Starblood

of it. Even the purchasers of its merchandise were ignorant of company's home. But those who bought the SAM liked that, for it meant that none of them could sell out Weapons Psionic and thus destroy a valuable tool of the underworld. A SAM provided anonymity for the killer, a perfectly untraceable means of murder. And for men closely watched by the authorities, such a cold, clueless tool as this was priceless.
    The SAM's supersensitive receptors began to function now. The heat sensors directed the killer's attention toward a hallway on the right which more than likely lead to sleeping quarters. The aural pickups correlated the initial data by the heat sensors, and the assassin turned toward the hall.
    It allowed its "ears" to listen: light breathing, a ragged sound of air moving through deformed nasal passages.
    It permitted its heat sensors to probe longer: a quantity of body heat radiating from the very end of the corridor.
    It drifted quietly forward…
    At the end of the hall, it ceased forward progression and rose on a level with the bedroom door handle. A thread of metallic substance weaved out of the husk and disappeared into the door's automatic mechanism. The seeking filament touched the motor within, and the portal slid soundlessly open. The SAM retracted the thread, hesitated, then slid forward into the dark, seeking…
    It located the twisted body of the mutant lying in the sling bed against the far wall. It called forth a dart nozzle from its anterior snout and fanned the body with fifty poisoned spines. There was no sound from the form as they sank in; the poison would be too swift for that.
    The SAM used the filament to turn on the overhead lights, then drew the thread back into its husk. When it was only half a dozen feet from the mutant, the amber light was bright enough to reveal that the target was not dead. There were no darts in it. Instead, the spines prickled the wall behind and littered the floor below. The assassin stopped, fired another series.
    They were deflected.
    Timothy rose from the sling bed and set his servos after the SAM. He was quite aware that the thing might have more than one weapons systems, and that if he did not act quickly he might end up a corpse despite the advantage of his psionic powers. The assassin drifted backward toward the door, but a servo slipped past it and closed the portal. Ti wondered if it wouldn't be better to let it escape. Then he realized he would have nothing to show the authorities, no way to ascertain the identity of his assassin. He would be left waiting for their next attempt, helplessly—like a man in a stalled car on railroad tracks, watching the locomotive screaming toward him…
    A nozzle protruded from the SAM's husk, spewing a napalm-like chemical. But the deadly bright flames did no harm, since Timothy was able to deflect the chemicals on which the flames depended. A moment later, his servos clasped the device at each blunt end and held it still. Timothy flushed a wave of psionic power through the cylinder, flicking closed all the switches in the SAM's guts, which all succumbed to the relatively light pressure of his ESP ability.
    The slight yellow luminosity of the sight sensors vanished as the device opaqued its hull and was still. In seconds, it had ceased to be a flame-spouting, dangerous antagonist and had become a docile hunk of metal.
    Cautiously, he directed his servos to release the weapon. They moved away from it, and it did not respond in any fashion. Since its grav-plates generated their own power, it remained weightless, though stationary. He took the cylinder down the corridor, through the living room, into the library. On the keyboard of the
Enterstat
computer, he punched: REQUEST SOURCE OF THIS DEVICE. DESCRIPTION AS FOLLOWS. After the description, in which he did not ignore any detail no matter how trivial, he pushed for a full data report.
    While he waited, he decided it must be the Brethren who were after him; surely his murdering Klaus Margle would have temporarily angered the man's cohorts. Then again, he had opened a position in the hierarchy of the underworld, and he could only have made a friend of the man who filled it. Yet only the money of the full organization could have purchased a device such as this; a splinter group of Margle's friends could never have financed it. His thoughts were interrupted as the data statted into the receival tray.
    He picked up the sheet, startled by the brevity of the report on