Starblood

by Dean Koontz

  CHAPTER 14

  He gasped, startled, and rushed backwards, away from the open drawer. He came to an abrupt halt as his own foolishness became evident to him. Even if he ran, he could not get out of here in time—not if they knew he was aboard. And if his extrasensory powers were of no use to him, there was nowhere on earth he could count himself safe; if they were useful, he had nothing to worry about.

  He also began to realize that the thing he had seen was not a living, breathing creature, but a corpse. If it had been alive, the world would surely have heard about it and from it a good many years ago; the Brethren would not have been able to exploit the wonders of the starship towards their own ends. That creature lying in the drawer was not the kind of fellow anyone exploited—if he wished to live to the end of his natural days.

  He went back, somewhat ashamed at himself and his fainthearted reaction.

  But he returned slowly, nevertheless.

  He peered over the brink of a surgical drawer, far less frightened now that he knew what to be prepared for.

  The alien stared up at him with two, huge, multifaceted eyes that had no differentiation between pupil and iris. Each of them was nothing more than a fist-sized convexity of a milky blue opaque color that somehow reminded him of fine china. Each eye was beveled, like the eye of a fly. The nose was actually more human than Timothy's own, though somewhat wider and flatter and possessed of one nostril rather than two. The man was thin, and his lips were almost like pencil lines. Gleaming through a gap in those lips were teeth of a human character. Indeed, the eyes were the only truly alien features, aside from the abnormally high and bulbous forehead. But they were enough to have given Ti that mild case of panic when he had come across them unexpectedly.

  He noticed, too, that the alien was armless and legless, though he did not consider this so nonhuman. Its condition had not been a matter of accident or amputation, for its body was too smoothly, perfectly, formed for that. It had been limbless its entire life—and apparently for the same reason that Timothy was limbless. He was excited by the thought. Both he and this alien had been born with an extrasensory power that made limbs unnecessary . . .

  Timothy thought back over all the things he had noticed since he boarded the starship, all the clues that should have fit together and completed the puzzle even before he was presented with the answer in the form of this corpse: the lack of true floors (which would not matter to a race which had the ability to levitate and propel itself with psychic energy rather than legs), the lack of controls in the extravehicular "spacesuits" (which would not be even desirable to a race which had evolved away from hands and which could monitor its machines, for the most part, with its psionic eyes and ears and hands), and the lack of an overall lighting system in favor of one where illumination followed you around (a race with so much psionic power would certainly have no vestigal fears of the dark and would require light only as a convenience to show them the way more easily; indeed, they very well might have learned to see with their ESP and without light, in which case the illumination would be here for guests, other intelligent races of the galaxy that might come aboard). Here was a race whose "paranormal" abilities were its birthright; he wondered how much more advanced than he they were.

  He was able to see, quite readily, why the Brethren had been so horrified by what they had discovered down here and had, to a man, tried to conceal what they had seen from even themselves. Timothy was accustomed to the corruption of the human form, for his own mortal shell was certainly as much of a freak as that of the alien. Years ago, he had ceased looking in the mirror, but he knew what corruption was, knew it with every breath he drew into lungs that were not quite right, with every mouthful of food his twisted stomach ingested. He could accept this alien form, even be pleased with it. However, those who were used to the pretty face and the handsome body would swiftly rebel at the concept of an entire race of beings such as this. They could only conceive of them as hideously evil and, to avoid nightmares, they would have to shove what they had seen deep into the subconscious pockets of their minds.

  He touched the nearly invisible transparent plastic shield that fitted over the alien, traced his ESP fingers on it. It was bitter cold, though no frost had formed inside.

  The morgue . . .

  Yet, if these creatures had such well-developed psionic abilities, why was this man-thing lying here dead? Why couldn't he have reached within his own body and cured whatever was wrong with him, just as Timothy had found he could cure his own wounds, heal breached flesh? He examined the body more closely and discovered why it had been unable to heal itself. There was a hole in its neck, angled upward into the skull. Whatever had killed it had forced its way into the brain. It was the only sort of wound that could kill a psionic man—and it must have come too suddenly and unexpectedly for him to use his powers to avoid it.

  He wondered if the Brethren had killed it. But the hole was ragged and too large to have been made by a bullet. He could not imagine a Brother carrying any weapon but a gun.

  Turning from the drawer, he surveyed the rest of the chamber, now more aware of what he should be looking for. He began to see that much of the machinery was of a medical nature, designed to perform almost any surgical function. This did not fit the concept of a psionic race that could cure itself. He reminded himself, however, that this was a totally alien culture and atmosphere he had entered and that his own rules did not necessarily apply. Besides, it was quite logical that a robotic hospital might be provided for guests on the ship who were of races other than that of these creatures. There was a walkway through the chamber, after all, and that certainly wasn't for the creatures like that dead one in the morgue drawer.

