“I’m afraid so. We’ve been checking the sites on that wacko routing path of Wiz’s and checking them regularly. But now we keep pinging and we keep getting nonsense.”
Danny went over the routing list item by item. Then he stopped dead. “Wait a minute! According to this he’s going through shark.vax.”
“That’s the North Australia Oceanographic Institute. So?”
“So shark.vax is down. They had a typhoon or something. There was a message about it on the net.”
“Let me see that!” Jerry grabbed the tablet from Danny’s hand. He traced down it and frowned. The frown grew deeper as he compared the tablet to the screen.
“Ping shark.vax.” Danny nodded and typed frantically.
“What is it?” Moira demanded, pressing close.
“I think . . .” Jerry began, but Danny cut him off. “See. shark.vax isn’t there. But how is he using it if it’s not there?”
“Magic?” Moira suggested.
Jerry slammed his hand down on the table so hard a pile of manuscripts slid onto the floor. “No, a gimmicked router table! He got into one of those routers and redid the table.”
“Slick. No wonder we couldn’t find him.”
“Does this help?”
“Yes, it helps a lot. All we’ve got to do now is find the router he tricked and see where the entries in the table really lead. With that we can find the switch he’s using and from there we can trace him back to this world.”
“But not quickly?”
Jerry forced a smile. “Oh, it’s not automatic, but we’ll find him. He can’t keep hiding like this for much longer.”
Twenty: The Prancing Pig
Good advice is where you find it.
The Consultants’ Handbook
I can’t keep going on like this, Wiz Zumwalt thought wearily. It wasn’t just that he had lost another solitaire game. He was stuck on the project and stuck fast. Even if he could keep a lid on things with the town council, which was doubtful, he still hadn’t made any real progress on protecting humans from dragons.
In fact, he realized, a lot of what he had done since he came here was in the nature of avoiding work on the problem hoping something would bubble up from his subconscious. But his subconscious was as flat as an open can of Coke left on a programmer’s desk over the weekend.
Maybe his subconscious didn’t have enough to work on. The truth of the matter was that he didn’t know much about dragons and he hadn’t really learned much about them since he came here.
“Hey, Malkin,” he called over his shoulder, at the same time he clicked his mouse to deal another game.
“What?” came a voice in his ear.
Wiz jumped. There was Malkin at his shoulder.
“I wish you wouldn’t sneak up on me like that when I’m working.”
The tall thief shrugged. “I’m not sneaking. It’s my normal way of walking.
Kind of a professional asset, you might say.”
“You might say sneaking, too,” Wiz retorted. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you about dragons.”
“Why ask me? You’re supposed to be the expert.”
“Yeah, but I’ve noticed the people around here don’t talk much about dragons, or even seem to know very much about them.”
“They don’t know because they don’t want to know. As far as most folks hereabouts are concerned the time you learn anything about dragons is usually when someone gets eaten.”
“Still, there must be someone.”
“Well now, since you mention it, there is one fellow who probably knows more than most.”
“I wonder if I can talk to him.”
Malkin shrugged. “Easy enough. If you’re up for a little walk.”
When they left the house they turned away from the main square and the town hall and headed downhill, toward the river. Wiz, who hadn’t been this way much, looked around with interest.
“There’s a lot I don’t understand about the way humans and dragons relate to each other here,” he told her.
“It’s simple enough. Dragons eat humans when they feel like it.”
“Yeah, but beyond that. For instance why haven’t the dragons attacked the town?”
In answer Malkin pointed to a stretch of the street before them. The paving bricks were rougher, darker and shinier. Vitrified, Wiz saw, as if fired at too high a heat. Looking further he realized there was more than one such patch on the street or on the sides of buildings.