BOOK TWO
THE THING
IN THE ATTIC

. . . And it is written that after the Giants came to
Tellura from the far stars, they abode a while, and
looked upon the surface of the land, and found it
-wanting, arid of evil omen. Therefore did they make
man to live always in the air and in the sunlight, and
in the light of the stars, that he would be reminded of
them. And the Giants abode yet a -while, and taught men
to speak, and to write, and to -weave, and to do many
things which are needful to do, of -which the writings
speak. And thereafter they departed to the far stars,
saying. Take this world as your own, and though we shall
return, fear not, for it is yours.
THE BOOK OF LAWS

Honath the Purse-Maker was haled from the nets an hour
before the rest of the prisoners, as befitted his role as the arch-
doubter of them all. It was not yet dawn, but his captors led
him in great bounds through the endless, musky-perfumed
orchid gardens, small dark shapes with crooked legs, hunched
shoulders, slim hairless tails, carried, like his, in concentric
spirals wound clockwise. Behind than sprang Honath on the
end of a long tether, timing his leaps by theirs, since any slip
would hang him summarily.
He would of course be on his way to the surface/some 250
feet below the orchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event.
But not even the arch-doubter of them all wanted to begin
the tripnot even at the merciful snap-spine end of a tether
a moment before the law said. Go.
The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them,
each cable as thick through as a man's body, bellied out and
down sharply as the leapers reached the edge of the fern-tree
forest which surrounded the copse of horsetails. The whole
party stopped before beginning the descent and looked east-
ward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more and
more rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could
still be picked out without doubt.
"A fine day," one of the guards said, convefgationally.
"Better to go below on a sunny day than in the rain, Purse-
Maker."
Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course, it was al-
ways raining down below in Hell, that much could be seen by
a child. Even on sunny days, the endless pinpoint rain of
transpiration, from the hundred million leaves of the eternal
trees, hazed the forest air and soaked the black bog forever.
He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The
eastern horizon was black against the limb of the great red
sun, which had already risen about a third of its diameter; it
was almost time for the small, blue-white, furiously hot con-
sort to follow. All the way to that brink, as to every other
horizon, the woven ocean of the tree tops flowed gently in
long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only
nearby could the eye break that ocean into its details, into the
world as it was: a great, many-tiered network, thickly over-
grown with small ferns, with air-drinking orchids, with a
thousand varieties of fungi sprouting wherever vine crossed
vine and collected a little humus for them, with the vivid par-
asites sucking sap from the vines, the trees, and even each
other. In the ponds of rainwater collected by the closely
fitting leaves of the bromelaids, tree-toads and peepers stopped
down their hoarse songs dubiously as the light grew. and fell
silent one by one. In the trees below the world, the tentative
morning screeches of the lizard-birdsthe souls of the
damned, or the devils who hunted them, no one was quite
sure whichtook up the concert.
A small gust of wind whipped out of the hollow above the
glade of horsetails, making the network under the party shift
slightly, as if in a loom. Honath gave with it easily, automat-
ically,  but one of the smaller vines toward which he had
moved one furless hand hissed at him and went pouring away
into the darkness beneatha chlorophyll-green snake, come
up out of the dripping aerial pathways in which it hunted in
ancestral gloom, to greet the suns and dry its scales in the
quiet morning. Farther below, an astonished monkey, routed
out of its bed by the disgusted serpent, sprang into another
tree, reeling off ten mortal insults, one after the other, while
still in mid-leap. The snake, of course, paid no attention, since
it did not speak the language of men; but the party on the
edge of the glade of horsetails snickered appreciatively.
"Bad language they favor, below," another of the guards
said.  "A  fit  place  for  you  and  your  blasphemers,  Purs&-
Maker. Come now."
The tether at Honath's neck twitched, and then his captors
were soaring in zig-zag bounds down into the hollow toward
the Judgment Seat. He followed, since he had no choice, the
tether threatening constantly to foul his arms, legs, or tail,
andworse, far worsemaking his every movement mor-
tally ungraceful. Above, the Parrot's starry plumes flickered
and faded into the general blue.
Toward the center of the saucer above the grove, the
stitched leaf-and-leather houses clustered thickly, bound to
the vines themselves, or hanging from an occasional branch
too high or too slender to bear the vines. Many of these
purses Honath kn6w well, not only as visitor but as artisan.
The finest of them, the inverted flowers which opened auto-
matically as the morning dew bathed them, yet which could be
closed tightly and safely around their occupants at dusk by a
single draw-string, were his own design as well as his own
handiwork. They had been widely admired and imitated.
The reputation that they had given him, too, had helped to
bring him to the end of the snap-spine tether. They had given
weight to his words among othersweight enough to make
him, at last, the arch-doubter, the man who leads the young
into blasphemy, the man who questions the Book of Laws.
And they had probably helped to win him his passage on
the Elevator to Hell.
The purses were already opening as the party swung among
them. Here and there, sleepy faces biinked out from amid the
exfoliating sections, criss-crossed by relaxing lengths of dew-
soaked rawhide. Some of the awakening householders rec-
ognized Honath, of that he was sure, but none came out to
follow the partythough the villagers should be beginning
to drop from the hearts of their stitched flowers like ripe seed-
pods by this hour of any normal day.
A Judgment was at hand, and they knew itand even
those who had slept the night in one of Honath's finest houses
would not speak for him now. Everyone knew, after all, that
Honath did not believe in the Giants.
Honath could see the Judgment Seat itself now, a slung
chair of woven cane crowned along the back with a row of
gigantic mottled orchids. These had supposedly been trans-
planted there when the chair was made, but no one could
remember how old they were; since there were no seasons,
there was no particular reason why they should not have
been there forever. The Seat itself was at the back of the
arena and high above it, but in the gathering light Honath
could make out the white-furred face of the Tribal Spokes-
man, like a lone silver-and-black pansy among the huge vivid
blooms.
At the center of the arena proper was the Elevator itself.
Honath had seen it often enough, and had himself witnessed
Judgments where it was called into use, but he could still
hardly believe that he was almost surely to be its next pas-
senger. It consisted of nothing more than a large basket, deep
enough so that one would have to leap out of it, and rimmed
with thorns to prevent one from leaping back in. Three
hempen ropes were tied to its rim, and were then cunningly
interwound on a single-drum windlass of wood, which
could be turned by two men even when the basket was loaded.
The procedure was equally simple. The condemned man
was forced into the basket, and the basket lowered out of
sight, until the slackening of the ropes indicated that it had
touched the surface. The victim climbed outand if he did
not, the basket remained below until he starved or until Hell
otherwise took care of its ownand the windlass was re-
wound.
The sentences were for varying periods of time according to
the severity of the crime, but in practical terms this formality
was empty. Although the basket was dutifully lowered when
the sentence had expired, no one had ever been known to get
back into it. Of course, in a world without seasons or moons,
and hence without any but an arbitrary year, long periods of
time are not easy to count accurately. The basket may often
have arrived thirty or forty days to one side or the other of
the proper date. This was only a technicality, however, for if
keeping time was difficult in the attic world, it was probably
impossible in Hell.
Hoifcth's guards tied the free end of his tether to a branch
and settled down around him. One abstractedly passed a
pine cone to him, and he tried to occupy his mind with the
business of picking the ]uicy seeds from it, but somehow they
had no flavor.
More captives were being brought in now, while the Spokes-
man watched with glittering black eyes from his high perch.
There was Mathild the Forager, shivering as if with ague,
the fur down her left side glistening and spiky, as though she
had inadvertently overturned a tank plant on herself. After
her was .brought Alaskon the Navigator, a middle-aged man
only a few years younger than Honath himself; he was tied
up next to Honath, where he settled down at once, chewing
at a joint of cane with apparent indifference.
Thus far, the gathering had proceeded without more than
a few words being spoken, but that ended when the guards
tried to bring Seth the Needlesmith from the nets. He could
be heard at onoe, over the entire distance to the glade, al-
ternately chattering and shrieking in a mixture of tones that
might mean fear or fury. Everyone in the glade but Alaskon
turned to look, and heads emerged from purses like new but-
terflies from cocoons.