  As Ti continued his investigation of the room, he saw a series of plastic flasks into which stainless steel tubes were dripping fluids of various colors. His mind registered the data after his eye had passed it by, and he looked swiftly back, more excited by this than he had been by his discovery of the alien corpse lying in the preservation drawer of the morgue. Of the six flasks, the second from the right was filling up with an amber fluid which looked strikingly like the PBT that Margle had boosted into his veins all those times in the basement of the house in New England.

  He drifted across the chamber to the bottle and looked at it more closely. On the floor, beneath the flask, there was a thick plasti-glass jug of the sort often used to hold cider or wine. It was half full of the amber fluid. Timothy lifted it, examined it, and discovered it had been made in Pernborth, New Jersey. It was most assuredly not an artifact from another world. The Brethren entered the room every day, perhaps twice a day judging by the production rate of the fluid, collected a full bottle, dumped it into the jug, replaced the bottle and left. When the jug was full, they would take the PBT away to be put into small flasks and inserted into brass statuettes for distribution. When they returned to collect the latest supply, a new jug would be brought along.

  The combination of the supertechnical alien machines and the plastic cider jug was almost comical. He would have laughed, except for the thoughts of Leonard Taguster and the other thousands who had had their lives ruined by the stuff.

  And it was no wonder that the police laboratories had not yet been able to break down the chemical composition of the stuff. Whatever it was, it was utterly unhuman, unearthly. It had come from another star system, perhaps even from another galaxy. There was little likelihood that any earthly analysis would ever decode the structure of the substance. Metals, such as these steel tubes, might be fairly uniform throughout large sections of the galaxy. But plant life would differ from world to world. Animal life would differ too, perhaps even more radically. And since the serums more than likely were produced from animal or vegetable sources, an earth laboratory would meet a blank wall every time it applied its own standards and knowledge to the task.

  Around the machine, the access plating had been pried loose and bent back as if the Brethren had summoned experts to examine the guts of the mechan
ism, perhaps searching for some manner of accelerating the production of the priceless fluid. There was a fantastically miniaturized and complex system behind the plating, more involved than anything Timothy had ever seen, even in the SAM built by Weapons Psionic. This indecipherable mess of circuits and switches had apparently dissuaded the Brethren from tinkering with it (and thereby possibly losing what supply they could obtain), because they had never bothered to remove the plating the entire way. Considering the Brethren he knew, it was difficult to believe they would be satisfied with such a slight attempt to change the flow of PBT. Perhaps their fear augmented their ignorance of the machinery. Perhaps they felt that death waited on anyone who would attempt to fool with the works of creatures like the one lying in the morgue drawer.

  Finally, there was nothing more to be discovered in the chamber, at least on a casual survey of the sort upon which he was now embarked. Later he would return and delve into things with his ESP, study and comprehend whatever he could. He moved toward the main tubeway.

  He was anxious to return to the surface and his mountainside home where he could contact United Nations narcotics people and break the story to them. After, of course, breaking it to the world in Enterstat first. He did not particularly care about getting the scoop on anyone anymore. Strangely, he did not even care whether Enterstat folded. But the chance to explode something like this would give George Creel more pleasure than he received from editing a thousand regular editions.

  There was still more of the starship to explore, and he wanted to have everything down pat before turning the matter over to the authorities. That was a habit he had gotten into after previous disastrous encounters with the police . . .

  In the corridor, the eerie blue light preceded him, emanating softly and inexplicably from the walls. He was reminded of a funhouse in a carnival, one of those nightmare places where the public (most of them reasonably sane but in need of some fear in a world where daily life grew more and more comfortable and unadventurous) paid to be given the opportunity to find its way through a dark maze of passages where anything and everything might leap out to block the way at the most unexpected times, where there were ghosts, goblins, and ghouls who were nonetheless frightening for their plastic and cardboard natures. But the comparison did nothing for his nerves, and he abandoned it before the submerged fear rose out of his mind again.

  In another twenty feet, the tubeway came to an abrupt end against a perfectly blank wall of burnished emerald metal similar to that which he had seen outside when he had first come upon the vast hull of the starship. He looked for a doorway, but there was none. He knew that he could not possibly have seen all the ship, even though he had traveled over two hundred feet since entering the portal part way along from the tubes of the rockets. For one thing, there had been no control room or observation deck. Indeed, those need have been only of a minimal nature, but there should have been something. And the crew quarters he had thus far seen, those small rooms off the main tubeway, could have slept no more than two dozen. Considering the microminiaturization of the ship, it would have been foolish to have built so huge a vessel for so few inhabitants. The theater alone had been large enough to seat a hundred. So, though this was the end—it wasn't the end. It was a barrier of some sort, a fake partition meant to conceal the heart of the great vessel.

