The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  “Can I help you?” Leoh asked, stopping at the edge of the slideway.

  “How... how did you do that, sir?”

  “Do what?”

  “Get that girl to agree to visit the university. I’ve been, well, sort of talking to her for half an hour and she... uh, she wouldn’t even look straight at me.”

  Leoh broke into a chuckle. “Well, young man, to begin with, you were much too flustered. It made you appear overanxious. On the other hand, I’m at an age where I can be fatherly. She was on guard against you, but not against me.”

  “I see... I think.”

  “Yes.” Leoh gestured toward the slideway. “I suppose this is where we go our separate ways.”

  “Oh no, sir. I’m going with you. That is, I mean... you are Dr. Leoh, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am. And you must be...” Leoh hesitated. Can this be a Star Watch officer? he wondered.

  The youth stiffened to attention and for an absurd flash of a second Leoh thought he was going to salute. “Junior Lieutenant Hector, sir; on special detached duty from cruiser SW4-J188, home base Perseus Alpha VI.”

  “I see,” Leoh replied. “Hmm... Is Hector your first name or your last?”

  “Both, sir.”

  I should have guessed, Leoh told himself. Aloud, he said, “All right, Lieutenant, we’d better get to the shuttle before it leaves without us.”

  They took to the slideway. Half a second later, Hector jumped off and dashed back to the communications booth for his travel kit. He hurried back to Leoh, bumping into seven bewildered citizens of various descriptions and nearly breaking both his legs when he tripped as he ran back onto the moving slideway. He went down on his face, sprawled across two lanes moving at different speeds, and needed the assistance of an elderly lady before he was again on his feet and standing beside Leoh.

  “I... I’m sorry to cause all that, uh, commotion, sir.”

  “That’s all right. You weren’t hurt, were you?”

  “Uh, no.... I don’t think so. Just embarrassed.”

  Leoh said nothing. They rode the slideway in silence through the busy station and out to the enclosed berths where the planetary shuttles were docked. They boarded one of the ships and found a pair of seats.

  “Just how long have you been with the Star Watch, Lieutenant?”

  “Six weeks, sir. Three weeks aboard a star ship bringing me out to Perseus Alpha VI, a week at the planetary base there, and two weeks aboard the cruiser... um, SW4-J188, that is. The crew called her Old Lardbucket... after the captain, I think. Oh, I mean, six weeks since I received my commission... I’ve been at the, uh, academy for four years.”

  “You got through the academy in four years?”

  “That’s the regulation time, sir.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  The ship eased out of its berth. There was a moment of free fall, then the drive engine came on and weight returned to the passenger cabin.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant, how did you get picked for this assignment?”

  “I wish I knew, sir,” Hector said, his lean face wrinkling into a puzzled frown. “I was working out a program for the navigation officer... aboard the cruiser. I’m pretty good at that... I can work out computer programs in my head, pretty much. Mathematics was my best subject at the academy.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, well, anyway, I was working out this program when the captain himself came on deck and started shaking my hand and telling me that I was being sent on special duty at Acquatainia by direct orders of the Commander in Chief. He seemed very happy... the captain, that is.”

  “He was probably pleased to see you get such an unusual assignment,” said Leoh, tactfully.

  “I’m not so sure,” Hector answered truthfully. “I think he regarded me as... well, some sort of a, um, problem. He had me on a different duty berth practically every day I was aboard the ship.”

  “Well now,” Leoh changed the subject, “what do you know about psychonics?”

  “About what, sir?”

  “Er... electroencephalography?”

  Hector looked blank.

  “Psychology, perhaps?” Leoh suggested hopefully. “Physiology? Computer molectronics?”

  “I’m pretty good at mathematics!”

  “Yes, I know. Did you, by any chance, receive any training in diplomatic affairs?”

  “At the Star Watch Academy? No, sir.”

  Leoh ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Then why did the Star Watch select you for this job? I must confess, Lieutenant, that I can’t understand the workings of a military organization.”

  Hector shook his head ruefully. “Neither do I, sir.”

