Part 2

It was only what to them could be called a few years ago, that the Orites had been able to build a spaceship. An expedition had come to Earth. It was a spaceship built for their own size--a cylindrical ship perhaps the size of Nixon's arm. A group of them, including this Tork, had come, landed and stayed for a time. So small, coming during Earth's night, remaining hidden, then moving to other places again during night, it had been easy for them to avoid discovery by the Earth giants.

"We found that your world, it is very beautiful," Tork was saying. "Much better than our own--that you shall see. And perhaps our mind is different from yours. You do not learn strange language by listening, and remembering?"

"Well, yes, but not exactly that." Nixon said. "Children do, I suppose. So you're taking me back to your world? You say you didn't want to kill me. Why should you? What do you want of me?"

He saw Tork turn and gaze at the smaller woman-creature beside him, as though Tork wasn't sure how he should answer that question. They were standing now so that as Nixon had relaxed, prone, with his face turned sidewise, they were only a foot or so away. He could see them more clearly than before. Their garments were of some flexible, metallic fabric--a sort of square-cut tunic and trousers on Tork; and on Nona more of a drape, belted tight at the waist.

Tork's head was round and shining, like a Gort; hers had a little growth of white and gleaming hair on it. And Nixon could see other differences now. The female was curved, broad at the hips, but every tiny line of the male figure was stiffly angular. It gave Tork, and the Gorts even more so, a mechanical look--the planes of the face were all tiny rectangles, as though hewn on metal....

"We need you," Tork said at last. "Our scientists need one of the Earth-giants."

"Need me? What for?" Nixon demanded.

"That you shall see," Tork said. He added evasively, "There is so much about your world that you can tell us."

"There will be no harm come to you," Nona said suddenly. "My father, he is leader of the Orites in all things of science. It was he who built our first spaceship."

"I am assistant to him," Tork put in.

"And then they built this giant ship, to bring a giant to our world," Nona added, "and my father, he is working now on something else--something that will be so good for all us Orites--"

"That we can explain later, not now," Tork said hastily.

Whatever it was, Nixon couldn't make them say any more about it. The trip now stretched on while around him, down on the floor, the miniature interior was busy with the routine of the voyage. Beneath him, he understood now, were the mechanism rooms, the air renewers, pressure equalizers, temperature controls, and the gravity engines--whatever they were. Perhaps, if he had been an Earth scientist, Tork would have tried to find the English words to explain them. But Tork did not, and Allen Nixon wasn't curious. To him it was enough that this strange thing was a fact.

His mind was busy with thoughts of how to escape from these weird little captors. Certainly he had no desire to be taken to this strange world. Tork's queer glance at Nona had seemed somehow to have a gruesome implication. If only he could get Tork within his fingers--

* * * * *

After a time Nixon slept. He was hungry and thirsty when he awoke. Down on the floor the Gorts were busy with their routine tasks. They were getting used to the monstrous prisoner now. None seemed to notice that he had opened his eyes. Then he saw Tork, in the little enclosure beyond Nixon's feet, where the cylindrical interior narrowed. It seemed to be the bow of the spaceship. A bullseye port was there, with a vista of the stars. There was a foot-high bank like an instrument panel, with rows of tiny dials hardly bigger than his smallest fingernail. They glowed with faint streams of lights. He saw Tork there, among the tiny controls.

"Tork!" he called.

Presently Tork came running along the floor and stood by Nixon's face.

"You awaken?" Tork said. "You giants sleep a very long time. We know that, of course. And you have slept even longer."

Nixon could well believe it. He was rested now. Far more clear-headed and alert, he realized, than he had been before, and the many tiny wounds on him didn't hurt so much now.

"I'm hungry and thirsty," he said. "I suppose you know that giants eat, don't you?"

Tork's weird slit of mouth widened and his bluish face knotted into a grotesque smile. "We had planned for that before we caught you," he said. "Water--your earth-water we have in tanks here. We have studied your food. In Orana our chemists studied it, and we have concentrated it for you. And perhaps some of our own things you will like."

