"I'll tell you, Berton," Durach laughed. "They can't kill me. But you can. Why? Because you're like us, Berton! They have no more real respect for you than for the rest of us here in this room. You're just a tool they're using, and when they're through, you'll go back into the garbage dumps of Third-Plane sickness.
"Berton—you're just another freak, like us!"
I felt blinded. I forced my eyes to hold him in sight as I tried to fire. I moved toward him; the room was large, and I kept walking, listening to him.
"But we're bigger than they are, because we're freaks, Berton. We're natural freaks, you might say. Mal and Glora created a freak out of you so you would come through the Barrier. But we're all freaks, neither Third or Fourth Stage—but the strongest talents of both planes are in us!
"They can't move back from Fourth to Third Plane after having once left the Fourth. They can't destroy anything with their paraphysical power, Berton. That's their weakness. But we can. They call us insane. But use your own intelligence! What do you think?"
I kept walking toward his voice, toward that shifting smoky outline. Sweat made a stream down my throat. I was sick and blinded.
"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.