Title: Earth needs a killer
Author: Walton, Bryce
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Earth needs a killer" ***


                         Earth Needs A Killer

                         DYNAMIC FEATURE NOVEL

                            By Bryce Walton

                 _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!_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
    Future combined with Science Fiction Stories July-August 1950.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



From an evening tele-audiocast by International Information Service,
New York City, September 8, 1983: Reporter: ... _and now, as a special
dramatic interest story, here's something for the Fortean Society,
though a more scientific diagnosis will certainly be forthcoming._

_At five P.M. today, a man's body materialized out of thin air at an
altitude of over ten thousand feet above Uptown Manhattan. According
to many reliable witnesses, the body plunged down to smash into an
unrecognizable mass on the plasticrete of Tier 19 and Grav-lift 6-H,
Fifth Avenue II._

_The reliable witnesses include twenty passengers of the trans-State
jetliner, all of whom agree that the unknown man did materialize out of
the air very near the liner's position as it circled for a cradle in La
Guardia Field._

_Every witness tells about the same story that the body did appear
suddenly from the atmosphere. There was no other air vessel near. Also
it was reported that another object followed the body out of the air,
according to preliminary reports, a manuscript oddly written on a
scroll of metal._

_Stay visioed to I.I.S. for further reports on this Fortean mystery.
The manuscript, we hope, will contain some kind of explanation which
will be forwarded to you as soon as it reaches our news clearance
scanners...._

       *       *       *       *       *

It starts for me on Mars. I guess Mars is about the only place it could
have started. Maybe they'll bring the real earth law there someday, and
clean up dives like Jelahn's _krin-krin_ tavern on the North Canal, a
breeding place for crime, and where a man can be goaded into killing.
That night I didn't care much.

The place was crawling with scum, strained through the sieves of
Marsport, and Jokhara and Sanskran where the worst of the asteroid
miners and space bums gather. Earthmen and Martians and half-breeds
whom the Solar cops, said to be the toughest ever to wear a shield,
would have gone at with care.

I was feeling high, with enough _krin-krin_ burning in me to make a
Martian _srith_-dog sit up and talk Esperanto. And by the time I'd been
blotting up _krin-krin_ for a few hours, any space bum thinking to push
me around was crazy. So the big yellow skinned Martian with the green
eyes was crazy for trying to drag this breed tavern girl away from my
table.

Crazy first, then dead. I'd seen plenty of dead men before, and I knew
the look. I knew I'd hit him too hard as soon as he stretched on the
bright green stones of Jelahn's tavern, and didn't try to get up.
Standing there looking down at him, I knew he'd never get up by himself.

The whole tavern had dried up like a scab. The place was so quiet you
could hear the Martian's blood trickling from his mouth onto the floor.
"You certainly lowered that poor, poor Marty," somebody whispered.

I swung around fiercely, but the speaker eased away from me. "What in a
blasted jet's the use of hitting a man, if you don't hit him right?" I
yelled. I was drunk, and I was getting sick; I'd never liked the sight
or smell of dead men.

Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at the dead Marty. The blood
stopped running. I prodded him with my foot. Oh, he had the look all
right, the kind a man only gets once and for always. People stared.
Even on Mars, death isn't so common that it isn't interesting.

I could hear myself breathing in the silence. I was sick. I'd
never been the kind of space tough one of those Martian Colonial
Administrator's women would invite to a Double Moon tea, but just the
same everyone doesn't like to kill.

My record wasn't too bad; brawls, drunks, a few killings in self
defense. Born in the asteroids, father a prospector, me a prospector.
At twenty-three, I'd hit a strike a month ago, and cushioned into the
big port at Sanskran to unload, get more machinery and return to that
meteorite where I'd hit "heavy" beryllium, paired-atom stuff worth
twice its weight in platinum to the Atomician boys on Earth.

The breed girl, the cause of the trouble, cried, "He's dead!"

Nobody moved. Then the girl came at me; the few jewels, which was all
she wore, flashed as red as her eyes and her clawing nails. "You killed
him!" she screamed. I pushed in her face with my flat hand, and sent
her sprawling beside the dead guy she was so nuts about.

