“Hmm?” Leoh snapped out of his reverie.
“How can you take apart the dueling machine?” Hector repeated. “I mean … well, it’s a big job to do in a week.”
“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 this job mentally.”
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 machines himself many times in the past, but only in tests of the system’s routine performance. Never in actual combat against another human being. To Hector, of ourse, 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 him. They wandered through jungles and cities, over glaciers and interplanetary voids, all without ever leaving the dueling machine booths.
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. Leoh did poorly, because he knew nothing about fencing, and his reflexes were much slower than Hector’s. The dueling machine did not change a man’s knowledge or his physical abilities; it only projected them into a dream he was sharing with another man. It matched Leoh’s skills and knowledge against Hector’s. Then they tried other weapons—pistols, sonic beams, grenades—but always with the, precaution of imagining themselves to be wearing protective equipment. Strangely, even though Hector was trained in me use of these weapons, Leoh won almost all the bouts. He was neither faster nor more accurate when they were targetshooting. But when the two of them faced each other, somehow Leoh almost always won.