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 mesa.

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 and 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 Giants.

* * * * *

This, then, was the end of the battle to do what was right, whatever the
odds. All the show of courage against superstition, all the black
battles against Hell itself, came down to this: _The Giants were real!_

They were unarguably real. Though they were twice as tall as men, stood
straighter, had broader shoulders, were heavier across 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 nothing--not 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 trying to fight free all his life--but 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 jail-breakers--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 faster. Always
the most outspoken unbeliever of the entire little group of rebels, the
one among them whose whole world was founded upon the existence of
rational explanations for everything, his was the po