A door was closing farther down the hall. Hector sprinted to it and yanked it open. The room was dark. He stepped in.
In the faint light from the hallway, Hector saw row after row of life-sized tri-di viewscreens, each flanked by a desk of control and monitoring equipment. A tape viewing room, he reasoned. Or maybe an editing room.
He walked hesitantly toward the center of the room. It was big, filled with the bulky screens and desks. Plenty of room to hide in. The door snapped shut behind him, plunging the room into total darkness.
Hector froze rock-still. Odal was in here. He could feel it. Gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. He turned slowly and began retracing his steps toward the door, only to bump into a chair and send it clattering into its desk.
“You defeated me in the dueling machine,” Odal’s voice echoed calmly through the room. “Now let’s see if you can defeat me in real life. This room is soundproof. We are alone. No one will disturb us.”
“Uh… I’m unarmed,” Hector said. It was hard to trace the source of Odal’s voice. The echoes spoiled any chance of locating him in the darkness.
“I’m also unarmed. But we are both trained fighting men. You have no doubt had standard Star Watch hand-to-hand combat training.”
The painful memory of fumbling through the rough-and-tumble courses at the Star Watch Academy surged through Hector’s mind. What he remembered most vividly was laying flat on his back with his instructor screaming, “No, no, no!” at him.
Odal stepped out from behind a full-length view screen. “You seem less than eager to do battle with me. Perhaps you’re afraid that you’ll hurt me. Let me demonstrate my qualifications.”
Odal’s foot lashed into one of the desk chairs, smashing its fragile frame against the tough plastic of the view screen. The chair disintegrated. Then he swung an edge-of-the-hand chop at the top of the nearby desk: the metal dented with a loud crunk!
Hector backed away until he felt another desk pressing against his legs. He glanced behind him and saw that it was some sort of master control unit, long and filled with complicated switches’ and monitor screens. Several roller chairs lined its length.
Odal was advancing on him. Something in the back of Hector’s mind was telling him to run away and hide, but then he heard the barking voice of his old instructor insisting, “The best defense is a fast, aggressive attack.” Hector took a deep breath, planted his feet solidly, and launched himself at Odal.
Only to find himself twisted around, lifted off his feet, and thrown back against the desk, banging painfully against the switches.
“LOOKING FOR THE IDEAL VACATION PARADISE?” a voice boomed at them. From behind Odal’s shoulder a girl in a see-through spacesuit did a free-fall somersault. Hector blinked at her, and Odal looked over his shoulder, momentarily amazed. The voice blared on, “JOIN THE FUN CROWD AT ORBIT HOUSE, ACQUATAINIA’S NEWEST ZERO-GRAVITY RESORT.…”
Through his mind flashed another maxim from his old instructor: “Whenever possible, divert your opponent’s attention. Create confusion. Feint, maneuver!”
Hector rolled off the desktop and ran along the master control unit, pounding every switch in sight.
“TIRED OF BEING CALLED SHORTY?” A disgruntled young man, standing on tiptoes next to a gorgeous, statuesque redhead, appeared beside Odal. The Kerak major involuntarily stepped back.
“THE IRRESISTIBLE PERFUME,” a seductive blonde materialized before his eyes, speaking smokily.
“MODERN SCIENCE CAN CURE ANY DISEASE, BUT WHEN EMBARRASSING…” said a medic, radiating sincerity and concern.
Odal was surrounded by solid-looking, life-sized, tri-di advertising pitches.
“WHEN YOU’VE EATEN MORE THAN YOU SHOULD…”
“THE NORMAL TENSIONS OF MODERN LIFE…
“FOR THE ULTIMATE IN FEMININE…”
Eyes goggling, Odal saw himself being pressed backward by a teenage dancer, an “average family” mother, a worried young husband, a nervous businessman, a smiling teen couple, a crowd of surfers, a chorus of animated vegetables. Suddenly bellowing with rage, Odal dived through the pleading, cajoling, urgent figures and threw himself at the long control desk.
“You can’t hide from me!” he roared, and he started punching at the control switches, banging the desk panels with both fists.
“Who’s hiding?” Hector yelled from behind him.
Odal turned and swung heavily at the voice. Startled, he saw his fist whisk through the impalpable jaw of a lovely girl in a skimpy bathing suit. She smiled at him and continued selling. “… AND WHEN YOU’RE IN THE MOOD FOR SOMETHING REALLY REFRESHING…”
Hector had ducked away. Odal turned and chased after the Watchman, trying to follow him as he flickered in and out among the dozens of tri-di images that were dancing, urging, laughing, drinking, eating, taking pills, worrying…
“You coward!” Odal screamed over the babble of sales talk.
“Why should I fight you?” Hector hollered back from somewhere across the room.
Odal squinted, trying to see through the gyrating tri-di figures. “You tricked me in the dueling machine but now there’ll be no tricks. I’ll find you, and when I do, I’ll kill you!”
The flash of a black-and-silver uniform among the fashion models, overweight women, underweight men, scientific demonstrations and new, new, new products. Odal headed in that direction.
“And what about Leoh?” Hector’s voice cut through the taped noise. “He killed you without any tricks. But you’re afraid to go after him now, aren’t you?”
Odal laughed. “Do you really believe that old man beat me? I could have destroyed him at any time I wished.”
He ducked under the arm of a well-preserved matron who was saying, “WHY LET ADVANCING AGE WORRY YOU, WHEN A REJUVE.…” There was Hector, edging slowly toward the door.
“You deliberately lost to Leoh?” Hector’s face, in the reflections of the tri-di images, looked more puzzled than frightened. “To make it seem…”
“To make it seem that Leoh is a great hero, and that Kerak is populated by weaklings and cowards. All his duels were designed for that purpose. And while he lulls the Acquatainians with his tales of victory, we prepare to strike.”
On the final word Odal leaped at Hector, hit him with satisfying solidity, shoulder in mid-section, and they both went down.
A tangle of arms and legs, knees and elbows, gasps, two strong young bodies grappling. Somehow they rolled into one of the desk chairs, which toppled down on them. Odal felt Hector slipping out of his grasp. As the Kerak major started to get back to his feet, the chair slid into him again and he slipped against it and hit the floor face first.
Swearing, he started to get up. But Hector was already on his feet. And then the door swung open, stabbing light from the hallway into the room. A girl stood there, with a gun in her trembling hand.
“Hector! Here!” Geri said, and she tossed the gun to the Watchman.
Hector grabbed it and pointed it at Odal. The Kerak major froze, on one knee, hands on the floor, head upturned, face a mask of rage turned to sudden fear. Hector stood equally immobile, arm outstretched with the gun aimed at Odal’s head.
“Kill him!” Geri whispered harshly. “Quickly, they’re coming!”
Hector let his arm relax. The gun dropped slightly away from Odal. “Get up,” he said. “And… don’t give me any excuses for using this thing.”