Bryce Walton

“ Immortality! Think of it, Berton! And then you can go on and on, through higher and higher stages of reality. Reach heights of experience the greatest dreamers have never touched.
"We'll be gods, Berton! They want to do it by slow and ponderous evolution, and play at a chance to become gods. They call us freaks—because we've found the short cut to eternal greatness. ”

“ You are the man we need, Ray Berton. You're a killer, but you're sane and rational. Those we are fighting are insane, irrational, and they'll destroy humanity if they are not stopped. We have power, but we can't use it for destruction, no matter how great the need. But we can give you power—then it's up to you! ”

“ I felt Durach's roaring thought. "No, Berton! They're giving you a false impression. That's a probability variant of Earth's future. They've let you see the Earth destroyed—but it's a different variant than what will happen if you join us. By destroying the Third Plane my way, we can save Fourth Stage reality from destruction—but their way—all will be destroyed!" ”

“ You'll automatically start to return to Third-Plane existence.
"You could control your fall here, with Fourth stage energy. But kill me, and you'll find yourself back in Third-Stage reality—two miles above the Earth! And nothing under you but death—that'll be your reward for saving Earth for a little while longer, Berton! You want to live!"
Far, far away, I felt Reeta and Carleth, still trying to help me. Sure, a man wants to live. That Marty in Jelahn's tavern, he wanted to live. Millions of people on Earth, they wanted to live, wanted to try to make it work. No man wants to die. ”

“ Malcolm said, "Too bad. He went through the Barrier. He is back in Fourth Stage reality now; we will go to work on the ten Uranium Pile men and remove the posthypnotic commands from their minds. We can do that, now that he has gone back through the barrier. But he can come back here, Ray; he will plan something, some way to defeat us.
"Ray—you will have to go through the barrier after him. You will have to develop Fourth Stage consciousness; you will have to grow beyond Earth's Three Stage reality. You still have to kill him, Ray." ”

“ The decision must be yours, Ray Berton. We can give you the support of what paraphysical energy we have left within us. But we can't destroy directly; you must do that. In that way, you're different from us, but you're not a freak like Durach and these others. You have temporary Fourth Stage awareness. At a given time, that awareness will fade, and you'll go back to Third Stage reality, and be as you were before, with no memory of this world. Destroy him, Berton. ”

“ They want to destroy us, because we're superior. They want Third-Stage reality, with its disease, its blindness and its million incurable sicknesses to go on being a burden to the realization of Fourth Stage greatness, holding it back, drawing its entropic rate down to zero.
"Listen, Berton! If we destroy the Third Plane, the energy release will speed up the entropic rate of Fourth Plane development a billion fold. You can be one of us. A part of it. And why not? We're mutations. You got through the barrier because they changed your nervous system and consciousness by synthetic methods. ”

“ But more than any of those things, you can—kill. Except for on the frontier planets and the asteroids, the ability to kill has been bred out by the new psychogenic surgery and conditioning marts."
She hesitated, then said, "And he has to be killed, Ray; that's the only way left. Killing is destructive, and we can't do it. We're mentally incapable of doing it. But he isn't; that's our handicap. You've got to help us."
And I knew she was right. Whether I knew it because of my own thinking, or whether Malcolm Mergon's mind had forced me to know it—that wasn't important any more. ”

“ Malcolm Mergon spoke then. "So—you are going to meet this person who controls them. We can not move against those ten while he is around, and he is stronger than we are. When he is gone, then we can go to work on those Chief's minds. You will have to kill this man!"
"Who is this man," I said, not very loud.
"Ronal LeStrang," he said. "President of the Atomic Energy Commission."
I jumped up. I was mad and scared and confused. "Hey wait now! You think just because I'm a bit of nameless scum you picked up out of a Martian garbage pit, you can make a sucker out of me! I'm no professional killer! ”

“ It had come through the barrier too.
Carleth's and Reeta's thoughts drifted after me: "We can give you some protection. A constant stream of mind-energy shielding. We'll stay with you, as closely as possible.
"Durach is there, in the tallest building in the City."
I looked back. Reeta stood in the center of the village by the fountain, waving. I didn't wave back. I knew that my smile was bitter. And then I concentrated as much as I could on the flat metal disc that came out at me from the wall of the bubble with a humming of delicate electronic power. ”

“ We're natural freaks, you might say. Mal and Glora created a freak out of you so you would come through the Barrier. But we're all freaks, neither Third or Fourth Stage—but the strongest talents of both planes are in us!
"They can't move back from Fourth to Third Plane after having once left the Fourth. They can't destroy anything with their paraphysical power, Berton. That's their weakness. But we can. They call us insane. ”

“ But if you are, why are you helpless before this guy Durach? Why do you have to call on me?"
Carleth said, "No, we're not supermen, Berton; just extended, or advanced men. There'll never be supermen; there'll never be perfection."
Carleth turned; he looked at the wall and it melted away. I was looking at a distant city. And what a city! Cone-shaped spires thousands of feet high, and one high above the others, with the moon behind it.
Carleth said, "This Fourth Stage world of Mohln is sparsely populated; only a few have come through. ”

“ Back to Mohln, the Fourth Stage.
According to Malcolm and Glora, when LeStrang came back through the barrier a second time, he would probably have some way to destroy Earth that couldn't be stopped—not even by me, the big super-super killer.
"His is a paranoid mind," Malcolm Mergon said. "He is unpredictable. His delusions of two different realities may change its course of action, but his psychological character can't change. His methods will; he is destructive. That is his goal, motivated by paranoiacal desire for revenge, because of persecution. He must be killed; that is the only way. ”

