“I beat him,” he said. “I beat Odal!”
They stepped outside the booth, Leoh smiling broadly now. Across the way, Odal’s thin face was deathly grim. The crowd was absolutely still, not daring to believe what it saw.
The chief meditech cleared his throat and announced loudly, “Professor Leoh is the victor!”
The crowd’s sudden roar burst through the room. They rose from their seats, swarmed down upon the machine and lifted Leoh and Hector to their shoulders. Jumping up and down on the main control desk, yelling louder han anyone, was the white-coated chief meditech. Outside, the much larger throng was cheering even harder.
Within a few minutes no one was left in the chamber except a few of the uniformed policemen, Odal, and his seconds.
“Are you able to go outside now?” asked one of the soldiers, also a major.
The taut expression on Odal’s face relaxed a little. “Of course.”
The three men walked from the building to a waiting ground car. The other soldier, a colonel, said to Odal, “You have taken your death rather well.”
‘Thank you.” Odal managed a thin smile. “But after all, it’s not as though I was killed by the enemy. I engaged in a suicide mission, and my mission has been accomplished.”
“I … well … you saw what happened,” Hector said to Geri. “How could anybody do anything in that mob?”
They were sitting together in a restaurant near the tridi studio where Leoh was being lionized by a panel of Acquatainia’s leading citizens.
She poked at her tood with a fork and said, “You might never get the chance to kill him again. He’s probably on his way back to Kerak right now.”