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?”
“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:
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
“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
