Part 3

A queer ironic feeling of his helplessness was in Nixon as he lay waiting, wondering what these strange little captors would try to do to him next. This world of civilized humans all in miniature, so tiny, made it seem absurd that he should have to lie here, patiently waiting for what would happen to him. But every moment as he gazed around at the busy little Orite world, revealed by the daylight, his respect for it grew. Quite evidently these were a scientific people. A totally different science from anything on Earth, so that he could never grasp it. A science, compared to his own Earth-world, which in many ways was probably less advanced, yet in other ways more so.

Beyond the three pyramid-cities he could see tilled fields in which tiny things were growing. Little furrows ridged them. Gorts were working there, with miniature machines that scurried like bugs along the ground. Now after the storm, Orites were trudging in from the hills, a rural population living out in the recesses of the cliffs, and in huts along the ground. A few of their little dwellings were visible in the nearer distance, mounds about a foot high. Some of the people living out there came carrying those who had been hurt in the storm--for medical attention in the pyramid-cities, Nixon surmised. Others evidently came out of curiosity to see the giant from Earth. At a respectful distance which to Nixon was five or six feet away, a crowd of them was gathering. Men and women, and the young some of which were hardly more than an inch high, clinging to a mother as they stared at the prone giant. It was a jabbering, excited crowd, augmented now by Orites who streamed out from the cities.

The nearer cliff of the canyon-side, as Nixon saw it, was fairly close here. It rose sheer, shining green in the sunlight. There was another building over there against the cliff bottom--a building which looked like a small cairn of stones. It was about two or three feet high. Its tiny oval windows, even now in the daylight, had a violet light in them; and at a peak from the top of it, colored vapour was streaming up.

"We are ready to attend to you now, giant." The Orite voice near Nixon's head startled him. Then he saw that Tork had arrived, and that Nona was behind him. Other Orites had come from the nearest of the pyramids and were gathered around Tork. Quite evidently they were important here. Somehow the look of them suggested advanced age; men a little bent, shriveled of outline, with robes that were ornamented for the dignity of their rank. Their wrinkled, bluish faces were solemn with dignity. There were some twenty of them. They stood in tiny groups, gazing, whispering to each other.

"Attend to me?" Nixon said. "It's time you turned me loose, isn't it?"

If he could only persuade them to free him! From the beginning Nixon had pondered how he could escape and get back to Earth. Certainly this had been an extraordinary adventure, but already he had had enough of it. If the Orites would free him now, it would be simple enough to force them to take him back in the Spaceship. Or would it? Nixon felt a queer shuddering, like a premonition. Why had they brought him here? What were they planning to do with him?

"Turn you loose," Tork was saying, and Nixon thought he could detect something like sarcasm in that small voice.

"Or at least, thank me," Nixon said. He grinned. Among his own kind on Earth, his was an appealing grin. But the great ruddy expanse of his face with the black stubble of beard which now was growing on it, wrinkled by that grin, certainly had no reassuring appeal for these tiny Orites. And Nixon knew it.

Absurd that he should have to wheedle these little captors! Nixon always had a hot temper and it rose in him now as from the Orites there came only a staring, blank silence. Despite his bonds, he could roll and lunge and kill hundreds of them! But what would it get him? The Gorts would mass for battle and kill him. Or if they couldn't--if even he wrecked all this miniature civilization here, there would be nothing left for him to do but lie here on this strange little world and starve to death.

He mastered his anger. He would have to be docile, do what he was told, for now at least.

"I helped you in the storm, didn't I?" he added. "I saved maybe hundreds of you from being killed. The last thing I want is to hurt any of you."

"My father is coming," Nona put in. She had turned at the sound of a voice calling from the pyramid entrance where other Orites were emerging. "My father is called Frane," Nona added. "I have told him that you want to be our friend." She flung a glance at Tork as she said it; but Tork ignored her and turned away, whispering to some of the dignitaries.

* * * * *

Then Nona's father stood with her. Frane was obviously aged. His shoulders were square and thin, with an ornate robe draping them. He bore himself with the commanding dignity of his age and rank as leading scientist here.

