I said for them to go ahead and give me the business. And they did; I
went through the barrier.
* * * * *
Behind the wall of that room above Manhattan, they had a small square
cell. They put me in it, and a reddish light filled the room and
started eating into me. There were no doors, no windows in it, nothing
but naked bare walls. And they went to work on me. They turned hidden
power on me I suppose, but anyway they changed me.
I don't know what they changed; I probably couldn't explain it if I did
know. Nervous system, mind, those dormant ESP abilities everyone has in
one degree or another.
Malcolm had given me an example of one stage reality--a line, with
everything else as the unknown, or time. And then the two stage
reality, where height became time, then the Third-Stage reality where
the Fourth became "time"--
It got over my head there; I felt sick and my head felt like it was
flying in a million parts. But by then, they said, my Fourth Stage
potential was ready for the final treatment. And I was ready to break
through.
There was a terrible kind of concentration with Glora and Malcolm
giving me mind-energy way above my own. Something seemed to burst
inside of me. There was pain beyond pain; after that faded away there
was a kind of quiet drifting that seemed to go on through a soft cloudy
nothingness for a long time.
The four walls of that small cell blurred, but remained as a misty
outline. The reddish light faded; black night took its place; the black
turned to gray. For a while it was like two superimposed pictures; the
cell, and behind it another place.
Then the cell was gone.
I was standing in a dim twilight that had a soft blue tone to it. I
was in a much bigger room now. The walls were a funny color, like gray
human flesh.
I stared at the wall as I climbed to my feet, wishing there was a door
or window so I could see out. And as I looked--a window was there! Or
rather, an opening melted away for me.
A feeling of wonderfulness, of magnificence went through me. I
staggered like I was drunk with a feeling of thundering joy. I walked
over and looked out. A soft sun was setting over soft purple hills.
Everything was like that, soft and inviting and warm; beauty, like in a
dream that you forget when you wake up. That's what it was like. And I
knew there was much more I couldn't see or feel.
They had expanded my mind so much that Third-Stage reality was gone.
I was in another world of awareness. But I guess even they couldn't
expand my mind enough to see what the real Fourth Stage was, all of it
I mean. Maybe we'll all know, sometime.
There was a sensation of _aliveness_--in everything. Walls, floor,
ceiling, the very air, all the outside of the room, the green fields
and giant ferns, everything seemed alive. And when I walked there was
that feeling of bursting freedom.
Malcolm had said that with increasing awareness, a similarity
developed. One got nearer to the basic energy of all things with his
own expanding mind. But this wasn't for me to understand; maybe it
won't be for but a very few--not for a long time yet.
I looked out. I wanted to be out of that room and down there on that
wonderfully soft grass with the ferns that seemed alive and calling to
me. A square of grayish metal moved out of the wall and came to me.
I knew what to do. I sat on it, and it carried me out of the room,
through the wall, and down to the ground. There was a connection
between the processes of thinking in me, my wishes, and the hidden
machinery in the metal square.
Machinery powered by some great efficiency that used mind-energy. I got
off the square and it raised and went back through the wall of the tall
cone-shaped tower. And as I looked, the tower disappeared. Where it had
stood was a field of shoulder-tall flowers with bright red blossoms.
* * * * *
I started walking. A path opened for me. Fern fronds parted and closed
again behind me. Water gushed over rocks in the cool shadows. It wasn't
very light, though the moon was full and red, and I walked carefully,
senses I'd never known before sharply tuned for danger.
I saw her then, a Fourth Stage girl, as I came round a curve in the
path. Her skin was golden and soft, like everything else around us. She
stared at me.