The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (21 page)

Volkov shrugged and spread his hands helplessly.

"It was there when I left and gone when I returned, not two minutes later," Vasily said.

"Where does that leave us?" asked the co-pilot.

"As traitors to the Motherland," Kuznetsov snapped. He furrowed his brow and grimly, desperately, tried to think.

"What are our options?" Volkov asked.

"We should call Leningrad Center and report this immediately," Vasily said when no one else spoke up. "It will go harder on us the longer we delay."

Kuznetsov shook his head. "Report what, Sergeant? That our cargo seems to be missing and we have acquired a pile of gold instead? Perhaps we had better consider the situation first."

Besides, Kuznetsov thought, it can't go any harder on us than it will already. 

"At least we have the gold," Semelov pointed out.

Kuznetsov snorted. "Leningrad Center isn't expecting gold. It is expecting a computer. May I remind you, comrades, computers such as this you cannot buy at a hard currency store?"

"I don't suppose there is any chance they will believe us?" Volkov asked tentatively.

Kuznetsov snorted again. "Would you? Besides, it makes no difference. The computer was in our care. We lost it. We are responsible."

Volkov licked his lips. "What do you think they will do to us?"

For a moment there was only the roar and vibration of the engines. "I doubt they will shoot us," he said at last. "Not when we give them the gold. But we will undoubtedly be interrogated—rigorously." He paused, remembering the courses he had had on interrogation techniques. Then he tried to shove those images out of his mind.

"They will doubtless conclude we sold the computer for gold. Nothing we could say or do will convince them otherwise. Then they will want to know who we sold it to. Eventually we will tell them."

"But we haven't sold the computer!" Volkov protested.

Kuznetsov grinned mirthlessly. "My friend, you do not appreciate scientific socialist interrogation. By the time they get done with us we will have confessed anyway—over and over again. Eventually we will come up with a confession they will choose to believe."

"And then?"

"Then we will spend the rest of our lives at hard labor in a prison camp. I understand that under Perestroika conditions in even the severe regimen camps have improved greatly. Now the average prisoner lives as long as seven years."

No one said anything.

"I have a wife . . ." the co-pilot began.

"She is disgraced," Kuznetsov cut him off. "She will doubtless be arrested and interrogated as well, probably sentenced to prison." He thought of his own Yelena and tried not to.

"Comrade Major . . ." Vasily began.

"Yes?"

"Sir, I . . ." He stopped, licked his lips and took a deep breath. Then the words came with a rush. "Sir, they do not imprison the families of defectors do they?"

All five men froze, not even breathing. Then their eyes darted around to the faces of the others, seeking some sign of their thoughts. Finally the other four looked straight at Kuznetsov.

"No," the GRU man said slowly. "They are disgraced and interrogated, but not rigorously. They are not imprisoned."

"And," Volkov added eagerly, "if we landed someplace in the West, they would assume the Americans had reclaimed their computer and were lying about it not being aboard."

Kuznetsov said nothing at all.

"There are even," Volkov went on carefully, "places in, say, Sweden, where you can land an aircraft like this and not be discovered for, oh, long enough to hide something in the woods before anyone arrived."

Kuznetsov hefted the gold bar thoughtfully.

"Comrades," he said finally, "I understand Sweden is lovely at this time of the year."

Volkov looked at Kuznetsov, Vasily looked at Semelov and the co-pilot looked at his charts. Then they all looked at the bar of gold in Kuznetsov's hand.

Without another word, Volkov reached up and flipped off the radar transponder. Then he pushed the wheel hard forward and shoved on the rudder pedal, sending the plane diving for the deck and, as soon as they were below radar, turning north toward Sweden.

"Hey Moira," Jerry called. "Can you come in here and help me for a minute?"

"Of course," Moira said. "But what are you doing?"

Because the room had no windows the only light came from a torch on the wall. Jerry was on his hands and knees with a string and a piece of chalk. With exaggerated care he marked a tiny dot on the concrete.

"Did Wiz ever explain to you about 220-volt single-phase 60-cycle AC?"

"No."