A moment later, Seth's guards .came over the lip of the
glade in a tangled group, now shouting themselves. Some-
where in the middle of the knot Seth's voice became still
louder; obviously he was clinging with all five members to
any vine or frond he could grasp, 'and was no sooner pried
loose from one than he would leap by main force, backwards
if  possible,  to  another.  Nevertheless,  he  was  being  brought
inexorably down into the arena, two feet forward, one foot
back, three feet forward . . .
Honath's guards resumed picking their pine cones. During
the disturbance, Honath realized, Charl the Reader had been
brought in quietly from the same side of the glade. He now
sat opposite Alaskon, looking apathetically down at the vine-
web, his shoulders hunched forward. He exuded despair; even
to look at him made Honath feel a renewed shudder.
From the high Seat, the Spokesman said: "Honath the
Purse-maker, Alaskon the Navigator, Charl the Reader, Seth
the Needlesmith, Mathild the Forager, you are called to an-
swer to justice."
"Justicel" Seth shouted, springing free of his captors with
,a tremendous bound, and bringing up with a jerk on the
end of his tether. "This is no justicel I have nothing to do
with"
The guards caTight up with him and clamped brown hands
firmly over his mouth. The Spokesman watched with amused
malice.
"The accusations are three," the Spokesman said. "The first,
the telling of lies to children. Second, the casting into doubt
of the divine order among men. Third, the denial of the Book
of Laws. Each of you. may speak in order of age. Honath the
Purse-Maker, your plea may be heard."
Honath stood up, trembling a little, but feeling a surpris-
ingly renewed surge of his old independence.
"Your charges," he said, "all rest upon the denial of the
Book of Laws. I have taught nothing else that is contrary to
what we all believe, and called nothing else into doubt. And I
deny the charge."
The Spokesman looked down at him with disbelief. "Many
men and women have said that you do not believe in the
Giants, Purse-Maker," he said. "You will not win mercy by
piling up more lies."
"I deny the charge," Honath insisted. "I believe in the Book
of Laws as a whole, and I believe in the Giants. I have taught
only that the Giants were not real in the sense that we are
real.  I have taught that they were intended as symbols of
- some higher reality, and were not meant to be taken as literal
Persons."
"What higher reality is this?" the Spokesman demanded.
"Describe it."
"You ask me to do something the writers of the Book of
Laws themselves couldn't do," Honath said hotly. "If they had
to embody the reality in symbols rather than writing it down
directly, how could a mere pursemaker do better?"
"This doctrine is wind," the Spokesman said. "And it is
plainly intended to undercut authority and the order es-
tablished, by the Book. Tell me, Purse-Maker, if man need
not fear the Giants, why should they fear the law?"
"Because they are men, and it is to their interest to fear
the law. They aren't children, who need some physical Giant
sitting over them with a whip to make them behave. Further-
more, Spokesman, this archaic belief itself undermines us. As
long as we believe that there are real Giants, and that some
day they'll return and resume teaching us, so long will we
fail to seek answers to our questions for ourselves. Half of
what we know was given to us in the Book, and the other
half is supposed to drop to us from the skies if we wait long
enough. In the meantime, we vegetate."
"If a part of the Book be untrue, there can be nothing to
prevent that it is all untrue," the Spokesman said heavily.
"And we will lose even what you call the half of our knowl-
edgewhich is actually the whole of it, to those who see with
clear eyes."
Suddenly, Honath lost his temper. "Lose it, then!" he
shouted. "Let us unlearn everything we know only by rote, go
back to the beginning, learn all over again, and continue to
learn, from our own experience. Spokesman, you are an old
man, but there are still some of us who haven't forgotten what
curiosity means!"
"Quiet!" the Spokesman said. "We have heard enough. We
call on Alaskon the Navigator."
"Much of the Book is clearly untrue," Alaskon said flatly,
rising. "As a handbook of small trades it has served us well.
As a guide to how the universe is made, it is nonsense, in my
opinion; Honath is too kind to it. I've made no secret of what
I think, and I still think it."
"And will pay for it," the Spokesman said, blinking slowly
down at Alaskon. "Chart the Reader."
"Nothing," Charl said, without standing, or even looking up.
"You do not deny the charges?"
"I've nothing to say," Charl said, but then, abruptly, his
head jerked up, and he glared with desperate eyes at the
Spokesman. "I can read. Spokesman. I have seen words of the
Book of Laws that contradict each other. I've pointed them
out. They're facts, they exist on the pages. I've taught noth-
ing, told no lies, preached no unbelief. I've pointed to the
facts. That's all."
"Seth the Needlesmith, you may speak now."
The guards took their hands gratefully off Seth's mouth;
they had been bitten several times in the process of keeping
him quiet up to now. Seth resumed shouting at once.
"I'm no part of this groupl I'm the victim of gossip, envious
neighbors, smiths jealous of my skill and my custom! No
man can say worse of me than that I sold needles to this
pursemakersold them in good faith! The charges against me
are lies. all of them!"
Honath jumped to his feet in fury, and then sat down again,
choking back the answering shoUt almost without tasting its
bitterness. What did it matter? Why should he bear witness
against the young man? It would not help the others, and if
Seth wanted to lie his way out of Hell, he might as well be
given the chance.
The Spokesman was looking down at Seth with the identi-
cal expression of outraged disbelief which he had first bent
upon Honath. "Who was it cut the blasphemies into the hard-
wood trees, by the house of Hosi the Lawgiver?" he demand-
ed. "Sharp needles were at work there, and there are witnesses
to say that your hands held them."
"More lies!"
"Needles found in your house fit the furrows, Seth."
"They were not mineor they were stolen! I demand to be
freed!"
"You will be freed," the Spokesman said coldly. .There was
no possible doubt as to what he meant. Seth began to weep
and to shout at the same time. Hands closed over his mouth
again. "Mathild the Forager, your plea may be heard."
The young woman stood up hesitantly. Her fur Was nearly
dry now, but she was still shivering.
"Spokesman," she said, "I saw the things which Charl the
Reader showed me. I doubted, but what Honath said restored
my belief. I see no harm in his teachings. They remove doubt,
instead of fostering it, as you say they do. I see no evil in
them, and I don't understand why this is a crime."
Honath looked over to her with new admiration. The
Spokesman sighed heavily.
"I am sorry for you," he said, "but as Spokesman we can-
not allow ignorance of the Law as a plea. We will be merci-
ful to you all, however. Renounce your heresy, affirm your
belief in the Book as it is written from bark to bark, and you
shall be no more than cast out of the tribe."
"I renounce it!" Seth said. "I never shared it! It's all blas-
phemy and every word is a lie! I believe in the Book, all of
it!"
"You, Needlesmith," the Spokesman said, "have lied before
this Judgment, and are probably lying now. You are not in-
cluded in the dispensation."
"Snake-spotted caterpillar! May yoururnmulph."
"Purse-Maker, what is your answer?"
"It is. No," Honath said stonily. "I've spoken the truth.
The truth can't be unsaid."
The Spokesman looked down at the rest of them. "As for
you three, consider your answers carefully. To share the
heresy means sharing the sentence. The penalty will not be
lightened only because you did not invent the heresy."
There was a long silence.
Honath swallowed hard. The courage and 'the faith in that
silence made him feel smaller and more helpless than ever.
He realized suddenly that the other three would have kept
that silence, even without Seth's defection to stiffen their
spines. He wondered if he could have done so.
"Then we pronounce the sentence," the Spokesman said.
"You are one and all condemned to one thousand days in
Hell.'"
There was a concerted gasp from around the edges of the
arena, where, without Honath's having noticed it before, a
silent crowd had gathered. He did not wonder at the sound.
The sentence was the longest in the history of the tribe.
Not that it really meant anything. No one had ever come
64
back from as little as one hundred days in Hell. No one had
ever come back from Hell at all.
"Unlash the Elevator. All shall go togetherand theil
heresy with them."

5

The basket swayed. The last of the attic world that Honath
saw was a circle of faces, not too close to the gap in the vine
web, peering down after them. Then the basket fell another
few yards to the next turn of the windlass and the faces van-
ished.
