Starblood

that he was.
    He put the books back on the pine shelves, exactly where he had gotten them.
    In the hour since he had left Leland's mind, he had faced up to this one inadequacy of his, had met it head on, and had—if only temporarily—come to terms with it There was no use wishing for what you could not have. In the centuries before him with the aliens he would forget this lack of sexual feeling. And when he was within his own body again and prey to the distant, awful ache of longing, mankind might be able to develop to the point of doing something about it.
    He breathed more easily as the ache dissipated. He thought of the smoothness of the girl's flesh. The ache did not return.
    Smiling, he began to summon the address of the final Brethren chief into his mind, to build a picture of the house where he must go on the final leg of his mission. He was at ease. He had been through the worst of it now—physically, anyway. As it turned out, his final target was to cause him the most mental and emotional anguish of the night…

CHAPTER 18
    In comparison with the other Brethren chiefs which Timothy had visited that night, Jacob Westblom lived simply. It was not necessarily simple by the standards of the average man, but quite so considering the millions of Westblom, like the others, must have amassed in his years of illegal activities. The house, near Albany, New York, was built in English Tudor style. It was a beautiful house of nine rooms, built sometime in the early part of the century. It was of solid brick construction with black-trimmed windows and shutters, a many-paned bay window off the living-room, now softly tinted with the amber light of a single lamp that burned in that room.
    He watched the house from a distance, positioned across the street in the residential neighborhood where Westblom lived. The man had perhaps three acres of ground, but other houses were close enough nearby that he could not have flaunted a plethora of well-armed guards. Timothy searched through the tangle of mind emanations that swarmed in the suburban air, and finally found three of the strange, nearly blank minds of the surgically created killers. He snuffed each of them into unconsciousness, then crossed the street, picked the iron gate lock with his mind, and entered the grounds of the house.
    He reached the front door, went through, closed it behind. There was the sound of talking from the kitchen. He reached out with his ESP, found a butler, out of uniform, and a chauffeur in jeans and tee-shirt drinking beer at the kitchen table. He put them to sleep.
    He searched the rest of the house but found no one in any of the other eight rooms. It meant that Jacob Westblom was not at home and that he would have to try the alternate addresses which he had gleaned from the minds of the Brethren in Iowa. One of those was a nightclub. Two more were restaurants. Another was a brother's residence, a blood kin, of Westblom who was not involved in the underworld. And eleven more were the addresses of women.
    But there was something else curious about the emptiness of the house. Would Westblom be satisfied with three exterior guards to protect the sanctity of his domain? Wouldn't he station one or two others within the house as a final barrier to his enemies? He did not believe that Westblom could be that much less paranoid than his fellow underworld chiefs—or that he had that much less real danger to fear from enemies that had once belonged to the powerful Mafia.
    Timothy floated into the kitchen, where the servants slumped over the table. A can of beer had been knocked over. It ran down onto the floor, and the malt smell of it was heavy in the air. He moved first to the well-groomed, salt-and-pepper-haired butler and dipped into his mind, skimming across the conscious level of it in search of anything that might tell him of Westblom's whereabouts.
    In seconds, he found what he wanted. He discovered that the old man was in the hospital, recovering (or so everyone hoped) from a cerebral hemorrhage which he had suffered only that morning.
    For a moment, Timothy was tempted to skip Westblom, to trust to the Brethren leader's sickness to destroy his memory—if not all of him. But that was folly, considering the importance of this mission not only to the fate of thousands of addicts but to his own future as well. He obtained the hospital's address and a visual impression of it from the butler's mind, tensed, closed his eyes, and teleported…
    He