So You Want to Be a Wizard

by Diane Duane

  (Probably the Learjet distracted them. Fred, come on, tone it down a little,) Nita said. (Let's go back inside and do what we have to. Then we can set the timeslide and have fun in the city for the rest of the day.)

  They went back inside and down the stairs again, accompanied by the quiet inward sound of Fred's grumbling. There was no trouble finding the little deli where the worldgate was situated, and Nita and Kit paused outside it. (You have everything ready?) Nita said.

  (All in here.) Kit tapped his head. (The spells are all set except for one or two syllables—it's like dialing almost all of a phone number. When I call for you, just come on back. All we need is for the supplies to be in range of the spell; there's nothing special that has to be done with them. Fred, you stay with Nita.)

  (As you say.)

  They went in. Nita lingered by the front counter, staring at dill pickles and sandwich makings, trying to look normal while she waited for Kit to call her. Fred hung over her shoulder, looking with great interest at bologna and salami and mayonnaise and cream cheese. (You people certainly have enough ways to internalize energy,) he said. (Is there really that much difference between one brand of matter and another?)

  (Well, wasn't there any difference when you were a black hole? Didn't a rock, say, taste different from a ray of light, when you soaked one or the other up?)

  (Now that you mention it, yes. But appreciating differences like that was something you had to work at for a long time. I wouldn't expect someone as young as you to—)

  (Nita,) Kit's thought came abruptly. (We've got trouble. It's not here.)

  (What? It has to be!)

  (It's gone, Nita.)

  "Girlie," said the man behind the deli counter in a no-nonsense growl, "you gonna buy anything?"

  "Uh," Nita said, and by reflex more than anything else picked up a can of soda from the nearby cooler and fished around in her pocket for the change. "Kit—" she called.

  "Coming."

  Nita paid for the soda. Kit joined her, carrying a small bag of potato chips, which he paid for in turn. Together they went back out into the corridor, and Kit knelt down by the window of a store across the way, a window full of shiny cutlery. He got his wizards' manual out of his pack and began going through the pages in a hurry. "I don't get it," he said. "I even checked this morning to make sure there hadn't been any change in the worldgate status. It said, right here, 'patent and operative.'"

  "Were the spells all right?"

  Kit glared up at Nita, and she was instantly sorry she'd asked. "The spells were fine," Kit said. "But they got caught like that first one I did, when you came along. Oh, damn..." He trailed off, and Nita edged around beside him to look at the page. "Something's changed," Kit said, and indeed the page didn't look as it had when Nita had checked it herself in her own manual the night before. The listings for the other Manhattan worldgates were the same—the World Trade Center gate was still listed as "under construction" and the Rockefeller Center gate as "closed for routine maintenance." But under the Grand Central gate listing was a small red box that said in boldface type, Claudication temporarily dislocated due to unscheduled spatial interruption, followed by a string of numbers and symbols in the Speech, a description of the gate's new location. Kit glanced up at the roof, through which the sound of jackhammers could plainly be heard. "The construction," he said. "It must have screwed up the worldgate's interruption of space somehow."

  Nita was puzzling over the symbols for the new location. "Isn't that term there the one for height above the ground?" she asked.

  "Uh-huh. Look at it, it must be sixty, seventy stories straight up from here." Kit slapped the book shut in great annoyance, shoved it back in his backpack. "Now what do we do?"

  (We go back outside?) Fred asked, very hopefully.

  It seemed the best suggestion. The three of them walked out again, and Fred bobbed and danced some more in the sunlight while Nita and Kit walked slowly east along Forty-second Street, toward the Park Avenue overpass. "Dislocated," Kit muttered. "And who knows how long it'll take to come undislocated? A perfectly good piece of time wasted."

  Nita stopped and turned, looking up into the, air and trying to estimate where the deli lay under the Grand Central complex. She picked a spot that seemed about right, let her eye travel up and up, sixty, maybe seventy stories. "Kit," she said. "Kit! Look what's seventy stories high, and right next door."

