While I ate, Carleth told me that people here didn't get energy that way when they had stayed here long enough. Here, he said, they used a process that Third-Stage minds call telurgy. Fourth Stage minds use telurgy to construct their buildings, and transportation, and to get energy directly from any element they wanted to get it from. The only difference, he said, between any objects is made by our limited consciousness (Third Stage) reacting to differently shaped electron-identity patterns. Yet basically every substance, everything in the cosmos, is the same, made different only by degrees of evolving mental machinery.
I finished eating and said, "You're supermen here—that it? But if you are, why are you helpless before this guy Durach? Why do you have to call on me?"
Carleth said, "No, we're not supermen, Berton; just extended, or advanced men. There'll never be supermen; there'll never be perfection."
Carleth turned; he looked at the wall and it melted away. I was looking at a distant city. And what a city! Cone-shaped spires thousands of feet high, and one high above the others, with the moon behind it.
Carleth said, "This Fourth Stage world of Mohln is sparsely populated; only a few have come through. We built these two small villages, for meditation and self development. We lived here, helping others who came through to adjust and realize their growing potentialities. It was peaceful then. Normally, it would be no other way here—sane and balanced and marvelously stimulating as we discovered and developed new abilities of Fourth Stage power."
He stared at the distant city, and said to me, "Then Durach and his freaks came through. They built that city. It might be called by you a city of the mind. Their diseased minds keep it there by paraphysical mental energy."
"Freaks," I said. "Here too?"
"Yes, freaks; they're different. There's only seven of them, and that they should build such a colossal futile city is proof enough of their pathological, third-stage thinking. Third plane disease still motivates them, even though they developed enough Fourth Stage awareness to come through the barrier. They're paranoids, according to Third-Stage standards. Here, they're much worse than that—able to realize many of their delusions.
"But they're freaks. They didn't develop by evolution to reach Mohln; they developed suddenly. As soon as they first came through, we knew they were abnormal, that they didn't belong. Durach brought Third Stage irrational, blind, destructive motivations with him. Diseased personality attitudes. He wanted power; he wanted to rule and conquer blindly. There had been an accident that sent him here.
"Durach and his freaks were seven chances in millions, but they happened. Teratological freaks, monsters. Before they broke away from us and built that mental city, we found their secret."