The Dueling Machine sw-3 Read online

  “Hello,” Geri said.

  He grinned at her. “Hi.”

  “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be able to live underwater, without any equipment, like a mermaid.”

  Hector noticed, when she said that, hundreds of fish swimming lazily about them. As his eyes adjusted to the subdued lighting, he saw sculptured shapes of coral about them, colors that he had never seen before.

  “Our castle,” Geri said, and she swam slowly toward one of the coral pinnacles and disappeared behind it.

  Hector found himself sliding easily after her. The water seemed to offer no resistance to his movement. He was completely relaxed, completely at home. He saw her up ahead, gliding gracefully along, and pulled up beside her. A great silver fish crossed in front of them, and brilliantly hued plants swayed gently in the currents.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Geri murmured. “Our own world, without troubles, without dangers.”

  Hector nodded. It was hard to believe that they were actually sitting in a pair of booths some thirty meters apart. Hard to admit that there was another world where a war was brewing, where Odal was waiting to commit another murder.

  A dark shape slid out from behind the rocks ahead. Geri screamed.

  It was Odal. Slim, dressed in black, his lean face a mask of death.

  “Hector, don’t let him! Hector, help me!”

  Everything went black.

  Hector snapped his eyes open. He was sitting in the booth beside Geri, his arms around her protectively. She was shuddering.

  “How did.…”

  “It was my fault,” she gasped. “I thought about Odal…”

  The door to the booth was yanked open. Leoh stood there, his face a mixture of surprise and puzzlement.

  “What are you two doing? All the lights and power in the building are off!”

  “I’m sorry…” Hector began.

  “It’s my fault,” Geri said. She explained what happened.

  Leoh still looked puzzled. “But why are you both in the same booth?”

  Hector started to answer, then it hit him. “I… I was in the other booth!”

  “It’s empty,” Leoh said. “I looked in there first, when the power went off. The door was closed.”

  Hector looked at Geri, then back at the Professor. “I must’ve jumped out of the booth and ran over here… but, I mean… I don’t remember doing it.”

  The chief meditech came striding into the room, his steps clicking angrily against the hard flooring. “What’s going on here? Who blew out the power?”

  Turning, Leoh said, “It’s all right, just a little experiment that didn’t work out.”

  The chief meditech looked over the control console in the fading sunlight of the afternoon as Geri and Hector got out of the booth. He muttered and glared at them.

  “No permanent damage, I’m sure,” Leoh said as soothingly as he could.

  The lights on the control panels sprang back to life, as did the room’s main illumination lights. “Hmp,” grunted the chief meditech. “I guess it’s all right. The power’s on again.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Hector said.

  “Neither do I,” Leoh answered. “But it’s something to think about.”

  “What is?”

  “How Hector got from one booth to the other.” To the chief meditech he called out, “I’m going to take the tape of this, er, experiment. Do you mind?”

  The chief meditech was still inspecting the machine with the aggressive solicitude of a worried father. He nodded curtly to Leoh. “I don’t think you should do any more such experiments until we have back-up power units installed. The entire building was blacked out.”

  10

  Leoh sat in his office behind the dueling machine room, staring at the now blank view screen. In three days he had run the tape at least a hundred times. He had timed it down to the picosecond. He had seen Geri and Hector swimming lazily, happily, like two humanized dolphins perfectly at ease in the sea. Then Odal’s shark-life form sliced into view. Geri screamed. The scene cut off.

  It was precisely at that moment (within four picoseconds, as nearly as Leoh could calculate it) that the power in the whole building went off.

  How long did it take Hector to get from his booth to Geri’s? Thirty seconds? Leoh was looking into Hector’s booth about thirty seconds after the power went off, he estimated. Less, then. Ten seconds? Physically impossible; no one could disconnect himself from the neurocontacts and spring from one booth to the other in ten seconds. And both booth doors were closed, too.

  Leoh muttered to himself, “Knowing Hector’s manual dexterity, it’s difficult to imagine him making the trip in less than ten minutes.”

  All right then, he asked himself, how did he get into Geri’s booth? Precognition? He realized ahead of time that Odal would appear and frighten Geri? Then why doesn’t he remember it, or even remember going from one booth to the other? And why the enormous power drain? What happened to the machine to cause it?

  There was only one answer that Leoh could see, but it was so farfetched that he wanted to find another one. The one answer was teleportation.

  The dueling machine amplifies the powers of natural telepaths. Some telepaths have been reported to be able to move small objects with no apparent physical force. Could the dueling machine amplify that talent, too? And drain all the power in the building to do it?

  Leoh shook his head. Too much theorizing, not enough facts. He wished there were tape cameras in the booths; then he could have timed Hector’s arrival. Did he make the trip in four picoseconds? Or was it four-trillionths of a second?

  The door slid open and Hector stood there uncertainly, his lanky form framed in the doorway.

  Leoh looked up at him. “Yes?”

  “It’s time… the, uh, newsman and his seconds are here for the duel.”

  Feeling annoyed at the interruption, Leoh pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the dueling machine. “A lot of silliness,” he muttered. “Just a publicity stunt.”

