"The result is that we have to go after them with knives and clubs. Now, the apes are fast, they gang up, they throw things, and if they can, they'll grab you from opposite sides and pull your arms and legs off. That's very funny—for them. So we'll have to work together as a team and fight as hard as we know how."
After the speaker finished, there was a silence in the room. Dan was thinking over the idea and he liked nothing about it. He had little enough time to do his job, and he did not want to spend it being pulled to pieces by apes. He called out, "Mind if I make a suggestion?"
"I'm willing to try anything. Let's hear it."
Dan said, "I don't know about anybody else here, but I am no team player myself. Let me go in alone first. You wait half an hour and then come in and see if there are fifty apes left."
Everyone craned to see who was offering to fight fifty wild apes singlehanded.
The man on the platform turned pale, but said, "Agreed. And if you win, you received the combined credits of all."
Dan found himself walking down a corridor, surrounded by well-wishers, to a room where several tables were loaded with hand-weapons. He picked up a short weighted club, and a short double-edge, razor-sharp sword. A few minutes later, he arrived at a heavy metal door studded with rivets and painted green.
Dan had intended to hide a transceiver nearby on the outside and spend as little time in the storeroom as possible. But everything had happened so fast, and there were so many eyes watching him, that he had no chance to hide a mataform unit anywhere.
There was a loud clang as the heavy door swung shut behind him. Then he was in a big dimly lighted room with a twelve-foot aisle running down the center, a narrower aisle along each wall, and high piles of wooden crates and wirebound heavy cardboard cartons spaced five feet apart to either side of the central aisle. There was a strong smell of damp dirty fur. On the floor partway up the aisle lay what looked like a clothed human arm.