Starblood

He listened at the wall.

He could hear them in there, and the sound was not rea.s.suring. Buzzing, churning, squirming over one another in mindless, chitinous, slick brown-black fury.

Quickly he went up through the many floors of the data bank, searching out those things he wished removed from the man"s store of knowledge. He worked quickly within the a.n.a.logue, then reviewed his work to make certain that he had not missed anything crucial. At last, satisfied with the job, he departed Leopold"s mind.

The room was quiet. Outside the window, some species of songbird was plying its trade. He pinched Leopold"s nerves in the base of his neck and sent the man into slumber again.

Three to go.

He tensed. He teleported...

... And arrived.

Ludwig Stutman, a member of the Inner Council of the Brethren, lived in an impressive estate near Baltimore, Maryland. The grounds were very extensive, every foot of them well cared for. The trees that formed a forest near the south end of the grounds seemed well pruned and surgically shaped to present the most aesthetically pleasing picture possible. There were no weeds and ground brush within the trees, only some crawling ivy and a few spots of tended flowers sprouting colorfully in black earth. Out of the forest, the lawn was as close-trimmed as the head of a Marine general, yet spongy like a thick carpet Some special sort of gra.s.s, he imagined. Not native to this part of the country. More like the stuff that grows in Florida. The house, on the smooth top of a small knoll, was three-storied, made of dark stone. It had white pillars and a veranda, all the architectural touches of genteel living.

Crime, Timothy thought rather sourly, does pay, no matter what the FBI and a.s.sociated branches might have to say.

He came up the long, twisted stone pathway from the wood, the night a bit cooler here than it had been in Iowa, his hair fluffing in the breeze and his eye watering a bit as the night air stung it. Three hundred yards from the house, he encountered the first guard.

He had not been expecting it, which was foolish. Stutman, like any of the Brethren hierarchy, would be well protected from authorities and from the renegades of the old-time Mafia who had refused to conform after their organization had been crushed and who might have a grudge to settle with one of the new crime bosses. When the tall, darkly dressed man approached him from a line of shrubs and shadows, he was startled.

He felt a warm wetness in his stomach, then heard the sharp snap of a pistol shot. The world seemed to tilt suddenly, and then the pain came, hard and rough-edged, tearing upward through his chest from his ruined belly.

There was a second, terrifying crack, the whine of a near miss, before he gathered his senses together fast enough to flush out with his psionic power a heavy wave of destructive force. He felt the insubstantial ESP crash over the guard, felt the millions of bright fingers of power seek the enemy flesh.

When he knew he was safe from the man, he withdrew the psionic weaponry and looked to himself. He was gagging blood, and the wound in the center of his body was pumping crimson fluid almost like a garden hose. He reached into himself, stopped the bleeding, and carefully began to knit the torn blood vessels.

Another bullet, from a different angle this time, snapped into the side of his skull, burrowed through the surface flesh and was gone. If it had been even half an inch lower, it would have torn through his oversized skull and destroyed the brain which contained the ESP power he needed to heal himself and save his life...

A second shot rang off the silver-capped trunk of his legs, making a sweet, poignant bell note in the crisp night air, a note that echoed through the wood below and was certain to draw more attention-attention that Timothy could not afford.

His confidence abruptly eroded by the turn in fortune, Timothy frantically .flushed out his ESP power and dropped the second guard where he stood by a pine tree a hundred feet away. Then, moving swiftly, he drifted to the shrubbery from which the first guard had opened fire. He swept through the tangle of carefully tended greenery and hid in the shadows and the branches of a stand of bristled, heavily scented pines.

Gingerly and somewhat reluctantly, he touched his head wound. He felt weak and dizzy, both with the loss of blood and with the fear that permeated him. The wound was half an inch deep, seeping blood, though not nearly so so much as he had lost from the stomach wound. Hair and flesh were matted in a sickening bandage that helped to stifle what little fluid he was losing. Carefully he knit the ruined vessels with his superhuman power; almost all of them were merely capillaries and not major veins or arteries such as had been broken in the stomach wound. much as he had lost from the stomach wound. Hair and flesh were matted in a sickening bandage that helped to stifle what little fluid he was losing. Carefully he knit the ruined vessels with his superhuman power; almost all of them were merely capillaries and not major veins or arteries such as had been broken in the stomach wound.

