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.