"Ah, I understand now," Odin muttered. "Loki has found a way to draw power from the static electric charge of Earth, transform and project it in a controlled field. Truly he is a daring scientist, as always."
"Curse him and his devil's tricks!" growled Thor. "I always mistrusted him, even in the ancient days in Muspelheim."
"Couldn't there be some way of creating an electric energy field that would screen out Loki's projected field?" I asked Odin eagerly, with great anxiety.
"You have divined the only possible defense, Jarl Keith." Odin nodded. "And I could soon build a mechanism to create such a screen of energy. But it would take tremendous power to operate it. Only controlled disintegration of a large mass of intensively radioactive matter could yield such power as that."
"You said once, lord Odin, that there are tremendous masses of radioactive matter in the deep world from which the Aesir originally came."
Odin's stare narrowed.
"Are you suggesting that we could get the radioactive substances from Muspelheim?"
"That's my idea," I stated. "You told me that there was a way down into Muspelheim. It was a way by which the Aesir originally came up, and which Loki later used for his researches in the atomic fires below."
"It is true," Odin said slowly. "There is such a path down to Muspelheim, though it is a perilous and fearful one to follow. The opening to that path is in the deepest chamber of this castle. When we emerged here long ago, we built Valhalla over it. And it is the same way that Loki used to descend and tamper with the atomic fires below, until we discovered what he was doing and banished him."
"But it would be deadly dangerous for anyone to go down that way to Muspelheim and seek to bring back radioactive matter. For that deep-buried world is a place of awful, raging atomic fires. The terrific radiation is such that it streams even up through Earth's crust into this land."