The _krin-krin_ went out of me. The place was hot and somebody said the
cops were coming. There was no time for talking or thinking or feeling
sorry; I measured my chances and ran for the door. I knocked two guys
out of the way and went through the blue stone doors into the street.
Up the red stone street like it was swimming in blood, a black jetcar
was coming fast under the shine of the Deimos.

Cops. I'd never had any trouble with them before. 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.

So I'd been a space bum, and ended up a drunken brawling killer in
a North Canal scum sieve! _All right, so maybe you could have done
better. Come on and get it, you guys who think you could have done any
better. Come on, come on...._

And then it hit me. _Thought._ A big hot fist of it, punching into my
head. A big exploding fire of thought--_but not my own_.

"_Step over here into the shadows, Ray Berton._"

       *       *       *       *       *

I didn't think of telepathy then, though I thought plenty about it
afterwards. I stumbled back, wanting to get away, but scared. I started
to sweat; somebody could get inside me, and stay there and do things
to me. 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. The next thing I knew I was coming into
Earth, a place I'd never been, and wasn't supposed to be able to go to
because I'd never been 'purified'. I had no Solar visa, I thought, and
didn't want to go through the psyche treatment necessary to get one.

But a lot of things changed for me that night when they took me off
that street. Teleportation, that's what it was--whatever _that_ is.
They had machines all right. Their minds and nervous systems, which
they had perfected, were machines. Mind-energy, the basic energy.

I learned a little about that stuff later, but not very much.

Even after they gave me some of their 'power' like giving a kid candy,
I didn't know what it was. Like any dumb atomeer can use the power of
breaking atoms and not know anything more about physical science than a
New York debutante knows about a _krin-krin_ hangover. Like the experts
who still can't tell you what electricity is.

I came out of the fog feeling pretty good, considering. I knew
one thing right off, as any spacer would: I was in space, at
C-acceleration, beyond the neutral-gravity point between planets, and
in free fall.

I sat up on foam-rubber cushioning and this girl was looking at me
with those black black eyes, so black they were almost purple. The big
aristocratic guy was sitting beside her.

She was young and very nice to look at. Her eyes softened, and I felt
more at ease. The gent smiled; both of them gave me the idea of having
a lot more energy and vitality than any ordinary person.

"We saved you from the police," she said. Her body moved softly under
skin-tight resensilk. She had used her voice, but I felt her thoughts.
I knew she didn't have to use her lips to tell me anything. It was a
funny feeling. "You're on a space-cruiser. We'll be in a La Guardia
field cradle in five hours."

"How?" I said. "How did it happen? How did you--?"

She shook her head. "You wouldn't understand. Not yet."

"All right," I said. "You saved my life, and a lot more. You may know
how the Martian cops crack down. You did a lot for me." I leaned
forward. "Now what's the catch?"

"You can repay us personally. You can do us a big favor in return. By
so doing, you can possibly save Earth from annihilation."

I laughed and her eyes widened. "Wouldn't you want to do that?"

My laugh faded; she meant it. Maybe she was crazy, but she didn't know
it. And for crazy people, they certainly had pulled a good job of
getting me off that street, into a cruiser, and to Earth. Maybe some
kind of a gag.

She said in a whisper. "You--_killed_ a man!"

I looked into her eyes until I thought I was passing out. I clenched my
hands. "An accident. Hit him too hard. I'm no killer, I--"

"But you did kill him, and you've killed before...."

"In self defense, sure," I said. "But out there in the Asteroids, you
have to--"

She said, "I understand. Now, you'll do some things for us. You
won't ask questions because you wouldn't understand; later, you may
understand without asking."

I felt like the commonest kind of crook. "So you saved my life," I
said, "just so you'd have a sucker to pull some kind of a job for you.
Now I suppose if I don't want to do what you say, you'll threaten to
turn me over to the Solar authorities for shipment back to the Martian
cops!"

She flushed a little. "Wait," she said, "until you find out the truth,
then I'm sure you'll _want_ to help us. I'm sure you want to save Earth
and its billions of people from death."

       *       *       *       *       *

I shrugged. "What'd Earth ever do for me? 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? A few lousy
credits, and a sign saying 'Keep out--no admission'. The devil with
Earth."

"You must help us," the man said very softly and yet very forcefully.

"You mean I've got no choice, is that it?"

The girl raised her eyebrows. "There would be no sense in your making a
choice now; you can't understand, so no choice would be valid. It would
be only blind emotionalism."

