Then slowly, feet first, the bound Nixon was hitching himself past the pyramid-city. A thousand little eyes watched him tensely. The rock was about twenty feet high. As his feet neared it, Nixon saw that Orites were up on the rock-ridges some ten feet above the ground. Tiny apparatus was up there. Nixon hardly noticed the crescent line of finger-size holes in the ground as he hitched over them. As his feet neared the bottom of the rock, he heard Tork calling,
"Enough, giant! Lie quiet!"
Tork gave a signal. From up on the tiny ledge of rock, the Orites answered it. The apparatus up there glowed, hummed. From the crescent line of holes in the rocky ground around Nixon, tiny purple beams of light, shot up vertically into the air—beams of radiance about six inches apart. They streamed up, sharp and clear for twenty or thirty feet and faded into the sunlit air. It was a crescent fence of light, from one end of the butte, out in a fifteen foot loop around the prone Nixon, bending until it touched the other end of the butte.
At the same moment Gorts rushed in, between the six-inch vertical light-bars. Nixon could feel them with tiny electro-torches burning at the knots of the ropes binding him. The ropes fell away. He was free. The Gorts scattered in a panic, running out between the upstanding purple rays.
Nixon's clothes were smouldering in several places from the tiny torches. The flesh of his wrists was burned. He beat out the smouldering fabric and staggered to his feet.
"Careful now, giant!" It was Tork's voice coming in to him from beyond the radiance of the bars of purple light. Somehow Tork's sneering warning enraged Nixon. Was this a cage? A cage of light-fire in which these damnable little creatures thought they could hold the Earth-giant? He'd show them!
Nixon's rage blurred his reason or he would have been more wary. With an oath that was thunder to the Orites, he hurled himself against the purple bars. The Orites' apprehensive cries mingled with a crackling, hissing shower of sparks. It was as though Nixon had struck something solid. He was aware of a shock, a resisting thrust, a repulsion that galvanized all his body as it hurled him backward.
Enveloped by the spark-shower, with his clothes smouldering and his flesh burned, he fell writhing in the center of his purple cage.
Nixon barely clung to his senses. Then after a moment he knew that his head was clearing, that he was brushing his smouldering clothes frantically with his hands. Around him the radiance from the glowing purple bars was dazzling. But presently he could see between them, and see the crescent of blue sky overhead. Between two of the bars, in the six-inch vertical slit of space, an Orite figure appeared. It was Nona. She came carefully in and stood looking at him.