"Then I'm drawing on the floor. Anyway, I need to mark out a pentagram. Can you stand in the center and hold the line exactly on this dot while I swing a circle?"

"Of course," Moira said as she took the string and stooped to hold it on the point Jerry had marked, "but why do you need to be so precise?"

"This spell multiplies a mass times a length and divides it by time. I've got to get the units exactly right or we won't get the output we need. So the pentagram has to be just the right diameter."

"Forgive me, my Lord, but that is a circle, not a pentagram."

"Special kind of pentagram," Jerry grunted.

"It is
not
a pentagram. It is a circle."

"A pentagram approaches a circle for sufficiently large values of five. Now, step out of the way, will you? And don't muss the lines."

As Moira moved out of the way, he deftly sketched a shape in the center of his creation.

"That is not any kind of pentagram," Moira insisted. "That is a circle with a sideways S in it."

"It does the job of a pentagram," Jerry said. "Stand back." He turned to the Emac which was standing nearby.

"backslash," he commanded. "power_up exe." 

A puff of bright blue smoke billowed into the diagram on the floor, coalesced, condensed and solidified. The demon was about two feet tall and looked like a stick figure. Except instead of straight lines, its arms, legs and body were composed of neon blue lightning bolts. Its nose was a 150-watt light bulb.

"bzzzzp bzzzzp ready,"
it said in a buzzing voice.

Jerry nodded and flipped the switch on the wall. The fluorescents in the ceiling flickered and caught, bathing the room in a cold bluish glow.

"Okay. Douse the torch, will you? We've got power."

"Of that I make no doubt," Moira said, eyeing Jerry's creation dubiously.

"Where does this go, Lord?" asked one particularly lanky guardsman as he and his fellows rolled a tan metal object through the opened double doors.

Wiz looked up from the sea of packing material, pallets and computer parts scattered across the floor of the computer room.

"Oh, that's part of the air conditioning. It goes in that room over there. And be careful of the stuff on the floor. There's metal strapping all over the place."

Moira looked over the slowly growing computer in the middle of all the litter. It still wasn't very impressive. There were four tan metal cubes, each about waist high, that stood all in a row. Next to them were a couple of taller cabinets. At the other end was a large desk with a workstation sitting on it—the "console" the programmers called it, although what consolation it might be Moira couldn't imagine. There were a half-dozen other workstations, a thing Wiz told her was a printer and some other equipment scattered around the room.

"Forgive me darling, but the problem with your world's magic is that it just doesn't look impressive."

"It's not supposed to," Wiz told her. "If it looks impressive it scares the suits."

Moira thought about that and then did what she usually did when the conversation lapsed into incomprehensibility. She changed the subject.

"What does that part do?" She nodded toward the box being maneuvered through the just-big-enough doorway.

"That's the climate control system. It's not really part of the computer at all. It just keeps the room at constant temperature and humidity. These things are picky that way."

"This could be done by magic, you know."

"I know, but the computer is designed to work with this system and as long as we have electric power, why not use it?"

"Magic would be more reliable," Moira said dubiously.

"Magic doesn't work as well here as it does at home. Besides, machinery can be just as reliable as magic."

Moira arched an eyebrow skeptically, but she said nothing.

"Hey Wiz," Danny called out. "I think I've got the cabling problem whipped. Come look at this."

Danny had several sections of the raised floor up to expose one of the cable runs. "You know you said it would take us a couple of days to get all the cabling spliced right? Well, I found a way around it."

"emac"
he said, and one of the yard-tall editor demons appeared beside him.

"?"
said the Emac.

He reached behind him on the floor and handed the demon the wiring manual and printout of the installation chart. The little demon staggered under the pile of paper nearly as tall as he was. Then Danny gestured down into the hole and commanded
"backslash untangle exe."
A foot-tall demon wearing work clothes and a tool belt popped up in the cable run. The Emac flipped open the wiring chart and started to gabble furiously. The demon in the cable run whipped out his tools and began splicing wires so fast its hands were a blur.

Wiz shook his head in admiration. "Danny, that is a truly tasty bit of work."

