Nightmare journey

you?”
    “Well-”
    “They'll spread the search and pick up your trail. You'll never make it on your own. Your chance is with me. Now come along.”
    “Wait.”
    “We have little time for argument,” the bruin said.
    “Why would you want to help me? What do you care whether they catch me once we've left here?”
    The bear-man hesitated a moment, then said, “Maybe I just want to get some gratification from having a Pure who's dependent on me. Maybe I would enjoy lording it over one of your kind. Satisfy you?”
    “For the moment, I guess.”
    The mutant shuffled across the cellar floor, his padded feet hissing on the stone. Behind a row of old clothes trunks he peered down a Stygian well set in the basement floor. “A storm drain,” he said.
    Jask could barely make it out, a blacker spot on the dark floor. Apparently his eyes had not adjusted to the gloom as well as the bruin's eyes had. He said, “You first.” His paranoia told him not to trust the hairy stranger, even though there was nothing else for him to do but trust.
    In a moment the quasi-man had lowered himself into the sewer and disappeared. Jask heard a faint splash of water, nothing else.
    He waited, reluctant to commit himself to such a comradeship as this, even if it were only temporary. After all, he was a Pure, even if he had fallen from grace. His blood flowed in a straight stream down the centuries from forgotten ancestors, a proud line of Pures.
    A burst of gunfire tore the cellar door into thousands of charred pieces that rained down from the top of the stairs.
    That made up his mind for him.
    He followed the telepathic mutant, the double outcast, into the stinking depths of the public tunnel, wondering how long and in what condition he would survive…
    3
    THE General held the broken manacle in the light of the hand torch. He could see where the iron had cracked like plastic before the chain links had been able to separate. Whatever had broken free was not a thing to be taken lightly. He dropped the iron, brushed his hands together briskly.
    “Lieutenant!” he commanded.
    A Pure, robed in blue-white, hurried to him, carrying a small case from which wound a flexible steel cord that terminated in a ring of brassy metal. He activated the device for his superior. The air hummed with the resonances set up inside the compact machine.
    The General passed his hands through the brass circle, withdrew them, effectively sterilizing the flesh that had touched non-Pure artifacts.
    The lieutenant switched off the machine and retreated to stand at a respectful distance. His own lineage could be traced back a dozen or more generations to a straggler named Bomark, who had come to the fortress on the white cliff and was given shelter after the proper testing of his genes. Perhaps one of his descendants, two or three centuries from now, could hope to become the General of the enclave.
    “What was it like?” the General asked Belmondo.
    The innkeeper said, “A great, bearlike man, Your Excellency.” He used the word “man” to irritate, though he knew the General's tolerance could swiftly give way to anger-and that anger could be deadly. “A child of the Wombs, if you ask me.”
    “But you were not asked.” The General's tone made Belmondo cringe and realize, suddenly, that he could not afford any more rebellion, no matter how low-keyed it might be. “You were asked only for a description,” the General said, “not for your uneducated suppositions.”
    Belmondo nodded penitently.
    The General was pleased with the tainted man's reaction. Now that he had been elected to the highest position in his enclave, a post that carried with it a lifetime term, he did not care especially to impress the living. What he wanted most, now, was to impress future generations, to become a moment of history far above those others who had served as the enclave's General before him. It was not altogether vanity that made this his motivation. If human history judged him favorably and named him as a great General, he could be almost certain that his descendants would supply at least one or two future Generals and that his family line would always know plenty and respect. Belmondo's obeisance was a sign that this entire affair would shortly be stabilized and finished with and that his own reputation would thereby be increased.
    He crossed to the storm drain and stared into the inkiness, aware that danger might very well lay only inches away, in those impenetrable shadows-but equally aware that