Seth was weeping in the bottom of the Elevator, curled up
into a tight ball, the end of his tail wrapped around his nose
and eyes. No one else could make a sound, least of all Hon-
ath.
The gloom closed around them. It seemed extraordinarily
still.  The  occasional  harsh  scream  of  a lizard-bird  somehow
emphasized the silence without breaking it. The light that
filtered down into the long aisles between the trees seemed to
be absorbed in a blue-green haze, through which the lianas
wove their long curved lines. The columns of tree-trunks, the
pillars of the world, stood all around them, too distant in the
dim light to allow them to gauge their speed of descent; only
- the irregular plunges of the basket proved that it was even
in motion any longer, though it swayed laterally in a com-
plex, overlapping series of figure-eights traced on the air in
response to the rotation of the planeta Foucault pendulum
ballasted with five lives.
Then the basket lurched downward once more, brought up
short, and tipped sidewise, tumbling them all against the hard
cane. Mathild cried out in a thin voice, and Seth uncurled al-
most instantly, clawing for a handhold. Another lurch, arid
the Elevator lay down on its side and was still.
They were in Hell.
Cautiously, Honath began to climb out, picking his way
over the long thorns on the basket's rim. After a moment,
Chart the Reader followed, and then Alaskon took Mathild
firmly by the hand and led her out onto the surface. The foot-
ing was wet and spongy, yet not at all resilient, and it felt
cold; Honath's toes curled involuntarily.
"Come on, Seth," Charl said in a hushed voice. "They
won't haul it back up until we're all out. You know that."
Alaskon looked around into the chilly mists. "Yes," he
said. "And we'll need a needlesmith down here. With good
tools, there's just a chance"
Seth's eyes had been darting back and forth from one to
the other. With a sudden chattering scream, he bounded out
of the bottom of the basket, soaring over their heads in a
long, flat leap, and struck the high knee at the base of the
nearest tree, an immense fan palm. As he hit, his legs doubled
under him, and almost in the same motion he seemed to rocket
straight up into the murky air.
Gaping, Honath looked up after him. The young needle-
smith had timed his course to the split second. He was already
darting up the rope from which the Elevator was suspended.
He did not even bother to look back.
After a moment, the basket tipped upright. The impact of
Seth's weight hitting the rope evidently had been taken by the
windlass team to mean that the condemned people were all
out on the surface; a twitch on the rope was the usual signal.
The basket began to rise, bobbing and dancing. Its speed of
ascent, added to Seth's, took his racing dwindling figure out
of sight quickly. After a while, the basket was gone, too.
"He'll never get to the top," Mathild whispered. "It's too
far, and he's going too fast. He'll lose strength and fall."
"I don't think so," Alaskon said heavily. "He's agile and
strong. If anyone could make it, he could."
"They'll km him if he does."
"Of course they will," Alaskon said, shrugging.
"I won't miss him," Honath said.
"No more will 1. But we could use some sharp needles down
here, Honath. Now, we'll have to plan to make our ownif
we can identify the different woods, down here where there
aren't any leaves to help us tell them apart."
Honath looked at the Navigator curiously. Seth's bolt for
the sky had distracted him from the realization that the bas-
ket, too, was gone, but now that desolate fact hit home. "You
actually plan to stay alive in Hell, don't you, Alaskon?"
"Certainly," Alaskon said calmly. "This is no more Hell than
up thereis Heaven. It's the surface of the planet, no
more, no less. We can stay alive if we don't panic. Were you
just going to sit here until the furies came for you, Honath?"
"I hadn't thought much about it," Honath confessed. "But
if there is any chance that Seth will lose his grip on that rope
before he reaches the top and they knife himshouldn't
we wait and see if we can catch him? He can't weigh more
than 35 pounds. Maybe we could contrive some sort of a
net"
"He'd just break our bones along with his," Chart said. "I'm
for getting out of here as fast as possible."
"What for? Do you know a better place?"
"No, but whether this is Hell or not, there are demons down
here. We've all seen them from up above, the snake-headed
giants. They must know that the Elevator always lands here
and empties out free food. This must be a feeding-ground for
them"
He had not quite finished speaking when the branches
began to sigh and toss, far above. A gust of stinging droplets
poured along the blue air, and thunder rumbled. Mathild
whimpered.
"It's only a squall coming up," Honath said. But the words
came out in a series of short croaks. As the wind had moved
through the trees, Honath had automatically flexed his knees
and put his arms out for handholds, awaiting the long wave
of response to pass through the ground beneath him. But
nothing happened. The surface under his feet remained stol-
idly where it was, flexing not a fraction of an inch in any di-
rection. And there was nothing nearby for his hands to grasp.
He staggered, trying to compensate for the failure of the
ground to move, but at the same moment another gust of
wind blew through the aisles, a little stronger than the first,
and calling insistently for a new adjustment of his body to
the waves which passed along the treetops. Again the squashy
-surface beneath him refused to respond; the familiar give-
and-take of the vine-web to the winds, a part of his world
as accustomed as the winds themselves, was gone.
Honath was forced to sit down, feeling distinctly ill. "The
damp, cool earth under his furless buttocks was unpleasant,
but he could not have remained standing any longer without
losing his meager prisoner's breakfast. One grappling hand
caught hold of the ridged, gritty stems of a clump of horse-
tail, but the contact failed to allay the uneasiness.
The others seemed to be bearing it no better than Honath.
Mathild in particular was rocking dizzily, her lips compressed,
her hands clapped to her delicate ears.
Dizziness. It was unheard of up above, except among those
who had suffered grave head injuries or were otherwise very
ill.  But on the motionless ground of Hell, it was evidently go-
ing to be with them constantly.
Charl squatted, swallowing convulsively. "I1 can't stand,"
he moaned. "It's magic,  Alaskonthe snake-headed de-
mons"
"Nonsense," Alaskon said, though he had remained stand-
ing only by clinging to the huge, mud-colored bulb of a cy-
cadella. "It's just a disturbance of our sense of balance. It's
amotionlessness-sickness. We'll get used to it."
"We'd better," Honath said, relinquishing his grip on the
horsetails by a sheer act of will. "I think Charl's right about
this being a feeding-ground, Alaskon. I hear something mov-
ing around in the ferns. And if this rain lasts long, the water
will rise here, too. I've seen silver flashes from down here
many a time after heavy rains."
"That's right," Mathild said, her voice subdued. "The base
of the ferntree grove always floods; that's why the treetops
are so much lower there."
The wind seemed to have let up a little, though the rain
was still falling. Alaskon stood up tentatively.
"Then let's move on," he said. "If we try to keep under
cover until we get to higher ground"
A faint crackling sound, high above his head, interrupted
him. It got louder. Feeling a sudden spasm of pure fear,
Honath looked up.
Nothing could be seen for an instant but the far-away cur-
tain of branches and fern-fronds. Then, with shocking sud-
denness, something small and black irrupted through the
blue-green roof and came tumbling toward them. It was a
man, twisting and tumbling through the air with grotesque
slowness, like a child turning in its sleep. They scattered.
The body hit the ground with a sodden thump, but there
were sharp overtones to the sound, like the bursting of a
gourd. For a moment nobody moved. Then Honath crept for-
ward.
It had been Seth, as Honath had realized the moment the
black figurine had burst through the branches far above. But
it had not been the fall that had killed him. He had been run
through by at least a dozen needlessome of them, beyond
doubt, tools from his own shop, their points edged hair-fine
by his own precious strops of leatherwood-bark, soaked until
they were soft, pliant, and nearly transparent in the mud at
the bottom of sun-warmed bromelaid tanks.
There would be no reprieve from above. The sentence was
one thousand days. This burst and broken huddle of fur was
the only alternative.
And the first day had barely begun.
They toiled all the rest of the day to reach higher ground,
clinging to the earth for the most part because the trees, ex-
cept for a few scattered gingkoes, flowering dogwoods and
live oaks, did not begin to branch until their tunks had soared
more than eighteen feet above the ground. As they stole cau-
tiously closer to the foothills of the Great Range and the
ground became firmer, they were able to take to the air for
short stretches, but they were no sooner aloft among the wil-
lows than the lizard-birds came squalling down on them by
the dozens, fighting among each other for the privilege of
nipping these plump and incredibly slow-moving monkeys.
