Part 7 (1/2)

He went through the parlor, through a dining nook and into the well-appointed kitchen which Thelma Boggs did not keep in a very admirable state. There were dirty dishes in the sink, on the drainboard, slimed with grease and dried food. There was a dirty pan and skillet on the stove and a scattering of cooking utensils and ingredients on the kitchen table. There was a desk in the corner littered with pieces of mail, recipes, women's magazines, two dirty gla.s.ses, an overflowing ashtray, and a stat order catalogue with a dozen felt markers dangling from it.

His eye strayed from the teetering piles of junk on the desk to a door recessed slightly in the wall to his left. He floated to it, opened it with invisible hands, and flipped the light switch along the wall. Panels of glow lights burst into bright existence in the ceiling, the sort of thing one might expect to see in a place of business or a supermodern house-but hardly in a renovated farm. He dropped down the stairwell, ignoring the steps.

As he fell, he flushed his psionic power into the lower chambers. He found no one waiting for him, no mental activity whatsoever.

As he floated out of the stairwell, he found himself in a square, concrete-walled room where tools were racked on peg-boards. Two workbenches flanked him, their tops fixed with hand vises and hand drill braces. In the right corner there was a drill press, and next to it an electric sander and buffer. Beside one of the workbenches was a crate of souvenirs, little bra.s.s Mexican men leading little bra.s.s donkeys, similar if not identical to the piece he had seen in Leonard Taguster's house.

He picked one of the souvenirs up, holding it above him so he could see it from all angles as he twirled it lazily in his unseen fingers. There were no marks on it to indicate where it might have been violated, but he thought he knew exactly what had been done. He threaded his ESP through the tightly packed molecules until he found the cylindrical pocket inside the statuette where a small flask of PBT was contained, perhaps a large enough amount-once cut to proper potency-for thirty doses.

Here, at these two benches and with these machines, the Brethren hollowed out the figures, placed the drug inside, then resmelted the chips of bra.s.s that had been scooped out, filled in over the flask, sanded, buffed, polished, and replaced the pieces in the crates. After that, someone would come and pick the souvenirs up for mailing to various points in this country and all over the world. It was a tedious and time-consuming process, to be sure, but the price of PBT and the small quant.i.ty needed for a usual dose made it quite worthwhile. Besides, it was safe, and men like the Brethren put a price on safety that was higher than that placed on turning a large profit. They knew very well that the United Nations would use the slightest excuse to stick them away in some well-guarded prison for the rest of their lives.

This explained the difficulty the narcotics agents had met with for so long, though it still did not explain how PBT was manufactured or what it was. And it certainly did not explain the terror with which the Brethren regarded the cellar. He drifted from this room into another where crates of figurines of various types lined all the walls. Without slowing, he entered the final chamber. It was an unfinished bas.e.m.e.nt room with cement slapped formlessly over the earth walls. The floor was dirt. There was no light here, except what drifted in from other chambers. Somehow, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for...

The place was a storage chamber for junk, broken lawn-mowers and shattered wheelbarrows, old newspapers and magazines, the things everyone saves against his best judgment. In the far corner of the room, the floor sloped into a jumble of rocks, then disappeared altogether as a limestone sinkhole yawned in the bowels of the earth. The hole had probably opened after the house had been built He wondered how long it would take before it would split wide enough to swallow one of the foundation walls.

He balanced above the gap in the floor, looking down into blackness. Using his ESP, he felt about the rim of the aperture and discovered a switch box just inside the rim of the depression. When he threw the toggle, soft yellow light sprang up within the cave, and he knew he had discovered the production center for the hallucinogen.

And, looking down into that hole, he had an inkling of the horror with which the Brethren viewed this place. He could not pinpoint what bothered him, but there was a feel of the-supernatural. It was a silly word, but it fit. He shuddered, took a deep breath, and descended...

The primary drop shaft of the sinkhole was some seventy feet long, breaking a bit to the left, then back to the right, but maintaining a fairly true vertical descent. Huge blocks of fractured rock formed the sides, tumbled against one another to form small caves and cul-de-sacs cul-de-sacs that were either too small for men to gain admittance or led nowhere once one was inside them. Here and there bats clung to overhanging rocks, eyes blinded by the light, wings folded tight against them, as if the flimsy membranes would give them protection. Along the right side, a series of rungs bolted firmly into the stone provided a means down for those who had no ESP. that were either too small for men to gain admittance or led nowhere once one was inside them. Here and there bats clung to overhanging rocks, eyes blinded by the light, wings folded tight against them, as if the flimsy membranes would give them protection. Along the right side, a series of rungs bolted firmly into the stone provided a means down for those who had no ESP.