  Kit looked. Dark blue and silver, with its big stylized globe logo on one side, the Pan Am Building reared its oblong self up at least seventy stories high, right there—not only right behind Grand Central, but part of it. "Yeah," Kit said, his voice still heavy with annoyance. "So?"

  "So you remember that shield spell you showed me? The one that makes the air solid? If you change the quantities in the spell a little, you can use it for something else. To walk on, even. You just keep the air hard."

  She couldn't keep from grinning. Kit stared at Nita as if she'd gone crazy. "Are you suggesting that we walk out to the worldgate and—" He laughed. "How are we going to get up there?"

  "There's a heliport on top of the building," Nita said promptly. "They don't use it for big helicopters anymore, but the little ones still land, and there's an elevator in the building that goes right to the top. There's a restaurant up there, too; my father had lunch with someone up there once. I bet we could do it."

  Kit stared at her. "If you talk the air solid, you're going to walk on it first! I saw that spell; it's not that easy."

  "I practiced it some. Come on, Kit, you want to waste the timeslide? It's almost ten now! It'll probably be years before these guys are finished digging. Let's do it!"

  "They'll never let us up there," Kit said with conviction.

  "Oh yes, they will. They won't have a choice, because Fred'll make a diversion for us. We don't even need anything as big as a Learjet this time. How about it, Fred?"

  Fred looked at them reluctantly. (I must admit I have been feeling an urge to burp...)

  Kit still looked uncertain. "And when we get up there," he said, "all those stories up, and looking as if we're walking on nothing—what if somebody sees us?"

  Nita laughed. "Who are they going to tell? And who's going to believe them?"

  Kit nodded and then began to grin slowly, too. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah! Let's go, it's getting late."

  Back they went into Grand Central, straight across the main concourse this time and up one of the six escalators that led up to the lobby of the Pan Am Building. They paused just outside the revolving doors at the end of the escalators. The Pan Am lobby was a big place, pillared and walled and paved in dark granite, echoing with the sound of people hurrying in and out of the station. They went up the escalator to the next floor, and Nita pointed off to one side, indicating an elevator bank. One elevator had a sign standing by it: COPTER CLUB—HELIPAD LEVEL—EXPRESS. Also standing by it was a bored-looking uniformed security guard.

  "That's it," Nita said.

  "So if we can just get him away from there..."

  "It's not that simple." She pointed down at the end of the hall between two more banks of elevators. Another guard sat behind a large semicircular desk, watching a row of TV monitors. "They've got cameras all over the place. We've got to get that guy out of there, too. Fred, if you're going to do something, do it right between them. Out in front of that desk."

  (Well,) Fred said, sounding interested, (let's see, let's see...) He damped his light down and floated off toward the elevators, looking like an unusually large speck of dust, nothing more. The dust mote stopped just between the desk and the elevator guard, hung in midair, and concentrated so fiercely that Nita and Kit could both feel it thirty feet away.

  (T-hup!)

  BANG!

  "That'll get their attention," Kit muttered. It did; both the guards started at the noise, began looking around for the source of it—then both went very very slowly over to examine the large barrel cactus in a brass pot that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the sh
iny floor.

  "Now," Kit said, and took off toward the elevator with Nita close behind. Both the guards had their backs turned, and Nita, passing them, saw the elevator keys hanging off one guard's belt. (Fred,) she said hurriedly, (can you grab those real fast, the way you grabbed my pen? Don't swallow them!)

  (I might make that mistake once,) Fred said, (but not twice.) As they slipped into the elevator Fred paused by the guard's belt, and the keys vanished without so much as a jingle. He sailed in to them. (How was that?)

  (Great. Quick, Nita, close the door!)

  She punched one of the elevator buttons and the doors slid shut; the keys appeared again, and Kit caught them in midair before they fell. "It's always one of these round ones, like they use on coin phones," he said, going through the keys. "Fred, I didn't know you could make live things!"

  (I didn't know either,) Fred said, sounding unsettled, (and I'm not sure I like it!)

  "Here we go," Kit said, and put one key into the elevator lock, turning it to RUN, and then pressed the button marked 73—RESTAURANT—HELIPAD. The elevator took off in a hurry.

