“Isn’t it beautiful?” Geri murmured. “Our own world, without troubles, without dangers.”
Hector nodded. It was hard to believe that they were actually sitting in a pair of booths some thirty meters apart. Hard to admit that there was another world where a war was brewing, where Odal was waiting to commit another murder.
A dark shape slid out from behind the rocks ahead. Geri screamed.
It was Odal. Slim, dressed in black, his lean face a mask of death.
“Hector, don’t let him! Hector, help me!”
Everything went black.
Hector snapped his eyes open. He was sitting in the booth beside Geri, his arms around her protectively. She was shuddering.
“How did.…”
“It was my fault,” she gasped. “I thought about Odal…”
The door to the booth was yanked open. Leoh stood there, his face a mixture of surprise and puzzlement.
“What are you two doing? All the lights and power in the building are off!”
“I’m sorry…” Hector began.
“It’s my fault,” Geri said. She explained what happened.
Leoh still looked puzzled. “But why are you both in the same booth?”
Hector started to answer, then it hit him. “I… I was in the other booth!”
“It’s empty,” Leoh said. “I looked in there first, when the power went off. The door was closed.”
Hector looked at Geri, then back at the Professor. “I must’ve jumped out of the booth and ran over here… but, I mean… I don’t remember doing it.”
The chief meditech came striding into the room, his steps clicking angrily against the hard flooring. “What’s going on here? Who blew out the power?”
Turning, Leoh said, “It’s all right, just a little experiment that didn’t work out.”
The chief meditech looked over the control console in the fading sunlight of the afternoon as Geri and Hector got out of the booth. He muttered and glared at them.
“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.”
10
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.”