“I still don’t like it,” Hector said in a near whisper to Leoh.
With his eyes sweeping the room, watching the restless onlookers and the busy meditechs, Leoh answered, “Relax, my boy. We’ve turned the machine inside out. The worst he can do is to defeat me. At the slightest medical irregularity, the machine will automatically stop us. And beside, I still think I can beat him. I’ll be using the neutron star environment again, the same one I used against that college student. He’ll have no advantage over me there.”
A roar went up from the crowd outside.
“Here he comes,” Hector said.
The main doors opened. Flanked by two rows of uniformed policemen, in walked Odal and his two seconds, all in the light blue uniforms of Kerak. Odal was annoyedly brushing something from his tunic.
“Evidently,” Leoh said, “diplomatic immunity didn’t protect Odal entirely from the crowd.”
The introductions, the medical checks, the instructions, the choice of weapon and environment—all seemed to take hours instead of minutes. Until suddenly they were over, and Hector found himself walking alone to his spectator’s seat.
He sat beside Geri and watched Leoh and Odal enter their booths, watched the meditechs take their stations at the control desks, watched the panel lights turn from amber to green. The duel was on.
The crowd stirred uncertainly. A buzzing murmur filled the room. There was nothing to do now but wait.
Geri leaned close to Hector and asked sweetly, “Did you bring a gun?”
“Huh? A… what for? I mean…”
She whispered, “For Odal. I have a small one in my handbag.”
“But… but.…”
“You promised me!” Still in a whisper, but harsher now.
“I know, but not here. There’re… well, there’re too many people here. Someone might get hurt… if shooting starts.…”
Geri thought a moment. “Maybe you’re right. Of course, if he kills Professor Leoh in there, he’ll walk right out of here and board a Kerak star ship and we’ll never see him again.”
Hector couldn’t think of a reply, so he just sat there feeling thoroughly miserable.
The two of them remained silent for the rest of the half-hour. At the end of the time limit for the duel, all the lights on the machine went amber. The crowd let out a gust of disappointed-yet-relieved sighs. Hector sprinted to Leoh’s booth while Odal’s seconds marched in time to his.
Leoh came out of the booth looking very thoughtful.
“You’re all right?” Hector asked.
“What? Oh yes, fine. He played exactly by the rules,” Leoh said. He looked toward Odal, who was smiling icily, calm and confident. “He played extremely well… extremely well. There were a couple of times when I thought he’d really finish me off. And I never really put him into much trouble at all.”
The chief meditech was motioning for the two duelists to come to him at the main control desk. Hector accompanied Leoh.
“The first part of the duel has been a draw,” the chief meditech said. “You—both of you—now have the option of withdrawing for a day, or continuing the duel now.”
“I will continue,” Odal said unhesitatingly.
Leoh nodded, “Continue.”
“Very well,” said the chief meditech. Turning to Odal, “Yours is the choice of environment and weapon. Are there any special instructions necessary?”
Odal shook his head. “The Professor knows how to drive a ground car?” At Leoh’s affirming nod he said, “Then that is all the skill that is necessary.”
Leoh found himself sitting at the wheel of a sleek blue ground car: plastic-bubble canopy, two bucket seats, engine throbbing under an aerodynamically sculptured hood.
Ahead of him stretched a highway, arrow-straight to the horizon, where jagged bluish mountains rose against the harsh yellow sky. The car was pulled off to the side of the road, in neutral gear. The landscape around the highway was bleak desert—flat, featureless, cloudless, and hot.
Odal’s voice came from the radio in the dashboard. “I am parked about five kilometers behind you, Professor. You will pull out onto the highway and I will follow you.
These cars have wheels, not air cushions; there are no magnetic bumpers, no electronic controls to lock you onto the highway. A few kilometers ahead, as we enter the mountains, the road becomes quite interesting. The object of the game, of course, is to make the other fellow crash. But if you can outrun me for a half hour, I will acknowledge you as the winner.”
Leoh glanced at the controls, touched the drive button, and nudged the throttle. The turbine purred smoothly. He swung onto the highway and ran up to a hundred kilometers per hour. The rearview screen showed a blood-red car, exactly like his own except for its color, pulling up precisely ten car lengths behind him.
“I’ll let you get the feel of the car while we’re on the straightaway,” Odal’s voice came through the radio. “We won’t begin to play in earnest until we get into the mountains.”
The road was rising now, Leoh realized. A gentle grade, but at their speed they were soon well above the desert floor. The mountains were no longer distant blue wrinkles; they loomed close, high, and bareboned, with scraggy bushes and sparse patches of grass on them.
Leoh nearly missed the first curve, it came on him so quickly. He cut to the inside, slammed on the brakes, and skidded around.
“Not very good,” Odal laughed.
The red car was just off his left rear fender now, crowding him against the shoulder of the mountain rise that jutted up from the right side of the road. Leoh could hear pebbles clattering against the floorboards, over the whine of their two turbines. On the other side of the road, the cliff dropped away to the desert floor. And they were still climbing.
Leoh hugged the right side of the road, with Odal practically beside him. Suddenly the mountains fell away and a bridge, threaded dizzily between two cliffs, stood before them. It seemed to Leoh that the bridge was leaping toward him. He tried to get back toward the center of the road, but Odal rammed his side. The wheel ripped out of his hands, spinning wildly. The car skidded toward the road’s shoulder. Leoh grabbed at the wheel, steered out of the skid, and found himself on the bridge, the supporting suspension cables whizzing past. He was sweating hard and hunched, white-knuckled, over the wheel.
Odal was in front of him now.
On the other side of the bridge the road became a torturous series of curves, climbs, and drops. The grades were steep, the turns murderous, and at times the road narrowed so much that two cars could barely squeeze by. Sometimes they were flanked on both sides by looming masses of rock, rising up out of sight. Mostly, though, one side of the road was a sheer drop of a thousand meters or more.
Odal braked, swerved, pulled up alongside Leoh and slammed the two cars together with bone-rattling force. He was trying to force Leoh off the edge of the cliff. Leoh clung to the wheel, fighting for control. His one defense was that he could set the speed for the battle; but to his horror he found that not even this was under his real control. The car refused to slow much past seventy-five.
“You wish to stop and enjoy the scenery?” Odal called to him, banging the two cars together again, pushing Leoh dangerously close to the cliffs edge.
Desperately, Leoh leaned on the throttle with all his weight. The car spurted ahead, leaving Odal momentarily in a cloud of wheel-churned dirt.
“Ah-hah, now the turtle becomes a rabbit!” The red car streaked after him.
There was a tunnel ahead. Leoh raced for it, praying that it was long enough and narrow enough for him to stay ahead of Odal.
