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.