The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  In the next three passes, Leoh scored two more hits. Hector’s ship was badly damaged now. In return, the Star Watchman had landed one glancing shot on Leoh’s ship. They came around again, and once more Leoh had outguessed his young opponent. He trained his guns on Hector’s ship, then hesitated with his hand poised above the firing button.

  Don't kill him again, he warned himself. His mind can't take another defeat.

  But Leoh’s hand, almost of its own will, reached the button and touched it lightly; another gram of pressure and the guns would fire.

  In that instant’s hesitation, Hector pulled his crippled ship around and aimed at Leoh. The Watchman fired a searing blast that jarred Leoh’s ship from end to end. Leoh’s hand slammed down on the firing button; whether he intended to do it or not, he didn’t know.

  Leoh’s shot raked Hector’s ship but didn’t stop it. The two vehicles were hurtling directly at each other. Leoh tried desperately to avert a collision, but Hector bore in grimly, matching Leoh’s maneuvers with his own.

  The two ships smashed together and exploded.

  Abruptly, Leoh found himself in the cramped booth of the dueling machine, his body cold and damp with perspiration, his hands trembling.

  He squeezed out of the booth and took a deep breath. Warm sunlight was streaming into the high-vaulted room. The white walls gleamed brilliantly. Through the tall windows he could see trees and early students and clouds in the sky.

  Hector walked up to him. For the first time in several days, the Watchman was smiling. Not much, but smiling. “Well, we... uh, broke even on that one.”

  Leoh smiled back, somewhat shakily. “Yes. It was... quite an experience. I’ve never died before.”

  Hector fidgeted. “It’s not so bad, I guess. It... sort of, well, it sort of shatters you, though.”

  “Yes. I can see that now.”

  “Try another duel?” Hector asked, nodding toward the machine.

  “No. Not now. Let’s get out of this place for a few hours. Are you hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  They fought several more duels over the next day and a half. Hector won three of them. It was late afternoon when Leoh called a halt.

  “We can get in another couple,” the Watchman said.

  “No need,” said Leoh. “I have all the data I require. Tomorrow Massan meets Odal, unless we can put a stop to it. We’ve got much to do before tomorrow morning.”

  Hector sagged into the couch. “Just as well. I think I’ve aged seven years in the past seven days.”

  “No, my boy,” Leoh said gently, “you haven’t aged. You’ve matured.”

  It was deep twilight when the ground car slid to a halt on its cushion of compressed air before the Kerak embassy.

  “I still think it’s a mistake to go in there,” Hector said. “I mean, you could’ve called him on the tri-di, couldn’t you?”

  Leoh shook his head. “Never give an agency of any government the opportunity to say, ‘hold the line a moment.’ They huddle together and consider what to do with you. Nineteen times out of twenty, they’ll end by passing you to another department or transferring your call to a taped, ‘So sorry,’ message.”

  “Still,” Hector insisted, “you’re sort of, well, stepping into enemy territory.”

  “They wouldn’t dare harm us.”

  Hector didn’t reply, but he looked unconvinced.

  “Look,” Leoh said, “there are only two men alive who can shed light on this matter. One of them is Dulaq, and his mind is closed to us for an indefinite time. Odal is the only other man who knows what happened in those duels.”

  Hector shook his head skeptically. Leoh shrugged, and opened the door of the ground car. Hector had no choice but to get out and follow him as he walked up the pathway to the main entrance of the embassy building. The building stood gaunt and gray in the dusk, surrounded by a precisely clipped hedge. The entrance was flanked by a pair of evergreen trees, straight and spare as sentries.

  Leoh and Hector were met just inside the entrance by a female receptionist. She looked just a trifle disheveled, as though she’d been rushed to her desk at a moment’s notice. They asked for Odal, were ushered into a sitting room, and within a few minutes—to Hector’s surprise—were informed by the girl that Major Odal would be with them shortly.

