the pile of paper nearly as tall as he was. Then Danny gestured down into
the hole and commanded “backslash untangle exe.” A foot-tall demon wearing
work clothes and a tool belt popped up in the cable run. The Emac flipped
open the wiring chart and started to gabble furiously. The demon in the
cable run whipped out his tools and began splicing wires so fast its hands
were a blur.
Wiz shook his head in admiration. “Danny, that is a truly tasty bit of
work.”
The younger programmer shrugged, but his face lit up at the compliment. “I
figure it will take maybe a couple of hours to get the cabling done.”
“What does that do to the rest of the schedule?” Moira asked.
Wiz thought for a minute. “We should be able to hook up the climate
control this evening. Once we turn it on that’s about all we can do
tonight. We need to let the temperature and humidity stabilize before we
try to bring the system up. That’ll take six or eight hours.”
The programmers were in fine fettle the next morning. They were days ahead
of schedule and best of all, the hardware installation was almost done.
All of them were much more at home with software and they were looking
forward to the next phase.
“Well,” Wiz was saying as they came down the hall, “if everything passes
the hardware checks we should be able to start loading system software by
this evening.”
“That’ll be a relief,” Danny said. “I’m getting sick of messing with
hardware. What’s the matter?”
Wiz had stopped dead and was frowning off into space.
“Is it my imagination or is it humid in here?”
“Humid,” Moira said.
“Definitely,” Jerry said.
Wiz looked at the others. “Come on.” He wasn’t quite running as he headed
toward the computer room, but he wasn’t far from it. The others were right
behind him.
Smoke was pouring out of the computer room.
“What the hell?”
“The place is on fire!” Wiz shouted.
Danny ran forward as if to dash into the room. “That’s not smoke,” he
exclaimed. “It’s cool and wet.”
“Fog,” Jerry said wonderingly. “The room’s full of fog.”
Wiz took a deep breath and charged into the computer room. The air was so
clammy he could hardly breathe and the fog swirled around him like the
special effects in a bad monster movie. Batting at the swirling mist he
fought his way to the back of the room. Thick white clouds of vapor were
pouring out of the air conditioning duct at the rear of the room.
“Shut off the climate control,” he yelled over his shoulder. “And get a
fan in here to clear this stuff out.”
Almost instantly a wind rushed through the room, sucking the fog out
faster than it could pour in through the vents. By the time Wiz reached
the door again, the air in the room was clear. The relays clicked over and
the air conditioning died.
Moira was standing in the doorway with her staff in her hand and the wind
she had raised tugging at her skirt and tousling her coppery hair. As Wiz
emerged she gestured and the winds died away instantly.
“My Lord,” the hedge witch said with a smug little smile and arched
eyebrow, “explain to me again how reliable mechanical contrivances are.”
She looked so lovely with her hair in disarray Wiz forgave her.
It took the programmers and their helpers nearly two hours to get things
under control. Water had to be vacuumed out of the soaked carpet, books
and papers had to be spread out to dry and a dehumidifying spell was used
to help dry out the equipment. Fortunately there wasn’t much damage, but
there was a lot of work to be done.
“Okay, ” Wiz said grimly. “Somehow the air conditioner and the humidifier
both got stuck on. The low temperature turned the high humidity to fog.”
“We’re lucky we didn’t take two days off,” Jerry said. “We probably would
have had ice all over the equipment.”
“I’m damn glad we hadn’t powered up the computer,” Wiz replied. “That
would have been a real mess.”
“Hey guys,” Danny called from the back of the room. “These things didn’t