In the first two seconds I forced a yoshida on him but he knew this one and broke it and his foot razored the air edge-on, fast and powerful and deadly but missing me and bringing down some of the jars. They crashed to the floor and my scalp rose but there was nothing I could do. The man was my first concern, not the reptiles, because he was trying to kill me and they would only attack in fright. We rolled and glass crunched under me and he gained a lock and I think it would have finished me but I was lying half across one of the snakes and it began striking at my arm, again and again, and I had to do something because I couldn't stand them, they nauseated me, again and again, coiling and releasing, its scales livid and the tiny black eyes glistening and the jaws gaping at right angles in a regular rhythm as it coiled, released and struck, coiling again as the pain burned in my arm.
It made me feel sick and I had to do something because there were some others free too, slithering around among the broken glass. They'd send me mad if I couldn't get away so I used my other knee and brought it against him in a jack-knife drive that would have been quite useless without my horror of these things to give it force, and the hold eased and came on again and then broke and I tried the only trick I had, the third movement of the toka, going straight in without the first and second preliminaries to open up the target, but he took it and waited, knowing I didn't have the leverage to make the kill. For nearly a second we lay locked and immobile, one body, one two-headed eight-limbed freak with its fierce internal energies at variance and on the point of blowing it apart as the electro-chemical forces sought to regain stability.
I didn't know anything about him. There had only been Chiang here when I'd walked into the snake shop, and at first he'd acknowledged me with a slight nod; then his eyes had shifted quickly to look past me, over my shoulder, and I had moved. There wasn't time to do anything consciously: in extreme danger the organism cedes control to the primitive brain, and the cortex is required only to compute data and supply intelligence. Of the several hundred thousand facts, impressions and implications, these were salient: I was presently listed for elimination by an alien network heavily infiltrating the field; there was alarm in Chiang's eyes; in the Orient the bare hand is the traditional weapon; Chiang's eyes had shifted only once, so that there was probably only one man behind me; my hope of survival in these circumstances (unarmed combat, close confines, one adversary) lay more in a blind lightning move than in a considered and organized attack. In the fifth of a second it would take me to turn and consider the ideal defence he could fell me with a hand-blade to the neck.
So I'd gone in low, spinning and reaching for his legs and finding them, bringing him off balance and chopping at the kneecap to paralyse, since it was the first target presented. If there'd been a mistake, if there'd been no intention on his part to attack, I would have known it at once and could have withdrawn, leaving him only bruised. But there hadn't been any mistake: I'd known from the stance of his feet that I'd caught him halfway through a blow designed to kill.
During this second of suspended time there was near-silence around us as we lay locked together in mortal intimacy on the fragments of glass. I had managed to shift my weight and roll sideways a little so as to bring one elbow down across the small scaly head, crushing it by degrees until its movement stopped. A heavy slithering came from somewhere close and I wished they weren't so quiet, I wished they'd scream in their fright or bang into something, to take my mind away from their oily leglessness.
Something else moved now: Chiang. I didn't know anything about Chiang either. He ran a safe-house for the Bureau with global transmission facilities and had no love for the mainland Chinese but that was all I knew. I didn't know what he was prepared to do for me at this moment; and it would be fatal to believe he'd do anything at all.
I think he was going to shut the door of the shop, and in part of my vision field I could see the faces of two boys peering in from the street, perhaps wondering at the crash of glass just now; but this street, at this hour, was filled with its own din and probably no one else had heard.
The man on the floor with me moved. I couldn't do anything immediately because this new advantage was his and we both knew it and we'd felt it coming: one of the hazards of close combat is sweat, and for the past few seconds it had been springing on our skin, most critically on the fingers of my left hand that were gripping his wrist. He had felt them begin to slip and so had I and we were both ready but he was faster and the air brushed my face as he chopped hard for the temple and missed and chopped again and tried for a third time, too greedy or too impatient, spending his strength and letting me work for a throw and letting me get it, a blinding light in my head as I called for more force than I had, pain under my palm as broken glass went in, the throw succeeding to the point of taking him off balance and leaving him vulnerable, not defenceless but open to anything I could do with my right hand. There wasn't a lot of opportunity because he was spinning away from me through the terminal phase of the throw, his shoulders smashing against the shelf of jars and sending them down, — his face passing for the first time across my field of vision: a youth with thick black brows and flattened eyes, a Chinese from the north or north-east, Mongolian or Manchurian. Glass flew as the jars hit the floor and a black and yellow trickle ran, forming a coil and rearing, but I blocked my mind and tried to concentrate totally on the need to survive.
Forebrain processing was taking over the gross elements of the task while the primitive creature conditioned itself, the nerve signals triggering the medulla and pouring adrenalin into the bloodstream, the pulse rate and blood pressure rising as sugar flowed in to feed the muscles, the senses increasing in their refinement so that the input of data should receive almost instantaneous assessment by the cortex.
But time moved slowly and at present the overall data was derived from a scene that was near stationary: the youth was still reacting from the momentum of the throw, his head jerking as his shoulder bounced from the shelf. Somewhere at the edge of the scene was Chiang, slamming the door.
Forebrain. The youth was coming back in a rebound from the shelf and I could take him with a single bracket throw if I waited long enough:' it would need a tenth of a second. His face had blenched and I thought it was only partly because his blood had receded to supply the internal organs: his shoulder had smashed fairly hard into the edge of the shelf and the muscle would be in trauma. I went on waiting, letting him come, working out what I wanted to do and planning the best way to do it. The bracket was still viable, right hand in a swinging chop at the nape of his neck to add force to his own momentum, left hand bunched and driven upwards into his abdomen. Supplementary moves: my left knee to his groin if the bracket spun him towards me, a chop at his shoulder to increase the degree of paralysis made by his impact with the edge of the shelf.
It was getting near time and he was already working for some kind of initiative but we were too close for foot-blows and he wasn't moving his left hand or arm: they were hanging from the shoulder and I knew why his face was white. The heel of his right hand was coming up but he wouldn't be able to make the blow because his right foot was too close for support. Then it was time and I put the bracket on him, connecting but not strongly enough for a finish because my foot was slipping on something and robbing me of the support I needed. He buckled over the abdomen blow and my hand hit iron muscle and there wasn't anything I could do about it because the bracket was on and he was still alive and very active, hooking at my leg and swinging a close fast throw that turned me and sent me down. He could have done it then because my spine was exposed and he still had the strength in one hand but what he didn't realize was that he was throwing me back into that bloody snakepit and I wasn't going to have it.