"Listen, Berton! If we destroy the Third Plane, the energy release will speed up the entropic rate of Fourth Plane development a billion fold. You can be one of us. A part of it. And why not? We're mutations. You got through the barrier because they changed your nervous system and consciousness by synthetic methods. But you're like us. You're a freak too, Berton.
"You're fighting on the wrong side. You're destroying—yourself!"
Time, movement, sight, everything seemed to freeze as I stood there. There was Durach and the others, like pale statues in a dream. Then I felt other minds and other eyes around me. Reeta! Carleth!
I saw them. It was like a dream look at a forgotten room, and people almost forgotten; their voices, like stillness beyond a threshold I had once crossed.
She said, her eyes sad and wet. "The decision must be yours, Ray Berton. We can give you the support of what paraphysical energy we have left within us. But we can't destroy directly; you must do that. In that way, you're different from us, but you're not a freak like Durach and these others. You have temporary Fourth Stage awareness. At a given time, that awareness will fade, and you'll go back to Third Stage reality, and be as you were before, with no memory of this world. Destroy him, Berton. Now! Now!"
My eyes were shut. I felt like I was falling. "You're gods," I sobbed at them. "I'm still human. You're asking too much. How can I decide? I could be like them—greater than you. And you want me to give it up, go back to—" I thought of it. The stinking disease of Jelahn's tavern, and the girl—
I laughed a little then, and in that laugh was a crazy climbing note of fear and madness and not-knowing. Go back to that, when—
"There are only five of us left now," Reeta said. "Durach's feelers have killed the rest of us. We can't hold the Merger against him but a few seconds longer, Berton."
I thought of the outer planets where I'd always lived. The disease and the cold, the sadistic cops, the taverns with rotten women, minds eaten away with krin-krin.