  “You see,” Leoh pointed out jovially, “when you come in person they haven’t as much of a chance to consider how to get rid of you.”

  Hector glanced around the windowless room and contemplated the thick, solidly closed door. “There’s a lot of scurrying going on behind that door, I’ll bet. I mean... they might be figuring out how to get rid of us... uh, permanently.”

  Leoh was about to reply when the door opened and Odal came into the room. He wore a military uniform of light blue, with his insignia of rank on the shoulders and the Star of Kerak on his breast.

  “Dr. Leoh, I’m flattered,” he said with a slight bow. “And Mr. Hector... or is it Lieutenant Hector?”

  “Junior Lieutenant Hector,” the Watchman answered, with a curtness that surprised Leoh.

  “Lieutenant Hector is assisting me,” the Professor said, “and acting as liaison for Commander Spencer.”

  “So,” Odal commented. He gestured them to be seated. Hector and Leoh placed themselves on a plush couch while Odal drew up a stiff chair, facing them. “Now, why have you come to see me?”

  “I want you to postpone your duel against Minister Massan tomorrow,” Leoh said.

  Odal’s lean face broke into a tight smile. “Has Massan agreed to a postponement?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should I?”

  “To be perfectly frank, Major, I suspect that someone is tampering with the machine used in your duels. For the moment, let’s say that you have no knowledge of this. I am asking you to forego any further duels until we get to the bottom of this. The dueling machines are not to be used for political assassinations.”

  Odal’s smile faded. “I regret, Professor, that I cannot postpone the duel. As for tampering with the machines, I can assure you that neither I nor anyone of the Kerak Worlds has touched the machines in any unauthorized manner.”

  “Perhaps you don’t fully understand the situation,” Leoh said. “In the past week we’ve tested the dueling machine here on Acquatainia exhaustively. We’ve learned that its performance can be greatly influenced by a man’s personality and his attitude. You’ve fought many duels in the machines. Your background of experience, both as a professional soldier and in the machines, gives you a decided advantage over your opponents.

  “However, even with all this considered, I’m still convinced that no one can kill a man in the machine—under normal circumstances. We’ve demonstrated that fact in our tests. An unsabotaged machine cannot cause actual physical harm.

  “Yet you’ve already killed one man and incapacitated another. Where will it stop?”

  Odal’s face remained calm, except for the faintest glitter of fire deep in his eyes. His voice was quiet, but it had the edge of a well-honed blade to it. “I cannot be blamed for my background and experience. And I have not tampered with your machine.”

  The door to the room opened, and a short, thickset, bullet-headed man entered. He was dressed in a dark street suit, so that it was impossible to guess his station at the embassy.

  “Would the gentlemen care for some refreshments?” he asked in a low-pitched voice.

  “No thank you,” Leoh said.

  “Some Kerak wine, perhaps?”

  “Well...”

  “I, uh, don’t think we’d better, sir,” Hector said. “Thanks all the same.”

  The man shrugged and sat at a chair next to the door.

  Odal turned back to Leoh. “Sir, I have my duty. Massan and I duel tomorrow. There is no possibility of postponing it.”

  “Very well,” Leoh said. “Will you at least allow me to place some special instrumentation into the booth with you, so that we can monitor the duel m
ore fully? We can do the same thing with Massan. I know that duels are normally private and you’d be within your legal rights to refuse the request, but morally...”

  The smile returned to Odal’s face. “You wish to monitor my thoughts. To record them and see how I perform during the duel. Interesting. Very interesting...”

  The man at the door rose and said, “If you have no desire for refreshments, gentlemen...”

  Odal turned to him. “Thank you for your attention.”

  Their eyes met for an instant. The man gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, then left.

  Odal returned his attention to Leoh. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I can’t allow you to monitor my thoughts during the duel.”

  “But...”

  “I regret having to refuse you. But, as you yourself pointed out, there is no legal requirement for such a course of action. I must refuse. I hope you understand.”

