“A difficult problem?”
Jerry grinned but there was no joy in it “I don’t even know enough to know that” He spun around in the chair to face the dragon on the hearth.
“Normally on a job like this where you’ve got a pile of observables—stuff—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. Here—” he waved a hand expressively. “Here no matter where I grab and how much I poke and prod I don’t get anything that makes sense.”
He spun back around and waved at the light show above his desk. “Ninety 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.”
“Well, Wiz always said you start with what you know.”
Jerry spun back to her. “I know enough to know I’m out of my depth on this. We need help, heavy-duty help from our world.”
“Another programming team?”
Jerry shook his head. “Not that simple. We need someone who can get his mind around this thing.”
“Another wizard programmer?”
“No, we need someone even more powerful. We need a programming legend, a code demigod”
“Do you have anyone in mind?”
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.”
“You mean he might not believe you?”
“I 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.”
“Are there some who are not occupied?”
“Yeah, a few.” He thought for a minute. “Well, Tom Digby isn’t available right now, so the best is probably Taj.”
“Taj?”
“E.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.” Moira didn’t know what that meant but it sounded powerful. So she concentrated on the part she thought she understood.
“E.T. Is that like the movie Wiz likes so much?” Moira asked.
“No, it’s E.T. as in Elvis Twitty.” Jerry shrugged. “His 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.
“Taj used to teach an extension class in debugging down in the Valley. I learned a hell 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.”
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.
“His power isn’t in his techniques. It’s in the way he sees.”
“That sounds like Patrius,” Moira said.
“The wizard who brought Wiz here in the first place?
Yeah, from what I’ve heard of him he would have liked Taj.”
“What would it take to get him?”
“Mostly 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.”
“Would it hurt to ask him?”
“No,” Jerry said slowly. “No, it wouldn’t hurt.” He brightened. “Thanks, Moira, you’re a genius.”