The Wizardry Cursed w-3

by Rick Cook

  "The cargo door," he demanded. "When did it open?"

  "It didn’t open," the pilot, Volkov, protested. "There’s an indicator…"

  "The devil take your fucking indicator," the GRU man roared. "When did that door open?"

  "It didn’t! We would have felt it in the controls. Comrade Major, I swear to you on my mother’s grave that door did not open."

  "Don’t lie to me! That door opened. Now when?" He took a deep breath, pulled his pistol from its holster and pressed it against Volkov’s head, just in front of his earphones. "If you do not tell me the truth immediately I will blow your brains all over this cabin."

  The co-pilot and flight engineer had their eyes studiously glued to their instrument panels. The pilot looked at the pistol out of the corner of his eye and Kuznetsov jammed the gun against his head even harder.

  "Major," Captain Volkov said with quiet dignity, "you may arrest me. You may shoot me here and now. But that door did not open. It could not have."

  "Very well," Kuznetsov said softly, so softly he was almost inaudible over the roar of the engines. "Very well, the door did not open." He took the gun from the pilot’s head. "Then would you please tell me where is the fucking cargo?" His voice dropped again to a near whisper. "That is all I want to know."

  Volkov blanched and started out of the pilot’s seat. Kuznetsov moved to block him and then thought better of it. He nodded curtly. "Sergeant, accompany him."

  As the two scrambled aft Kuznetsov stared moodily at the cloudscape below him. They were somewhere over Estonia, he knew, and the Estonians were notorious through the USSR as the biggest thieves of state property in all the republics. The Georgians were bigger black marketers and the Azerbijaniis were more violent, but over the years the Estonians had stolen everything from a freight train to an entire fleet of fishing trawlers. "Well, this time those damned Estonians have gone too far," he muttered to himself.

  "Sir?" asked the co-pilot. Then he withered under the GRU man’s glare.

  "Sir, should I radio Leningrad and declare an emergency?"

  "No, you idiot! The last thing we need is to have Leningrad Center shouting questions at us."

  Although the questions would come soon enough, he realized. Chill fear clutched at his stomach as he thought what those questions would be like.

  Just then the intercom squawked. "Major," Vasily’s voice came over the loudspeaker. "Major, I think you’d better come down here and take a look at this."

  Kuznetsov looked down at the co-pilot and flight engineer and decided he was not going to leave them alone in the cockpit to do God-knows-what.

  "Come with me," he commanded. The co-pilot opened his mouth to protest and Kuznetsov touched his holster. "Now," he ordered, "immediately." Wordlessly the men slid out of their seats and preceded the major down to the cargo deck.

  Volkov and Vasily were squatting over the heap of webbing where the computer had been, staring intently at one of the pallets. As Kuznetsov made his way back to them, bracing with one hand against the side of the plane, he saw there was a small pile of something shiny and metallic in among the straps and buckles.

  "When we looked closely we found this," Vasily shouted to make himself heard over the din of the engines. He handed Kuznetsov an object off the stack, an object that glinted like summer sunlight even in the gloom of the aircraft deck.

  Kuznetsov had never seen gold before, but no one had to tell him this was gold.

  "But where did it come from?" Volkov asked, bewildered.

  "That is a very good question," Kuznetsov said, kneeling down to study the pile of gold bars. They were surprisingly tiny, each one fitting neatly in the palm of his hand and weighing about two kilograms. There were no identifying marks of the kind usually found on bar gold, not even assayer’s marks.

  "How much do you suppose it is worth?" asked the co-pilot.

  "If I had to guess, I would say perhaps ten million American dollars. That was the value of our cargo."

  "What was our cargo, anyway?" the pilot asked.

  The GRU man glared at him. "That is none of your concern."

  Volkov did not flinch. "If my career is to be ruined I would at least like to know what over."

  Kuznetsov considered and then nodded. "Very well. It was an American supercomputer. The latest model of supercomputer and one that took us nearly two years to acquire."

  The pilot’s mouth dropped as he realized the enormity of the loss. "Boishemoi!" he breathed.

  The GRU man nodded curtly. "Just so."

  "What I don’t understand," the co-pilot said, "is why go to the trouble of leaving the gold after stealing the computer?"

  "That too is a very good question," Kuznetsov said sourly as he braced himself against the plane’s gentle bank to the right. "Does anyone have any more good questions?"

  "Just one," Vasily said hesitantly as the craft began to bank more steeply. "Who is flying the plane?"

  Volkov and Semelov gaped at each other and both dashed for the cockpit.

  "Well," Wiz said at last for want of anything better to say, "there it is."

  Sitting under the lights on the concrete floor were two dozen boxes full of computer and supporting equipment, all cocooned in foam and cardboard, wrapped around with clear plastic and bound with metal straps.

  Moira followed the programmers’ admiring looks and tried to be enthusiastic, but it all looked so ordinary. The way Wiz and the others had been talking she expected a nimbus of power around the boxes, or lightning bolts or something.

  None of the programmers noticed her disappointment. They were too busy swarming over the pile, touching cabinets and opening boxes.

