Starblood

on the ship who were of races other than that of these creatures. There was a walkway through the chamber, after all, and
that
certainly wasn't for the creatures like that dead one in the morgue drawer.
    As Ti continued his investigation of the room, he saw a series of plastic flasks into which stainless steel tubes were dripping fluids of various colors. His mind registered the data after his eye had passed it by, and he looked swiftly back, more excited by this than he had been by his discovery of the alien corpse lying in the preservation drawer of the morgue. Of the six flasks, the second from the right was filling up with an amber fluid which looked strikingly like the PBT that Margle had boosted into his veins all those times in the basement of the house in New England.
    He drifted across the chamber to the bottle and looked at it more closely. On the floor, beneath the flask, there was a thick plasti-glass jug of the sort often used to hold cider or wine. It was half full of the amber fluid. Timothy lifted it, examined it, and discovered it had been made in Pernborth, New Jersey. It was most assuredly not an artifact from another world. The Brethren entered the room every day, perhaps twice a day judging by the production rate of the fluid, collected a full bottle, dumped it into the jug, replaced the bottle and left When the jug was full, they would take the PBT away to be put into small flasks and inserted into brass statuettes for distribution. When they returned to collect the latest supply, a new jug would be brought along.
    The combination of the supertechnical alien machines and the plastic cider jug was almost comical. He would have laughed, except for the thoughts of Leonard Taguster and the other thousands who had had their lives ruined by the stuff.
    And it was no wonder that the police laboratories had not yet been able to break down the chemical composition of the stuff. Whatever it was, it was utterly unhuman, unearthly. It had come from another star system, perhaps even from another galaxy. There was little likelihood that any earthly analysis would ever decode the structure of the substance. Metals, such as these steel tubes, might be fairly uniform throughout large sections of the galaxy. But plant life would differ from world to world. Animal life would differ too, perhaps even more radically. And since the serums more than likely were produced from animal or vegetable sources, an earth laboratory would meet a blank wall every time it applied its own standards and knowledge to the task.
    Around the machine, the access plating had been pried loose and bent back as if the Brethren had summoned experts to examine the guts of the mechanism, perhaps searching for some manner of accelerating the production of the priceless fluid. There was a fantastically miniaturized and complex system behind the plating, more involved than anything Timothy had ever seen, even in the SAM built by Weapons Psionic. This indecipherable mess of circuits and switches had apparently dissuaded the Brethren from tinkering with it (and thereby possibly losing what supply they could obtain), because they had never bothered to remove the plating the entire way. Considering the Brethren he knew, it was difficult to believe they would be satisfied with such a slight attempt to change the flow of PBT. Perhaps their fear augmented their ignorance of the machinery. Perhaps they felt that death waited on anyone who would attempt to fool with the works of creatures like the one lying in the morgue drawer.
    Finally, there was nothing more to be discovered in the chamber, at least on a casual survey of the sort upon which he was now embarked. Later he would return and delve into things with his ESP, study and comprehend whatever he could. He moved toward the main tubeway.
    He was anxious to return to the surface and his mountainside home where he could contact United Nations narcotics people and break the story to them. After, of course, breaking it to the world in
Enterstat
first. He did not particularly care about getting the scoop on anyone anymore. Strangely, he did not even care whether
Enterstat
folded. But the chance to explode something like this would give George Creel more pleasure than he received from editing a thousand regular editions.
    There was still more of the starship to explore, and he wanted to have everything down pat before turning the matter over to the authorities. That was a habit he had gotten into after