Starblood

Nothingness…
    Then he found himself in one piece, leaping backward on his psionic legs, away from the wall. He rebounded from the side of the tubeway, cracking his head a rather solid blow. The pain from that encounter was welcome, for it was proof that he was still alive and functioning. He looked down at himself, nevertheless surprised to discover that he could still see and that what he saw was as it had always been. That excruciatingly horrible plunge into death had seemed too real to be an illusion—and yet that was exactly what it appeared to have been.
    He was tempted to feel and pinch himself with his extrasensory hands, to let out a yell of relief at the undamaged condition of his mutant husk. He had always enjoyed life, despite what he had suffered and the limitations his body had presented him with. But now, having experienced the moment of death, having suffered the micro-second spasm that somehow seemed to continue on and on, without regard to the passing of objective time, life was far more precious than it had ever been.
    Now he saw why the Brethren had brought in the robot machines to breach the wall for them. The agony of dying over and over again, every time he set his drill bit to the sheen of that unearthly metal, would have driven a human workman mad.
    The star people had incorporated an alarm into the wall to insure its sanctity. Or perhaps a better word than "alarm" was "deterrent." It was not a warning to the possessors of this vessel so much as a show of their muscle to those who would depose them. Some sort of structured subliminal broadcast was played whenever the solidity of the partition was endangered, thrusting deep into the fear centers of the brain and dredging up that most ingrained of fears—death.
    There was only one pleasant thing about discovering this deterrent the hard way: the knowledge that, though they were races from vastly different star systems, their basic fears must be similar. Unless, in other species, the broadcast aroused fears of a different nature than that of death. It was impossible to say what some alien mind might find terrifying.
    His optimism about their similarity was further shattered when he thought that the alarm-deterrent might very well have been set up after an analysis of the human brain. Indeed, to have compared mankind's struggling intellect to that of a race traveling casually between the stars was like comparing his fellow human beings to himself now that, his psionic abilities were fully flowered. It was almost certain then. They had structured this deterrent after studying human intelligence. But how long ago? Ten years ago? A century ago? Ten thousand years ago?
    He touched the metal with ESP fingers once more, threading the power into the molecules. Perhaps his problem had been in not exerting a sudden enough force—and thus being caught by a trap the aliens had laid for lesser men. They could not have been anticipating a psionically gifted mind, much like their own, to attempt to destroy their handi work.
    He fed more power into the wall, between the small, tightly packed molecules.
    It surged there, waiting for him to make some use of it.
    He tensed himself. He was afraid, but there was no sense in admitting that to himself now.
    Without warning, he blasted the ESP power outward in an attempt to rip the wall asunder…
    … And staggered backward as his body was impaled on a dozen long and wicked spikes which sprung out of the wall and snapped angrily into his soft flesh…
    Blood fountained up, splattering across the ceiling, dripping down the walls, and then the spikes were worked completely through him, and he was sliding and sliding and sliding down a very long trough, toward inky blackness. Somehow, he knew the slide would require several million years to complete…
    When this vision passed, he found himself curled at the. waist against the awful pain—both physical and psychological—of dying. The deterrent worked much faster than his ESP power ever could, negating any chance of opening the wall by force. He simply could not withstand too many spiralings down into the grave, artificial or real, without being thoroughly unhinged by them. And if he lost his sanity, he was not at all certain he would be able to make use of the extrasensory powers to heal himself. If his mind were unhinged, so might be his psionic abilities.
    He floated before the shimmering emerald panel, searching for a switch that might send the wall up or