Starblood

sideways, knowing even as he looked that such a thing was impossible. This was no cleverly disguised door before him, but a thick and sturdy wall. As he had thought, there was no sign of a switch.
    He did not even consider returning topside, to the mountainside home that had once been the main part of his life. That was unthinkable. Now that he had discovered the source of PBT and had cracked the hold of the Brethren on the underworld and on all the people addicted to their amber-colored drug, he needed another goal, something more to be met and engaged and conquered. If he did not tackle the challenge of this wall, the time would have come when he would have to stop deluding himself about the unimportance of his new-found powers. He would have to plan for the future. And the future scared him. If he had been a freak in a normal world before, he was a superfreak now. There was no possible way he could fit into the fabric of modern society. No way at all.
    His life had been a desperate race to be accepted, to have at least a goodly number of peripheral friends, if he had to be restricted to only Taguster as a confidant
Enterstat
had connected him with the beautiful people, the favored, the talented, the wealthy. He had boosted himself into the second-echelon corridors of high society. Now he had completed the circle of his mutation and had passed out of their world, forever and without question. He was alone.
    In the back of his mind he knew there was one other thing he could try—to get beyond this wall. And though it was a dangerous plan, it was far safer—psychologically—than giving up and returning to the surface. The answer was simple enough: he must teleport…
    The problem was that he had only the vaguest of impressions concerning the area beyond this wall. It was not nearly enough to fix it in his mind as a solid point in space-time. As a result, he was not certain that, if he teleported without a distinct destination embedded in his mind, he would end up where he wished to go. He might find himself inextricably wound up in the molecular patterns of this partition, his own molecules hopelessly enmeshed in those of the emerald substance. It was not the pleasantest of thoughts—especially if it were to happen and he were to maintain his mental powers as he had while teleporting the first time…
    Yet he had not known any exact coordinates when he had come to this farm from New England. He had known what it looked like and that it was close to Charter Oak, Iowa, but that was hardly hair-fine sighting. Perhaps an exact impression of the destination was not essential. If it were, then he could never teleport beyond this wall, for he would have to be there first to ascertain the landscape. Therefore, he stopped worrying about it and decided to take the plunge.
    The life he would have to lead once he was in the outside world again, and reported this to the United Nations was more frightening with each passing moment And though his ESP might have expanded, his emotions were still primitively human. Out there, it would be an emotional problem, something his great power could not help him cope with.
    He turned back to the green wall, examined it carefully, tried to establish a mental image of the ghostly X-ray he had seen of the chambers beyond.
    He sucked in breath; the air seemed infinitely cooler than it had been moments earlier.
    He teleported…
    The time spent in transit was no different than it had been when he had taken the much longer jump from New England to the Brethren farmhouse. The landscape of the eerie, non-matter universe through which he passed like a beam of black light was just as it had been before: dark, singing yet silent, warm yet cold…
    Then he was standing within the core of the vast ship, beyond the green barrier that had been erected to stop him. He felt a flush of triumph, of superiority—which a glance around at the marvelous ship dispelled immediately. He was at the very front of the starship, in a small chamber that served as a minimal guidance deck. It was very bare of decoration and contained only three seats, all on swivel bases, all heavily padded. He would have to walk backward toward the barrier through which he had traveled to see what the other rooms contained.
    In this tabu section of the vessel, his curiosity had been whetted even further, and he had forgotten all about the future and his place in it. Or at least he pretended that he had..
    As he drifted through the