No man, no matter how confirmed a free-thinker, could
have stood up under such an onslaught by the creatures he
had been taught as a child to think of as his ancestors. The
first time it happened, every member of the party dropped like
a pine-cone to the sandy ground and lay paralyzed under the
nearest cover, until the brindle-feathered, fan-tailed scream-
ers tired of flying in such tight circles and headed for clearer
air. Even after the lizard-birds had given up, they crouched
quietly for a long time, waiting to see what greater demons
might have been attracted by the commotion.
Thus far, none of the snake-headed Powers had shown
themselvesthough several times Honath had heard sugges-
tively heavy movements in the jungle around them.
Luckily, on the higher ground there was much more cover
available, from low-growing shrubs and treespalmetto, sas-
safras, several kinds of laurel, magnolia, and a great many
sedges. Up here, too, the endless jungle began to break to
"pour around the bases of the great pink cliffs, leaving welcome
vistas of open sky, only sketchily crossed by woven bridges
leading from the vine-world to the cliffs themselves. In the
intervening columns of blue air a whole hierarchy of flying
creatures ranked themselves, layer by layer: First the low-
flying beetles, bees  and two-winged insects; then the dra-
gon-flies which hunted them, some with wingspreads as wide
as two feet; then the lizard-birds, hunting the dragon-flies
and anything else that could be nipped without fighting back;
and at last, far above, the great gliding reptiles coasting along
the brows of the cliffs, riding the rising currents of air, their
long-jawed hunger stalking anything  that  flewas they
sometimes stalked the birds of the attic world, and the flying
fish along the breast of the distant sea.
The party halted in an especially thick clump of sedges.
Though the rain continued to fall, harder than ever, they were
all desperately thirsty. They had yet to find a single brome-
laid; evidently the tank-plants did not grow in Hell. Cupping
their hands to the weeping sky accumulated surprisingly little
water; and no puddles large enough to drink from accumu-
lated on the sand. But at least, here under the open sky,
there was too much fierce struggle in the air to allow the liz-
ard-birds to congregate and squall above their hiding place.
The white sun had already set, and the red sun's vast arc
still bulged above the horizon only because the light from its
limb had been wrenched higher into Tellura's sky by its pass-
age through the white sun's intense gravitational field. In the
lurid glow the rain looked like blood, and the seamed faces
of the pink cliffs had all but vanished. Honath peered dubi-
ously out from under the sedges at the still-distant .escarp-
ments.
"I don't see how we can hope to climb those," he said, in a
low voice. "That kind of limestone crumbles as soon as you
touch it, otherwise we'd have had better luck with our war
against the cliff tribe."
"We could go around the cliffs," Chart said. "The foothills
of the Great Range aren't very steep. If we could last until
we get to them, we could go on up into the Range itself."
"To the volcanoes?" Mathild protested. "But nothing can
live up there, nothing but the white fire-things. And there are
the lava-flows, too, and the choking smoke"
"Well, we can't climb these cliffs, Honath's quite right,"
Alaskon said. "And we can't climb the Basalt Steppes, either
there's nothing to eat along them, let alone any water or
cover. I don't see what else we can do but try to get up into
the foothills."
"Can't we stay here?" Mathild said plaintively.
"No," Honath said, even more gently than he had intended.
Mathild's four words were, he knew, the most dangerous
words in Hellhe knew it quite surely, because of the im-
prisoned creature inside him that cried out to say "Yes" in-
stead. "We have to get out of the country of the demons. And
maybejust maybeif we can cross the great Range, we
can Join a tribe that hasn't heard about our- being condemned
to Hell. There are supposed to be tribes on the other side of
the Range, but the cliff people would never let our folk get
through to them. That's on our side now."
"That's true," Alaskon said, brightening a little. "And from
the top of the Range, we could come down into another tribe
instead of trying to climb up into their village out of Hell.
Honath, I think it might work."
"Then we'd better try to sleep right here and now," Chart
said. "It seems safe enough. If we're going to skirt the cliffs
and climb those foothills, we'll need all the strength "we've got
left."
Honath was about to protest, but he was suddenly too tired
to care. Why not sleep it over? And if in the night they were
found and takenwell, that would at least put an end tc
the struggle.
It was a cheerless and bone-damp bed to sleep in, but there
was no better alternative. They curled up as best they could.
Just before he was about to drop off at last, Honath heard
Mathild whimpering to herself, and, on impulse, crawled ovei
to her and began to smooth down her fur with his tongue. To
his astonishment, each separate, silky hair was loaded with
dew. Long before the girl had curled herself more tightly and
her complaints had dwindled into sleepy murmurs, Honath's
thirst was  assauged.  He reminded himself to mention the
method in the morning.
But when the white sun finally came up, there was no time
to think of thirst. Charl the Reader was gone. Something had
plucked him from their huddled midst as neatly as a fallen
breadfruitand had dropped his cleaned ivory skull just
as negligently, some two hundred feet farther on up the
slope which led toward the pink cliffs.

*3

Late that afternoon, the three found the blue, turbulent
stream flowing out of the foothills of the Great Range. Not
even Alaskon knew quite what to make of it. It looked like
water, but it flowed like the rivers of lava that crept downward
fSpm the volcanoes. Whatever else it could be, obviously it
wasn't water; water stood, it never flowed. It was possible to
imagine a still body of water as big as this, but only as a mo-
ment of fancy, an exaggeration derived from the known
bodies of water in the tank-plants. But this much water in
motion? It suggested pythons; it was probably poisonous. It
did not occur to any of them to drink from it. They were
afraid even to touch it, let alone cross it, for it was almost
surely as hot as the other kinds of lava-rivers. They followed
its  course  cautiously  into the  foothills,  their throats  as  dry
and gritty as the hollow stems of horsetails.
Except for the thirstwhich was in an inverted sense their
friend, insofar as it overrode the hungerthe climbing was
not difficult. It was only circuitous, because of the need to
stay under cover, to reconnoiter every few yards, to choose
the most sheltered course rather than the most direct. By an
unspoken consent, none of the three mentioned Charl, but
11
their eyes were constantly darting from side to side/searching
for a glimpse of the thing that had taken him.
That was perhaps the worst, the most terrifying part of the
tragedy: that not once since they had been in Hell bad they
actually seen a demon, or even any animal as large as a man.
The enormous, three-taloned footprint they had found in the
sand beside their previous night's bedthe spot where the
thing had stood, looking down at the four sleeping men from
above, coldly deciding which of them to seizewas the only
evidence they had that they were now really in the same
world with the demonsthe same demons they had some-
times looked down upon from the remote vine-webs.
The footprintand the skull.
By nightfall, they had ascended perhaps a hundred and
fifty feet. It was difficult to judge distances in the twilight, and
the token vine bridges from the attic world to the pink cliffs
were now cut off from sight by the intervening masses of the
cliffs themselves. But there was no possibility that they could
climb higher today. Although Mathild had borne the climb sur-
prisingly well, and Honath himself still felt almost fresh,
Alaskon was completely winded. He had taken a bad cut on
one hip from a serrated spike of volcanic glass against which
he had stumbled, and the wound, bound with leaves to pre-
vent its leaving a spoor which might be followed, evidently
was becoming steadily more painful.
Honath finally called a halt as soon as they reached the
little ridge with the cave in back of it. Helping Alaskon over
the last boulders, he was astonished to discover how hot the
Navigator's hands were. He took him back into the cave and
then came out onto the ledge again.
"He's really sick," he told Mathild in a low voice. "He needs
water, and another dressing for that cut. And we've got to get
both for him somehow. If we ever get to the jungle on the
other side of the Range, we'll need a navigator even worse
than we need a needlesmith."
"But how? I could dress the cut if I had the materials, Hon-
ath. But there's no water up here. It's a desert; we'll never get
aCTOSS it.)t
"We've got to try. I can get him water, I think. There was
a big cycladella on the slope we came up, just before we
passed that obsidian spur that hurt Alaskon. Gourds that size
usually have a fair amount of water inside themand I can
use a piece of the spur to rip it open"
A small hand came out of the darkness and took him
tightly by the elbow. "Honath, you can't go back down there.