"I thank you, giant, for what you have done." His voice was thin and high, his words slow, carefully intoned. "For myself, I would trust you. But these men who rule us--" His gaze went to the group with whom Tork was whispering as he added, "have decided against me."

Tork whirled around. "We do not dare give our world into the keeping of this monster."

It brought a babble of agreement from the listening Orites, most of whom quite evidently understood the Earth language.

"Why did you bring me here?" Nixon demanded. "You certainly went to plenty of trouble."

"To be of help to us," Frane said. "There is no reason why I should not tell you."

Frane in his laboratory here, with Tork as his assistant, for years had been working on a momentous chemical discovery. Drugs to cause a size-change of the human body; to alter the size of every tiny cell, without changing its shape.

Frane gestured. "That is my laboratory, off there." He was indicating the cairn-like little building with the oval violet windows, at the base of the cliff.

A growth-drug. A generation ago they had done it with plants to some extent. "Perhaps you know," Frane was saying, "that natural growth is not steady. It comes in spurts, a rapid growth, a resting, then growth again."

And this new drug would greatly accelerate the growing periods--a vast and rapid acceleration into a size far beyond what nature ordinarily would have attained. Frane's growth-drug was now nearing success.

"To make us Orites perhaps as large as you," Frane was saying. "Then we could dominate our world more easily."

Nixon could understand the desire. This miniature civilization was like a colony of ants on Earth. He could imagine an anthill swept by an Earth-storm; a forest fire, with millions of insects scuttling before it, and millions of others consumed by it. This Orana storm, to Nixon, had been bad enough; but to many of the Orites it had been fatal.

"You brought me here," Nixon said, "and yet you hope to make yourselves as big as I am. Why did you need me?"

Tork had approached. His face bore a triumphant leer. "They say it is better to stop this talk with the giant now," he said to Frane.

Orders from Frane's superiors. It was obvious. "Later, giant," Frane said. His face was serious, and Tork's leer of triumph, somehow made Nixon shudder.

"I beg you, for your own good, cause no trouble," Frane added hastily. "You understand that, giant?"

"Yes," Nixon said.

"We have a home for you," Tork said suavely.

"A home? Where?"

"Not far." Tork gestured toward a butte-like rock that rose from the slope, over in the direction of the nearer cliff. To Nixon it was only some fifty feet away. "And you will be made quite comfortable," Tork added smilingly. "Our Gorts will feed you and take care of you."

Then slowly, feet first, the bound Nixon was hitching himself past the pyramid-city. A thousand little eyes watched him tensely. The rock was about twenty feet high. As his feet neared it, Nixon saw that Orites were up on the rock-ridges some ten feet above the ground. Tiny apparatus was up there. Nixon hardly noticed the crescent line of finger-size holes in the ground as he hitched over them. As his feet neared the bottom of the rock, he heard Tork calling,

"Enough, giant! Lie quiet!"

Tork gave a signal. From up on the tiny ledge of rock, the Orites answered it. The apparatus up there glowed, hummed. From the crescent line of holes in the rocky ground around Nixon, tiny purple beams of light, shot up vertically into the air--beams of radiance about six inches apart. They streamed up, sharp and clear for twenty or thirty feet and faded into the sunlit air. It was a crescent fence of light, from one end of the butte, out in a fifteen foot loop around the prone Nixon, bending until it touched the other end of the butte.

At the same moment Gorts rushed in, between the six-inch vertical light-bars. Nixon could feel them with tiny electro-torches burning at the knots of the ropes binding him. The ropes fell away. He was free. The Gorts scattered in a panic, running out between the upstanding purple rays.

Nixon's clothes were smouldering in several places from the tiny torches. The flesh of his wrists was burned. He beat out the smouldering fabric and staggered to his feet.

"Careful now, giant!" It was Tork's voice coming in to him from beyond the radiance of the bars of purple light. Somehow Tork's sneering warning enraged Nixon. Was this a cage? A cage of light-fire in which these damnable little creatures thought they could hold the Earth-giant? He'd show them!