On the knoll, like a dragon awakening from slumber, the house lights flicked on on all three floors, yellow illumination spilling almost gaily across the dark gra.s.s and changing it, in the instant, to to a colorful, almost dyed-looking green. a colorful, almost dyed-looking green.

There were shouted commands as other guards went into a search-and-destroy pattern they had worked out among themselves a thousand times before, preparing for a moment just like this. Some of the voices were disturbingly close to the place where Timothy was desperately working to mend himself so that he might be able to face and defeat them when the time came. And the time was coming swiftly.

Then arc lights on tall, gray poles, sedately concealed by the landscaping, burst into brilliant life all over the grounds, even down in the thick wood where he had arrived moments earlier. There were only a few points of shadow, one of them being the place where he hid now. In moments, they would find him.

He could not risk facing them with his body partially ruined. One or two more well-placed rounds might make him so weak that he would not be able to use his power to knit himself. And then it would not matter that he was the most powerful human being on the planet Earth.

Cursing himself for his stupidity in rushing into this without the proper amount of thought and consideration, he joined cell to cell, forced a speeded mitosis, grew new cells, replaced the dead flesh. The problem was that he was too excited about the offer of the whispering alien, the offer to join the extraterrestrials for the next few hundred years. For the first time in his life, he realized, he would be with people on his own level, people he could communicate with fully. More than one. Hundreds of them. And, if it meant that he would be inferior for a while, even that was a pleasant prospect. He had never been actually inferior, not since that hospital stretch before his psionic abilities were discovered. And that had been a physical inferiority. It might be quite interesting to be among mental superiors who could teach him. Perhaps it was a longing for parental guidance which he had never known. All of this fled through his mind as he finished healing himself.

As he was finishing, one of the guards now searching the grounds found him and opened fire. Timothy deflected the bullets. He was ready for them now. He was cooler, more thoughtful than when he had arrived the first time.

He used his ESP to plunge the guard into sleep. The man staggered, tripped over his own feet, and crashed into the bushes, hanging there in a parody of crucifixion, snoring loudly in the cold air.

He moved out of the shrubs, back into the brilliantly illuminated lawn. He moved smoothly toward the house, reaching out with his mind to tap the glowing centers of the guards" thoughts, snuffing them out one at a time until the slumbering forms of the surgically created bodyguards lay all over the knoll.

At the front door, he used his ESP to throw the locks, pushed the portal inward, and drifted through. He caught a guard on the winding staircase to the second and third floors and pinched the nerves in his neck. The man fell against the railing, back onto the steps, and rolled over and over down a dozen risers to the floor below.

He made his way through two more men, and reached Ludwig Stutman in his business study on the third floor of the enormous house. Stutman was perhaps fifty years old. He was short, stocky, blond-haired and blue-eyed. He was, Timothy could tell without even probing the man"s mind, a physical-fitness fanatic. His arms were developed beyond usefulness to that thick, rippling-muscled state that is good only for show and not practice. His chest was a barrel, expanded by weight-lifting and deep-breathing exercises. On his desk were jars of seeds labeled and arranged carefully as to vitamin contents.

"Who are you?" Stutman asked. He tried to match his physique with an equally manly fearlessness, but his terror was painfully obvious to both of them.

Timothy said nothing.

"Who?" Stutman insisted, as if it mattered more that he have a name for the man who had forced his way through Stutman"s security than that he fend him off.

Timothy pinched the proper nerves.

Stutman fell back into the chair from which he had risen when Timothy entered the study. Even in total repose, the muscles of his bare arms were corded, the tissue of his neck stiff and twined like steel cables.

Ti carefully insinuated himself into Stutman"s mind, his own mind forming an a.n.a.logue that would allow him to seek out that data which he had come to erase from Stutman"s memory.

It seemed proper that the conscious mind be represented by a gymnasium. Within the gymnasium were thousands of men working out, hoisting bars, doing pushups, climbing ropes, sitting in steam cabinets. It impressed Timothy that there were no women within the gym, no women at all.

