He breathed in deeply and pushed the door open. Stepping through, he found himself at the rear of the seventeenth-century French court tableau. The vast interior of the tower was silent, the sightseers gone, the circling escalator stopped, the information screens turned off, the sounds of the robot beasts quelled. The workers that he had feared might be repairing or altering exhibits were not there. Or, if they were, he could not hear them. Certainly, there were none in this recess.
He moved from around the back of the dais and thrones past the sitting figures of The King and The Queen. He zigzagged through The Courtiers, the gentlemen in their finery and powdered wigs, the ladies in their silk, brocades, hooped skirts, and high-piled wigs. They all looked very realistic. A smiling young woman displayed four teeth missing, the rest blackened by decay. A man's face was deeply scarred with smallpox. A fan held by a woman did not entirely conceal that part of her nose had been eaten away by syphilis. Missing, however, were other realistic elements. The stench of long-unwashed bodies and the perfume to cover the stench. The head lice infesting the wigs. Stains on the shoes spattered when their owners urinated in the corners of the palace halls.
He also noticed something that at another time would have made him laugh. Despite all the research and rechecking, the designer of these figures had forgotten that seventeenth-century people were much shorter than New Era people. Every one of these figures would have towered above all in the court of the real Louis XIII.
Near the middle of the throng, he stopped. The silent and motionless woman in a scarlet and yellow gown and golden-yellow wig stared at him with large brown eyes. Her face was thickly powdered and rouged.
He said, "God help us!"
He lifted the wig and saw, as he had expected, the short, straight, gleaming-brown hair that looked like the fur of a seal.
"The bastards! The old bastard! What arrogance!"
He stepped behind her and began dragging her backward toward the elevator. Her high-heeled shoes made a slight rubbing noise, then came off. He stopped, held her upright with one hand, and bent down to pick up the shoes. He must not leave any evidence that an exhibit figure was missing. It was possible that her absence might not be noticed for a long time. All he wanted was a relatively short time.
"Ohm!"
The voice came from somewhere close, and it was Mudge's. Charlie dropped the shoes and the stoned body of Snick, which fell with a loud noise to the floor. He stared wildly around and saw two men, but he was so bewildered and surprised that he did not immediately recognize them. It took a second or two for him to bring them into the focus of reality. A dreamlike state washed over him, numbing him. Then he saw that the two cavaliers who had seemed to come to life were Mudge and a companion.
They had clad themselves in the clothes taken from two figures and had waited for him. They must have monitored him from the moment he entered the underground. They had assumed the stiffness of exhibit figures just before he came through the door.
"Traitor! Damn fool!" Mudge said as he walked slowly toward Ohm. "What do you care about the womhn? She's an organic, a danger to us! What in hell is wrong with you?"
Ohm slipped off his shoulderbag and let it fall to the floor. He crouched and looked around as if he were about to run. Let them think that.
The other man, a tall thin fellow with burning black eyes, circled around to cut Ohm off. He was drawing the rapier from the scabbard at his belt and would be in the path to the exit door before Ohm could get past him.
"I told Hetman ... the chief ... that you'd fall for it," Mudge said. He had stopped and was removing the long moustaches and the feathered hat and wig. His right hand was on the grip of the rapier at his left.
"Fall for it?" Ohm said.
Wyatt Repp's voice seemed to come faintly to him, telling him that this scene was right out of one of his dramatic-admittedly, corny-empathorium works. "You're the hero," the fading voice said.
"Yes. It wasn't any accident that you saw Snick. There was a subliminal flashing just above her head. You couldn't have missed her. Hetman 1mm- ... the chief ... put her there to test you. He wanted to find out if you really were mentally unstable, if you could be a traitor. Now we know!"
"I wanted to find out if you killed her," Ohm said. He moved toward a splendidly dressed male courtier on his right.
"What does it matter to you?" Mudge said. "You were getting away free, and the family was safe."
His rapier whispered as it was pulled from the scabbard.
"Come quietly with us, Ohm. There's no one else here, and you can't fight us. If you do, I'll have an excuse to kill you here and now."
"Is she dead?"
Mudge smiled and said, "You'll never know."
"The hell I won't!" Charlie yelled. He sprang forward, reached across his stomach with his left hand, and snatched the blade from the scabbard of the courtier dummy. "En garde, you son of a bitch!"
Mudge's smile became even broader. "You stupid weedie, it's two against one. You may be a pretty good fencer, Bela said you were, but you're a drunk and even a world champion couldn't stand against two good fencers. I'm not bad, and Bela he's an Olympic silver medalist. Put the sword down, Ohm, and take your medicine like a man."
Mudge looked as if he were enjoying the coming attraction of combat to the death. The other man also seemed to be relishing it. So much for seven generations of government conditioning against the impulses and use of violence.
It would take five seconds, maybe more, for Bela to rзach him. By that time, his intended victim should be even further away. Yelling, his voice seemingly reinforced by the shouts of the others in him-especially Jim Dunski and Jeff Caird-he pushed over the figure from which he had taken the sword. It fell toward Mudge, causing him to step back. Then Ohm had leaped over the figure and was on Mudge. Moving swiftly in the position required, he thrust for Mudge's face. This was a target forbidden in fencing, but he hoped that Mudge, not being used to such an attack, would not react in time. Mudge, however, parried and then thrust for his enemy's upper sword arm. Ohm riposted and leaped back out of the seventeenth-century exhibit area. Mudge advanced. With his right arm, Ohm toppled another figure, The Stockbroker, at Mudge.
He ran toward the railing and vaulted over it with his right arm to the escalator. Bela Wang Horvath and Janos Ananda Mudge stood side by side for a moment. Horvath said something to his partner, who nodded, turned, and ran toward the corner of the recess. Horvath ran toward the opposite corner. They were going to cut him off and move in on him from his front and back.
He went over the railing back into the recess and ran toward Mudge past the figures of The Mail Carrier, The Bald Man, and The Diplomat. Mudge stopped, whirled, and assumed a defensive position.
Mudge was grinning. Ohm grinned back at him. From the moment he had yelled, he had lost all doubts and fears. He seemed to have the strength of seven, a hallucination, no doubt, but his adrenaline was pumping through him. And he wanted to kill. Not just anybody. Mudge.
Their blades clashed and rang again and again. Though the rapier was heavier and stiffer than the foil, it felt to Ohm as light as balsa and as supple as a feather. Cold fury and the combined self-survival drive of seven men powered him. Mudge was an excellent fencer. But he had several disadvantages, one being that it was difficult for a right-handed fencer to duel with a left-handed fencer. The lines of target were changed, making it hard to aim at them. The sinister-handed fencer was also in the same reversed position, but he was more used to it.