Leoh slouched back in his desk chair and cast a weary eye on the stack of papers that recorded the latest performance 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 circuits. 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 human beings.
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 overpowered Dulaq’s.
“Overpowered?” That’s a terribly unscientific term, Leoh argued against himself.
Before he could cany the debate any further, he heard the main door of the big chamber slide open and bang shut, and Hector’s off-key whistle shrilled and echoed through the high-vaulted room.
Leoh sighed and put his self-contained argument off to the back of his mind. Trying to think logically near Hector was a hopeless prospect,
“Are you in, Professor?” the Star Watchman’s voice rang out.
“In here.”
Hector ducked in through the doorway and plopped his rangy frame on the couch.
“Everything going well, sir?”
Leoh shrugged. “Not very well, I’m afraid. I can’t find anything wrong with the dueling machine. I can’t even force it to malfunction.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Hector chirped happily.
“In a sense,” Leoh admitted, feeling slightly nettled at the youth’s boundless, pointless optimism. “But, you see, it means that Kanus’ people can do things with the machine that I can’t.”