In the first place, how could a thing that big and awkward have handled the helicopter so gracefully? How could any organic creature survive the explosion of an atomic grenade? How could it breath fire? How could it stand a burning torch being thrust into its eyes?
But it was the quotation that had brought it all home to me. I suddenly realized I was being fooled—and another of Suzi's quotations came to mind. This is a horse of another color. Then it clicked in its entirety.
The Trojan Horse, I had thought, something is inside. It's a robot, a mechanical fighting machine, like the tanks of old.
Suddenly the diplomats and the reporters were gone and Suzi was there, the star dust in her eyes again.
Before she could speak, I told her, humbly, "You were right, Suzi, I am a phony. I'm no champ. I was scared to death out there, when I found that all the super-weapons they'd made for me were—"
"But, darling, you won!" She knelt beside the bed, but I turned my head away.
"Won," I said bitterly. "Sure, by a fluke again. I won against a little half pint that could have been defeated by a child." I snorted in self-deprecation. "I wonder what the crowd out there is thinking. I enter the arena with enough weapons to depopulate a small planet, and it takes me half an hour to find out it's all a hoax."
She remained kneeling there, but it was another voice that said, "The crowd doesn't see it that way, Jak." It was Alger Wilde, who had entered with my manager.
"Of course not," Suzi insisted. "You didn't know what you were against, but you were in there all the time, taking on something worse than any gladiator in the System.—You proved yourself, Jak."
Alger went to the window and opened it. "Listen to this," he said grudgingly. From the distance I could hear the arena crowd singing The Solar System Forever.