Sweat stood on Stuart's forehead, and he brushed it away impatiently. His deeply-tanned face set into harsh lines of curiously hopeless desperation. There was no blaster gun at his belt; that didn't matter. Guns couldn't help him now—on Asgard.
The red moon had told him the answer. Only one world in the System had a red moon, and men didn't go to that artificial asteroid willingly. They went, yes—but only to be doomed and damned. From Venus to Callisto spacemen spoke of Asgard in hushed voices—Asgard where the Aesir lived and ruled the worlds of Man.
No spaceships left Asgard, except the sleek black cruisers manned by the priests of Aesir. No man had ever returned from Asgard.
Stuart grinned mirthlessly. He'd learned a lesson, though he'd never profit by it now. Always before he'd been confident of his ability to outdrink anyone of his own weight and size. And certainly that slight, tired-eyed man at the Singing Star, in New Boston, should have passed out long before Stuart—under normal circumstances.
So the circumstances hadn't been quite normal. It was a frame. A beautiful, air-tight frame, because he'd never come back to squawk. Nobody came back from Asgard.
He shivered a little and looked up warily. There were legends, of course. The Watchers who patrolled the asteroid ceaselessly—robots, men said. They served the Aesir. As, in a way, all men served the Aesir.
No sound. No movement. Only the sullen crimson light beating down ominously from that dark sky.
Stuart took stock of his clothing. Regular leatheroid spaceman's rig; they'd left him that, anyway. Whoever they were. He couldn't remember anything that had happened after the fifth drink with the tired-eyed man. There was a very faint recollection of running somewhere—seeing unpleasant things—and hearing two oddly unreal voices. But the memories slipped away and vanished as he tried to focus on them.
The hell with it. He was on Asgard. And that meant—something rather more unpleasant than death, if the legends were to be believed. A very suitable climax to an unorthodox life, in this era when obedience and law enforcement were the rigid rule.