The professor was sitting in the office that the Acquatainians had given him in one end of the former lecture hall that 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 to Leoh, and the Acquatainian government had turned the other cubbyhole offices into sleeping rooms for the professor and the Star Watchman, and an auto-kitchen. A combination cook-valet-handyman appeared twice each day—morning and evening—to handle any special chores that the cleaning machines and auto-kitchen might miss. Leoh slouched back in his desk chair and cast a weary eye on the stack of papers that recorded the latest performances 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 unit. 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 a human being. _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 simply 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 then 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, doctor?” Hector’s voice rang out. “In here.” Hector ducked in through the doorway and plopped his rangy frame on the office’s 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 frowned, considering the problem. “Hm-m-m ... yes, I guess that’s right, too, isn’t it?” “Did you see the girl back to her ship safely?” Leoh asked. “Yes, sir,” 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 she enjoyed her visit very much.” “Good. It was, eh, very good of you to escort her about the campus. It kept her out of my hair ... what’s left of it, that is.”