Nobody spoke. I knew by instinct that they realized now who their betrayer had been. They wanted to shred me up with their hands; they wouldn't use lead on Ray Rollins. I had taken two steps and was up to Bill Cuff and abruptly a rage overcame me that rivaled their vaunted primal ire. What the hell were they doing here? How dared these two things that ought to have been eons dead and turned to dust come into this room when I was telling my wife that I loved her? I saw my finish in Cuff's gray smoldering eyes and I would not stand for it. With a mad suddenness I hit Bill Cuff in the pit of the stomach while his hands dangled motionless. It should have folded him over like an axed sapling. He coughed once, and then he reached out and took me. I had seen what he could do with those hands. But even as he lifted me free of the floor, I wrenched up a punch from my waist that caught him smack in the right eye. It was a lucky blow for it hurt him in the only vulnerable spot in all that magnificent frame. He yelled and clenched his grip tighter, but he dropped his head and shook it, squinting the injured eye. I rabbit-punched him at the base of the skull, just behind the ear. It wasn't a good rabbit-punch by any means, for I was in agony with the bite of those fingers of steel in my flesh, but it added to his pain and one of his hands left me for an instant. [illus] I was still dangling in midair. Now I hurled all my weight sideways, and he lost his grip and grabbed for me again. I fell to the floor and twisted between his legs, diving for the control board where my pistol lay. Something crashed in my ear. I felt that my skull was flying apart, splintering off to the corners of the earth. I rolled like a shot hare and fought to keep my senses. I seemed to go down into red nothingness and struggle back up to the white light of the chamber, and discovered that Cuff was just turning around to me, and I had barely stopped rolling. I was against the curved wall. Skagarach had shot at me and my head was ringing. I had lost my bearings for no more than a second. I jumped to my feet and already the noise and pain was fading. My head must have been creased. I saw Nessa step in front of the yellow-haired beast and then almost by reflex I did what I'd have done years before on the football field. I collected my strength and hurled myself at Cuff's shins in a flying tackle. He was a brawler, a magnificent piece of muscle, but his technique was to pick people up and tear them apart. At fighting this way, falling and being walloped himself, he wasn't so good. What I had to do was avoid being gripped by those bear-traps of his, and whittle him down. Maybe I could do it, if Skagarach would let me.