II + 

Every spaceman has an automatic sense of orientation. In ancient days, when clipper ships sailed the seas of Earth, the Yankee skippers knew the decks beneath their feet, and they knew the stars. Southern Cross or Pole Star told them in what latitudes they sailed. In unknown waters, they still had their familiar keels and the familiar stars. + 

So it is with the spacemen who drift from Pluto to Mercury Darkside, trusting to metal hulls that shut in the air and shut out the vast abysses of interplanetary space. When they work outship, a glance at the sky will tell a trained man where he is⁠—and only tough, trained men survive the dangerous commerce of space. On Mercury the blazing solar corona flames above the horizon; on clouded Venus the green star of Earth shines sometimes. On Io, Callisto, Ganymede, a man can orient himself by the gigantic mother planet⁠—Saturn or Jupiter⁠—and in the Asteroid Belt, there is always the strange procession of little worlds like lanterns, some half-shadowed, others brightly reflecting the Sun’s glare. Anywhere in the System the sky is friendly⁠— + 

Except on Asgard. Jupiter was too far and too small; Mars was scarcely visible; the Asteroid Belt not much thicker than the Milky Way. The unfamiliar magnitudes of the planets told Stuart, very surely, that he was on unknown territory. He was without the sure, safe anchor that spacemen depend upon, and that lack told him how utterly he stood alone now. + 

But the unreasoning confidence did not flag. If anything, it mounted stronger within him as he hurried along the road, his rangy legs eating up the miles with easy speed. The sooner he reached his goal, the better he’d like it. Nor did he wish to encounter any more of the Aesir’s guardians⁠—his business was with the Aesir! + 

The tower of light grew taller as he went on. Now he saw that it was a cluster of buildings, massed cylinders of varying heights, each one gigantic in diameter as well as height, and all shining with that cold, shadowless radiance that apparently came from the stone⁠—or metal⁠—itself. The road led directly to the base of the tallest tower. + 

It ran between shining pillars⁠—a gateless threshold⁠—and was lost in silvery mists. No bars were needed to keep visitors out of this fortress! + 

Briefly a cool wind of doubt blew upon Stuart. He hesitated, wishing he had at least his blaster gun. But he was unarmed; he had even left the club back in the forest. + 

He glanced around. + 

The red moon was sinking. A heavier darkness was creeping over the land. Very far away he thought he saw the shifting flicker of dancing lights⁠—a Watcher? + 

He hurried onward. + 

Cyclopean, the tower loomed above him, like a shining rod poised to strike. His gaze could not pierce the mists beyond the portal. + 

He stepped forward⁠—between the twin pillars. He walked on blindly into the silver mists. + 

Twenty steps he took⁠—and paused, as something dark and shapeless swam into view before him. A pit⁠—at his feet. + 

In the dimness he could not see its bottom, but a narrow bridge crossed the gulf, a little to his left. Stuart crossed the bridge. Solidity was again under his feet. + 

With shocking suddenness, a great, brazen bellow of laughter roared out. Harsh mockery sharpened it. And it was echoed. + 

All around Stuart the laughter thundered⁠—and was answered. The walls gave it back and echoed it. The bellowing laughter of gods deafened Stuart. + 

The mists drifted away⁠—were sucked down into the pit. They vanished. + 

As though they fled from that evil laughter. + 

Stuart stood in a chamber that must have occupied the entire base of that enormous tower. Behind him the abyss gaped. Before him a shifting veil of light hid whatever lay behind it. But all around, between monstrous pillars, were set thrones, ebon thrones fifty feet tall. + 

On the thrones sat giants! + 

Titan figures, armored in glittering mail, ringed Stuart, and instantly his mind fled back to half-forgotten folklore.⁠ ⁠… Asgard, Jotunheim, the lands of the giants and the gods. Thor and Odin, sly Loki and Baldur⁠—they were all here, he thought, bearded colossi roaring their black laughter into the shaking air of the hall. + 

Watching him from their height⁠— + 

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 byplay 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 byplay. 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. + 