Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  I knew it couldn't be quite that bad. I knew because of the few tantalizing jottings which Saul had left in his notebook. The level he had reached at the bottom of his dropshaft wasn't cold, and there were living creatures there. There was light, and there was plant life, and there were animals. He'd seen enough, before he was forced to return because he was at the very limit of his exploratory range, to make that plain. But what Saul had seen wasn't sufficient to demonstrate that there was still intelligent life inside Asgard. It wasn't sufficient to prove that if a war had been fought, it hadn't been lost.

  The star-captain's scenario was still a lively contender— and if she was right, then the warm, living part of Asgard into which we were headed might be far more dangerous than I had previously supposed.

  Eventually, we came to the next big wall.

  It looked like most of the other walls in the levels: frosted, curving, windowless. There was a doorway in front of us, which Saul had opened with the aid of levers and a torch, so that it presented itself to us as a narrow and jagged slash of shadow. We approached it very carefully, knowing it to be the ideal spot for another of Myrlin's little traps. Perhaps for that very reason there was nothing untoward to be found. The android probably figured that if he had got this far without being caught then he was virtually home and dry. Once he moved away from the bottom of the dropshaft he was making his own way, and all he had to do was cover his tracks.

  The corridors inside the wall were like those in any other complex, but the doors that Saul had opened showed us rooms that were different from any I had seen before. For one thing, they hadn't been entirely emptied. There was payload here—enough to have made Saul rich even without the shaft to the interior.

  There were no bare walls inside the rooms; there was storage space of one kind or another, all of it packed tight. There were shelves for objects, and big pieces of equipment with display screens, keyboards and instrument panels. Even the chairs were still in place. There were sinks and benches, and sealed chambers fitted with artificial manipulators. There was a great deal of glassware.

  Obviously, this was one place the cavies had intended to come back to. Equally obviously, they hadn't actually been back for a very long time.

  "It's a laboratory," said Crucero, looking around one of the bigger rooms.

  "Damn right," I replied, abstractedly. I was examining some big steel boxes, which might have been refrigerators, ovens, radiation chambers or autoclaves, and wondering whether there was any way to get inside them.

  "It's a biotech lab," said Susarma Lear, by way of amplification. I could tell that her imagination was showing her ranks of technicians trying to solve the problem of defending a closed world against a plague-attack . . . and failing.

  "The C.R.E. would pay plenty for a place like this," I told her. "If it's been stripped at all, it doesn't show. They may have closed it down, but they left it ready to be started up again. Everywhere else, we've found nothing but the litter they left behind because they considered it useless. This is the real thing."

  Even so, there was a kind of desolation about the place. It was too tidy. It hadn't been deserted in a panic; whatever work had gone on here had been brought to a conclusion. It looked as if you could simply find the main power-switch, and turn everything right back on, but that was misleading.

  Khalekhan brushed his suited forefinger over one of the keyboards, as though he expected the keys to click and the screen above it to light up. But the keys were stuck solid, immovable, and whatever data had been enshrined in the silicon chips inside the machine must have long since decayed into chaos. Even at twenty degrees Kelvin—and it was no colder than that here—entropy takes its slow toll. Electronic systems can last for millions of years, because silicon is tough stuff, but they need use and maintenance. The unnatural stillness of the deep-freeze isn't such a wonderful preservative as some people make out.

  "Let's not waste time," said the star-captain, gruffly. "You can play games to your heart's content when we come back. We have a job to do, remember?" The reason she sounded gruff was that her last hopes of catching Myrlin in the upper levels had now evaporated. If she was going to catch and kill him, she was going to have to do it much closer to the centre of the world.

  I didn't protest against her haste. I was as keen to find the dropshaft as she was, albeit for very different reasons. These laboratories were exciting, but they paled into insignificance by comparison with what might be waiting for us down below.

  So we moved on, passing doors which Saul had never got round to forcing, barely glancing into the rooms which he had opened up. There was only one where I lingered a little while, letting my curiosity off the bit; that was when I found myself beside one of the sealed transparent chambers where artificial hands were poised above a small assortment of equipment: pipettes, reagent jars, beakers. It was a touch of untidiness that seemed fascinating, and somehow very promising. Whatever was inside that sealed chamber might have been the very last thing that the cavies were working on before they left—before they made their exit down the deep elevator shaft which might have taken them all the way to the mysterious centre.

  While I paused momentarily, Serne went ahead, scanning the path for tripwires. He didn't find any booby-traps, but he found the shaft.

  He called out for us to come quickly, but he was out of sight; we all went through the standard pantomime of asking "Where?" so that he could reply, unhelpfully, "Here." Eventually, though, we managed to find him.

  If we had been in any doubt as to whether Myrlin was still ahead of us, what we found in the shaft settled the question. There were two doubled-up cords secured at the top, and there were half a dozen pieces of equipment abandoned there. It was my equipment, taken from my truck. There was no sled—Myrlin had been strong enough to carry all that he needed, at a pace we couldn't match.

  There was an air current drifting up the shaft. We couldn't feel it inside our suits, but we could see its effects in the corridor, where some of the ices had begun to melt or sublimate. This was one little corner of level three that had begun to warm up, though our instruments confirmed that the effect was as yet slight. It was one hell of a chimney that the warm air had to climb, and the top of it was still pretty cold. Saul had only drilled a small hole in the door at the bottom of the shaft—just enough to let him look around— but the flow we monitored implied that there was a much bigger breach now. Myrlin had obviously made a gap big enough to let him through.

  We had made very good progress, despite the pauses caused by Myrlin's one real trap and several fake ones, and I was pretty sure that our advantages would have allowed us to catch up with any normal fugitive. The android, though, was still a step and a half in front of us. I hoped that we never would catch up.

  "It's going to be a long ride down to the bottom," I said. "It's obviously possible to abseil down, but we should rig some kind of cradle using the winch. We'll have to come up again soon enough, and I don't relish the thought of having to climb. The temperature's high enough for us to leave a block-and-tackle for some time without the pulley freezing solid, but we ought to leave a man here anyhow."

  "Why?" asked Crucero.

  "Because if we don't," the star-captain put in, "those goons who are following us might simply squat here and wait for us. Someone has to make this place seriously defensible, and lay a much better series of traps than the one the android left for us. If those fail, he has to take the bastards from behind. I don't mind if they follow us down, so that we can meet them on equal terms, but I'm not going to let them take us one by one as we come up. Okay?"

  "You want a volunteer?" asked Serne.

  "No," she said. "I want Crucero."

  She didn't explain why. That was one of the prerogatives of being a star-captain. I think Crucero had mixed feelings about the job, but he followed the logic of the case well enough. He didn't have the same curiosity about what was down below as I had, and he wasn't about to howl with anguish at the lost opportunity. H
e was probably more worried about the number of men Amara Guur might have sent after us, and whether one lousy lieutenant and a dozen cunning booby-traps could hold the fort against them all.

  "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.

  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.

  25

  I stepped across the threshold between the worlds without much difficulty. The door yielded easily enough to the pressure of my hand. I wasn't surprised to find myself in a corridor; it seemed only logical that there'd be some kind of establishment here similar to the one at the top of the shaft. This corridor, however, was very much warmer than the one up above, and like the room from which we'd come it was dimly lit by some kind of bioluminescence. The beam of my headlight picked out scuttling white insects as they hurriedly disappeared into various cracks and coverts. The largest of them was no bigger than my thumbnail.