Starblood

would like that," he said.
    "There are things you must attend to."
    "Yes. The Brethren. The newspaper. It will not take very much time."
    "When you return, all will have been prepared for your entombment
," the alien said. The greenish cubes glinted with stray pieces of light, their edges soft, now smooth, now struck with light again as they turned slowly, slowly, first to the left, then the right, too slight a movement to be easily discerned.
    "I'll hurry," he said.
    When the whisper did not reply, Timothy closed his eyes and gathered about himself the cloak of serenity necessary to a leap into the nonmatter continuum of teleportation. He conjured up a vision of the Brethren farm, of the darkling earth around it.
    He teleported.
    He had work to do…

CHAPTER 17
    He found himself standing beneath the same willow tree where he had first arrived when he had teleported from the Brethren house in New England, though he had not made a conscious effort to return to the exact same terminus. He drifted quickly across the lawn, onto the porch where he found the slumbering bodies of Richard Boggs and the unnamed henchman who had been sitting in the swing. He entered the mind of the surgically created killer and wiped away whatever knowledge the man had possessed of the starship and the origins of PBT.
    Richard Boggs's mind was somewhat more intricate. The analogue which Timothy's own mind established to deal with it was of a junkyard, where rusting, useless articles of the man's life rested in varying states of decay. Richard Boggs was a dreamer, a man with a million schemes all contained within him at once—none of them workable. He would be, until the end of his days, exactly what he was now: a second-rate hired man. In the junkyard, among the rust and the twisted metal, Timothy located that which he wished to expunge, and left the man ignorant of not only the source of the drug, but of its existence as well. When he woke, the letters PBT would have no meaning whatsoever for him.
    He drifted into the house and did the same with Thelma Boggs, wiping out all knowledge of the drug and the starship.
    Her mind was similar to her husband's, and the hopeless schemes she had were often ones he had cultivated first.
    He went to the three Brethren whose minds he had explored earlier, and took away the selected bits of data from two of them. Moving faster now, more anxious to get this finished, he went outside and eradicated the starship and PBT from the memories of the rear door guard and from the mind of the man who had been patrolling the white picket fence.
    When all of this had been accomplished, within a matter of ten minutes, he returned to the living-room, where the gray-haired Brother who had shot at him through the window lay on his face, his mind as yet untouched. Timothy delved deeply into the ancient library analogue and stirred through the thousands of books of thoughts, discarding them, throwing them on the floor when he discovered they were not what he wanted. In time he knew the name of every Brother who knew of the existence of the starship below the house. There were only four of them, all members of the Inner Circle of the organization. There was Leopold, of course. And three others who. shared in the policy-making of the Brethren structure. He collected their addresses, permanent and alternate, then wiped the starship and the PBT out of the gray-haired gentleman's memories.
    He floated into the darkness, over the dew-damp lawn, taking a moment or two to enjoy the fresh, untainted fragrance of the country air. The anti-pollution laws had slowly begun to have their intended effect on the cities, but they were not nearly so clean as this. He was well aware, as he filled his lungs and savored the crispness, that this might well be the last chance he would have for reverie for the next few centuries—or longer.
    He looked at the stars overhead. They no longer seemed cold and distant and uncaring, but warm and close. They were things to be viewed as guiding beacons in the darkness. And soon, quite soon now, he would be there, among them, if only with his psionic abilities. He understood, looking at those far points of light, why the aliens could not simply teleport to their homeworld. Even the superhuman talents of the fully developed mind could not cope with those vast reaches of space.
    He closed his eye, blocking out the stars and concentrating on finishing what must be done here on earth.
    He tensed every