He focused his attention on his surroundings and scanned the busy dining room. It was a beautiful place, really, decorated with crystal and genuine woods and fabric draperies. Not a synthetic in sightThe odors of delicious food, the hushed murmur of polite conversation. The waiters and cooks and bus boys were humans, not the autocookers and servers that most restaurants employed. Leoh suddenly felt touched at Hector’s attempt to restore his spirits—and at a junior lieutenant’s salary.
He saw the young Watchman approaching the table, coming back from the phone. Hector bumped two waiters and stumbled over a chair before reaching the relative safety of his own seat.
“What’s the verdict?” Leoh asked.
Hector’s lean face was bleak. ‘They couldn’t revive him. Cerebral hemorrhage, the meditechs said . . . brought on by shock.”
“Shock?”
“That’s what they said. Something must’ve, um, overloaded his nervous system … I guess.”
Leoh shook his head. “I just don’t understand any of this. I might as well admit it. I’m no closer to an answer now than when I arrived herePerhaps I should have retired years ago, before the dueling machine was invented.”
“No….”
“I mean it,” said Leoh. “This is the first real intellectual problem I’ve had to contend with in years. Tinkering with machinery, that’s easy. You know what you want and all you need is to make the machinery perform properly. But this .,. I’m afraid I’m too old to handle a puzzle like this.”
Hector scratched his nose thoughtfully. Then he answered, “If you can’t handle the problem, sir, then we’re going to have a war on our hands in a matter of months … or maybe just weeks. I mean, Kanus won’t be satisfied with swallowing the Szamo group. The Acquataine Cluster is next … and he’ll have to fight to get it.”