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." * * * * *