It was deep twilight when the groundcar slid to a halt on its cushion
of compressed air before the Kerak Embassy.
“I still think it’s a mistake to go in there,” Hector said. “I mean,
you could’ve called him on the tri-di just as well, couldn’t you?”
Leoh shook his head. “Never give an agency of any government the
opportunity to say ‘hold the line a moment’ and then huddle together
to consider what to do with you. Nineteen times out of twenty, they’ll
end by passing your request up to the next higher echelon, and you’ll
be left waiting for weeks.”
“Still,” Hector insisted, “you’re simply stepping into enemy
territory. It’s a chance you shouldn’t take.”
“They wouldn’t dare touch us.”
Hector did not reply, but he looked unconvinced.
“Look,” Leoh said, “there are only two men alive who can shed light on
this matter. One of them is Dulaq, and his mind is closed to us for an
indefinite time. Odal is the only other one who knows what happened.”
Hector shook his head skeptically. Leoh shrugged, and opened the door
of the groundcar. Hector had no choice but to get out and follow him
as he walked up the pathway to the main entrance of the Embassy. The
building stood gaunt and gray in the dusk, surrounded by a
precisely-clipped hedge. The entrance was flanked by a pair of tall
evergreen trees.
Leoh and Hector were met just inside the entrance by a female
receptionist. She looked just a trifle disheveled—as though she had
been rushed to the desk at a moment’s notice. They asked for Odal,
were ushered into a sitting room, and within a few minutes—to
Hector’s surprise—were informed by the girl that Major Odal would be
with them shortly.
“You see,” Leoh pointed out jovially, “when you come in person they
haven’t as much of a chance to consider how to get rid of you.”
Hector glanced around the windowless room and contemplated the thick,
solidly closed door. “There’s a lot of scurrying going on on the other
side of that door, I’ll bet. I mean ... they may be considering how
to, uh, get rid of us ... permanently.”
Leoh shook his head, smiling wryly. “Undoubtedly the approach closest
to their hearts—but highly improbable in the present situation. They
have been making most efficient and effective use of the dueling
machine to gain their ends.”
Odal picked this moment to open the door.
“Dr. Leoh ... Lt. Hector ... you asked to see me?”
“Thank you, Major Odal; I hope you will be able to help me,” said Leoh.
“You are the only man living who may be able to give us some clues to
the failure of the Dueling Machine.”
Odal’s answering smile reminded Leoh of the best efforts of the
robot-puppet designers to make a machine that smiled like a man. “I
am afraid I can be of no assistance, Dr. Leoh. My experiences in the
machine are ... private.”
“Perhaps you don’t fully understand the situation,” Leoh said. “In the
past week, we have tested the dueling machine here on Acquatainia
exhaustively. We have learned that its performance can be greatly
influenced by a man’s personality, and by training. You have fought
many duels in the machines. Your background of experience, both as a
professional soldier and in the machines, gives you a decided
advantage over your opponents.
“However, even with all this considered, I am convinced that you
cannot kill a man in the machine—under normal circumstances. We have
demonstrated that fact in our tests. An unsabotaged machine cannot
cause actual physical harm.
“Yet you have already killed one man and incapacitated another. Where
will it stop?”
Odal’s face remained calm, except for the faintest glitter of fire
deep in his eyes. His voice was quiet, but had the edge of a
well-honed blade to it: “I cannot be blamed for my background and
experience. And I have not tampered with your machines.”
The door to the room opened, and a short, thick-set, bullet-headed man
entered. He was dressed in a dark street suit, so that it was
impossible to guess his station at the Embassy.
“Would the gentlemen care for refreshments?” he asked in a low-pitched
voice.
“No, thank you,” Leoh said.
“Some Kerak wine, perhaps?”
“Well—”
“I don’t, uh, think we’d better, sir,” Hector said. “Thanks all the
same.”
The man shrugged and sat at a chair next to the door.
Odal turned back to Leoh. “Sir, I have my duty. Massan and I duel
tomorrow. There is no possibility of postponing it.”