  Nita swallowed repeatedly to pop her ears. "Aren't you going to have to change the spells a little to compensate for the gate being up high now?" she said after a moment.

  "A little. You just put in the new height coordinate. Oops!"

  The elevator began to slow down quickly, and Nita's stomach churned for a moment. She and Kit both pressed themselves against the sides of the elevator, so they wouldn't be immediately visible to anyone who might happen to be standing right outside the door. But when the doors slid open, no one was there. They peered out and saw a long carpeted corridor with a plate-glass door at one end. Through it they saw tables and chairs and, more dimly, through a window, a hazy view of the East Side skyline. A muffled sound of plates and silverware being handled came down the hall to them.

  (It's early for lunch,) Nita said, relieved. (Let's go before someone sees us.)

  (What about these keys?)

  (Hmm...)

  (Look, let's leave them in the elevator lock. That way the guard downstairs'll just think he left them there. If they discover they're missing, they'll start looking for whoever took them—and this would be the first place they'd look.)

  (Yeah, but how are we going to get down?)

  (We'll walk on air,) Kit said, his voice teasing. Nita rolled her eyes at the ceiling. (Or we'll go down with the people coming out from lunch, if that doesn't work. Let's just get out of here first, okay? Which way do we go to get up on the heliport?)

  (Left. There are stairs.)

  They slipped out of the elevator just as it chimed and its doors shut again—probably the guard had called it from downstairs. The corridor off to the left was featureless except for one door at its very end. helipad access, the door said in large red letters. Nita tried the knob, then let her hand fall in exasperation. (Locked. Crud!)

  (Well, wait a moment,) Kit said, and tried the knob himself. "You don't really want to be locked, do you?" he said aloud in the Speech, very quietly. Again Nita was amazed by how natural the wizards' language sounded when you heard it, and how nice it was to hear—as if, after being lost in a foreign country for a long time, someone should suddenly speak warmly to you in English. "You've been locked for a couple of days now," Kit went on, his voice friendly and persuasive, not casting a spell, just talking—though in the Speech, the two were often dangerously close. "It must be pretty dull being locked, no one using you, no one paying any attention. Now we need to use you at least a couple of times this morning, so we thought we'd ask—"

  Kt-chk! said the lock, and the knob turned in Kit's hand. "Thank you," he said. "We'll be back later." He went through the door into the stairwell, Nita and Fred following, and as the door swung to behind them and locked itself again, there was a decidedly friendly sound to the click. Kit grinned triumphantly at Nita as they climbed the stairs. "How about that?"

  "Not bad," Nita said, determined to learn how to do it herself, if possible. "You've been practicing, too."

  "Not really—some of this stuff just seems to come naturally as you work with it more. My mother locked herself out of the car at the supermarket last week and I was pulling on the car door and talking at it—you know how you do when you're trying to get something to work. And then it worked. I almost fell over, the door came open so fast. It's the Speech that does it, I think. Everything loves to hear it."

  "Remember what Carl said, though."

  "I know. I won't overdo it. You think we ought to call him later, let him know what happened to the gate?"

  They came to the top of the stairs, paused before the next closed door, breathing hard from the exertion of climbing the stairs fast. "Probably he knows, if he's looked at his book this morning," Nita said. "Look, before we do anything else, let's set the timeslide. This is a good place for it; we're out of sight. When we're tired of running around the city, we can just activate it and we'll be back here at quarter of eleven. Then we just go downstairs, into Grand Central and downstairs to the shuttle, and then home in time for lunch."

  "Sounds good." They began rummaging in their backpacks, and before too long had produced the eight and a half sugar cubes, the lithium-cadmium battery—a fat one, bigger than a D cell and far heavier—a specific integrated-circuit chip salvaged from the innards of a dead pocket calculator, and the handle of a broken glass teacup. "You might want to back away a little, Fred, so your emissions don't interfere with the spell," Kit said.

  (Right.) Fred retreated high up into one ceiling-corner of the stairwell, flaring bright with interest.