  "I hope the installation instructions are complete," Danny said dubiously. "I’ve never installed anything bigger than a 386 PC."

  "Voila!" Wiz stood up from a newly opened box waving a black oblong. "A complete installation course on video tape. Just sit ourselves down with some popcorn and get educated."

  "Wiz."

  "Yeah, Jerry?"

  "Where are we going to get a VCR?"

  "Lift one out of a store the same way we lifted the computer," Danny said.

  Wiz frowned. "I dunno. That would be stealing."

  "Wiz."

  "Yeah, Jerry?"

  Jerry gestured at the $10 million pile of crates. "What do you call this?"

  "Well," Major Ivan Kuznetsov said, hefting the bar of gold absently, "what do we do now?"

  The occupants of the cockpit looked at one another and no one said anything. By now it was painfully obvious they would all share the same fate.

  "Think, comrades," Kuznetsov urged. "Think as if your lives depended on it." As they well may, he didn’t have to add. "What could have possibly happened to that computer?"

  "It was fine when we loaded it aboard," Vasily said. "I checked and rechecked it myself."

  "And I also," Semelov put in. "The webbing was secure and there was nothing unusual about it."

  The pilot and the major nodded. They had also checked the cargo and the mountings before takeoff and Kuznetsov and Vasily had been on the cargo deck for takeoff.

  "And there was nothing out of the ordinary when you left to go to the latrine?" Kuznetsov asked Vasily.

  "Not the least little thing."

  Kuznetsov said nothing. Technically both he and the sergeant were supposed to have been on the cargo deck at all times. But rank has privileges and he had chosen to ride up front where it was warmer and quieter. Abstractedly he realized that would be seen as dereliction of duty by his interrogators, but he did not think it would matter much. He turned to the pilot.

  "And you are sure the cargo doors did not open in flight?"

  "Major, I swear to you on my mother’s grave that none of the aircraft doors opened after we left the ground," Volkov said. "For that matter the load did not even shift. We would have felt the alteration in the center of gravity."

  Kuznetsov looked at him with contempt. "So one moment it was there and the nex
t it vanished like winter fog?"

  Volkov shrugged and spread his hands helplessly.

  "It was there when I left and gone when I returned, not two minutes later," Vasily said.

  "Where does that leave us?" asked the co-pilot.

  "As traitors to the Motherland," Kuznetsov snapped. He furrowed his brow and grimly, desperately, tried to think.

  "What are our options?" Volkov asked.

  "We should call Leningrad Center and report this immediately," Vasily said when no one else spoke up. "It will go harder on us the longer we delay."

  Kuznetsov shook his head. "Report what, Sergeant? That our cargo seems to be missing and we have acquired a pile of gold instead? Perhaps we had better consider the situation first."

  Besides, Kuznetsov thought, it can’t go any harder on us than it will already.

  "At least we have the gold," Semelov pointed out.

  Kuznetsov snorted. "Leningrad Center isn’t expecting gold. It is expecting a computer. May I remind you, comrades, computers such as this you cannot buy at a hard currency store?"

  "I don’t suppose there is any chance they will believe us?" Volkov asked tentatively.

  Kuznetsov snorted again. "Would you? Besides, it makes no difference. The computer was in our care. We lost it. We are responsible."

  Volkov licked his lips. "What do you think they will do to us?"

  For a moment there was only the roar and vibration of the engines. "I doubt they will shoot us," he said at last. "Not when we give them the gold. But we will undoubtedly be interrogated-rigorously." He paused, remembering the courses he had had on interrogation techniques. Then he tried to shove those images out of his mind.

  "They will doubtless conclude we sold the computer for gold. Nothing we could say or do will convince them otherwise. Then they will want to know who we sold it to. Eventually we will tell them."

  "But we haven’t sold the computer!" Volkov protested.

  Kuznetsov grinned mirthlessly. "My friend, you do not appreciate scientific socialist interrogation. By the time they get done with us we will have confessed anyway-over and over again. Eventually we will come up with a confession they will choose to believe."

  "And then?"

  "Then we will spend the rest of our lives at hard labor in a prison camp. I understand that under Perestroika conditions in even the severe regimen camps have improved greatly. Now the average prisoner lives as long as seven years."

  No one said anything.

  "I have a wife…" the co-pilot began.

  "She is disgraced," Kuznetsov cut him off. "She will doubtless be arrested and interrogated as well, probably sentenced to prison." He thought of his own Yelena and tried not to.

  "Comrade Major…" Vasily began.

  "Yes?"

  "Sir, I…" He stopped, licked his lips and took a deep breath. Then the words came with a rush. "Sir, they do not imprison the families of defectors do they?"

  All five men froze, not even breathing. Then their eyes darted around to the faces of the others, seeking some sign of their thoughts. Finally the other four looked straight at Kuznetsov.

  "No," the GRU man said slowly. "They are disgraced and interrogated, but not rigorously. They are not imprisoned."

  "And," Volkov added eagerly, "if we landed someplace in the West, they would assume the Americans had reclaimed their computer and were lying about it not being aboard."

