Part 2

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. Just a big room that seemed empty even though I was in it. He had disappeared, but I hadn't fired.

For a minute I went completely blank. I felt numb all over, then panic hit me. LeStrang had disappeared in front of me. I knew he hadn't been wiped out; he'd just gone someplace else. That was part of this--power. Mental power. Glora and Malcolm Mergon had it. LeStrang had it--

And Ray Berton--no that was crazy! Maybe I could send and receive thoughts. But a lot of ESP groups could do that. It was still borderline stuff, not accepted by the big shot scientists. Telepathy, and--ESP included other wild talents, I knew. An old woman on the South Canal had claimed to have the power of teleportation. Gamblers talked about telekenesis.

I had to get out of LeStrang's office; I was trapped there, and I'd be the goat if caught. From somewhere, I heard Glora's thought voice calling.

"Get out of that office, right now, Ray! Hurry. We'll help you. Get rid of doubts. You can do it; think about how you can do it. Come back here to us, Ray. Back to us. Right now. All of you, at once, right now. Think of us, visualize us, this room. You're not there. You're here. _You're here, Ray! Here!_"

And she was right. I wasn't in LeStrang's office anymore.

I was someplace else, and as close to death as I'd ever been in my life.

I re-formed, I guess you would say, but somehow I missed the inside of Glora and Malcolm's sky-top suite. I suddenly found myself hanging in empty air, just outside their window.

A hundred and twenty some stories straight down--air. I started to fall, then grabbed the window ledge. But the shock had weakened me so much I don't think I could have held on. Glora and Malcolm came to the window, grabbed my wrists and dragged me inside.

I fell down on my knees. I didn't have the strength to stand up. My clothes were wet, and I held my hands down hard on the floor to keep them from shaking.

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."

3

Through The Barrier

I didn't have any idea what they were talking about then. They were so urgent and desperate, I guess they forgot that I was just an ignorant, no-good space bum who'd happened to strike it rich, and then gotten himself into a killer's brawl.

Later I got to know a little about the various stages of consciousness and how they determine what reality is.

But then, I knew next to nothing; so I asked them again to please explain what it was all about. They tried to explain, but you can't explain color to a man who'd never seen color. And that's the way it is with trying to explain Fourth Stage reality, the next step above three-dimensional awareness, to a man who's all tied up in the blindfold of three-dimensional perspective.

LeStrang and Glora and Malcolm were Fourth Stage people. They had come back through a barrier, a state of mental awareness separating Third from Fourth dimensional reality; they had come back through this barrier from the Fourth Stage plane of reality. This is coexistent with Earth's Three Stage plane, and it's called Mohln.

LeStrang had come through to destroy Earth; then Glora and Malcolm, at great sacrifice, had followed him into Three Stage Plane, or Earth, to try to stop him.

Their only chance was to get some sucker, someone who could be destructive, as they said. They couldn't. So I'd been picked, and had chased the mad guy back where he came from. 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. We have tried everything else. We can not influence him mentally. There is no rapport with diseased and twisted personalities, such as his."

I felt as though I didn't have any mind of my own left--and I didn't care much. I was bigger than any lousy human I'd ever met, besides Malcolm and Glora, or LeStrang. Maybe a few ESP guys around the planets had a little of what I had, but nothing like me. I didn't want to go back to being a narrow Third-Plane mind, squeezed down to blind thinking not much above any other animal's.

So I agreed to go through the barrier. There was a lot of explanation there, too, and I guess I remember some of it; something about reality--being relative to degrees of awareness.

He talked about how consciousness was a great machine that evolved slowly, powered by basic energy, the energy that makes atoms and electrons. He told me about how this machine evolved, how it was once only one-dimensional in its awareness, then two-dimensional, then three. But that there were ever higher degrees of awareness; and for each definite plane of increased awareness, was another coexistent world.

They told me how the evolution was gradual, sporadic among different people, but gradual among species over millions of years of time. And now the increase in extrasensory perception showed that more and more third-stage minds and nervous systems were developing very close to breaking the barrier into Fourth Stage awareness. A new world. A new reality of tremendously expanded senses.

That's what he said, Malcolm Mergon.

Then he said that the mind and the nervous system being a great and highly complex machine powered by the basic energy of the cosmos, that machine could be tinkered with, changed, stepped up--automatically--if the tools were available.

They had the tools; they had minds so far above mine it wasn't anything you could even talk about. Not and make any sense out of it. Everyone has the latent capacity to develop Fourth Stage consciousness. Even a one-celled amoeba, given time, will develop it.

But me--they were going to make me develop it fast. My sensory apparatus would grow in complexity and degree of awareness of higher-stage reality. And I would be in that other plane of Mohln where the guy I was after had gone.

I didn't understand. But I had the feeling that I--might.

I said for them to go ahead and give me the business. And they did; I went through the barrier.

* * * * *

Behind the wall of that room above Manhattan, they had a small square cell. They put me in it, and a reddish light filled the room and started eating into me. There were no doors, no windows in it, nothing but naked bare walls. And they went to work on me. They turned hidden power on me I suppose, but anyway they changed me.

