"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 control 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."
The programmers were in fine fettle the next morning. They were days ahead of schedule and best of all, the hardware installation was almost done. All of them were much more at home with software and they were looking forward to the next phase.
"Well," Wiz was saying as they came down the hall, "if everything passes the hardware checks we should be able to start loading system software by this evening."
"That’ll be a relief," Danny said. "I’m getting sick of messing with hardware. What’s the matter?"
Wiz had stopped dead and was frowning off into space.
"Is it my imagination or is it humid in here?"
"Humid," Moira said.
"Definitely," Jerry said.