by Rick Cook
"We weren’t expecting so many of you, you see and we are so terribly crowded here…" His voice trailed off as they approached the building.
It was sturdily built of stone below and timber above. As they drew nearer, a distinctive aroma gave a hint of its original purpose and once they stepped through the large double doors there was no doubt at all as to what it was.
"A stable?" Jerry said dubiously.
"Well, ah, a cow barn actually," the man almost cringed as he said it.
"Wonderful," Cindy said, "back in the bullpen."
"Oh wow, man," said one of the group, a graying man with his hair pulled back into a pony tail, "like rustic."
"Hell, I’ve worked in worse," one of the programmers said as he looked around. "I used to be at Boeing."
The room was good-sized, but as cold as every other place in the City of Night. A mullioned window, its tracery in ruins, let in the sharp outside air. Piles of sodden trash and pieces of broken furniture lay here and there. On one wall stood a tall black cabinet, tilting on a broken leg but its doors still shut.
Wiz came into the room eagerly. Maybe there was something in the closed cabinet he could use.
Cold and hunger dulled his caution and he was halfway across the room before a skittering sound behind him told him he had made a mistake.
Wiz whirled at the sound, but it was too late. There, blocking the only way out, was a giant black rat. It was perhaps five feet long in the body and its shoulder reached to Wiz’s waist. Its beady eyes glared at Wiz. It lifted its muzzle to sniff the human, showing long yellow teeth. Wiz stepped back again and the rat sniffed once more, whiskers quivering.
Wiz licked his lips and took a firmer grip on the broken halberd shaft. The rat eyed him hungrily and moved all the way into the room, its naked tail still trailing out into the corridor.
Wiz stepped to one side, hoping the rat would follow and leave him room for a dash to the door. But the rat wasn’t fooled. It lowered its head and squealed like a piglet caught in a fence. Then it charged.
In spite of his disinclination to exercise, Wiz had naturally fast reflexes. Moreover, his two years in the World had hardened his muscles and increased his wind. He was far from being the self-described "pencil-necked geek" he had been when he had arrived here, but he was even further from being a warrior.
The monster closed in squealing. Wiz swung wildly with his rusty axe. The giant rat ducked under the blade and leaped for his throat.
Against a halfway competent swordsman the tactic would have worked. But Wiz wasn’t even halfway competent. He had swung blindly and he brought his weapon back equally blindly, backhand along the same path.
The spike on the back of the axe caught the rat just below the ear. Any guardsman on the drill field would have winced at such a puny blow, but the spike concentrated the force on a single spot. Wiz felt a "crunch" as the spike penetrated bone. The rat squealed, jerked convulsively and fell in a twitching heap at Wiz’s feet.
Wiz’s first instinct was to turn and run. But he checked himself. Think he told himself sternly, you’ve got to think. Running wouldn’t solve anything. There was nowhere to run to and running burned calories he could ill-afford to lose. Panic wouldn’t get him the food he so desperately needed.
Well, he thought, looking down at the gray-furred corpse, maybe I can use one problem to solve another.
Kneeling over the body, he set to work with his halberd.
Wiz emerged from the room a while later wiping his mouth on a bit of more or less clean rag.
Rat sashimi, Wiz decided, wasn’t half bad—if you used lots of wasabe. He didn’t have any wasabe, but it still wasn’t half bad.
While the rest of the team broke for lunch, Jerry, Karl and Moira went back to the apartment to start sorting through Wiz’s papers.
"A barn!" Moira said angrily. "I cannot believe they would do that to you."
"Hey, it’s dry and it looks like it can be made fairly comfortable," Karl said. "Besides, it’s already divided up into cubicles."
"Well, I can assure you, My Lords…" Moira began as she started to open the door.
There was a low moan and the sound of scuffling from the apartment.
Moira threw open the door.
"Danny!" Jerry yelled.
The young programmer was rocking back and forth, his body slamming first forward almost to the desk and then back so forcefully the chair teetered.
"Something’s wrong! He’s having a stroke or something."
"Stay away from him!" Moira ordered. "He is caught in a spell."
"Stop it."
"I do not know how. The command should be in the book.
Jerry edged around the still-thrashing Danny and hooked the Dragon Book off the desk. The dragon demon ignored him, watching Danny the way a cat watches a new and particularly interesting toy.
"Damn, no index!"
"Try the table of contents," Karl suggested.
"No table of contents, either!" He paged frantically through the book and muttered something about hackers under his breath.
"Here it is." He read hurriedly. "reset!" he commanded.
Danny continued to jerk back and forward.
"Exe, My Lord," Moira said frantically. "You must end with exe."
"Oh, right. reset exe!"
Suddenly Danny flopped forward and hit the table with a thump.
Moira and Jerry gently raised him up and leaned him back in the chair.
"Are you okay?" Jerry asked as the teenaged programmer gasped for breath.
" ’s alright," he slurred as he lifted his head off his chest. "I’ll be alright." Jerry saw he was white and shaking but he was breathing more normally.
"What happened?" Danny mumbled.
Moira pressed a cup of wine into his hands.
"You were entrapped by the spell you created, My Lord," she told him. "The spell repeated endlessly and you could not get out."