  Leoh rose slowly from the couch. “No, I do not understand. You sit here and discuss legal points when we both know full well that you’re planning to murder Massan tomorrow.” His voice burning with anger, Leoh went on, “You’ve turned my invention into a murder weapon. But you’ve turned me into an enemy. I’ll find out how you’re doing it, and I won’t rest until you and your kind are put away where you belong... on a planet for the criminally insane!”

  Hector reached for the door and opened it. He and Leoh went out, leaving Odal alone in the room. In a few minutes, the dark-suited man returned.

  “I have just spoken with the Leader on the tri-di and obtained permission to make a slight adjustment in our plans.”

  “An adjustment, Minister Kor?”

  “After your duel tomorrow, your next opponent will be Dr. Leoh,” said Kor. “He is the next man to die.”

  The mists swirled deep and impenetrable around Fernd Massan. He stared blindly through the useless view plate in his helmet, then reached up slowly and carefully placed the infrared detector before his eyes.

  I never realized a hallucination could seem so real, Massan thought.

  Since the challenge by Odal, the actual world had seemed quite unreal. For a week, he had gone through the motions of life, but felt as though he were standing aside, a spectator mind watching its own body from a distance. The gathering of his friends and associates last night, the night before the duel—that silent, funereal group of people—it had all seemed completely unreal to him.

  But now, in this manufactured dream, he seemed vibrantly alive. Every sensation was solid, stimulating. He could feel his pulse throbbing through him. Somewhere out in those mists, he knew, was Odal. And the thought of coming to grips with the assassin filled him with a strange satisfaction.

  Massan had spent many years serving his government on the rich but inhospitable high-gravity planets of the Acquataine Cluster. This was the environment he had chosen: crushing gravity; killing pressures; atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen, laced with free radicals of sulphur and other valuable but deadly chemicals; oceans of liquid methane and ammonia; “solid ground” consisting of quickly crumbling, eroding ice; howling, superpowerful winds that could pick up a mountain of ice and hurl it halfway around the planet; darkness; danger; death.

  He was encased in a one-man protective outfit that was half armored suit, half vehicle. An internal liquid suspension system kept him tolerably comfortable at four times normal gravity, but still the suit was cumbersome, and a man could move only very slowly in it, even with the aid of servomotors.

  The weapon he had chosen was simplicity itself: a hand-held capsule of oxygen. But in a hydrogen/ammonia atmosphere, oxygen could be a deadly explosive. Massan carried several of these “bombs” hooked to his suit. So did Odal. But the trick, Massan thought to himself, is to throw them accurately under these conditions; the proper range, the proper trajectory. Not an easy thing to learn, without years of experience.

  The terms of the duel were simple: Massan and Odal were situated on a rough-topped iceberg that was being swirled along one of the methane/ammonia ocean’s vicious currents. The ice was rapidly crumbling. The duel was to end when the iceberg was completely broken up.

  Massan edged along the ragged terrain. His suit’s grippers and rollers automatically adjusted to the roughness of the topography. He concentrated his attention on the infrared detector that hung before his view plate.

  A chunk of ice the size of a man’s head sailed through the murky atmosphere in the steep glide peculiar to heavy gravity and banged into the shoulder of Massan’s suit. The force was enough to rock him slightly off balance before the servos readjusted. Massan withdrew his arm from the sleeve and felt inside the shoulder seam. Dented, but not penetrated. A leak would have been disastrous, fatal. Then he remembered: Of course, I cannot be killed except by the direct action of my antagonist. That is one of the rules of the game.

  Still, he carefully fingered the shoulder seam to make certain it was not leaking. The dueling machine and its rules seemed so very remote and unsubstantial, compared to this freezing, howling inferno.

  He diligently set about combing the iceberg, determined to find Odal and kill him before their floating island disintegrated. He thoroughly explored every projection, every crevice, every slope, working his way slowly from one end of the berg toward the other. Back and forth, cross and recross, with the infrared sensors scanning 360 degrees around him.

