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.