At the bottom of the main plummet, Timothy found he had to angle his body sideways to get through a bottleneck in the tunnel He brushed through, sc.r.a.ping the worn surfaces of the rocks, and found himself in a large chamber whose dimensions rivaled those of an old-fas.h.i.+oned baseball stadium. He righted himself and spent a few moments marveling at the stalact.i.tes and stalagmites, at the grotesque weathering of the stone that dripping streams of water had managed to sculpt in the last handful of centuries. A stream of water, no wider than a yardstick and perhaps a foot or two deep, wound through the vaulted cavern, making gurgling, baby laughter that rang from the walls in hundreds of different echoes that sounded like other streams whispering in response. The air was almost cold and carried a damp, musty smell that was unpleasant and generated a feeling of claustrophobia despite the dimensions of the cave.

He drifted along the room toward the far end, which was slanted downward at a rather sharp angle. When the floor began tilting at a forty-five-degree slope, he saw the rungs again, bolted solidly into the stone, and he knew he was still on the trail of whatever it was that was nestled here in the belly of the earth.

And then he saw it...

At the bottom of the long slope, a magnificent length of emerald-colored metal gleamed as if it had been buffed and waxed only moments before. It was a hundred feet long and seemed to disappear into the rock itself, as if it were a piece of cosmic pipe that had been capped here in case an extension was ever required. It tapered as it grew closer to him, unlike a pipe, and the end of it was not capped but open. As he drew closer, he realized that the huge tubes, each twenty feet across, that were recessed in the terminal aperture were vaguely reminiscent of rocket boosters, although of an altogether different type and size from anything he had seen before.

As his sense of eeriness and fear began to blossom within him, he realized that he was looking upon what could be only a portion of an alien vessel, a stars.h.i.+p which buried itself in the earth so long ago that no man could have existed to watch it. At that time, man was little more than a slimy thing newly crawled from the ocean and fighting desperately to grow legs fast enough to keep from being pushed into extinction by the irresistible natural forces of the world which had sp.a.w.ned it.

He drifted along the hull, looking for a way inside, for he was now certain that the Brethren were getting the PBT from this artifact that could-despite the death of its crew-just possibly still be functioning in some areas. Perhaps the stuff came from the s.h.i.+p's medical supplies, drugs which were nothing more than antibiotics to the extraterrestrials but hallucinogenics to men. At last, he saw the circular port which stood open on the far side of the s.h.i.+p, giving view to impenetrable blackness.

He hovered before it, trying to peer inside, but could not see anything. He searched for a light switch. There was none.

He waited, listening, but could hear no noise within the great s.h.i.+p. He searched for the telltale sign of Brethren presence with his psionic abilities. There was no one here. Hesitantly, he went inside...

CHAPTER 13.

The corridor of the stars.h.i.+p was more of a tube than a hallway, lacking any well-defined floor, the walls and ceiling merely curving together without benefit of a seam. As he floated warily into the alien structure, the walls themselves began to illuminate his way, glowing dully blue for twenty feet on either side of him. He tried to see how the lighting functioned, but his gaze met only the flat surface of the metal walls, and he could not focus well enough to see any way the light could possibly be s.h.i.+ning through. He abandoned that pursuit when his eye began to water. He continued down the corridor, carefully studying every projection or recession along the way, waiting expectantly for something horrible to happen.

Shortly, the entrance tube pa.s.sed through the reinforced doorway, and it seemed as if his progress was to be halted by a thick door painted in spirals of green and gray. But as he approached, the spirals swirled, the door irised, and he pa.s.sed through into the first room that he had seen since clambering through the exterior hatch.

It was a small room, perhaps fifteen feet square-except that it was not not square; it had no angles whatsoever. The room was perfectly round inside. There was a storage rack of what appeared to be s.p.a.ce activity suits, though they were not suits so much as very small cars, hardly larger than a man, into which a man might slide like a foot into a boot. square; it had no angles whatsoever. The room was perfectly round inside. There was a storage rack of what appeared to be s.p.a.ce activity suits, though they were not suits so much as very small cars, hardly larger than a man, into which a man might slide like a foot into a boot.

