The next week was an enervatingly slow one for Leoh, evenly divided between tedious checking of each component of the dueling machine, and shameless ruses to keep Hector as far away from the machine as possible.
The Star Watchman certainly wanted to help, and he actually was little short of brilliant in doing intricate mathematics completely in his head. But he was, Leoh found, a clumsy, chattering, whistling, scatterbrained, inexperienced bundle of noise and nerves. It was impossible to do constructive work with him nearby.
Perhaps you’re judging him too harshly, Leoh warned himself. You just might be letting your frustrations with the dueling machine get the better of your sense of balance.
The professor was sitting in the office that the Acquatainians had given him in one end of the former lecture hall that held the dueling machine. Leoh could see its impassive metal hulk through the open office door.
The room he was sitting in had been one of a suite of offices used by the permanent staff of the machine. But they had moved out of the building completely, in deference to Leoh, and the Acquatainian government had turned the other cubbyhole offices into sleeping rooms for the professor and the Star Watchman, and an auto-kitchen. A combination cook-valet-handyman appeared twice each day—morning and evening—to handle any special chores that the cleaning machines and auto-kitchen might miss.
Leoh slouched back in his desk chair and cast a weary eye on the stack of papers that recorded the latest performances of the machine. Earlier that day he had taken the electroencephalographic records of clinical cases of catatonia and run them through the machine’s input unit. The machine immediately rejected them, refused to process them through the amplification units and association circuits.
In other words, the machine had recognized the EEG traces as something harmful to a human being.
Then how did it happen to Dulaq? Leoh asked himself for the thousandth time. It couldn’t have been the machine’s fault; it must have been something in Odal’s mind that simply overpowered Dulaq’s.
“Overpowered?” That’s a terribly unscientific term, Leoh argued against himself.
Before he could carry the debate any further, he heard the main door of the big chamber slide open and then bang shut, and Hector’s off-key whistle shrilled and echoed through the high-vaulted room.