Nixon's rage blurred his reason or he would have been more wary. With an oath that was thunder to the Orites, he hurled himself against the purple bars. The Orites' apprehensive cries mingled with a crackling, hissing shower of sparks. It was as though Nixon had struck something solid. He was aware of a shock, a resisting thrust, a repulsion that galvanized all his body as it hurled him backward.

Enveloped by the spark-shower, with his clothes smouldering and his flesh burned, he fell writhing in the center of his purple cage.

* * * * *

Nixon barely clung to his senses. Then after a moment he knew that his head was clearing, that he was brushing his smouldering clothes frantically with his hands. Around him the radiance from the glowing purple bars was dazzling. But presently he could see between them, and see the crescent of blue sky overhead. Between two of the bars, in the six-inch vertical slit of space, an Orite figure appeared. It was Nona. She came carefully in and stood looking at him.

"You are not too badly hurt?" she said anxiously. "You should not have tried that."

"So they send _you_?" Nixon said bitterly. "What for? To get me ready for some new trickery?"

Then Nixon saw that her father was behind her. "We understand your feelings," Frane said. "I would trust you, but you see I have not enough power here. I am only a man of science; I have nothing to do with the government. Not many of the Gorts will take orders from me."

He seemed wholly sincere, so that Nixon smiled grimly. "All right. I think I _am_ beginning to understand."

And Tork, who in rank was only Frane's assistant, seemed to have the confidence of those Government leaders.

"The Gorts will come and bring you food and water," Nona said.

"There will be five hundred Gorts just to be trained for your needs," Frane offered. "If they come now, you will not harm them so that they have to attack and kill you?"

Whatever thoughts of wishful thinking Nixon had had that these little people could kill him, now certainly were dispelled. "Okay," Nixon agreed. "You have my promise. I won't hurt the Gorts."

"Thank you," Frane said gravely. He turned away....

V

A dozen or more of the Orana days and nights went by. Nona often came to talk with the giant. Then she brought a young Orite with her named Loto. He seemed about her own age. He spoke English. He was, Nona said, studying to be a scientist. From him and Nona, Nixon now learned many details of the little asteroid world. The rotation of Orana on its axis gave an alternate daylight and darkness of about six hours each. There was about the same gravity as Earth, because the asteroid was so extremely dense. And the moon here was a smaller twin of Orana, one revolving around the other.

The days were mostly sunlit, sometimes with swirls of orange and purple clouds. There was no rain; the rain fell only during the infrequent storms. The nights were opalescent moonlight; then with a period when the moon-twin had moved into the hours of the day, and showed only as a dull crescent in the sunlight.

Through the glowing purple bars, Nixon could see the miniature Orite world busy with its routine of life. The cairn-mound of Frane's laboratory was only a few yards distant along the cliff. Day and night its tiny oval windows gleamed with the violet radiance.

Still Nixon had no idea of why he had been brought here. He had demanded it of Nona and Loto, but always they avoided it. Nona looked frightened, and the youthful Loto was gravely solemn. To say the least, their look was anything but reassuring. Then one day, they told him.

"You are a giant," Nona said. "Originally my father wanted to study the growth-factors of larger creatures. On our first visit to your Earth, several of them were brought here. They were very young, not too terribly big then to be caught and brought here. But they grew so fast."

Again that queer look was on her face as she added, "They are all dead now, except one. It is, I think, what you call a panther. It is caged in a cave--" She gestured. "Out there in a nearby valley--a cave, with the purple barrage like this across the entrance."

"Studying the growth of larger creatures," Nixon echoed. "And now these animals are all dead but one! What you're trying to tell me--your father and Tork experimented on them. Is that it?"

"In the interest of science," Loto said hastily. "That is done on your Earth, isn't it?"

And then they had realized that, if the growth-drug Frane was after was to be effective on the human Orites, a human giant from Earth would be the best on which to experiment. So Tork had been sent to get one.

Nixon stared. "Keep me here, telling me I'll not be harmed until you're ready to vivisect me!"