Without pausing any longer to consider Stutman"s s.e.xual proclivities, he went through the gym, questioning those people he found there, and soon he had wiped out of the conscious mind all thought of PBT and its origins. He found a door in the far wall of the gym and went down into the subconscious.

Here the a.n.a.logue was a hospital. Not the operating rooms, but the wards, full of diseased and dying people. There were cancerous patients, lepers, all the worst decay that man is heir to. Timothy supposed that anyone with such concern for his body would contain a seething cauldron of horror over sickness and death. He destroyed the thoughts he wished and quickly departed that place...

Stutman slept peacefully, his hulking body unaware that its most inner sanctums had been rudely violated, and some of the knowledge which sustained it in this luxury had been drained away.

Timothy let his thoughts congeal around the next address on his list. He pictured it clearly in his mind, as he had gotten it from the gray-haired man in the Iowa farmhouse. He tensed, teleported...

... And shimmered into existence immediately before the door of Arthur Leland"s home.

Behind him, a bodyguard gasped, whirled, then fell over into sleep, his pistol clattering on the brick floor of the exterior foyer. He hit the floor, himself, with a thick, sickening whump whump.

Timothy unlocked the door, opened it, and went inside, closing it behind. The house was a supermodern one, the floor covered in thick s.h.a.g carpet that in its richness resembled fur. The furniture was specially crafted, full of bold sweeps, brilliant colors, and daring designs that were all brilliant in themselves and somehow managed to complement, not compete, to form an even more attractive whole.

Somewhere, soft cla.s.sical music was playing, almost an anachronism in the sleek plastic-and-vinyl-and-synthetics decor of the house itself. Yet this too seemed somehow to complement the furniture.

He listened, but heard no one.

It occurred to him that he was much like Red Death in the Poe story. Though these people locked themselves away in flashy, rich surroundings, in gaiety and pleasure, he found them, stalked them, and did with them what he wished. It was not an altogether pleasant simile...

He found Arthur Leland in a bedroom on the second floor. He was with a woman, a sleek, large-breasted black woman whose skin shone ebony and smooth as she maneuvered on the mattress to accommodate her lover. Timothy felt the low, pulsing ache, the sickness that he got whenever he was around the most stunning of women. He had thought that he had outgrown it in these last few hours. But now he knew that was not so. Perhaps he would always be burdened with it.

The woman shrieked, and Leland, sensing the source of her horror, rolled off the bed, fumbling in the pile of his clothes for a gun. Timothy tweaked him into sleep, and the Brethren chief slumped naked on the floor.

The black girl was almost to the door, her wonderfully smooth, dark body moving with the swiftness and stealth of a cat. Timothy put her to sleep as well.

Arthur Leland was a ladies" man, and Timothy"s mind chose to use the a.n.a.logue of a brothel to help the mutant search the man"s thoughts. Almost all of them were erotic, or had erotic connotations, even when the thoughts dealt with business. But the hundreds of full-bosomed, smooth-thighed women who represented the thoughts of Arthur Leland only made Timothy"s aching quasi-s.e.xual longing worse than it had been. He wished his own mind could have come up with a less disturbing a.n.a.logue.

The subconscious was a madhouse of sado-m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic s.e.xual longings, disgusting, ugly dreams that made Timothy spasm with disgust and uneasiness. He wanted to withdraw swiftly, retreat from both these places of flesh, but he gritted his teeth and remained, doing the job that he had come to do, that he must do if the future were to be as he planned it.

Finally, he left the mind of the Brethren master and floated again within his own body in the dimly lighted bedroom, trying to regain his senses. He had been inundated with sensual visions, exotic dreams of virility, potency, pleasure. His perspective, now, was tilted, and he knew it would require more than a second or two to settle into his normal state of mind. Until he accomplished that, he could not risk proceeding with the plan, for fear he would act foolish once again, as he had when he had first arrived at Stutman"s house and been shot.

Unconsciously, he had drifted across the chamber to the fallen body of Leland"s dark mistress. With ESP fingers, he reached out and touched the softness of her flesh, traced his feeling yet invisible fingers along the forbidden mounds and depressions of her body.

He did this for a long time. He did not realize how long. When the trance broke, at last, he pulled away, ashamed of himself, confused and worried.

