by the third book in the series, marc has matured into a highly capable metapsychic and is regarded as a paramount. through manipulated dreams, marc conceives an idea called 'mental man' which would create a new subspecies of man called "homo [sapiens] summus". it would use selective breeding, surgical modification, mental training (through induced pain) and technological enhancement to create hundreds of humans with the powers — and disembodiment — of marc's younger brother jack. this project has been kept highly secret for several years, but peers and competitors of marc begin to get suspicious. he develops several increasingly powerful ce devices. these amplify a human's inherent metapsychic ability by orders of magnitude. the ce device is discussed in the debates of the concilium, and is deemed too dangerous to be generally used. marc disagrees, his research continues in secret although outlawed, and culminates in devices capable of 600× amplification. marc's increasing ambition draws him to side with a rebel faction of the concillium — those that do not wish to join 'unity' with the other races and therefore with the galactic mind itself. the rebel faction determinedly opposes this as they believe humans will lose their individuality and privacy and will become thralls to the other races.