“Very well,” Leoh said. “Will you at least allow us to place some
special instrumentation into the booth with you, so that we can
monitor the duel more fully? We can do the same with Massan. I know
that duels are normally private and you would be within your legal
rights to refuse the request. But, morally—”
The smile returned to Odal’s face. “You wish to monitor my thoughts.
To record them and see how I perform during the duel. Interesting.
Very interesting—”
The man at the door rose and said, “If you have no desire for
refreshments, gentlemen—”
Odal turned to him. “Thank you for your attention.”
Their eyes met and locked for an instant. The man gave a barely
perceptible shake of his head, then left.
Odal returned his attention to Leoh. “I am sorry, professor, but I
cannot allow you to monitor my thoughts during the duel.”
“But—”
“I regret having to refuse you. But, as you yourself pointed out,
there is no legal requirement for such a course of action. I must
refuse. I hope you understand.”
Leoh rose from the couch, and Hector popped up beside him. “I’m afraid
I do understand. And I, too, regret your decision.”
Odal escorted them out to their car. They drove away, and the Kerak
major walked slowly back into the Embassy building. He was met in the
hallway by the dark-suited man who had sat in on the conversation.
“I could have let them monitor my thoughts and still crush Massan,”
Odal said. “It would have been a good joke on them.”
The man grunted. “I have just spoken to the Chancellor on the tri-di,
and obtained permission to make a slight adjustment in our plans.”
“An adjustment, Minister Kor?”
“After your duel tomorrow, your next opponent will be the eminent Dr.
Leoh,” Kor said.
X
The mists swirled deep and impenetrable about Fernd Massan. He stared
blindly through the useless viewplate in his helmet, then reached up
slowly and carefully to place the infrared detector before his eyes.
_I never realized an hallucination could seem so real_, Massan
thought.
Since the challenge by Odal, he realized, the actual world had seemed
quite unreal. For a week, he had gone through the motions of life, but
felt as though he were standing aside, a spectator mind watching its
own body from a distance. The gathering of his friends and associates
last night, the night before the duel—that silent, funereal group of
people—it had all seemed completely unreal to him.
[Illustration]
But now, in this manufactured dream, he seemed vibrantly alive. Every
sensation was solid, stimulating. He could feel his pulse throbbing
through him. Somewhere out in those mists, he knew, was Odal. And the
thought of coming to grips with the assassin filled him with a strange
satisfaction.
Massan had spent a good many years serving his government on the rich
but inhospitable high-gravity planets of the Acquataine Cluster. This
was the environment he had chosen: crushing gravity; killing
pressures; atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen, laced with free
radicals of sulphur and other valuable but deadly chemicals; oceans of
liquid methane and ammonia; “solid ground” consisting of quickly
crumbling, eroding ice; howling superpowerful winds that could pick up
a mountain of ice and hurl it halfway around the planet; darkness;
danger; death.
He was encased in a one-man protective outfit that was half armored
suit, half vehicle. There was an internal grav field to keep him
comfortable in 3.7 gees, but still the suit was cumbersome, and a man
could move only very slowly in it, even with the aid of servomotors.
The weapon he had chosen was simplicity itself—a hand-sized capsule
of oxygen. But in a hydrogen/ammonia atmosphere, oxygen could be a
deadly explosive. Massan carried several of these “bombs”; so did
Odal. _But the trick_, Massan thought to himself, _is to know how to
throw them under these conditions; the proper range, the proper
trajectory. Not an easy thing to learn, without years of experience._
The terms of the duel were simple: Massan and Odal were situated on a
rough-topped iceberg that was being swirled along one of the
methane/ammonia ocean’s vicious currents. The ice was rapidly
crumbling; the duel would end when the iceberg was completely broken
up.
Massan edged along the ragged terrain. His suit’s grippers and rollers
automatically adjusted to the roughness of the topography. He
concentrated his attention on the infrared detector that hung before
his viewplate.
