"Then that was Tork I saw running out," Nixon said. He checked his impulse to jump up and rush away to seize the damned murderer. How could you find a tiny, scurrying, six-inch figure in this expanse of moonlit crags?
Frane was not dead, but he obviously was dying. They had laid him on the ground. He saw Nixon's face so high above him, and he called faintly.
"Come closer, giant. Tork was triumphant—he told me what he had planned. I was so stupid—I would never believe ill of him—"
Tork had planned to organize an expedition to go to Earth. With the growth-drug, they would go in their normal small size. Then on Earth, they would use the drugs and get large. There was no real limit to growth through Frane's drug. Frane had meant it to be governed by environmental needs but the more one took the larger he would grow. Giants on Earth! They could make themselves what on Earth would be men a hundred feet tall.
"Tork always said your Earth is so much better a world than Orana could ever be," Frane was saying. "With fighter-Gorts a hundred feet tall on Earth, he felt surely that your world could be conquered."
And many of the Orites here, and the Gorts they controlled, had felt the lure of it. The Orite Government would oppose it. They would have no desire to embark upon the murderous conquest of a neighboring world. Then Tork and his followers would have seized the Government. And more of the Orites would have rallied around him, of course. It is instinct to follow a successful leader.
But with the Earth-giant dominating Orana now, Tork's fellow plotters had melted away.
"Well," Nixon murmured grimly, "what does he think he can do now?"
The answer came almost with Nixon's grim question. "Look!" Loto gasped. "Off there!"
Then Nixon saw it. In the notch between the towering rocks where the pass led into the broad adjoining valley, a figure had appeared, not a tiny six-inch figure but an upright man-shape that seemed about as high as Nixon's waist. It was Tork, and he was half as big as the Earth-giant now! Long since, Tork's clothes had burst with tiny shreds that had dropped away so that his bluish flesh glistened in the moonlight.