"I see." I was mad. I could handle this cruiser myself. I'd been
kidnapped by people who considered me nothing more than a robot they
were going to use. I swung my feet around, got them planted solidly
down on the mesh grid flooring.

I got my hands down on either side of me so I could move fast and hard.
"I see. Well, I'm not playing sucker for anybody."

I could hear the soft whispering of space against the platinum lined
skin of the cruiser. Her eyes burned into me. I felt helpless and very
much alone. But the devil with them I thought.

So I jumped straight for the aristocratic gent, and swung a long stiff
right for his jaw. He faded into the air. I yelled wildly as he seemed
to drift away like smoke, and into nothingness. I turned and there he
was over in the corner of the cabin.

[Illustration: I jumped straight for the aristocratic gent, and swung a
long stiff right to his jaw. He faded into the air....]

His eyes shot sparks, but he wasn't mad; he just looked grim. "You
may cause us trouble when we cushion in," he said softly. "So I think
you had better go back to sleep." He moved toward me. I tried to move
my arms and legs, but I suddenly found that I couldn't move anything.
"And perhaps it will be better if you have no more resistance to our
suggestions after we reach earth."

His eyes seemed to expand out and out and out. It was like I was
falling into a widening black pool.

"And," I heard his distant voice say, "that is the way it will be.
Until you can make free choice of your own, you will have to agree
with us completely. Subconsciously you know we are right; some time you
will know it with your full consciousness."

They had it all right, whatever it was. But not as much as their
friends. They had as much of the greater power as you can have, and
still be bounded by Third-Plane reality.

It was mental power. Mind-energy they called paraphysical. Nothing
trite, like I'd seen the quack women along the North Canal pull with
mass hypnotism; this was something big and way beyond me.

I fell forward into a black hole.



                                   2

                             Kill For Us!


Their names were Glora and Malcolm Mergon; he was her father. They
could make suckers out of anyone they wanted to; they could get into
another guy's mind and make him think, see, feel, hear anything they
wanted him to. Take Extra Sensory Perception, and imagine somebody
who's perfected all of it--and that's the way Glora and Malcolm Mergon
were. Only more so.

We didn't need visas; we didn't have to go into the antiseptic wards;
we didn't have to be scanned. Every time we came into contact with
Guards, or doctors or officers--those guys thought whatever Glora and
Malcolm wanted them to think. So we walked right straight through
all the red tape, and caught a sky-taxi to a sky-top hotel bordering
Central Park West; by then it was noon of a nice spring day.

I sat there, sweating and feeling cold in spite of the even
temperature. I didn't savvy anything; I felt like a kid who'd gotten
lost.

They brought a three-dimensional map out of the air, I guess; I
couldn't tell. It hung in the air like it was glued to nothingness.
Glora moved around me and stood in front of the big tri-dimensional
map. Her legs were long and slim and smooth; she'd be a prize for some
big shot, I thought; but she wasn't my kind. My kind you'll still find
along the North Canal, with very little on, and nothing in their heads
but phony dreams.

"Now," she pointed at various marked sections on the map. "These are
the locations of the ten Uranium Piles that supply all of Earth's
power. If these piles should all reach critical mass at the same time,
the earth would vaporize instantaneously.

"Scientific theory here is that even if all of them blew at once,
though the destruction would be terrific, it wouldn't be fatal. 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."

I gulped. "Is that liable to happen?"

"It probably will, unless you can stop it from happening."

I felt gray sickness on my face, felt that she knew what she was
talking about. "How?" I whispered. "Who'd want to do a thing like that?"

"There's an atomician Chief in control of each of those Piles. 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. 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."

And so then, naturally, I wanted to know what that had to do with me.

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! You guys are hypnotists. How do I know that what
you're saying is fact? How do I know you aren't some foreign agents,
wanting to start a world revolution or something? You think I can go
out and kill a man just because a couple of guys tell me to!"

She pleaded with me. "That's why we came to Mars, Ray," she said. "We
might never have found anyone like you otherwise. You're strong, you
have courage, and very strong latent ESP potentials. 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. I knew I had to do it.

He moved toward me. His eyes burned.

