n 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,