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But Franklin was up as quickly. The tiny forest trees crackled under Lee’s tread as again he hurled himself viciously on his antagonist….

* * * * *

At the head of the distant ravine, the numbed Aura crouched alone, staring out at the hills with mute horror–staring at the two monstrous giants slugging it out. Franklin was the larger. She saw Lee rise up, and with a hand on one of the hills, vault over it. Giants that loomed against the sky as they fronted each other and then crashed together, went down.

Lee was underneath! Dear God–

Two monstrous bodies–Lee was lying with a ridge of crags under his shoulders…. Franklin’s voice was a blurred roar of triumph in the distance. Then she saw Lee’s groping hand come up with a monstrous fifty foot boulder. He crashed it home.

They were up again. Their giant staggering lunges had carried them five miles from her. They were almost the size of fighting titans. The blurred distant shapes of them were silhouettes against the glow of the sky. The forest out there was crackling under their tread … a blurred roar of breaking, mangled trees….

It was just a few seconds while Aura stared, but each second was an eternity of horror. Then one of the monstrous figures was toppling. A great boulder had crashed on Franklin’s head; he had broken loose, staggering while Lee jumped backward and crouched.

For just a second the towering shape of the stricken Franklin loomed up in the sky. And then it fell crashing forward. A swift-flowing stream was there, and the body fell across it–blocking the water which dammed up, then turned aside and went roaring off through the mangled forest.

* * * * *

Lee, again in his former size, sat at old Anthony’s bedside, with Aura behind him. The news of the combat out there against the sky had come to Anthony–the excitement of it, too much for his faltering old heart….

“But you will be all right, grandfather. The thing is over now.”

“Yes. All right–of course, Lee. Just a visitor here–and you will take my place–“

He lay now–as old Anna Green had been that night–just on the brink. “Lee, listen to me–those mechanisms–the space-globe–Lee, I realize now there is no possibility that we could help Earth–and surely it could only bring us evil here. What we have found here–don’t you see, back on Earth each man must create it for himself. Within himself: He could do that, if he chose. And so you–you must disconnect us–forever–“

“Yes, grandfather–“

“And I–guess that is all–“

For some time he seemed to hover on the brink, while Lee and Aura, sitting hand in hand, silently watched him. And then he was gone.

* * * * *

The last of the mechanisms irrevocably was smashed. The little line of vacuums and tubes of the space-globe’s mechanisms went up into a burst of opalescent light under Lee’s grim smashing blows.

Then silently he went outside and joined Aura. Behind them, down the declivity toward the village, the people were gathering. He was silent, his heart pounding with emotion, as he faced them from a little eminence–faced them and heard their shouts, and saw their arms go up to welcome him.

Slowly he and Aura walked down the slope toward his waiting people. And with her by his side, her hand in his, Lee Anthony knew then that he had found fulfillment–the attainment of that which is within every man’s heart–man’s heritage–those things for which he must never cease to strive.