Starblood

proper potency—for thirty doses.
    Here, at these two benches and with these machines, the Brethren hollowed out the figures, placed the drug inside, then resmelted the chips of brass that had been scooped out, filled in over the flask, sanded, buffed, polished, and replaced the pieces in the crates. After that, someone would come and pick the souvenirs up for mailing to various points in this country and all over the world. It was a tedious and time-consuming process, to be sure, but the price of PBT and the small quantity needed for a usual dose made it quite worthwhile. Besides, it was safe, and men like the Brethren put a price on safety that was higher than that placed on turning a large profit. They knew very well that the United Nations would use the slightest excuse to stick them away in some well-guarded prison for the rest of their lives.
    This explained the difficulty the narcotics agents had met with for so long, though it still did not explain how PBT was manufactured or what it was. And it certainly did not explain the terror with which the Brethren regarded the cellar. He drifted from this room into another where crates of figurines of various types lined all the walls. Without slowing, he entered the final chamber. It was an unfinished basement room with cement slapped formlessly over the earth walls. The floor was dirt. There was no light here, except what drifted in from other chambers. Somehow, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for…
    The place was a storage chamber for junk, broken lawn-mowers and shattered wheelbarrows, old newspapers and magazines, the things everyone saves against his best judgment. In the far corner of the room, the floor sloped into a jumble of rocks, then disappeared altogether as a limestone sinkhole yawned in the bowels of the earth. The hole had probably opened after the house had been built He wondered how long it would take before it would split wide enough to swallow one of the foundation walls.
    He balanced above the gap in the floor, looking down into blackness. Using his ESP, he felt about the rim of the aperture and discovered a switch box just inside the rim of the depression. When he threw the toggle, soft yellow light sprang up within the cave, and he knew he had discovered the production center for the hallucinogen.
    And, looking down into that hole, he had an inkling of the horror with which the Brethren viewed this place. He could not pinpoint what bothered him, but there was a feel of the—supernatural. It was a silly word, but it fit. He shuddered, took a deep breath, and descended…
    The primary drop shaft of the sinkhole was some seventy feet long, breaking a bit to the left, then back to the right, but maintaining a fairly true vertical descent. Huge blocks of fractured rock formed the sides, tumbled against one another to form small caves and
cul-de-sacs
that were either too small for men to gain admittance or led nowhere once one was inside them. Here and there bats clung to overhanging rocks, eyes blinded by the light, wings folded tight against them, as if the flimsy membranes would give them protection. Along the right side, a series of rungs bolted firmly into the stone provided a means down for those who had no ESP.
    At the bottom of the main plummet, Timothy found he had to angle his body sideways to get through a bottleneck in the tunnel He brushed through, scraping the worn surfaces of the rocks, and found himself in a large chamber whose dimensions rivaled those of an old-fashioned baseball stadium. He righted himself and spent a few moments marveling at the stalactites and stalagmites, at the grotesque weathering of the stone that dripping streams of water had managed to sculpt in the last handful of centuries. A stream of water, no wider than a yardstick and perhaps a foot or two deep, wound through the vaulted cavern, making gurgling, baby laughter that rang from the walls in hundreds of different echoes that sounded like other streams whispering in response. The air was almost cold and carried a damp, musty smell that was unpleasant and generated a feeling of claustrophobia despite the dimensions of the cave.
    He drifted along the room toward the far end, which was slanted downward at a rather sharp angle. When the floor began tilting at a forty-five-degree slope, he saw the rungs again, bolted solidly into the stone, and he knew he was still on the trail of whatever it was that was nestled here