Once inside the guard uniform. Hector started down the steps. Three more guards were waiting for him at the bottom of the flight, in a stone-faced hallway that curved off into darkness. The lighting wasn’t very good, but Hector could see that these men were big, toughlooking, and armed with pistols. He hoped they wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t the same man who had gone up the stairs a few minutes earlier.
Hector grinned at them and fluttered a wave. He kept walking, trying to get past them and down the corridor.
“Hey, you’re the …” one of the guards started to say, in the Kerak language.
Hector suddenly felt sick. He could barely understand the Kerak tongue, much less speak it. He kept his grin, weak though it was, and walked a bit faster.
The second guard grabbed the first one’s arm and cut him short. “Let him through,” he whispered. “We’ll try to get the word to our people downstairs and get him into the dueling machine and out of here. But don’t get caught near him by Kor’s peoplel Understand?”
“All right, but somebody better cut off the scanners that watch the halls.”
“Can’t do that without running the risk of alerting Kor himself!”
“We’ll have to chance it … otherwise they’ll spot him in a minute, in a guard uniform four sizes too small for him.”
Hector was past them now, wondering what the whispering was about, but still moving. As he rounded the comer of the corridor, he saw an open lift tube, looking raw and new in the warm polished stone of the walL The tube was lit and operating. Hector stepped in, said. “Dueling machine level” in basic Terran to the simpleminded computer that ran the tube, and closed his eyes.