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.
III
Stuart let out his breath in a long sigh. He had no illusions about the vanishment of the Aesir; he knew he had not conquered those mighty beings. It would take more than human powers to do that. But at least he had a respite. All but the most stolid spacemen develop hypertension, and there seems to be a curious mathematical rule about that; it increases according to the distance from the Sun. Which may be explained by the fact that environmental differences also increase as the outer planets are reached—and alien environments breed alien creatures. A great many men have gone insane on Pluto. …
This was not Pluto; it was nearer Sunward than Jupiter, but the utter alienage that brooded over Asgard was almost palpable. Even the solidity under Stuart’s feet, the very stones of the planetoid, were artificially created, by a science a million years beyond that of his own time. And the Aesir—
Unexpectedly his deep chest shook with laughter. The inexplicable self-confidence that had first come to him in the Asgard forests had not waned; it seemed to have grown even stronger since his meeting with the Aesir giants. Now he stared around the colossal hall, his eyes straining toward the spot of light far above where those incredible columns converged. His own insignificance by comparison did not trouble him.
Whether or not he could have the slightest hope of winning this game—at least he was giving his enemies a run for their money!
A sound from the pit roused him. Stuart walked warily toward the edge. The dozen motionless figures were still there, fifty feet below, and among them was one he had not noticed before—an Earthgirl, he thought, with curling dark hair framing a white face as she tilted up her chin and stared at him.
At this distance he could make out few details; she wore a close-fitting green suit which left slender arms and legs bare.
“Earthman—” she said, in a clear, carrying voice. “Earthman! Quick! The Aesir will be back—go now! Leave their temple before they—”
“Don’t waste your breath,” Stuart said. “This is Asgard.” Whoever the girl was, she should know the impossibility of leaving the taboo world. “If I can find a rope—”
She said quickly, “You won’t find one. Not here, in the temple.”
“How can I get you out of there? And the others?”
“You’re mad,” the girl said. “What good would it do. …” She shook her head. “Better to die at once.”
Stuart narrowed his eyes at the dozen frozen figures. “I don’t think so. Fourteen of us can put up a better fight than one. If your friends wake up—”
The girl said, “On your left, between the pillars, there’s a tapestry showing Perseus and the Gorgon. Touch the helm of Perseus and the hand of Andromeda. Then go carefully—there may be traps.”
“What is it?”
“It will lead you down here. You can free us. If you hurry—oh, but it’s hopeless! The Aesir—”
“Damn the Aesir,” Stuart snarled. “Wake up the others!” He whirled and ran toward the distant wall, where he could see the Perseus tapestry, brown and gold, a huge curtain between two columns.
If the Aesir saw, they made no move. …
Stuart’s lips twisted in a bitter smile. The crazy confidence had not left him, but he was conscious of a reassuring warmth; at least he was no longer completely alone. That would help. Between the worlds, and on the desolate planets that swing along the edge of the System, loneliness is the lurking terror, more horrible than the most exotic monster ever spawned by the radioactive Plutonian earth.
He touched the tapestry twice; it swept away from him, and a staircase was visible, leading down through stone or metal—he