I don't know what they changed; I probably couldn't explain it if I did know. Nervous system, mind, those dormant ESP abilities everyone has in one degree or another.

Malcolm had given me an example of one stage reality--a line, with everything else as the unknown, or time. And then the two stage reality, where height became time, then the Third-Stage reality where the Fourth became "time"--

It got over my head there; I felt sick and my head felt like it was flying in a million parts. But by then, they said, my Fourth Stage potential was ready for the final treatment. And I was ready to break through.

There was a terrible kind of concentration with Glora and Malcolm giving me mind-energy way above my own. Something seemed to burst inside of me. There was pain beyond pain; after that faded away there was a kind of quiet drifting that seemed to go on through a soft cloudy nothingness for a long time.

The four walls of that small cell blurred, but remained as a misty outline. The reddish light faded; black night took its place; the black turned to gray. For a while it was like two superimposed pictures; the cell, and behind it another place.

Then the cell was gone.

I was standing in a dim twilight that had a soft blue tone to it. I was in a much bigger room now. The walls were a funny color, like gray human flesh.

I stared at the wall as I climbed to my feet, wishing there was a door or window so I could see out. And as I looked--a window was there! Or rather, an opening melted away for me.

A feeling of wonderfulness, of magnificence went through me. I staggered like I was drunk with a feeling of thundering joy. I walked over and looked out. A soft sun was setting over soft purple hills. Everything was like that, soft and inviting and warm; beauty, like in a dream that you forget when you wake up. That's what it was like. And I knew there was much more I couldn't see or feel.

They had expanded my mind so much that Third-Stage reality was gone. I was in another world of awareness. But I guess even they couldn't expand my mind enough to see what the real Fourth Stage was, all of it I mean. Maybe we'll all know, sometime.

There was a sensation of _aliveness_--in everything. Walls, floor, ceiling, the very air, all the outside of the room, the green fields and giant ferns, everything seemed alive. And when I walked there was that feeling of bursting freedom.

Malcolm had said that with increasing awareness, a similarity developed. One got nearer to the basic energy of all things with his own expanding mind. But this wasn't for me to understand; maybe it won't be for but a very few--not for a long time yet.

I looked out. I wanted to be out of that room and down there on that wonderfully soft grass with the ferns that seemed alive and calling to me. A square of grayish metal moved out of the wall and came to me. I knew what to do. I sat on it, and it carried me out of the room, through the wall, and down to the ground. There was a connection between the processes of thinking in me, my wishes, and the hidden machinery in the metal square.

Machinery powered by some great efficiency that used mind-energy. I got off the square and it raised and went back through the wall of the tall cone-shaped tower. And as I looked, the tower disappeared. Where it had stood was a field of shoulder-tall flowers with bright red blossoms.

* * * * *

I started walking. A path opened for me. Fern fronds parted and closed again behind me. Water gushed over rocks in the cool shadows. It wasn't very light, though the moon was full and red, and I walked carefully, senses I'd never known before sharply tuned for danger.

I saw her then, a Fourth Stage girl, as I came round a curve in the path. Her skin was golden and soft, like everything else around us. She stared at me.

Her voice was like music. "You just--came through?"

It wasn't a question. She knew I had just come through the barrier. I don't remember whether we talked verbally or by telepathy. But on Mohln it doesn't make any difference.

She nodded. "Yes," and started walking toward me. She didn't seem quite real; nothing here seemed solid, quite real. Or it was more like I couldn't see quite enough to make it very real for me. Like a man who has lost part of his vision.

She looked like Glora, and she gave out with a sobbing cry of joy as she probed my mind and knew everything about how I had come through, and why. She ran to me and took hold of my hands; her body glowed and her breath came faster. "I'm Reeta. Glora is my sister. I've been wondering if they would send someone through."

She stepped back. "We must get him--Durach--fast!"

She caught my confusion. "Durach, same man as LeStrang. Here he is Durach."

Reeta turned, led me through a wall of fern branches and onto a different path. "We could go to my brother Carleth the other way," she said softly--referring, I knew, to teleportation. "But we can't strain your newly acquired senses too much now. Ordinarily, one breaking through has many days just for readjustment and adaptation. But you won't have any time at all for that. Durach is already acting against us; he's killing us."

She was running, and leading me. She ran effortlessly, like somebody without weight. "We'll go right to the village and see Carleth, my brother. We haven't much time. Maybe we're already too late, Ray Berton!"

As I ran, I wondered what had happened to the real LeStrang back on Earth, the Third Plane. Durach had gone through the Barrier and had taken LeStrang's place; he'd gotten away with it by using his extra-senses. By suggestion he could have made everyone else think he was LeStrang. And he could have gotten rid of LeStrang easily enough--For example by just willing him some place else, all at once. Say five thousand feet under the Earth's surface, or in the middle of the Atlantic, or out in space.

Then Durach had become LeStrang for a while, long enough to interview each of those Uranium Pile chiefs, and put them under his domination. He'd given them a hypnotic command, posthypnotic, for each to allow his Uranium Pile to reach critical mass upon a certain signal. I didn't know how he'd worked that--

Reeta led me down through an underground tubeway and into a big bubble. A warm soft light shone inside the bubble. Small cone buildings were built in a neat circle. In the center were gardens and fountains. People stared and whispered at me.