Suppose the demon thatthat took Chart is still following
us? They hunt at nightand this country is all so strange . . ."
"I can find my way. I'll follow the sound of the stream of
glass or whatever it is. You pull some fresh leaves for Alas-
kon and try to make him comfortable. Better loosen those
vines around the dressing a little. I'll be back."
He touched her hand and pried it loose gently. Then, with-
out stopping to think about it any further, he slipped off the
ledge and edged toward' the sound of the stream, travelling
crabwise on all fours.
But he was swiftly lost. The night was thick and com-
pletely impenetrable, and he found that the noise of the stream
seemed to come from all sides, providing him no guide at all.
Furthermore, his memory of the ridge which led up to the
cave appeared to be faulty, for he could feel it turning
sharply to the right beneath him, though he remembered dis-
tinctly that it had been straight past the first side-branch, and
then had gone to the left. Or had he passed the first side-
branch in the dark without seeing it? He probed the dark-
ness cautiously with one hand.
At the same instant, a brisk, staccato gust of wind came
whirling up out of the night across the ridge. Instinctively,
Honath shifted his weight to take up the flexing of the
ground beneath him
He realized his error instantly and tried to arrest the com-
plex set of motions, but a habit-pattern so deeply ingrained
could not be frustrated completely. Overwhelmed with ver-
tigo, Honath grappled at the empty air with hands, feet, and
tail and went toppling.
An instant later, with a familiar noise and an equally fa-
miliar cold shock that seemed to reach throughout his body,
he was sitting in the midst of
Water. Icy water, and water that rushed by him impro-
bably with a menacing, monkeylike chattering, but water all
the same.
It was all he could do to repress a hoot of hysteria. He hun-
kered into the stream and soaked himself. Things nibbled
delicately at his calves as he bathed, but he had no reason to
fear fish, small species of which often showed up in the tanks
of the bromelaids. After lowering his muzzle to the rushing,
invisible surface and drinking his fill, he ducked himself
completely and then clambered out onto the banks, carefully
neglecting to shake himself.
Getting back to the ledge was much less difficult. "Mathild,"
he called in a hoarse whisper. "Mathild, we've got water."
"Come in here quick then. Alaskon's worse. I'm afraid,
Honath."
Dripping, Honath felt his way into the cave. "I dofa't have
any container. I just got myself wetyou'll have to sit him
up and let him lick my fur."
"I'm not sure he can."
But Alaskon could, feebly, but sufficiently. Even the cold-
ness of the watera totally new experience for a man who
had never drunk anything but the soup-warm contents of the
bromelaidsseemed to help him. He lay back at last, and
said in a weak but otherwise normal voice: "So the stream
was water after all."
"Yes," Honath said. "And there are fish in it, too."
"Don't talk," Mathild said. "Rest, Alaskon."
"I'm resting. Honath, if we stick to the course of the stream
.... Where was I? Oh. We can follow the stream through the
Range, now that we know it's water. How did you find that
out?"
"I lost my balance and fell into it."
Alaskon chuckled. "Hell's not so bad, is it?" he said. Then
he sighed, and rushes creaked under him.
"Mathild! What's the matter? Is hedid he die?"
"No . . . no. He's breathing. He's still sicker than he real-
izes, that's all . . . Honathif they'd known, up above, how
much courage you have"
"I was scared white," Honath said grimly. "I'm still scared."
But her hand touched his again in the soi'd blackness, and
after he had taken it, he felt irrationally cheerful. With Alas-
kon breathing so raggedly behind them, there was little
chance that either of them would be able to sleep that night;
but they sat silently together on the hard stone in a kind of
temporary peace, and when the mouth of the cave began to
outline itself, as dimly at first as the floating patches of color
seen behind the closed eye, with the first glow of the red sun,
they looked at each other in a conspiracy of light all their
own.
Hell, Honath reflected, wasn't so bad, after all.
With the first light of the white sun, a half-grown oxyaena
cub rose slowly from its crouch at the mouth of the cave, and
stretched luxuriously, showing a full set of saber-like teeth.
It looked at them steadily for a moment, its ears alert, then
turned and loped away down the slope.
How long it had been crouched there listening to them, it
was impossible to know. They had been lucky that they had
stumbled into the lair of a youngster. A full-grown animal
would have killed them all, within a few seconds after its cat's
eyes had collected enough dawn to identify them positively,
The cub, since it had no family of its own as yet, evidently
had only been puzzled to find its den occupied, and unin-
clined to quarrel about it.
The departure of the big cat left Honath frozen, not so
much frightened as simply stunned by so unexpected- an end
to the vigil. At the first moan from Alaskon, however, Mathild
was up 'and walking softly to the Navigator, speaking in a low
voice, sentences which made no particular sense and perhaps
were not intended to. Honath stirred and followed her.
Halfway back into the cave, his foot struck something and
he looked down. It was the thigh bone of some medium-large
animal, imperfectly cleaned, but not very recentpossibly
the keepsake the oxyaena had hoped to rescue from the usurp-
ers of its lair. Along a curved inner surface there was a patch'
of thick gray mold. Honath squatted and peeled it off care-
fully.                                                  -
"Mathild, we can put this over the wound," he said. "Some
molds help prevent wounds from festering . . . How is he?"
"Better, I think," Mathild murmured. "But he's still feverish.
I don't think we'll be able to move on today."
Honath was unsure whether to be pleased or disturbed.
Certainly, he was far from anxious to leave the cave, where
they seemed at least to be reasonably comfortable. Possibly
they would also be reasonably safe, for the low-roofed hole
,a~lmostt surely still smelt of oxyaena, and possible intruders
wOtrid recognize the smell-as the men from the attic world
could notand keep their distance. They would have no way
of knowing that the cat had only been a cub to begin with,
and that it had vacated the premises, though of course the
odor would fade before long.
Yet it was important to move on, to cross the Great Range
if possible, and in the end to win their way back to the world
where they belonged; even to win vindication, no matter how
long it took. Even should it prove relatively easy to survive in
Helland there were few signs of that, thus farthe only
proper course was to fight until the attic world was totally
reconquered. After all, it would have been the easy and the
comfortable thing, back there at the very beginning, to have
kept one's incipient heresies to oneself and remained on com-
fortable terms with one's neighbors. But Honath had spoken
up and so had the rest of them, in their fashions.
It was the ancient internal battle between what Honath
wanted to do, and what he knew he ought to do. He had never
heard of Kant and the Categorical Imperative, but he knew
well enough which side of his nature would win in the long
run. But it had been a cruel joke of heredity which had fas-
75
tened a sense of duty onto a lazy nature. It made even small
decisions aggressively painful.
But for the moment at least, the decision was out of his
hands. Alaskon was too sick to be moved. In addition, the
strong beams of sunlight which had been glaring in across
the floor of the cave were dimming by the instant, and there
was a distant, premonitory growl of thunder.
"Then we'll stay here," he said. "It's going to rain again,
and hard this time. Once it's falling in earnest, I can go out
and pick up some fruitit'll screen me even if anything is
prowling around in it. And I won't have to go as far as the
stream for water, as long as the rain keeps up."
The rain, as it turned out, kept up all day, in a growing
downpour which completely curtained the mouth of the cave
by early afternoon. The chattering of the nearby stream grew
quickly to a roar.
By evening, Alaskon's fever seemed to have dropped almost
to normal, and his strength nearly returned as well. The
wound, thanks more to the encrusted matte of mold than to
any complications within the flesh itself, was still ugly-look-
ing, but it was now painful only when the Navigator moved
carelessly, and Mathild was convinced that it was mending.
Alaskon himself, having been deprived of activity all day,
was unusually talkative.
"Has it occurred to either of you," he said in the gathering
gloom, "that since that stream is water, it can't possibly be
coming from the Great Range? All the peaks over there are
just cones of ashes and lava. We've seen young volcanoes in
the process of building themselves, so we're sure of that.
What's more, they're usually hot. I don't see how there could
possibly be any source of water in the Rangenot even run-
off from the rains."