Timothy noticed with interest that there was no room for a man's legs in one of these capsules, though the vehicles were otherwise roughly tailored to humanoid dimensions and requirements. Perhaps even more mysteriously, there was no control console of any sort visible within the devices, no wheel or stick for guiding them and no instruments for monitoring conditions internally or externally. There was only a seat shaped like a shallow cup, a great deal of rolled padding. It was the most alien thing he had seen thus far, this total lack of toggles and switches and b.u.t.tons which decorated all earthly devices.

The next stretch of hallway led to a huge chamber forty feet across and easily eighty feet long. Timothy was aware that now he must be in that portion of the stars.h.i.+p which was wedged into the rock, the part he had not been able to see from outside. He was amazed that the interior of the vessel showed no damage, and he suspected that the exterior might prove the same if it could be extricated from the viselike grip of the earth.

Again, this room contained no corners, and the eye was permitted to rest on hundreds of gentle curves both in the design of the room itself and in the furniture which had been bolted into it. There were chairs and couches and slings, all of which were heavily padded and low-slung. There were machines beside all the chairs and couches, thrusting down from the ceiling next to the slings. He investigated the mechanism of one of them and decided that it was a greatly perfected version of the senso-theater projector. He wondered what sort of programs it provided for the creatures who came here to be entertained; then he forced himself to stop extrapolating on every item that caught his attention. If he gave way to his questing curiosity about every device, it would take him a lifetime to make his way through the s.h.i.+p.

He left the theater and drifted into another brief section of corridor with irising doors to either side of it that led to private chambers which seemed to be living quarters with chain-hung sling beds. Shortly after entering the third major chamber through which the main tube corridor pa.s.sed, he gained the end of the temporary goal which he had set for himself: he uncovered the source of PBT.

The room was another sphere of approximately the same dimensions as the first he had encountered upon entering the stars.h.i.+p. Here, though, there were some noticeable and notable differences of architecture. The walls, ceiling, and even the floor were covered with access plates to blocks of machinery and with readout screens that appeared to be communications links to the s.h.i.+p computers. He searched into them with his ESP, through circuitry not unlike human electrical equipment, and verified that guess. There was a walkway through the maze of wires and slots and raised modules, although it was so straight and narrow that it could never have been used by the technicians who would have to service these machines when they malfunctioned, or by the crew who would be using the devices.

Timothy drifted to the first series of drawers that seemed to slide into the walls themselves and was not at all surprised when the thing rolled out at his approach. It was large enough, both in length and depth, to contain him, and he fancied it very nearly contoured to the form of a body, but for the lack of leg s.p.a.ce. It was laced across with friction straps to tie down whatever cargo it had been meant to hold. When he drifted lower to look in the drawer and to the s.p.a.ce above it that was revealed when it was open, he saw a series of spidery-fingered hands that seemed to hold surgical instruments. He straightened, his curiosity aroused more than it had been at any moment since his entrance. He opened the next drawer and found the same setup, the needles and surgical equipment. When he pulled open the third drawer, hoping that he would find some variance which-by comparison-would help him to understand the nature of these drawers, he was confronted by the penetrating stare of the alien which lay within...

CHAPTER 14.

He gasped, startled, and rushed backwards, away from the open drawer. He came to an abrupt halt as his own foolishness became evident to him. Even if he ran, he could not get out of here in time-not if they knew he was aboard. And if his extrasensory powers were of no use to him, there was nowhere on earth he could count himself safe; if they were useful, he had nothing to worry about.

He also began to realize that the thing he had seen was not a living, breathing creature, but a corpse. If it had been alive, the world would surely have heard about it and from it a good many years ago; the Brethren would not have been able to exploit the wonders of the stars.h.i.+p towards their own ends. That creature lying in the drawer was not the kind of fellow anyone exploited-if he wished to live to the end of his natural days.

He went back, somewhat ashamed at himself and his fainthearted reaction.

But he returned slowly, nevertheless.

He peered over the brink of a surgical drawer, far less frightened now that he knew what to be prepared for.

The alien stared up at him with two, huge, mulifaceted eyes that had no differentiation between pupil and iris. Each of them was nothing more than a fist-sized convexity of a milky blue opaque color that somehow reminded him of fine china. Each eye was beveled, like the eye of a fly. The nose was actually more human than Timothy's own, though somewhat wider and flatter and possessed of one nostril rather than two. The man was thin, and his lips were almost like pencil lines. Gleaming through a gap in those lips were teeth of a human character. Indeed, the eyes were the only truly alien features, aside from the abnormally high and bulbous forehead. But they were enough to have given Ti that mild case of panic when he had come across them unexpectedly.

