Wiz took a bite of his doughnut and chewed thoughtfully, dribbling powdered sugar down his chin.
"How does that tie in with these-things-that want to destroy the World?"
"Well, there’s an alternate interpretation of quantum mechanics from a guy named Everett which says that what we’re really seeing is multiple worlds, all equally real. What collapsing the state vector really means is that we’ve chosen among them. One of them becomes ’real’ because we’ve taken that branch of the skein of parallel universes and that makes the others unreal."
Wiz put his doughnut down on the console behind him and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, leaving white streaks on his cheek.
"That would explain a lot about this place. For instance, why there are some operations that seem to be basic that we can’t use in our magic language because they’re unstable."
"Yes," Jerry said slowly. "We’ve been beating our brains out because we thought they have to be composed of several simpler operations. Maybe there’s some kind of uncertainty principle at work and those are primitives, they’re just one thing one day and another thing the next."
"Well, the appearance of demons is sure influenced by the operator’s mental state, unless you specify what they look like in the spell." Wiz wiped at the sugar on his cheek thoughtfully, smearing it out more evenly. "And so these things that Duke Aelric’s worried about come from one of these parallel universes?"
"I suppose you could say that they represent a universe with a low-probability wave function that overlaps ours," Jerry said. Then he brightened. "Hey! If I work out the mathematics on this, will that make me the Neils Bohr of this universe?"
"You know…" Wiz began and reached behind him for the doughnut. When he couldn’t find it he turned to look.
A mouse-sized gremlin was halfway down the desk with the doughnut clasped in front of him. The prize was nearly as big as it was and the gremlin was bent backwards under the load as it staggered away.
"Hey!" Wiz yelled.
The gremlin looked over its shoulder at Wiz, grinned, and broke into a wobbly run. Right to the edge of the desk and several steps beyond into empty air.
Suddenly the grin faded. The little creature looked down and saw it was standing on nothing. Its face fell and its bat ears drooped to its shoulders.
"Uh oh," it squeaked. Then gremlin and doughnut plummeted to the floor.
As the gremlin scuttled away, Wiz walked over, picked up the doughnut, brushed it off and took a second bite.
"I don’t know if that makes you Neils Bohr," he began again, "but if you’re right I think Chuck Jones is the Erwin Schr”dinger of this universe."
"Who’s Chuck Jones?" asked Jerry.
"Who’s Erwin Schr”dinger?" asked Danny.
Halfway to the hills Mick and Karin met a ruined army.
They smelled it before they saw it. The stink of burning rubber and insulation, of overheated metal and cordite. Of dust churned up in the heat of battle.
But there was no sound of combat. No artillery, no engines. Not even the shouts of men. Cautiously, Karin and Mick eased to the top of a rise and peered over it.
The panorama was so big and so torn up it was hard to tell what had happened here. Gilligan thought of the pictures he had seen of the destruction at Mitla Pass in the Sinai during the Six-Day War. But this was worse than any of those pictures. It seemed that the destroyed equipment spread over the plain for miles in front of them.
His first instinct was to go around, even if it meant walking for miles. But there was no hint of movement anywhere on that enormous battlefield, no contrails in the sky. Except for the occasional crackle of flame and the whistle of the wind there was nothing.
"Well?" Karin asked.
"I say go across. It’s risky, but we’re low on water. Besides, we’ll be harder to spot out among all that junk than we would be out on the plain."
The dragon rider nodded and went back to get her mount.
It took hours to cross the battlefield.
They walked past a line of what looked like self-propelled guns-if self-propelled guns had barrels made of glass that would droop and melt under the effects of enemy weapons.
Here a half-dozen tanks in various stages of destruction confronted the remains of a fifty-foot-tall robot they had pulled down like wolves on an elk. Further on were the remains of a missile battery caught on the march and burned while trying to deploy.
But there were no bodies. The wind brought the smell of burnt vehicles but not a trace of the sweetish stink of burning flesh. Not even the carrion birds seemed interested in this plain of dead machines.
"Mick," Karin asked at last, "why do they do this? Do our enemies fight among themselves?"
"I think it’s more likely they’re just conducting live ammo practices."
"But they are killing their own creations!"
"These things weren’t ever alive. They’re machines, like my F-15, not living beings like Stigi. I doubt a single living creature lost its life here."
"Still, there is something… obscene about all this."
Gilligan shrugged. "For us, war is a material-intense business. You go through a lot of equipment."
But looking over the carnage, Mick tended to agree with her. Even if these things weren’t alive, it had taken ingenuity to design them and time and resources to build them. He had been taught that in a war you expended your equipment wholesale in an effort to win. If you struck hard and fast with overwhelming strength you minimized casualties, or so the reasoning went.
Gilligan had always accepted it unthinkingly. Now, wandering among acres of scorched and twisted ruins, he began to appreciate what that meant.
Besides, he thought, this wasn’t a battle. This was an exercise, a test. You don’t need to wreck all this just to test it.
"Mick?" Karin said after they had trudged on in silence for several minutes more. "The people who do this, why do they do it? Why like this?"
"I don’t know," Mick told her sadly. "I don’t understand their thinking at all."
Thirty-eight: TRAP
Wiz Zumwalt sat on a rock under a spreading tree and savored the experience. It was cool and pleasant here. The late afternoon sun did not quite reach down through the leaves and the forest around him was alive with birdsong and the skitterings of squirrels and other little animals.
Wiz wondered what season it was. It looked like late summer, but the Bubble World didn’t seem to have seasons. How can a world shaped like a burrito have seasons? he wondered.
For once the pressure was off. The visualization program was running well, Lannach was keeping the gremlins under control and everything else he could think of to do was done. So he had slipped out of the Mousehole for a couple of hours to do a little exploring.
It was the first time he had really been outside the Mousehole since he arrived and he was enjoying it. No gremlins, no brownies, no elves and no dwarves.
Glandurg could not believe his luck. After all the weeks of hunting and the long weary days of waiting, there was the Sparrow, not two hundred paces away, with his back turned!