brightly lighted street for the figure of a policeman, saw none, stepped outside and ran.

During all these preparations, she was viewing, with her inner sight, Thorus' tiny ship streaking through the night toward a distant mountain peak where a small metal ball, large enough for one man, sat shrouded by a screen of invisibility. Now she saw the streak of flame die in the night and the tiny ship sitting motionless beside the metal ball; saw Thorus open a hatch in the ball's side, let himself through the opening and swing shut the circle of steel.

"Thank God," she said. "Whatever comes now, at least he's made it."

Wiping away the vision of him, she hesitated a moment, said goodby to earth and life as she'd known it and would never know it again. A moment of yearning for a chance to live safely and well as a wife and mother swept her with sadness. The yearning held her finger from the button; a final hugging of human love and full human life, a last lonely cry for earth as she had known it in childhood with the press of wind and the touch and sight of green growing things and the depth of blue above and the ground beneath.

Feeling then as though she were plunging into midnight ocean depths, she thrust her finger hard against the button!

Instantly light shimmered all about!

The room dissolved. A sense of dreaming too vividly, yet of being deep in a sleep that was a thousand times more acutely awake than any awakeness she had ever known filled all her being. She felt herself sinking into a great bottomless depth and yet at the same time soaring through space to the ends of the universe, until both falling and soaring flowed into each other and became suspension. And then suddenly she saw all things as one. She saw the intricate design of a snowflake that was the snows of all the earth and a drop of water that held all the oceans.

There was the rhythmic beating all around as though of a great, omnipresent heart and the surge and flow of oceans of lifeblood and the rise and fall of eternal breathing. A speck of soil was the soil of all the earth, from which grew forests and fields of green. She let herself out into the space of all this and was merely there, like time is, where there is the motion and change of birth and death and birth again and death again. She felt a gentle touch on her body that was the body of all mankind and knew it for the touch of air, a single element of all earth's winds that yet was all the clear winds of earth.

The next moment a thundrous roar crashed like a tidal wave. She felt a gigantic shaking in all the snow and water, in the oceans and mountains, in the air and wind, in the blood and life and beating heart. A faltering of the rhythm and flow went, like a cosmic shudder, through all this life and through her own being so that she was conscious of nausea and ache and a violent flinging about.

She had a sense then of pulling within herself, like a sea anemone that has been touched by an enemy.

And in her silent voice, she cried out, "Thorus!"

In the macrocosm. Thorus destroying! Destroying! The next instant her inner sight swung back to where Thorus' ship, the shining metal ball, had leapt up off the mountain of earth; leapt, in the fraction of a second, through the blue earth covering into black, outer space. Her inner sight saw the metal ball inflating, a cosmic balloon, flashing like the sun, then seeming to fill the space between all the suns!