They had the tools; they had minds so far above mine it wasn't anything you could even talk about. Not and make any sense out of it. Everyone has the latent capacity to develop Fourth Stage consciousness. Even a one-celled amoeba, given time, will develop it.
But me—they were going to make me develop it fast. My sensory apparatus would grow in complexity and degree of awareness of higher-stage reality. And I would be in that other plane of Mohln where the guy I was after had gone.
I didn't understand. But I had the feeling that I—might.
I said for them to go ahead and give me the business. And they did; I went through the barrier.
Behind the wall of that room above Manhattan, they had a small square cell. They put me in it, and a reddish light filled the room and started eating into me. There were no doors, no windows in it, nothing but naked bare walls. And they went to work on me. They turned hidden power on me I suppose, but anyway they changed me.
I don't know what they changed; I probably couldn't explain it if I did know. Nervous system, mind, those dormant ESP abilities everyone has in one degree or another.
Malcolm had given me an example of one stage reality—a line, with everything else as the unknown, or time. And then the two stage reality, where height became time, then the Third-Stage reality where the Fourth became "time"—
It got over my head there; I felt sick and my head felt like it was flying in a million parts. But by then, they said, my Fourth Stage potential was ready for the final treatment. And I was ready to break through.
There was a terrible kind of concentration with Glora and Malcolm giving me mind-energy way above my own. Something seemed to burst inside of me. There was pain beyond pain; after that faded away there was a kind of quiet drifting that seemed to go on through a soft cloudy nothingness for a long time.