He noticed, too, that the alien was armless and legless, though he did not consider this so nonhuman. Its condition had not been a matter of accident or amputation, for its body was too smoothly, perfectly, formed for that. It had been limbless its entire life-and apparently for the same reason that Timothy was limbless. He was excited by the thought. Both he and this alien had been born with an extrasensory power that made limbs unnecessary...

Timothy thought back over all the things he had noticed since he boarded the stars.h.i.+p, all the clues that should have fit together and completed the puzzle even before he was presented with the answer in the form of this corpse: the lack of true floors (which would not matter to a race which had the ability to levitate and propel itself with psychic energy rather than legs), the lack of controls in the extravehicular ”s.p.a.cesuits” (which would not be even desirable to a race which had evolved away from hands and which could monitor its machines, for the most part, with its psionic eyes and ears and hands), and the lack of an overall lighting system in favor of one where illumination followed you around (a race with so much psionic power would certainly have no vestigal fears of the dark and would require light only as a convenience to show them the way more easily; indeed, they very well might have learned to see with their ESP and without light, in which case the illumination would be here for guests, other intelligent races of the galaxy that might come aboard). Here was a race whose ”paranormal” abilities were its birthright; he wondered how much more advanced than he they were.

He was able to see, quite readily, why the Brethren had been so horrified by what they had discovered down here and had, to a man, tried to conceal what they had seen from even themselves. Timothy was accustomed to the corruption of the human form, for his own mortal sh.e.l.l was certainly as much of a freak as that of the alien. Years ago, he had ceased looking in the mirror, but he knew knew what corruption was, knew it with every breath he drew into lungs that were not quite right, with every mouthful of food his twisted stomach ingested. He could accept this alien form, even be pleased with it. However, those who were used to the pretty face and the handsome body would swiftly rebel at the concept of an entire race of beings such as this. They could only conceive of them as hideously evil and, to avoid nightmares, they would have to shove what they had seen deep into the subconscious pockets of their minds. what corruption was, knew it with every breath he drew into lungs that were not quite right, with every mouthful of food his twisted stomach ingested. He could accept this alien form, even be pleased with it. However, those who were used to the pretty face and the handsome body would swiftly rebel at the concept of an entire race of beings such as this. They could only conceive of them as hideously evil and, to avoid nightmares, they would have to shove what they had seen deep into the subconscious pockets of their minds.

He touched the nearly invisible transparent plastic s.h.i.+eld that fitted over the alien, traced his ESP fingers on it. It was bitter cold, though no frost had formed inside.

The morgue...

Yet, if these creatures had such well-developed psionic abilities, why was this man-thing lying here dead? Why couldn't he have reached within his own body and cured whatever was wrong with him, just as Timothy had found he could cure his own wounds, heal breached flesh? He examined the body more closely and discovered why it had been unable to heal itself. There was a hole in its neck, angled upward into the skull. Whatever had killed it had forced its way into the brain. It was the only sort of wound that could kill a psionic man-and it must have come too suddenly and unexpectedly for him to use his powers to avoid it.

He wondered if the Brethren had killed it. But the hole was ragged and too large to have been made by a bullet. He could not imagine a Brother carrying any weapon but a gun.

Turning from the drawer, he surveyed the rest of the chamber, now more aware of what he should be looking for. He began to see that much of the machinery was of a medical nature, designed to perform almost any surgical function.

This did not fit the concept of a psionic race that could cure itself. He reminded himself, however, that this was a totally alien culture and atmosphere he had entered and that his own rules did not necessarily apply. Besides, it was quite logical that a robotic hospital might be provided for guests on the s.h.i.+p who were of races other than that of these creatures. There was a walkway through the chamber, after all, and that that certainly wasn't for the creatures like that dead one in the morgue drawer. certainly wasn't for the creatures like that dead one in the morgue drawer.

As Ti continued his investigation of the room, he saw a series of plastic flasks into which stainless steel tubes were dripping fluids of various colors. His mind registered the data after his eye had pa.s.sed it by, and he looked swiftly back, more excited by this than he had been by his discovery of the alien corpse lying in the preservation drawer of the morgue. Of the six flasks, the second from the right was filling up with an amber fluid which looked strikingly like the PBT that Margle had boosted into his veins all those times in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the house in New England.