"Berton! You can know immortality, perfection, omnipotence! Don't sacrifice your life for a cause already lost according to that vision you had of the future! You know the conditions on the Third Plane! They have conquered a part of atomic power, but their Third-Stage mentalities will never develop fast enough to keep that power from destroying them. Them and us too! That's the probability variant of a future that will happen anyway—unless we destroy the Third Stage now, in a way that will let this higher reality go on, unburdened!
"Earth will destroy itself anyway, Berton. Let us save ourselves!" My legs wouldn't hold me anymore. I was on my knees. I tried to lift the gun again.
"It's your choice, Berton," Reeta said. Now her thought and her voice was weaker, faraway, dying. "Remember—Durach's insane."
Insane? Insane by what judgment? It was relative. Who—?
Durach's final argument was the most convincing; nobody wants to die. "It means death for you, Berton, if you kill me. This city, this tower we're on top of—it exists because I will it to exist! This tower is two miles high, Berton! Kill me, and the tower will crumble from under you. You'll fall—fall, Berton! Remember, your Fourth Stage capacity is only temporary. When you kill me, your work for them will be done. You'll automatically start to return to Third-Plane existence.
"You could control your fall here, with Fourth stage energy. But kill me, and you'll find yourself back in Third-Stage reality—two miles above the Earth! And nothing under you but death—that'll be your reward for saving Earth for a little while longer, Berton! You want to live!"
Far, far away, I felt Reeta and Carleth, still trying to help me. Sure, a man wants to live. That Marty in Jelahn's tavern, he wanted to live. Millions of people on Earth, they wanted to live, wanted to try to make it work. No man wants to die.
There are some ways no man cares to live.
I fired the gun, fired it point blank into Durach's chest, then moved it around over the others.
There was blinding white light. And Durach and his kind stopped living. They went back to some other energy form, a kind that would never cause anyone any more trouble.