Feeding this bound giant was quite a problem. The Gorts struggled now with a great ladder, resting it against Nixon's shoulder, carrying pails of water up to his chest, pouring them into his mouth, each not much more than a thimbleful. Then a long line of them came, each with a chunk of food, a mouthful for Nixon. But it was gratifying, if queer-tasting, and at last he had had enough.

The days slowly passed, while the tiny ship plunged on through the abyss of space. Days? There was here nothing but the same humming, glowing interior, and outside through the tiny bullseyes, the vast unchanging panorama of the stars. Nixon slept when he could; and when he was thirsty or hungry, he called for Tork to order the Gorts to their task. A hundred of them, whose only work was to feed him.

Nixon realized now that these little people slept very often. Watching them, it seemed that every two or three hours they needed sleep. A lifespan, probably much shorter than ours. Ten years from birth to old age, perhaps. This trip to Orana, as Tork once explained, to them was a very long, tedious voyage. To Nixon it would be while he slept perhaps twenty or twenty-five times.

"If you would let one of my hands loose," Nixon told Tork once, "you wouldn't have to carry the food and water up to me. Have the Gorts put it beside me, down there on the floor and that's enough."

He did his best to persuade Tork. After all, what could he do to escape, even if they turned him loose? A lunge, even an incautious movement, could wreck this little ship. Kill them all, but it would kill him too.

"You don't reckon I'm that foolish," Nixon said.

"No, I do not," Tork agreed.

"Then turn me loose. It's silly to keep me shackled like this. Causes you a lot of trouble."

But Tork only grinned his grotesque grin and shook his head.

"Why not?" Nixon argued. "What can I do?"

"You could reach and seize me," Tork said grimly. "You could hold me with your fingers. And to save my life, would I not order the Gorts to turn us back to Earth? That you could do. Have you not thought of it?"

Nixon had indeed. Something like that was what he had been planning. These tiny captors weren't so dumb.

But as the time passed and they told him that now the orbit of Mars was crossed and presently their world of Orana would lie ahead of them, Nixon had in some measure won the confidence of Nona. Sometimes when he called to her she would come and climb the long ladder at his shoulders and sit on his chest and talk to him. At first she was timid, but then as her confidence grew she got over it. Under her questions Nixon passed the long hours telling her about Earth.

"But you saw a good deal of it yourself, Nona. You made two trips there."

"Yes," she agreed. "But it is a world so gigantic, it did not look anything of the way you tell it to me."

"And I guess your world will look pretty different to me," he said, "from the way it does to you."

But she was queerly reticent about her world. He decided that Tork had warned her not to talk about it.

At another time it occurred to Nixon to ask how they had gotten his huge body into their ship. She described how it had been dragged in with cables. A dozen little electronic engines, and the pulling of about five hundred Gorts who were here on board. But to get him out they had planned it differently. Even though shackled, he could perhaps hitch himself along, just a little at a time, out through the bow of the ship which was built so that the whole of it would spread apart.

"Of course I can," Nixon agreed. "I certainly don't want to make it hard, Nona. If you people got so you could trust me--"

"I think my father will trust you," she said suddenly. "Yes, that I think."

Then there came the time when Nona gestured toward the front port of the ship, down past Nixon's feet. "There is Orana," she said.

He saw it then, a great silvery crescent which had swung into view. During the hours it enlarged, until presently it was filling all that area of the sky. And a little later, Nona came climbing up the ladder to his chest.

"When you have slept the next time," she said, "we shall be there."

She seemed frightened. He could interpret more readily the expressions on her tiny, bluish face now.

"What's the matter?" he demanded.

She said, "Tork has seen with the telescope that a storm may be there when we land."

"A storm on your world? Oh, I see. Well, we have storms. Wind and rain. And I told you about a snowstorm--"

But she burst out: "A storm on Orana--Oh, giant, if only you could help us! That is what my father thinks--that you will be able to help us live on our world!"

A storm on Orana ... somehow it made him shudder, hearing the terror in her tiny voice.