He left the bedroom and floated along the quiet corridor. He found a reading room where the shelves were filled with nothing but erotica. He left there in more haste than he would have liked, for haste indicated a reluctance to face this most basic part of his makeup.

He forced himself to go back. Once in the room again, he inspected the volumes of prose, poetry, photography and art that Leland had collected to satisfy his almost obsessive curiosity about s.e.xual matters. It occurred to Timothy sometime later that he could one day know the sensual world if he wished. Certainly with the knowledge of the aliens at his disposal, man would learn the secret of cloning, a process believed possible even today but hampered in practicality by the primitiveness of modern science.

Cloning: Take a single rabbit cell. It contains all the genes and the stringy chromosomes of the animal. From it, all the characteristics of the animal can be ascertained. And from it, an exact duplicate of the first rabbit can be made. Scientists can clone a copy. Or will be able to some day. And the same thing for a man. It was not inconceivable that very beautiful people would allow-for a price-scientists to clone a copy of them from one of their cells. Then, as science further developed, a brain transplant, moving another man"s memories and gray tissue into the new body, would be a simple procedure.

One day, perhaps, he would know sensuality. No, not perhaps. He was certain of it. One day, he could have a mistress such as the dark girl, any sort of mistress he wished. And then, no area of human experience would be closed to him.. He would be the first totally free man in the history of the race.

He was not totally free now, even with his ESP. And there was no sense in pretending that he was.

He put the books back on the pine shelves, exactly where he had gotten them.

In the hour since he had left Leland"s mind, he had faced up to this one inadequacy of his, had met it head on, and had-if only temporarily-come to terms with it There was no use wishing for what you could not have. In the centuries before him with the aliens he would forget this lack of s.e.xual feeling. And when he was within his own body again and prey to the distant, awful ache of longing, mankind might be able to develop to the point of doing something about it.

He breathed more easily as the ache dissipated. He thought of the smoothness of the girl"s flesh. The ache did not return.

Smiling, he began to summon the address of the final Brethren chief into his mind, to build a picture of the house where he must go on the final leg of his mission. He was at ease. He had been through the worst of it now-physically, anyway. As it turned out, his final target was to cause him the most mental and emotional anguish of the night...

CHAPTER 18.

In comparison with the other Brethren chiefs which Timothy had visited that night, Jacob Westblom lived simply. It was not necessarily simple by the standards of the average man, but quite so considering the millions of Westblom, like the others, must have ama.s.sed in his years of illegal activities. The house, near Albany, New York, was built in English Tudor style. It was a beautiful house of nine rooms, built sometime in the early part of the century. It was of solid brick construction with black-trimmed windows and shutters, a many-paned bay window off the living-room, now softly tinted with the amber light of a single lamp that burned in that room.

He watched the house from a distance, positioned across the street in the residential neighborhood where Westblom lived. The man had perhaps three acres of ground, but other houses were close enough nearby that he could not have flaunted a plethora of well-armed guards. Timothy searched through the tangle of mind emanations that swarmed in the suburban air, and finally found three of the strange, nearly blank minds of the surgically created killers. He snuffed each of them into unconsciousness, then crossed the street, picked the iron gate lock with his mind, and entered the grounds of the house.

He reached the front door, went through, closed it behind. There was the sound of talking from the kitchen. He reached out with his ESP, found a butler, out of uniform, and a chauffeur in jeans and tee-shirt drinking beer at the kitchen table. He put them to sleep.

He searched the rest of the house but found no one in any of the other eight rooms. It meant that Jacob Westblom was not at home and that he would have to try the alternate addresses which he had gleaned from the minds of the Brethren in Iowa. One of those was a nightclub. Two more were restaurants. Another was a brother"s residence, a blood kin, of Westblom who was not involved in the underworld. And eleven more were the addresses of women.

But there was something else curious about the emptiness of the house. Would Westblom be satisfied with three exterior guards to protect the sanct.i.ty of his domain? Wouldn"t he station one or two others within the house as a final barrier to his enemies? He did not believe that Westblom could be that much less paranoid than his fellow underworld chiefs-or that he had that much less real danger to fear from enemies that had once belonged to the powerful Mafia.

