For there might be a way. It was a hope to cling to, it was a thing to think about.
Not even yet, he suspected, had he begun to plumb the strange depth of abilities lodged within his body and his mind.
He had not known that his hate alone could kill, that hate could spear out from his brain like a lance of steel and strike a man down dead. And yet Benton had died with a bullet in the arm…and he had been dead before the bullet hit him. For Benton had fired first and missed and Benton, alive, never would have missed.
He had not known that by mind alone he could control the energy that was needed to lift the dead weight of a ship from a boulder bed and fly it across eleven years of space. And yet that is what he'd done, winnowing the energy from the flaming stars so far away they dimmed to almost nothing, from the random specks of matter that floated in the void.
And while he knew that he could change at will from one life to another, he had not known for certain that when one way of life was killed, the other way would take over automatically. Yet that was what had happened. Case had killed him and he had died and he had come to life again. But he had died before the change had started. Of that much he was sure. For he remembered death and recognized it. He knew it from the time before.
He felt his body eating…sucking at the stars as a human sucks an orange, nibbling at the energy imprisoned in the bit of rock to which the ship was clamped, pouncing on the tiny leaks of power from the ship's atomic motors.
Eating to grow strong, eating to repair…
"Johnny, is there any way?"
And there was no answer.
He let his head sag forward until it lay upon the inclined panel that housed the instruments.