. I'll cover you."

"No!" she snapped back. "You are not going to sacrifice--"

"Sacrifice, nuts!" he yelled. "This is part of the plan you'd have heard
if you hadn't sneaked into the landing party at the last minute. Get
going!" He was reloading as he spoke.

She ran, almost flying down the cave-tunnel with great leaps that
covered many yards each. He fired three times at the giants who now
loomed above him; then he was running too, stretching his legs and
throwing every ounce of power and panic in his frame into the incredible
jumps. And apparently he had the advantage over the brutes, for he began
to outdistance them; their mass being greater, he was helped by the lack
of gravity.

Then a rock crumbled under his toe, he was thrown off balance, his
momentum shot him full tilt against the wall of the passage, and his
head cracked sharply against the inside of his helmet. He knew that he
was losing consciousness, and that he had fallen and was rolling
straight into the path of the raging aliens.

CHAPTER XIX

Thought came to him before feeling. Pink lay in a hazy world of shifting
ideas, of coagulating and disintegrating forms of cerebration. He was
not wholly unaware of what had happened, but his groping mind was more
concerned with piecing together certain facts and fancies, reaching
conclusions he felt were of the first importance. If his body were in
danger, it must help itself, for Pink had other fish to fry.

As he sank into thick-witted stupor, then fought up to the light of
reason, feeling his mind ebb and flow with ideas and mad conjectures, it
came to him that he knew the truth of the giants, and had not stated it
to himself before in so many words. He had deliberately shied away from
it, in fact, for it stank of fantasy, of crack-brained superstition and
imbecilic fairy tales....

Admit it, he told himself, giggling in the far reaches of his brain.
Admit it. You know about these critters, Pink.

Yes. I know about them. They are the djinn.

The djinn that Solomon ruled, conquered, and put down. The enormous
entities of Arabian Nights tales, whose habits and character and
shrewd-canny-gullible ways of thinking were all set down in the books
and marveled at by people even yet, hundreds and hundreds of years after
they had been written. Marveled, sure, but marveled only at the
imaginations that had produced them. And it wasn't imagination at all.
It was the real actual goddam solid thing.

T