oke on them."

The man grunted. "I have just spoken to the Chancellor on the tri-di,
and obtained permission to make a slight adjustment in our plans."

"An adjustment, Minister Kor?"

"After your duel tomorrow, your next opponent will be the eminent Dr.
Leoh," Kor said.

X

The mists swirled deep and impenetrable about Fernd Massan. He stared
blindly through the useless viewplate in his helmet, then reached up
slowly and carefully to place the infrared detector before his eyes.

_I never realized an hallucination could seem so real_, Massan
thought.

Since the challenge by Odal, he realized, the actual world had seemed
quite unreal. For a week, he had gone through the motions of life, but
felt as though he were standing aside, a spectator mind watching its
own body from a distance. The gathering of his friends and associates
last night, the night before the duel--that silent, funereal group of
people--it had seemed completely unreal to him.

[Illustration]

But now, in this manufactured dream, he seemed vibrantly alive. Every
sensation was solid, stimulating. He could feel his pulse throbbing
through him. Somewhere out in those mists, he knew, was Odal. And the
thought of coming to grips with the assassin filled him with a strange
satisfaction.

Massan had spent a good many years serving his government on the rich
but inhospitable high-gravity planets of the Acquataine Cluster. This
was the environment he had chosen: crushing gravity; killing
pressures; atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen, laced with free
radicals of sulphur and other valuable but deadly chemicals; oceans of
liquid methane and ammonia; "solid ground" consisting of quickly
crumbling, eroding ice; howling superpowerful winds that could pick up
a mountain of ice and hurl it halfway around the planet; darkness;
danger; death.

He was encased in a one-man protective outfit that was half armored
suit, half vehicle. There was an internal grav field to keep him
comfortable in 3.7 gees, but still the suit was cumbersome, and a man
could move only very slowly in it, even with the aid of servomotors.

The weapon he had chosen was simplicity itself--a hand-sized capsule
of oxygen. But in a hydrogen/ammonia atmosphere, oxygen could be a
deadly explosive. Massan carried several of these "bombs"; so did
Odal. _But the trick_, Massan thought to himself, _is to know how to
throw them under these conditions; the proper range, the proper
trajectory. Not