The Dueling Machine sw-3 Page 16

  Romis’ mind recoiled. Then he recovered and said, “There might be some way in which I can help you…”

  Odal lost his patience. “You haven’t contacted me in the middle of the night, using this elaborate procedure, to ask about my comfort. Something is troubling you greatly and you believe I can be useful to you.”

  “Can you actually read my thoughts?”

  “Not in the manner one reads a tape. But I can sense things…and the dueling machine amplifies this talent.”

  Romis hesitated a moment, then asked, “Can you… sense… what is in my mind?”

  Now it was Odal’s turn to hesitate. Was this a trap? He glanced around the confining walls of the tiny booth, and at the door that he knew was locked from the outside. What more can they do? Kill me?

  “I can feel in your thoughts,” Odal replied, “a hatred for Kanus. A hatred that is matched only by your fear of him. If you had it in your power you would…”

  “I would what?”

  Odal finally saw the picture clearly. “You would have the Leader assassinated.”

  “how?”

  “By a disgraced army officer who would have good cause to hate Kanus.”

  “You have cause to hate him,” Romis emphasized.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps? Can you fail to hate him?”

  Odal shook his head. “I’ve never considered the question. He is the Leader. I have neither loved nor hated, only followed his commands.”

  “Duty above self,” Romis’ thought returned. “You speak like a member of the nobility.”

  “Such as you are. And yet you wish to assassinate the Leader.”

  “Yes! Because a true member of the nobility puts his duty to the Kerak Worlds before his allegiance to this madman—this usurper of power who will destroy us all, nobleman and commoner alike.”

  “I am only a commoner,” Odal replied, very deliberately. “Perhaps I’m not equipped to decide where my duty lies. Certainly, I have no choice in my duties at present.”

  Romis recovered his composure. “Listen to me. If you agree to join us, we can help you escape from this beastly experimentation. As you can see, certain members of Kor’s staff are with us; so too are groups in the army and space fleet. If you will help us, you can once again be a hero of Kerak.”

  If I murder Kanus and survive the deed, Odal thought to himself. And if I am not then assassinated in turn by your friends.

  To Romis he asked, “And if I don’t agree to join you?”

  The Minister remained silent.

  “I see,” Odal answered for himself. “I know too much now to be allowed the risk of living.”

  “Unfortunately, the stakes are too high to let personal feelings intervene. If you do not agree to help us before leaving the dueling machine, the medical technician and sergeant are waiting outside for you. They have their orders.”

  “To murder me,” Odal said bluntly, “and make it seem as though I tried to escape.”

  “Yes. I am sorry to be brutal, but that is your choice. Join or die.”

  4

  While Odal deliberated his choice in the midnight darkness of Kerak, it was sunset in the capital city of Acquatainia.

  High above the city, Hector circled warily in a rented air car that had been ready for the junk heap long ago. He kept his eyes riveted to the view screens on the control panel in front of him, sitting tensely in the pilot’s seat; the four-place cabin was otherwise empty.

  Part of his circle carried him through one of the city’s busier traffic patterns, but he ignored other air cars and kept the autopilot locked on its circle while homeward-bound commuters shrieked into their radios at him and dodged around the Watchman’s vehicle. Hector had his radio off; every nerve in his body was concentrating on the view screens.

  The car’s tri-di scanners were centered on Geri Dulaq’s house, on the outskirts of the city. As far as Hector was concerned, nothing else existed. Cars buzzed by his bubble-topped canopy and apoplectic-faced drivers shook their fists at him. He never saw them. Wind whistled suspiciously through what should have been a sealed cabin; the air car groaned and rattled when it should have hummed and soared. He never noticed.

  There she is! He felt a charge of electricity flash through him as he saw her at last, walking through the garden next to the house.

  For an instant he wondered if he had the nerve to go through with it, but his hands had already nudged the controls and the air car, shuddering, started a long whining descent toward the house.

