Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One by Jack Vance Read Free Book Online Page A

life at stake.” “ Of three trials ,” came a thought. “Of three trials,” added Kelly. “In the story, the man won and was permitted to return to his native land. After this fashion letme duel in three trials with Han.”
    The surge of thoughts thickened the air—rancorous contempt from Han, sly encouragement from the Antagonist, amusement from the Leader.
    “You invoke a barbaric principle,” said the Leader. “But by a simple yet rigorous logic, it is a just device, and shall be honored. You shall duel Han in three trials.”
    “Why waste time?” inquired Han. “I can powder him to less than the atoms ofatoms.”
    “No,” said the Leader. “The trial may not be on a basis of sheer potential. You and this man are at odds over an issue which has no fundamental right or wrong. It is the welfare of his people opposedto the welfare of your jewel-senders. Since the issues are equal, there would be no justice in an unequal duel. The trial must be on a basis which will not unwontedly handicap either party.”
    “Let a problem be stated,” suggested the Antagonist. “He who first arrives at a solution wins the trial.”
    Han was scornfully silent. So the Leader formulated a problem—a terrific statement whose terms were dimensionsand quasi-time and a dozen concepts which Kelly’s brain could in no wise grasp. But the Antagonist intervened.
    “That is hardly a fair problem, lyingas it does entirely out of the man’s experience. Let me formulate a problem.” And he stated a situation which at first startled Kelly, and then brought him hope.
    The problem was one he had met a year previously at the station. A system to integrate twenty-five different communication bands into one channel was under consideration, and it was necessary to thrust a beam of protons past a bank of twenty-five mutually inter-actingmagnets and hit a pin-point filter at the far end of the case. The solution was simple enough—a statement of the initial vector in terms of a coordinate equation and a voltage potential—yet the solution had occupied the station calculator fortwo months. Kelly knew this solution as he knew his own name.
    “Hurry!” came the Antagonist’s secret thought.
    Kelly blurted out the answer.
    There was a wave of astonishment through the group, and he felt their suspicious inspection.
    “You are quick indeed,” said the Leader, non-plussed.
    “Another problem,” called the Antagonist. Once more he brought a question from Kelly’s experience, this concerning the behavior of positrons in the secondary layer of a star in a cluster of six, all at specified temperatures and masses. And this time Kelly’s mind worked faster. He immediately stated the answer. Still he anticipated Han by mere seconds.
    Han protested, “How could this small pink brain move faster than my cosmic consciousness?”
    “How is this?” asked the Leader. “How do you calculate so swiftly?”
    Kelly fumbled for ideas, finally strung together a lame statement: “I do not calculate. In my brain is a mass of cells whose molecules form themselves into models of the problems. They move in an instant, the problem is solved, and the solution comes to me.”
    Anxiously he waited, but the reply seemed to satisfy the group. These creatures—or gods, if such they were—were they so naïve? Only the Antagonist suggested complex motives. Han, Kelly sensed, was old, of great force, of a hard and inflexible nature. The Leader was venerable beyond thought, calm and untroubled as space itself.
    “What now?” came from the Antagonist. “Shall there be another problem? Or shall the man be declared the victor?”
    Kelly would have been well pleased to let well enough alone, but this evidently did not suit the purposes of the Antagonist; hence his quiet jeer.
    “No!” The thoughts of Han roared forth almost like sound. “Because of a ridiculous freak in this creature’s brain, must I admit him my superior? I can fling him through a thousand