Gary whirled around. "Who said that?" he shouted.
"You cannot find me," said the voice, still talking out of nowhere. "Don't waste your time in trying to find me. I brought you here and I brought the others here and only the one of you may leave… the humans or the Hellhounds.”
"I don't understand," said Gary. "You are mad…”
"You are enemies, you and the Hellhounds," said the voice. "You are equal in number and in strength of arms. There are two of you and there are two of them. You have small weapons only and so have they. It will be a fair encounter.”
Fantastic, thought Gary. A situation jerked raw from a latter-day Alice in Wonderland. A nightmare twisted out of the strange and grotesque alienness of this splotched planet. A planet filed with goblins and with nightmares — a fairyland turned sour.
"You want us to fight?" he asked. "Fight the Hellhounds? A sort of — well, you might call it a duel?”
"That is exactly it," the voice told him.
"But what good will it do?”
"You are enemies, aren't you, human?”
"Why, yes, we are," said Gary, "but anything that we do here won't affect the war one way or the other.”