III

He slept again. And when he awoke the little interior of the Orite spaceship was busy with the activities of landing. Through one of the bullseye ports beside him, Nixon stared down at the strange new world. Beneath them now it was a great, darkly dim expanse of gaunt naked mountains. A place, by the look of it, seemingly of monstrous desolation.

The spaceship settled lower. Now Nixon could see the huge, naked mountain peaks. They were like greenish polished spires of glass, towering up into a queer orange-tinted haze of the Orana night. Beneath the topping spires, the vast gaunt mountains spread out in serrated ranks. The sides of them were polished cliff-ramps, bleak, precipitous slopes dropping down into the great chasms of the valleys where the orange haze was thicker so that the bottoms were an empty blur.

He found Nona standing down on the floor, between him and the bullseye port.

"There--Orana," she said.

He was puzzled. "But Tork told me it was a very small asteroid," he said. "Those mountains, those canyons--so huge--"

A little world, but so monstrously contorted by some great cataclysm of nature in its birth, that everything on it was tremendous. As Nixon stared down, it seemed that there could be easily ten miles, as distance would be measured on Earth, between the tops of these towering spires and the ragged gashes of deeps between them. A vast world, vast with the hugeness of this amazing panorama of utter, bleak desolation. Somehow there was a majesty to it. A brooding landscape, awesome in its sweep of barren immensity. And it was sinister--the monstrous, brittle-looking cliff-faces, smooth and green, with the orange hazes whirling about them, and the shadows in the depths murky with purple mystery.

"It looks large to you?" Nolan said. "Then you can understand how much bigger it looks to us."

He could try to see it from their viewpoint. To them he was a seventy-foot giant--and so to them these immense slashed metal mountains must seem titanic. A harsh world, with nature cruel and relentless, so that on it these tiny creatures had struggled, were struggling, for a bare existence....

Now the little Spaceship had settled lower so that the swirling orange haze was like a veil around it. A thousand feet away, outside this port, Nixon could see a dim blur of smooth almost vertical cliff-face sliding upward as they sank.

"Nona, come." It was Tork, here on the floor with Nona. A line of Gorts went past, dragging a wheeled apparatus. Nixon recognized it as the little electronic gun which had spat its flash at him, back there on the bank of the Florida bayou.

Tork called a command to the Gorts, and then he herded Nona away and stood looking up into Nixon's down-turned face. "You, giant," he said. "You will take orders from me now? You will do what I tell you?"

"Maybe," Nixon said slowly. He had come to dislike Tork's small arrogance. "Are you going to turn me loose?"

"That is impossible," Tork said shortly. "I want you to know, if you are helpful it will be for your good. Can you understand that?"

"You've said it enough so I reckon I should," Nixon retorted.

"When we land, I will direct you," Tork said. "The home--the place where we will keep you--to your size it will be quite close. I will direct you to it."

Then the turmoil of the landing drew Tork away. With the orange mists almost solid outside the little port, presently Nixon felt the spaceship rock and bump, and then settle quiescent. The interior was a babble of the excited, tiny voices of the Orites, and the throbbing grind of mechanisms as the ports were opened. The outer air came in with a swirling rush, heavy wisps of tinted vapour, spreading like a visible gas. Nixon's first breath of it was choking. It had a heavy, chemical smell. He coughed, but after a moment he found that, though it was dankly oppressive, making his lungs tingle and burn and his head feel unsteady, he could breathe it.

For a moment, Nona was here again. "The storm air," she said.

"The storm is coming?" he said. "Or is this the storm, outside there now?"

"No, no, but it is coming."

* * * * *

The grind of the interior mechanisms had ceased, but then they began again. Nixon saw now that the vaulted ceiling of the little Spaceship was slowly being raised. It seemed hinged at about his waist and from the bow beyond his feet it was rising up. And then there past his feet, the bow-section spread apart. The orange mist, danker than ever, swirled in around him. Beside him, lines of Gorts were hurriedly carrying things out of the ship. Presently all the tiny figures had disembarked. Nixon was lying in the narrow, vaulted little cylinder with its top end down by his feet fully opened. Over him, from the waist down, there was the tossed, storm-filled murk of the new world--a blur with only a distant monstrous crag dimly visible. Silence was around him here, but outside there was the weird muttering voice of the oncoming storm.

