Starblood

been secured, he directed his questing ESP throughout the grounds of the farmhouse, searching for other killers who might be on patrol. He found a man at the back of the house whose duty it was to remain at that spot come hell or hurricane. Since Ti did not plan on using the rear door, he let the man be. A third of the zombies was also behind the house, patrolling a small, white fence that corralled most of the lawn. Ti waited until he was out of sight of the rear door guard, then sent him spiraling into darkness. The Brother doubled over and fell on his head, sprawled on the dew damp grass. There was no one else.
    The night was cool, and he felt refreshed, better than he had ever felt in his life. For once, there was no question that he was any man's equal—superior, in fact. But power angle didn't interest. He was not the type to develop a desire to rule. But the knowledge of being equal, being unafraid, was magnificent!
    He turned his attention back to the living room. He delved into the mind of the tall, gray-haired man who sat in the first of the three leather chairs, a drink held in his hand tight against his chest as if it were a magic stone to protect him from witches.
    The analogue for his conscious mind was a well-cared for but ancient private library room where books stretched from floor to ceiling, wall after wall. There were comfortable reading chairs, a smoking stand, a desk, several floor lamps. In moments, Ti flipped through the pages of that store of knowledge, searching for the source of PBT. When he found the volume that was marked as containing this information, he found all the words had been carefully erased from the pages in a painstakingly long letter-by-letter manner. It was a hideously plain attempt to forget something unpleasant. He closed the book, put it bade on its shelf, and left that mind…
    The next man was short, a good bit too heavy, and was nursing a gin and tonic like a small child with a particularly flavorful popsicle. Ti slipped into him, probing…
    Ti's own psionic powers chose the house analogue again, though this man's mind was not so much of a mansion as Jon Margle's had been. It was instead a peeling, rotting, creak-filled gothic horror whose every shadow seemed filled with disaster and terror. There were very few thoughts to be found in it in comparison with other minds Ti had investigated, and what thoughts there were were less factual and more of a paranoid nature. Here was a man who fought the universe every day of his life. When Ti began looking for data about the source of the PBT, where he should look for it in the house, the gothic manor was soon filled with bloodcurdling screams, the sounds of a mind teetering on the brink of madness.
    It was much the same in the third man's mental landscape. Though he was not a borderline schizophrenic like his Brethren, he reacted in terror to the gentle probing for the production center of the drug. This was the fourth man Ti had ransacked for the knowledge, and all of them had cringed in fear at the probing, had fought valiantly and successfully to shove that piece of the world down into their subconscious minds. What the hell, he wondered, could be so terrifying about the source of an hallucinogenic drug?
    He was about to go to either Richard Boggs or his wife when he was struck with the idea of trying something in the, gray-haired gentleman's mind that had eluded him the first time he had been there. He slipped back into the ancient library and moved along the shelves of books that made up the analogue of the old man's mind. In moments he found what he wanted: a switch set in the edge of a strip of shelving. He threw it and stepped back as the wall slid away and a smaller room became visible.
    This portion of the analogue was a musty cubbyhole which contained a mere fifty volumes on warped, dirty shelves.
    There were volumes concerned with sexual perversions, with death-wishes and with the inflicting of pain on others, all the paraphernalia of the subconscious mind. But there was also a volume on PBT. He pulled it down, opened it, and read enough of the crumbling yellow pages to ascertain that the labs, the places where the drug was produced, were in the cellars. But even so, the information was skimpy, broken, and nearly hysterical in tone. Once again he retreated from the old man's mind.
    Outside the analogue, back in reality, he breathed in deeply, smelling the newly turned earth from a nearby field, letting the cool