  The reddish sun of Acquatainia was shining straight into Hector’s eyes, through the ancient photochromic canopy that was supposed to screen out the glare. Squinting hard, Hector barely made out the menacing bulk of the house as it rose to meet him. He pulled back on the controls, jammed the brake flaps full open, flipped the screeching engine pods to their landing angle, and bounced the car in a shower of dust and noise and wind squarely into Geri’s flower bed.

  “You!” she screamed as he popped the canopy open.

  She turned and ran to the house. He went to leap out after her, but the seat harness yanked cuttingly at his middle and shoulders.

  By the time Hector had unbuckled the harness and jumped, stumbling, to the ground, she was inside the house. But the door was still open, he saw. Hector sprinted toward it.

  A servant, rather elderly, appeared on the walk before the door. Hector ducked under his feebly waving arms and launched himself toward the door, which was now swinging shut. He got halfway through before the door slammed against him, wedging him firmly against the jamb.

  Hector could hear someone panting behind the door, struggling to get it closed despite the fact that one of his arms and a leg were flailing inside the doorway. Hoping it wasn’t Geri, he pushed hard against the door. It hardly budged. It’s not her, he realized. Setting himself as solidly as he could on his outside leg, he pushed with all his might. The door gave slowly, then suddenly burst open. Hector sailed off balance into the husky servant who had been pushing against him. They both sprawled onto the hard plastiwood floor of the entryway.

  Hector groped to all fours and caught a glimpse of Geri at the top of the wide, curving stairway that dominated the main hall of the house. Then the servant fell on him and tried to pin him down. He rolled over on top of the servant, broke loose from his clumsy grip, and got to his feet.

  “I don’t want to hurt you!” he said shakily, holding his hands out in what he hoped was a menacing position. Another pair of arms grappled at him from behind, but weakly. The old servant. Hector shrugged him off and took a few more steps into the house, his eyes still on the husky one, who was now crouched on the floor and looking up questioningly at Geri.

  All she has to do is nod, Hector knew, and they’ll both jump me.

  “I told you I never wanted to see you again!” she screamed at him. “Never!”

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” he shouted back. “Just for five minutes… Uh, alone.”

  “I don’t… your nose is bleeding.”

  He touched his upper lip with a finger. It came away red and sticky.

  “Oh… the door… I must’ve banged it on the door.”

  Geri took a few steps down the stairway, hesitated, then seemed to take a deep breath and came slowly down the rest of the way.

  “It’s all right,” she said calmly to the servants. “You may leave.”

  The brawny one looked uncertain. The old one piped, “But if he…”

  “I’ll be all right,” Geri insisted firmly. “You can stay in the next room, if you like. The Lieutenant will only be here for five minutes. No longer,” she added, turning to Hector.

  They withdrew reluctantly.

  “You ruined my flowers,” she said to Hector. But softly, and the corners of her mouth looked as though they wanted to turn up. “And your nose is still bleeding.”

  Hector fumbled through his pockets. She produced a tissue from a pocket in her dress.

  “Here. Now clean yours
elf up and leave.”

  “Not until I’ve said what I came to say,” Hector replied nasally, holding the tissue against his nose.

  “Keep your head up, don’t bleed on the floor.”

  “It’s hard to talk like this.”

  Despite herself, Geri smiled. “Well, it’s your own fault. You can’t come swooping into people’s gardens like… like…”

  “You wouldn’t see me. And I had to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Putting his head down, his neck cracking painfully as he did, Hector said:

  “Well… blast it, Geri, I love you. But I’m not going to be your hired assassin. And if you loved me, you wouldn’t want me to be. A man’s not supposed to be a trained pet… to do whatever his girl wants him to. I’m not…”

  Her expression hardened. “I only asked you to do what I would have done myself, if I could have.”

  “You would’ve killed Odal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he murdered your father.”

  “That’s right.”

  Hector took the tissue away from his face. “But Odal was just following orders. Kanus is the one who ordered your father killed.”

