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!

* * * * *

Thorus, in his ship, was conscious of being a colossus that could step
from planet to 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 gree