Starblood

projected and nothing more, as an animal more than a man, he went back into the conscious mind to the data banks where the memories of the starship and the PBT were stored.
    He selected the proper tape from the storage niche, a flat gray spool.
    The walls of the mind analogue, white plaster like those of Leopold's mind, shook from floor to ceiling.
    He concentrated on remembering Jacob Westblom as an animal, a lust-crazed, power-mad creature with no human qualities whatsoever, a comic book creation of evil.
    He remembered the look of the stroke-damaged brain tissue, but he blanked that memory immediately.
    He ordered the tape erased.
    He tried to be careful, tried not to destroy the mind and the brain beyond that. His goal was still not Westblom's destruction, but the erasure of this information from the storage vaults of his mind. If he could preserve the man's life at the same time, so be it.
    He wished that he could heal Westblom with his ESP power. But, again, he knew that the brain was too intricate, too mysterious, for his still coltish powers to heal. And injury there was permanent.
    The lights dimmed.
    Cracks appeared in the walls.
    Timothy held down on the erasure control, though he was weeping and gagging and desperately wanted out of that place. He had never been in a dying mind before, and the absolute terror of the destruction almost drove him beyond the bounds of his own sanity.
    Part of the analogue roof tumbled down around him, dust exploding in great, obscuring clouds. Above the roar of the demolition, there echoed a faint and distant scream…
    When he was done and had left the mind of the dead man, not bothering to finish erasing the tape, he knew that the trick of pretending that the subconscious was representative of the whole man had worked to help him get the necessary job done, had given him the ability to kill—but that it was a delusion that would not help to assuage his own guilt in the years to come. That was something no number of tricks could cope with.
    The electrocardiograph had stopped its incessant bleeping and was humming a sharp, electronic note.
    The nurse still slept.
    Otherwise, still quiet.
    He looked at Westblom, although he did not want to. He wanted only to get out of there, to be away from the smells of sickness, the white walls, the starched and supercleanly nurse, the low humming of the heart-watching machine which meant death, death, death…
    He saw that the stroke had twisted the thin, aristocratic nose, setting it out of line. There was a darkening of the facial flesh, and in some areas, especially just under the eyes, it was perfectly blue-black. The mouth was still open. One hand had clenched the sheets in the last moments of life, had twisted them up and through bony, white fingers, as if they could save him.
    He tried to recall the picture he had gotten of Westblom from his subconscious, all the lusts and perversions, all the ugly, twisted desires that had been the inner core of the man. But he could not get that all together again.
    Strangely, the vision that appeared was of the naked black girl, lying on Leland's bedroom floor. He shook that off.
    He tensed. Teleported…

CHAPTER 19
    His house was a painful place now, for more than one reason. Looking at it, he saw the old Timothy, the man he had once been but could never be again. The flowering of his ESP and the centuries to come with the aliens had and would continue to change him beyond recognition—at least mentally and emotionally. Also, he was pained at having to leave this place. Even if it was no longer he, no longer relative and important to the man he had become, it was a link with the past, a tenuous connection to the rest of humanity. Leaving it would be the final, indisputable indication that there would never be any going back.
    He went into the basement and sat through a senso-tape show on his tri-dimension screens. But he flicked it off, bored, a few moments before it was to end. In the shooting range he pulled off a couple dozen rounds into the targets, but gained no flush of achievement when they were all bull's eyes. Upstairs in the library he still felt a faint glimmer of belonging, among the books and tapes and knowledge. But even this was not as strong as it had once been.
    He slid the panel back on the comscreen controls and dialed George Creel's home number. He had to wait only a short moment before the dark man answered.
    "Hello, George."
    He could see that Creel was startled. He