at once. That was too hard.
Okay, so what about breaking it down? Suppose you could imagine something
one part at a time, like drawing it out on paper? Or on a computer screen!
Yeah. Like a workstation!
What he needed was a magical workstation. Already the image was forming in
his mind. He’d never seen a jet fighter up close, but he knew exactly what
a workstation was like. Of course, he’d want to make a few improvements.
Craig left the misshapen fighter sitting in the courtyard. He’d do a hell
of a lot better the next time, but he was going to build that fighter
anyway. Squadrons and squadrons of them, just on principle.
* * *
It took him nearly three days, but at last Craig had his workstation. The
“screen” was a gently glowing rectangle nearly a yard across. There was a
keyboard and a mouse, of course, but the system also had voice input. If
he really wanted he could just think hard at the screen and make things
happen.
The display was an engineer’s dream. Infinite resolution, at least sixteen
million colors, three-dimensional, fully shaded modeling and redraws at
better than sixty frames a second. He could design anything on this baby!
Craig stared at the glowing surface and tried to think of his first
project. Maybe jet fighters were a little old fashioned for what they
needed to do. They needed weapons that were more far-out, more
science-fictional.
Like giant robots! Yeah, now there was something he could really get into.
He’d always liked Robobattle, where the gamers slugged it out in
twenty-fifth-century robot war machines. Now he could actually build
something like that.
Instinctively he reached for the mouse and began to sketch designs on his
super-workstation. More accurately, he tried to remember what the warbots
in Robobattle were like. They were nice and impressive and in the game
they had a lot of firepower. Then there were the giant intelligent tanks
from Orc. And magic! Yeah, what would it be like to have a couple of
hundred megaton/seconds of firepower and the destruction spells of a
Seventh-Level Mage? That would be really something.
Working with bits and pieces from computer games, role-playing games and
old television shows, Craig began to fashion his engines of destruction.
It never occurred to him that he had the power to do something original.
“See?” Craig said eagerly. “I can design stuff here on the screen and then
build it magically.”
Mikey looked over Craig’s workstation and didn’t say anything.
“I don’t have to imagine it all in one piece. I can work on it a piece at
a time, and . . .”
“So build me a planet buster.”
“Huh?”
“Come on. Whip me up something that can blow up a whole planet.” He
smacked his fist into his palm. “Pow! Just like that.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Craig said uncomfortably.
“Why not?”
“You’ve got to have at least a general idea of how something’s supposed to
work before you can build it.”
“You mean we’ve got to sit down and fucking design all this shit?”
“No, not that bad. But we’ve got to know how the stuff functions or it
won’t work.”
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Mikey muttered. “What a pile of shit.”
“You wanna go back and tell them that?” Craig snapped. “I sure as hell
ain’t gonna.”
Mikey grinned in that nasty, superior way of his. “Maybe I will do that
the next time I talk to them.”
Craig’s jaw dropped. “You’ve been talking to them?”
“They’re around, if you want to make contact.”
“But Jesus, I mean . . .”
“They’re real interesting too. I’m learning a lot from them.”
The way he said it made Craig uncomfortable. “You mean magic and stuff?”
Mikey grinned again. “Oh, I’m learning lots of things.”
Craig knew he needed to learn more about how magic operated, but the
thought of even seeing an Ur-elf again made him weak in the knees.
“Look, suppose you concentrate on the theoretical stuff and I’ll keep
working on the robots and shit.”
“Okay,” Mikey said with a little smile. Craig had the uneasy feeling he’d
been outmaneuvered again.
Mikey stopped at the doorway and turned back to Craig. “Oh, if you want to