Part 6 (1/2)

aNothing,a she said quietly.

aOkay folks, single file and move softly. We don't want whatever's out there to surprise us.a Wiz considered leaving the light off, but he decided the danger of falling into a hole outweighed the risk of alerting whatever was in the neighborhood. With a gesture he sent the globe of light floating above them. I gotta figure out a way to make these things directional, he thought as he followed Malkin out into the room.

The room was huge. After nearly a hundred paces the light no longer showed the walls or ceiling, only the uneven, stalagmite-studded floor, glistening with moisture. It occurred to Wiz that the detector might be pointing toward their ultimate destination rather than toward the exit. If that was true they could spend hours searching for the way out and if there was more than one they could be thoroughly lost before they knew it.

Out in tile gloom was a heap of something. It wasn't rocks and it didn't seem to be alive, but aside from that Wiz couldn't make out just what it was. With a gesture he increased the brightness of the magic light and was rewarded with a glint from the heap.

At first Wiz thought the pile had caught fire. Then he realized it was his own light reflected back at them, glittering off the objects in the pile.

Another gesture and the light grew even brighter. Now there was no doubt at all what the heap was.

Gold winked yellow or glowed ruddy in the light. Gems flashed green and red and wine-purple fire. Pearls and opals threw back a soft l.u.s.ter. There were ingots and cups and brooches and rings; candlesticks and platters and coins and gems loose like marbles. Wiz even caught a glimpse of a full suit of golden armor, studded with precious stones and filigreed with enamel. All of it piled head-high in a loose, careless ma.s.s.

aLook at that,a Wiz breathed.

The others could only stare. Malkin started edging toward it, only to be pushed aside roughly by Glandurg in his haste to reach the pile.

aGlandurg! Get back here. We're not here for gold.a aWhat kind of adventure is it if you don't get the treasure?a the dwarf grumbled. aUncivilized, I say.a aBoy,a said Danny, aI always knew dungeons were supposed to have treasure, but thisaa He waved his arm in awe. June stayed behind her husband, obviously torn between wonder at the sight and distaste at his reaction.

Wiz noticed that there were no containers in the pile. No chests, no bags, nothing that could be used to transport or contain the h.o.a.rd. It was as if it had been carefully brought here and emptied out and then the containers removed.

aWhere do you suppose this came from?a aYour dark wizards, or whatever.a Malkin ran her fingers through the pile. aWhoever it was is long gone.a aYou hope,a Wiz retorted.

With a clatter and the ringing sound of falling gold hitting the stone floor, Glandurg burrowed into the pile like a homesick gopher. Suddenly his head emerged from the top, sending a shower of wealth cascading down the mound. He spat out a ruby the size of a hen's egg and grinned gleefully.

aLook, people,a Wiz said, athis isn't what we're here for.a aBut it doesn't hurt,a retorted Malkin, who was already elbow-deep in a ma.s.s of gold coins.

Danny threw himself down in the treasure; scooped up handfuls and poured it over his head. He winced when a particularly heavy and tasteless gold goblet hit him on me head. aHey, Scrooge McDuck was onto something with his money bin.a Wiz hesitated. He didn't like this at all and he sure didn't want to be enc.u.mbered by a lot of dead weight. But obviously the attraction of all that loot was an irresistible force for Glandurg and Malkin.

aWe need a way to carry this stuff,a Malkin said.

aIf you think I'm going to whomp up a levitation spell just so we can take that along with us, you're crazy.a Malkin and Glandurg looked at him.

aOkay,a he sighed, ayou can take what you can carry in a cloak.a It took Malkin and Glandurg a minute to decide whose cloak was bigger. Then they started shoveling gold, jewels and other treasure from the pile. When the heap on Malkin's cape was about three feet high in the center they stopped for breath.

aaNow try to move it,a Wiz said.

