Part 9 (1/2)

He listened at the wall.

He could hear them in there, and the sound was not rea.s.suring. Buzzing, churning, squirming over one another in mindless, chitinous, slick brown-black fury.

Quickly he went up through the many floors of the data bank, searching out those things he wished removed from the man's store of knowledge. He worked quickly within the a.n.a.logue, then reviewed his work to make certain that he had not missed anything crucial. At last, satisfied with the job, he departed Leopold's mind.

The room was quiet. Outside the window, some species of songbird was plying its trade. He pinched Leopold's nerves in the base of his neck and sent the man into slumber again.

Three to go.

He tensed. He teleported...

... And arrived.

Ludwig Stutman, a member of the Inner Council of the Brethren, lived in an impressive estate near Baltimore, Maryland. The grounds were very extensive, every foot of them well cared for. The trees that formed a forest near the south end of the grounds seemed well pruned and surgically shaped to present the most aesthetically pleasing picture possible. There were no weeds and ground brush within the trees, only some crawling ivy and a few spots of tended flowers sprouting colorfully in black earth. Out of the forest, the lawn was as close-trimmed as the head of a Marine general, yet spongy like a thick carpet Some special sort of gra.s.s, he imagined. Not native to this part of the country. More like the stuff that grows in Florida. The house, on the smooth top of a small knoll, was three-storied, made of dark stone. It had white pillars and a veranda, all the architectural touches of genteel living.

Crime, Timothy thought rather sourly, does pay, no matter what the FBI and a.s.sociated branches might have to say.

He came up the long, twisted stone pathway from the wood, the night a bit cooler here than it had been in Iowa, his hair fluffing in the breeze and his eye watering a bit as the night air stung it. Three hundred yards from the house, he encountered the first guard.

He had not been expecting it, which was foolish. Stutman, like any of the Brethren hierarchy, would be well protected from authorities and from the renegades of the old-time Mafia who had refused to conform after their organization had been crushed and who might have a grudge to settle with one of the new crime bosses. When the tall, darkly dressed man approached him from a line of shrubs and shadows, he was startled.

He felt a warm wetness in his stomach, then heard the sharp snap of a pistol shot. The world seemed to tilt suddenly, and then the pain came, hard and rough-edged, tearing upward through his chest from his ruined belly.

There was a second, terrifying crack, the whine of a near miss, before he gathered his senses together fast enough to flush out with his psionic power a heavy wave of destructive force. He felt the insubstantial ESP crash over the guard, felt the millions of bright fingers of power seek the enemy flesh.

When he knew he was safe from the man, he withdrew the psionic weaponry and looked to himself. He was gagging blood, and the wound in the center of his body was pumping crimson fluid almost like a garden hose. He reached into himself, stopped the bleeding, and carefully began to knit the torn blood vessels.

Another bullet, from a different angle this time, snapped into the side of his skull, burrowed through the surface flesh and was gone. If it had been even half an inch lower, it would have torn through his oversized skull and destroyed the brain which contained the ESP power he needed to heal himself and save his life...

A second shot rang off the silver-capped trunk of his legs, making a sweet, poignant bell note in the crisp night air, a note that echoed through the wood below and was certain to draw more attention-attention that Timothy could not afford.

His confidence abruptly eroded by the turn in fortune, Timothy frantically .flushed out his ESP power and dropped the second guard where he stood by a pine tree a hundred feet away. Then, moving swiftly, he drifted to the shrubbery from which the first guard had opened fire. He swept through the tangle of carefully tended greenery and hid in the shadows and the branches of a stand of bristled, heavily scented pines.

Gingerly and somewhat reluctantly, he touched his head wound. He felt weak and dizzy, both with the loss of blood and with the fear that permeated him. The wound was half an inch deep, seeping blood, though not nearly so so much as he had lost from the stomach wound. Hair and flesh were matted in a sickening bandage that helped to stifle what little fluid he was losing. Carefully he knit the ruined vessels with his superhuman power; almost all of them were merely capillaries and not major veins or arteries such as had been broken in the stomach wound. much as he had lost from the stomach wound. Hair and flesh were matted in a sickening bandage that helped to stifle what little fluid he was losing. Carefully he knit the ruined vessels with his superhuman power; almost all of them were merely capillaries and not major veins or arteries such as had been broken in the stomach wound.

On the knoll, like a dragon awakening from slumber, the house lights flicked on on all three floors, yellow illumination spilling almost gaily across the dark gra.s.s and changing it, in the instant, to to a colorful, almost dyed-looking green. a colorful, almost dyed-looking green.

There were shouted commands as other guards went into a search-and-destroy pattern they had worked out among themselves a thousand times before, preparing for a moment just like this. Some of the voices were disturbingly close to the place where Timothy was desperately working to mend himself so that he might be able to face and defeat them when the time came. And the time was coming swiftly.

Then arc lights on tall, gray poles, sedately concealed by the landscaping, burst into brilliant life all over the grounds, even down in the thick wood where he had arrived moments earlier. There were only a few points of shadow, one of them being the place where he hid now. In moments, they would find him.

He could not risk facing them with his body partially ruined. One or two more well-placed rounds might make him so weak that he would not be able to use his power to knit himself. And then it would not matter that he was the most powerful human being on the planet Earth.

Cursing himself for his stupidity in rus.h.i.+ng into this without the proper amount of thought and consideration, he joined cell to cell, forced a speeded mitosis, grew new cells, replaced the dead flesh. The problem was that he was too excited about the offer of the whispering alien, the offer to join the extraterrestrials for the next few hundred years. For the first time in his life, he realized, he would be with people on his own level, people he could communicate with fully. More than one. Hundreds of them. And, if it meant that he would be inferior for a while, even that was a pleasant prospect. He had never been actually inferior, not since that hospital stretch before his psionic abilities were discovered. And that had been a physical inferiority. It might be quite interesting to be among mental superiors who could teach him. Perhaps it was a longing for parental guidance which he had never known. All of this fled through his mind as he finished healing himself.

