Nightmare journey

taken from the moon, pictures of other moons taken from other worlds, glossy images of spacecraft exploding off the face of the Earth or sailing serenely through the emptiness of space.
    Tedesco turned up the lantern flame. The other book, too.
    Jask opened it. He saw cities that, he knew immediately, were not the homes of men, saw starships so unusual in design that it was clear they had been constructed to contain forms of life radically different from human beings, though evidently just as intelligent. He saw, at last, photographs of the creatures from the stars, more alien than any human mutation could be, so basically different from mankind that the variations between the Pure and the tainted seemed insignificant.
    Why didn't you show me these right away? he 'pathed.
    I had to be sure of you before that.
    I swear, such sights as these would have convinced me!
    They would only have temporarily convinced you.
    No. I would have had to come to grasps with reality much sooner.
    Tedesco 'pathed, Until you had rejected your Pure heritage, fought and won your own moral battle, you could not be relied upon at all. He lowered the flame in the lantern. Gradually your sense of spiritual guilt would have forced you to reevaluate the photographs. Because you didn't, back then, want to believe in such things, you would have found reasons to reject them. You would have thought of ways to identify them as fakes and forgeries.
    But you could have reasoned me out of such a reaction if, indeed, I used it.
    Could I have? Tedesco 'pathed. I don't know. At that time I wanted to believe in the Black Presence, in the legends and in these photographs. Yet I had my own doubts.
    You never seemed to!
    But I did. And if you were to play a doubting Thomas, constantly rejecting the validity of these pictures, I don't know whether I could have kept going all this time.
    Jask looked at the pictures one last time, closed the books, gave them to the bruin who tucked them back into the rucksack. I owe you so much, he 'pathed, gently.
    We owe each other.
    You nursed me when I was sick, badgered me into going on when I would have given up.
    And you gave me something to occupy my mind. Raging at your Pure stupidities, I had less time to doubt the purpose of the voyage.
    Jask turned out the light. We better start out for Boomer's Pass.
    Yes, the bruin 'pathed. In another week we should reach the Black Glass.
    Do you think the Presence waits there?
    If not, we've two more maps to employ.
    23
    TEDESCO and Kiera walked in front of the gypsy wagon, while Chaney sat in the driver's nook and urged the horse on both with slaps of the reins and with gentle psionic images of eventual reward for its efforts. Jask and Melopina walked to the left of the wagon, at the edge of the crumbling roadbed, holding hands and occasionally conversing telepathically.
    Above them the snowy Gabriel Fit Range gleamed ghostily in the moonlight, fifty kilometers above them as they entered the mouth of Boomer's Pass. Jask was commenting on their beauty when the first power rifle opened fire on them. The energy bolt caught the horse and killed it instantly.
    Pures!
    The wagon turned nearly striking Jask and Melopina.
    They dived off the broken concrete and stone.
    The wagon rolled backward down the steep incline for a hundred meters before Chaney succeeded in applying the hand brake. The dead horse, fallen in its harness, left a trail of dark blood to indicate the path that had been taken.
    Jask leaned against the curb wall at the edge of the road and risked a look up the hillside. He could see three Pures stationed in the center of the way, kneeling with rifles brought up to their skinny shoulders. Tedesco was running for the side of the road, ushering Kiera ahead of him. The Pures fired. A bolt of energy either passed so close to the bruin that it singed him or actually struck, for he screeched, both aloud and telepathically as he leaped to safety in the heavy brush at the edge of the highway.
    Another energy bolt struck the wagon.
    The vehicle shattered into a hundred smoldering pieces.
    Jask hoped Chaney had been far from it when that happened.
    It's kill or be killed, Melopina 'pathed.
    A moment later one of the Pures was consumed by flames, threw down his rifle and, screaming, ran blindly down the road, flailing at himself. In the space of a dozen meters he fell, dead.
    A second Pure flamed up.
    Ahead, from the foliage on either side of the road and from the piled boulders at