Ben Bova - The Dueling Machine

“When we’re ready to attack the Acquatainians, just how far can we trust Kanus to allow the army to operate without political interference?”

“I simply don’t understand what came over me,” Leoh said to Spencer and Hector. “I never let my temper get the better of me.”

They were standing in the former lecture hall that housed the grotesque bulk of the dueling machine. No one else had entered yet; the duel with Ponte was still an hour away.

“Come now, Albert,” said Spencer. “If that whining little politician had spoken to me the way he did to you, I’d have been tempted to hit him there and then.”

Leoh shrugged.

“These Acquatainians are an emotional lot,” Spencer went on. “Frankly, I’m glad to be leaving.”

“When will you go?”

“As soon as this silly duel is finished. It’s quite clear that Martine is unwilling to accept any support from the Commonwealth. My presence here is merely aggravating him and his people.”

Hector spoke for the first time. “That means there’ll be war between Acquatainia and Kerak.” He said it quietly, his eyes gazing off into space, as though he were talking to himself.

“Both sides want war,” Spencer said.

“Stupidity,” muttered Leoh.

“Pride,” Spencer corrected. “The same kind of pride that makes men fight duels.”

Startled, Leoh was about to answer until he saw the grin on Spencer’s leathery face.

The chamber filled slowly. The meditechs who operated the dueling machine came in, a few at a time, and started checking out the machine. There was a new man on the team, sitting at a new console. His equipment monitored the duels and made certain that neither of the duelists was getting telepathic help from outside.

Ponte and his group arrived precisely at the appointed time for the duel. Four newsmen appeared in the press gallery, high above. Leoh suppressed a frown. Surely a duel involving the machine’s inventor should warrant more attention from the networks.

They went through the medical checks, the instructions on using the machine (which Leoh had written), and the agreement that the challenged party would have the first choice of weapons.

“My weapon will be the elementary laws of physics,” Leoh said. “No special instructions will be necessary.”

Ponte’s eyes widened slightly with puzzlement. His seconds glanced at each other. Even the dueling machine’s meditechs looked uncertain. After a heartbeat’s silence, the chief meditech shrugged.

“If there are no objections,” he said, “let us proceed.”

Leoh sat patiently in his booth while the meditechs attached the neurocontacts to his head and torso. Strange, he thought. I’ve operated dueling machines hundreds of times. But this is the first time the other man in the machine is really angry at me. He wants to kill me.

The meditechs left and shut the booth. Leoh was alone now, staring into the screen and its subtly shifting colors. He tried to close his eyes, found that he couldn’t, tried again and succeeded.

When he opened them he was standing in the middle of a large, gymnasium-like room. There were windows high up near the lofty ceiling. Instead of being filled with athletic apparatus, this room was crammed with rope pulleys, inclined ramps, metal spheres of all sizes from a few centimeters to twice the height of a man. Leoh was standing on a slightly raised, circular platform, holding a small control box in his hand.

Lal Ponte stood across the room, his back to a wall, frowning at the jungle of unfamiliar equipment.

“This is a sort of elementary physics lab,” Leoh called out to him. “While none of the objects here are really weapons, many of them can be dangerous if you know how to use them. Or if you don’t know.”

Ponte began to object. “This is unreasonable…”

“Not really,” Leoh said pleasantly. “You’ll find that the equipment is spread around the room to form a sort of maze. Your job is to get through the maze to this platform, and to find something to use as a weapon on me. Now, there are traps in the maze. You’ll have to avoid them. And this platform is really a turntable… but we’ll talk about that later.”

Ponte looked around. “You are foolish.”

“Perhaps.”

The Acquatainian took a few steps to his right and lifted a slender metal rod. Hefting it in his hand, he started toward Leoh.

“That’s a lever,” the Professor said. “Of course, you can use it as a club if you wish.”

A tangle of ropes stood in Ponte’s way. Instead of detouring around them, he pushed his way through.

Leoh shook his head and touched a button on his control box. “A mistake, I’m afraid.”

The ropes—a pulley, actually—jerked into motion and heaved the flooring under Ponte’s feet upward. The Acquatainian toppled to his hands and knees and found himself on a platform suddenly ten meters in the air. Dropping the lever, he began grabbing at the ropes. One of them swung free and he jumped at it, curling his arms and legs around it.

“Pendulum,” Leoh called to him. “Watch your…”

Ponte’s rope, with him on it, swung out a little way, then swung back again toward the mid-air platform. He cracked his head nastily on the platform’s edge, let go of the rope, and thudded to the floor.

“The floor’s padded,” Leoh said, “but I forgot to pad the edge of the platform. Hope it didn’t hurt you too badly.”

Ponte sat up groggily, his head rolling. It took him three tries to stand up again. He staggered forward.

“On your right is an inclined plane of the sort Galileo used, only much larger. You’ll have to hurry to get past the ball.…”

At a touch of Leoh’s finger on the control box, an immense metal ball began rolling down the gangway-sized plane. Ponte heard its rumbling, turned to stare at it goggle-eyed, and barely managed to jump out of its way. The ball rolled across the floor, ponderously smashing everything in its way until it crashed against the far wall.

“Perhaps you’d better sit down for a few moments and gather your wits,” Leoh suggested.

Ponte was puffing hard. “You… you’re a devil… a smiling devil.”

He reached down for a small sphere at his feet. As he raised his hand to throw it, Leoh touched the control box again and the turntable platform began to rotate slowly. Ponte’s awkward toss missed him by a meter.

“I can adjust the turntable’s speed,” Leoh explained as Ponte threw several more spheres. All missed.

The Acquatainian, his once-bland face furiously red now, rushed toward the spinning platform and jumped onto it, on the side opposite Leoh. He still had two small spheres in his hand.

“Be careful,” Leoh warned as Ponte swayed and nearly fell off. “Centrifugal force can be tricky.…”

The two men stood unmoving for a moment: Leoh alertly watching, Ponte glaring. The room appeared to be swinging around them.

Ponte threw one of the spheres as hard as he could. It seemed to curve away from Leoh.

“The Coriolis force,” said Leoh, in a slightly lecturing tone, “is a natural phenomenon on rotating systems. It’s what makes the winds curve across a planet’s rotating surface.”

The second sphere whistled by, no closer than the first.

“I should also warn you that this platform is made of alternate sections of magnetic and nonmagnetic materials.” Leoh gestured toward the mosaic-colored floor. “Your shoes have metal in them. If you remain on the magnetized sections, the red ones, you should be able to move about without too much difficulty.”

He touched the control box again and the turntable speeded up considerably. The room seemed to whirl wildly around them now. Leoh hunched down and leaned inward.