"Huh," Carl said suddenly, "Callahan, J., and Rodriguez, C., is that you two?" They nodded. "You have a credit already," Carl said, sounding a little surprised. "What have you two been doing to rate that?"
"Must have been for bringing Fred through," Tom said. "I didn't know that Upper Management had started giving out door prizes, though."
From her perch on Tom's shoulder, Picchu snorted. "Oh? What's that mean?" Tom said.
"Come on, bird, be useful. Is there something you know that these kids ought to?"
"I want a raise," Picchu said, sounding sullen.
"You just had one. Talk!"
" 'Brush your teeth twice a day, and see your dentist regularly,' " the macaw began, in a commercial-announcer's voice. Tom made a fist and stared at her. "AH right, all right," Picchu muttered. She looked over at Kit and Nita, and though her voice when she spoke had the usual good-natured annoyance about it, her eyes didn't look angry or even teasing — they looked anxious. Nita got a sudden chill down her back, "Don't be afraid to make corrections," Picchu said. "Don't be afraid to lend a hand." She fell silent, seeming to think for a moment. "And don't look down."
Tom stared at the macaw. "Can't you be a little more specific?" "Human lives," Picchu said irritably, "aren't much like the Dow-Jones index. No, 1 can't." Tom sighed. "Sorry. Kids, if she says it, she has a reason for saying it—so remember."
"Here you go," Carl said. "Your piece of time is from ten forty-five to ten forty-seven on this next Saturday morning. There aren't any weekend openings after that until sometime in July." "We'll take this one," Kit said. "At least I can—Nita, will your folks let you go?"
She nodded. "I have some allowance saved up, and I'd been thinki about going into the city to get my dad a birthday present anyhow. I doul there'll be any trouble."
Kit looked uncomfortable for a moment. "But there's something I'm sure about. My spell—our spell brought Fred here. How are we going to him back where he belongs?" (Am I a problem?) Fred said, sounding concerned.
"Oh, no, no—it's just that, Fred, this isn't your home, and it seemed as sooner or later you might want to go back where you came from,"
"As far as that goes," Tom said, "if it's your spell that brought him ou'H be able to send him back. The instructions are in your book, same as the instructions for opening the Grand Central worldgate."
"Stick to those instructions," Carl said. "Don't be tempted to improvise. That claudication is the oldest one in New York, and it's the trickiest because of all the people using it all the time. One false syllable in a spell and you may wind up in Schenectady." (Is that another world?) Fred asked.
"Nearly." Carl laughed. "Is there anything else we can do for you?"
Nita and Kit shook their heads and got up to leave, thanking Tom and Carl and Picchu. "Let us know how things turn out," Tom said. "Not that we have any doubts—two wizards who can produce a white hole on the first try are obviously doing all right. But give us a call. We're in the book."
The two men saw Nita and Kit as far as the patio door, said their good-byes, and went back into the house. Nita started off across the lawn the way she had come, but Kit paused for a moment by the fishpool, staring down into it. He pulled a penny out of his pocket, dropped it in.
Nita saw the ripples spread—and then suddenly another set of ripples wavered away from the head of a very large goldfish, which spat the penny back at Kit and eyed him with distaste. "Do / throw money on your living-room floor?" it said, and then dived out of sight. Kit picked up his penny and went after Nita and Fred as they pushed through the poplar hedge again. The blue Mercedes, which had been half in the street and half on the sidewalk, was now neatly parked by the curb. In front of it sat Annie., with her tongue hanging out and a satisfied look on her face. There were teethmarks deep in the car's front fender, Annie grinned at them as Nita and Kit passed, and then trotted off down the street, probably to "find" something else.
"If my dog starts doing things like that," Kit muttered, "I don't know how I m going to explain it to my mother."
Nita looked down the street for signs of Joanne. "If we can just get home without being killed, I wouldn't care what the dog found. Uh oh—" A good ways down the street, four or five girls were heading toward them, and Nita saw Joanne's blond hair. "Kit, we'd better split up. No reason for them to c°irie after you too."
Right. Give me a call tonight. I'm in the book…, " He took off down a
Side street. ^>he looked around, considering the best direction to run in—and then nought of the book she was carrying. There wasn't much time, though. She °rced herself to calm down even while she knew they were coming for her, acte herself turn the pages slowly to the place Kit had shown her that °rning, the spell that made blows slide off. She read through it slowly in the
Aech, sounding out the syllables, taking the time to look up the pronunciation of the ones she wasn't sure of, even though they were getting close and she could hear Joanne's laugh.
Nita sat down on the curb to wait for them. They let her have it when they found her, as they had been intending to all day; and she rolled around on the ground and fell back from their punches and made what she hoped were horrible groaning noises. After a while Joanne and her four friends turned away to leave, satisfied that they had taught her a lesson. And Nita stood up and brushed herself off, uncut, unbruised, just a little dirty. "Joanne," she called after them. In what looked like amazement, Joanne turned around. Nita laughed at her. "It won't work any more," she said. Joanne stood dumb,
"Never again/' she said. She felt like turning her back on them, but in-stead she walked toward them, watching the confusion in their eyes. On a sudden urge, she jumped up in the air and waved her arms crazily. "BOO!" she shouted.
They broke and ran, all of them. Joanne was the first, and then the rest followed her in a ragged tail down Rose Avenue. Not a word, not a taunt. They just ran.
Nita stopped short. The feeling of triumph that had been growing in her withered almost instantly. Some victory, she thought. It took so little, so little to scare them. Maybe I could have done that at any time, without a shield. Maybe. And now I'll never know for sure.
(Are you all right?) Fred said quietly, bobbing again by her shoulder. (They didn't hurt you this time.)
"No," Nita said slowly. She was thinking of all the glorious plans she'd had to use her new-found wizardry on Joanne and her bunch, to shame them, confuse them, hurt them. And look what so small and inoffensive thing as a body shield had done to them. They would hate her worse than ever now.
I've got to be careful with this, she thought. I thought it was going to be all fun. "Come on, Fred," she said, "let's go home."
Temporospatial Claudications Use and Abuse
The week went by quickly for Nita. Though Carl had made the business of opening a worldgate sound fairly simple, she began to suspect that he'd been doing it so long that it actually seemed that way to him. It wasn't simple, as her book told her as soon as she opened to the pertinent chapter, which was forty pages long in small print.
Grand Central worldgate had its own special requirements: specific sup-plies and objects that had to be present at an opening so that space would be properly bent, spells that had to be learned just so. The phone calls flew between Nita's house and Kit's for a couple of days, and there was a lot of visiting back and forth as they divided up the work. Nita spent a lot of time keeping Fred from being noticed by her family, and also got to see a lot of Kit's mother and father and sisters, all of whom were very friendly and kept forgetting that Nita couldn't speak Spanish. She started to learn a little of it in self-defense. Kit's dog told her the brand of dog biscuits it could never get enough of; she began bringing them with her when she visited. The dog spoke the Speech with a Spanish accent, and would constantly interrupt Kit and Nita as they discussed who should do what in the spelling, Kit wound up with most of the spoken work, since he had been using the Speech longer and was better at it; Nita picked up supplies. You ever swallow anything accidentally before, Fred?" Nita said under her breath. It was late Friday afternoon, and she was in a little antiques-and-)unk store on