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," 

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