“I don’t understand it,” Hector said.
“Neither do I,” Leoh answered. “But it’s something to think about.”
“What is?”
“How Hector got from one booth to the other.” To the chief meditech he called out, “I’m going to take the tape of this, er, experiment. Do you mind?”
The chief meditech was still inspecting the machine with the aggressive solicitude of a worried father. He nodded curtly to Leoh. “I don’t think you should do any more such experiments until we have back-up power units installed. The entire building was blacked out.”
Leoh sat in his office behind the dueling machine room, staring at the now blank viewscreen. In three days he had run the tape at least a hundred times. He had timed it down to the picosecond. He had seen Geri and Hector swimming lazily, happily, like two humanized dolphins perfectly at ease in the sea. Then Odal’s shark-like form sliced into view. Geri screamed. The scene cut off.
It was precisely at that moment (within tour picoseconds, as nearly as Leoh could calculate it) that the power in the whole building went off.
How long did it take Hector to get from his booth to Geri’s? Thirty seconds? Leoh was looking into Hector’s booth about thirty seconds after the power went off, he estimated. Less, then. Ten seconds? Physically impossible; no one could disconnect himself from the neurocontacts and spring from one booth to the other in ten seconds. And both booth doors were closed, too.
Leoh muttered to himself, “Knowing Hector’s manual dexterity, it’s difficult to imagine him making the trip in less than ten minutes.”