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.