  “Then I’d kill Kanus, too, if I had the chance,” she snapped angrily.

  “You’d kill anybody who had a hand in your father’s death?”

  “Of course.”

  “The other soldiers, the ones who helped Odal during the duel, you’d kill them too?”

  “Certainly!”

  “Anybody who helped Odal? Anybody at all? The star-ship crew that brought him here?”

  “Yes! All of them! Anybody!”

  Hector put his hand out slowly and took her by the shoulder. “Then you’d have to kill me, too, because I let him go. I helped him to escape from you,”

  She started to answer. Her mouth opened. Then her eyes filled with tears and she leaned against Hector and began crying.

  He put his arms around her. “It’s all right, Geri. It’s all right. I know how much it hurts. But… you can’t expect me to be just as much of a murderer as he is… I mean, well, it’s just not the way to…”

  “I know,” she said, still sobbing. “I know, Hector. I know.”

  For a few moments they remained there, holding each other. Then she looked up at him, and he kissed her.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said, very softly.

  He felt himself grinning like a circus clown. “I… well, I’ve missed you, too.”

  They laughed together, and she pulled out another tissue and dabbed at his nose with it.

  “I’m sorry about the flowers.”

  “That’s all right, they’ll.…” She stopped and stared toward the doorway.

  Turning, Hector saw a blue-anodized robot, about the size and shape of an upended cargo crate, buzzing officiously at the open doorway. Its single photoeye seemed to brighten at the sight of his face.

  “You are Star Watch Lieutenant Hector H. Hector, the operator of the vehicle parked in the flower bed?” it inquired tinnily.

  Hector nodded dumbly.

  “Charges have been lodged against you, sir: violations of flight safety regulation regarding use of traffic lanes, failure to acknowledge radio intercept, unauthorized flight patterns, failure to maintain minimum altitude over a residential zone, landing in an unauthorized area, trespass, illegal and violent entry into a private domicile, assault and battery. You are advised to refrain from making any statement until you obtain counsel. You will come with me, or additional charges of resisting arrest will be lodged against you. Thank you.”

  The Watchman sagged; his shoulders slumped dejectedly.

  Geri barely suppressed a giggle. “It’s all right, Hector. I’ll get a lawyer. If they send you to jail, I’ll visit you. It’ll be very romantic.”

  5

  Odal sat in the darkness of the dueling machine booth, turning thoughts over and over in his mind. To remain as Kor’s experimental animal meant disgrace and the torture of ceaseless mind-probing. Ultimately an utterly unpleasant death. To join Romis meant an attempt to assassinate the Leader; an attempt that would end, successful or not, in death at the hands of Kanus” guards. To refuse to join Romis led again—and this time immediately—to death.

  Every avenue of choice came to the same end. Odal sat there calmly and examined his alternatives with a cool detachment, almost as though this was happening to someone else. It was even amusing, almost, that events could arrange themselves so overwhelmingly against a lone man.

  Romis’ voice in his mind was imperative. “I cannot keep this link open much longer without risking detection. What is your decision?”

  To stay alive as long as possible, Odal realized. Hoping that thought didn’t get across to Romis, he said, “I’ll join you.”

  “You do this willingly?”

  A picture of the armed guard waiting for him outside flashed through Odal’s mind. “Yes, willingly,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Very well, then. Remain where you are, act as though nothing has happened. Within the next few days, a week at most, we’ll get you out of Kor’s hands.”

  Only when he was certain that contact was broken, that Romis and the relay man at the machine’s controls could no longer hear him, did Odal allow himself to think: If I round up Romis and all the plotters against the Leader, that should make me a hero of Kerak again.

  Hector was all smiles as he strode into the dueling machine chamber. Geri was on his arm, also smiling.

  Leoh said pleasantly, “Well, now that you’re together again and you’ve paid all your traffic fines, I hope you’re emotionally prepared to go to work.”

  “Just watch me,” said Hector.