"In other words you were stuck in a DO loop," Jerry explained.
Danny raised the cup in both hands and drained it in a gulp.
"Jesus. I was in there and it started and it just kept going over and over. Like a live wire you can’t let go." He lowered the cup and it slipped from his numbed grasp to clatter on the table. "Jesus!"
"Tell us what happened."
"Well, I was flipping through the manual and I figured I’d try it out. So I set up a simple little hack, only when it started it just kept going. I didn’t think I’d ever get out."
"That was a dumb-ass stunt," Jerry told him. "You’re lucky it wasn’t worse."
"How the hell was I supposed to know?" Danny snapped. "I didn’t think…"
"You sure as hell didn’t," Jerry cut him off. "And you’d better start thinking before you do a damn fool thing like that again!"
Danny muttered something but Jerry ignored him.
"Okay," Jerry said. "From now on nobody practices this stuff alone."
Wiz was feeling almost jaunty as he made his way up the street with the broken halberd over his shoulder. He was still cold, but on a day as bright as this he could almost ignore that. Besides, the cold was easier to bear when you weren’t hungry all the time.
The halberd made a big difference in Wiz’s standard of living. There turned out to be a lot more food left in the City of Night than he had realized. But almost all of what remained was locked behind doors or in cupboards or chests. In the last few days he had gotten very good at using the halberd’s axe blade and the heavy spike behind to pry, chop and smash things open. Finding food was a full-time job, but it wasn’t quite the hopeless one it had been.
Today he was well-fed on magically preserved meat and bread so dry and brick-like he had to soak it in water before he could eat it. The meat had an odd taste and the water he soaked the bread in hadn’t been very clean, but his stomach was still pleasantly full.
And now this neighborhood looked promising. The street was lined with smaller buildings, two and three stories. A number of s
mall buildings, shops or houses, were more likely to yield food than a few big ones. Best of all, the doors and window shutters on nearly every house on the street were intact. That meant they had not been systematically looted and larger scavengers had been kept out.
The weather added to his mood. There was not a trace of the clouds that usually hung low and gray over the Southern Lands. The only thing in the pale-blue sky was the sun and it was almost at its zenith. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in it, but there was a certain amount of cheer.
A motion above the buildings caught his eye. Wiz turned his head just in time to see a black-robed wizard drift lazily over the rooftops. The man’s robe fluttered about his ankles and his head moved constantly as he scanned the city.
Wiz shrank back against the wall. But he knew he stood out sharply against the dark volcanic rock of the street and buildings. There wasn’t even a shadow to hide in and the wizard was floating in his direction. He was as exposed as an ant on a griddle and he would be fried like one as soon as the wizard spotted him.
Wiz bit his lip and silently cursed the bright sun and the shuttered houses. He looked up and down the street frantically, but there was not an open door or window to be seen.
There was a storm sewer opposite. It didn’t look big enough to take him and it was covered with an iron grate, but it was the only chance he had. Wiz dashed across the street and levered up the grate with a quick jerk of his halberd. Then heedless of how deep the hole might be he thrust himself through.
It was perhaps eight feet from the street to the trickle of freezing slime that ran through the bottom of the sewer. The shock and the slippery bottom forced him to his hands and knees before he regained his balance. He looked up just in time to see the wizard float down the street housetop high.
Wiz dared not breathe as the man passed over the grating. The sorcerer looked directly down at his hiding place, but floated on by majestically. Apparently the shadows in the hole hid Wiz from him.
Once the man passed out of Wiz’s field of vision, he breathed a sigh of relief. Then he froze again. There was something moving in the tunnel behind him. Something big.
The tunnel was as black as the inside of midnight, but Wiz heard a splash-scrape sound as if something too large to move quietly was trying to do so. He listened more intently. Again the splash-scrape, nearer this time.
Wiz realized he was trapped. He couldn’t see the flying wizard, but he could not have gone far. Leaving the shelter of the sewer meant exposing himself to his enemies. On the other hand, whatever he was sharing this tunnel with was getting closer by the second.
For some reason it stuck in his mind that he had found no bodies in the ruins. Not even bones.
He listened again. There was no further sound from the tunnel except the drip, drip of water. The lack of sound reminded him of a cat getting ready to pounce.
With one motion he twisted around and lashed upward with the halberd. The spike caught on the edge of the hole and he swung himself up to grab the coping with his other hand.
Behind him came a furious splashing. He swung his leg up and rolled free of the sewer just as a huge pair of jaws snapped shut where he had been. Wiz had a confused impression of a mouth full of ripping teeth and a single evil eye before he rolled away from the opening.
Gasping, Wiz gained his feet and flattened against the building. There was no sign of the flying wizard and the creature in the sewer showed no sign of coming after him.
Muddy, chilled and thoroughly frightened, Wiz ran off down the street, looking for a place to hide.
"Well," said Jerry Andrews, "what have we got?"
The team was crowded into the Wizard’s Day Room, which they were using as a temporary office while the last renovations were completed on the cow barn.
For the last two days the programmers had torn into Wiz’s spell compiler and the material he had left behind. By ones and twos they had pored over the Dragon Book, Wiz’s notes and conducted small and carefully controlled experiments.
