him at the desolation he had wrought. Straight out into space, out into the forever, where earth would cease to exist, where he and his remorse would be lost.

As incredible distances stretched almost to breaking between himself and earth, he thought: So this is the end. For all I've been and wanted to be, this is it. A nothingness beyond the universe.

But as the last word went from his thought, he saw a greenish blue ball of light rush toward him. He watched it inflate in the port. It enveloped the whole ship. The suns and the galaxies had faded into nothingness. He was aware of sinking into eternal depths but at the same time he felt himself soaring until sinking and soaring flowed into each other. After a time, he saw shimmering white crystals encircling his ship. And then the encircling crystals became one snowflake reflecting light like the moon.

A great wonder filled him and he stared in overwhelming awe. He heard his own heartbeat in his body and outside the ship, holding the ship in an eternal throbbing; heard the flowing of his own blood like a turbulent river; heard his breathing become the ebb and flow of wind, like the sound of surf. His body too became the soil of earth and its rock and water and he was deeply conscious of growth all through him. He was birth and death and he was both in one and he was the life of mankind, of animals, of plants.

As he waited in what seemed to be eternity, sunlight broke into his sight and he saw a field of grass forming around his ship. Blue sky swam into focus above him. White cloud patches formed in the blue as though they had been ordered there by the word of creation. Thorus knew then that he was on earth again, that he had come up from deep inside it.

Rising up, like one awakening uncertainly from sleep in a strange room, he opened the ship's hatch and looked out upon the land. A flash of light caught his eyes then, from above, and he looked up in wonder.

He gasped.

She crawled out and stood looking across the field of grass at him, a strange, smile on her face.

Thorus leaped from his ship and ran toward her. He ran silently. She held out her hands and he grasped them tenderly, as he would grasp the hands of a child. And all he could say was, "Aria. Aria."

"Thorus," she said, and there was courage and joy in her voice. "We've come back."

They stared into each other's eyes for a long moment and then they were close, and they held to each other and swayed.

"Do you know what's happened?" she said.

"Yes. You came back through hyper-space while I came back through the atoms." His voice was quiet. "Oh, Lord. Oh good and strange Lord. We forgot that one of the great men twenty thousand years ago, proved that space was curved."

"Yes." She stood away from him now, yet held to his hand. "We couldn't escape from our place in life or ourselves or the good and the evil that we have done. We came back to our earth and now we must do what we have left undone."

There was much to be done.

Thorus looked around. He saw in the distance a crushed and smoking ruins. "I've destroyed the Authority, but I've destroyed too much. Now the people are in chaos."

Aria stood silently awhile, and then moved his arm. "But now you can help me to heal them. You've seen in the microcosm, as I have in the