"Wait," I said quickly. I looked around for a way out. I was trapped,
and I didn't know whether I really wanted to get away or not. I only
knew I was scared of what they could do to my mind. My mind wasn't
much, but I was used to it. It was all I had. "Wait a minute, you guys.
Give me a chance. Give--"

"We haven't much time, Ray," he said. "But first we must give you some
added ability. It's already in you, but it's dormant. We'll bring it
into the active stage. Maybe you would like to have some of the--power
that we have, Ray? Anyway, you will need it. Now, Ray, go back to sleep
so we can give you the power. It won't take long. Go back to sleep, Ray.

"_Ray, go back to sleep!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

This time when I recognized daylight again, I was different. I felt
funny, not the same; things were twisted around now. I was walking
down the big new Eighth Tier of Uptown Broadway, feeling the jet-cars
pushing past in their different speed lanes. The sun was shining on the
big lacework of tiers and tubes, and I was walking. But things were not
the same.

I felt like everything that had happened since hitting the Martian in
Jelahn's tavern was part of a dream, and that now I was coming awake
maybe for the first time. The life around me looked faded, blurred, not
quite real.

I had some of _their_ power all right. I could feel it, and it was like
a new kind of Martian rotgut was giving me a crazy highness. I felt
like I'd suddenly gone screwy, but didn't care--as though nobody could
touch me for it. I had some of their power, whoever or whatever they
were, but not very much I thought; just enough to help me kill Ronal
LeStrang.

A tele-audio flash information band on the side of the building shocked
me as I stared at it. It gave the date. September 6, 1983.

Since Malcolm Mergon had walked toward me saying "Ray, go back to
sleep," it had been three weeks! I'd been out three weeks. It jolted
me. Three weeks. Work on my brain; work on my body; do things to my
nervous set-up; make me different. This Glora and Malcolm Mergon--I
knew they could do an awful lot to a guy in three weeks.

I stumbled a little, ran into a cute little blonde. She glared at me
then looked scared. I felt her thoughts, felt hundreds, thousands of
thoughts that belonged to the pedestrians around me, swarming and
beating at my head like moths at a light. "He's a drunk! ... looks
like one of those non-rehabilitated space men ... see the cosmic-ray
burns on his face ... stay away from him ... dangerous...."

Dangerous, sure. They'd done plenty to me, but I didn't know what nor
how much. And I didn't even know why ... not for sure; just what they'd
told me to believe. But I remembered--dangerous--I was supposed to kill.

A piece of uncultured, ignorant, un-psyched space-rot! Picked up and
brought to Earth to do a murder job. They got me, Ray Berton, killer.
But that wasn't enough for them, oh no. They had to give me added
abilities--make me a super-delux killer!

Me, Ray Berton. The guy who would save the world!

       *       *       *       *       *

I took a grav-raise tube up the building front to the top of the big
central UN Building in International Square. I stepped into a scanning
cubicle. A mechanical voice said: "State the purpose of your visit,
please."

I stared around me at the mosaicked floors and walls. A super-super
delux killer. And with one of the most important men in the world to
kill. I knew that, through Glora and Malcolm, I'd made an appointment.
Made it sound important.

"An appointment to see Mr. Ronal LeStrang. About a 'heavy' beryllium
strike in the asteroids." As head of the Atomic Energy Commission,
LeStrang would be more than willing to have a personal talk about that.
The Earth was supposed to be International minded, but it was still a
case of getting the most and getting it first then saying "See!"

"You may go in, Mr. Berton."

I dropped my right hand into my jacket pocket, wrapped my fingers
around a small coiled bunch of deadly metal. Metal with a trigger that
would release enough energy to kill the biggest man in the world as
quickly as any other.

As I came into the big glass-lined office, LeStrang got up from behind
a desk. He was short and stocky, with a naked-looking head and white
eyebrows. There wasn't any sense in wasting time, I figured. I had a
slight advantage of surprise; I took it.

I jumped across the room, and took the little neutron gun out of my
pocket. Before LeStrang could shrug his eyelashes, I had that gun
jabbed right at his belly.

I shivered. His body didn't look real. His eyes didn't belong in that
body; they seemed to flame out at me. I felt thought fingers grabbing
at my mind, but there seemed to be automatic shields clicking into
place, blocking him.

"The interview's over," I said, and started to pull the trigger.

Something stopped me. Sweat ran into my eyes; I felt like I was going
to lay down on the floor. His eyes looked at my cosmic-rayed face, the
purple scars of burns from the wild radioelements of the asteroids.

