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 

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