Starblood

by Dean Koontz

  "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 analogue 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 sexual 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 analogue 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.

  Timothy unlocked the door, opened it, and went inside, closing it behind. The house was a supermodern one, the floor covered in thick shag 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 classical 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 analogue 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-sexual longing worse than it had been. He wished his own mind could have come up with a less disturbing analogue.

  The subconscious was a madhouse of sado-masochistic sexual 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 sexual 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 froget this lack of sexual 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 amassed 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 sanctity 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 pass from the desk. And he knew he could never obtain one. Passes 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 bunked 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 bastard.

  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 analogue of a data storage system housed in a great, windowless building, much like the analogue 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 analogue 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 ungodly squeal of protest as he worked. He soon realized that any toying he did caused the mind and, by association, 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 associated, 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, damn it, it just might work . . .