Circle of Flight Read online

closed his eyes. The next instant a shattering blow rippedthrough every inch of his body. Fire ran along his nerves. He felt hislips grimacing away from his teeth, felt the corners of his mouthstretching back to his ears. Oh God, oh God, he cried out in silentagony. Hold back my screams. Then he heard himself groan. He cut off thesound of it. Choked. Heard a growl deep in his chest. Lights flashed inhis eyes and there was a tearing apart through his whole body. Asqueezing together rushed all around him and an insane pounding andpulling as though his flesh were being beaten and clawed from his bones.Time dropped away from him until it seemed he had never been aware ofanything but this agony. Then he was empty of sensation. He felt himselffall forward, felt heavy hands catch him roughly and set him upright.The soft voice of the commander flowed into his mind like a voice fromouter space:

  "You will tell us your method of going into the macrocosm. Theequations, the type ship, its propellent, where the ship is hidden."

  Thorus felt enveloped in a void.

  The voice of the commander droned on. "All we need is a clue. We'll workout the rest."

  Life and feeling and thought were surging back into Thorus now. Strengthfilled his muscles again. Sight came into his eyes. Again he satstraight and stiff on the chair. The block held, he thought. It held andthey cannot know now!

  "Speak!" The commander's voice rose. "Damn you!" He seized Thorus by thehair. "You've blocked off the information. I'll see both of you tortureduntil you'll wish to kill each other. Then we'll try the clamps again."He smashed his fist into Thorus' face.

  On the instant the commander pulled back his fist, Thorus reached outand jerked the blaster from his belt. His foot came up hard against theman's groin. There was a grunting cry of pain. Thorus fell backward offthe stool, pressing the blaster trigger as he hit the floor. He sawblood gush from the commander's middle, saw him pitch sideways, like abroken statue, heard Aria's scream. The clamps pulled from his head. Heswung the gun's muzzle to the two policemen, clawing at their holsters.The blaster struck out, a long coughing hiss, a spray of flame. Therewere cries and gasps and jerking and clutching and the scrambling fallof the two bodies.

  Then silence.

  Thorus crawled unsteadily to his feet, stood swaying. The gun hungloosely in his hand. Now he felt Aria close to him, heard her voicetrembling and breathy.

  "Thorus! Are you all right?"

  "Yes."

  "The blocks held! They held!"

  Steadying himself, he saw Aria glance at the bodies on the floor.

  "Destruction!" she shuddered. "Nothing but destruction. Oh God, I'm sickof it!"

  Thorus let the gun drop to the floor. "There's no time to talk. Yourlaboratory." He grasped her by the shoulders and turned her toward abright steel door across the room. "_You'll_ save time to go into yourdamned microcosm. _You'll_ make it. Good luck. If I have any luck atall, I'll make it too." He gave her a push. Without speaking or turningback, she moved across the room, as though sleep walking. The gleamingdoor slab slid back as she approached it, closed behind her.

  The memory of her face stayed in his mind for a long moment after shehad disappeared, and from the room's atmosphere he seemed to breathe inregret and a sense of their failure. He turned abruptly, looked down ateach crumpled body. Opening the door a crack, he searched the brightlylighted street for the figure of a policeman, saw none, stepped outsideand ran.

  * * * * *

  In her laboratory, Aria worked deftly, swiftly at the transparentbody-length cylinder. She checked wire connections, dials, buttons, thenopened one end of the tube, lowered herself into place, when she hadclosed the tube, she lay still, the forefinger of her right hand restingon a button.

  During all these preparations, she was viewing, with her inner sight,Thorus' tiny ship streaking through the night toward a distant mountainpeak where a small metal ball, large enough for one man, sat shrouded bya screen of invisibility. Now she saw the streak of flame die in thenight and the tiny ship sitting motionless beside the metal ball; sawThorus open a hatch in the ball's side, let himself through the openingand 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 toearth and life as she'd known it and would never know it again. A momentof yearning for a chance to live safely and well as a wife and motherswept her with sadness. The yearning held her finger from the button; afinal hugging of human love and full human life, a last lonely cry forearth as she had known it in childhood with the press of wind and thetouch and sight of green growing things and the depth of blue above andthe ground beneath.

  Feeling then as though she were plunging into midnight ocean depths, shethrust her finger hard against the button!

  Instantly light shimmered all about!

  The room dissolved. A sense of dreaming too vividly, yet of being deepin a sleep that was a thousand times more acutely awake than anyawakeness she had ever known filled all her being. She felt herselfsinking into a great bottomless depth and yet at the same time soaringthrough space to the ends of the universe, until both falling andsoaring flowed into each other and became suspension. And then suddenlyshe saw all things as one. She saw the intricate design of a snowflakethat was the snows of all the earth and a drop of water that held allthe oceans.

  There was the rhythmic beating all around as though of a great,omnipresent heart and the surge and flow of oceans of lifeblood and therise and fall of eternal breathing. A speck of soil was the soil of allthe earth, from which grew forests and fields of green. She let herselfout into the space of all this and was merely there, like time is, wherethere is the motion and change of birth and death and birth again anddeath again. She felt a gentle touch on her body that was the body ofall mankind and knew it for the touch of air, a single element of allearth's winds that yet was all the clear winds of earth.

  The next moment a thundrous roar crashed like a tidal wave. She felt agigantic 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. Afaltering of the rhythm and flow went, like a cosmic shudder, throughall this life and through her own being so that she was conscious ofnausea and ache and a violent flinging about.

  She had a sense then of pulling within herself, like a sea anemone thathas been touched by an enemy.

  And in her silent voice, she cried out, "Thorus!"

  In the macrocosm. Thorus destroying! Destroying! The next instant herinner sight swung back to where Thorus' ship, the shining metal ball,had leapt up off the mountain of earth; leapt, in the fraction of asecond, through the blue earth covering into black, outer space. Herinner sight saw the metal ball inflating, a cosmic balloon, flashinglike the sun, then seeming to fill the space between all the suns!

  * * * * *

  Thorus, in his ship, was conscious of being a colossus that could stepfrom planet to planet as though he were using them for stones to cross apond of earth water. Step past the solar system, he thought, out intothe 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, flickEarth and the other planets into nothingness. "I've broken through," hethought. "I've done it! I've been released." And looking out and away,he saw universe upon universe extending past infinity, it seemed, anocean without a horizon.

  Now, said his thought, I will destroy all evil and I shall begin withthe evil of earth. As though he were looking through a microscope, hefocused his sight on the grain of dust that was earth. His fingers madedelicate adjustments on a dial, and earth, softly green and blue, swamclearly into his vision. He magnified his sight of earth until he couldsee all of it like a gigantic relief map. He saw the fortified places ofthe Authority--great, spreading, shining, metal domes; saw them dottingthe earth; saw the lines of vehicles speeding back and forth betweenthem. He saw too the hamlets of the people, in the spaces between theforts of the Auth
ority, all places of squalor with row upon row ofboxlike houses, each exactly like the other. There were not any greenlawns or shade trees, only houses and streets and people moving about.

  Thorus felt his anger rise. He pressed a button that flung out fields ofgravity. Earth rocked and heaved, like an animal in convulsions.Volcanos exploded, shot out their flaming, poisonous refuse. Oceans weremonsters writhing and rolling in their troughs, reaching onto the land,as though to pull it beneath them. And the land itself split wide andsnapped shut great, yawning jaws. There was a wild rushing about amongall the people, a madness, as though frantic motion would save them.They looked up off the convulsed earth with panic stricken eyes, theirvoices raised in agony.

  Thorus' voice sounded, "The time for the death of the Authority hascome. I will