Then he looked up, and the giants were dwarfed.
The chamber was roofless. At least he could see no roof. The pillars
climbed up and up tremendously all around the walls that were hung with
vast stretches of tapestry, till they dwindled to a pinpoint far above.
The sheer magnitude of the tower made Stuart's mind rock dizzily.
Still the laughter roared out. But now it died....
Thundered through the hall a voice ... deep ... resonant ... the voice
of the Aesir.
"_A human, brother!_"
"_Aye! A human--and a mad one, to come here._"
"_To enter the hall of the Aesir._"
A red-bearded colossus bent down, his glacial blue eyes staring at
Stuart. "_Shall I crush him?_"
* * * * *
Stuart sprang back as an immense hand swooped down like a falling tree
upon him. Instinctively his hand flashed to his belt, and suddenly the
red-beard was shouting laughter that the others echoed.
"_He has courage._"
"_Let him live._"
"_Aye. Let him live. He may amuse us for a while...._"
"_And then?_"
"_Then the pit--with the others._"
The others? Stuart slanted a glance downward. The silver mists had
dissipated now, and he could see that the abyss was not bottomless. Its
floor was fifty feet below the surface on which he stood, and a dozen
figures were visible beneath.
They stood motionless--like statues. A burly, leather-clad Earthmen
who might have been whisked from some Plutonian mine; a slim, scantily
clad Earthgirl, her hair powdered blue, her costume the shining
sequin-suit of a tavern entertainer. A stocky, hunch-shouldered
Venusian with his slate-gray skin; a Martian girl, seven feet tall,
with limbs and features of curious delicacy, her hair piled high atop
that narrow skull. Another Earthman--a thin, pale, clerklike fellow.
A white-skinned, handsome Callistan native, looking like Apollo, and,
like all Callistans, harboring the cold savagery of a demon behind that
smooth mask.
A dozen of them--drawn from all parts of the System. Stuart remembered
that this was the time of the periodic tithing--which meant nothing
less than a sacrifice. Once each month a few men and women would
vanish--not many--and the black ships of the Aesir priests sped back to
Asgard with their captives.
Not one looked up. Frozen motionless as stone, they stood there in the
pit--waiting.
Again the laughter crashed out. The red-beard was watching Stuart.
"His courage flags," the great voice boomed. "Speak the truth,
Earthman. Have you courage to face the gods?"
Stuart stubbornly refused to answer. He had an odd, reasonless
impression that this was part of some deep game, that behind the
mocking by-play lay a more serious purpose.
"He has courage now," a giant said. "But did he always have courage?
Has there never been a time in his life when courage failed him?
Answer, Earthman!"
Stuart was listening to another voice, a quiet, infinitely distant
voice within his brain that whispered: _Do not answer them!_
"Let him pass our testing," the red-beard commanded. "If he fails,
there is an end. If he does _not_ fail--he goes into the pit to walk
the Long Orbit."
The giant leaned forward.
"Will you match skill--and courage--with us, Earthling?"
Still Stuart did not answer. More than ever now he sensed the violent,
hidden undercurrents surging beneath the surface of this by-play. More
than he knew swung in the balance here.
He nodded.
"He has courage," a giant repeated. "But did he always have courage?"
"We shall see ..." the red-beard said.
The air shimmered before Stuart. Through its shaking his senses played
him false. He knew quite well who he was and where he stood, in what
deadly peril--but in that shimmer which bewildered the eyes and the
mind he was a boy again, seeing a certain hillside he had not seen
except through his boyhood's eyes. And he saw a black horse standing
above him on the slope, pawing the ground and looking at him with
red eyes. And an old, old terror came flooding over him that he had
not remembered for a quarter of a century. A boy's acute and sudden
terror....
Who had opened the doors of his mind and laid this secret bare? He
himself had long forgotten--and who upon this alien world could look
back through space and time to remind him of that long-ago day when the
vicious black horse had thrown an inexperienced boy rider and planted a
seed of terror in his mind which he had been years outgrowing? But the
fear was long gone now, long gone.... _Was it?_
Then whence had come this monstrous black stallion that pawed the floor
of the hall, glaring down red-eyed at him and showing teeth like fangs?
No horse, but a monster in the shape of a horse, a monster ten feet
high at the shoulder, wearing the shape of his boyhood nightmare that
woke in Stuart even now the old, unreasoning horror....
It was stamping down upon him, shaking its bridled head, snorting,
lifting its lip above the impossible teeth. He saw the reins hanging
loose, he saw the saddle and the swinging stirrups. He knew that the
only safety in this hall for him was paradoxically upon the nightmare's
back, where the hoofs and fangs could not reach him. But the terror and
revulsion which the boy had buried long ago came welling up from founts
deep-buried in the man's subconscious mind....
* * * * *
Now it was rushing him, head like a snake's outthrust, hissing like a
snake, reins flying like Medusa-locks as it stretched to seize him.
For one instant he stood there paralyzed. He had faced dangers on many
worlds to which this nightmare was nothing, but he had never since
boyhood felt the paralysis of horror that gripped him now. It was a
child's horror, resurrected from the caves of sleep to ruin him....
