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.
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
“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;
The boy tried bravely as the two ships circled the dying star. The tape showed the view from each ship,
