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