Timothy floated into the kitchen, where the servants slumped over the table. A can of beer had been knocked over. It ran down onto the floor, and the malt smell of it was heavy in the air. He moved first to the well-groomed, salt-and-pepper-haired butler and dipped into his mind, skimming across the conscious level of it in search of anything that might tell him of Westblom"s whereabouts.

In seconds, he found what he wanted. He discovered that the old man was in the hospital, recovering (or so everyone hoped) from a cerebral hemorrhage which he had suffered only that morning.

For a moment, Timothy was tempted to skip Westblom, to trust to the Brethren leader"s sickness to destroy his memory-if not all of him. But that was folly, considering the importance of this mission not only to the fate of thousands of addicts but to his own future as well. He obtained the hospital"s address and a visual impression of it from the butler"s mind, tensed, closed his eyes, and teleported...

He arrived outside the building, a monstrosity of yellow brick and aluminum, in the middle of a pedestrian slidewalk, floating above the rolling rubberized tread that stretched in both directions. It had been stupid, he chided himself, to forget that he might pop into existence right before some startled citizen"s eyes and cause an uproar where he wanted anonymity. This was not, after all, the sort of quiet, closed grounds where Brethren officers lived, but a public structure.

A moment later, he drifted into the main lobby of the hospital, the odor of disinfectant and flowers heavy and somewhat unpleasant in the home of the sick. He looked over the roster of in-patients on the public board, and located Westblom"s room. It was on the eighteenth floor, but the elevators were manned with scrubbed young women who insisted on a pa.s.s from the desk. And he knew he could never obtain one. Pa.s.ses to Westblom"s room would be difficult for the President to get.

The stairwells were closed at this hour, the heavy fire doors locked and chained. And though he could have picked the locks and removed the chains, the noise would surely have attracted the attention that he must avoid at all costs.

He found the directory of the hospital floorplan on an end table in the visitors" lounge and paged through it until he was able to pinpoint Westblom"s room. But it was, not going to be easy to teleport out of a busy lobby without causing some sort of furor. He found the men"s room, feeling rather ridiculous, and when he was alone within the ammonia-fumed confines of the John, he tensed, concentrated on the position of the room, and blinked into the nonmatter universe of instantaneous transmission.

In Westblom"s hospital room, he was confronted with a nurse, a stout woman in stark white clothes wearing ridged, squeaking shoes and walking around the bed checking on the monitoring devices there, especially the bleeping electrocardiograph. She looked up, took a few steps backward, rubbed at her eyes as if she were unwilling to believe that a man-or something resembling a man, anyway-had appeared before her eyes magically, out of thin air.

As she opened her mouth to scream, Timothy silenced her. He did not let her drop rudely to the floor as he had the men he put to sleep earlier in the evening. He used his ESP to cushion her weight, to swing her around and into the chair where she had been sitting earlier, reading a paperback novel.

In the bed was the withered husk of a man, punctured by needles which led to tubes which lead to bottles of clear liquid dangling overhead on a bright stainless steel stand. The pulse of intravenous feeding continued, despite the excitement in the room. The man"s mouth hung open, gaping like the mouth of the dead-though there was still a great deal of life in the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Timothy slipped psionic fingers into the man"s mind and brain to see exactly how much life. He found that the damaged area of the organic brain tissue had pretty much settled down to normal and that therapy of some sort must have been administered, since other cerebral areas had begun to take over a few of the functions of the small, deadened section. This was ample evidence that it would be foolish to trust to the stroke or death to silence the old man.

Carefully, he slipped into Westblom"s mind, searching through an a.n.a.logue of a data storage system housed in a great, windowless building, much like the a.n.a.logue of Leopold"s mind (did ambition and ruthlessness breed the same sort of men?). He discovered the information about the starship and the origins of PBT. It had not been stored in those banks of memories which had been burned out by the hemorrhaging.

He began fiddling with the a.n.a.logue controls of Westblom"s data bank, attempting to eradicate the crucial facts. But the walls of the place began to tremble, and the data tapes set up an unG.o.dly squeal of protest as he worked. He soon realized that any toying he did caused the mind and, by a.s.sociation, the brain to erupt in turmoil and fear that could easily lead to another stroke. And another stroke, so soon after the first, was almost sure death for the man.

He withdrew his fingers of ESP, returned completely to his own twisted body, and considered the problem.

