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  Then, as if his mind had just finished mulching the fodder of the alien's comments, he turned to other tilings and suddenly remembered a forgotten morsel, one phrase with more meaning than he had at first attributed to it: ". . . whether or not to go back . . ." Whether or not. That implied that he had a choice of leaving the starship or remaining within its emerald metal walls.

  "But I can't stay here!" he said, the words far louder and sharper than they had been intended, ringing on the cold walls with an echo of the panic and excitement building in him.

  "Why not?"

  Why not . . . ?

  He almost laughed at the whispered brevity of that. Why not? The alien had made it seem like a black-and-white question when there were so many shades of gray involved! Should a man retreat from a world because he fears that he cannot easily cope with it? Should a man deny his race, the nature of the soul within him, simply because there is an alternative that may lead to less heartache than continuing as he has continued in the past? Should a man relinquish all the material comforts which have required years to acquire, all the most lavish luxuries of his society, in return for some esoteric, intangible benefits of the intellect which might be gained in the exchange? Should a man leave that which he is certain of for that which is mysterious, unsure?

  Yes. His own calm and reasoned reply to the questions he had been posing startled him. Yes, a man should retreat from a world he fears he cannot cope with—if the reasons for his inability to cope lay with the nature of that world and not within himself. Yes, a man should deny his race and the heritage of it if his own race and its history deny him the right of that peace of mind. Yes, a man should exchange material possessions, no matter what the degree of status they represent, for intangible ones if joy lies with the latter and not the former. Yes, a man should tackle that which is mysterious and frightening, for only in that manner can a man ever find satisfaction in himself and in the personal world which he has constructed around him.

  "You would accept me?" he asked.

  "It would be an easy matter on our part. We have accepted others of far stranger races than yours. Perhaps it would be difficult for you to accept us. You will have to learn and embrace our customs, language, and basic patterns of reasoning—which are all different than yours. It will be far more difficult for you to adjust than it was for me to adapt your language and cultural patterns. Our culture is far more complex. It is possible that, confronted with its intricacy, you could go mad."

  "I doubt it," he said.

  "I agree."

  "But why do you want me? Why bother?"

  "There are cubes. They are empty. You are the first psionic of your race. You will make an excellent emissary when the time comes for us to meet the rest of your race. And what reasons, on the other hand, could be argued against your acceptance?"

  "But your shipmates—"

  "Have heard every word that has been spoken between us, heard with a part of their minds, either as a major focus or a minor point."

  "And they feel the same?"

  "They do."

  Timothy looked around the chamber at the hundreds of other dangling cubes, trapped between coppery strands of webbing, like surreal horses on an other-world merry-go-round. He was not frightened or repulsed by the prospect of spending centuries within one of those while his mind functioned in disembodiment on some far and nonhuman world.

  "I would like that," he said.

  "There are things you must attend to."

  "Yes. The Brethren. The newspaper. It will not take very much time."

  "When you return, all will have been prepared for your entombment," the alien said. The greenish cubes glinted with stray pieces of light, their edges soft, now smooth, now struck with light again as they turned slowly, slowly, first to the left, then the right, too slight a movement to be easily discerned.

  "I'll hurry," he said.

  When the whisper did not reply, Timothy closed his eyes and gathered about himself the cloak of serenity necessary to a leap into the nonmatter continuum of teleportation. He conjured up a vision of the Brethren farm, of the darkling earth around it.

  He teleported.

  He had work to do ...

  CHAPTER 17

  He found himself standing beneath the same willow tree where he had first arrived when he had teleported from the Brethren house in New England, though he had not made a conscious effort to return to the exact same terminus. He drifted quickly across the lawn, onto the porch where he found the slumbering bodies of Richard Boggs and the unnamed henchman who had been sitting in the swing. He entered the mind of the surgically created killer and wiped away whatever knowledge the man had possessed of the starship and the origins of PBT.

