planet as though he were using them for stones to cross a pond of earth water. Step past the solar system, he thought, out into the universe. Now the sun became a tiny ball of fire, a lightning bug, the earth a grain of dust. He could blow out the light of the sun, flick Earth and the other planets into nothingness. "I've broken through," he thought. "I've done it! I've been released." And looking out and away, he saw universe upon universe extending past infinity, it seemed, an ocean without a horizon.

Now, said his thought, I will destroy all evil and I shall begin with the evil of earth. As though he were looking through a microscope, he focused his sight on the grain of dust that was earth. His fingers made delicate adjustments on a dial, and earth, softly green and blue, swam clearly into his vision. He magnified his sight of earth until he could see all of it like a gigantic relief map. He saw the fortified places of the Authority—great, spreading, shining, metal domes; saw them dotting the earth; saw the lines of vehicles speeding back and forth between them. He saw too the hamlets of the people, in the spaces between the forts of the Authority, all places of squalor with row upon row of boxlike houses, each exactly like the other. There were not any green lawns or shade trees, only houses and streets and people moving about.

Thorus felt his anger rise. He pressed a button that flung out fields of gravity. Earth rocked and heaved, like an animal in convulsions. Volcanos exploded, shot out their flaming, poisonous refuse. Oceans were monsters writhing and rolling in their troughs, reaching onto the land, as though to pull it beneath them. And the land itself split wide and snapped shut great, yawning jaws. There was a wild rushing about among all the people, a madness, as though frantic motion would save them. They looked up off the convulsed earth with panic stricken eyes, their voices raised in agony.

Thorus' voice sounded, "The time for the death of the Authority has come. I will crush them as though I were crushing snails." He reached out from the ship with rays that seized meteors and flung them like a schoolboy flinging stones at bottles, one by one against the massive, shining domes of the Authority. The domes cracked and split and were crushed. The atomic bombs broke open with flame that leapt up yellow tongues and grew mushrooms in the sky, and a burning death spread all around.

Then Thorus was quiet, watching all that he had destroyed.

But suddenly, he became aware of Aria's thought within him, crying out. "Destroyer! Murderer! In moments you've set humanity back a hundred thousand years. You're worse than the Authority. There'll never be any peace for you or for the earth or even the universe after what you've done. Other Authorities will come and you'll have to destroy them and others and others. Destruction for you forever, on and on, until you fill the universe with it...."

In his mind, Thorus saw her among the falling snowflakes and the drops of cool water and the green, growing atoms; saw her in the transparent tube sink deeper and deeper into the microcosm, away and away like a minnow swimming down into a beautiful lake on a summer's day. Deeper, ever deeper, until there was nothing but the blue, sleepy water.

As Thorus looked upon the earth again and saw the terrible destruction he had wrought, he trembled. There was the realization in him that, beneath his consciousness, had lain the hope that, after he had wiped clean the earth, Aria's healing power would remake it. But now there would be no healing, and for thousands of years earth would lie a smoking ruins with the people crawling about its shattered surface like bugs.

He turned from all he saw. He closed his eyes and threw his ship out into space, threw it away into the fathomless void. He must escape from the universe, must flee from the horror that filled