw that we had entered a round stone chamber of considerable size. It was dank and dusty, as though unused for ages. Standing about were dust-covered instruments and mechanisms of copper, quartz and iron, which I guessed were long unused devices of the ancient Aesir science.
In the very center of the big chamber's stone floor yawned a pit fifty feet in diameter, sinking to unguessable depths. Up from that opening beat a fierce green glow of throbbing force, from somewhere far beneath. I heard a dim, remote, roaring sound.
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."