Reeta stopped, her face suddenly froze, and then turned slowly with sick eyes. Her fingers pressed her cheeks.

A wrenching scream stabbed through that garden. Still screaming and clutching her head, a woman came running crazily down a path through the center of the village. Faces of men, women and children came out of buildings, staring and flinching with sick pain.

The woman ran with her hands reaching out in front of her. Her neck was straining like a starving bird's. I felt Reeta's fingernails dig into my arm. The voice hit me like a spray of ice. "Another one! Another one to Durach and his freaks!"

The tortured woman's cries chopped at me. My ears hurt; my insides knotted. She was still screaming and running when she suddenly fell on her face. She lay there jerking and twitching among the smashed flowers. Other people were running toward her, tall, marvelously strong and light moving people. I thought of them as being like gods, maybe. The woman's body stopped moving as two men bent over her.

I could tell it wouldn't move again. It had that look.

"Dead," 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."

I thought it was all about as clear as Venusian moonlight. I turned quickly as a low soft voice spoke. I knew it was Carleth, her brother, standing just outside the nearest cone building. He was tall and terrifically strong looking. He was studying me, inside and out.

Then he looked at Reeta. "Give the thought order to both our villages right now! That Glora and Mal have sent a man with Third-Stage abilities through. Tell them to throw up full resistance in the _sith_-sector. Maybe that way, we can hold Durach's attacks off until Berton can get to him."

4

"There Is Durach"

Carleth led me inside the cone, right through the wall. I felt the humming of delicate machinery as though it was part of the working of my own brain. An opening that closed again behind us.

I sat down. I was very tired. Something was very wrong; I knew that. Here I was--but here I wasn't. I was through the Barrier, with enough of this so-called awakened consciousness to live in the Fourth Stage world of perception; but I wasn't like Reeta or Carleth, not by a long shot.

I almost yelled as the chair reached up around me and stretched itself to fit me. I shifted my position, and the chair remolded itself to me. I was still trying to get rid of a clammy helpless feeling when Carleth said: "We still may have time to act against Durach. We've saved this last paraphysical resistance band in each of our minds until the last. He's broken down the others since he came back through the barrier. He might be able to kill the rest of us within an hour."

He looked at me strangely. "One hour perhaps, Ray Berton, to save your world, Earth, from annihilation. One hour to get Durach."

Fine, I thought, but first, I'm hungry. And a tray of food floated out of the wall and settled down on my lap. A steak, and all the accessories, just what I'd wished I had.

While I ate, Carleth told me that people here didn't get energy that way when they had stayed here long enough. Here, he said, they used a process that Third-Stage minds call telurgy. Fourth Stage minds use telurgy to construct their buildings, and transportation, and to get energy directly from any element they wanted to get it from. The only difference, he said, between any objects is made by our limited consciousness (Third Stage) reacting to differently shaped electron-identity patterns. Yet basically every substance, everything in the cosmos, is the same, made different only by degrees of evolving mental machinery.

I finished eating and said, "You're supermen here--that it? 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. We built these two small villages, for meditation and self development. We lived here, helping others who came through to adjust and realize their growing potentialities. It was peaceful then. Normally, it would be no other way here--sane and balanced and marvelously stimulating as we discovered and developed new abilities of Fourth Stage power."

He stared at the distant city, and said to me, "Then Durach and his freaks came through. They built that city. It might be called by you a city of the mind. Their diseased minds keep it there by paraphysical mental energy."

"Freaks," I said. "Here too?"

"Yes, freaks; they're different. There's only seven of them, and that they should build such a colossal futile city is proof enough of their pathological, third-stage thinking. 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; he wanted to rule and conquer blindly. There had been an accident that sent him here.

"Durach and his freaks were seven chances in millions, but they happened. Teratological freaks, monsters. Before they broke away from us and built that mental city, we found their secret."

Carleth fell silent for a moment, then continued softly. "Durach and the others there are offsprings of Third-Stage men and women who were exposed to gamma rays, from experimental radioactivity, from the last war, from various conditions on Third-Stage Earth allowing over-exposure to hard radiation.

"Durach's father was an atomician engineer who was subjected to gamma rays while working in one of the imperfected Uranium Piles, sometime during 1964, according to Earth reckoning. Five years later, Durach reached what is adult maturity in the Third Plane. 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."

* * * * *

It was strange, hearing him say these things with hatred in his voice. 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.

"Durach made a Merging machine to open a channel between the two coexisting planes. 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.

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. He'll be more powerful there than they are, because in returning to Third-Stage reality, they've sacrificed most of their Fourth Plane capacities.

"In other words, the next time Durach goes through the barrier, he'll achieve his purpose. He'll have killed all of us by the electronic feeler. It disassociates electron structure of the nervous system so that it can't reform."

"And I'm the only one who can stop him," I whispered.

Carleth said that was right.

I said, "Why doesn't Durach use the Merger then, right now, and go back and get the job done?"