Starblood

side of him, locked to their "hold" pattern. They would go wherever his grav-ball went, but would not follow his directions. Then he tried to flip switches inside his grav-plate mechanism, to make it lift up and up, to its limit of eighty feet, up where they couldn't touch him. But there was no response from the ball when he tried this.
    It was then that he realized they had given him something that blanked out his psionic ability…
    He was helpless as he had not been since he had left that hospital and had been educated by the weapons-hungry generals. He wanted to scream and kick and shout and swing his servos, not so much to attack those who had done this to him, but to work off some of the energy of terror that adrenalin was pumping through his twisted hulk.
    Kealy turned him completely about and started pushing him toward the trees. Ahead, the young couple stood, watching them. Ti wanted to shout, cry out, scream at them for help. He concentrated on saying something, anything that would clue them in to what was happening. He stopped resisting with his body, stopped trying to control the grav-plate mechanism, stopped trying to use his servos. With every ounce of strength in him, he managed to shatter the drug's control long enough to issue a weak cry for help.
    The young couple came forward, grabbed hold of him, and for a moment he was set to rejoice.
    Then Kealy let go of him, hurried ahead toward the woods, and said to the young couple: "Make it fast before anyone comes around from the other side of the pool."
    The sweet kids propelled him toward the trees and into the forest, moving quickly along a footpath that twisted and wound. Soon they were out of sight of the fountain and the midway and anyone who might possibly help him.
    The footpath ended at a small lane along which a darkly painted grav-car rested on its rubber rim. When Kealy opened the door, the girl and boy muscled him into the backseat, arranging themselves on either side of him, fencing him
in
and keeping anyone outside from looking through the windows and getting a good look at him.
    Kealy and Polly London sat up front, the dark man behind the wheel. In a moment, they lifted and hummed down the dirt path, the trees flashing swiftly by on all sides. Reluctantly, Polly turned and looked at him, her face lined and tired, as if she had been up all night. "Don't be scared," she said.
    He wanted to scream at her.
    He could not.
    "Don't be frightened. Really. It's nothing that can hurt you very badly. It's only PBT. They aren't going to kill you. You might have a few bad delusions, since it was a massive dose, but that's the worst of it. Do you believe me?"
    He did not respond. She could not know that the PBT had paralyzed that section of his brain that gave him his psionic ability—and that without his ESP he was not a man, not anything but a helpless, useless hulk. She could never conceive of how terrified that made him. Without his ESP, he might just as well be dead.
    Kealy took the car onto a main highway, punched out to traffic control for an upper level pathway, received one, and took the craft soaring into the perfectly cloudless blue day.
    As they rose, the PBT illusions struck Ti with the force of a hammer blow and catapulted him from the real world into a never-never land of surreal fantasies which he could taste and touch and smell and feel…
    There were women, at first, an abundance of them that made the dreams good and thrilling. In the dream, he drifted down a river of wine on a grass mat that was cool and green. He had arms and legs just as any normal man, had a face that was not twisted and perverted but wonderfully handsome. He was whole, and the world was perfect. As he progressed down the winding waterway, dipping his hands into the fluid to obtain sweet refreshing drinks, the women began to descend from the lightly clouded sky. At first, they were leaves on the wind, nothing more than bits of autumn scattered by a breeze. Then each of the leaves underwent a metamorphosis.
    The first to approach his raft was a hugely breasted, long-legged blonde who looked strikingly like Polly London. She circled over him, lighter than air, then sank onto the raft with him. She was naked, and her tanned flesh quivered enticingly before him.
    He touched her: his hands sang along her flesh as they picked up the subtle harmony of her warm body.
    He kissed her: and felt for the first time the sweet commingling of tongue and tongue…
    He made love to