For that moment a panic struck at Nixon. He was wrapped with metal ropes from head to foot, and still chained to the little lines of metal posts beside him. It was as though he were lying bound, here in a partly opened coffin. Had the Orites abandoned him, scurrying away in their terror of the storm?

"Ready," shouted Tork. And as Nixon shifted his head, he saw his captor standing at the foot of one of the posts that came up past Nixon's ear. Tork was loosening the cable, casting it off. Then he was at each of the others. Presently Nixon's bound body was free from its lashings.

"Careful now, giant!" Tork said. He cast off the last cable, down by Nixon's feet; and then he darted back, turned and ran hurriedly out of the opened bow. His shouted voice came in.

"Come out now," Tork called. "Be careful!"

Nixon could bend at the waist a little, and bend at the knees. His arms could move to get an elbow under him when he turned sidewise. Grimly it occurred to him that he could roll over perhaps, or lunge and wreck this cursed little cylinder.

"Come now!" Tork called sharply. "And surely we will kill you if there is trouble."

Feet first, slowly, laboriously, Nixon inched his way along and out of the spread bow of the spaceship.

The world of Orana. A curious bristling sward was under him. Around him, the acrid orange air swirled and sucked. At first he could see nothing but an orange blur. Then off to one side, on a dim slope some twenty feet away, he saw that a terraced pyramid was standing--a pyramid with its top third sliced off. The Orite city. A community dwelling. It was one of three here. Dimly Nixon could make out the outlines of the other two, further away up the slope. They were all three about of a size--some fifty feet square at the base and twenty feet high up their terraced sides to the flat roof. Tiny lights gleamed like window eyes along the terraces at different levels about a foot apart; and now Nixon could see the little Orite figures moving there on the ramparts, with their thin voices babbling, excited by the return of the Spaceship with its giant from Earth.

"Keep going," Tork was calling. He was off to one side, down by Nixon's feet. A crowd of Gorts stood further back, watching. And from the nearest pyramid, other Orites were coming. Some, the young, were only an inch or so high. Groups of them clustered timidly around a mother. A stiff formation of what seemed the slave Gorts was standing in a double line. Several hundred of them. The little wheeled guns were with them. The guns pointed at Nixon. Alert Gort commanders stood ready to attack the giant if it became necessary.

"Keep going," Tork called again.

* * * * *

He stood cautiously to one side, ten feet from Nixon's lashed ankles. He moved along to keep there, as Nixon moved. Nixon had shifted three or four lengths of his body from the spaceship now. Suddenly, as for a moment he relaxed, panting from the effort, he found Nona walking here on the ground near his face. Of them all, she was the least afraid of him. She was so close now that a flip of his head could have knocked her down.

"Hurry," she urged. "There is a place for you--"

"How far away? What sort of place?" he demanded.

"It is, what you call a--" She suddenly checked herself. "Oh giant, you hear that? The storm--coming now!"

He heard it. The distant, rumbling storm voice had abruptly intensified--a rumble that now was separated into a fusillade of crackling explosions. The orange air was swirling crazily, swirling and crackling.

Then in the full intensity of its fury, the Orana storm burst upon them.

IV

The orange rain came down in a pelting deluge, with a steady blast of the wind. Under the impact of it Nixon stopped his hitching movement along the ground and lay motionless. Overhead the clouds were turning green. Great masses of smoking, turgid vapour swung majestically like the slow-motion image of a cyclone.

In the orange-green murk Nixon could see the crowds of little figures running frantically for the shelter of the pyramid-cities. The nearer pyramid was dimly visible through the blur. Tiny lights were glowing there now, seemingly all over it. Not the lights of the windows. He could still see the little spaced rows of them at the foot-high levels. This was a purple glow--a sheen of light-fire. It seemed something to protect the city from the storm. Up at the flat-top roof, fifty feet above the ground, the purple light-fire stood up in little crossed beams.