  Richard Boggs's mind was somewhat more intricate. The analogue which Timothy's own mind established to deal with it was of a junkyard, where rusting, useless articles of the man's life rested in varying states of decay. Richard Boggs was a dreamer, a man with a million schemes all contained within him at once—none of them workable. He would be, until the end of his days, exactly what he was now: a second-rate hired man. In the junkyard, among the rust and the twisted metal, Timothy located that which he wished to expunge, and left the man ignorant of not only the source of the drug, but of its existence as well. When he woke, the letters PBT would have no meaning whatsoever for him.

  He drifted into the house and did the same with Thelma Boggs, wiping out all knowledge of the drug and the starship. Her mind was similar to her husband's, and the hopeless schemes she had were often ones he had cultivated first.

  He went to the three Brethren whose minds he had explored earlier, and took away the selected bits of data from two of them. Moving faster now, more anxious to get this finished, he went outside and eradicated the starship and PBT from the memories of the rear door guard and from the mind of the man who had been patrolling the white picket fence.

  When all of this had been accomplished, within a matter of ten minutes, he returned to the living-room, where the gray-haired Brother who had shot at him through the window lay on his face, his mind as yet untouched. Timothy delved deeply into the ancient library analogue and stirred through the thousands of books of thoughts, discarding them, throwing them on the floor when he discovered they were not what he wanted. In time he knew the name of every Brother who knew of the existence of the starship below the house. There were only four of them, all members of the Inner Circle of the organization. There was Leopold, of course. And three others who shared in the policy-making of the Brethren structure. He collected their addresses, permanent and alternate, then wiped the starship and the PBT out of the gray-haired gentleman's memories.

  He floated into the darkness, over the dew-damp lawn, taking a moment or two to enjoy the fresh, untainted fragrance of the country air. The anti-pollution laws had slowly begun to have their intended effect on the cities, but they were not nearly so clean as this. He was well aware, as he filled his lungs and savored the crispness, that this might well be the last chance he would have for reverie for the next few centuries—or longer.

  He looked at the stars overhead. They no longer seemed cold and distant and uncaring, but warm and close. They were things to be viewed as guiding beacons in the darkness. And soon, quite soon now, he would be there, among them, if only with his psionic abilities. He understood, looking at those far points of light, why the aliens could not simply teleport to their homeworld. Even the superhuman talents of the fully developed mind could not cope with those vast reaches of space.

  He closed his eye, blocking out the stars and concentrating on finishing what must be done here on earth.

  He tensed every muscle.

  The night was cool; he left it.

  He dematerialized on that Iowa lawn . . .

  . . . And materialized in the study of the New England house where he had so recently been a captive. The four men were still in the room, much the same as he had left them, though Leopold had awakened and was sitting on the couch wit
h bis head propped between his hands, trying—it seemed —to press the fog out of his brain in order to get his thoughts clicking properly once more. Margle was groaning and tossing his head restlessly from side to side, though he was still unconscious. The two apemen, Baker and Siccoli, were as contented as babes newly fallen into slumber.

  Timothy slipped into the minds of the two henchmen and erased their knowledge of the existence of PBT. He did the same with Jon Margle, then pinched the nerves in the base of the man's neck again, sending him down into perfectly still sleep.

  Next he entered Leopold's mind, as cautiously as possible, fearing that the bloated, roachlike insects that had poured out of the walls of the conscious mind might still be running free. But the things had either been driven back into the walls of the conscious mind or had returned of their own free will. The subconscious must fear and detest the conscious, he thought, as much as the aware portion refuses to have anything to do with the seamier concerns of the subconscious. In this manner, all of us may be schizophrenics in a private way, and thus cope with life far better than if we had to face it straight on, without compromises.

  He listened at the wall.

  He could hear them in there, and the sound was not reassuring. 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 analogue, 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 grass, 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 associated 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 lif e . . .

  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 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 mined 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 grass and changing it, in the instant, to 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.