the space around him. A counterthrust and counterparty. Nothing done. Neither man was vulnerable to attack at that level.
Vanity put her hand out to stop me. 'What are we going to do when we get there?' she said.
I slowed down. It was a good question.
Victor pointed at the cables still wound around the motionless Colin. Colin spun over in the snow, a human yo- yo. The cables jumped off Colin and snaked up into the air, lassoing Dr. Fell.
Two of the four arc lights went dark as the cables from the generator jumped skyward at Victor's gesture. The generator cables fused (in little hissing flares of acetylene light) to the dangling ends of the cables winding around Dr. Fell.
Meanwhile, Dr. Fell's metal eye dilated. A shower of motes flickered across the snow to every side of Victor. I saw the meaning of what was happening. The internal nature of the snow—cold and nonmflammable—was being disintegrated into hydrogen and oxygen—flammable. It was chemically impossible; the energy of the reaction needed to split a water molecule into atoms and recom-bine them into 0 and H was not present——-
2
4
The snow at Victor's feet glowed red, writhed like a living thing, and then exploded. The flame was not red; it was blue-white, and an outer, hotter flame rushed over it, and popped like a balloon.
Fell lowered his head, and the blue beam narrowed like the cutting torch. I saw motes stream out from his pupil, molecular machines programmed to break apart the chemical bonds of anything they touched. It was a disintegration ray. His chin touched his breastbone.
With a screaming hiss, the ray began cutting through the cords wrapping his arms.
I saw Victor, coated in flames, step forward out of the globe of pale fire. His skin had been replaced by a diamond crust, which he had collected out of the atmospheric carbon. He raised one diamond-gleaming hand. The diesel generator's switches flipped. The turbine turned on.
Fell had cut through the insulation, but had not yet severed the copper core of the cable. The voltage arched between the bare copper and his coat of ringmail. There was a flash like a photographer's bulb going off, and a smell of ozone permeated the air.
The dazzling afterimage in my eyes showed a purple banner of smoke, thin as cigarette smoke, hanging between the spot where Dr. Fell had just been hovering, and the wreckage of the truck, struck in two by the impact, with a crater of splashed snow in a wide circle around it.
The remaining two arc lights failed. I heard the diesel engine whine and splutter into silence. I could smell burnt insulation.
The white fire surrounding Victor fluttered and was gone. My eyes were blind. I waited for them to re-adapt to the starlight.
In the darkness, Vanity cheered and clapped. 'Fell fell!' She cheered. 'Hurrah for our team! Go, Victor!
Victor, go!'
I said, 'Fell is not hurt.'
'How far was that? That was at least as tall as a ten-story building!'
'He altered the internal character of his muscles and bones into something like wood. He splintered, but the pieces are regathering. His nervous system was not harmed…'
She said, 'Can you see? I can't see a thing.'
'Vanity, I don't know what to do. Should we run up and try to help?'
'Help with what? Help how?' she said. 'I don't even have a baseball bat…'
The headlights of the truck turned on. The bulbs, trailing wires like the eyestalks of a crab, rose up out from the grille, and turned toward the wrecked truck body.
Dr. Fell stood up out of the wreck. He did not stand up the way a man would, bending his legs, squatting, putting a hand on the ground. No. Stiff as a corpse, as if pulled upright by invisible wire, he went from being prone to being upright. Imagine a man stepping on the tines of a rake, and seeing the handle lift suddenly upright, and you will know what it looked like.
The prosthetic he wore for a face was torn and burnt. An impatient hand pulled at the tattered mask and threw it away. The integument underneath it looked as hard as bone. The mouthparts looked like the mandibles of an insect. There were no eyeholes, only one central orb, gleaming and turning, in the forehead, like the headlamp of an oncoming train.
The two exchanged radio signals. I do not know what higher sense of mine detected and interpreted the rapid pulse of meaning between them, but I heard it, somehow: Fell: 'If defeat-conditions cannot be reached, then the core value for our interaction matrix is null.'
Victor: 'I am treating this as a single instance of an infinitely repeatable set.'
'A child cannot harm me, but I can deliver any harm up to but less than death, which will involve unacceptable repercussions.'
'I am no longer a child, Dr. Fell. I am Damnameneus of the Telchine.'
'I am Telemus, one of the Cyclopean Archons. Our race defeated yours in times past; that instance has application here.'
'There is still an information cost associated with determining the truth-value of your assertion of invulnerability.'
'Let us proceed to the demonstration…'
The hood of the engine flew open, and the engine block, pistons, cylinders, battery, and shaft rose up into the
