"Oh, you didn't?" Nixon's temper always sprang readily. He could feel his hands suddenly tingle. It was absurd that this tiny creature should speak so calmly of killing him. Why if he had his hands loose, he could seize the damned little thing, squeeze it until it screamed.... Unconsciously Nixon was straining at the metal ropes, with the muscles under his bronzed skin taut as he held his breath, pulling and straining. The metal posts bent inward a little with the pull; but the ropes held.... It was a moment of horrible tenseness for his captors. He could see it as he slowly strained, exerting all his strength until the sweat poured out on his forehead and he was panting. A tense horrible moment, while Tork and Nona stood with their tiny bluish faces turned upward, with glowing little eyes staring. Then Tork's face wrinkled into a grotesque smile as he saw Nixon's body relax. The crucial test had come and passed. They could hold this giant. Tork said quietly, "There is a blood-tube in your throat. I could climb up there and plunge what you call a sword into it." Nixon had heard of the jugular vein, of course. A sword, as Tork would wield it, would be only a needle. But, even so, it could have been stabbed into his jugular while he was unconscious and he might have bled to death. Or it could be stabbed into his eyes, blinding him.... "All right," Nixon said. "It's hard to realize--I reckon I'm beginning to understand now--" "That we have an intelligence like your own," Tork finished. "What are you called? You have a name? Is it not so that all Earth people are named?" "Nixon," he said. "Allen Nixon. Look here--what the devil is all this? Who are you? You've got me here in some sort of thing--" "Our Spaceship," Tork said. "We came to Earth to get you." "Get me? Came to Earth?" But of course! These little creatures, so grotesquely in a sort of human mould, couldn't belong on Earth. Nixon stared out again through the tiny bullseyes beside him at the starry abyss of the heavens. A spaceship, and he and his captors were no longer on Earth now, but hurtling out somewhere among the stars. Allen Nixon, Floridian backwoodsman, was far from a scientist. But he had read a great deal. Atomic bombs. Rockets to the Moon. That sort of thing was no longer a fantasy. Fantasy or not, he had to accept it now. "You came to Earth--to get me?" he repeated. "Well, not exactly you," Tork said. "We came for one of you Earth giants. We landed--a place where there would not be many of you. And then you came...." * * * * * Strange facts, which now Nixon's tiny captors were telling him. They had come from a small world, in that belt of asteroids which lies beyond Mars. A world which in their language was called something that sounded like Orana. And they called themselves Orites--a little civilization of them huddled on a bleak, rocky world.