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."