A chunk of ice the size of a man’s head sailed through the murky
atmosphere in a steep glide peculiar to heavy gravity and banged into
the shoulder of Massan’s suit. The force was enough to rock him
slightly off-balance before the servos readjusted. Massan withdrew his
arm from the sleeve and felt the inside of the shoulder seam. _Dented,
but not penetrated._ A leak would have been disastrous, possibly
fatal. Then he remembered: _Of course—I cannot be killed except by
direct action of my antagonist. That is one of the rules of the game._
Still, he carefully fingered the dented shoulder to make certain it
was not leaking. The dueling machine and its rules seemed so very
remote and unsubstantial, compared to this freezing, howling inferno.
He diligently set about combing the iceberg, determined to find Odal
and kill him before their floating island disintegrated. He thoroughly
explored every projection, every crevice, every slope, working his way
slowly from one end of the ’berg toward the other. Back and forth,
cross and re-cross, with the infrared sensors scanning three hundred
sixty-degrees around him.
It was time-consuming. Even with the suit’s servomotors and propulsion
units, motion across the ice, against the buffeting wind, was a
cumbersome business. But Massan continued to work his way across the
iceberg, fighting down a gnawing, growing fear that Odal was not there
at all.
And then he caught just the barest flicker of a shadow on his
detector. Something, or someone, had darted behind a jutting rise of
the ice, off by the edge of the iceberg.
* * * * *
Slowly and carefully, Massan made his way toward the base of the rise.
He picked one of the oxy-bombs from his belt and held it in his
right-hand claw.
Massan edged around the base of the ice cliff, and stood on a narrow
ledge between the cliff and the churning sea. He saw no one. He
extended the detector’s range to maximum, and worked the scanners up
the sheer face of the cliff toward the top.
There he was! The shadowy outline of a man etched itself on the
detector screen. And at the same time, Massan heard a muffled roar,
then a rumbling, crashing noise, growing quickly louder and more
menacing.
He looked up the face of the ice cliff and saw a small avalanche of
ice tumbling, sliding, growling toward him. _That devil set off a bomb
at the top of the cliff!_
Massan tried to back out of the way, but it was too late. The first
chunk of ice bounced harmlessly off his helmet, but the others knocked
him off-balance so repeatedly that the servos had no chance to
recover. He staggered blindly for a few moments, as more and more ice
cascaded down on him, and then toppled off the ledge into the boiling
sea.
_Relax!_ he ordered himself. _Do not panic! The suit will float
you. The servos will keep you right-side-up. You cannot be killed
accidentally; Odal must perform the_ coup-de-grace _himself._
Then he remembered the emergency rocket units in the back of the suit.
If he could orient himself properly, a touch of a control stud on his
belt would set them off, and he would be boosted back onto the
iceberg. He turned slightly inside the suit and tried to judge the
iceberg’s distance through the infrared detector. It was difficult,
especially since he was bobbing madly in the churning currents.
Finally he decided to fire the rocket and make final adjustments of
distance and landing site after he was safely out of the sea.
But he could not move his hand.
He tried, but his entire right arm was locked fast. He could not budge
it an inch. And the same for the left. Something, or someone, was
clamping his arms tight. He could not even pull them out of their
sleeves.
Massan thrashed about, trying to shake off whatever it was. No use.
Then his detector screen was lifted slowly from the viewplate. He
felt something vibrating on his helmet. The oxygen tubes! They were
being disconnected.
He screamed and tried to fight free. No use. With a hiss, the oxygen
tubes pulled free of his helmet. Massan could feel the blood pounding
through his veins as he fought desperately to free himself.
Now he was being pushed down into the sea. He screamed again and tried
to wrench his body away. The frothing sea filled his viewplate. He was
under. He was being held under. And now ... now the viewplate itself
was being loosened.
_No! Don’t!_ The scalding cold methane ammonia sea seeped in through
the opening viewplate.
“It’s only a dream!” Massan shouted to himself. “Only a dream. A
dream. A—”