  They began slowly. First Hector merely teleported himself from one booth of the dueling machine to the other. He did it a dozen times the first day. Leoh measured the transit time and the power drain each time. It took four picoseconds, on the average, to make the jump. And—according to the desk-top calculator Leoh had set up alongside the control panels—the power dram was approximately equal to that of a star ship’s drive engines pushing a mass equal to Hector’s weight.

  “Do you realize what this means?” he asked of them.

  Hector was perched on the desk top again, with Geri sitting in a chair she had pulled up beside Leoh’s. Drumming his fingers thoughtfully on the control panel for a moment, Hector replied, “Well… it means we can move things about as efficiently as a star ship…”

  “Not quite,” Leoh corrected. “We can move things or people as efficiently as a star ship moves its payload. We needn’t lift a star ship’s structure or power drive. Our drive—the dueling machine—can remain on the ground. Only the payload is transported.”

  “Can you go as fast as a star ship?” Geri asked.

  “Seemingly faster, if these tests mean anything,” Leoh answered.

  “Am I traveling in subspace,” Hector wanted to know, “like a star ship does? Or what?”

  “Probably ‘what,’ I’d guess,” said Leoh. “But it’s only a guess. We have no idea of how this works, how fast you can really go, how far you can teleport, or any of the limits of the phenomenon. There’s a mountain of work to do.”

  For the next few days, Hector moved inanimate objects while he sat in one booth of the dueling machine. He lifted weights without touching them, and then even transported Geri from one booth to the other. But he could only move things inside the dueling machine.

  “We may have an interstellar transport mechanism here,” Leoh said at the end of a week, tired but enormously happy. “There’d have to be a dueling machine, or something like it, at the other end, though.”

  The pain was unbearable. Odal screamed soundlessly, in his mind, as a dozen lances of fire drilled through him. His body jerked spasmodically, arms and legs twitching uncontrolled, innards cramping and coiling, heart pounding dangerously fast. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, could only taste blood in his mouth.

  Rom
is! Where is Romis! Why doesn’t he come? He would have told his inquisitors everything, anything, just to make them stop. But they weren’t even asking him questions. They weren’t interested in his memories or his confession.

  Jump!

  Transport yourself to the next booth.

  You are a trained telepath, you must have latent teleportation powers, as well.

  We will not ease up on this pressure until you teleport to the next booth. Indeed, the pressure will be increased until you do as you are told.

  JUMP!

  Hector sat in the dueling machine in Acquatainia and concentrated on his job. A drawerful of papers, tapes, and holograms was in the other booth. Hector was going to transport it to a dueling machine on the other side of the planet. This would be the first long-distance jump.

  It wasn’t easy to concentrate. Geri was waiting for him outside. Leoh had been working him all day. A stray thought of Odal crossed his mind:I wonder what he’s up to now? Is he working on teleportation too?

  He felt a brief tingling sensation, like a mild electric shock.

  “Funny,” he muttered.

  Puzzled, he removed the neurocontacts from his head and body, got up, and opened the booth door.

  The technicians at the control desk gaped at him. It took Hector a full five seconds to realize that they were wearing Kerak uniforms. A pair of guards, looking equally startled, reached for their side arms as soon as they recognized the Star Watch emblem on Hector’s coveralls.

  He had time to say, “Oh-oh,” before the guards shot him down.

  On Acquatainia, Leoh was shaking his head unhappily as he inspected the pile of materials that Hector was supposed to teleport.

  “Nothing,” he muttered. “It didn’t work at all.” His puzzled musing was shattered by Geri’s scream. Looking up, he saw her cowering against the control desk, screaming in uncontrolled hysteria. Framed in the doorway of the farther booth stood the tall, lithe figure of Odal.

  “This is absolutely fantastic,” said Sir Harold Spencer.

  Leoh nodded agreement. The old scientist was at his desk in the office behind the dueling machine chamber. Spencer seemed to be on a star ship, from the looks of the austere, metal-walled cabin that was visible behind his tri-di image.