Starblood

of power seek the enemy flesh.
    When he knew he was safe from the man, he withdrew the psionic weaponry and looked to himself. He was gagging blood, and the wound in the center of his body was pumping crimson fluid almost like a garden hose. He reached into himself, stopped the bleeding, and carefully began to knit the torn blood vessels.
    Another bullet, from a different angle this time, snapped into the side of his skull, burrowed through the surface flesh and was gone. If it had been even half an inch lower, it would have torn through his oversized skull and destroyed the brain which contained the ESP power he needed to heal himself and save his life…
    A second shot rang off the silver-capped trunk of his legs, making a sweet, poignant bell note in the crisp night air, a note that echoed through the wood below and was certain to draw more attention—attention that Timothy could not afford.
    His confidence abruptly eroded by the turn in fortune, Timothy frantically .flushed out his ESP power and dropped the second guard where he stood by a pine tree a hundred feet away. Then, moving swiftly, he drifted to the shrubbery from which the first guard had opened fire. He swept through the tangle of carefully tended greenery and hid in the shadows and the branches of a stand of bristled, heavily scented pines.
    Gingerly and somewhat reluctantly, he touched his head wound. He felt weak and dizzy, both with the loss of blood and with the fear that permeated him. The wound was half an inch deep, seeping blood, though not nearly
so
much as he had lost from the stomach wound. Hair and flesh were matted in a sickening bandage that helped to stifle what little fluid he was losing. Carefully he knit the ruined vessels with his superhuman power; almost all of them were merely capillaries and not major veins or arteries such as had been broken in the stomach wound.
    On the knoll, like a dragon awakening from slumber, the house lights flicked on on all three floors, yellow illumination spilling almost gaily across the dark grass and changing it, in the instant,
to
a colorful, almost dyed-looking green.
    There were shouted commands as other guards went into a search-and-destroy pattern they had worked out among themselves a thousand times before, preparing for a moment just like this. Some of the voices were disturbingly close to the place where Timothy was desperately working to mend himself so that he might be able to face and defeat them when the time came. And the time was coming swiftly.
    Then arc lights on tall, gray poles, sedately concealed by the landscaping, burst into brilliant life all over the grounds, even down in the thick wood where he had arrived moments earlier. There were only a few points of shadow, one of them being the place where he hid now. In moments, they would find him.
    He could not risk facing them with his body partially ruined. One or two more well-placed rounds might make him so weak that he would not be able to use his power to knit himself. And then it would not matter that he was the most powerful human being on the planet Earth.
    Cursing himself for his stupidity in rushing into this without the proper amount of thought and consideration, he joined cell to cell, forced a speeded mitosis, grew new cells, replaced the dead flesh. The problem was that he was too excited about the offer of the whispering alien, the offer to join the extraterrestrials for the next few hundred years. For the first time in his life, he realized, he would be with people on his own level, people he could communicate with fully. More than one. Hundreds of them. And, if it meant that he would be inferior for a while, even that was a pleasant prospect. He had never been actually inferior, not since that hospital stretch before his psionic abilities were discovered. And that had been a physical inferiority. It might be quite interesting to be among mental superiors who could teach him. Perhaps it was a longing for parental guidance which he had never known. All of this fled through his mind as he finished healing himself.
    As he was finishing, one of the guards now searching the grounds found him and opened fire. Timothy deflected the bullets. He was ready for them now. He was cooler, more thoughtful than when he had arrived the first time.
    He used his ESP to plunge the guard into sleep. The man staggered, tripped over his own feet, and crashed into the bushes, hanging there in a parody of crucifixion, snoring loudly in the