As he was finis.h.i.+ng, one of the guards now searching the grounds found him and opened fire. Timothy deflected the bullets. He was ready for them now. He was cooler, more thoughtful than when he had arrived the first time.

He used his ESP to plunge the guard into sleep. The man staggered, tripped over his own feet, and crashed into the bushes, hanging there in a parody of crucifixion, snoring loudly in the cold air.

He moved out of the shrubs, back into the brilliantly illuminated lawn. He moved smoothly toward the house, reaching out with his mind to tap the glowing centers of the guards' thoughts, snuffing them out one at a time until the slumbering forms of the surgically created bodyguards lay all over the knoll.

At the front door, he used his ESP to throw the locks, pushed the portal inward, and drifted through. He caught a guard on the winding staircase to the second and third floors and pinched the nerves in his neck. The man fell against the railing, back onto the steps, and rolled over and over down a dozen risers to the floor below.

He made his way through two more men, and reached Ludwig Stutman in his business study on the third floor of the enormous house. Stutman was perhaps fifty years old. He was short, stocky, blond-haired and blue-eyed. He was, Timothy could tell without even probing the man's mind, a physical-fitness fanatic. His arms were developed beyond usefulness to that thick, rippling-muscled state that is good only for show and not practice. His chest was a barrel, expanded by weight-lifting and deep-breathing exercises. On his desk were jars of seeds labeled and arranged carefully as to vitamin contents.

”Who are you?” Stutman asked. He tried to match his physique with an equally manly fearlessness, but his terror was painfully obvious to both of them.

Timothy said nothing.

”Who?” Stutman insisted, as if it mattered more that he have a name for the man who had forced his way through Stutman's security than that he fend him off.

Timothy pinched the proper nerves.

Stutman fell back into the chair from which he had risen when Timothy entered the study. Even in total repose, the muscles of his bare arms were corded, the tissue of his neck stiff and twined like steel cables.

Ti carefully insinuated himself into Stutman's mind, his own mind forming an a.n.a.logue that would allow him to seek out that data which he had come to erase from Stutman's memory.

It seemed proper that the conscious mind be represented by a gymnasium. Within the gymnasium were thousands of men working out, hoisting bars, doing pushups, climbing ropes, sitting in steam cabinets. It impressed Timothy that there were no women within the gym, no women at all.

Without pausing any longer to consider Stutman's s.e.xual proclivities, he went through the gym, questioning those people he found there, and soon he had wiped out of the conscious mind all thought of PBT and its origins. He found a door in the far wall of the gym and went down into the subconscious.

Here the a.n.a.logue was a hospital. Not the operating rooms, but the wards, full of diseased and dying people. There were cancerous patients, lepers, all the worst decay that man is heir to. Timothy supposed that anyone with such concern for his body would contain a seething cauldron of horror over sickness and death. He destroyed the thoughts he wished and quickly departed that place...

Stutman slept peacefully, his hulking body unaware that its most inner sanctums had been rudely violated, and some of the knowledge which sustained it in this luxury had been drained away.

Timothy let his thoughts congeal around the next address on his list. He pictured it clearly in his mind, as he had gotten it from the gray-haired man in the Iowa farmhouse. He tensed, teleported...

... And s.h.i.+mmered into existence immediately before the door of Arthur Leland's home.

Behind him, a bodyguard gasped, whirled, then fell over into sleep, his pistol clattering on the brick floor of the exterior foyer. He hit the floor, himself, with a thick, sickening whump whump.

Timothy unlocked the door, opened it, and went inside, closing it behind. The house was a supermodern one, the floor covered in thick s.h.a.g carpet that in its richness resembled fur. The furniture was specially crafted, full of bold sweeps, brilliant colors, and daring designs that were all brilliant in themselves and somehow managed to complement, not compete, to form an even more attractive whole.

Somewhere, soft cla.s.sical music was playing, almost an anachronism in the sleek plastic-and-vinyl-and-synthetics decor of the house itself. Yet this too seemed somehow to complement the furniture.

He listened, but heard no one.

It occurred to him that he was much like Red Death in the Poe story. Though these people locked themselves away in flashy, rich surroundings, in gaiety and pleasure, he found them, stalked them, and did with them what he wished. It was not an altogether pleasant simile...

He found Arthur Leland in a bedroom on the second floor. He was with a woman, a sleek, large-breasted black woman whose skin shone ebony and smooth as she maneuvered on the mattress to accommodate her lover. Timothy felt the low, pulsing ache, the sickness that he got whenever he was around the most stunning of women. He had thought that he had outgrown it in these last few hours. But now he knew that was not so. Perhaps he would always be burdened with it.

The woman shrieked, and Leland, sensing the source of her horror, rolled off the bed, fumbling in the pile of his clothes for a gun. Timothy tweaked him into sleep, and the Brethren chief slumped naked on the floor.

The black girl was almost to the door, her wonderfully smooth, dark body moving with the swiftness and stealth of a cat. Timothy put her to sleep as well.

Arthur Leland was a ladies' man, and Timothy's mind chose to use the a.n.a.logue of a brothel to help the mutant search the man's thoughts. Almost all of them were erotic, or had erotic connotations, even when the thoughts dealt with business. But the hundreds of full-bosomed, smooth-thighed women who represented the thoughts of Arthur Leland only made Timothy's aching quasi-s.e.xual longing worse than it had been. He wished his own mind could have come up with a less disturbing a.n.a.logue.