  The chief meditech, in his professional white cover-all now, introduced the duelists and their seconds. For Leoh, only Hector. For the newsman, his editor—a thin, balding, nervous type—and a network vice president, who looked comfortable and well-fed. Probably keeps three dietitians and a biochemist busy preventing him from going overweight, Leoh groused to himself.

  They exchanged formalities and entered the booths. Hector sat at one end of the long, curving, padded bench that ran along the wall across the floor from the machine’s control desk. The editor and V.P. sat at the other end. Except for the meditechs, who took their stations at the control consoles, there was no one else in the room. The press gallery was empty. The lights on the panels winked on. The silent room vibrated with the barely audible hum of electrical power.

  In ten minutes, all the lights on the control panels flicked from green to amber. The duel was finished.

  Hector shot up and started for Leoh’s booth. The Professor came out, smiling slightly.

  “Are you… did it go… all right?” Hector asked.

  The newsman was getting out of the other booth. His editor put out a hand to steady him. The V.P. remained on the bench, looking half-disappointed, half-amused. The newsman seemed like a lumpy wad of dough, white-faced, shaken.

  “He has terrible reflexes,” Leoh said, “and no concept at all of the most elementary rules of physics.”

  The V.P. got up from his seat and walked over toward Leoh, his hand extended and a toothy smile on his smooth face. “Let me congratulate you, Professor,” he said in a hearty baritone.

  Leoh took his hand, but replied, “This has been nothing but a waste of time. I’m surprised that a man in your position indulges in such foolishness.”

  The V.P. bent his head slightly and answered softly, “I’m afraid I’m to blame. My staff convinced me that it would be a good idea to test the dueling machine and then make the results of the test public. You have no objection if
we run the tape of your duel on our tri-di broadcasts?”

  With a shrug, Leoh said, “Your man is going to look very foolish. He was run over by a bowling ball, and then overestimated his strength and popped his back trying to lift…”

  The V.P. put up his hands. “I don’t care what the tape shows. I made up my mind to put it on the air, if you have no objections.”

  “No, I don’t object.”

  “You’ll become a famous man all over the planet,” the V.P. beamed. “Your name will become a household word; tri-di stardom can do that for you.”

  “If the tape will convince the Acquatainian people that the dueling machine is safe, fine,” Leoh said. “As for fame… I’m already rather well known.”

  “Ah, but not to the general public. Certainly you’re famous among your fellow scientists, and to the elite of Acquatainia and the Commonwealth. But all the general public’s seen of you has been a few fleeting glimpses on news broadcasts. But now you’re going to become very famous.”

  “Because of one silly duel? I doubt that”

  “You’ll see,” the V.P. promised.

  The V.P. did not exaggerate. In fact, he had been overly conservative.

  Leoh’s duel was broadcast over the tri-di networks all across the planet that night. Within the week, it had been shown throughout the Acquataine Cluster and was in demand in the Commonwealth.

  It was the first time a duel had ever been seen by the general public, and the fact that the inventor of the dueling machine was involved made it doubly fascinating. The sight of the chubby newsman bumbling into obvious traps and getting tangled in pulleys and inclined planes with bowling balls atop them, while Leoh solicitously urged him to be careful every step of the way, struck most people as funny. The Acquatainians, living for months now with the fear of war hanging over them, found a sudden and immense relief in Leoh’s duel. Here was the inventor of the dueling machine, the man who had stopped the Kerak assassinations, appearing on tri-di, showing how clever he is, proving that Kerak is up against a mastermind.

  The real facts of the matter—that Leoh had no influence with Martine’s government, that Odal was now back in Acquatainia, that Kerak war fleets were quietly deploying along the Acquatainian frontier—these facts the average Acquatainian submerged in his joy over Leoh’s duel.

  Leoh became an instant public figure. He was invited to speak at every university in the Cluster. Tri-di shows vied for his appearance and newsmen followed his every move.

  The old scientist tried to resist the pressure, at first. For the week after the original showing of his duel on tri-di, he refused to make any public statement.

  “Tell them I’m busy,” he said to Hector, and he tried to barricade himself behind his equations and computer tapes in the office behind the dueling machine.

  When the universities began calling on him, though, he bowed to their wishes. Before he knew it, he was swept away in a giddy tide of personal appearances, tri-di shows, and parties.

  “Perhaps,” he told Hector, “this is the way to meet the people who influence Martine’s government. Perhaps I can convince them to consider the Commonwealth alliance, and they can put pressure on Martine.”

  At parties, at private meetings, at press conferences, Leoh stressed the point. But there was no apparent affect The students, the professors, the newsmen, the businessmen, the tri-di audience—they wanted entertainment, not politics. They wanted to be assured that all was well, not forced to think about how to protect themselves.

  The university lectures were huge successes, as lectures. Leoh expected to be speaking mainly to the psychonics students, but each vast auditorium was filled to overflowing with students and faculty from political science, physics, mathematics, sociology, psychiatry… thousands at each campus.

  And at each university there were the local newsmen, tri-di appearances, discussion clubs. And the faculty parties in the evenings. And the informal student seminars in the late afternoons. And the newsman who just “dropped in for a few words” at breakfast time.

