Starblood

night breeze purge the perspiration from his body and set his nerves at ease.
    The next step would be to black out each of those inside so that he could have unchallenged access to the house and the labs beneath it He looked back to the bar where Richard Boggs had been mixing drinks, prepared to put the man and his wife out first, since they were nearest an exit from the room. Thelma Boggs was mixing what looked like a marvelously horrendous drink with five or six different kinds of liquor—but her husband was nowhere in sight.
    And then he knew where the man was. There was a sharp intake of breath to Timothy's left. He whirled in time to see Boggs standing at the half-opened door, only partway onto the porch.
    He had a gun, and he was fast.
    The .22 slug tore through Timothy's chest and out his back, spattering blood against the white walls of the farmhouse…

CHAPTER 12
    For the shortest of moments, Timothy felt as if he were dropping helplessly down a narrow well toward a pool of brackish water while the light dimmed with every foot of his descent; darkness stretched around him, obscuring the moss-covered stone walls and reaching fingers out to grasp and hold him. Then his senses overcame the stifling shock of having been wounded, and his psionically gifted mind shifted into high gear where—he angrily admonished himself—it should have been from the moment he had teleported onto this farm.
    Also, in the back of his mind, he was aware that there had been a few seconds there when he had felt relief at the prospect of dying, had welcomed it. It would obliterate the future and the loneliness ahead of him as the only superman in a world of neanderthals. And loneliness was the thing he most feared, the thing which had terrified him all his life. But he did not want to think about how easily he had almost given in. There was no loneliness quite like death, after all—so that was no way out of his predicament.
    And although he might be something of a superman, death was still all too possible. If Boggs had aimed for his head, his irreplaceable brain in which all his talents lay, rather than for his chest…
    He pinched the proper nerve in Richard Boggs's neck with an ESP finger and watched the man fold into himself and crash onto the floorboards of the porch, taking the impact on his chin. He bounced once, as if he were rubber, and was still.
    Another bullet smashed the window out in front of Timothy as one of the three Brethren who had been sitting in the conversation corner fired through the glass. The projectile itself missed him, but whirling shards of glass studded the side of his trunk in a hundred different places. Pain washed through him, again bringing blackness with it It was growing more difficult to stave off the questing, pitch fingers of unconsciousness.
    He expanded his extrasensory powers, radiating his talent into the house where he quickly made the three Brothers and Thelma Boggs unconscious. They slumped into a peaceful sleep on the hardwood floor. The uproar had ended as swiftly as it had begun, and the heavy quiet of the Iowa night settled over the place once more.
    Ti reached into the mind of the surgically created moronic killer who stood guard at the rear door of the farmhouse. The man had not moved more than three feet since Timothy had last checked on him, but he was contemplating leaving his post after the ruckus that had just exploded and died so rapidly in the front of the house. For insurance, and because he did not want the man to have a chance to humiliate him as he had been humiliated twice already, Timothy sent him spiraling down into sleep on a mattress of damp grass. In sleep, the man's nearly blank mind was almost totally empty.
    There was no one in the house or anyone on the grounds who was not unconscious and who would not be that way for at least another hour. With this in mind, Timothy hung by the shattered window, calming himself, forcing his overexcited mind to settle into rationality. He surveyed the damage that had been done his body and found that the bullet wound was clean. It had not touched any vital organs, though it had been close to his heart. He thrust his psionic fingers into his own flesh, plunging them into the cellular level of his tissue, where he used them to knit the torn meat He meshed cell to cell, threaded the filaments of muscle fiber into one another again. In ten minutes, there was not even a scar…
    When that was finished, he plucked the slivers of