Ben Bova - The Dueling Machine

“No permanent damage, I’m sure,” Leoh said as soothingly as he could.

The lights on the control panels sprang back to life, as did the room’s main illumination lights. “Hmp,” grunted the chief meditech. “I guess it’s all right. The power’s on again.”

“I don’t understand it,” Hector said.

“Neither do I,” Leoh answered. “But it’s something to think about.”

“What is?”

“How Hector got from one booth to the other.” To the chief meditech he called out, “I’m going to take the tape of this, er, experiment. Do you mind?”

The chief meditech was still inspecting the machine with the aggressive solicitude of a worried father. He nodded curtly to Leoh. “I don’t think you should do any more such experiments until we have back-up power units installed. The entire building was blacked out.”

Leoh sat in his office behind the dueling machine room, staring at the now blank view screen. In three days he had run the tape at least a hundred times. He had timed it down to the picosecond. He had seen Geri and Hector swimming lazily, happily, like two humanized dolphins perfectly at ease in the sea. Then Odal’s shark-life form sliced into view. Geri screamed. The scene cut off.

It was precisely at that moment (within four picoseconds, as nearly as Leoh could calculate it) that the power in the whole building went off.

How long did it take Hector to get from his booth to Geri’s? Thirty seconds? Leoh was looking into Hector’s booth about thirty seconds after the power went off, he estimated. Less, then. Ten seconds? Physically impossible; no one could disconnect himself from the neurocontacts and spring from one booth to the other in ten seconds. And both booth doors were closed, too.

Leoh muttered to himself, “Knowing Hector’s manual dexterity, it’s difficult to imagine him making the trip in less than ten minutes.”

All right then, he asked himself, how did he get into Geri’s booth? Precognition? He realized ahead of time that Odal would appear and frighten Geri? Then why doesn’t he remember it, or even remember going from one booth to the other? And why the enormous power drain? What happened to the machine to cause it?

There was only one answer that Leoh could see, but it was so farfetched that he wanted to find another one. The one answer was teleportation.

The dueling machine amplifies the powers of natural telepaths. Some telepaths have been reported to be able to move small objects with no apparent physical force. Could the dueling machine amplify that talent, too? And 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. Probably keeps three dietitians and a biochemist busy preventing him from going overweight, Leoh groused to himself.

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 very famous.”

“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.