"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."