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
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 immortal. 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