  It was time-consuming. Even with the suit’s servomotors and propulsion units, motion across the ice, against the buffeting wind, was a cumbersome business. But Massan continued to work his way across the iceberg, fighting down a gnawing, growing fear that Odal was not there at all.

  And then he caught just the barest flicker of a shadow on his detector. Something, or someone, had darted behind a jutting rise of ice, off by the edge of the berg.

  Slowly and carefully, Massan made his way across to the base of the rise. He picked one of the oxygen bombs from his belt and held it in his right-hand claw. Edging around the base of the ice cliff, he stood on a narrow ledge between the cliff and the churning sea. He saw no one. He extended the detector’s range to maximum and worked the scanners up the sheer face of the cliff toward the top.

  There he was! The shadowy outline of a man etched itself on his detector screen. And at the same time, Massan heard a muffled roar, then a rumbling, crashing noise, growing quickly louder and more menacing. He looked down the face of the ice cliff and saw a small avalanche of ice tumbling, sliding, growling toward him. That devil set off a bomb at the top of the cliff!

  Massan tried to back out of the way, but it was too late. The first chunk of ice bounced harmlessly off his helmet, but the others knocked him off balance so repeatedly that the servos had no chance to recover. He staggered blindly for a few moments, as more and more ice cascaded down on him, and then toppled off the ledge into the boiling sea.

  Relax! he ordered himself. Do not panic! The suit will float you. The servos will keep you right side up. You cannot be killed accidentally; Odal must perform the coup de grace himself.

  There were emergency rockets on the back of the suit. If he could orient himself properly, a touch of the control stud on his belt would set them off and he would be boosted back onto the iceberg. He turned slightly inside the suit and tried to judge the iceberg’s distance through the infrared detector. It was difficult, since the suit was bobbing madly in the churning currents.

  Finally he decided to fire the rockets and make final adjustments of distance and landing site while he was in the air.

  But he could not move his hand.

  He tried, but his entire right arm was locked fast. He could not budge it a millimeter. And the same for the left. Something, or someone, was clamping his arms tight. He could not even pull them out of their sleeves.

  Massan thrashed about, trying to shake off whatever it was. No use.

  Then his detector screen was slowly lifted from the view plate. He felt something vibrating on his helmet. The oxygen tubes! They were being disconnecte
d.

  He screamed and tried to fight free. No use. With a hiss, the oxygen tubes pulled free of helmet. Massan could feel the blood pounding through his veins as he fought desperately to free himself.

  Now he was being pushed down into the sea. He screamed again and tried to wrench his body away. The frothing sea filled his view plate. He was under. He was being held under. And now... now the view plate itself was being loosened.

  No! Don't! The scalding cold methane/ammonia sea seeped through the opening view plate.

  “It’s only a dream!” Massan shouted to himself. “Only a dream! A dream! A...”

  Dr. Leoh stared at the dinner table without really seeing it. Coming to the restaurant had been Hector’s idea. Three hours earlier Massan had been removed from the dueling machine—dead.

  Leoh sat stolidly, hands in lap, his mind racing in many different directions at once. Hector was off at the phone, getting the latest information from the meditechs. Odal had expressed his regrets perfunctorily, and then left for the Kerak embassy, under a heavy escort of his own plain-clothes guards. The government of the Acquataine Cluster was quite literally falling apart, with no man willing to assume the responsibility of leadership... and thereby expose himself. One hour after the duel, Kanus’ troops had landed on all the major planets of Szarno; the annexation was complete.

  And what have I done since I arrived here? Leoh demanded of himself. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I have sat back like a doddering old professor and played academic games with the machine, while younger, more vigorous men have USED the machine to suit their own purposes.

  Used the machine. There was a fragment of an idea there. Something nebulous that must be approached carefully or it will fade away. Used the machine... used it... Leoh toyed with the phrase for a few moments, then gave it up with a sigh of resignation. Lord, I’m too tired even to think.

  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 sight. The 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.