Starblood

by Dean Koontz

  Also, in the back of his mind, he was aware that there had been a few seconds there when he had felt relief at the prospect of dying, had welcomed it. It would obliterate the future and the loneliness ahead of him as the only superman in a world of neanderthals. And loneliness was the thing he most feared, the thing which had terrified him all his life. But he did not want to think about how easily he had almost given in. There was no loneliness quite like death, after all— so that was no way out of his predicament.

  And although he might be something of a superman, death was still all too possible. If Boggs had aimed for his head, his irreplaceable brain in which all his talents lay, rather than for his chest . . .

  He pinched the proper nerve in Richard Boggs's neck with an ESP finger and watched the man fold into himself and crash onto the floorboards of the porch, taking the impact on his chin. He bounced once, as if he were rubber, and was still.

  Another bullet smashed the window out in front of Timothy as one of the three Brethren who had been sitting in the conversation corner fired through the glass. The projectile itself missed him, but whirling shards of glass studded the side of his trunk in a hundred different places. Pain washed through him, again bringing blackness with it. It was growing more difficult to stave off the questing, pitch fingers of unconsciousness.

  He expanded his extrasensory powers, radiating his talent into the house where he quickly made the three Brothers and Thelma Boggs unconscious. They slumped into a peaceful sleep on the hardwood floor. The uproar had ended as swiftly as it had begun, and the heavy quiet of the Iowa night settled over the place once more.

  Ti reached into the mind of the surgically created moronic killer who stood guard at the rear door of the farmhouse. The man had not moved more than three feet since Timothy had last checked on him, but he was contemplating leaving his post after the ruckus that had just exploded and died so rapidly in the front of the house. For insurance, and because he did not want the man to have a chance to humiliate him as he had been humiliated twice already, Timothy sent him spiraling down into sleep on a mattress of damp grass. In sleep, the man's nearly blank mind was almost totally empty.

  There was no one in the house or anyone on the grounds who was not unconscious and who would not be that way for at least another hour. With this in mind, Timothy hung by the shattered window, calming himself, forcing his overexcited mind to settle into rationality. He surveyed the damage that had been done his body and found that the bullet wound was clean. It had not touched any vital organs, though it had been close to his heart. He thrust his psionic fingers into his own flesh, plunging them into the cellular level of his tissue, where he used them to knit the torn meat. He meshed cell to cell, threaded the filaments of muscle fiber into one another again. In ten minutes, there was not even a scar . . .

  When that was finished, he plucked the slivers of glass from his skin and mended the sliced flesh until it was smooth and healthy. He expunged the blood that had wet and matted his simple clothes, and used his psionic power to break it down into molecules of heat energy that radiated away from him. Then there was nothing further to be done to correct the abuse his body had suffered. Now he would have to enter the house and find the cellar.

  For the first time he felt a tinge of fear. Four men had been familiar with that basement area and what was to be found down there—and all four of them had been so terrified that they had locked it from their minds, had attempted to shove it from the conscious arena of their mental processes down into the backrooms where it could be forgotten. For the most part these were strong men, not easily scared. He could not help but feel uneasy about confronting whatever it was that had made men such as these afraid even to think of it.

  But this was not the time to hesitate. He had come all this way to find the source of the drug, to discover exactly what it was and how it was produced. An entire underworld 'family' had been built on it; tens of thousands had become addicted to it while hundreds of thousands of others used it frequently or infrequently; it had taken his own limited extrasensory functions and had torn down the walls to allow them to flow through his mind in full glory. Besides, it was the temporary goal he had set for himself, in order to conceal the fact that he had made no plans for a future that was, now, even more uncertain than before: how could a superman exist in a world of normally powered men without becoming a symbol of what everyone else was denied; and how could a man to whom anything was possible find tasks complex enough to avoid complete boredom?

  He felt cold, separate from all the world. He was aware that the last time he had been with Polly, helping her into the car that would take her from the Brethren's house in New England, even the starlet's fantastic beauty had not stirred the hollow quasi-sexual longing within him. He was so separated from mankind that a normal woman, even beautiful, could not resurrect his crippled sexuality. He was alone.

  He floated over Richard Boggs, through the open door of the farmhouse, and into the livingroom where Thelma Boggs lay in the middle of the floor on her back, her mouth open. She was snoring heartily.

  He went through the parlor, through a dining nook and into the well-appointed kitchen which Thelma Boggs did not keep in a very admirable state. There were dirty dishes in the sink, on the drainboard, slimed with grease and dried food. There was a dirty pan and skillet on the stove and a scattering of cooking utensils and ingredients on the kitchen table. There was a desk in the corner littered with pieces of mail, recipes, women's magazines, two dirty glasses, an overflowing ashtray, and a stat order catalogue with a dozen felt markers dangling from it

  His eye strayed from the teetering piles of junk on the desk to a door recessed slightly in the wall to his left. He floated to it, opened it with invisible hands, and flipped the light switch along the wall. Panels of glow lights burst into bright existence in the ceiling, the sort of thing one might expect to see in a place of business or a supermodern house—but hardly in a renovated farm. He dropped down the stairwell, ignoring the steps.

