Starblood

arrived outside the building, a monstrosity of yellow brick and aluminum, in the middle of a pedestrian slidewalk, floating above the rolling rubberized tread that stretched in both directions. It had been stupid, he chided himself, to forget that he might pop into existence right before some startled citizen's eyes and cause an uproar where he wanted anonymity. This was not, after all, the sort of quiet, closed grounds where Brethren officers lived, but a public structure.
    A moment later, he drifted into the main lobby of the hospital, the odor of disinfectant and flowers heavy and somewhat unpleasant in the home of the sick. He looked over the roster of in-patients on the public board, and located Westblom's room. It was on the eighteenth floor, but the elevators were manned with scrubbed young women who insisted on a pass from the desk. And he knew he could never obtain one. Passes to Westblom's room would be difficult for the President to get.
    The stairwells were closed at this hour, the heavy fire doors locked and chained. And though he could have picked the locks and removed the chains, the noise would surely have attracted the attention that he must avoid at all costs.
    He found the directory of the hospital floorplan on an end table in the visitors' lounge and paged through it until he was able to pinpoint Westblom's room. But it was, not going to be easy to teleport out of a busy lobby without causing some sort of furor. He found the men's room, feeling rather ridiculous, and when he was alone within the ammonia-fumed confines of the John, he tensed, concentrated on the position of the room, and blinked into the nonmatter universe of instantaneous transmission.
    In Westblom's hospital room, he was confronted with a nurse, a stout woman in stark white clothes wearing ridged, squeaking shoes and walking around the bed checking on the monitoring devices there, especially the bleeping electrocardiograph. She looked up, took a few steps backward, rubbed at her eyes as if she were unwilling to believe that a man—or something resembling a man, anyway—had appeared before her eyes magically, out of thin air.
    As she opened her mouth to scream, Timothy silenced her. He did not let her drop rudely to the floor as he had the men he put to sleep earlier in the evening. He used his ESP to cushion her weight, to swing her around and into the chair where she had been sitting earlier, reading a paperback novel.
    In the bed was the withered husk of a man, punctured by needles which led to tubes which lead to bottles of clear liquid dangling overhead on a bright stainless steel stand. The pulse of intravenous feeding continued, despite the excitement in the room. The man's mouth hung open, gaping like the mouth of the dead—though there was still a great deal of life in the old bastard.
    Timothy slipped psionic fingers into the man's mind and brain to see exactly how much life. He found that the damaged area of the organic brain tissue had pretty much settled down to normal and that therapy of some sort must have been administered, since other cerebral areas had begun to take over a few of the functions of the small, deadened section. This was ample evidence that it would be foolish to trust to the stroke or death to silence the old man.
    Carefully, he slipped into Westblom's mind, searching through an analogue of a data storage system housed in a great, windowless building, much like the analogue of Leopold's mind (did ambition and ruthlessness breed the same sort of men?). He discovered the information about the starship and the origins of PBT. It had not been stored in those banks of memories which had been burned out by the hemorrhaging.
    He began fiddling with the analogue controls of Westblom's data bank, attempting to eradicate the crucial facts. But the walls of the place began to tremble, and the data tapes set up an ungodly squeal of protest as he worked. He soon realized that any toying he did caused the mind and, by association, the brain to erupt in turmoil and fear that could easily lead to another stroke. And another stroke, so soon after the first, was almost sure death for the man.
    He withdrew his fingers of ESP, returned completely to his own twisted body, and considered the problem.
    If he let Westblom alone, the man would live. He was strong. His heartbeat was steady. His will to survive—that, Timothy was certain—was the most forceful thing about him. And, surviving, he would remember the