Starblood

  [Dean Koontz – Starblood]

  [Scanned by BuddyDk – August 5 2003]

  [Original typos hasn’t been corrected]

  THE HOUND

  entered the room, sensed Timothy's presence, made sure that he was the proper quarry. It fired three pins.

  Timothy slammed down on his mobility controls, streaked into the hall and down the cellar stairs. He slammed the heavy door of the shooting range. It was monstrously thick, plated in lead. Even the Hound would require time to break it down.

  He floated along the cellars that stretched back into the mountain, ripping the paneling away from the walls with his servos, and squeezing into the old part of the house.

  Behind him, he heard the heavy door explode before the attack of the Hound . . . and ahead was a cave-in, trapping him in this room, his pursuer no more than thirty feet behind.

  He turned, and saw the Hound's sensors gleaming in the dim light . . .

  STARBLOOD

  DEAN R. KOONTZ

  LANCER BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  A LANCER BOOK

  STARBLOOD

  Copyright © 1972 by Dean Koontz

  All rights reserved

  Printed In the U.S.A.

  DEDICATION: FOR DAD

  LANCER BOOKS, INC. • 1560 BROADWAY

  NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036

  "There was no 20th century hallucinogenic so heinous as PBT—slang for Perfectly Beautiful Trip. We're still plagued by it in this new century. The substance cannot be analyzed, and there is no known way to break an addict of his habit Addiction leads to non-involvement with productive society, an early loss of mental capacities, and too frequently, death. Many drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, seem to offer rich rewards to their addicts, but if there is one person in the world who has ever gained from PBT, his must be a singularly odd case indeed . . ."

  Address by Chief of Narcotics Bureau,

  World Health Organization

  ". . . a singularly odd case . . ."

  PROLOGUE

  Timothy was not human. Not wholly.

  If you include arms and legs in a definition of the human body, then Timothy did not meet the necessary criteria. If you count two eyes in that definition, Timothy was also ruled out, for he had but one, and even that was placed in an unusual position: somewhat closer to his left ear than a human eye should be and definitely an inch lower in his overlarge skull than was the norm. Then there was his nose: it totally lacked cartilage; the only evidence of its presence was two holes, ragged nostrils punctuating the relative center of his bony, misshapen head. There was his skin: waxy yellow like some artificial fruit and coarse with large, irregular pores that showed like dark pinpricks bottomed with dried blood. There were his ears: very flat against his head and somewhat pointed, like the ears of a wolf. There were other things which would show up on closer examination: his hair (which was of different texture than any racial variant among the normal human strains), his nipples (which were ever so slightly concave instead of convex), and his genitals (which were male, but which were contained in a pouch just below his navel and not between his truncated limbs).

  There was only one way in which Timothy was even remotely human, and that was in his brain, his intellect. But even here, he was not entirely normal, for his IQ was slightly above 250, placing him well within the limits of "genius."

  He was the product of the artificial wombs, a strictly military venture intended to produce living weapons: beings with psionic abilities who just possibly might bring the Asians to their knees. To a certain type of military mind, the human body is little more than a tool to be used as the officer wishes, and such were the men in charge of the wombs. When results like Timothy slid from the steamy chambers, gnarled and useless specimens, they shook their heads, ignored public condemnation, and went on with their mad work.

  Timothy was placed in a special home for subhuman products of the wombs, where it was expected he would die within five years. It was in his third year there that they came to realize Timothy (he was the T birth in the fifth alphabetical series, thus his name) was more than a mindless vegetable . . . it happened at feeding time. The nurse had been dutifully spooning pap into his mouth, cleaning his chin as he dribbled, when one of the other "children" in the ward entered its death throes. She hurried off to assist the doctor, leaving Timothy hungry.

  Due to the training of a new staff nurse that afternoon, he had inadvertently been skipped during the last meal. He was ravenous now. When the nurse did not respond to his caterwauling, he tossed about on the foam mattress. Legless and armless as he was, there was nothing he could do to reach the bowl of food that rested on the table next to his crib, painfully within sight of his one, misplaced eye. He blinked that eye, squinted it, and lifted the spoon without touching it. He levitated the instrument to his mouth, licked the pablum from it, and sent it back to the bowl for more.

  It was during his sixth spoonful when the nurse returned, saw what he was doing, and promptly fainted dead away.

  That same night, Timothy was moved from the ward.

  Quietly.

  He did not know where they were taking him. Indeed, lacking the sensory stimulation afforded most three-year-olds, he did not even care. Without proper stimulation, he had never developed rational thought processes. He understood nothing beyond the basic desires of his own body: hunger, thirst, excretion. He could not wonder where they were taking him.

  He was not permitted to remain ignorant for long. The military hungered for success (they had only had two others) and hurried his development. They tested his IQ as best they could and found it slightly above average. They were jubilant, for they had feared they would have to work with a psionically gifted moron. Next, the computers devised an educational program suited to his unique history, and initiated it at once.

  They expected him to be talking in seven months: he was verbalizing in five weeks. They expected him to be reading in a year and a half; he was quantitatively absorbing on a college level in three months.

