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?"