"No! No--" the Orite girl cried vehemently. "Not that! Never! Father has promised it!"

"He has found that his work does not need it," Loto said earnestly. "Believe us, that is true. The panther has not yet been used. Perhaps it never will be. And Frane does not need you. He thought that he would. But now he's almost sure it isn't necessary."

"And Tork is still trying to persuade your leaders to have Frane--use me?" Nixon demanded.

"Yes," Loto admitted. "That is so. You see, the drugs are so terribly important to us--"

"But my father needs nothing more," Nona said. "Except perhaps, my giant, there will be blood samples--"

"And a little tissue to be studied with our microscopes," Loto put in. "And secretion, perhaps, from the pituitary gland--"

A grave little group of scientists, with Frane, came one day for specimens from the giant. Then they came again. Their tiny surgical instruments were like needles pricking and Nixon only laughed grimly.

But would Frane succeed with his experiments? It seemed now as though Nixon's life hung on that. Then there was a day when Nona said impulsively,

"My father is more sure than ever of success. But Tork refuses to believe it."

"Refuses?" Nixon echoed. "Look here, what do you mean by that? I reckon there's still plenty you're not telling me, Nona."

There was indeed! There was so much going on out there in the busy little Orite world that the caged giant could not see. Nona and Loto tried to explain it.

"Tork is surely planning something," Loto said. "Something more than just working for the success of the drug."

There had been rumors of trouble. Talk of plans that were being made by secret meetings in the night. And Tork's followers seemed increasing. More and more the rumors involved him as a leader.

"Planning what?" Nixon demanded. "Is he aiming to seize your government?"

Perhaps it was that. Frane himself could not believe that Tork had any sinister plans; for so many years he had trusted Tork. And Frane was absorbed with his work. An impractical old man.

"So are most of our leaders," Loto said bitterly. "Too old. What you would call rusting on the job."

"One thing I'm sure," Nixon said. "Whatever that fellow Tork is up to, he'd mighty well like to tack my hide to his cabin door."

* * * * *

The days passed. And Nixon saw himself like a monstrous dumb creature waiting to be slaughtered. There must be something that he could do to get out of here! He began planning it and as the plan evolved, the thing looked feasible, if only he could persuade Nona and the youthful Loto!

He put his plan to them one evening when they came to talk to him, as they now did quite often. In the glow of the purple bars he sat with the two small figures perched on his upraised knee.

"Look," Nixon said softly. "I'm not willing to go on like this. And you--you're just stalling around giving Tork and his men every chance to pull off what they're after."

Nixon felt desperate, and he knew he looked it--ragged and dirty, his clothes tattered where the barrage had burned them, and his face with sunken cheeks covered by a ragged growth of black beard. And he knew he was ill. The lack of exercises perhaps, because always on Earth Allen Nixon had been used to great muscular activity. The food and water the Gorts brought him, lately had been distasteful. It was strange stuff, at best. And there was the apprehension of his fate--the damnable sitting and waiting.

"Whatever Tork is after," Nixon was saying, "it's something Frane would not want. Nor you--nor any of those who are like you. For your sake as well as mine, you've got to go into this with me."

He persuaded them at last. Loto had the youthful, reckless enthusiasm of youth. He was like Nixon himself, in that! And they both trusted the giant.

"Tonight will be best," Loto said. "Greev will be on duty--"

Greev was one of the Orite guards in charge of the barrage mechanism. His little post was back in a recess on a ledge of the butte. From where Nixon was sitting its cave-entrance was dimly visible off at the left end where the barrage ended at the rock-face. To Nixon it was about ten feet up; to the Orites it was a climb of about a hundred feet, up a steep winding rock-path from the other side of the butte. Greev was a rough fellow who had seemed much interested in Nona. Often he had urged her to come up there and sit with him through the long tedious hours of his duty.

"What time would be best?" Nixon demanded.

"I could go soon after the moon-rise," Nona said.