  The Brethren had reached similar conclusions and had made several attempts to cut their way through the partition that denied them access to whatever further wonders might lie ahead. There was a powerful hand drill lying on the deck, a dozen broken bits scattered around it. Ti saw that one of the bits was an industrial diamond and that it had done no better than the bits which were tempered steel. There was a robot drilling device whose bit and arm were mangled into uselessness. It had apparently been applying maximum pressure when the bit broke, and the destruction had carried back along the heavy arm in the form of harsh vibrations. A second robot worker with a laser drill instead of the standard bit was scattered all over the end of the hallway in pieces no larger than a man's hand, indicating that it had been set to continue drilling no matter what—and that the energy of the pencil-thin light beam had carried back on itself to climax in an explosion of rather severe magnitude.

  But the wall was totally unmarked. It was as if gnats had been flying against it. There was not the slightest scratch or impression upon the alien alloy.

  Timothy flushed his psionic power through the partition and was able to distinguish the hollow areas of rooms, a good number of them, bisected by thin gray shadows which were walls. He could not see anything more than what an X-ray might reveal of a man's intestines, but it was enough to convince him of the necessity of conquering this barrier. The Brethren may have failed repeatedly at the task, but they were not as equipped as he was, did not have psi fingers to pry with, to rip, rend, and tear.

  He extended those insubstantial fingers now, with the same naturalness he had once had for the direction of his servo hands. He slid them between the terribly dense molecules of the emerald wall.

  When he felt that he had correctly ascertained the nature of the atomic patterns of the material, he spread his psionic digits in an attempt to rip apart the very fabric of the structure before him.

  Abruptly, his body expanded, exploding with a blinding white ball of flame, and flung itself apart in thousands of bloody pieces . . .

  CHAPTER 15

  Blackness welled up like pooling blood, swallowing all traces of light and life.

  There was a sensation of falling, and the understanding that the fall would never end. There was no bottom to the well into which he had been dropped, for that well was eternity.

  He tried to breathe, but there was no air in this place. Just as there was no sound, light, color, odors, or sensations of a tactile nature. This was only nothingness. Nothingness . . .

  Then he found himself in one piece, leaping backward on his psionic legs, away from the wall. He rebounded from the side of the tubeway, cracking his head a rather solid blow. The pain from that encounter was welcome, for it was proof that he was still alive and functioning. He looked down at himself, nevertheless surprised to discover that he could still see and that what he saw was as it had always been. That excruciatingly horrible plunge into death had seemed too real to be an illusion—and yet that was exactly what it appeared to have been.

  He was tempted to feel and pinch himself with his extrasensory hands, to let out a yell of relief at the undamaged condition of his mutant husk. He had always enjoyed life, despite what he had suffered and the limitations his body had presented him with. But now, having experienced the moment of death, having suffered the micro-second spasm that somehow seemed to continue on and on, without regard to the passing of objective time, life was far more precious than it had ever been.

  Now he saw why the Brethren had brought in the robot machines to breach the wall for them. The agony of dying over and over again, every time he set his drill bit to the sheen of that unearthly metal, would have driven a human workman mad.

  The star people had incorporated an alarm into the wall to insure its sanctity. Or perhaps a better word than "alarm" was "deterrent." It was not a warning to the possessors of this vessel so much as a show of their muscle to those who would depose them. Some sort of structured subliminal broadcast was played whenever the solidity of the partition was endangered, thrusting deep into the fear centers of the brain and dredging up that most ingrained of fears—death.

  There was only one pleasant thing about discovering this deterrent the hard way: the knowledge that, though they were races from vastly different star systems, their basic fears must be similar. Unless, in other species, the broadcast aroused fears of a different nature than that of death. It was impossible to say what some alien mind might find terrifying.

  His optimism about their similarity was further shattered when he thought that the alarm-deterrent might very well have been set up after an analysis of the human brain. Indeed, to have compared mankind's
struggling intellect to that of a race traveling casually between the stars was like comparing his fellow human beings to himself now that his psionic abilities were fully flowered. It was almost certain then. They had structured this deterrent after studying human intelligence. But how long ago? Ten years ago? A century ago? Ten thousand years ago?

  He touched the metal with ESP fingers once more, threading the power into the molecules. Perhaps his problem had been in not exerting a sudden enough force—and thus being caught by a trap the aliens had laid for lesser men. They could not have been anticipating a psionically gifted mind, much like their own, to attempt to destroy their handiwork.

  He fed more power into the wall, between the small, tightly packed molecules.

  It surged there, waiting for him to make some use of it

  He tensed himself. He was afraid, but there was no sense in admitting that to himself now.

  Without warning, he blasted the ESP power outward in an attempt to rip the wall asunder . . .

  . . . And staggered backward as his body was impaled on a dozen long and wicked spikes which sprung out of the wall and snapped angrily into his soft flesh . . .

  Blood fountained up, splattering across the ceiling, dripping down the walls, and then the spikes were worked completely through him, and he was sliding and sliding and sliding down a very long trough, toward inky blackness. Somehow, he knew the slide would require several million years to complete . . .