She caught my confusion. "Durach, same man as LeStrang. Here he is
Durach."
Reeta turned, led me through a wall of fern branches and onto a
different path. "We could go to my brother Carleth the other way," she
said softly--referring, I knew, to teleportation. "But we can't strain
your newly acquired senses too much now. Ordinarily, one breaking
through has many days just for readjustment and adaptation. But you
won't have any time at all for that. Durach is already acting against
us; he's killing us."
She was running, and leading me. She ran effortlessly, like somebody
without weight. "We'll go right to the village and see Carleth, my
brother. We haven't much time. Maybe we're already too late, Ray
Berton!"
As I ran, I wondered what had happened to the real LeStrang back
on Earth, the Third Plane. Durach had gone through the Barrier and
had taken LeStrang's place; he'd gotten away with it by using his
extra-senses. By suggestion he could have made everyone else think
he was LeStrang. And he could have gotten rid of LeStrang easily
enough--For example by just willing him some place else, all at once.
Say five thousand feet under the Earth's surface, or in the middle of
the Atlantic, or out in space.
Then Durach had become LeStrang for a while, long enough to interview
each of those Uranium Pile chiefs, and put them under his domination.
He'd given them a hypnotic command, posthypnotic, for each to allow his
Uranium Pile to reach critical mass upon a certain signal. I didn't
know how he'd worked that--
Reeta led me down through an underground tubeway and into a big bubble.
A warm soft light shone inside the bubble. Small cone buildings were
built in a neat circle. In the center were gardens and fountains.
People stared and whispered at me.
Reeta stopped, her face suddenly froze, and then turned slowly with
sick eyes. Her fingers pressed her cheeks.
A wrenching scream stabbed through that garden. Still screaming and
clutching her head, a woman came running crazily down a path through
the center of the village. Faces of men, women and children came out of
buildings, staring and flinching with sick pain.
The woman ran with her hands reaching out in front of her. Her neck was
straining like a starving bird's. I felt Reeta's fingernails dig into
my arm. The voice hit me like a spray of ice. "Another one! Another one
to Durach and his freaks!"
The tortured woman's cries chopped at me. My ears hurt; my insides
knotted. She was still screaming and running when she suddenly fell
on her face. She lay there jerking and twitching among the smashed
flowers. Other people were running toward her, tall, marvelously strong
and light moving people. I thought of them as being like gods, maybe.
The woman's body stopped moving as two men bent over her.