Starblood

glass from his skin and mended the sliced flesh until it was smooth and healthy. He expunged the blood that had wet and matted his simple clothes, and used his psionic power to break it down into molecules of heat energy that radiated away from him. Then there was nothing further to be done to correct the abuse his body had suffered. Now he would have to enter the house and find the cellar.
    For the first time he felt a tinge of fear. Four men had been familiar with that basement area and what was to be found down there—and all four of them had been so terrified that they had locked it from their minds, had attempted to shove it from the conscious arena of their mental processes down into the backrooms where it could be forgotten. For the most part these were strong men, not easily scared. He could not help but feel uneasy about confronting whatever it was that had made men such as these afraid even to think of it.
    But this was not the time to hesitate. He had come all this way to find the source of the drug, to discover exactly what it was and how it was produced. An entire underworld 'family' had been built on it; tens of thousands had become addicted to it while hundreds of thousands of others used it frequently or infrequently; it had taken his own limited extrasensory functions and had torn down the walls to allow them to flow through his mind in full glory. Besides, it was the temporary goal he had set for himself, in order to conceal the fact that he had made no plans for a future that was, now, even more uncertain than before: how could a superman exist in a world of normally powered men without becoming a symbol of what everyone else was denied; and how could a man to whom anything was possible find tasks complex enough to avoid complete boredom?
    He felt cold, separate from all the world. He was aware that the last time he had been with Polly, helping her into the car that would take her from the Brethren's house in New England, even the starlet's fantastic beauty had not stirred the hollow quasi-sexual longing within him. He was so separated from mankind that a normal woman, even beautiful, could not resurrect his crippled sexuality. He was alone.
    He floated over Richard Boggs, through the open door of the farmhouse, and into the livingroom where Thelma Boggs lay in the middle of the floor on her back, her mouth open. She was snoring heartily.
    He went through the parlor, through a dining nook and into the well-appointed kitchen which Thelma Boggs did not keep in a very admirable state. There were dirty dishes in the sink, on the drainboard, slimed with grease and dried food. There was a dirty pan and skillet on the stove and a scattering of cooking utensils and ingredients on the kitchen table. There was a desk in the corner littered with pieces of mail, recipes, women's magazines, two dirty glasses, an overflowing ashtray, and a stat order catalogue with a dozen felt markers dangling from it.
    His eye strayed from the teetering piles of junk on the desk to a door recessed slightly in the wall to his left. He floated to it, opened it with invisible hands, and flipped the light switch along the wall. Panels of glow lights burst into bright existence in the ceiling, the sort of thing one might expect to see in a place of business or a supermodern house—but hardly in a renovated farm. He dropped down the stairwell, ignoring the steps.
    As he fell, he flushed his psionic power into the lower chambers. He found no one waiting for him, no mental activity whatsoever.
    As he floated out of the stairwell, he found himself in a square, concrete-walled room where tools were racked on peg-boards. Two workbenches flanked him, their tops fixed with hand vises and hand drill braces. In the right corner there was a drill press, and next to it an electric sander and buffer. Beside one of the workbenches was a crate of souvenirs, little brass Mexican men leading little brass donkeys, similar if not identical to the piece he had seen in Leonard Taguster's house.
    He picked one of the souvenirs up, holding it above him so he could see it from all angles as he twirled it lazily in his unseen fingers. There were no marks on it to indicate where it might have been violated, but he thought he knew exactly what had been done. He threaded his ESP through the tightly packed molecules until he found the cylindrical pocket inside the statuette where a small flask of PBT was contained, perhaps a large enough amount—once cut to