To stay alive as long as possible, Odal realized. Hoping that thought didn’t get across to Romis, he said, “I’ll join you.”
“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: If I round up Romis and all the plotters against the Leader, that should make me a hero of Kerak again.
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 payload. We needn’t lift a star ship’s structure or power drive. Our drive—the dueling machine—can remain on the ground. Only the payload is transported.”
“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 lifted weights without touching them, and then even transported Geri from one booth to the other. But he could only move things inside the dueling machine.
“We may have an interstellar transport mechanism here,” Leoh said at the end of a week, tired but enormously happy. “There’d have to be a dueling machine, or something like it, at the other end, though.”
The pain was unbearable. Odal screamed soundlessly, in his mind, as a dozen lances of fire drilled through him. His body jerked spasmodically, arms and legs twitching uncontrolled, innards cramping and coiling, heart pounding dangerously fast. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, could only taste blood in his mouth.
Romis! Where is Romis! Why doesn’t he come? He would have told his inquisitors everything, anything, just to make them stop. But they weren’t even asking him questions. They weren’t interested in his memories or his confession.
Jump!
Transport yourself to the next booth.
You are a trained telepath, you must have latent teleportation powers, as well.
We will not ease up on this pressure until you teleport to the next booth. Indeed, the pressure will be increased until you do as you are told.
JUMP!
Hector sat in the dueling machine in Acquatainia and concentrated on his job. A drawerful of papers, tapes, and holograms was in the other booth. Hector was going to transport it to a dueling machine on the other side of the planet. This would be the first long-distance jump.
It wasn’t easy to concentrate. Geri was waiting for him outside. Leoh had been working him all day. A stray thought of Odal crossed his mind:I wonder what he’s up to now? Is he working on teleportation too?
He felt a brief tingling sensation, like a mild electric shock.
“Funny,” he muttered.
Puzzled, he removed the neurocontacts from his head and body, got up, and opened the booth door.
The technicians at the control desk gaped at him. It took Hector a full five seconds to realize that they were wearing Kerak uniforms. A pair of guards, looking equally startled, reached for their side arms as soon as they recognized the Star Watch emblem on Hector’s coveralls.
He had time to say, “Oh-oh,” before the guards shot him down.
On Acquatainia, Leoh was shaking his head unhappily as he inspected the pile of materials that Hector was supposed to teleport.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “It didn’t work at all.” His puzzled musing was shattered by Geri’s scream. Looking up, he saw her cowering against the control desk, screaming in uncontrolled hysteria. Framed in the doorway of the farther booth stood the tall, lithe figure of Odal.
“This is absolutely fantastic,” said Sir Harold Spencer.
Leoh nodded agreement. The old scientist was at his desk in the office behind the dueling machine chamber. Spencer seemed to be on a star ship, from the looks of the austere, metal-walled cabin that was visible behind his tri-di image.
“He actually jumped from Kerak to Acquatainia?” Spencer still looked unconvinced.
“In something less than a second,” Leoh repeated. “Four hundred and fifty light years in less than a second.”
Spencer’s brow darkened. “Do you realize what you’ve done, Albert? The military potential of this… teleportation. And Kanus must know all about it, too.”
“Yes. And he’s holding Hector somewhere in Kerak. We’ve got to get him out… if he’s still alive”
“I know,” Spencer said, absolutely glowering now. “And what about this Kerak assassin? I suppose the Acquatainians have him safely filed away?”
Nodding again, Leoh answered, “They’re not quite sure what to do with him. Technically, he’s not charged with any crimes. Actually, the last thing in the world anyone wants is to send him back to Kerak.”
“Why did he leave? Why come back to Acquatainia?”
“Don’t know. Odal won’t tell us anything, except to claim asylum on Acquatainia. Most people here think it’s another sort of trick.”
Spencer drummed his fingers on his thigh impatiently. “So Odal is imprisoned in Acquatainia, Hector is presumably jailed in Kerak—or worse. And I have a survey fleet heading for the Acquataine-Kerak frontier on a mission that’s now obviously hopeless. Kanus needn’t fight his way into Acquatainia. He can pop into the midst of the Cluster, wherever there are dueling machines.”
“We could shut them down, or guard them,” Leoh suggested.
Frowning again, Spencer pointed out, “There’s nothing to prevent Kanus from building machines inside every Kerak embassy or consulate building in the Cluster… or in the Commonwealth, for that matter. Nothing short of war can stop him from doing that.”
“And war is exactly what we’re trying to prevent.” “We’ve got to prevent it,” Spencer rumbled, “if we want to keep the Commonwealth intact.”