"It can't just come up out of the ground," Honath said. "It
must be fed by rain. By the way it sounds now, it could even
be the first part of a flood."
"As you say, it's probably rain water," Alaskon said cheer-
fully. "But not off the Great Range, that's out of the ques-
tion. Most likely it collects on the cliffs."
"I hope you're wrong," Honath said. "The cliffs may be a
little easier to climb from this side, but there's still the cliff
tribe to think about."
"Maybe, maybe. But the cliffs are big. The tribes on this
side may never have heard of the war with our treetop folk.
No, Honath, I think that's our only course from here."
"If it is," Honath said grimly, "we're going to wish more
than ever that we had some stout, sharp needles among us."
Alaskon's judgment was quickly borne out. The three left
the cave at dawn the next morning, Alaskon moving some-
what stiffly but not otherwise noticeably incommoded, and re-
sumed following the stream bed upwardsa stream now swol-
len by the rains to a roaring rapids. After winding its way up-
wards for about a mile in the general direction of the Great
Range, the stream turned on itself and climbed rapidly back to-
ward the basalt cliffs, falling toward the three over success-
ively steeper shelves of jutting rock.
Then it turned again, at right angles, and the three found
themselves at the exit of a dark gorge, little more than thirty
feet high, but both narrow and long. Here the stream was al-
most perfectly smooth, and the thin strip of land on each
side of it was covered with low shrubs. They paused and
looked dubiously into the canyon. It was singularly gloomy.
"There's plenty of cover, at least," Honath said in a low
voice. "But almost anything could live in a place like .that."
"Nothing very big could hide in it," Alaskon pointed out.
"It should be safe. Anyhow it's the only way to go."
"All right. Let's go ahead, then. But keep your head down,
and be ready to jump!"
Honath lost the other two by sight as soon as they crept
into the dark shrubbery, but he could hear their cautious
movements nearby. Nothing else in the gorge seemed to move
at-~ not even the water, which flowed without a ripple over
r,n invisible bed. There was not even any wind, for which
Honath was grateful, although he had begun to develop an
immunity to the motionlessness sickness.
After a few moments, Honath heard a low whistle. Creep-
ing sidewise toward the source of the sound, he nearly
bumped into Alaskon, who was crouched beneath a thickly
spreading magnolia. An instant later, Mathild's face peered
out of the dim greenery.
"Look," Alaskon whispered. "What do you make of this?"
"This" was a hollow in the sandy soil, about four feet across
and rimmed with a low parapet of earthevidently the same
earth that had been scooped out of its center. Occupying most
of it were three gray, ellipsoidal objects, smooth and feature-
less.
"Eggs," Mathild said wonderingly.
"Obviously. But look at the size of them! Whatever laid
them must be gigantic. I think we're trespassing in some-
thing's private valley."
Mathild drew in her breath. Honath thought fast, as much
to prevent panic in himself as in the girl. A sharp-edged
stone lying nearby provided the answer. He seized it and
struck.
The outer surface of the egg was leathery rather than brit-
tle; it tore raggedly. Deliberately, Honath bent and put his
mouth to the oozing surface.
It was excellent. The flavor was decidedly stronger than
that of birds' eggs, but he was far too hungry to be squeamish.
After a moment's amazement, Alaskon and Mathild attacked
the other two ovoids with a will. It was the first really satis-
fying meal they had had in Hell. When they finally moved
away from the devastated nest, Honath felt better than he
had since the day he was arrested,
As they moved on down the gorge, they began again to
hear the roar .of water, though the stream looked as placid as
ever. Here, too, they saw the first sign of active life in the
valley: a flight of giant dragonflies skimming over the water.
The insects took flight as soon as Honath showed himself, but
quickly came back, their nearly non-existent brains already
convinced that there had always been men in the valley.
The roar got louder very rapidly. When the three rounded
the long, gentle turn which had cut off their view from the
exit, the source of the roar came into view. It was a sheet of
falling water as tall as the depth of the gorge itself, which
came arcing out from between two pillars of basalt and fell
to a roiling, frothing pool.
"This is as far as we go!" Alaskon said, shouting to make
himself heard at all over the tumult. "We'll never be able to
get up those walls I"
Stunned, Honath looked from side to side. What Alaskon
had said was all too obviously true. The gorge evidently had
begun life as a layer of soft, partly soluble stone in the cliffs,
tilted upright by some volcanic upheaval, and then worn com-
pletely away by the rushing stream. Both cliff faces were of
the harder rock, and were sheer and as smooth aa if they had
been polished by hand. Here and there a network of tough
vines had begun to climb them, but nowhere did such a
network even come close to reaching the top.
Honath turned and looked once more at the great arc of
water and spray. If there were only some way to prevent their
being forced to retrace their steps
Abruptly, over the riot of the falls, there was a piercing,
hissing shriek. Echoes picked it up and sounded it again and
again, all the way up the battlements of the cliffs. Honath
sprang straight up in the air and came down trembling, fac-
ing away from the pool.
At first he could see nothing. "Then, down at the open end
of the turn, there was a huge flurry of motion.
A second later, a two-legged, blue-green reptile half as tall
as the gorge itself came around the turn in a single huge
bound and lunged violently into the far wall of the valley. It
stopped as if momentarily stunned, and the great head turned
toward them a face of sinister and furious idiocy.
The shriek set the air to boiling again. Balancing itself
with its heavy tail, the beast lowered its head and looked
redly toward the falls.
The owner of the robbed nest had come homeand they
had met a demon of Hell at last.
Honath's mind at that instant went as white and blank as
the underbark of a poplar. He acted without thinking, without
even knowing what he did. When thought began to creep back
into his head again, the three of them were standing shiv-
ering in semi-darkness, watching the blurred shadow of the
demon lurching back and forth upon the screen of shining
water.
It had been nothing but luck, not foreplanning, to find that
there was a considerable space between the back of the falls
proper and the blind wall of the canyon. It had been luck,
too, which had forced Honath to skirt the pool in order to
reach, the falls at all, and thus had taken them all bebind the
silver curtain at the point where the weight of the falling
water was too low to hammer them down for good. And it
had been the blindest stroke of all that the demon had charged
after them directly into the pool, where the deep, boiling
water had slowed the threshing hind legs enough to halt it be-
fore it went under the falls, as it had earlier blundered into
the hard wall of the gorge.
Not an iota of all this had been in Honath's mind before he
had discovered it to be true. At the moment that the huge
reptile had screamed for the second time, he had simply
grasped Mathild's hand and broken for the falls, leaping from
low tree to shrub to fern faster than he had ever leapt before.
He did not stop to see how well Mathild was keeping up with
him, or whether or not Alaskon was following. He only ran.
He might have screamed, too; he could not remember.
They stood now, all three of them, wet through, behind
the curtain until the shadow of the demon faded and van-
ished. Finally Honath felt a hand thumping his shoulder, and
turned slowly.
Speech was impossible here, but Alaskon's pointing finger
was eloquent enough. Along the back wall of the falls, cen-
tunes of erosion had failed to wear away completely-the orig-
inal soft limestone; there was still a sort of serrated chimney
there, open toward the gorge, which looked as though it could
be climbed. At the top of the falls, the water shot out from
between the basalt pillars in a smooth, almost solid-looking
tube, arching at least six feet before beginning to break into
the fan of spray and rainbows which poured down into the
gorge. Once the chimney had been climbed, it should be pos-
sible  to  climb  out  from under  the falls without passing
through the water again.
And after that?
Abruptly, Honath grinned. He felt weak all through with
reaction, and the face of the demon would probably be leer-
ing in his dreams for a long time to comebut at the same
time he could not repress a surge of irrational confidence. He
gestured upward jauntily, shook himself, and loped forward
into the throat of the chimney.