  Not surprisingly, they found his IQ rising. Intelligence quotient is based on what an individual has learned, as well as what he inately knows. When Timothy had first been tested, he had learned absolutely nothing. His slightly above average IQ score had been garnered solely on that native ability. Excitement at the project grew until Timothy no longer reached a meaningful IQ of 250. It was now eighteen months since he had lifted the spoon without hands, and he was very nearly devouring books, switching from topic to topic, from two weeks of advanced physics texts to a month of nineteenth-century British literature. The military didn't care, for they did not expect him to be a one-field expert, merely educated and conversant. At the end of eighteen months, he was both these things. The military turned to other plans . . .

  They coached his psionic abilities carefully. There were dreams in military minds, of Timothy destroying the entire Asian Army with one psionic burst. But dreams are only dreams. The fact was soon evident that Timothy's psi powers were severely limited. The heaviest thing he could lift was a spoon full of applesauce, and his radius of ability was only a hundred feet As a superweapon, he was something of a washout.

  The generals were disappointed: after the initial paralysis wore off, they opted to dissect Timothy to see what they could discover of his ability.

  Luckily for him, the war ended.

  The Bio-Chem people came up with the ultimate weapon. They released a virus on the Asian mainland at roughly the same time the army was discovering Timothy's limits. Before the generals could act on him, the virus had destroyed approximately half of the Asian male population—it was structured to affect only certain chromosome combinations that occured only in Mongolians—and had induced the enemy to a reluctant surrender.

  With pea
ce, the wombs were put under the administration of the Bio-Chem people, and the project was dissolved,

  But the scientists were still fascinated with Timothy. For three weeks, he was exhaustively tested and retested by his new masters. He overheard their discussions about "What his brain might look like . . ."

  It was a rugged three weeks.

  In the end a leak reached the press and the story of the horribly deformed mutant who could lift spoons without touching them was a three-day sensation. The Veterans' Bureau, the largest bureau of the now peace-oriented government, stepped into the uproar and took control of him. Senator Kilby announced that the government was going to "rehabilitate" the young man, provide him with servo-hands and a grav-plate system for mobility.

  He was a three-day sensation again. And so was the politically wise senator who took credit for his rehabilitation . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  Timothy stood on the patio that jutted beyond the cliff and watched a flock of birds settling into the big green pines which spread thickly down the mountainside. He was fascinated by nature because it contained two qualities he did not —an intricacy of purpose and general perfection. As most normal men are intrigued by freaks, so Timothy was intrigued by the nature of normalcy. He directed his left servo-hand to pull apart the branches obscuring his view of a particularly fine specimen. The six-fingered prostho swept away from him on the grav-plates that cored its palm, shot forty feet down the embankment to the offending branch, and gently pulled it aside so as not to disturb the birds. But the birds were too aware: they flew.

  Using his limited psionic powers, Ti reached into the two hundred micro-miniature switches of the control module buried in the globe of the grav-plate system that capped his truncated legs. The switches, operated by psi power, in turn maneuvered his hands and moved him about as he wished. He recalled his left servo now that the bird had gone. It rushed back to him and floated at his side.

  He looked at the watch strapped to the servo and was surprised to find that it was past time for his usual morning chat with Taguster. He flipped the microminiature switches and floated around and through the patio doors, Into the somewhat plush living-room of his house.

  The house was the pivotal spot of his life, giving him comfort when he was depressed, companionship when he was lonely, a sense of accomplishment when his life seemed hollow. He had built it with money earned from his two volumes of autobiography, a proud monument built over the ruins of a Revolutionary War, pro-British secret supplies' cellar. It was maintained by the revenues from Enterstat, the first stat newspaper devoted to gossip and entertainment, a project launched successfully with the book monies.

  He crossed the fur carpet and glided into the special cup-chair of his Mindlink set. Raising a "hand," he pulled down the burnished aluminum helmet and fitted it securely to his bony cranium (the helmet too had been specially crafted). He used the other servo to flip the proper toggles to shift his mind into the receiver in Taguster's living-room.

  There was a moment of blurring when intense blacks and grays swarmed formlessly about him. It was said that this was the moment when death tried to rush into the vacated body —and when the Mindlink circuits dissauded it from claiming another victim as it wished. Then his consciousness flashed onto the Mindlink Company's beam past thousands of other entities going to other receivers. In less than a second, the blacks and grays swirled dizzily, then cleared and metamorphosed into colors. The first thing he saw through the receiver was Leonard Taguster lying dead against the wall . . .

  For a moment, he attempted to break away from the artificial brain blank and the camera eyes of the receiver, tried to plunge back into the chiaroscuro world of the beam. Taguster simply could not be dead. And if he were, then Ti simply could not admit it. There was, after all, no one else in his world, no one with whom he might talk with ease, as equal; no one else who would easily understand him. After Taguster, there was only the house, and the house could not converse. Then the core of him, which had survived so much in the past, gripped him and forced him to cease his childish flight from reality. He settled firmly into the receiver again and looked out through the glass eyes of the cameras attached to the brain blank.