With a superhuman effort he broke that frozen fear, snatching for
the flying reins, whirling as the monstrous thing swept past him in
a thunder of terrifying hoofs. Desperately he clung to the reins,
and as the thing rushed by he somehow got a clutching hand upon the
saddle-horn and found a stirrup that swung sickeningly when it took his
weight.
Then he was in the saddle, dizzy still with the terrors of childhood,
but astride the nightmare.
And now, with a sudden intoxicating clarity, the fear fell from his
mind. For an instant he sat high on the back of the incredible fanged
thing, an old, old terror clearing from his mind. Confidence which was,
he knew, his own and no bodiless reassurance drawn from dreams, such
as he had felt in the jungle, flooded warmly through him. He was not
afraid any more--he would never be afraid. The festering terror buried
deep in his childhood had come to light at last and was wiped away. He
caught the reins tight and flashed a sudden grin around the hall--
Brazen laughter boomed through the building. And beneath his knees
Stuart felt the horse's body alter incredibly. One moment he was
gripping a solid, warm-fleshed, hairy thing whose body had a familiar
pitch and motion beneath the saddle. Then, then--
Indescribably the body _writhed_ under him. The warm hairy flesh flowed
and changed. Cold struck through leatheroid against his thighs, and
it was a smooth, pouring cold of many alien muscles working powerfully
together in a way no mammal knows. He looked down.
He was riding a monstrous snake that twisted its head to look at him in
the moment he realized what had happened. Its great diamond-shaped head
towered high and came looping down toward him, wide-mouthed, tongue
like a flame flickering....
It laid its cold, smooth cheek against his with a hideous caressing
motion, sliding around his neck, sliding down his arm and side, laying
a loop of cold, scaly strength around him and pressing, pressing....
His hands closed around the thickness of its throat, futilely--and the
throat melted in his grasp and was hairy with a hairiness no mammal
ever knew. The motion of the body he bestrode changed again and was
incredibly springy and light.
He rode a monstrous spider. His hands were sunk wrist-deep in loathsome
coarse hair, and his eyes stared into great cold faceted eyes that
mirrored his own face a thousandfold. He saw his own distorted features
looking back at him in countless miniatures, but behind the faces,
in the great eyes of the spider, he saw no consciousness regarding
him. The cold multiple eyes were not aware of Derek Stuart. Behind
the shield of its terrible face the spider shut away its own arachnid
thoughts and the memories of the red fields of Mars that were its home.
With dreadful, impersonal aloofness its mandibles gaped forward toward
its prey.
Loathing ran in waves of weakness through Stuart's whole body, but
he shut his eyes and blindly struck out at the nearer of those great
mirroring eyes, feeling wetness shatter against his fist as--as--
As the horror shifted and vanished, while rippling waves of green light
darkened all about him. Now they coagulated, drew together into a
meadow, cool with Earthly grass, bordered by familiar trees far away.
Primroses gleamed here and there. Above him was the blue sky and the
warm bright sun that shone only upon the hills of Earth.
But what he felt was horror.
Twenty feet from him was a rank, rounded patch of weeds. His gaze was
drawn inexorably to that spot. And it was from there that the crawling
dread reached out to him.
Faintly he heard laughter ... of the gods ... of the Aesir. The Aesir?
Who--what were they? How had he, Derek Stuart, ever heard of them
except as a name whispered in fear as the spaceships streaked through
the clouds above that Dakota farmstead....
Derek Stuart ... a boy of eleven....
But--but--that was wrong, somehow. He wasn't a child any more. He had
matured, become a spaceman--
Dreams. The dreams of an eleven-year-old.
Yet the hollow, dreadful laughter throbbed somewhere, in the vaults of
the blue overhead, in the solidity of the very ground beneath him.
This had happened before. It had happened to a boy in South Dakota--a
boy who had not known what lay concealed in that verdant clump of weeds.
But now, somehow--and very strangely--Stuart knew what he would find
there.
He was afraid. Horribly, sickeningly afraid. Cold nausea crawled up
his spine and the calves of his legs. He wanted to turn and run to the
farmhouse half a mile away. He almost turned, and then paused as the
distant laughter grew louder.
_They_ wanted him to run. _They_ were trying to scare him--and, once
the defenses of his courage had broken, he would be lost. Stuart knew
that with an icy certainty.
Somewhere, very far away, he sensed a man standing in a cyclopean
hall--a man in ragged spaceman's garb, hard-faced, thin-lipped,
angry-eyed. A familiar figure. The man was urging him on--telling him
to go on toward that clump of weeds--
Derek Stuart obeyed the voiceless command. His throat dry, his heart
pumping, he forced himself across the meadow till he stood at his goal
and looked down at the bloody, twisted corpse of the tramp who had been
knifed by another hobo, twenty years before, on that Dakota farm. The
old nausea of shocked horror took him by the throat and strangled him.
He fought it down. This time he didn't run screaming back to the
farmhouse....
And suddenly the laughter of the gods was stilled. Derek Stuart, a man
once more in mind, stood again in the tower of the Aesir. The thrones
between the monstrous pillars were vacant.
The Aesir were gone.