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 by-play 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 by-play. 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....