  The next week was an enervatingly slow one for Leoh, evenly divided between a tedious checking of each component of the dueling machine, and shameless ruses to keep Hector as far away from the machine as possible.

  The Star Watchman certainly wanted to help, and he actually was little short of brilliant in handling intricate mathematics completely in his head. But he was also, Leoh found, a clumsy, chattering, whistling, scatter-brained, inexperienced bundle of noise and nerves. It was impossible to do constructive work with him nearby.

  Perhaps you're judging him too harshly, Leoh warned himself. You might be letting your frustrations with the machine get the better of your sense of balance.

  The professor was sitting in the office that the Acquatainians had given him in one end of the former lecture hall that now held the dueling machine. Leoh could see its impassive metal hulk through the open office door. The room he was sitting in had been one of a suite of offices used by the permanent staff of the machine. But they had moved out of the building completely, in deference (or was it jealousy) to Leoh, and the Acquatainian government had turned the cubbyhole offices into living quarters for Leoh and the Star Watchman.

  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 carry 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.”

  Hector considered the problem. “Hmm... yes, I guess that’s right too, isn’t it?”

  “Did you see the girl back to her ship safely?” Leoh asked.

  “Yessir,” Hector replied, bobbing his head vigorously. “She’s on her way back to the communications booth at the space station. She said to tell you thanks and she enjoyed the visit a lot.”

  “Good. It was very good of you
to escort her around the campus. It kept her out of my hair... what’s left of it, that is.”

  Hector grinned. “Oh, I liked taking her around and all that... and, well, it sort of kept me out of your hair too, didn’t it?”

  Leoh’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  Laughing, Hector said, “Professor, I may be clumsy, and I’m sure no scientist... but I’m not completely brainless.”

  “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression.”

  “Oh no... don’t be sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound... well, the way it sounded... That is, I know I’m just in your way...” He started to get up.

  Leoh waved him back to the couch. “Relax, my boy, relax. You know, I’ve been sitting here all afternoon wondering what to do next. Somehow, just now, I’ve come to a conclusion.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to leave the Acquataine Cluster and return to Carinae.”

  “What? But you can’t! I mean...”

  “Why not? I’m not accomplishing anything here. Whatever it is that this Odal and Kanus have been doing, it’s basically a political problem, not a scientific one. The professional staff of the machine here will catch up to their tricks, sooner or later.”

  “But, sir, if you can’t find the answer, how can they?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know. But, as I said, this is a political problem more than a scientific one. I’m tired and frustrated and I’m feeling my years. I want to return to Carinae and spend the next few months considering beautifully abstract problems such as instantaneous transportation devices. Let Massan and the Star Watch worry about Kanus.”

  “Oh! That’s what I came to tell you. Massan has been challenged to a duel by Odal.”

  “What?”

  “This afternoon. Odal went to the Capital building and picked an argument with Massan right in the main corridor and challenged him.”

  “Massan accepted?” Leoh asked.

  Hector nodded.

  Leoh leaned across his desk and reached for the phone. It took a few minutes and a few levels of secretaries and assistants, but finally Massan’s dark, bearded face appeared on the screen above the desk.

  “You’ve accepted Odal’s challenge?” Leoh asked, without preliminaries.

  “We meet next week,” Massan replied gravely.

  “You should have refused.”

  “On what pretext?”

  “No pretext. A flat refusal, based on the certainty that Odal or someone else from Kerak is tampering with the dueling machine.”

  Massan shook his head sadly. “My dear learned sir, you do not comprehend the political situation. The government of Acquatainia is much closer to dissolution than I dare to admit publicly. The coalition of star-nations that Dulaq had constructed to keep Kerak neutralized has broken apart completely. Kerak is already arming. This morning, Kanus announced he would annex Szarno, with its enormous armaments industry. This afternoon, Odal challenges me.”

  “I think I see...”

  “Of course. The Acquataine government is paralyzed now, until the outcome of the duel is known. We cannot effectively intervene in the Szarno crisis until we know who will be heading the government next week. And, frankly, more than a few members of the Cabinet are now openly favoring Kanus and arguing that we should establish friendly relations with him before it is too late.”

