Thorus let the gun drop to the floor. "There's no time to talk. Your laboratory." He grasped her by the shoulders and turned her toward a bright steel door across the room. "_You'll_ save time to go into your damned microcosm. _You'll_ make it. Good luck. If I have any luck at all, I'll make it too." He gave her a push. Without speaking or turning back, she moved across the room, as though sleep walking. The gleaming door slab slid back as she approached it, closed behind her. The memory of her face stayed in his mind for a long moment 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.