The Dark Symphony

himself dizzily after the rifle, rolling across the floor and clutching it, losing it in his panic and having to clutch it again. Turning to stand, he found a blood beast towering over him. The clots churned through it as it gurgled even closer to him. A pseudopod snaked out and wrapped around his leg, stung and tightened there.
    The crowd moaned.
    He felt the tingling as his natural molecular patterns were disturbed. He swung the rifle up, heaving frightful sobs from his chest, and blasted point blank at the blood beast. There was a rich humming as sound pattern canceled sound pattern, and the blood beast was gone. The tingling sensation in his leg was gone too, but it left behind a dull aching as his molecular patterns protested the near obliteration. But the blood beast was gone!
    The other four were not.
    And they were closer.
    Reaching out…
    Clutching the sound rifle, he rolled sideways until he slammed against the arena wall. Still dizzy, he stood and braced his back against the low barrier of cool shimmer-stone. His ribs ached, as did his leg and the side of his head. He fought to clear the multiple images from his mind while panic boomed in him and warned him that he didn't have time to straighten himself out, didn't have enough time at all…
    The crowd was roaring again, and the sharp bellow of noise seemed to help flush away the dizziness. He felt his breathing return to some semblance of normality, though the slamming of his heart against his chest wall did not decrease. He brought the gun up and played it on the four blood beasts. They could not move as fast as he could shoot They sank rapidly into nothingness.
    The screams of the crowd indicated a knowledge of what was coming next.
    But his head ached and his vision was now blurred by sweat and blood and he could not, for the moment, see anything. Through the watery haze, the arena seemed empty, save for the body of the dragon and some scattered members of the devils he had cut with the sonic knife. Hugging the wall, he started back toward the Bench so that there might be room behind him for running when the next challenge was thrown at him. He felt us if he would have to run, for there was so little energy left to fight with.
    His legs did not hurt. Contrariwise, they held no feeling whatsoever. They were like dull, senseless hunks of steel that had been welded to his hips and moved on some distant, involuntary robot control mechanism. Up and down, up and down… He realized that he could not even feel the slap of his feet against the floor. He was so very, very tired. Only the pumping of his natural supply of adrenalin was keeping him going, and that seemed perilously close to exhaustion. He searched again for an opponent as the crowd screamed and had its millionth paroxysm of horror-filled joy, its millionth orgasm of terror. He blinked sweat out of his eyes, raised an arm to wipe away some of the blood. His hands were still alive, but he realized the half paralysis that had invaded his legs was creeping down his arms in an effort to turn him into a complete zombie. He knew that, if he were to survive, the next test would have to come soon while he still had some energy, still a droplet of strength. Then he saw it…
    … wriggling in the paper skin of the dragon…
    … crawling in there…
    Something
…
    The dragon was a Pandora's Box filled with nightmares. This one was a snake—a giant of a snake. It reared its truck-sized head with washtub green eyes, rose from the carcass of the lizard, its forked tongue hissing in and out of its mammoth Jaws. How many coils laid in the dragon? How many feet could the dragon possibly contain? Then he realized the test masters could make as many feet of coils as they wished come out of the dead dragon. Logic played no part in all of this. Logic and physical laws had been set aside. This was their nightmare they were sharing with him, and they could dream anything they liked. A thousand feet of snake could come boiling out of there. Two thousand. Ten thousand. They could fill the arena wall to wall with it and smother him with its scaly body.
    And how many other things might follow the snake out of the carcass—assuming he could kill the snake? Could not countless terrors be swarming inside? Enough to keep him fighting here until he dropped and was defeated?
    Then he saw it clearly and simply. The one thing he was supposed to grasp. The first rule of sound was to understand the simplicity of all the other