  “But that’s all the more reason for refusing the duel,” Leoh insisted.

  “And be accused of cowardice in my own Cabinet meetings?” Massan shook his head. “In politics, my dear sir, the appearance of a man means much—sometimes more than his substance. As a coward, I would soon be out of office. But, perhaps, as the winner of a duel against the invincible Odal... or even as a martyr... I may accomplish something useful.”

  Leoh said nothing.

  Massan continued, “I put off the duel for a week, which is the longest time I dare to postpone. I hope that in that time you can discover Odal’s secret. As it is, the political situation may collapse about our heads at any moment.”

  “I’ll take the machine apart and rebuild it again, molecule by molecule,” Leoh promised.

  As Massan’s image faded from the screen, Leoh turned to Hector. “We have one week to save his life.”

  “And, uh, maybe prevent a war,” Hector added.

  “Yes.” Leoh leaned back in his chair and stared off into infinity.

  Hector shuffled his feet, rubbed his nose, whistled a few bars of off-key tunes, and finally blurted, “How can you take apart the dueling machine?”

  “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 course, 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 the use of these weapons, Leoh won almost all the bouts. He was neither faster nor more accurate when they were target-shooting. But when the two of them faced each other, somehow Leoh almost always won.

  The machine projects more than thoughts, Leoh began to realize. It projects personality.

  They worked in the dueling machine day and night now, enclosed in the booths for twelve or more hours a day, driving themselves and the machine’s regular staff to near exhaustion. When they gulped their meals, between duels, they were physically ragged and sharp-tempered. They usually fell asleep in Leoh’s office, discussing the results of the day’s work.

  The duels slowly grew more serious. Leoh was pushing the machine to its limits now, carefully extending the rigors of each bout. Even though he knew exactly what and how much he intended to do in each fight, it often took a conscious effort to remind himself that the battles he was fighting were actually imaginary.

  As the duels became more dangerous, and the artificially amplified hallucinations began to end in blood and death, Leoh found himself winning more and more frequently. With one part of his mind he was driving to analyze the cause of his consistent success. But another part of him was beginning to enjoy his prowess.

  The strain was telling on Hector. The physical exertion of constant work and practically no relief was considerable in itself. But the emotional effects of being �
��hurt” and “killed” repeatedly were infinitely worse.

  “Perhaps we should stop for a while,” Leoh suggested after the fourth day of tests.

  “No, I’m all right.”

  Leoh looked at him. Hector’s face was haggard, his eyes bleary.

  “You’ve had enough,” Leoh said quietly.

  “Please don’t make me stop,” Hector begged. “I... I can’t stop now. Please give me a chance to do better. I’m improving... I lasted twice as long in this afternoon’s duels as I did this morning. Please, don’t end it now... not while I’m completely lost...”

  Leoh stared at him. “You want to go on?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if I say no?”

  Hector hesitated. Leoh sensed he was struggling with himself. “If you say no,” he answered dully, “then it’ll be no. I can’t argue against you any more.”

  Leoh was silent for a long moment. Finally he opened a desk drawer and took a small bottle from it. “Here, take a sleep capsule. When you wake up we’ll try again.”

  It was dawn when they began again. Leoh entered the dueling machine determined to let Hector win. He gave the youthful Star Watchman his choice of weapons and environment. Hector picked one-man scout ships in planetary orbits. Their weapons were conventional laser beams.

  But despite his own conscious desire, Leoh found himself winning! The ships spiraled around an unnamed planet, their paths intersecting at least once in every orbit. The problem was to estimate your opponent’s orbital position, and then program your own ship so that you would arrive at that position either behind or to one side of him. Then you could train your guns on him before he could turn on you.

  The problem should have been an easy one for Hector, with his knack for intuitive mental calculation. But Leoh scored the first hit. Hector had piloted his ship into an excellent firing position, but his shot went wide. Leoh maneuvered clumsily, but he managed to register a trifling hit on the side of Hector’s ship.