If he let Westblom alone, the man would live. He was strong. His heartbeat was steady. His will to survive-that, Timothy was certain-was the most forceful thing about him. And, surviving, he would remember the starship and the drug, a memory that would totally destroy all the careful blanking work that he, Timothy, had done this night in other minds. Yet, if he thrust his psionic fingers into Westblom and manhandled his mind long enough to abolish the information, he might very likely kill the Brethren officer in the process. He thought of bursting blood vessels and darkening brain tissue... it was not a pleasant pair of alternatives. The Lady or the Tiger? No, it was more like the Tiger or the Lion. Both choices made him despair.

As he stood there, listening to an occasional gurgled comment from the bottle of glucose, listening too to the heavy breathing of the nurse, he argued that Westblom was a parasite working the underbelly of society, had been a parasite most all his life. He had probably been a.s.sociated, if not an integral part of, the old Mafia before switching allegiances and rising through the ranks of the Brethren. His food and his clothes, his Tudor house, and even the medical care he was now receiving to prolong his life had been bought on the agony and the death of other human beings. He preyed on the weak and the confused and lived well on the meat he was able to rip from their bones.

The bottle dripped.

The nurse snored.

Otherwise, quiet.

Though Timothy believed every word of the arguments that he was giving himself, though he agreed with the placing of all inflections, they were just not enough to justify the murder of Jacob Westblom-at least, not a murder as cold and efficient as this. Especially not a murder of a man who had not raised one finger against him personally. With Klaus Margle and his henchmen it had been easier, for they had been shooting at him, actively engaged in trying to destroy him. It was a matter of self-preservation that night, and demanded more of a gut reaction than this. That was what made him different than these men, he told himself. He could not treat another human being, another man of his own race, with such ruthless objectivity as they treated others. Murder... he could not.

Unless...

The idea that rose within his mind was a bold one. It was also shameful. A cop-out of sorts. An attempt to delude himself into ignoring the very ,real moral problem that confronted him. It was not the sort of thing he liked to see in others, let alone in himself. But, d.a.m.n it, it just might work...

He extended his psionic power into Westblom"s mind, delved down into his subconscious world, whose a.n.a.logue was a series of caves beneath the data storage building. He wandered through the slime-walled depths where id l.u.s.ts and ego dreams crawled and slithered, lurking in nooks and crevices as if afraid of the light he carried.

They chittered at him. They growled. They moaned. They tried to s.n.a.t.c.h away his light.

In the brief moments they could not avoid the light, they leered, faces hideous and twisted.

He allowed the crawling, chittering, cancerous beasts of Westblom"s mind to brush against him, to lay wet and clammy hands on him, drag decaying fingers down his spine. He listened to them until he thought he understood the language they spoke. He learned all the basest, most horrible traits his victim possessed, forced himself to indulge in it until he was sickened into the core of his soul.

No one"s id and ego should be probed, prodded, teased, and finally dissected like that, Timothy knew. It could end in his own gibbering insanity if he were not careful. The flowing tide, thrusting forward and ebbing back only to thrust forward again, of incest, murder, sadism, masochism, bigotry, blood-l.u.s.t, hate, fear, power-hunger, all these were not meant to be studied and turned over in his ESP fingers. But the incident did exactly what he wanted it to do. It stirred up a deep and unremitting loathing for this Jacob Westblom, this sick old man in the expensive private hospital room. He knew Westblom better than he had ever known anyone, knew all of the perverted things that drove the man. It was true, of course, that Timothy himself must surely possess subconscious l.u.s.ts and motivations equally as evil and depraved as those Westblom unknowingly nurtured-just as every man"s subconscious is a dumping ground for that which he could not bear to consider consciously. But Ti ignored that now, working his hatred into a full-blooming garden, raising his monument of hatred to higher and higher peaks. At last, when he had somewhat deluded himself into thinking of Westblom as exactly what his id projected and nothing more, as an animal more than a man, he went back into the conscious mind to the data banks where the memories of the starship and the PBT were stored.

He selected the proper tape from the storage niche, a flat gray spool.

The walls of the mind a.n.a.logue, white plaster like those of Leopold"s mind, shook from floor to ceiling.