I heard myself whimpering like a scared _srith_-dog. His thoughts were
stronger, in a way, than Glora's or Malcolm's. They started eating away
at my mind like dark acid--thought fingers getting hold and trying to
squeeze like my brain was a sponge.

"Glora and Mal sent you of course. They couldn't touch me here, so they
sent you. I didn't think they'd stoop so low as to hire animals to work
for them. Well, they can't win anyway; I had the thing all set, but now
it's just a case of postponement. I'll fix it next time so they can't
stop me."

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. 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?"

He explained that to me also. "As soon as he came back this time, we
knew what he had tried to do, what he was planning. We got conscious
control of the Merger machinery, or part of it anyway. We've maintained
that control because we have greater numbers, and the combined
mind-energy has been too much for Durach. 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."

I thought about everything, as much as I could. About how bitter it
would be to know the feeling of being a part of this higher world of
Mohln, then finding yourself once again in the blind and groping world
of the Third Plane where no one had any idea of what greater reality
was so near.

       *       *       *       *       *

Reeta came in. I caught a stray thought from her that sent pain and
sickness and futility through me. A thought of sadness and pity for me
as she looked at me.

I backed toward the wall. I thought hard, hard, and the wall opened for
me. A second of joyous power gave way to despair. I didn't belong here;
I didn't belong anywhere now. What if I should kill Durach? And then
what if I went back to the Third Plane?

What then? I wouldn't fit there either. I'd still keep some of the
power, I knew that. I'd be an ESP freak then, probably working in some
televised vaudishow. And I couldn't stay here, I thought, because I
hadn't developed normally. I'd been artificially developed so that I
could go through the Barrier hadn't I?

I was nobody; I was nowhere. I didn't have a name anymore, not really.
These supermen weren't my kind either.

Carleth pointed toward the City. "Durach's there," I heard him whisper.
And Reeta's eyes were wet with sorrow as she came toward me.

I didn't want to see her anymore, or feel her hands on me; I didn't
wait for anything else. One thing I knew as I went through the wall and
started down the beautiful still street:

_I would kill Durach, and then I'd be finished._ I tried to ignore the
screams in the village, tried not to see the people dying around me.

I still carried that neutron gun Malcolm Mergon had given me. 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. I sat on it. I thought: "I'd like to be on my way to
the City. To the City."

I was outside the bubble. I was high above the surface of Mohln, with
the quickness of thought. And I was--high!

It was like a splash of white light under me, the moon shining on that
wonderful world. I looked ahead toward those giant spires of that
colossal city. Built for ten men, ten freaks. A city of thought.

That one tower stuck up half again as high as the rest of the City. A
blue dangerous looking light shone from its top. There wasn't any use
drawing this appointment out, I thought. And a fast appearance might
give me an advantage of surprise, if I had any advantage at all, and I
doubted that.

"There," I thought, "is where I want to be next. On top of that
building, facing Durach. _Now!_"

And I was there.



                                   5

                             Remember Me?


Durach was waiting for me. Not LeStrang; nothing that looked like
LeStrang. This was the real Durach, and he was not something you would
want to see a second time, nor anything you would care to remember, if
you could help it.

He wasn't human; he was a monster, a freak. Yet, he looked much like
anyone else. It was the inside of him that was so different.

Durach wasn't alone as I found myself standing there before him. Two
women and several men were in the big arched room with him. None of
them were any more pleasant on the inside than Durach. Jelahn's dive
on the North Canal seemed like the memory of an anteroom to paradise
compared with the feeling in this room of Durach's.

It was filthy and obscene, and it made me mad; it made me shaking mad
to think that a chance thing like these freaks had been sent into the
Fourth Stage world of Mohln where they didn't belong, to contaminate
it, and bring hate and destruction and death to a world that had put a
few men at least on the edge of marvelous super life.

Durach was bigger than he had been in the personality of LeStrang, a
personality he had given to people by suggestion. He was on a couch of
bright red that seemed to writhe under him. Durach was a fat white man
with white hair, his fat wrapped up in a tight-fitting shiny stuff like
resensilk. His face was soft and his eyes wide and bland and blue. Pale
jowls hung over his collar on either side, and under his beaked nose
was a small, pursed, red button of a mouth.

