Nightmare journey

been built for machines instead of for citizens of flesh and blood. They passed hundreds of robots that still performed tasks they had been programmed for, tasks now meaningless but carried out with an admirable diligence nonetheless. Still other metal men clanked mindlessly from building to building, sometimes turning baleful yellow sight receptors on the five espers as they passed through, more often ignoring them altogether. A few guardbots stopped them and demanded their business, threatened them with stubby guns built into metal chests and foreheads, but always let them pass when they said they were humans and had a right to go where they wished.
    I feel so sorry for them-Melopina 'pathed.
    Sorry?-Chaney.
    They've got just enough intelligence to know things are not right and to want to set things straight, but they've not got the ability to cope with anything but an ordered world. From now until they all fall apart and rust, this world offers them no hope.
    Machines can't feel-Chaney.
    Not as we can, at least. But somehow, deep down within, I suspect they have a trace of a soul.
    Romanticist, Chaney 'pathed.
    Cynic.
    In the center of Iron Man's Trust they came across a huge, coppery building which had withstood the centuries quite well but did not seem to be inhabited by anyone, man or machine. Inspecting it while their horses rested and grazed, the espers found ten thousand more robots, none of which had ever been activated or seen any use at all. They lay in airtight storage drawers that slid from the walls. Chaney used the butt of his power rifle to smash in the plasti-glass over one of these drawers to see, he said with a straight face, if the metal-man within could crumble into dust.
    It did not.
    They left Iron Man's Trust and ventured into the far western nation of Caloria Sunshine, struck south and, in twelve more days, reached the ruins of Velvet Bay. This city had been called by other names in the centuries man had lived in it, but all of these names were now forgotten. Nature had come back to claim the land, and from Nature came the crumbling city's name, for it was constructed on the hills surrounding a gorgeous, wide-mouth inlet of the great West Sea.
    It was here, in Velvet Bay, that Deathpit waited.
    The map Tedesco had did not pinpoint the location of the pit. For three days they quartered the ancient city, looking for something that might deserve such a sinister name-and in the late afternoon of their third search period, they discovered it. In the midst of dust and worm-eaten mortar, mold-laced plastics and shattered glass, the approach to Deathpit stood out like a beautiful woman in a group of crones…
    The courtyard between the four large, prewar buildings was twenty meters across. The old cobblestones had been covered with some slick, shining material, like millions of silver flecks suspended in a two- foot thickness of glass. This caught the sunlight and dazzled the eyes with bright reflections. From each of the four entrances to the courtyard a meter-wide path of lusterless black stone led through the glittering material on both sides and directly to the pit. This was a hole, one meter in diameter, cut in the center of the courtyard floor. It was rimmed with a black stone curb and filled with rich darkness clear to its bottom.
    This is it!-Melopina.
    Don't get your hopes up-Tedesco.
    But what else could it be but an accessway to the Presence?
    Many things, the bruin 'pathed. None of which we've ever heard of.
    Chaney retrieved a brick from one of the dilapidated buildings and dropped it into the pit. From the time it took to strike bottom, they learned the depth of the well was somewhere near thirty meters.
    I can sense an intelligent mind, Melopina said.
    And alien-Kiera.
    But it seems more distant than a hundred feet-Jask.
    If this is the Black Presence, Chaney said, why doesn't it contact us? We're what it's been waiting for.
    Perhaps it is something else altogether-Tedesco.
    I can sense alien landscapes, strange thoughts, too strange for a creature of this world to have-Kiera.
    The living city's emanations were alien, too, Chaney reminded them. Yet it was not the Black Presence.
    They formed a meditation circle beside the pit, joined hands and linked minds until their esp powers had coalesced into a single, strong psychic probe.
    One hand… one hand… grasping, seeking… we are all one hand… Melopina directed them.
    They managed to touch the shell of the creature's mind where it lay