Starblood

he was, apparently, the sort of man who forgot nothing—which would help to explain his position of importance in such a rugged and competitive arena.
    Timothy went up through the floors of the place, calling forth data, disregarding it when it proved of no importance.
    On the eighty-first floor, seconds after his entry into the mental construct, he found a bit of relevant information.
    The source of PBT was a farmhouse owned by the Brethren near a small town in Iowa called Charter Oak. He sought further details and learned that Charter Oak was in the west of the state, near Sioux City. After that, Leopold's memory bank offered no more. Timothy searched through all nine hundred and nineteen floors, but whenever he got close to the subject again, Leopold's mind—even though he was unconscious—radiated fear and loathing so heavily that Timothy could not make any sense of the data. But what could the man have to fear in the synthesis of a drug?
    He picked one of the data points concerned with the farmhouse and obtained a perfect picture of the place: a large, white, rambling structure that had been built of moderate size and thereafter added to every generation as the clan grew larger and larger still. There were three large trees, perhaps willows, on the flat and rolling lawn—then nothing but yawning stretches of tabletop land in all directions, the vague phantoms of other houses at distant points. There was a swing on the front porch. The inside had been renovated, supermodern and expensively furnished. The house was occupied by a couple in their early thirties, Richard and Thelma Boggs. They seemed, judging from the mental picture which Leopold had of them, the stereotype of the average Middle American farm couple. He was lanky, wiry, well-muscled, with short curly hair, a rich, leathery tan. She tended toward plumpness, with heavy breasts, a milky complexion, and large blue saucer eyes. Her mouth was drawn in a petulant pout, and she looked as if she might be just a bit difficult to get along with.
    With this much in the open, Ti probed deeper, seeking the source of PBT…
    And immediately the horror and disgust rose in Leopold's mind, blocking the existence of those memories. There was a hint of
some
subterranean room—or at least of a very dark and dank sort of chamber. There was a smell that was at the same time sweet and bitter, that cloyed in the nostrils and teased a man to sickness. And that was all. Whenever Ti tried to probe more deeply, Leopold's mind grew agitated, frightened, and set up a terrified wailing that was impossible to still.
    Timothy thought of searching through Leopold's subconscious mind to discover if there might be anything there that could tell him more about, the farmhouse. But he could not discover how to reach the subconscious from the regions of the man's conscious mind; it was nowhere near as simple as it had been with Jon Margle. He grew more curious as he searched, unable to envision what the subconscious mind of such an orderly man would be like. At last, he was drawn to the walls of the data storage structure in which the conscious mind's analogue took form. Inside those walls there was a humming, buzzing, frantic noise, as if another level of labor were being performed. He ran his psionic fingers along the walls, felt the tremor of that labor without being able to identify it. He thrust ESP fingers out and breached the partition…
    … And through the crack in the ethereal plaster rushed hundreds of thousands of hideous, bloated, roachlike insects. They had tiny, razor-edged mandibles, wicked enough to inflict a painful wound. They chittered and hummed, swarming over one another, devouring one another as they advanced, a wave of madness. In a conscious mind where nearly everything that had ever happened or been learned was stored methodically, nothing much was left to relegate to the subconscious mind except id desires of the most grotesque form. Leopold's subconscious was the exact opposite of the conscious mind: disordered, filthy, shot through with a living, mobile rot that would devour Timothy's own sanity in seconds if he did not retreat—and that would surely plunge Leopold into madness some day in the not too distant future.
    Ti vacated those chambers, shivering and slightly ill. He backed off from the man, as if the roaches would swarm from his skull and into this room—when he was perfectly aware that the insects were not real, but analogues of the