She was running, and leading me. She ran effortlessly, like somebody without weight. "We'll go right to the village and see Carleth, my brother. We haven't much time. Maybe we're already too late, Ray Berton!"
As I ran, I wondered what had happened to the real LeStrang back on Earth, the Third Plane. Durach had gone through the Barrier and had taken LeStrang's place; he'd gotten away with it by using his extra-senses. By suggestion he could have made everyone else think he was LeStrang. And he could have gotten rid of LeStrang easily enough—For example by just willing him some place else, all at once. Say five thousand feet under the Earth's surface, or in the middle of the Atlantic, or out in space.
Then Durach had become LeStrang for a while, long enough to interview each of those Uranium Pile chiefs, and put them under his domination. He'd given them a hypnotic command, posthypnotic, for each to allow his Uranium Pile to reach critical mass upon a certain signal. I didn't know how he'd worked that—
Reeta led me down through an underground tubeway and into a big bubble. A warm soft light shone inside the bubble. Small cone buildings were built in a neat circle. In the center were gardens and fountains. People stared and whispered at me.
Reeta stopped, her face suddenly froze, and then turned slowly with sick eyes. Her fingers pressed her cheeks.
A wrenching scream stabbed through that garden. Still screaming and clutching her head, a woman came running crazily down a path through the center of the village. Faces of men, women and children came out of buildings, staring and flinching with sick pain.
The woman ran with her hands reaching out in front of her. Her neck was straining like a starving bird's. I felt Reeta's fingernails dig into my arm. The voice hit me like a spray of ice. "Another one! Another one to Durach and his freaks!"
The tortured woman's cries chopped at me. My ears hurt; my insides knotted. She was still screaming and running when she suddenly fell on her face. She lay there jerking and twitching among the smashed flowers. Other people were running toward her, tall, marvelously strong and light moving people. I thought of them as being like gods, maybe. The woman's body stopped moving as two men bent over her.
I could tell it wouldn't move again. It had that look.
"Dead," Reeta whispered. "They don't last long once Durach and his gadgets pierce our last protective neural defense bands. We've had no real defense. Even the last, or sith-threshold, is temporary. He's hit us with various degrees of destructive mental force, augmented by his gadgets. We've resisted each stage, but not the sith-threshold breaker. Durach's closing in fast now that he's weakened us. He wants full control of the Merger, so he can go back into the Third-Stage plane and destroy it."