  No, Taguster was not dead. There was blood, surely, pooling about the concert guitarist's head, but the same head was also moving, nodding in near unconsciousness, but nodding nonetheless. Ti operated the voicebox of the machine, spoke in a mechanical harshness. "Lenny!"

  Taguster raised his head a little, enough for Ti to see the thin dart buried half in his throat. Taguster tried to say something, but he could only manage a thick gurgle, like syrup splattering against the bottom of a galvanized bucket.

  Timothy felt a silent scream welling up inside him, heard it booming deep within him. A moment later, he realized it was not silent, but given voice by the receiver. That frightened him, and he looked away from the wounded body of his friend, trying to regain his wits. Darts? Who would want to kill Leonard Taguster? And why hadn't they finished the job?

  The musician made frantic noises, as if he desperately needed to communicate something. His head bobbed, jerked, as convulsions hit him. Ti wished he had not looked back. Taguster's eyes were wide open and brimming with tears. He knew he was dying.

  Ti's mind swam inside the receiver, receding into the swirl of black and gray, then surging into color and life again as his fear of retreating overcame his fear of remaining. He was fighting off inglorious panic, and he knew it. But Taguster wanted to say something and that was the important thing to remember. But how could that be accomplished, with the man's pale throat so horribly violated?

  Taguster scrabbled a limp hand against the wall as if writing without implement, and Ti got the idea. He turned the head of his receiver around so that the cameras showed him most of the room. There was a desk with various writing tools lying on it, a mere twenty feet away against the far wall. But a receiver was not mobile—and Taguster could not move. Ti thought of retreating from the receiver and returning to his own body, calling the police from his house. But Taguster's desire to communicate was too intense to ignore.

  Ti squinted eyes that he didn't have (the cameras could not rightly be called eyes, and his own single orb was at home, lying lopsided in his irregular skull) and forced his psi energies to coalesce in the vicinity of the desk. He reached out and toyed with the pencil. It flipped over and almost rolled onto the floor. He doubled his effort, lifted it, and floated it across the room to where Taguster lay dying. He imagined he was sweating.

  Taguster picked the instrument up and held it as if he were not certain what it was. He coughed bright blood, stared at that a moment. When Timothy urged him to write, he looked up blearily at the receiver cameras, seemed to make an expression of assent . . . or pain. He wrote on the wall: MARGLE. The letters were shaky and uneven, but readable. Then Taguster sighed, dropped the pencil. It made an eerily loud sound as it clattered on the slate floor.

  "Lenny!"

  Timothy seemed to remember having heard the name before, though he could not place the source. However, he felt justified in slipping out of the set now to call the police. But as he was loosening himself from the brain blank, someone screamed.

  It was a woman; it came high and piercing, bursting out full strength and turning into a gurgle, trailing away in seconds. It had come from the bedroom, and Ti tensed his mind and shifted into the bedroom receiver extension.

  It was a woman. She had been trying to get out of the window, but her flimsy nightdress had caught on the latch, delaying her one moment too long. There were three darts in her back. Blood dripped off the frilly lace and onto the floor.

  Ti had been working under the assumption that the killer had left. Now he shifted the camera to the left and saw the murderer.

  A Hound floated toward the doorway, twin servo-hands flying ahead of it, fingers seemingly tensed as if to strangle someone. The dart tube on the burnished belly of the spherical machine protruded, ready. Here was the kille
r: thirty-odd pounds of ball-shaped computer that could track with seven sensory systems.

  And only the police should have one.

  But why should the police want Taguster dead . . . and why should they choose such an easily traced means of obtaining his destruction?

  The Hound disappeared through the doorway, suddenly reminding Ti that Taguster was back there in the living-room, half dead. The Hound was returning to check on its work. Ti shifted his consciousness into the main receiver again.

  Taguster was in the same position, still gurgling. When the mechanical killer entered the room, the dying man saw it.

  Ti found a curio, a small brass peasant leading a brass mule, a handcrafted trinket Taguster had brought back from a trip to Mexico. Lifting with his psionic power, he threw it at the Hound with all the force he could muster. The toy bounced off the dully gleaming hide and fell harmlessly to the floor.

  The Hound drifted toward Taguster, firing tube open.

  Timothy found an ashtray, tried to lift it but could not manage. He cursed the limitations of his power. Then he remembered the gun on the desktop, lying opposite the pencils, heavy and ugly. He touched the pistol psionically, but could not budge it. He pressed harder, eventually moved it slightly until the barrel pointed directly at the Hound. Pulling the light wire of the trigger was easy enough. The gun spat a narcodart that bounced off the beast with no effect other than to elicit a scanning by its sight receptors.

  Then the Hound shot Taguster. Four times in the chest.

  Timothy felt as if all his energy had been sucked out of him by an electronic vampire. He wanted only to fold up, shrivel in upon himself, and slide home into his temporal shell where, at least, he could gain succor from his books, his films, his house. But he could not let the Hound escape. He sent the cameras swiveling in search of articles small enough for his talent to handle. He found a number of trinkets and figurines and rained these uselessly upon the machine.