Starblood

cold air.
    He moved out of the shrubs, back into the brilliantly illuminated lawn. He moved smoothly toward the house, reaching out with his mind to tap the glowing centers of the guards' thoughts, snuffing them out one at a time until the slumbering forms of the surgically created bodyguards lay all over the knoll.
    At the front door, he used his ESP to throw the locks, pushed the portal inward, and drifted through. He caught a guard on the winding staircase to the second and third floors and pinched the nerves in his neck. The man fell against the railing, back onto the steps, and rolled over and over down a dozen risers to the floor below.
    He made his way through two more men, and reached Ludwig Stutman in his business study on the third floor of the enormous house. Stutman was perhaps fifty years old. He was short, stocky, blond-haired and blue-eyed. He was, Timothy could tell without even probing the man's mind, a physical-fitness fanatic. His arms were developed beyond usefulness to that thick, rippling-muscled state that is good only for show and not practice. His chest was a barrel, expanded by weight-lifting and deep-breathing exercises. On his desk were jars of seeds labeled and arranged carefully as to vitamin contents.
    "Who are you?" Stutman asked. He tried to match his physique with an equally manly fearlessness, but his terror was painfully obvious to both of them.
    Timothy said nothing.
    "Who?" Stutman insisted, as if it mattered more that he have a name for the man who had forced his way through Stutman's security than that he fend him off.
    Timothy pinched the proper nerves.
    Stutman fell back into the chair from which he had risen when Timothy entered the study. Even in total repose, the muscles of his bare arms were corded, the tissue of his neck stiff and twined like steel cables.
    Ti carefully insinuated himself into Stutman's mind, his own mind forming an analogue that would allow him to seek out that data which he had come to erase from Stutman's memory.
    It seemed proper that the conscious mind be represented by a gymnasium. Within the gymnasium were thousands of men working out, hoisting bars, doing pushups, climbing ropes, sitting in steam cabinets. It impressed Timothy that there were no women within the gym, no women at all.
    Without pausing any longer to consider Stutman's sexual proclivities, he went through the gym, questioning those people he found there, and soon he had wiped out of the conscious mind all thought of PBT and its origins. He found a door in the far wall of the gym and went down into the subconscious.
    Here the analogue was a hospital. Not the operating rooms, but the wards, full of diseased and dying people. There were cancerous patients, lepers, all the worst decay that man is heir to. Timothy supposed that anyone with such concern for his body would contain a seething cauldron of horror over sickness and death. He destroyed the thoughts he wished and quickly departed that place…
    Stutman slept peacefully, his hulking body unaware that its most inner sanctums had been rudely violated, and some of the knowledge which sustained it in this luxury had been drained away.
    Timothy let his thoughts congeal around the next address on his list. He pictured it clearly in his mind, as he had gotten it from the gray-haired man in the Iowa farmhouse. He tensed, teleported…
    … And shimmered into existence immediately before the door of Arthur Leland's home.
    Behind him, a bodyguard gasped, whirled, then fell over into sleep, his pistol clattering on the brick floor of the exterior foyer. He hit the floor, himself, with a thick, sickening
whump
.
    Timothy unlocked the door, opened it, and went inside, closing it behind. The house was a supermodern one, the floor covered in thick shag carpet that in its richness resembled fur. The furniture was specially crafted, full of bold sweeps, brilliant colors, and daring designs that were all brilliant in themselves and somehow managed to complement, not compete, to form an even more attractive whole.
    Somewhere, soft classical music was playing, almost an anachronism in the sleek plastic-and-vinyl-and-synthetics decor of the house itself. Yet this too seemed somehow to complement the furniture.
    He listened, but heard no one.
    It occurred to him that he was much like Red Death in the Poe story. Though these people locked themselves away in flashy, rich surroundings, in gaiety and pleasure, he found them, stalked them, and did with