  "All right," Kit said, thumbing through his manual to a page marked with a bit of ripped-up newspaper, "here we go. This is a timeslide inauguration," he said aloud in the Speech. "Claudication type mesarrh-gimel-veignt-six, authorization, group—" Nita swallowed, feeling the strangeness set in as it had during their first spell together, feeling the walls lean in to listen. But it was not a silence that fell this time. As Kit spoke, Nita became aware of a roaring away at the edge of her hearing and a blurring at the limits of her vision. Both effects grew and strengthened to the overwhelming point almost before she realized what was happening. And then it was too late. She was seeing and hearing everything that would happen for miles and miles around at quarter to eleven, as if the building were transparent, as if she had eyes that could pierce stone and ears that could hear a leaf fall blocks away. The words and thoughts of a million minds poured down on her in a roaring onslaught like a wave crashing down on a swimmer, and she was washed away, helpless. Too many sights, commonplace and strange, glad and frightening, jostled and crowded all around her, and squeezing her eyes shut made no difference—the sights were in her mind. I'll go crazy, I'll go crazy, stop it! But she was caught in the spell and couldn't budge. Stop it, oh, let it stop—

  It stopped. She was staring at the floor between her and Kit as she had been doing when the flood of feelings swept over her. Everything was the same as it had been, except that the sugar was gone. Kit was looking at her in concern. "You all right?" he said. "You look a little green."

  "Uh, yeah." Nita rubbed her head, which ached slightly as if with the memory of a very loud sound.

  "What happened to the sugar?"

  "It went away. That means the spell took." Kit began gathering up the rest of the materials and stowing them. He looked at her again. "Are you sure you're okay?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine." She got up, looked around restlessly. "C'mon, let's go."

  Kit got up too, shrugging into his backpack. "Yeah. Which way is the—"

  CRACK! went something against the door outside, and Nita's insides constricted. She and Kit both threw themselves against the wall behind the door, where they would be hidden if it opened. For a few seconds neither of them dared to breathe.

  Nothing happened.

  (What was that?) Kit asked.

  (I don't know. It sounded like a shot. Lord, Kit, what if there's somebody up here with a gun or som
ething—)

  (What's a gun?) Fred said.

  (You don't want to know,) Kit said. (Then again, if there was somebody out there with a gun, I doubt they could hurt you. Fred, would you go out there and have a quick look around? See who's there?)

  (Why not?) Fred floated down from the ceiling, looked the door over, put his light out, and slipped through the keyhole. For a little while there was silence, broken only by the faint faraway rattle of a helicopter going by, blocks away.

  Then the lock glowed a little from inside, and Fred popped back in. (I don't see anyone out there,) he said.

  Kit looked at Nita. (Then what made that noise?)

  She was as puzzled as he was. She shrugged. (Well, if Fred says there's nothing out there—)

  (I suppose. But let's keep our eyes open.)

  Kit coaxed the door open as he had the first one, and the three of them stepped cautiously out onto the roof.

  Most of it was occupied by the helipad proper, the long wide expanse of bare tarmac ornamented with its big yellow square-and-H symbol and surrounded by blue low-intensity landing lights. At one end of the oblong pad was a small glass-walled building decorated with the Pan Am logo, a distended orange wind sock, and an anemometer, its three little cups spinning energetically in the brisk morning wind. Beyond the helipad, the roof was graveled, and various low-set ventilator stacks poked up here and there. A yard-high guardrail edged the roof. Rising up on all sides was Manhattan, a stony forest of buildings in all shapes and heights. To the west glimmered the Hudson River and the Palisades on the New Jersey side; on the other side of the building lay the East River and Brooklyn and Queens, veiled in mist and pinkish smog. The Sun would have felt warm if the wind had stopped blowing. No one was up there at all.

  Nita took a few steps off the paved walkway that led to the little glass building and scuffed at the gravel suspiciously. "This wind is pretty stiff," she said. "Maybe a good gust of it caught some of this gravel and threw it at the door." But even as she said it, she didn't believe it.

  "Maybe," Kit said. His voice made it plain that he didn't believe it either. "Come on, let's find the gate."