Nightmare journey

floor and shining across the open pit.
    Grayson was still screaming.
    She heard the mutant snarl, heard him strike the other soldier.
    The rat squealed, fell off onto her chest, scrabbled away into the shadows.
    Grayson, mortally wounded, pitched over the brink of the drainage well, crying out, steadily, until he collided with a distant floor or a curve in the main shaft.
    “Tedesco, no!”
    She was not certain who had shouted, then realized it must be Jask Zinn.
    “No!” he called again.
    Miraculously the bearlike mutant checked the wicked, slashing blow it had aimed for her face, ripped the rifle out of her hands in one brutal movement, and was gone, taking Jask Zinn with him, leaving her badly shaken, stunned, but definitely alive. Hurt, yes. She was wracked with pain across her shoulders and breasts; lights of searing intensity shot through her head from the place where she had struck the wall. Chiefly, though, she was undamaged and alive.
    When she had her breath back, she sat up, crawled to the edge of the central pit and shone her flashlight beam into it.
    Darkness.
    She could not see far enough to view Grayson's body. Suddenly she decided that was just as well. She got to her feet and looked for the other flashlight and for Grayson's rifle, found that the mutant had taken those with him. Turning, she stumbled into the tunnel out of which they had first come. She had to reach the General and tell him what had happened, what she had seen and what, from this encounter, she had surmised about the espers' purpose.
    8
    MORE than two kilometers beyond the tainted village, the storm drains broke open among the ruins of an unimaginably ancient city that had not harbored any form of intelligent life since centuries before the Last War, a place of canted walls, crumbling stone, rusted artifacts, a place of vines that fed on plastisteel but had not even now, after all these ages, consumed half of the available fodder. Three walls of what might have been a cathedral still stood, great arched windows free of glass, stone pews occupied by a few scattered bones, which may or may not have been the bones of men or quasi-men, its altar filled up with vines that consumed the plastisteel images that had once been symbols of some forgotten anthropomorphic god or goddess, demon or angel. Slabs of stone, some of them as much as eighty meters high, others as little as Jask himself, lay on edge, flat, or were still standing, carved with messages that could no longer be read, in words that were now without meaning. Odd machines, with skeletal frameworks that disappeared into the earth, with pincer hands, blank glass eyes, rusted speakers, stood on concrete pedestals, looking out over the vine-tangled vista that had once, presumably, been choked with life, with bustling, thinking creatures.
    Jask and Tedesco passed what appeared to be a great, battered spacecraft, though Jask knew that was impossible. Spacecraft were only myths, fairy tales, heresies. Yet this monolithic hulk, pointing halfway to the sky, broken at its midsection, charred and dented, wound round with creepers and shaded by trees that had grown from saplings into mighty giants during its long sleep, had all the characteristics of a spaceship, according to the myths.
    “What do you make of it, friend?” Tedesco asked over his shoulder as they tramped the crumbling streets, stepped around piles of curious debris and skirted gaping holes in the pavement that gave entrance to secret, vaulted cellars out of which swept cool, briskly moving currents of air. All the while they were flanked by the shiplike structure; it was immense.
    “Nothing,” Jask said curtly.
    “You've seen its like?”
    “Never.”
    “Then it would seem to me that such a sight would give rise to all manner of doubts-concerning your religion, that is.”
    “It is not a spaceship,” Jask said.
    “Oh?”
    “It is something else altogether, something that was once quite common and ordinary.”
    “Such as?”
    “A monument, perhaps.”
    Tedesco laughed aloud but said nothing more. He was aware that he had scored a point and that if he continued on this tact, he would only force Jask into a rambling and boring exposition of the tenets of his faith, of Pure beliefs. He had said that they would discuss the history of the Earth-both his version and the Pure, theological explanation-later, and he had meant that. Right at the moment, however, they must concentrate on clearing these ruins, which could easily be circled by