The trouble with great ideas is that someone is sure to expend enormous effort and ingenuity figuring out how to louse them up....

D ulaq rode the slide to the upper pedestrian level, stepped off and walked over to the railing. The city stretched out all around him—broad avenues thronged with busy people, pedestrian walks, vehicle thoroughfares, aircars gliding between the gleaming, towering buildings. And somewhere in this vast city was the man he must kill. The man who would kill him, perhaps. It all seemed so real! The noise of the streets, the odors of the perfumed trees lining the walks, even the warmth of the reddish

Dr. Leoh was lecturing at the Carinae Regional University when the news of Dulaq’s duel reached him. An assistant professor perpetrated the unthinkable breach of interrupting the lecture to whisper the news in his ear. Leoh nodded grimly, hurriedly finished his lecture, and then accompanied the assistant professor to the University president’s office. They stood in silence as the slideway whisked them through the strolling students and blossoming greenery of the quietly-busy campus. Leoh remaine

Chancellor Kanus, the supreme leader of the Kerak Worlds, stood at the edge of the balcony and looked across the wild, tumbling gorge to the rugged mountains beyond. “These are the forces that mold men’s actions,” he said to his small audience of officials and advisors, “the howling winds, the mighty mountains, the open sky and the dark powers of the clouds.” The men nodded and made murmurs of agreement. “Just as the mountains thrust up from the pettiness of the lands below, so shall we rise abo

It took the starship two weeks to make the journey from Carinae to the Acquataine Cluster. Dr. Leoh spent the time checking over the Acquatainian dueling machine, by direct tri-di beam; the Acquatainian government gave him all the technicians, time and money he needed for the task. Leoh spent as much of his spare time as possible with the other passengers of the ship. He was gregarious, a fine conversationalist, and had a nicely-balanced sense of humor. Particularly, he was a favorite of the you

One of the advantages of being Commander-in-Chief of the Star Watch, the old man thought to himself, is that you can visit any planet in the Commonwealth. He stood at the top of the hill and looked out over the green tableland of Kenya. This was the land of his birth, Earth was his homeworld. The Star Watch’s official headquarters may be in the heart of a globular cluster of stars near the center of the galaxy, but Earth was the place the commander wanted most to see as he grew older and wearier

The space station orbiting around Acquatainia—the capital planet of the Acquataine Cluster—served simultaneously as a transfer point from starships to planetships, a tourist resort, meteorological station, communications center, scientific laboratory, astronomical observatory, medical haven for allergy and cardiac patients, and military base. It was, in reality, a good-sized city with its own markets, its own local government, and its own way of life. Dr. Leoh had just stepped off the debarking

The next week was an enervatingly slow one for Leoh, evenly divided between 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 doing intricate mathematics completely in his head. But he was, Leoh found, a clumsy, chattering, whistling, scatterbrained, inexperienced bundle of noise and nerves. It was impossible to do cons

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 dueling machine himself many times in the past, but only in tests of the machines’ routine performance. Never in actual combat against another human being. To Hector, of course, the machine was a totally ne

It was deep twilight when the groundcar 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 just as well, couldn’t you?” Leoh shook his head. “Never give an agency of any government the opportunity to say ‘hold the line a moment’ and then huddle together to consider what to do with you. Nineteen times out of twenty, they’ll end by passing your request up to the next hi

The mists swirled deep and impenetrable about Fernd Massan. He stared blindly through the useless viewplate in his helmet, then reached up slowly and carefully to place the infrared detector before his eyes. I never realized an hallucination could seem so real , Massan thought. Since the challenge by Odal, he realized, 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 fr

Dr. Leoh stared at the dinner table without really seeing it. Coming to this 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 plainclothes guards. The gover

Their groundcar glided from the parking building to the restaurant’s entrance ramp, at the radio call of the doorman. Within minutes, Hector and Leoh were cruising through the city, in the deepening shadows of night. “There’s only one man,” Leoh said, “who has faced Odal and lived through it.” “Dulaq,” Hector agreed. “But ... for all the information the medical people have been able to get from him, he might as well be, uh, dead.” “He’s still completely withdrawn?” Hector nodded. “The medicos th

They plunged to work immediately. Leoh preferred not to inform the regular staff of the dueling machine about their plan, so he and Hector had to work through the night and most of the next morning. Hector barely understood what he was doing, but with Leoh’s supervision, he managed to dismantle part of the dueling machine’s central network, insert a few additional black boxes that the professor had conjured up from the spare parts bins in the basement, and then reconstruct the machine so that it

The morning of the duel arrived, and precisely at the agreed-upon hour, Odal and a small retinue of Kerak representatives stepped through the double doors of the dueling machine chamber. Hector and Leoh were already there, waiting. With them stood another man, dressed in the black-and-silver of the Star Watch. He was a blocky, broad-faced veteran with iron-gray hair and hard, unsmiling eyes. The two little groups of men knotted together in the center of the room, before the machine’s control boa

The door opened and Leoh squeezed into the booth. “You’re all right?” Hector blinked and refocused his eyes on reality. “Think so—” “Everything went well? The Watchmen got through to you?” “Good thing they did. I was nearly killed anyway.” “But you survived.” “So far.” Across the room, Odal stood massaging his forehead while Kor demanded: “How could they possibly have discovered the secret? Where was the leak?” “That is not important now,” Odal said quietly. “The primary fact is that they have n

The office was that of the new prime minister of the Acquataine Cluster. It had been loaned to Leoh for his conversation with Sir Harold Spencer. For the moment, it seemed like a great double room: half of it was dark, warm woods, rich draperies, floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The other half, from the tri-di screen onward, was the austere, metallic utility of a starship compartment. Spencer was saying, “So this hired assassin, after killing four men and nearly wrecking a government, has returned to