“ Things worse than a Martian cop could do with his coercoats and neuron twisters.
My head hurt and I yelled something. Everything around me started to melt and run together, and the stone under my boots got soft. I got a fading look at them, two of them, standing like purple shadows. A girl with black black eyes. And a man, a big Earthman, aristocratic and distinguished-looking, with eyes like polished Venusian fog crystals.
I heard the fading thunder from the spaceport outside Sanskran, and that was all, for a while. ”

“ Reeta said. Now her thought and her voice was weaker, faraway, dying. "Remember—Durach's insane."
Insane? Insane by what judgment? It was relative. Who—?
Durach's final argument was the most convincing; nobody wants to die. "It means death for you, Berton, if you kill me. This city, this tower we're on top of—it exists because I will it to exist! This tower is two miles high, Berton! Kill me, and the tower will crumble from under you. You'll fall—fall, Berton! Remember, your Fourth Stage capacity is only temporary. When you kill me, your work for them will be done. ”

“ What it really does is regress consciousness molecules to lower and lower stages of development until it becomes again bounded by Third-Stage blindness. Durach made the Merger to help him and his freaks destroy Earth's plane. What they don't realize is that the two planes are the same, part of the same reality field, except that one is the result of more complex powers of awareness."
I thought about what Carleth had been telling me. It all started to fit together. I told him what had happened on Earth—about Durach getting control of the minds of the ten Chiefs who ran the Uranium Piles. ”

“ I raised the neutron gun. "Next time," I said. "There isn't going to be any."
He laughed softly at me. As I started to fire, his body faded; it became nothingness right there in front of me, like it had turned into smoke, and then the smoke became transparent. Then there was nothing at all. ”

“ Now it was just Ray Berton and the cops—and nothing in between but the cold Martian night. So I turned and ran the other way. A knot of men came out of the tavern and came at me. I stopped. Another jetcar curved into the street from the other end of the block. All right. I turned, backed into the side of the triangle of stone, stood waiting and my fists were hard. I'd never had any parents, not much. My mother died when I was born, and twelve years later, my dad died from over-exposure to above ten point cos-rays. It isn't anything to remember, seeing an old man die like that. ”

“ Yet, I knew he hated this menace.... "Durach and the other freaks have feelings of inferiority. They want to compensate, they have developed paranoid delusions. They were persecuted on Earth, naturally as freaks. Regarded as insane, imprisoned, mistreated. They have strong revenge motives; they want to destroy Earth.
"Also, Durach has a theory that Third-Stage Earth is holding back the development of Mohln. He thinks that if Earth's plane was destroyed, Mohln could expand into complete Fourth Stage reality. ”

“ What's it ever done for any of the poor guys dying from cosmic-rays and getting killed because there aren't any laws out there? It takes our metal for precious atomician work, and what does it give us in return? ”

“ That is why he's been killing us one by one. Our power over the Merger has been going down. The danger point is reached now."
"And what about Mal and Glora?"
"They followed Durach into Third-Plane reality to try to stop him. By so doing, they sacrificed most of their higher abilities. Durach, being a freak, an abnormal Fourth Stage man, came back through. But Glora and Mal cannot; they can never attain Fourth Stage life again."
Carleth paused, then said, "You can destroy, Berton; we cannot. Therefore, you're the last chance of defeating Durach." ”

“ Men who have been tested and scanned and conditioned until the Atomic Energy Commission hasn't any doubt of their reliability. But we happen to know that an unintegrated personality of great mental power—powers like our own—has gotten control of these ten Chief's minds. ”

“ Carleth nodded. "You ran Durach back here into Fourth Stage reality. Since then he's been using various kinds of gadgets to destroy us, one by one. A kind of electron force feeler, you might call it. We've caught flashes of his purpose, though they keep their diseased minds locked up pretty well. It's almost impossible, and sometimes destructive, to try to contact them mentally.
"He intends to return to Earth through the Merger. This time he'll take the secret of the electronic feeler with him. He'll be able to kill Mal and Glora with it. ”

“ Third plane disease still motivates them, even though they developed enough Fourth Stage awareness to come through the barrier. They're paranoids, according to Third-Stage standards. Here, they're much worse than that—able to realize many of their delusions.
"But they're freaks. They didn't develop by evolution to reach Mohln; they developed suddenly. As soon as they first came through, we knew they were abnormal, that they didn't belong. Durach brought Third Stage irrational, blind, destructive motivations with him. Diseased personality attitudes. He wanted power ”

“ Reeta whispered. "They don't last long once Durach and his gadgets pierce our last protective neural defense bands. We've had no real defense. Even the last, or sith-threshold, is temporary. He's hit us with various degrees of destructive mental force, augmented by his gadgets. We've resisted each stage, but not the sith-threshold breaker. Durach's closing in fast now that he's weakened us. He wants full control of the Merger, so he can go back into the Third-Stage plane and destroy it." ”

“ He organized some other freaks who were being kept on a small island off the coast of Japan. A year later they had developed sufficiently to break through into Mohln."
"There's only twelve of us left. You see no one here's in the same stage of Fourth Plane awareness; some develop faster than others. That makes us have different degrees of susceptibility to Durach's mental attacks. Reeta and myself, we happen to be the highest, now that Mal and Glora have gone back into Third-Stage existence." ”

“ That a hundred square miles around each pile would be destroyed only. That's so wrong, Ray. Through special abilities, Mal and I are aware of an unstable element existing here; Earth scientists can't discover it. If those Ten Piles reach simultaneous critical mass, it will react on this big unstable element. The Earth won't exist anymore. ”

“ At a specific time, acting in complete unconscious accord, they will respond to a posthypnotic command already planted in their unconscious minds. Upon responding, they will allow those Piles to reach critical mass. ”