Starblood

expected, that was the stereotype procedure for all extraterrestrials. He was not surprised to realize that he would prefer being destroyed, just as in all the cliche horror stories, to being patted on the head and sent blithely on his way…
    Again, a pause when he was finished. Then: "
And this PBT which you describe
—
what is the source of the name?"
    "From the words 'Perfectly Beautiful Trip,' which users coined when they learned the stuff had no chemical formula—known, anyway—from which to devise a catchphrase." It now seemed to be time for him to ask something instead of waiting for the next question. It was time to get at least a little of the situation under his control He said, "What is the drug? What is it made from?"
    "
It is not a drug at all,"
the voice whispered. "
It is
…
plasma
…
blood. It is the blood of one of the six non-psionic races of the Inner Galaxy. Intelligent race, but no extrasensory perception. The medical room keeps a constant supply of it on hand for emergencies in which our guests might be injured. It is produced through our biological engineering module
."
    Timothy tried to envision a race so alien in its physical makeup that its blood was a powerful narcotic and hallucinogen to earthmen. He wanted to ask the speaker what they were like, then decided that was only infantile curiosity and that there were more important matters at hand.
    "Where are you speaking from?" He asked. "I can't see you." He was anxious to examine the alien in its living state, to see how it walked, how its face moved when it talked, thousands of minutiae such as that.
    "
My cube. If you move into the next chamber, you will see me in my cube
—
you will see all of us
."
    Timothy floated down the corridor and into a large chamber, fully as extensive as the theater in the far rear of the starship. Suspended midway between the high domed ceiling and the floor, on single, finger-thick strands of coppery metal, were cubes of a smoky green transparent material in which the bodies of nearly two hundred aliens hung like flies in amber, staring out at the room without actually seeing anything there, immobile, quiet, but not dead. There was no doubt that life still seethed within these beings, for their faces were caught, not in slackness, but with expressions of fear, anticipation, and relief. The brother of theirs, in the other half of the ship, in the morgue drawer, was dead. Not these.
    "The dead man in the drawer?" he asked as he recalled that frozen husk. "What happened to him?"
    "A
little over a thousand years ago, we ventured forth to explore your world, to see if it had changed in the million and a quarter years we had been sleeping here. He was killed by a bow and arrow. The wound was too sudden and penetrating for our psionic powers to go to his aide. When we saw the creatures of that time possessed intelligence but would require dozens of centuries to develop into anything we could contact, we entered these cubes again to wait. We wanted to solicit help for the repair of this vessel, but such would have been impossible with those semi-savages
."
    "And you have all been here, except for that short time, inactive for a million and more years?" It was impossible to conceive of that, and he felt old and tired when he tried.
    "Hardly. We have frozen our bodies, but not our minds. We remain in intimate mental contact with our homeworlds, with those we love. Our mates, our relatives and friends, have all died, of course. They lived their proper eight thousand years and passed on. But we keep in touch with our ancestors and with developments on the homeworlds. We take turns keeping watch over these inner sanctums of the ship. Life, you see, is much more than having a body whose metabolism continues."
    He had always felt that way himself, of course. It would have destroyed him, quite early in life, if he had contained the physical egotism of a beach bum muscleman.
    "But now it is possible for us to leave these cubes and seek aid from your people."
    "No," Timothy said, realizing how harsh that word must sound to the creature in the cube, to all of them who had been waiting such an unimaginably long time. "
Explain
?"
    "I'm the only one of my kind who has the psionic powers you spoke of." He went on to explain his heritage, the artificial womb, and his expansion of ESP powers achieved through the application of alien blood. "I'm certain, now, that it was only because of my latent ESP that the chemical