Nightmare journey

would have to worry most about the General's continued lust for her. When the time was ripe for assassination, she would need to be next to him, where she could strike suddenly and cover up the traces of her villainy before the news was made public. The simplest way to keep in his graces was to make him dependent on her favors.
    She perfumed herself as he liked.
    She stood before the mirror and brushed her luxuriant dark hair.
    At the bed she pulled back the covers.
    He did not wake.
    With her mouth, but without words, she bent over him and awakened him to the night and to his need.

14
    ON the morning following their narrow escape from the Pure soldiers, Jask and Tedesco woke in the blue-green room, ate a cold breakfast that lay heavy on their stomachs, and began their trek through the jeweled sea, down corridors of dazzling color, through chambers like melting rainbows. Several times, they came to dead ends or to a narrowing of the way through which the bulky mutant could not pass, and they were forced to retrace their steps, exploring alternate passageways.
    Often, they stepped from the end of a corridor into a pocket of open land where scraggly grasses grew and, sometimes, scrawny trees struggled for existence. Why the bacteria jewels, which towered for forty meters and more on all sides, had not closed in, neither Jask nor Tedesco could guess.
    In these places Tedesco took compass readings and consulted his maps, chose the direction they would take when leaving the patch of land and returning to the jewels. Here, too, they performed their toilet without feeling as if they were fouling some wondrous artifact.
    Shortly after noon, as they sat down in the middle of one of these clearings to rest, Jask said, “I can't go any farther today.''
    “Have to,” Tedesco said. “If we don't make good time, we could be in these formations when our supplies run out. And as you've seen, there's precious little to eat around here, except an occasional plot of grass.”
    As they progressed through the jeweled tunnels, Jask had carried his cloak over his arm, dressed only in the stretch-fit, neck-to-toe jumpsuit that all the Pures wore. In the clearings, where they rested, he folded the cloak under him like a pillow, to protect his bruised backside. Now, perched upon this pillow, his scrawny legs outstretched before him, he said, “I ache all over, legs and arms and back and neck. I haven't any strength to go on.”
    Tedesco said nothing, but stood and used his compass, consulted his various maps, pondered things a while and finally decided on the proper direction for their departure. “Come along,” he said.
    Jask did not move.
    “Get up, now,” Tedesco said. And there was more than cajolery in his voice; he spoke with a tone of command.
    “I really can't,'' Jask protested. “My ankles are swollen. My thighs are knotted like ropes, and my kidneys ache.”
    The bruin stalked across the clearing and stood over him. “My own feet are hot and sore,” he told Jask. “But I'm not giving up here.”
    “Your discomfort can't match mine,” Jask said. “You're built to take this kind of punishment, clambering through those tunnels and pacing off kilometer after kilometer.”
    “You Pures, with all your holy disdain for 'tainted' genes have inbred yourselves to the point of uselessness. I see that. I understand. But I'm not letting you stay behind.”
    Jask smiled bitterly.
    He continued to massage his swollen legs, and he said, “Then you'll just have to carry me.”
    Tedesco did not smile at all. He said. “I won't carry you my friend. I have my own rucksack to worry with.”
    “Then-”
    Tedesco lifted one of the prewar power rifles he had stolen from the General's men and aimed it dead center at Jask's chest. He said, “I'll kill you before I go.”
    Even the bitter smile slid away from the smaller man's face as he stared up into the incredibly large barrel of the power rifle. He said, “You've no reason to kill me.”
    “Yes, I have,” the bruin said. “I wouldn't want to leave you here to starve-or to get lost in the jewels and eventually go mad. One does not permit such an end for his friends. If I must leave you behind, I'll kill you and get your suffering over with quickly. Otherwise my conscience would always bother me.”
    Jask shifted his gaze from the rifle barrel to the deep-set, dark eyes under the shelf of the mutant's brow, and he read the truth in those eyes. Painfully he got to his feet, picked up his cloak and said, morosely,