Asgard's Secret (29 page)

"They also
serve who only stand and wait," I assured him.

He didn't laugh.

"Let's get to
work," said Susarma Lear.

We began preparing
for our descent into the abyss—our passage from the seventh circle of hell to
what I hoped would be the hinterlands of paradise.

I am not by nature
an optimist, but as we worked to rig the makeshift cradle I felt almost rigid
with excitement. I really did hope that I was on my way to some kind of paradise
run by men like gods; the allure of the centre had a very powerful hold on me.

But as the
star-captain had remarked, sometimes hope just isn't enough.

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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.

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