Now Jerry had called a meeting to sum up, compare notes and plan strategy. He had set it for late afternoon, so most of the programmers were awake and functional. They had pushed the tables in the Day Room together to make a long table in the middle of the room and, heedless of tradition, pulled chairs from their accustomed spots up around it.
"Does the phrase ’bloody mess’ do anything for you?" a lean woman with short black hair and piercing dark eyes asked from halfway down the table. "This thing is written in something that looks like a bastard version of Forth crossed with LISP and some features from C and Modula 2 thrown in for grins."
"When do we get to meet this guy, anyway?" someone else asked. "I’d like to shake him warmly by the throat."
"There may be a problem with that, My Lord," Moira said from her place next to Jerry. "He went off alone into the Wild Wood and we have not yet found him."
"We’re going to need him," Nancy said. "Someone has got to explain this mess. Some of this code is literally crawling with bugs."
"You mean figuratively," Jerry corrected.
"I said literally and I mean literally," she retorted. "I tried to run one routine and I got a swarm of electric blue cockroaches." She made a face. "Four-inch-long electric blue cockroaches."
"Actually the basic concept of the system is rather elegant and seems to be surprisingly powerful," Karl said.
Nancy snorted.
"No, really. The basic structure is solid. There are a lot of kludges and some real squinky hacks, but at bottom this thing is very good."
"I’ll give you another piece of good news," Jerry told them. "Besides the Dragon Book, Wiz left notes with a lot of systems analysis and design. Apparently he had a pretty good handle on what he needed to do, he just didn’t have the time to do it. I think we can use most of what he left us with only a minimal review."
"Okay, so far we’ve just been nibbling around the edges to get the taste of the thing. Now we’ve got to get down to serious work."
"There’s one issue we’ve got to settle first," Nancy said. "Catching errors."
"What’s the matter, don’t you like electric blue cockroaches?" Danny asked.
"Cockroaches I can live with. They glow in the dark and that makes them easy to squash. I’m more concerned about HMC or EOI-type errors."
"HMC and EOI?"
"Halt, Melt and Catch fire or Execute Operator Immediately."
"One thing this system has is a heck of an error trapping system," said Jerry.
"That is because the consequences of a mistake in a spell can be terrible," Moira told him. "Remember, a spell is not a computer which will simply crash if you make an error."
The people up and down the table looked serious, even Danny.
"Desk check your programs, people," Jerry said.
"That’s not going to be good enough. There are always bugs, and bugs in this stuff can bite—hard. We need a better system for catching major errors."
"There is one way," Judith said thoughtfully.
"How?"
"Redundancy with voting. We use three different processors—demons—and they have to all agree. If they don’t the spell is aborted."
"Fine, so suppose there’s a bug in your algorithm?"
"You use three different algorithms. Then you code each primitive three different ways. Say one demon acts like a RISC processor, another is a CISC processor and the third is something like a stack machine. We split up into three teams and each team designs its own demon without talking to any of the others."
"That just tripled the work," someone said.
"Yeah, but it gives us some margin for error."
"I think we’ve got to go for the maximum safety," Jerry Andrews said finally. "I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have no desire to see what a crash looks like from inside the system."
"My Lord, you seem to have made remarkable progress," Moira said as Jerry showed her through the programmers’ new quarters.
The
team had settled in quickly. Each programmer got his or her own stall and trestle tables filled the center aisle. The stalls were full of men and women hunched over their trestle table desks or leafing through stacks of material. At the far end of the room Judith and another programmer were sketching a diagram in charcoal on the whitewashed barn wall.
"Once you get used to giving verbal commands to an Emac instead of using a keyboard and reading the result in glowing letters in the air, programming spells isn’t all that different from programming computers," Jerry told her. "We’d be a lot further along if Wiz were available, but we’re not doing badly."
Moira’s brow wrinkled. "I wish he was here too. But we cannot even get a message to him, try as we might." She shook the mood off. "It must be very hard to work with spells without having the magician who made them to guide you."
"It’s not as bad as it might be," Jerry told her. "Probably our biggest advantage is that we know all the code was written by one person and I’m very familiar with Wiz’s programming style.
"Look, a lot of this business is like playing a guessing game with someone. The more you know about the person and the way that person thinks, the more successful you are likely to be."
He sighed. "Still, it would be nice not to have to guess at all. Besides, Wiz is good. He’d be a real asset."
"We are doing everything we can to locate him," Moira said. "Meanwhile, is there anything else you need?"
"A couple of things. First, is there any way to get cold cuts and sandwich fixings brought in? My people tend to miss meals."
"Certainly. Anything else?"
"Well, you don’t have coffee, tea or cola here, so I guess not."
"Wiz used to drink blackmoss tea," Moira told him, "but that is terrible stuff."
"Can we try some?" Jerry asked.
Moira rang for a servant and while they waited for the tea, she and Jerry chatted about the work.
"We call the new operating system ’WIZ-DOS’—that’s the Wiz Zumwalt Demon Operating System."
"If this thing has a 640K memory limit, I quit!" someone put in from one of the stalls.