int of view most
completely challenged 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.

[Illustration]

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 Pursemaker, and I am Mathild the Forager."

"You are a long distance from the place we left your people," the first
Giant said. "Don't you still live in the vine-webs above the jungles?"

"Lord--"

"My name is Jarl Eleven. This man is Gerhardt Adler."

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 like--it's a place where evolution has never
managed to leave the tooth-and-nail stage. Dinosaurs from every period
of