The younger programmer shrugged, but his face lit up at the compliment. "I figure it will take maybe a couple of hours to get the cabling done."

"What does that do to the rest of the schedule?" Moira asked.

Wiz thought for a minute. "We should be able to hook up the climate control this evening. Once we turn it on that's about all we can do tonight. We need to let the temperature and humidity stabilize before we try to bring the system up. That'll take six or eight hours."

The programmers were in fine fettle the next morning. They were days ahead of schedule and best of all, the hardware installation was almost done. All of them were much more at home with software and they were looking forward to the next phase.

"Well," Wiz was saying as they came down the hall, "if everything passes the hardware checks we should be able to start loading system software by this evening."

"That'll be a relief," Danny said. "I'm getting sick of messing with hardware. What's the matter?"

Wiz had stopped dead and was frowning off into space.

"Is it my imagination or is it humid in here?"

"Humid," Moira said.

"Definitely," Jerry said.

Wiz looked at the others. "Come on." He wasn't quite running as he headed toward the computer room, but he wasn't far from it. The others were right behind him.

Smoke was pouring out of the computer room.

"What the hell?"

"The place is on fire!" Wiz shouted.

Danny ran forward as if to dash into the room. "That's not smoke," he exclaimed. "It's cool and wet."

"Fog," Jerry said wonderingly. "The room's full of fog."

Wiz took a deep breath and charged into the computer room. The air was so clammy he could hardly breathe and the fog swirled around him like the special effects in a bad monster movie. Batting at the swirling mist he fought his way to the back of the room. Thick white clouds of vapor were pouring out of the air conditioning duct at the rear of the room.

"Shut off the climate control," he yelled over his shoulder. "And get a fan in here to clear this stuff out."

Almost instantly a wind rushed through the room, sucking the fog out faster than it could pour in through the vents. By the time Wiz reached the door again, the air in the room was clear. The relays clicked over and the air conditioning died.

Moira was standing in the doorway with her staff in her hand and the wind she had raised tugging at her skirt and tousling her coppery hair. As Wiz emerged she gestured and the winds died away instantly.

"My Lord," the hedge witch said with a smug little smile and arched eyebrow, "explain to me again how reliable mechanical contrivances are."

She looked so lovely with her hair in disarray Wiz forgave her.

It took the programmers and their helpers nearly two hours to get things under control. Water had to be vacuumed out of the soaked carpet, books and papers had to be spread out to dry and a dehumidifying spell was used to help dry out the equipment. Fortunately there wasn't much damage, but there was a lot of work to be done.

"Okay, " Wiz said grimly. "Somehow the air conditioner and the humidifier both got stuck on. The low temperature turned the high humidity to fog."

"We're lucky we didn't take two days off," Jerry said. "We probably would have had ice all over the equipment."

"I'm damn glad we hadn't powered up the computer," Wiz replied. "That would have been a real mess."

"Hey guys," Danny called from the back of the room. "These things didn't get stuck on. Someone reset the thermostat and the humidity thingie."

Wiz and Jerry crowded around him quickly. Sure enough inside the clear plastic box covering the controls both dials were at their maximum positions.

"I could have sworn I set those properly," Jerry said.

"You did," Wiz told him. "I double-checked before I left the computer room last night."

"Someone must have messed with them," Danny said.

"Inside the locked cover? I don't see how."

"Magic," the young programmer retorted.

"From where?" Wiz asked. "Moira, did you . . ."

"Certainly not!" the hedge witch said indignantly. "Nor did any of the other wizards here. Believe me, my Lord, if there is one thing any apprentice learns early it is not to tamper with another's magic. Those who do not learn it do not live long enough to become magicians."

Wiz put his hand on her arm. "Of course you didn't darling, it's just that . . ." Then he stopped as he caught sight of something over Moira's shoulder.

A line of seven little figures marched across the top of the computer console, their arms swinging and their bodies swaying in time to the song they were bawling out at the top of their tiny lungs. Their voices were so shrill that the words were lost, but the tune came through clearly, as if hummed by a chorus of mosquitoes.