hack, if I do say so myself.”
Danny reached out and poked one of the rings with his forefinger. “So what
do they do, shoot lightning bolts?”
“Nope, they generate a stasis field. Basically the spell is an amplified
variation of that spell we used to stretch out a night and get more
programming time while we were working on the magic compiler. Except
instead of stretching nights out two-to-one, this spell stretches time out
sagans to one.”
“Sagans?” asked Jerry.
“Yeah, you know. Like ‘SAY-guns and SAY-guns of light years.’ ”
“Oh, right,” Jerry said, catching the imitation of the famous astronomer.
Moira frowned. “One moment. You say this spell slows down time
enormously?”
“Yep.”
“Then how can you move when the spell is active?”
“You can’t. It freezes you solid. But nothing can hurt you.”
“Still, the spell can be broken, can it not?”
“It automatically shuts off when malevolent magic goes away. Kind of like
the protective spell I used against those dwarves.”
“So at the first sign of trouble you slip on the ring and turn into a
statue?”
“Well, no. We wear the rings all the time. They activate automatically
when you’re under direct attack and they stay active as long as you’re in
danger. The rest of the time they’re inert.”
“These things are like bullet-proof vests?” asked Jerry.
“More like an airbag in a car. Nothing happens until you need it.”
Wiz passed the rings around and each of them slipped one on. Then Danny
turned and held one out to June. But she hissed and shrank away as if
Danny had offered her a scorpion.
“June, please.” But June’s face was white and she refused to touch the
ring.
“It is not like the enchantment in the elf hill,” Moira said, coming over
to her and laying a hand on her arm. “It will serve only to protect you.”
Still June shook her head and turned away.
Danny held up his hand to display the ring he was wearing. “Look, if I
wear this and you don’t, we’ll be separated if something happens. But if
we both wear one we’ll always be together. Please darling, wear it for
me.”
Hesitantly June reached out a shaking hand and clutched the ring Danny
extended to her. With a sudden move she jammed the ring onto her finger
and then jerked her hands back into the folds of her skirt. Danny grabbed
her and hugged her to him.
“Oh yeah, I almost forgot,” Wiz said a shade too brightly. “There’s
another way to turn the ring on and off.”
He held up his hand and mimed twisting the stone. “If you want you can
activate the spell by turning the stone in the ring a quarter turn to the
right. You can deactivate the spell in the presence of danger by having
someone turn the stone a quarter turn to the left.”
“What kind of a moron would want to turn off the spell when he’s in
danger?” Danny asked.
Wiz stopped short. “You know, I never thought of that.”
“Feeping creatureism,” Jerry said.
“What kind of creature?” Moira asked.
“A feeping one,” Danny explained. “That’s one that has too feeping many .
. .”
“What it means is that I’ve added features just to add features,” Wiz
interrupted. “It’s a spoonerism on featurism.”
“If you expect me to ask you about spoons, my Lord, you will be sorely
disappointed. Nevertheless I understand the idea.”
“Yeah,” Wiz said sadly, “and that took more work than all the rest of the
spell put together.”
“So now we can continue to work even under the strongest magical attack?”
Moira asked, eager to get the conversation back to something that halfway
made sense.
“Not under actual attack, but right up to the minute it begins.”
Moira looked down at the ring on her finger. “I hope it works.”
“I hope we never find out,” Jerry said fervently.
Forty: RAID
The drone had come so far south only by accident, cut off from its base by
a line of strong thunderstorms and blown well past the point where it
should have turned for home. Nevertheless it kept recording what its