Quentin down with himself atop. The beam struck Colin. I was expecting, I do not know what, an explosion or something, but the beam seemed to do Colin no more hurt than a flashlight.
On my table of opposites, I wasn't sure how Colin's paradigm matched up against Dr. Fell. Neither one trumped the other. Were they roughly equal? Or were they both immune to each other? I didn't know.
Dr. Fell hovered lower. I could see, under his lab coat, he was wearing a jacket of chain mail. I had seen those chain-mail jerkins every day of my life. It never occurred to me that anyone except the mannequins in the corridors could wear them.
He shouted down, 'Mr. mac FirBolg! Move aside, or I will be forced to deal with you!'
Colin answered him by holding up two fingers. Not a victory sign.
Dr. Fell took a syringe out of his jacket pocket, filled it from a vein in his arm. He held the syringe for a moment before his face; an azure spark flickered between his metal eye and the tube.
He closed his third eye, and he opened his hand. The syringe hung in the air a moment, unsupported.
Then it turned end over end and darted toward Colin.
Colin slapped the speeding thing out of midair just before it touched him, clapping his hands together like a man swatting a wasp. His clasped hands jerked back and forth for a moment, as if the wasp were still alive. Then, with a funny look on his face, Colin slumped over in a faint.
'Well, that was not difficult, was it?' Dr. Fell asked himself.
Vanity and I were simply too far away to do anything. I was not sure if I should call out. Neither of us, apparently, had been seen yet. But I was stepping quickly down the slope, and Vanity followed me.
What was I supposed to do once I got closer? Maybe I could make Fell weigh more, and drag him down out of the air.
Quentin was on his back, awkwardly holding Colin's body between himself and Fell.
Fell looked at a coil of electrical cable that was resting next to the diesel generator; then he looked at where Colin was slumped over atop Quentin. The cables unwound and reached across the snow like arms of an octopus. The cables must have had copper cores he was manipulating magnetically. Loops of cable snaked around Colin's shoulders and legs, and yanked him to one side.
'Now, then,' said Dr. Fell. He opened his third eye again.
The battery of lights atop the stone door swiveled around in their brackets, and turned on, a silent explosion, dazzling. Dr. Fell did not blink, but he jerked his hand up to guard his forehead, where the metal eye—his real eye —was.
I saw Victor, now far below me, not twenty yards from the entrance to the howe. He was covered from head to foot in snow. Behind him, in a straight line reaching back up the slope, was a crease of snow where he had (evidently) flung himself headfirst down the side of the crater, using his stomach as a toboggan. He was not ten yards from the empty truck and the other crates and equipment of the archeologist's camp.
Dr. Fell's head swiveled like a gun turret toward Victor, and his third eye gleamed with blue light. Firefly dots of azure blue streamed out along the beam.
Victor raised his head; the flesh along his forehead creased and puckered and opened. A metal eye appeared on Victor's head. His eye was a deeper, purple color, and streaks and sparks of gold flickered through the beam that issued from it.
The beams did not pass through each other, as light would have done. Instead, where they met in midair, the tiny motes of gold and azure canceled each other out with a flash like heat lightning.
Dr. Fell called down in a dispassionate voice: 'I ask you to surrender.'
Victor called back in a voice also calm and matter-of-fact: 'Impossible. I can be killed, but I cannot be defeated without some act of consent on my part. I do not consent.'
Dr. Fell said, 'That strategy limits your available range of options. You lose the opportunity to minimize unfavorable outcomes and maximize favorable ones.'
Victor replied, 'Only in the short term. Over the span of all possible future interactions, positive as well as negative, a declared policy of no-surrender lowers transaction costs by deterring zero-sum situations.'
Fell: 'Your policy renders the present interaction negative-sum.'
Victor: 'I am taking that into account.'
'The cost to you will be higher than to me.'
'My cost-benefit calculation also includes my companions, who may survive whether or not I die, into the satisfactory outcome definition. Your satisfactory outcome range is more limited.'
'But my strategic options are far greater to begin,' said Dr. Fell, and he raised his hand.
Again, both their metal eyes lit up. There was an exchange of lances of fire, a strike and a parry.
I could see the internal nature of the charged particle packages being sent out.
Dr. Fell had emitted molecular engines designed to enter Victor's body, find his nervous system, and send a shutdown command to his motor centers. He had ionized the particles and accelerated them by means of a magnetic monopole he had generated in certain specialized centers of his nervous system.
Victor's response was to ionize the air in the beam path, so the molecular engines lost their charge.
Neutral, they could not be accelerated. They were still dangerous, but now they were drifting quite slowly, like a little cloud of dust motes, down, up, whichever way the Brownian motions of the air carried them, a spreading vapor of fine ink.
Victor's metal eye flashed fire; this time it was Dr. Fell, still standing in midair high as a treetop, who ionized