Hardly more than an hour later they were all standing on a
ledge overlooking the gorge, with the waterfall creaming over
the brink next to them, only a few yards away. From here, it
was evident that the gorge itself was only the bottom of a far
larger cleft, a split in the pink-and-gray cliffs as sharp as
though it had been driven in the rock by a bolt of sheet light-
ning. Beyond the basalt pillars from which the fall issued.
however, the stream foamed over a long ladder of rock
shelves which seemed to lead straight up into the sky. On this
side of the pillars the ledge broadened into a sort of truncated
mesa, as if the waters had been running at this level for cen-
turies before striking some softer rock-stratum which had per-
mitted them to cut down further to create the gorge. The
stone platform was littered with huge rocks, rounded by long
water erosion, obviously the remains of a washed-out stratum
of conglomerite or a similar sedimentary layer.
Honath looked at the huge pebblesmany of them bigger
than he wasand then back down into the gorge again. The
figure of the demon, foreshortened into a pigmy by distance
and perspective, was still roving back and forth in front of
the waterfall. Having gotten the notion that prey was hiding
behind the sheet of water, the creature might well stay sta-
tioned there until it starved, for all Honath knewit cer-
tainly did not seem to be very brightbut Honath thought
he had a better idea.
"Alaskon, can we hit the demon with one of these rocks?"
The navigator peered cautiously into the gorge. "It wouldn't
surprise me," he said at last. "It's just pacing back and forth
in that .same small arc. And all things fall at the same speed;
if we can make the rock arrive just as it walks under ithmm.
Yes, I think so. Let's pick a big one to make certain."
But Alaskon's ambitions overreached his strength; the rock
he selected would not move, largely because he himself was
still too weak to help much with it. "Never mind," he said.
"Even a small one will be falling fast by the time it gets
down there. Pick one you and Mathild can roll easily your-
selves; I'll just have to figure it a little closer, that's all."
After a few tests, Honath selected a rock about three times
the size of his own head. It was heavy, but between them he
a~d Mathild got it to the edge of the ledge.
"Hold on," Alaskon said in a pre-occupied voice. "Tip it
over the edge, so it's ready to drop as soon as you let go of it.
Good. Now wait. He's on his backtrack now. As soon as he
crossesAll right. Four, three, two, one, drop it!"
The rock fell away. All three of them crouched in a row at
the edge of the gorge. The rock dwindled, became as small as
a fruit, as small as a fingernail, as small as a grain of sand.
The dwarfed figure of the demon reached the end of its mad
stalking arc, swung furiously to go back again
And stopped. For an instant it just stood there. Then, with
infinite slowness, it toppled sidewise into the pool. It thrashed
convulsively two or three times, and then was gone; the
spreading waves created by the waterfall masked any rip-
ples it might have made in sinking.
"Like spearing fish in a bromelaid," Alaskon said proudly.
But )US voice was shaky. Honath knew exactly why.
After all, they had just killed a demon.
"jffe could do that again," Honath whispered.
Often," Alaskon agreed, still peering greedily down at the
pool. "They don't appear to have much intelligence, these
demons. Given enough height, we could lure them into blind
alleys like this, and bounce rocks off them almost at will. I
wish I'd thought of it."
"Where do we go now?" Mathild said, looking toward the
ladder beyond-the basalt pillars. "That way?"
"Yes, and as fast as possible," Alaskon said, getting to his
feet and looking upward, one hand shading his eyes. "It must
be late. I don't think the light will last much longer."
"We'll have to go single file," Honath said. "And we'd bet-
ter keep hold of each other's hands. One slip on those wet
steps andit's a long way down again."
Mathild shuddered and took Honath's hand convulsively.
To his astonishment, the next instant she was tugging him
toward the basalt pillars.
The irregular patch of deepening violet sky grew slowly as
they climbed. They paused often, clinging -to the tagged es-
carpments until their breath came back, and snatching icy
water in cupped palms from the stream that fell down the lad-
der beside them. There was no way to tell how far up into the
dusk the way had taken them, but Honath suspected that they
were already somewhat above the level of their own vine-
webbed world. The air smelled colder and sharper than it
ever had above the jungle.
The final cut in the cliffs through which the stream fell was
another chimney, steeper and more smooth-walled than the
one which had taken them out of the gorge under the water-
fall, but also narrow enough to be climbed by bracing one's
back against one side, and one's hands and feet against the
other. The column of air inside the chimney was filled with
spray, but in Hell that was too minor a discomfort to bother
about.
At long last Honath heaved himself over the edge of the
chimney onto flat rock, drenched and exhausted, but filled
with an elation he could not suppress and did not want to.
They were above the attic .jungle; they had beaten Hell it-
self. He looked around to make sure that Mathild was safe,
and then reached a hand down to Alaskon; the navigator's
bad leg had been giving him trouble. Honath heaved mightily,
and Alaskon came heavily over the edge and lit sprawling on
the high moss.
The stars were out. For a while they simply sat and gasped
for breath. Then they turned, one by one, to see where they
were.
There was not a great deal to see. There was the mesa,
domed with stars on all sides; a shining, finned spindle, like a
gigantic minnow, pointing skyward in the center of the rocky
plateau; and around the spindle, indistinct in the starlight . . .
. . . Around the shining minnow, tending it, were the
Giants.

4

This, then, was the end of the battle to do what was right,
whatever the odds. All the show of courage against supersti-
tion, all the black battles against Hell itself, came down to
this: The Giants were real!
They were inarguably real. Though they were twice as tall
as men, stood straighter, had broader shoulders, were heavier
acros'S the seat and had no visible tails, their fellowship with
men was clear. Even their voices, as they shouted to each
other around their towering metal minnow, were the voices
of men made into gods, voices as remote from those of men
as the voices of men were remote from those of monkeys, yet
just as clearly of the same family.
These were the Giants of the Book of Laws. They were not
only real, but they had come back to Tellura as they had
promised to do.
And they would know what to do with unbelievers, and
with fugitives from Hell. It had all been for nothingnot
only the physical struggle, but the fight to be allowed to think
for oneself as well. The gods existed, literally, actually. This
belief was the real hell from which Honath had been try-
ing to fight free all his lifebut now it was no longer just a
belief. It was a fact, a fact that he was seeing with his own
eyes.                                                 *
The Giants had returned to judge their handiwork. And the
first of the people they would meet would be three outcasts,
three condemned and degraded criminals, three jailbreakers
the worst possible detritus of the attic world.
All this went searing through Honath's mind in less than a
second, but nevertheless Alaskon's mind evidently had worked
still taster. Always the most outspoken unbeliever of the en-
tire little group of rebels, the one among them whose whole
world was founded upon the existence of rational explana-
tions for everything, his was the point of view most com-
pletely ~allengedd by the sight before them now. With a deep,
sharply indrawn breath, he turned abruptly and walked away
from them.
Mathild' uttered a cry of protest, which she choked off in
the middle; but it was already too late. A round eye on the
great silver minnow came alight, bathing them all in an oval
patch of brilliance.
Honath darted after the navigator. Without looking back,
Alaskon suddenly was running. For an instant longer Honath
saw his figure, poised delicately against the black sky. Then
he dropped silently out of sight, as suddenly and completely
as if he had never been.
Alaskon had borne every hardship and every terror of the
ascent from Hell with courage and even with cheerfulness
but he had been unable to face being told that it had all been
meaningless.
Sick at heart, Honath turned back, shielding his eyes from
the miraculous light. There was a clear call in some unknown
language from near the spindle.
Then there were footsteps, several pairs of them, coming
closer.
It was time for the Second Judgment.
After a long moment, a big voice from the darkness said:
"Don't be afraid. We mean you no harm. We're men, just as
you are."
The language had the archaic flavor of the Book of Laws,
but it was otherwise perfectly understandable. A second voice
said: "What are you called?"
Honath's tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his
mouth. While he was struggling with it, Mathild's voice came
clearly from beside him:
"He is Honath the Purse-Maker, and I am Mathild the For-
ager."
"You are a long distance from the place we left your peo-
ple," the first Giant said. "Don't you still live in the vine-webs
above the jungles?"
"Lord"
"My name is Jarl Eleven. This is Gerhardt Adier."
This seemed to stop Mathild completely. Honath could
understand why: the very notion of addressing Giants by
name was nearly paralyzing. But since they were already
as good as cast down into Hell again, nothing could be lost
by it.
