What I'm thinking now as this tower and this city fades around me, it will all be on that metal for you to read. Maybe they could still save me, someway, but they can't because I guess I don't really want to go back to being a Third-Stage guy.
I'm not like Glora and Malcolm, willing to give up so much, for a cause. After playing god, I can't go back to drinking krin-krin in Jelahn's tavern on the North Canal of Mars.
I'd rather die this way.
Durach said you'd blow up Earth and this higher reality too, with atomic power, because you wouldn't be able to learn to think enough to control it. Reeta and Carleth said Durach was insane, that he was wrong.
I don't know; I hope they were right. Because it's all waiting for you. I've seen it and I know. Beauty and greatness you can't imagine now. I don't know when, or how, but it can be yours someday. If you can hang on. And it'll be yours not just for a little while, like it was for me, but forever.
I guess it's up to you to prove whether Durach was insane or not.
I wonder if my thoughts are being recorded now by Carleth and Reeta for you to read? I can't tell. I've lost them. Things around me are blurred, and I seem to be falling down through a gray, slow rain....
From a midnight teleaudocast by International Information Service. New York City. September 9, 1983:
Reporter: The preceding has been teleod as a special interest feature, and is not intended as a factual report, naturally. The body of the man who appeared so mysteriously, according to reports, from the atmosphere two miles above Manhattan, and crashed into the city, cannot be satisfactorily identified. The metal scroll which fell after him, and which was just narrated for your interest, is obviously the work of a quack looking for notoriety, and a possible niche in Fortean records.