Rising up, like one awakening uncertainly from sleep in a strange room, he opened the ship's hatch and looked out upon the land. A flash of light caught his eyes then, from above, and he looked up in wonder. He gasped. * * * * * Aria, in the transparent cylinder, sinking down through the blue, like a leaf, settling gently to the earth a hundred feet away. She crawled out and stood looking across the field of grass at him, a strange, smile on her face. Thorus leaped from his ship and ran toward her. He ran silently. She held out her hands and he grasped them tenderly, as he would grasp the hands of a child. And all he could say was, "Aria. Aria." "Thorus," she said, and there was courage and joy in her voice. "We've come back." They stared into each other's eyes for a long moment and then they were close, and they held to each other and swayed. "Do you know what's happened?" she said. "Yes. You came back through hyper-space while _I_ came back through the atoms." His voice was quiet. "Oh, Lord. Oh good and strange Lord. We forgot that one of the great men twenty thousand years ago, proved that space was curved." "Yes." She stood away from him now, yet held to his hand. "We couldn't escape from our place in life or ourselves or the good and the evil that we have done. We came back to our earth and now we must do what we have left undone." There was much to be done. Thorus looked around. He saw in the distance a crushed and smoking ruins. "I've destroyed the Authority, but I've destroyed too much. Now the people are in chaos." Aria stood silently awhile, and then moved his arm. "But now you can help me to heal them. You've seen in the microcosm, as I have in the macrocosm that all life is one. Now we can show the people that outer and inner space are not separate. We can show them how they exist together and how there can be no escape in either or from either. It will take a long time. But we will do it. And the doing will be grand." She paused. "The beginning and the end, Thorus. The greatness and the smallness. The light and the darkness. It's all here." "And all that's in between. That too." "Yes," she answered quietly. "That too." They turned to the smoking ruins and arm in arm began walking toward it. THE END * * * * * Transcriber Notes: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction May 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. "Obvious punctuation errors repaired." Page 100 (page 8 of this ebook) baloon spelling corrected to balloon