"As a result, you are a man immune to harm. You have absolute control over your body, over inanimate objects that exist about you. Once you are aware of what danger threatens, you may avert it by so arranging the electronic groupings within your body either to merge and blend with the danger, or harden into a shield of antidote or corrective.
"Of course, as your brain evolved, it needed the body to feed it, to give it energy. Thus the body became an essential part of it. But the body changed, too, the body will respond to any environment, as a necessary corollary of the brain.
"In short, you are the ultimate evolution. It became the perfect tool of the mind. It did anything the mind ordered it to. So of the third planet of the Sun Duryu. Or Sol."
Jonathan drew a deep breath. He knew with deepest conviction that he had heard truth, bizarre as it was. He was not a man any more. He knew that, within himself. He was as far beyond man, or would be now, with study, as men were above the Neanderthals. He was ultimate man. Man in his final stage. Man multiplied by all the powers that be. Man to the nth degree.
Man nth!
"Now that I'm here, I've failed you," he grunted hoarsely.
"Not yet. Oh, no. Many of us have failed. They are no longer—here. We still hope that you may, out of your experiences on Earth, construct us an edifice upon which our scientists may find some clue, some hint. All we ask is some idea as to what it is we face. Just a thought. One tiny clue.
"But now you must see how we fight ourselves."
A gigantic, bulbous being, a fishbelly-white due to the heavy cloud formation that sheathed its native planet five light years from Neeoorna, rose to his feet. He turned his many-faceted eyes to the rostrum.