"There, that’ll give me more protection," he told Malkin as he leaned back from the keyboard. Not a lot, he admitted to himself. But until he got Widder Hackett off his back he wasn’t going to be able to do much better.
"Protection from who?"
"From anyone at the Wizard’s Keep who might want to find me."
His erstwhile assistant regarded him with a look Wiz was coming to know all too well. "These folks are your friends, right?"
"Of course."
"Then I’d think you’d be yelling to them for help instead of hiding from them."
"I can’t," Wiz said miserably. "I can’t let them find me."
Malkin muttered something about "wizards" and left the room.
The first order of business, Wiz decided, was to tell everyone he was all right. He quickly composed an e-mail message and sent it over the net to thekeep.org, the Wizard’s Keep’s Internet node.
He typed furiously for several minutes, stopping frequently to erase a revealing phrase or to re-read his work to make sure he wasn’t giving too much away. Then he spent some time planning the exact path the message would take to reach its destination. At last he hit the final "enter" to send the message on its way and settled back in his chair with a sigh of contentment.
He was promptly jerked erect by Widder Hackett’s screech at air-raid-siren intensity.
"Loafing again, are you? The house falling down about your ears and you lolling at your ease. Wizard or not, you are the laziest, most good-for-nothing layabout I have ever seen in all my days."
There was a lot more in that vein.
Over the course of the day Wiz discovered that the person who said you can get used to anything had never met Widder Hackett. The combination of her awful voice and her complaining nearly drove Wiz to distraction. If she had been there all the time he might have gotten used to her. But she would vanish for five or ten or fifteen minutes only to reappear with more demands just as Wiz was settling in to concentrate on what he was doing.
And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her. Even an attempt to sweep and dust the front parlor ended with the ghost shrieking that he was a useless ninny and all he was doing was moving the dirt from one corner of the room to another. Meanwhile, he not only wasn’t getting anything done, he wasn’t even able to think seriously about what he wanted to do. Worst of all, Wiz discovered that the exorcism spells that laid demons to rest had no effect at all on ghosts.
Fortunately for Wiz, Widder Hackett shut up at about ten o’clock at night-perhaps because old ghosts need their sleep. Be that as it may, Wiz got several hours of uninterrupted work in late that night.
Unfortunately Widder Hackett was back at sunup the next morning, loud as ever and full of new complaints and demands. Even putting a pillow over his head couldn’t shut her out, so Wiz was up and about before the cock stopped crowing.
Meanwhile Wiz’s message was on its way to the Wizard’s Keep. It traveled a long and convoluted path through two worlds. First it was injected into the telephone lines by magical interference with a digital switch in a telephone company central office. It traveled over the regular phone network to the modem attached to the system he had cracked. There it slipped by security, thanks to Wiz’s handiwork, and was received in one mailbox, transferred to another mailbox and sent out on the Internet. It traveled from computer to computer over the net as each node routed it to a succeeding node moving it closer to its destination. After traveling for several hours and touching every continent, including penguin.edu at Ross Station, Antarctica, it reached a node in Cupertino where it was stored until the final node made its daily connection to collect its mail. When thekeep.org called, the message was forwarded along with the rest of the day’s e-mail down a telephone line to the junction box serving an apartment building-specifically the line leading to the apartment occupied by a programmer and fantasy writer named Judith Conally. There it was magically picked off, translated back to the Wizard’s World along with most of the rest of the mail and showed up in Jerry’s mailbox in his workstation in the Wizard’s Keep.
Since Jerry slept mornings he didn’t find it until he came into the workroom about mid-afternoon. He was still yawning over his second mug of blackmoss tea when he sat down at his terminal. He looked over the job he had left running, found it was progressing satisfactorily and punched up a list of his mail.
Jerry called the message up and started reading. By the time he had finished the first screen he was biting his lip.
"Danny! Moira! You’d better come look at this."
Hi Jerry and everyone (especially Moira!):
I can’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing, but I’m safe-at least for now.
I don’t know how long this job is going to take, but I’ll have to stick with it until I’m done.
As to what I’m doing, let’s just say I’m taking a lesson from Charlie Bowen.
Say hi to everyone for me and don’t worry about me.
Give my love to Moira.
PS: Please don’t try to find me. It’s very important.
-W
"Who’s Charlie Bowen?" Danny asked.
"Someone Wiz used to work with at Seer Software," Jerry told him, abstractedly. "Another programmer."
"A real hotshot, huh?"
"No, that’s the funny thing. He was a lousy programmer. He wrote their accounts payable routine and he made a royal mess of it. The module kept fouling up assigning purchase order numbers, choking on invoices and if there was the least little problem in the paperwork, it kicked the thing out and it had to be processed manually. It was taking Seer Software six or eight months to pay even a simple bill and they kept having to explain to everyone it was the software’s fault."
Danny took a swig of tea. "So did they fire him?"
"That’s the other funny thing," Jerry said. "They promoted him."
Just then Moira came dashing into the room, face flushed and flour up to her elbows. "You’ve heard from Wiz!" she panted.
Jerry gestured to the message on the screen. She craned forward to read it over Jerry’s shoulder. As she read her face fell and then she started to frown, deeper and deeper as she read along. By the time she reached the bottom she was scowling.
"There is something very wrong here. Why didn’t he tell us where he is?"
Jerry shrugged. "He said he didn’t want us to know."
"He also said he did not want us to worry," Moira said grimly. "Those are mutually exclusive and he knows that."
"Then maybe," Danny said slowly, "he can’t tell us."
Jerry frowned. "You mean he doesn’t know where he is? That’s crazy. Wiz’s magic could tell him in an instant."
"So maybe he knows and can’t tell us," Danny said, groping.
"A geas!" Moira exclaimed. "Of course! He cannot tell us because he is magically forbidden to do so."