sitting. “When’s she due back anyway?”
“She said probably late this afternoon.” Wiz swiveled back to the monitor,
but the shape still looked the same. Irritably he started flipping through
the views, each of which showed three of the shape’s dimensions at a time.
But the effect started to give him a headache.
June stiffened and grabbed Danny’s arm.
“Noise,” she said.
“I don’t hear anything,” Jerry told her.
Danny was frowning and listening hard. “I do. Kind of a whine.”
“Are we losing a bearing on the disk drive?” asked Wiz. He bent and
pressed his ear to the case. “No, I don’t think it’s coming from there.”
By now the whine was louder.
“I think it’s coming from outside,” Jerry said and all four of them moved
to the window.
There was a flash and the window blew in with a roar.
Pieces of glass the size and shape of knives scythed toward them in a
glittering rain. But they shattered or bounced off when they struck the
four immobile figures. Clouds of dust from the explosion roiled through
the empty window frames. But not one of the four moved so much as a
muscle.
They stood still and silent as the doors to the computer room flew open
and three hulking robots marched in, tracking mud behind them.
Then came Craig in a suit of power armor and lastly Mikey wearing jeans
and a T-shirt.
“What’s wrong with them?” Craig’s voice was tinny through the battle
armor’s speaker.
“They were like that when I came in.” Mikey looked them up and down and
smiled nastily. “It’s a spell of some sort.” He turned his back on the
group and went to the computer console. The screen still showed the
weaving blue form of the key.
“Son of a bitch,” Mikey said, open-mouthed.
Craig stomped up to peer over Mikey’s shoulder. “What is it?”
“Something that makes this whole business worthwhile. Something that gives
us just what we need.”
Mikey smiled. Not one of his half-sneers or tight little mouth quirks, but
a big broad smile like a child on Christmas Day.
He left the console and went around in front of the impromptu sculpture
garden where he could stare directly into Wiz’s eyes.
“Thanks for the computer. It will save us a lot of trouble.”
He turned to Craig. “Have the robots pack all this up and load it on the
ship. Then search the place and grab anything else that looks useful.”
“What about them?”
Mikey looked at the frozen group. “Finish them.”
Craig raised his arm and pointed the laser in his suit’s right forearm at
the group. A brilliant beam of red light shot out and played across Wiz
and his friends. The wall behind them smoked and scorched but the four
statues were unaffected.
“What the hell?” Craig raised both arms and two laser beams converged in a
spot of blinding incandescence that moved over the forms. The concrete
wall behind them pocked and spalled and the aluminum window frame with its
remaining shards of glass melted and ran. But still Wiz and his friends
were unharmed.
“Oh shit, just leave them,” Mikey said. “Later we’ll see how well that
spell stands up to a nuclear fireball. If that doesn’t work we’ll just
drop them in the Sun. But get the computer on board first.”
With one last look at the object on the screen, he left the computer room.
Quickly Craig brought the system down, cursing the clumsiness of his
armor’s steel fingers on the keyboard. For a space there was no sound save
the clicking of the keyboard. Neither the programmers nor the robots
stirred.
Gradually the room began to fill with dense black smoke from a fire
elsewhere in the Mousehole. Craig, protected by his armor, barely noticed.
After several minutes the system blinked and died. Craig ordered the
robots to begin dismantling and removing the computer. Then he went over
to stand in front of the four motionless figures.
“Greatest wizard in the world, huh?” he said to Wiz. “Man, you were easy.”
Wiz did not twitch. Not even the look in his eyes changed.
Craig turned from one to the other, savoring the moment. So this was what