Starblood

viselike grip of the earth.
    Again, this room contained no corners, and the eye was permitted to rest on hundreds of gentle curves both in the design of the room itself and in the furniture which had been bolted into it. There were chairs and couches and slings, all of which were heavily padded and low-slung. There were machines beside all the chairs and couches, thrusting down from the ceiling next to the slings. He investigated the mechanism of one of them and decided that it was a greatly perfected version of the senso-theater projector. He wondered what sort of programs it provided for the creatures who came here to be entertained; then he forced himself to stop extrapolating on every item that caught his attention. If he gave way to his questing curiosity about every device, it would take him a lifetime to make his way through the ship.
    He left the theater and drifted into another brief section of corridor with irising doors to either side of it that led to private chambers which seemed to be living quarters with chain-hung sling beds. Shortly after entering the third major chamber through which the main tube corridor passed, he gained the end of the temporary goal which he had set for himself: he uncovered the source of PBT.
    The room was another sphere of approximately the same dimensions as the first he had encountered upon entering the starship. Here, though, there were some noticeable and notable differences of architecture. The walls, ceiling, and even the floor were covered with access plates to blocks of machinery and with readout screens that appeared to be communications links to the ship computers. He searched into them with his ESP, through circuitry not unlike human electrical equipment, and verified that guess. There was a walkway through the maze of wires and slots and raised modules, although it was so straight and narrow that it could never have been used by the technicians who would have to service these machines when they malfunctioned, or by the crew who would be using the devices.
    Timothy drifted to the first series of drawers that seemed to slide into the walls themselves and was not at all surprised when the thing rolled out at his approach. It was large enough, both in length and depth, to contain him, and he fancied it very nearly contoured to the form of a body, but for the lack of leg space. It was laced across with friction straps to tie down whatever cargo it had been meant to hold. When he drifted lower to look in the drawer and to the space above it that was revealed when it was open, he saw a series of spidery-fingered hands that seemed to hold surgical instruments. He straightened, his curiosity aroused more than it had been at any moment since his entrance. He opened the next drawer and found the same setup, the needles and surgical equipment. When he pulled open the third drawer, hoping that he would find some variance which—by comparison—would help him to understand the nature of these drawers, he was confronted by the penetrating stare of the alien which lay within…

CHAPTER 14
    He gasped, startled, and rushed backwards, away from the open drawer. He came to an abrupt halt as his own foolishness became evident to him. Even if he ran, he could not get out of here in time—not if they knew he was aboard. And if his extrasensory powers were of no use to him, there was nowhere on earth he could count himself safe; if they were useful, he had nothing to worry about.
    He also began to realize that the thing he had seen was not a living, breathing creature, but a corpse. If it had been alive, the world would surely have heard about it and from it a good many years ago; the Brethren would not have been able to exploit the wonders of the starship towards their own ends. That creature lying in the drawer was not the kind of fellow anyone exploited—if he wished to live to the end of his natural days.
    He went back, somewhat ashamed at himself and his fainthearted reaction.
    But he returned slowly, nevertheless.
    He peered over the brink of a surgical drawer, far less frightened now that he knew what to be prepared for.
    The alien stared up at him with two, huge, mulifaceted eyes that had no differentiation between pupil and iris. Each of them was nothing more than a fist-sized convexity of a milky blue opaque color that somehow reminded him of fine china. Each eye was beveled, like the eye of a fly. The nose was actually more human than Timothy's own, though somewhat wider