Dwarf and thief each seized an edge of the cloak and gave a mighty tug. The pile moved perhaps six inches.

aWhat you need is a cart,a Danny suggested.

aWon't work. Floors too rough.a aOkay,a Wiz said, aif it will get us moving again, I've got a spell that reduces friction to almost nothing. That will make the cloak easier to haul. But we're burying the stuff the first chance we get.a He stepped forward, raised his staff and spoke a few words.

aThere, it should pull easily now.a Malkin tugged on the edge of her cloak and nearly went over backwards when her hands slipped off the material. Glandurg grabbed and yanked and went careening into Malkin when his hands slipped. Both of them landed in a tangle on the rocky floor and glared at Wiz.

aOkay, let me modify the spell.a He drew a breath to list out the spell, but before he could exhale he heard a noise from beyond the circle of light. Something was moving out there in the dark.

aAh, folksaa Danny began. He never finished the sentence. He didn't need to.

Wiz didn't know if it was the biggest dragon he'd ever seen or not. For one thing, the cavern was mostly dark. For another he couldn't see all of it. But primarily, he was too scared to take accurate measurements. If it wasn't the biggest dragon he'd ever seen it would do quite nicely for now.

The dragon spouted a gout of flame that illuminated the cavern to its corners and left a dark smear of an afterimage clouding his vision. He tried to raise his staff to cast a spell and realized he was magically frozen in place. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the others straining to move as well. The dragon fire had been misdirection while the creature pinned them where they stood with a spell.

Its enemies neutralized, the dragon lumbered forward for the kill Wiz muttered under his breath.

Talons extended, the dragon's left front paw landed on the cavern floor and promptly flew out from under him, dumping the beast on his nose. The great muzzle slipped on the floor and left the dragon lying spread-eagled and neck extended on the glistening limestone.

However dragons are not so easily defeated. The huge talons on all four feet dug into the limestone as if it were soft clay and the beast levered itself erect. It crouched to spring across the intervening distance at its prey, but its purchase failed just as it leapt and the dragon went sprawling and slithering across the cavern. Wiz and the others watched fascinated as the dragon slid helplessly by, bit the cave wall behind them and rebounded back into the cavern like a pool ball coming off the side rail Wiz had cast the reduce-friction spell not on the floor, but on the dragon.-That not only made the dragon slippery all over, but it charged the beast to a high magic potentiala”and made every stalagmite, stalact.i.te, flow-stone and ordinary rock in the cavern repel him violently. The creature had put enormous power into his spring and lost almost none of it in the inelastic collisions. As a result a very unhappy dragon went caroming off everything he hit, and he managed to hit just about everything in the cave except Wiz and his friends.

Every time the beast struck a rock it let out a roar and a gout of flame, making the walls ring and lighting the cavern to its edges. The result was like being in a giant pinball machine during especially active play.

Finally the dragon slid backwards into a tunnel off the main cave. A quick, precisely aimed lightning bolt struck inside the tunnel and collapsed the mouth into a pile of rock Behind the landslide they could hear the faint roaring of a very unhappy dragon.

aDragon in the side pocket!a Danny whooped aAwesome.a Wiz discovered he could move again. aLet's get our awes out of here before that dragon digs himself out. Move it people!a aBut the treasure!a Malkin protested.

aMark it on the map and we'll pick it up on the way out. Now come on!a Everyone complied, but Wiz noticed that Malkin and Glandurg clinked suspiciously as they hurried down the tunnel.

There was a dragon asleep beside the fire, with only an occasional tail twitch or foot thump to show he was dreaming dragonish dreams.

It was in fact an achingly normal scene for the programmers' workroom, if you could ignore the whispering shadows outside the windows.

Jerry Andrews stared at the four screens hanging above his desk and bit his lip. As decoration they were spectacular, all neon colors ranging through the whole spectrum with annotations and hypertext finks in other glaring colors. As information they were just about use- as.h.i.+t,a Jerry exclaimed, throwing himself backwards so hard his chair creaked.

