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.