  As he fell, he flashed his psionic power into the lower chambers. He found no one waiting for him, no mental activity whatsoever.

  As he floated out of the stairwell, he found himself in a square, concrete-walled room where tools were racked on peg-boards. Two workbenches flanked him, their tops fixed with hand vises and hand drill braces. In the right corner there was a drill press, and next to it an electric sander and buffer. Beside one of the workbenches was a crate of souvenirs, little brass Mexican men leading little brass donkeys, similar if not identical to the piece he had seen in Leonard Taguster's house.

  He picked one of the souvenirs up, holding it above him so he could see it from all angles as he twirled it lazily in his unseen fingers. There were no marks on it to indicate where it might have been violated, but he thought he knew exactly what had been done. He threaded his ESP through the tightly packed molecules until he found the cylindrical pocket inside the statuette where a small flask of PBT was contained, perhaps a large enough amount—once cut to proper potency —for thirty doses.

  Here, at these two benches and with these machines, the Brethren hollowed out the figures, placed the drug inside, then resmelted the chips of brass that had been scooped out, filled in over the flask, sanded, buffed, polished, and replaced the pieces in the crates. After that, someone would come and pick the souvenirs up for mailing to various points in this country and all over the world. It was a tedious and time-consuming process, to be sure, but the price of PBT and the small quantity needed for a usual dose made it quite worthwhile. Besides, it was safe, and men like the Brethren put a price on safety that was higher than that placed on turning a large profit. They knew very well that the United Nations would use the slightest excuse to stick them away in some well-guarded prison for the rest of their lives.

  This explained the difficulty the narcotics agents had met with for so long, though it still did not explain how PBT was manufactured or what it was. And it certainly did not explain the terror with which
the Brethren regarded the cellar. He drifted from this room into another where crates of figurines of various types lined all the walls. Without slowing, he entered the final chamber. It was an unfinished basement room with cement slapped formlessly over the earth walls. The floor was dirt. There was no light here, except what drifted in from other chambers. Somehow, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for . . .

  The place was a storage chamber for junk, broken lawn-mowers and shattered wheelbarrows, old newspapers and magazines, the things everyone saves against his best judgment. In the far corner of the room, the floor sloped into a jumble of rocks, then disappeared altogether as a limestone sinkhole yawned in the bowels of the earth. The hole had probably opened after the house had been built. He wondered how long it would take before it would split wide enough to swallow one of the foundation walls.

  He balanced above the gap in the floor, looking down into blackness. Using his ESP, he felt about the rim of the aperture and discovered a switch box just inside the rim of the depression. When he threw the toggle, soft yellow light sprang up within the cave, and he knew he had discovered the production center for the hallucinogen.

  And, looking down into that hole, he had an inkling of the horror with which the Brethren viewed this place. He could not pinpoint what bothered him, but there was a feel of the —supernatural. It was a silly word, but it fit. He shuddered, took a deep breath, and descended . . .

  The primary drop shaft of the sinkhole was some seventy feet long, breaking a bit to the left, then back to the right, but maintaining a fairly true vertical descent. Huge blocks of fractured rock formed the sides, tumbled against one another to form small caves and cul-de-sacs that were either too small for men to gain admittance or led nowhere once one was inside them. Here and there bats clung to overhanging rocks, eyes blinded by the light, wings folded tight against them, as if the flimsy membranes would give them protection. Along the right side, a series of rungs bolted firmly into the stone provided a means down for those who had no ESP.

  At the bottom of the main plummet, Timothy found he had to angle his body sideways to get through a bottleneck in the tunnel. He brushed through, scraping the worn surfaces of the rocks, and found himself in a large chamber whose dimensions rivaled those of an old-fashioned baseball stadium. He righted himself and spent a few moments marveling at the stalactites and stalagmites, at the grotesque weathering of the stone that dripping streams of water had managed to sculpt in the last handful of centuries. A stream of water, no wider than a yardstick and perhaps a foot or two deep, wound through the vaulted cavern, making gurgling, baby laughter that rang from the walls in hundreds of different echoes that sounded like other streams whispering in response. The air was almost cold and carried a damp, musty smell that was unpleasant and generated a feeling of claustrophobia despite the dimensions of the cave.

  He drifted along the room toward the far end, which was slanted downward at a rather sharp angle. When the floor began tilting at a forty-five-degree slope, he saw the rungs again, bolted solidly into the stone, and he knew he was still on the trail of whatever it was that was nestled here in the belly of the earth.

  And then he saw it . . .

  At the bottom of the long slope, a magnificent length of emerald-colored metal gleamed as if it had been buffed and waxed only moments before. It was a hundred feet long and seemed to disappear into the rock itself, as if it were a piece of cosmic pipe that had been capped here in case an extension was ever required. It tapered as it grew closer to him, unlike a pipe, and the end of it was not capped but open. As he drew closer, he realized that the huge tubes, each twenty feet across, that were recessed in the terminal aperture were vaguely reminiscent of rocket boosters, although of an altogether different type and size from anything he had seen before.

