“Yes, it is. But, my boy, perhaps we ... the two of us ... can do it.”
Hector scratched his head. “Well, uh, sir ... I’m not very ... that is, my mechanical aptitude scores at the Academy—”
Leoh smiled at him. “No need for mechanical aptitude, my boy. You were trained to fight, weren’t you? We can do the job mentally.”
VIII
It was the strangest week of their lives.
Leoh’s plan was straightforward: to test the dueling machine, push it to the limits of its performance, by actually operating it—by fighting duels.
They started off easily enough, tentatively probing and flexing their mental muscles. Leoh had used the dueling machine himself many times in the past, but only in tests of the machines’ routine performance. Never in actual combat against another human being. To Hector, of course, the machine was a totally new and different experience.
The Acquatainian staff plunged into the project without question, providing Leoh with invaluable help in monitoring and analyzing the duels.
At first, Leoh and Hector did nothing more than play hide-and-seek, with one of them picking an environment and the other trying to find his opponent in it. They wandered through jungles and cities, over glaciers and interplanetary voids, seeking each other—without ever leaving the booths of the dueling machine.
Then, when Leoh was satisfied that the machine could reproduce and amplify thought patterns with strict fidelity, they began to fight light duels. They fenced with blunted foils—Hector won, of course, because of his much faster reflexes. Then they tried other weapons—pistols, sonic beams, grenades—but always wearing protective equipment. Strangely, even though Hector was trained in the use of these weapons, Leoh won almost all the bouts. He was neither faster nor more accurate, when they were target-shooting. But when the two of them faced each other, somehow Leoh almost always won.