The dragon lifted his head questioningly.

aMy Lord?a Moira asked as her personality a.s.serted itself.

aIt's been a long time since I've felt this frustrated.a As a hacker's significant other, Moira recognized the signs. Jerry needed a sounding board. She also knew that a sympathetic ear was more important than cogent advice. A Siamese cat would do the job nicely if it meowed in the appropriate spots.

aA difficult problem?a Jerry grinned but there was no joy in it aI don't even know enough to know thata He spun around in the chair to face the dragon on the hearth.

aNormally on a job like this where you've got a pile of observablesa”stuffa”and no paradigm, you just grab hold of anything that looks likely and see where it leads. You poke and prod at it and see what happens and eventually you can make sense out of what you're seeing. Herea”a he waved a hand expressively. aHere no matter where I grab and how much I poke and prod I don't get anything that makes sense.a He spun back around and waved at the light show above his desk. aNinety percent of this sort of project is getting inside the other guy's head. Eventually you've got to be able to see the code through his eyes, to understand a little of how he thinks. Only here, no matter how hard I try, I can't make any sense of what I'm seeing. Some of this stuff is truly elegant, some of it is a triumph of development over design, some of it is awfully crude and some of it is pigeon droppings. And there's no sense to any of it, no rhyme or reason, no overriding structure.a aWell, Wiz always said you start with what you know.a Jerry spun back to her. aI know enough to know I'm out of my depth on this. We need help, heavy-duty help from our world.a aAnother programming team?a Jerry shook his head. aNot that simple. We need someone who can get his mind around this thing.a aAnother wizard programmer?a aNo, we need someone even more powerful. We need a programming legend, a code demiG.o.da aDo you have anyone in mind?a Jerry thought for a minute. That's a problem. You can't very well go up to someone like Ken Thompson and ask him to take a sabbatical from Bell Labs to go off to another world to solve a problem involving an evil magician.a aYou mean he might not believe you?a aI mean the paperwork would be a little excessive. People of this caliber don't grow on trees and a lot of them are key figures at their companies, teaching at the university level or in jail for getting cute with someone else's computer. In any event they're not available.a aAre there some who are not occupied?a aYeah, a few.a He thought for a minute. aWell, Tom Digby isn't available right now, so the best is probably Taj.a aTaj?a aE.T. Tajikawa, the Tajmanian Devil. The guy spends most of his time surfing the far, far end of the bell curve, out three sigmas west of Strange.a Moira didn't know what that meant but it sounded powerful. So she concentrated on the part she thought she understood.

aE.T. Is that like the movie Wiz likes so much?a Moira asked.

aNo, it's E.T. as in Elvis Twitty.a Jerry shrugged. aHis mom was Korean. She didn't speak English real good but she loved country music and she wanted to give her son an American name.

aTaj used to teach an extension cla.s.s in debugging down in the Valley. I learned a h.e.l.l of a lot from him, but for the first four weeks I thought I'd wandered into a 'Kung Fu' episode. He started us off with Tai Chi exercises and quotes from Bugs Bunny cartoons. We ended with five minutes of meditation while he rang this little bell. And crazy as it sounds, it all tied together.a Moira, who didn't know what Tai Chi was and to whom a lot of programming was a mystery anyway, was willing to take his word for it.

aHis power isn't in his techniques. It's in the way he sees.a aThat sounds like Patrius,a Moira said.

aThe wizard who brought Wiz here in the first place?

Yeah, from what I've heard of him he would have liked Taj.a aWhat would it take to get him?a aMostly you'd have to catch his interest. But that's hard to do. Last I heard he was hip-deep in a six-figure design project for a gaming company.a aWould it hurt to ask him?a aNo,a Jerry said slowly. aNo, it wouldn't hurt.a He brightened. aThanks, Moira, you're a genius.a Moira took the compliment without comment. aYou had best ask Bal-Simba before you talk about bringing another through from your world.a aRight. I'm sure he won't have any problem with it.a In a matter of minutes Bal-Simba was summoned and he listened carefully, if somewhat sleepily, to Jerry's proposal.

aIf you think it will aid us, by all means ask this person to come here,a he said when Jerry finally wound down.