Starblood

starship and the drug, a memory that would totally destroy all the careful blanking work that he, Timothy, had done this night in other minds. Yet, if he thrust his psionic fingers into Westblom and manhandled his mind long enough to abolish the information, he might very likely kill the Brethren officer in the process. He thought of bursting blood vessels and darkening brain tissue… it was not a pleasant pair of alternatives. The Lady or the Tiger? No, it was more like the Tiger or the Lion. Both choices made him despair.
    As he stood there, listening to an occasional gurgled comment from the bottle of glucose, listening too to the heavy breathing of the nurse, he argued that Westblom was a parasite working the underbelly of society, had been a parasite most all his life. He had probably been associated, if not an integral part of, the old Mafia before switching allegiances and rising through the ranks of the Brethren. His food and his clothes, his Tudor house, and even the medical care he was now receiving to prolong his life had been bought on the agony and the death of other human beings. He preyed on the weak and the confused and lived well on the meat he was able to rip from their bones.
    The bottle dripped.
    The nurse snored.
    Otherwise, quiet.
    Though Timothy believed every word of the arguments that he was giving himself, though he agreed with the placing of all inflections, they were just not enough to justify the murder of Jacob Westblom—at least, not a murder as cold and efficient as this. Especially not a murder of a man who had not raised one finger against him personally. With Klaus Margle and his henchmen it had been easier, for they had been shooting at him, actively engaged in trying to destroy him. It was a matter of self-preservation that night, and demanded more of a gut reaction than this. That was what made him different than these men, he told himself. He could not treat another human being, another man of his own race, with such ruthless objectivity as they treated others. Murder… he could not.
    Unless…
    The idea that rose within his mind was a bold one. It was also shameful. A cop-out of sorts. An attempt to delude himself into ignoring the very ,real moral problem that confronted him. It was not the sort of thing he liked to see in others, let alone in himself. But, damn it, it just might work…
    He extended his psionic power into Westblom's mind, delved down into his subconscious world, whose analogue was a series of caves beneath the data storage building. He wandered through the slime-walled depths where id lusts and ego dreams crawled and slithered, lurking in nooks and crevices as if afraid of the light he carried.
    They chittered at him. They growled. They moaned. They tried to snatch away his light.
    In the brief moments they could not avoid the light, they leered, faces hideous and twisted.
    He allowed the crawling, chittering, cancerous beasts of Westblom's mind to brush against him, to lay wet and clammy hands on him, drag decaying fingers down his spine. He listened to them until he thought he understood the language they spoke. He learned all the basest, most horrible traits his victim possessed, forced himself to indulge in it until he was sickened into the core of his soul.
    No one's id and ego should be probed, prodded, teased, and finally dissected like that, Timothy knew. It could end in his own gibbering insanity if he were not careful. The flowing tide, thrusting forward and ebbing back only to thrust forward again, of incest, murder, sadism, masochism, bigotry, blood-lust, hate, fear, power-hunger, all these were not meant to be studied and turned over in his ESP fingers. But the incident did exactly what he wanted it to do. It stirred up a deep and unremitting loathing for this Jacob Westblom, this sick old man in the expensive private hospital room. He knew Westblom better than he had ever known anyone, knew all of the perverted things that drove the man. It was true, of course, that Timothy himself must surely possess subconscious lusts and motivations equally as evil and depraved as those Westblom unknowingly nurtured—just as every man's subconscious is a dumping ground for that which he could not bear to consider consciously. But Ti ignored that now, working his hatred into a full-blooming garden, raising his monument of hatred to higher and higher peaks. At last, when he had somewhat deluded himself into thinking of Westblom as exactly what his id