The humming rose to a shrill scream ... frightened ... warning. Stuart tightened his grip. He lay motionless, his eyes closed. But all around him he could feel the icy tendrils of the star-thing lashing at him, drinking his human warmth, probing with avid fingers at his brain. He felt that warm--core--writhe and try to slip between his fingers. He squeezed.... The scream burst out, an inhuman agony in its raw-edged keening. It stopped. In Stuart's hand was--nothing. He opened his eyes. The dazzling glitter of star-points had vanished. Only the forest, with its purple shadows, lay empty and silent around him. Stuart got up slowly, swallowed dry-throated. The creatures of the Aesir were not invulnerable, then. Not to one who knew their weaknesses. _How had he known?_ What voice had spoken in his brain? There had been an odd, impossible familiarity to that--that mental voice, now that he remembered it. Somewhere he had heard it, sensed it before. That gap in his memory-- He tried to bridge it, but he could not. There was only a quickening of the desire to go on westward. He felt suddenly certain that he would find the Aesir in that direction. He took a hesitant step--and another. And with each step, a queer, unmotivated confidence poured into him. As though some barrier in his mind had broken down, letting some strange flood of proud defiance rush in. It was impossible. It was dangerous. But--certainly--no more dangerous than supinely waiting here on Asgard till another Watcher came to destroy him. There were worse things than the starry Watchers here, if legends were to be trusted. He went on, the curious tide of defiance rising higher and ever higher in his blood. It was a strangely intoxicating sense of--of pure, crazy self-confidence such as no man should rightfully have felt on this haunted asteroid. He wondered--but the drunkenness was such that he did not wonder much. He did not question. He thought: _To hell with the Aesir!_ The forest ended. At his feet a road began, leading off into the purple horizons of the flat plain before him. At the end of that road was a thrusting pillar of light that rose like a tower toward the dark sky. _There were the Aesir...._ 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.