And at each university there were the local newsmen, tri-di appearances, discussion clubs. And the faculty parties in the evenings. And the informal student seminars n the late afternoons. And the newsman who just “dropped in for a few words” at breakfast time.
It took more than two months to make the rounds of each university in the Cluster. At first, Leoh tried to steal a few moments each day to work on the problem of Hector’s “jump.” But each day he woke up more tired, each day was filled with still more people to talk to, people who listened respectfully, admiringly. Each night he retired later; happy, exhausted, with a small nagging grumble in the back of his mind that he should really stop this show-business routine and get back to science.
Hector grew more and more worried as he shepherded Leoh from one campus to the next. The old man was obviously enjoying himself hugely, and just as obviously spending too much of his strength on the traveling and personal appearances and parties. What’s more. Gen was in the capital city, and all the eager smiling girls on all the campuses in the Cluster couldn’t replace her in his eyes.
In the midst of all this, Leoh even fought two more duels.
The first one was with a university physics student who had bet his friends that he could beat the Professor. Leoh agreed good-naturedly to the duel, provided the boy was willing to let the tape be shown on tri-di. The boy agreed.
Instead of the simple physics arena, Leoh chose a more difficult battleground: the intensely warped space in the powerful gravitational field of a collapsed star. The duelists fought in one-man spacecraft, using laser beams for weapons. The problem was to control the ship in a gravitational field so tenacious that one slip meant an inevitable spiral into the star’s seething surface; and to aim the laser weapons properly, where the relativistic warp of space drove straight-line physics out the window.