The heavy orange rain increased. They were queerly solid raindrops. They stung Nixon's face like hail so that he tried to shield himself by twisting around. The cries of the running Orites were faint little screams in the roar. He saw a sucking whirl of wind knock a group of them down. Then they rose, struggled on, trying to get to the sheltering doorways of the city. The raindrops were like hail, of different sizes. He saw an Orite struck by one that to the little six-inch figure was monstrous. The Orite fell and lay motionless.

Now the rain-water was coming in rills down the rocky slope. The rills were rivers to the fleeing Orites. A group of them were cut off. They milled around in panic, then they came running back toward Nixon. Suddenly as they neared him, he saw that Nona was among them. She was running, staggering. A blob of raindrop barely missed felling her.

He called, "Nona! Nona!"

The voice of the giant. It rumbled with a roar, mingling with the roar of the storm. Through the swirling murk, with the haven of the purple-glowing pyramid blurred in the distance, Nixon could see that the slope was dotted by fallen figures. Some of them lay with the cascading rivulets of water tumbling over them; others were being washed away down the slope. Half of the Orite crowd perhaps had reached the city. The others were caught out here, surging back in a panic toward the giant, momentarily more in terror of the storm than of him. And Nixon knew now what he could do to give them at least partial shelter.

"Nona!" he called. "Come over here by me! Tell them--all of them come here!"

Then they were coming, and Nixon lay on his side, with his back to the wind and rain. For them there was shelter, here against the giant figure so that in a moment a hundred or more of them were huddling here. He lay tensed, motionless. Down his length he could dimly see the mass of tiny figures crouched in the lee of his body, with the choking mists and the rain whirling high above them. Presently he could feel the rivulets of water backing up against him, as though he were a monstrous dam stretched here. He realized that his body was blocking the water, keeping it from surging like a flood upon the Orites he was sheltering.

He said, "You're all right now, Nona? Better now?"

She was crouching against his chest. He heard her answering call. "Yes. Oh yes, giant."

He lay through an interval. And now through the storm came a burst of lightning--a crackling burst with a roar like thunder. But it was very different lightning from anything Nixon had ever seen! It seemed to strike one of the distant cliffs. There was a sustained crackling for a second or two, then an orange-green burst of light. It was like a bomb striking the cliff-face, with masses of rock hurled into the blur of the air. A chunk, perhaps as big as Nixon's forearm, fell clattering across the slope. Now he saw the meaning of the purple light-fire like a barrage around and above the pyramid-city. It was a barrage of some strange electronic nature, to act like a lightning rod. Presently a crackling bolt hit it--a great burst, a blob of pyrotechnics in the air above the city roof. It crackled for a second and then harmlessly was swept away, dissipating into the murk.

An hour passed, with the storm raging while Nixon lay taut with the crowd of Orites huddled against him. Then it seemed that the wind and rain were lessening. And presently a rift came in the wheeling orange clouds--a rift with a pallid opalescent light breaking through. The Orana moon. As the clouds at last wheeled and swung away, the firmament of stars was spread overhead--pin-points of fire in the Orana night-sky, with the moon a huge crescent of opalescent shimmer. It bathed the glistening wet slope, strewn with the tiny dead figures. It edged with pallid silver the frowning ramparts of the distant mountains....

* * * * *

Presently the daylight came. There was a swift, brightening twilight of flat, pale glow; and then all in a few minutes there was full daylight as the sun mounted above the cliffs. Out here beyond Mars, it was a sun small and pale. Nixon's first Orana day. The sunlight had warmth, a grateful warmth that soon was drying him. In it the bound Nixon lay quiet. Momentarily the giant was ignored. The wet slope was steaming in the sunlight. Nona and the Orites whom he had sheltered had fled into the city as soon as the storm abated. The barrage glow had gone from the pyramids. Gorts were carrying in the dead and wounded.