nt after she
had disappeared, and from the room's atmosphere he seemed to breathe in
regret and a sense of their failure. He turned abruptly, looked down at
each crumpled body. Opening the door a crack, he searched the brightly
lighted street for the figure of a policeman, saw none, stepped outside
and ran.

* * * * *

In her laboratory, Aria worked deftly, swiftly at the transparent
body-length cylinder. She checked wire connections, dials, buttons, then
opened one end of the tube, lowered herself into place, when she had
closed the tube, she lay still, the forefinger of her right hand resting
on a button.

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