Silly little mouth, I thought. I wanted to laugh at it, but I didn't; I
couldn't laugh. I couldn't do much of anything except stand there and
try to figure out what I was really doing here--wherever I was.

The women and men around the room looked at me, very silently, terribly
curious, and far away. Durach's little red mouth smiled at me. No one
said anything. They just thought--about the ways I could look dead--and
about the many ways it was possible for me to become dead--ways that
can take so long.

And there were other thoughts pounding at my skull. They were laughing
at me; they were feeling sorry for me, and they were thinking I was an
idiot, at least.

I felt like a silly little mortal suddenly brought before a bunch of
wicked gods. And then it hit me--

_That's just about what I was!_

I was scared. My mind seemed covered with a cold twisted shadow.
Winds I couldn't see seemed to sweep and cry and thunder through that
giant room. And I could feel power, great stores of controlled power,
churning and boiling and ready to explode around me.

No one moved. I saw the great rotary convertors spinning away beside
banks and banks of transformers, and grid oscillators. Machinery, and
it was running and developing power, but it seemed unreal, foggy, as
though I was seeing it through a curtain of fog.

Well, I knew that this great room contained the Merger that Durach
had built. Durach was a freak, both Third and Fourth stage. He was
utilizing both fields in a mad kind of fusion. He was mad, beyond the
mental reach of sane Fourth Stage minds. That was understandable.

Fourth Stage minds, combined, could control some part of the Merger by
mental energy, so that Durach couldn't use it. But Fourth Stage minds
were being killed off by another gadget Durach and his freaks had made.

The Merger--a big gadget channeling unknown electronic force partly
by mind-energy. This Merger could hit hard at a man's entire nervous
system and his mind, and force it back to Third-Stage awareness, or
step it up so that Third-Stage reality faded away, and the Fourth
became reality.

But I knew this was phony. It was like the old methods of shock
treatment for the insane. The methods were wrong, and the results might
be harmful, and unpredictable.

Then Durach laughed, and he was laughing at me; his laughter burned and
roared inside my skull.

I blinked and gasped out something as I jerked the neutron gun from my
pocket and pointed it for the second time at his belly.

       *       *       *       *       *

I knew I was talking, but my voice didn't sound like mine; it didn't
sound like anybody's voice. "This time I do it, Durach. You can't go
through the Barrier to get away from me now. The Merger machinery, you
can't use it. Carleth's people have you blocked, Durach."

Durach's little red mouth stretched at me. He purred. "What do you want
to kill _me_ for?"

A woman in the corner laughed. It was like somebody had sprayed dry
ice through the room.

I said, "I'm not wasting time talking, Durach. I'm killing you
because--because--"

Durach laughed again. "Because you've been told to by a bunch of
humanitarian perfectionists obsessed with their own vague destinies!
Because you think you want to save the Third Plane--a dismal unreal
blind world where people shamble like cattle and peer into continuous
fog like moles! Is that why you want to kill me?"

I knew I'd have to do it now, fast, or I'd never be able to. I tried to
press the trigger back. I knew that Durach couldn't stop me, not by any
physical means. They had no weapons; they didn't need any, to deal with
the Fourth Stage people in their own plane. They had mental-shattering
gadgets, but none of them could work on me. I wasn't built like the
other Fourth Stage people. I wasn't built like anyone now. I was a
special job, made to get Durach, and that was all.

"You know the reasons you've been told and made to follow," Durach
smiled. "You're the big sucker, as you think you are, Berton. You're
beginning to see the truth now; you're beginning to realize why they
can't touch me--why they had to get _you_ to do it."

I tried to fire the gun. The air seemed to get hot and smoky around me
with conflicting thoughts. I knew there was a battle going on--a fight
of mind-energy. But I wasn't a part of it. It was between Durach and
his freaks, and Carleth and Reeta and whoever was left of their kind. A
fight for control of the Merger.

I tried to fire, but I couldn't; I wanted to hear what Durach had to
say. I knew it was something that might mean a lot to me. I shouldn't
want to listen; I had my job. I--

I felt like knives were stabbing me. I was shivering and sweating. I
could feel my face growing wet and gray and lips quivering. I was about
finished and I knew it. And I knew that if I did anything, I'd have to
do it quick.