"Jarl Eleven," he said, "the people still live among the
vines. The floor of the jungle is forbidden. Only criminals are
 sent there. We are criminals."
"Oh?" Jarl Eleven said. "And you've come all the way from
the surface to this mesa? Gerhardt, this is prodigious. You
have no idea what the surface of this planet is likeit's a
place where evolution has never managed to leave the tooth-
and-nail stage. Dinosaurs from every period of the Meso-
zoic, primitive mammals all the way up the scale to the an-
cient catsthe works. That's why the original seeding team
put these people in the treetops instead."
"Honath, what was your crime?" Gerhardt Adier said.
Honath was almost relieved to have the questioning come
so quickly to this point; Jarl Eleven's aside, with its many
terms he could not understand, had been frightening in its
very meaninglessness.
"There were five of us," Honath said in a low voice. "We
said 'wethat we did not believe in the Giants."
There was a brief silence. Then, shockingly, both Jarl
Eleven and Gerhardt Adier burst into enormous laughter.
Mathild cowered, her hands over her ears. Even Honath
flinched and took a step backward. Instantly, the laughter
stopped, and the Giant called Jarl Eleven stepped into the
oval of light and sat down beside them. In the light, it could
be seen that his face and hands were hairless, although there
was hair on his crown; the rest of his body was covered by
a kind of cloth. Seated, he was no taller than Honath, and
did not seem quite so fearsome.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "It was unkind of us to laugh,
but what you said was highly unexpected. Oerhardt, come
over here and squat down, so that you don't look so much like
a statue of some general. Tell me, Honath, in what way did
you not believe in the Giants?"
Honath could hardly believe his ears. A Giant had begged
his pardon! Was this some still crueler joke? But whatever
the reason, Jarl Eleven had asked him a question.
"Each of the five of us differed," he said. "I held that you
were notnot real except as symbols of some abstract truth.
One of us, the wisest, believed that you did not exist in any
sense at all. But we all agreed that you were not gods."
"And, of course, we aren't," Jarl Eleven said. "We're men.
We come from the same stock as you. We're not your rulers,
but your brothers. Do you understand what I say?"
'"No," Honath admitted.
"Then let me tell you about it. There are men on many
worlds, Honath. They differ from one another, because the
worlds differ, and different kinds of men are needed to people
each one. Gerhardt and I are the kind of men who live on a
world called Earth, and many other worlds like it. We are two
very minor members of a huge project called a 'seeding pro-
gram,' which has been going on for thousands of years now.
It's the job of the seeding program to survey newly discovered
worlds, and then to make men suitable to live on each new
world."
"To make men? But only gods"
"No, no. Be patient and listen," said Jarl Eleven. "We don't
make men. We make them suitable. There's a great deal of
difference between the two. We take the living germ plasm,
the sperm and the egg, and we modify it; then the modified
man emerges, and we help him to settle down in his new
world. That's what we did on Tellurait happened long ago,
before Gerhardt and I were even born. Now, we've come
back to see how you people are getting along, and to lend a
hand if necessary."
He looked from Honath to Mathild, and back again. "Do
you follow me?" he said.
"I'm trying," Honath said. "But you should go down to the
jungle-top, then. We're not like the others; they are the people
you want to see."
"We shall, in the morning. We just landed here. But, just
because you're not like the others, we're more interested in
you now. Tell me: has any condemned man ever escaped from
the jungle floor before?"
"No, never. That's not surprising. There are monsters down
there."
Jarl Eleven looked sidewise at the other Giant; he seemed
to be smiling. "When you see the films," he remarked, "you'll
call that the understatement of the century. Honath, how did
you three manage to escape, then?"
Haltingly, at first, and then with more confidence as the
memories came crowding vividly back, Honath told him.
When he mentioned the feast at the demon's nest, Jarl Eleven
again looked significantly at Adier, but he did not interrupt.
"And, finally, we got to the top of the chimney and came
out on this flat space," Honath said. "Alaskon was still with
us then, but when he saw you and the shining thing he threw
himself back down the pleft. He was a criminal like us,
but he should not have died. He was a brave man, and a wise
one."
"Not wise enough to wait until all the evidence wai in,"
Adier said enigmatically. "All in all, Jarl, I'd say 'prodigious'
is the word for it. This is really the most successful seeding
job any team has ever done, at least in this limb of the galaxy.
And what a stroke of luck, to be on the spot just as it came to
term, and with a couple at that!"
"What does it mean?" Honath said.
"Just this, Honath. When the seeding team set your people
up in business on Tellura, they didn't mean for you to live
forever in the treetops. They knew that, sooner or later, you'd
have to come down to the ground and learn to fight this planet
on its own terms. Otherwise, you'd go stale and die out."
"Live on the ground all the time?" Mathild said in a faint
voice.
"Yes, Mathild. The life in the treetops was to have been
only an interim period,, while you gathered knowledge you
needed about Tellura, and put it to use. But to be the real
masters of the world, you will have to conquer the surface,
too.
"The device your people worked out, of sending only crim-
inals to the surface, was the best way of conquering the planet
that they could have picked. It takes a strong will and excep-
tional courage to go against custom; and both those qualities
are needed to lick Tellura. Your people exiled just such fight-
ing spirits to the surface, year after year after year.
"Sooner or later, some of those exiles were going to discover
how to live successfully on the ground, and make it possible
for the rest of your people to leave the trees. You and Honath
have done just that."
"Observe please, Jari," Adier said. "The crime in this first
successful case was ideological. That was the crucial turn in
the criminal policy of these people. A spirit of revolt is not
quite enough; but couple it with brains, andecce homo!"
Honath's head was swimming. "But what does all this
mean?" he said. "Are wenot condemned to Hell any more?"
"No, you're still condemned, if you still want to call it
that," Jari Eleven said soberly. "You've learned how to live
down there, and you've found out something even more val-
uable: How to stay alive while cutting down your enemies.
Do you know that you killed three demons with your bare
hands, you and Mathild and Alaskon?"
"Killed"
"Certainly," Jari Eleven said. "You ate three eggs. That
is the classical way, and indeed the only way, to wipe out
monsters like the dinosaurs. You can't kill the adults with
~iitpthing short of an anti-tank gun, but they're helpless in
embryoand the adults haven't the sense to guard their
nests. '"~'
Honath heard, but only distantly. Even his awareness of
Mathild's warmth next to him did not seem to help much.
"Then we have to go back down there," he said dully. "And
this time forever."
"Yes," Jari Eleven said, his voice gentle. "But you won't be
alone, Honath.  Beginning tomorrow, you'll have all your
people with you."
"All our people? Butyou're going to drive them out?"
"All of them. Oh, we won't prohibit the use of the vine-
webs, too, but from now on your race will have to fight it out
on the surface as well. You and Mathild have proven that it
can be done. It's high time the rest of you learned, too."
"Jari, you think too little of these young people themselves,"
Adier said. "Tell them what is in store for them. They are
frightened."
"Of course, of course. It's obvious. Honath, you and
Mathild are the only living individuals of your race who know
how to survive down there on the surface. And we're not
going to tell your people how to do that. We aren't even going
to drop them so much as a hint. That part of it is up to you."
Honath's jaw dropped.
"It's up to you," Jarl Eleven repeated firmly. "We'll return
you to your tribe tomorrow, and we'll tell your people that
you two know the rules for successful life on the ground
and that everyone else has to go down and live there, too.
We'll tell them nothing else but that. What do you think they'll
do then?"
"I  don't know," Honath said dazedly.  "Anything could
happen. They might even make us Spokesman and Spokes-
womanexcept that we're just common criminals."
"Uncommon pioneers, Honath. The man and woman to
lead the humanity of Tellura out of the attic, into the wide
world." Jarl Eleven got to his feet, the great light playing
over him. Looking up after him, Honath saw that there were
at least a dozen other Giants standing just outside the oval of
light, listening intently to every word.
"But there's a little time to be passed before we begin,"
Jarl Eleven said. "Perhaps you two would like to look over
our ship."
Numbly, but with a soundless emotion much like music
inside  him,  Honath  took  Mathild's  hand.  Together  they
walked away from the chimney to Hell, following the foot-
steps of the Giants.