  As his sense of eeriness and fear began to blossom within him, he realized that he was looking upon what could be only a portion of an alien vessel, a starship which buried itself in the earth so long ago that no man could have existed to watch it. At that time, man was little more than a slimy thing newly crawled from the ocean and fighting desperately to grow legs fast enough to keep from being pushed into extinction by the irresistible natural forces of the world which had spawned it.

  He drifted along the hull, looking for a way inside, for he was now certain that the Brethren were getting the PBT from this artifact that could—despite the death of its crew—just possibly still be functioning in some areas. Perhaps the stuff came from the ship's medical supplies, drugs which were nothing more than antibiotics to the extraterrestrials but halluciongenics to men. At last, he saw the circular port which stood open on the far side of the ship, giving view to impenetrable blackness.

  He hovered before it, trying to peer inside, but could not see anything. He searched for a light switch. There was none.

  He waited, listening, but could hear no noise within the great ship. He searched for the telltale sign of Brethren presence with his psionic abilities. There was no one here. Hesitantly, he went inside . . .

  CHAPTER 13

  The corridor of the starship was more of a tube than a hallway, lacking any well-defined floor, the walls and ceiling merely curving together without benefit of a seam. As he floated warily into the alien structure, the walls themselves began to illuminate his way, glowing dully blue for twenty feet on either side of him. He tried to see how the lighting functioned, but his gaze met only the flat surface of the metal walls, and he could not focus well enough to see any way the light could possibly be shining through. He abandoned that pursuit when his eye began to water. He continued down the corridor, carefully studying every projection or recession along the way, waiting expectantly for something horrible to happen.

  Shortly, the entrance tube passed through the reinforced doorway, and it seemed as if his progress was to be halted by a thick door painted in spirals of green and gray. But as he approached, the spirals swirled, the door irised, and he passed through into the first room that he had seen since clambering through the exterior hatch.

  It was a small room, perhaps fifteen feet square—except that it was not square; it had no angles whatsoever. The room was perfectly round inside. There was a storage rack of what appeared to be space activity suits, though they were not suits so much as very small cars, hardly larger than a man, into which a man might slide like a foot into a boot.

  Timothy noticed with interest that there was no room for a man's legs in one of these capsules, though the vehicles were otherwise roughly tailored to humanoid dimensions and requirements. Perhaps even more mysteriously, there was no control console of any sort visible within the devices, no wheel or stick for guiding them and no instruments for monitoring conditions internally or externally. There was only a seat shaped like a shallow cup, a great deal of rolled padding. It was the most alien thing he had seen thus far, this total lack of toggles and switches and buttons which decorated all earthly devices.

  The next stretch of hallway led to a huge chamber forty feet across and easily eighty feet long. Timothy was aware that now he must be in that portion of the starship which was wedged into the rock, the part he had not been able to see from outside. He was amazed that the interior of the vessel showed no damage, and he suspected that the exterior might prove the same if it could be extricated from the viselike grip of the earth.

  Again, this room contained no corners, and the eye was permitted to rest on hundreds of gentle curves both in the design of the room itself and in the furniture which had been bolted into it. There were chairs and couches and slings, all of which were heavily padded and low-slung. There were machines beside all the chairs and couches, thrusting down from the ceiling next to the slings. He investigated the mechanism of one of them and decided that it was a greatly perfected version of the senso-theater projector. He wondered what sort of programs it provided for the creatures who came here to be entertained; then he forced himself to stop extrapolating on every item that caught
his attention. If he gave way to his questing curiosity about every device, it would take him a lifetime to make his way through the ship.

  He left the theater and drifted into another brief section of corridor with irising doors to either side of it that led to private chambers which seemed to be living quarters with chain-hung sling beds. Shortly after entering the third major chamber through which the main tube corridor passed, he gained the end of the temporary goal which he had set for himself: he uncovered the source of PBT.

  The room was another sphere of approximately the same dimensions as the first he had encountered upon entering the starship. Here, though, there were some noticeable and notable differences of architecture. The walls, ceiling, and even the floor were covered with access plates to blocks of machinery and with readout screens that appeared to be communications links to the ship computers. He searched into them with his ESP, through circuitry not unlike human electrical equipment, and verified that guess. There was a walkway through the maze of wires and slots and raised modules, although it was so straight and narrow that it could never have been used by the technicians who would have to service these machines when they malfunctioned, or by the crew who would be using the devices.

  Timothy drifted to the first series of drawers that seemed to slide into the walls themselves and was not at all surprised when the thing rolled out at his approach. It was large enough, both in length and depth, to contain him, and he fancied it very nearly contoured to the form of a body, but for the lack of leg space. It was laced across with friction straps to tie down whatever cargo it had been meant to hold. When he drifted lower to look in the drawer and to the space above it that was revealed when it was open, he saw a series of spidery-fingered hands that seemed to hold surgical instruments. He straightened, his curiosity aroused more than it had been at any moment since his entrance. He opened the next drawer and found the same setup, the needles and surgical equipment. When he pulled open the third drawer, hoping that he would find some variance which—by comparison —would help him to understand the nature of these drawers, he was confronted by the penetrating stare of the alien which lay within . . .