No physical weapons. What trap would they use against me, what unknown
forces?

I felt my lips move, and heard my own tortured, sobbing cries.

"I'll tell you, Berton," Durach laughed. "They can't kill me. But
you can. Why? Because you're like us, Berton! They have no more real
respect for you than for the rest of us here in this room. You're just
a tool they're using, and when they're through, you'll go back into the
garbage dumps of Third-Plane sickness.

"_Berton--you're just another freak, like us!_"

I felt blinded. I forced my eyes to hold him in sight as I tried to
fire. I moved toward him; the room was large, and I kept walking,
listening to him.

"But we're bigger than they are, because we're freaks, Berton. 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 use
your own intelligence! What do you think?"

I kept walking toward his voice, toward that shifting smoky outline.
Sweat made a stream down my throat. I was sick and blinded.

"They're asking you to give it all up, just for their fanatical belief
in some sort of abstract destiny for all humanity. _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.

"Mutation, that's one way. You got it another way, thanks to them. But
from now on, it can be our show, Berton.

"They want to hold us back, using Third-Stage people as pacers. 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 you're like us. You're a freak
too, Berton.

"_You're fighting on the wrong side. You're destroying--yourself!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

Time, movement, sight, everything seemed to freeze as I stood there.
There was Durach and the others, like pale statues in a dream. Then I
felt other minds and other eyes around me. Reeta! Carleth!

I saw them. It was like a dream look at a forgotten room, and people
almost forgotten; their voices, like stillness beyond a threshold I had
once crossed.

She said, her eyes sad and wet. "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. _Now! Now!_"

My eyes were shut. I felt like I was falling. "You're gods," I sobbed
at them. "I'm still human. You're asking too much. How can I decide? I
could be like them--greater than you. And you want me to give it up, go
back to--" I thought of it. The stinking disease of Jelahn's tavern,
and the girl--

I laughed a little then, and in that laugh was a crazy climbing note of
fear and madness and not-knowing. Go back to that, when--

"There are only five of us left now," Reeta said. "Durach's feelers
have killed the rest of us. We can't hold the Merger against him but a
few seconds longer, Berton."

I thought of the outer planets where I'd always lived. The disease and
the cold, the sadistic cops, the taverns with rotten women, minds eaten
away with _krin-krin_.

"You picked me wrong," I yelled wildly. "You don't get heroes from
where I came from. Like Durach said--he's more my kind. We could be
like gods. Immortal--how can I--"

I felt mind-energy, paraphysical power, flow into me from Reeta
and Carleth. They told me something, a word--extratemporal--new
perception that could let me see things that would happen! Space
factors disappeared, for one terrible second. The factor of future time
faded--_and I could see_!

I felt it. Hot and horrible and final. A flash of future knowledge. I
saw Earth disappear into a great white flame. And where it had been was
a white hot nova in black space.

Horror rose like a volcano of madness, and a sheet of pain seemed to
split my head wide open.

"No," 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!"

"It's your choice," Reeta said. "We have only a few flashes of time
left, and then it won't matter anymore."

Maybe I didn't make any decision, not consciously. The pressure was too
much for me. I had to do something, anything. I heard myself screaming
as I pressed the trigger of the gun.

Durach fell beneath its power beam. It sprayed and burned and roared
in the great room. He came around the desk as I turned; his white face
had turned gray with a coat of wet over it. I felt the sudden complete
effort within all of them as they tried to get me.

Freaks. But there wasn't much physical difference between these people
and the average looking group. It was the inside of them that was
different. Differences in metabolism, neural structure, conscious
awareness ... a lot more....

Durach and the others were surging in toward me. Walls of mind-energy
throbbed around me. Their faces were twisted with hate and fear.

"Berton! You can know immortality, perfection, omnipotence! Don't
sacrifice your life for a cause already lost according to that vision
you had of the future! You know the conditions on the Third Plane!
They have conquered a part of atomic power, but their Third-Stage
mentalities will never develop fast enough to keep that power from
destroying them. Them and us too! That's the probability variant of a
future that will happen anyway--unless we destroy the Third Stage now,
in a way that will let this higher reality go on, unburdened!

"_Earth will destroy itself anyway, Berton. Let us save ourselves!_" My
legs wouldn't hold me anymore. I was on my knees. I tried to lift the
gun again.

