“Now cut that out!” Jerry roared. The fighters vanished with soft pops and there was a snickering from one corner of the Bullpen.
Bal-Simba stared off at the wall and carefully avoided saying anything.
“Ah, yes,” Jerry said. “Well, ah, this is where we work.”
The central aisle of the barn was taken up by a plank-and-sawhorse table piled high with books, scrolls, blank sheets of parchment, inkpots, quills and wooden tablets marked and unmarked. At the far end of the barn the whitewashed wall was streaked and smudged from being used as an impromptu whiteboard. Next to the wall sat a waist-high brazier warming an enormous pot of blackmoss tea.
The stalls were on either side of the aisles and each stall held a littered trestle table and a chair. Most of them also held at least one programmer.
“All these ones are working on one great spell?” the giant magician asked dubiously.
“Yes, Lord. We divide the work so each of us has a specific part. Our first week here was spent doing systems analysis and producing a design document so we’d all know what we were doing.”
Jerry gestured at the long table. “This is our central library. We keep the project documentation and specs here where we can all consult them.”
Petronus reached out to examine a large book on top of the pile. Just as his fingers touched it, the pile shifted and hissed at him. He yanked his hand back as a scaly head on a long neck rose out of the mass and slitted yellow eyes transfixed him. Sinuously a small dragon flowed out of its lair among the books. It was bigger than the beast which had guarded Wiz’s original book, perhaps two feet long. Its scales were the same vivid red, but they were tinged with blue along the edges. It eyed Bal-Simba with suspicious disapproval.
“Another demon?” the wizard asked.
“No, that’s a real dragon. Wandered in here one day and decided it liked it.”
“Hunts mice real good,” Danny volunteered.
Petronus sniffed and the group moved on. The dragon whuffed suspiciously, decided these people bore watching, and trailed after them, eyeing the hem of Petronus’s robe speculatively.
Jerry scanned the cubicles desperately for someone to show off. Cindy Naismith’s feminist manner was likely to offend them, Larry Fox hadn’t had a bath since they arrived and Danny was too big a risk to even consider. Finally he saw Karl was in his cubicle and steered the group, dragon and all, in there.
“This is Karl Dershowitz, one of our programmers. Karl, you know Bal-Simba and these are, ah, Malus and Petronius.”
“Petronus,” the wizard corrected, stonefaced.
“Ah, yes. Petronus. Anyway, they’re here observing today and I wanted to show them what you were doing.”
Bal-Simba pushed into the stall until he stood directly behind Karl. “What have you there?” he asked.
“I’m working on a sequencing module,” Karl told them, slightly awed by Bal-Simba’s bulk and pointed teeth. “This is the part that reports conflicts between the different processors.”
“And this is the—ah—sequencer?” Bal-Simba gestured at what sat on the desk.
“No, this is a debugging tool. Each of these demons monitors one of the versions of the code and reports any destructive interactions.”
Sitting on Karl’s desk were three monkeys. One had his paws clasped tightly over its ears, another had its eyes clinched shut and the third was covering its mouth. “Hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil,” Karl said. “That means everything’s running fine.”
“There’s something familiar about those three,” Jerry said. “Something in their faces.”
Karl looked sheepish. “Well, yeah. That kinda just happened.”
The monkey demon in the middle suddenly opened his eyes and glared at the one to his left. He reached out and poked his fingers in the other’s eyes. The demon recoiled and then grabbed his tormentor by the nose, twisting it sideways and leading him around the desk. The third monkey broke up laughing at the sight and the first two turned on him.
“Okay,” Karl said, “we’ve got a conflict here. One of the processors jumped the queue and grabbed a resource intended for another one. When they got locked in contention the third processor got more than his share of resources.”