  Kuznetsov said nothing at all.

  "There are even," Volkov went on carefully, "places in, say, Sweden, where you can land an aircraft like this and not be discovered for, oh, long enough to hide something in the woods before anyone arrived."

  Kuznetsov hefted the gold bar thoughtfully.

  "Comrades," he said finally, "I understand Sweden is lovely at this time of the year."

  Volkov looked at Kuznetsov, Vasily looked at Semelov and the co-pilot looked at his charts. Then they all looked at the bar of gold in Kuznetsov’s hand.

  Without another word, Volkov reached up and flipped off the radar transponder. Then he pushed the wheel hard forward and shoved on the rudder pedal, sending the plane diving for the deck and, as soon as they were below radar, turning north toward Sweden.

  Twenty-two: INSTALLATION

  "Hey Moira," Jerry called. "Can you come in here and help me for a minute?"

  "Of course," Moira said. "But what are you doing?"

  Because the room had no windows the only light came from a torch on the wall. Jerry was on his hands and knees with a string and a piece of chalk. With exaggerated care he marked a tiny dot on the concrete.

  "Did Wiz ever explain to you about 220-volt single-phase 60-cycle AC?"

  "No."

  "Then I’m drawing on the floor. Anyway, I need to mark out a pentagram. Can you stand in the center and hold the line exactly on this dot while I swing a circle?"

  "Of course," Moira said as she took the string and stooped to hold it on the point Jerry had marked, "but why do you need to be so precise?"

  "This spell multiplies a mass times a length and divides it by time. I’ve got to get the units exactly right or we won’t get the output we need. So the pentagram has to be just the right diameter."

  "Forgive me, my Lord, but that is a circle, not a pentagram."

  "Special kind of pentagram," Jerry grunted.

  "It is not a pentagram. It is a circle."

  "A pentagram approaches a circle for sufficiently large values of five. Now, step out of the way, will you? And don’t muss the lines."

  As Moira moved out of the way, he deftly sketched a shape in the center of his creation.

  "That is not any kind of pentagram," Moira insisted. "That is a circle with a sideways S in it."

  "It does the job of a pentagram," Jerry said. "Stand back." He turned to the Emac which was standing nearby.

  "backslash," he commanded. "power_up exe."

  A puff of bright blue smoke billowed into the diagram on the floor, coalesced, condensed and solidified. The demon was about two feet tall and looked like a stick figure. Except instead of straight lines, its arms, legs and body were composed of neon blue lightning bolts. Its nose was a 150-watt light bulb.

  "bzzzzp bzzzzp ready," it said in a buzzing voice.

  Jerry nodded and flipped the switch on the wall. The fluorescents in the ceiling flickered and caught, bathing the room in a cold bluish glow.

  "Okay. Douse the torch, will you? We’ve got power."

  "Of that I make no doubt," Moira said, eyeing Jerry’s creation dubiously.

  Twenty-three: GREMLINS

  "Where does this go, Lord?" asked one particularly lanky guardsman as he and his fellows rolled a tan metal object through the opened double doors.

  Wiz looked up from the sea of packing material, pallets and computer parts scattered across the floor of the computer room.

  "Oh, that’s part of the air conditioning. It goes in that room over there. And be careful of the stuff on the floor. There’s metal strapping all over the place."

  Moira looked over the slowly growing computer in the middle of all the litter. It still wasn’t very impressive. There were four tan metal cubes, each about waist high, that stood all in a row. Next to them were a couple of taller cabinets. At the other end was a large desk with a workstation sitting on it-the "console" the programmers called it, although what consolation it might be Moira couldn’t imagine. There were a half-dozen other workstations, a thing Wiz told her was a printer and some other equipment scattered around the room.

  "Forgive me darling, but the problem with your world’s magic is that it just doesn’t look impressive."

  "It’s not supposed to," Wiz told her. "If it looks impressive it scares the suits."

  Moira thought about that and then did what she usually did when the conversation lapsed into incomprehensibility. She changed the subject.

  "What does that part do?" She nodded toward the box being maneuvered through the just-big-enough doorway.

  "That’s the climate co
ntrol system. It’s not really part of the computer at all. It just keeps the room at constant temperature and humidity. These things are picky that way."

  "This could be done by magic, you know."

  "I know, but the computer is designed to work with this system and as long as we have electric power, why not use it?"

  "Magic would be more reliable," Moira said dubiously.

  "Magic doesn’t work as well here as it does at home. Besides, machinery can be just as reliable as magic."

  Moira arched an eyebrow skeptically, but she said nothing.

  "Hey Wiz," Danny called out. "I think I’ve got the cabling problem whipped. Come look at this."

  Danny had several sections of the raised floor up to expose one of the cable runs. "You know you said it would take us a couple of days to get all the cabling spliced right? Well, I found a way around it."

  "emac" he said, and one of the yard-tall editor demons appeared beside him.

  "?" said the Emac.

  He reached behind him on the floor and handed the demon the wiring manual and printout of the installation chart. The little demon staggered under 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."