"It's your choice, Berton," 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.
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.

There are some ways no man cares to live.

I fired the gun, fired it point blank into Durach's chest, then moved
it around over the others.

There was blinding white light. And Durach and his kind stopped living.
They went back to some other energy form, a kind that would never cause
anyone any more trouble.

I knew then that Durach had been right, in one respect anyway; when
he died, the tower died. I felt it melting away around me as the
mind-energy that had created it started to fade away. I felt that awful
emptiness opening under me. And--this is funny--I felt like a little
boy who's done something he thinks is pretty good and pretty big. But
no one knows he's done anything, and he feels hurt, and he wants people
to know.

I wanted people to know. I didn't want what I'd done, and everything
that had happened and might happen, to be lost to people. It wouldn't
be fair. Reeta and Carleth knew what I was thinking. I felt their
thoughts coming back again, stronger, and stronger and growing, and
joyous.

Reeta--Carleth--help me.

I don't want to be forgotten.

       *       *       *       *       *

Somehow, they were holding me with them, but I knew they couldn't do
it very much longer. Around me was a gray billowing fog, and I was
starting to fall through it--

Reeta and Carleth will stay here with Fourth Stage power; they are all
right now. Durach's finished, and they have the Merger back in their
power completely now, and can use it for constructive purposes, or not
at all. It doesn't matter. I've done my job. The danger's gone.

But I want people to know.

They're telling me to concentrate. They'll help me, but I must hurry,
hurry. I've still some of the power, and they'll help me. Mind-energy.
Matter changed from one form to another by thought. MY thought and
theirs, together. Telurgy. Everything's made from the same stuff, only
the electronic patterns are different. So we're willing patterns to
change. We change some of the patterns of elements around me to another
arrangement--into a metal scroll, my story to you, my thoughts of all
that has happened, and what I've done. So you'll remember.

And they'll send it through the Barrier by the Merger.

What I'm thinking now as this tower and this city fades around me, it
will all be on that metal for you to read. Maybe they could still save
me, someway, but they can't because I guess I don't really want to go
back to being a Third-Stage guy.

I'm not like Glora and Malcolm, willing to give up so much, for a
cause. After playing god, I can't go back to drinking _krin-krin_ in
Jelahn's tavern on the North Canal of Mars.

I'd rather die this way.

Durach said you'd blow up Earth and this higher reality too, with
atomic power, because you wouldn't be able to learn to think enough to
control it. Reeta and Carleth said Durach was insane, that he was wrong.

I don't know; I hope they were right. Because it's all waiting for
you. I've seen it and I know. Beauty and greatness you can't imagine
now. I don't know when, or how, but it can be yours someday. If you can
hang on. And it'll be yours not just for a little while, like it was
for me, but forever.

I guess it's up to you to prove whether Durach was insane or not.

I wonder if my thoughts are being recorded now by Carleth and Reeta
for you to read? I can't tell. I've lost them. Things around me are
blurred, and I seem to be falling down through a gray, slow rain....

       *       *       *       *       *

From a midnight teleaudocast by International Information Service. New
York City. September 9, 1983:

Reporter: _The preceding has been teleod as a special interest feature,
and is not intended as a factual report, naturally. The body of the man
who appeared so mysteriously, according to reports, from the atmosphere
two miles above Manhattan, and crashed into the city, cannot be
satisfactorily identified. The metal scroll which fell after him, and
which was just narrated for your interest, is obviously the work of a
quack looking for notoriety, and a possible niche in Fortean records._

_However, the Atomic Energy Commission has ordered a complete scanning
of Uranium Pile personnel. This move is reported to be motivated by the
discovery that during the afternoon, Ronal LeStrang, President of the
Atomic Energy Commission, disappeared, and no trace of him has been
found, up to this time._

_Teleflashes will be brought to you directly from the scanning rooms as
soon as further reports come in regarding President LeStrang. Security
Police say that perhaps foreign agents are again trying to bore from
within ... though they insist that there is no proof up to this time
that any foreign State is responsible for LeStrang's disappearance._

_And now there will be an interlude of music, brought to you by
special permission of Interplanetary Cultural Foundation, through the
facilities of I.I.S.'s new Teleospan System. The first number features
the Martian folk dance cycle...._


                                THE END



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Earth needs a killer" ***


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