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.

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