  It took more than two months to make the rounds of each university in the Cluster. At first, Leoh tried to steal a few moments each day to work on the problem of Hector’s “jump.” But each day he woke up more tired, each day was filled with still more people to talk to, people who listened respectfully, admiringly. Each night he retired later; happy, exhausted, with a small nagging grumble in the back of his mind that he should really stop this show-business routine and get back to science.

  Hector grew more and more worried as he shepherded Leoh from one campus to the next. The old man was obviously enjoying himself hugely, and just as obviously spending too much of his strength on the traveling and personal appearances and parties. What’s more, Geri was in the capital city, and all the eager smiling girls on all the campuses in the Cluster couldn’t replace her in his eyes.

  In the midst of all this, Leoh even fought two more duels.

  The first one was with a university physics student who had bet his friends that he could beat the Professor. Leoh agreed good-naturedly to the duel, provided the boy was willing to let the tape be shown on tri-di. The boy agreed.

  Instead of the simple physics arena, Leoh chose a more difficult battleground: the intensely warped space in the powerful gravitational field of a collapsed star. The duelists fought in one-man spacecraft, using laser beams for weapons. The problem was to control the ship in a gravitational field so tenacious that one slip meant an inevitable spiral into the star’s seething surface; and to aim the laser weapons properly, where the relativistic warp of space drove straight-line physics out the window.

  The boy tried bravely as the two ships circled the dying star. The tape showed the view from each ship, alternately. Now the viewer could see the black depths of space, empty except for a few distant pinpoints of stars, and the curving crescent of the other duelist’s ship streaking by, a pencil beam of laser light flicking out, bending weirdly in that crazy gravity field, seeking its target. Then the bluish inferno of the star would slide into view, blazing, brilliant, drowning out everything else from sight.

  The boy fought well, but finally maneuvered himself too close to the star. He could have escaped if he had controlled the ship a little better. Instead, he power-dived straight into its flaming surface. The tri-di executives decided to erase his final screams from the tape before they showed it to the public.

  The second challenge came from an Acquatainian merchant, one of the richest men in the Cluster, who had drunk too much at a party and picked a quarrel with Leoh. The Professor went back to the simple physics arena and disposed of him easily.

  By the time Leoh (and Hector) returned to the capital, he was the darling of Acquatainian society. They feasted him, they toasted him, they took him to the ballet and opera, they did everything except let him alone to work. Geri was part of Acquatainia’s social leadership, so Hector at least got to see her—but only in crowded, noisy rooms.

  11

  Odal sat tensely to his room’s only chair and watched Kor’s bullet-shaped head on the view screen as the Intelligence Minister said:

  “So far the plan has gone extremely well. Leoh has not only been of no trouble to us, but his exploits have distracted most of the soft-headed Acquatainians. Meanwhile our preparations are exactly on schedule.”

  “The invasion,” Odal murmured.

  Kor smiled. “We have—let us say, persuaded—the government of the Etra Domain to allow us to station a battle fleet in their territory. Etra stands between the Acquatainian Cluster and the nearest Star Watch bases. If the Commonwealth tries to intervene, we can hold up their forces long enough to allow us to conquer Acquatainia.”

  Odal nodded curtly, he had heard the plan before.

  “Now is the time,” Kor went on, “for you to supply the final step. The destruction of Leoh, and the complete lulling of the Acquatainians.”

  Odal said nothing.

  “You still do not like the role you are required to p
lay,” Kor said. “No, don’t bother to deny it, I can see it in your face. Let me remind you that your duty may not always be pleasant, but if you succeed your rewards will be high.”

  “I will do my duty, unpleasant or not,” Odal said stiffly. And I know the penalties for failure, he added silently.

  Leoh looked bone-weary to Hector as they returned from the party. That morning, a new psychonics building had been dedicated at the university. It was named the Albert Robertus Leoh Center for Psychonics Studies.

  The day had been spent in speeches on an outdoor platform in the morning, a tour of the new building in the afternoon, dinner with the president and trustees of the university, and the inevitable party that night.

  “I’ve simply got to find time,” Leoh was saying as they stepped out of the lift tube into the hallway in front of their apartment, “to run some experiments on your ‘jump.’ We can use the tape of…”

  But Hector was staring quizzically at the apartment door. It was open and the lights inside were on.

  “Another newsman, I’ll bet,” Leoh said wearily.

  “I’ll tell him to come back some other time,” said Hector. He moved ahead of Leoh and entered the apartment.

  Sitting on the air couch in the middle of the living room was Odal.

  “You!”

  The Kerak major rose to his feet slowly, a tight smile on his face, as first Hector and then Leoh came in, saw him, and stopped.

  “Good evening,” Odal said, getting to his feet. “Come right in. After all, this is your place.”

  “How did you get into?…”

  “That’s of no real concern. I’m here to settle some unfinished business. Professor Leoh, some time ago you accused me of cheating in the dueling machine. I was about to challenge you when the Watchman intervened. I challenge you now.”

  “Now wait,” Hector began, “you can’t…”

  “I already have. Professor, do you accept my challenge?”