academy…”
Leoh smiled at him. “No need for mechanical aptitude, my boy. You were trained to fight, weren’t you? We can do this job mentally.”
8
It was the strangest week of their lives.
Leoh’s plan was straightforward: to test the dueling machine, push it to the limits of its performance, by actually operating it—by fighting duels.
They started off easily enough, tentatively probing and flexing their mental muscles. Leoh had used the machines himself many times in the past, but only in tests of the system’s routine performance. Never in actual combat against another human being. To Hector, of course, the machine was a totally new and different experience.
The Acquatainian staff plunged into the project without question, providing Leoh with invaluable help in monitoring and analyzing the duels.
At first, Leoh and Hector did nothing more than play hide-and-seek, with one of them picking an environment and the other trying to find him. They wandered through jungles and cities, over glaciers and interplanetary voids, all without ever leaving the dueling machine booths.
Then, when Leoh was satisfied that the machine could reproduce and amplify thought patterns with strict fidelity, they began to fight light duels. They fenced with blunted foils. Leoh did poorly, because he knew nothing about fencing, and his reflexes were much slower than Hector’s. The dueling machine did not change a man’s knowledge or his physical abilities; it only projected them into a dream he was sharing with another man. It matched Leoh’s skills and knowledge against Hector’s. Then they tried other weapons—pistols, sonic beams, grenades—but always with the precaution of imagining themselves to be wearing protective equipment. Strangely, even though Hector was trained in the use of these weapons, Leoh won almost all the bouts. He was neither faster nor more accurate when they were target-shooting. But when the two of them faced each other, somehow Leoh almost always won.
They worked in the dueling machine day and night now, enclosed in the booths for twelve or more hours a day, driving themselves and the machine’s regular staff to near exhaustion. When they gulped their meals, between duels, they were physically ragged and sharp-tempered. They usually fell asleep in Leoh’s office, discussing the results of the day’s work.
The duels slowly grew more serious. Leoh was pushing the machine to its limits now, carefully extending the rigors of each bout. Even though he knew exactly what and how much he intended to do in each fight, it often took a conscious effort to remind himself that the battles he was fighting were actually imaginary.
As the duels became more dangerous, and the artificially amplified hallucinations began to end in blood and death, Leoh found himself winning more and more frequently. With one part of his mind he was driving to analyze the cause of his consistent success. But another part of him was beginning to enjoy his prowess.
The strain was telling on Hector. The physical exertion of constant work and practically no relief was considerable in itself. But the emotional effects of being “hurt” and “killed” repeatedly were infinitely worse.
“Perhaps we should stop for a while,” Leoh suggested after the fourth day of tests.
“No, I’m all right.”
Leoh looked at him. Hector’s face was haggard, his eyes bleary.
“You’ve had enough,” Leoh said quietly.
“Please don’t make me stop,” Hector begged. “I… I can’t stop now. Please give me a chance to do better. I’m improving… I lasted twice as long in this afternoon’s duels as I did this morning. Please, don’t end it now .… not while I’m completely lost.…”
Leoh stared at him. “You want to go on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if I say no?”
Hector hesitated. Leoh sensed he was struggling with himself. “If you say no,” he answered dully, “then it’ll be no. I can’t argue against you any more.”
Leoh was silent for a long moment. Finally he opened a desk drawer and took a small bottle from it. “Here, take a sleep capsule. When you wake up we’ll try again.”
It was dawn when they began again. Leoh entered the dueling machine determined to let Hector win. He gave the youthful Star Watchman his choice of weapons and environment. Hector picked one-man scout ships in planetary orbits. Their weapons were conventional laser beams.
But despite his own conscious desire, Leoh found himself winning! The ships spiraled around an unnamed planet, their paths intersecting at least once in every orbit. The problem was to estimate your opponent’s orbital position, and then program your own ship so that you would arrive’ at that position either behind or to one side of him. Then you could train your guns on him before he could turn on you.
The problem should have been an easy one for Hector, with his knack for intuitive mental calculation. But Leoh scored the first hit. Hector had piloted his ship into an excellent firing position, but his shot went wide. Leoh maneuvered clumsily, but he managed to register a trifling hit on the side of Hector’s ship.
In the next three passes, Leoh scored two more hits. Hector’s ship was badly damaged now. In return, the Star Watchman had landed one glancing shot on Leoh’s ship. They came around again, and once more Leoh had outguessed his young opponent. He trained his guns on Hector’s ship, then hesitated with his hand poised above the firing button.
But Leoh’s hand, almost of its own will, reached the button and touched it lightly; another gram of pressure and the guns would fire.
In that instant’s hesitation, Hector pulled his crippled ship around and aimed at Leoh. The Watchman fired a searing blast that jarred Leoh’s ship from end to end. Leoh’s hand slammed down on the firing button; whether he intended to do it or not, he didn’t know.
Leoh’s shot raked Hector’s ship but didn’t stop it. The two vehicles were hurtling directly at each other. Leoh tried desperately to avert a collision, but Hector bore in grimly, matching Leoh’s maneuvers with his own.
The two ships smashed together and exploded.
Abruptly, Leoh found himself in the cramped booth of the dueling machine, his body cold and damp with perspiration, his hands trembling.
He squeezed out of the booth and took a deep breath. Warm sunlight was streaming into the high-vaulted room. The white walls gleamed brilliantly. Through the tall windows he could see trees and early students and clouds in the sky.
Hector walked up to him. For the first time in several days, the Watchman was smiling. Not much, but smiling. “Well, we… uh, broke even on that one.”
Leoh smiled back, somewhat shakily. “Yes. It was… quite an experience. I’ve never died before.”
Hector fidgeted. “It’s not so bad, I guess. It… sort of, well, it sort of shatters you, though.”
“Yes. I can see that now.”
“Try another duel?” Hector asked, nodding toward the machine.
“No. Not now. Let’s get out of this place for a few hours. Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
They fought several more duels over the next day and a half. Hector won three of them. It was late afternoon when Leoh called a halt.
“We can get in another couple,” the Watchman said.
“No need,” said Leoh. “I have all the data I require. Tomorrow Massan meets Odal, unless we can put a stop to it. We’ve got much to do before tomorrow morning.”
