Since the challenge by Odal, 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 all seemed completely unreal to him.
But now, in this manufactured dream, he seemed vibrantly alive. Every sensation was solid, stimulating. He could feel his puke 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 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 sul-
Ehur and other valuable but deadly chemicals; oceans of quid methane and ammonia; “solid ground” consisting of quickly crumbling, eroding ice; howling, superpowerful winds that could pick up a mountain of ice and huri it halfway around the planet; darkness; danger; death.
He was encased in a one-man protective outfit that was half armored suit, half vehicle. An internal liquid suspension system kept him tolerably comfortable at four times normal gravity, but still the suit was cumbersome, nd a man could move only very slowly in it, even with the aid of servomotors-