The meditechs left and shut the booth. Leoh was alone now, staring into the screen and its subtly shifting colors. He tried to close his eyes, found that he couldn’t, tried again and succeeded.
When he opened them he was standing in the middle of a large, gymnasium-like room. There were windows high up near the lofty ceiling. Instead of being filled with athletic apparatus, this room was crammed with rope pulleys, inclined ramps, metal spheres of all sizes from a few centimeters to twice the height of a man. Leoh was standing on a slightly raised, circular platform, holding a small control box in his hand.
Lal Ponte stood across the room, his back to a wall, frowning at the jungle of unfamiliar equipment.
“This is a sort of elementary physics lab,” Leoh called out to him. “While none of the objects here are really weapons, many of them can be dangerous if you know how to use them. Or if you don’t know.”
Ponte began to object. “This is unreasonable. . . .”
“Not really,” Leoh said pleasantly. “You’ll find that the equipment is spread around the room to form a sort of maze. Your job is to get through the maze to this platform, and to find something to use as a weapon on me. Now, there are traps in the maze. You’ll have to avoid them. And this platform is really a turntable . . . but we’ll talk about that later.”
Ponte looked around. “You are foolish.”
“Perhaps.”
The Acquatainian took a few steps to his right and lifted a slender metal rod. Hefting it in his hand, he started toward Leoh.
“That’s a lever,” the Professor said. “Of course, you can use it as a club if you wish.”
A tangle of ropes stood in Ponte’s way. Instead of detouring around them, he pushed his way through.
Leoh shook his head and touched a button on his control box. “A mistake, I’m afraid.”
The ropes-a pulley, actually-jerked into motion and heaved the flooring under Ponte’s feet upward. The Acquatainian toppled to his hands and knees and found himself on a platform suddenly ten meters in the air. Dropping the lever, he began grabbing at the ropes. One of them swung free and he jumped at it, curling his arms and legs around it.
“Pendulum,” Leoh called to him. “Watch your. . . .”
Ponte’s rope, with him on it, swung out a little way, then swung back again toward the mid-air platform. He cracked his head nastily on the platform’s edge, let go of the rope, and thudded to the floor.
“The floor’s padded,” Leoh said, “but I forgot to pad the edge of the platform. Hope it didn’t hurt you too badly.”
Ponte sat up groggily, his head rolling. It took him three tries to stand up again. He staggered forward.
“On your right is an inclined plane of the sort Galileo used, only much larger. You’ll have to hurry to get past the ball. …”
At a touch of Leoh’s finger on the control box, an immense metal ball began rolling down the gangway-sized plane. Ponte heard its rumbling, turned to stare at it goggle-eyed, and barely managed to jump out of its way. The ball rolled across the floor, ponderously smashing everything in its way until it crashed against the far wall.
“Perhaps you’d better sit down for a few moments and gather your wits,” Leoh suggested.
Ponte was puffing hard. “You . . . you’re a devil … a smiling devil.”
He reached down for a small sphere at his feet. As he raised his hand to throw it, Leoh touched the control box again and the turntable platform began to rotate slowly. Ponte’s awkward toss missed him by a meter.
“I can adjust the turntable’s speed,” Leoh explained as Ponte threw several more spheres. All missed.
The Acquatainian, his once-bland face furiously red now, rushed toward the spinning platform and jumped onto it, on the side opposite Leoh. He still had two small spheres in his hand.
“Be careful,” Leoh warned as Ponte swayed and nearly fell off. “Centrifugal force can be tricky. …”
The two men stood unmoving for a moment: Leoh alertly watching, Ponte glaring. The room appeared to be swinging around them.