An hour from now. Nona would talk to the guard. She would contrive that just for a moment or two they would leave the little cave-entrance, walking along the ledge in the shimmer of the moon. And, unseen, Loto would be up there.

"It can be done," Nixon said. "You're sure you understand the mechanisms, Loto?"

"Oh yes, yes."

Perched on the seated giant's upraised knee, Loto and Nona suddenly clutched at the huge folds of his trousers to keep from falling as the knee jerked. And Nixon's hand had gone up to his forehead--a sweep of wind that was like a little swirl of storm.

"What's the matter?" Loto demanded anxiously.

"I don't know," Nixon murmured. "I sure feel sick."

A wave of nausea and dizziness had swept him, convulsing his muscles. "This food I get here don't seem to agree with me," Nixon added. "Lately, I--"

He sucked in his breath as the inescapable thought came to him.

"Poison!" he gasped. "That's it! Poisoning me--those damned little--"

"Not so loud!" Loto murmured. "You're voice is a roar. It could be heard up there in the control room."

Poisoning the giant! His body was so tremendous that they could only give him enough to be slow-acting, making him gradually sick. Nona and Loto were aghast. More than ever now, this plan to free the giant and let him rule this world as Frane and the others would want it ruled, must succeed tonight.

"Maybe it isn't poison. It could be a sleeping drug," Loto said.

"Sure! To knock me out and vivisect me!" Nixon rasped grimly. "What difference?"

* * * * *

For a time longer they discussed the details of their plan, while Nixon sat fighting the weird feelings that were sweeping him. Then Nona and Loto quietly left, walking out between the upstanding purple bars. And Nixon was alone, waiting for moon-rise.... This cursed sickness! He fought with it. He was bathed in cold sweat now, with a shuddering chill creeping through him. But it was some hours since he had had anything to eat or drink. He'd certainly take nothing more.

The minutes slowly dragged, with an apprehension of tenseness in the waiting Nixon. Now doubts were assailing him. Would Greev be suspicious, with Nona coming up to visit him tonight when she had always refused before? Would Loto be able to get into the control room unseen? Sometimes Gorts were around up there. Would they oppose him?

And where was Tork tonight? At this time, almost always he was in his apartment in one of the pyramid-cities. Frane now was in his laboratory; Tork would join him there later. But sometimes Tork vanished on one of his mysterious missions. And it occurred to Nixon that possibly tonight, with poison slowly overcoming the giant, Tork himself might be planning to do something....

Then Nixon suddenly was aware that out through the glowing purple bars, the stars were paling above the distant cliffs. The moon was rising. The time had come! Nixon still sat quiet, hunched against the face of the rock. Diagonally up over his head, the little entrance of the control room was visible. It glowed with radiance. Occasionally the tiny blob of Greev showed as he moved about. Was Loto already up there? He had said that there were places where he could climb up without using the path. And to a six-inch Orite the ledge up there outside the control room was broken and crag-strewn so that Loto easily could hide.

Now Nixon saw the figure of Nona, a pale little blob in the moonlight as she mounted the path. A moment more and she was in the glowing recess with Greev. No Gort had challenged her. Good enough! Another interval and then the guard and Nona came out on the ledge, stood a moment and then moved along it.

Loto's chance! Slowly Nixon stood up, stretching as though casually yawning. His head reeled. His ears were roaring. This accursed sickness!... But now he saw the blob of Loto in the control room! Nixon tensed.

A sudden humming and hissing of current sounded overhead. The barrage went down! The purple bars of light crackled for an instant and were gone!

The giant was free! Overhead he heard the shout of Greev. A spreading alarm, with the voice of Gorts up on the rock; and others out on the rocky slope. Nixon leaped. He was aware that it was a staggering step so that he almost fell. But he recovered himself, staggered on toward the rock-slope. Everywhere there was a turmoil of frightened little voices. This damnable dizziness! But it could be conquered. Nixon shook himself, trying to straighten and get his balance. Now he was aware that a line of Gorts was before him. Behind him the glow of the barrage sprang up again, Greev had evidently rushed back to his post. But it was too late! The giant was out!