can’t hurt you.”
“I know. It was Odal and Kanus’ hired monsters that killed father, not the machine itself.”
She walked along the long, curving, main control desk, looked over its banks of gauges and switches, ran a finger lightly across its plastisteel edge.
“Could you show me what it’s like?”
Hector blinked. “Huh?”
“In the dueling machine,” she said. “Can it be used for something else, other than duels? I’d like to see what it’s like to have your imagination made real.”
“Oh, but… well, you’re not… I mean, nobody’s supposed to ran it without… that is…”
“You do know how to run the machine, don’t you?” She looked right up into his eyes.
With a gulp, Hector managed a weak, “Oh sure…”
“Then can’t we use it together? Perhaps we can share a dream.”
Looking around, his hands suddenly clammy, Hector mumbled, “Well, uh, somebody’s supposed to be at the controls to, er, monitor the duel… I mean—”
“Just for a few little minutes?” Geri smiled her prettiest.
Hector melted. “Okay… I guess it’ll be all right. Just for a few minutes, that is.”
He walked with her to the farther booth and helped her put on the neurocontacts. Then he went back to the main desk and with shaky hands set the machine into action. He checked and double-checked all the controls, pushed the final switches, and dashed to the other booth, tripping as he entered it and banging noisily into the seat. He sat down, fumbled with the neurocontacts hastily, and then stared into the screen.
Nothing happened.
For a moment he was panic-stricken. Then the screen began to glow softly, colors shifted, green mostly, soft cool green with a hint of blue in it.…
And he found himself floating dreamily next to Geri in a world of green, with greenish light filtering down ever so softly from far above them.
“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.”
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
