Krypton stashes Slothrop in a garbage bin and goes looking for Seaman Bodine. After a number of short, glittering feints, Purfle dodges in, quick as a fighting-cock. With a high slash that Bladdery tries to parry in third, Purfle rips through the Commando’s blouse and draws blood. But when he goes to jump back, it seems thoughtful Bladdery has brought his combat boot down on the American’s low dress shoe, nailing him where he stands.

Promotor Bodine and his two combatants are burning crystals of awareness in this poisoned gray gathering: a good half of the crowd are out in the foothills of unconsciousness, and the rest are not exactly sure what’s going on. Some think that Purfle and Bladdery are really mad at each other. Others feel that it is meant to be comedy, and they will laugh at inappropriate moments. Now and then the odd beady eyes will appear up in the night superstructures of the warships, staring, staring… .

Purfle and Bladdery have made simultaneous thrusts and are now corps à corps—with a scrape and clank the runcible spoons are locked, and elbows tense and set. The outcome rests with scrawny Purfle’s gift for trickery, since Bladdery appears ready to hold the position all night.

“Rocketman’s here,” Krypton tugging at Bodine’s damp wrinkled collar, “in a pig suit.”

“Not now, man. You got the, ah—”

“But but the heat’s after him, Bodine, where can we hide him?”

“Who cares, it’s some asshole, is all. A fake. Rocketman wouldn’t be here.”

Purfle yanks his runcible-spoon hand back, leaning to the side, twisting his own weapon to keep its tines interlocked with those of Bladdery’s, pulling the commando off-balance long enough to release his own foot, then deftly unlinking the spoons and dancing away. Bladdery recovers his footing and moves heavily in pursuit, probing in with a series of jabs then shifting the spoon to his other hand and surprising Purfle with a slash that grazes the sailor’s neck, missing the jugular, but not by much. Blood drips into the white jumper, black under these arc-lights. Sweat and cold shadows lie darkly in the men’s armpits. Purfle, made reckless by the pain, goes flying at Bladdery, a flurry of blind wild pokes and hackings, Bladdery hardly needing to move his feet, weaving from the knees up like a great assured pudding, finally able to grab Purfle’s spoon hand at the wrist and twirl him about, like jitterbugging a girl, around in front of him, his own knife-edge now up and bisecting Purfle’s Adam’s apple, ready to slice in. He looks up, around, wheezing, sweaty, seeking some locus of power that will thumb-signal him what to do.

Nothing: only sleep, vomiting, shivering, a ghost and flowered odor of ethanol, solid Bodine counting his money. Nobody really watching. It then comes to Bladdery and Purfle at once, tuned to one another at the filed edge of this runcible spoon and the negligible effort it will take to fill their common world with death, that nobody said anything about a fight to the finish, right? that each will get part of the purse whoever wins, and so the sensible course is to break it up now, jointly to go hassle Bodine, and find some Band-Aids and iodine. And still they linger in their embrace, Death in all its potency humming them romantic tunes, chiding them for moderate little men… So far and no farther, is that it? You call that living?