Night & Demons by David Drake Page B

power for myself. Nothing will stop me, Jones. Nothing!”
    “Mr. Strange, I’m your man!” Howard said. He spoke enthusiastically despite his concern that Strange might reply something along the lines of, “Fine, I’ll take your kidneys now to feed my pet ferrets.”
    “If you serve me well, you won’t regret it,” Strange said. Unspoken but much louder in Howard’s mind was the corollary: But if you fail, I won’t leave enough of you to bury !
    “Master Popple, can you be ready to proceed in two hours?” Strange asked. When he talked to Wally, there was a respect in his tone that certainly hadn’t been present when he spoke to Howard or Genie.
    “Well, I suppose . . .” Wally said. He frowned in concentration, then shrugged and said, “I don’t see why not, if Howard is willing. I suppose we could start right now, Mr. Strange.”
    “It’ll take me the two hours to make my own preparations,” Strange said with a curt shake of his head. “I respect your art, Master Popple, but I won’t depend on it alone.”
    As he strode toward the door, Strange added without turning his head, “I’ll have a black ewe sent over. And if that’s not enough—we’ll see!”

    “Now hold your arms out from your shoulders, please, Howard,” Wally said as he changed values on his display. Howard obeyed the way he would if a barber told him to tilt his head.
    Waiting as the little man made adjustments gave Howard enough time to look over the room. Much of the racked equipment meant nothing to him, but his eyes kept coming back to a black cabinet that looked like a refrigerator-sized tube mating with a round sofa.
    “Wally?” he said, his arms still out. “What’s that in the northeast corner? Is it an air conditioner?”
    “Oh, that’s the computer that does the modulations,” Wally said. “You can put your arms down now if you like. I used a Sun workstation to control the window, but the portal requires greatly more capacity. I’d thought we’d just couple a network of calculation servers to the workstation, but Mr. Strange provided a Cray instead to simplify the setup for the corrections.”
    “Oh,” said Howard, wondering what a supercomputer cost. Pocket change to the Wizard of Fast Food, he supposed.
    “Now if you’ll turn counterclockwise, please . . .” Wally said. “About fifteen degrees.”
    Howard wore a cotton caftan that came from Genie’s suite. She’d brought it in when Howard protested at standing buck naked in the middle of the floor with security cameras watching. Howard was willing to accept that the clothes wouldn’t go through the portal with him, but waiting while Pete and his partner chuckled about his masculine endowments was a different matter.
    Not that there was anything wrong with his masculine endowments.
    Genie didn’t stay, but Howard knew she was keeping abreast of what went on through the part-open door. He wasn’t sure whether he was glad of that or not.
    The mica window looked onto the glade where Howard would enter the other world if everything went right. Occasionally a small animal appeared briefly—once Howard saw what looked very much like a pink bass swimming through the air—but Wally had chosen the site because it was isolated. There was only so much you could get from leaves quivering, even if they did seem to be solid gold.
    The carpets, layered like roof shingles over the concrete, weren’t the neutrally exotic designs you normally saw on Oriental rugs. Some of these had stylized camels and birds, sure; but one had tanks, jets, and bright explosions, while peacock-winged devils capered as they tortured people against the black background of the newer-looking rugs.
    Around where Howard stood was a six-pointed star drawn in lime like the markings of a football field. Howard would’ve expected a pentacle, but he didn’t doubt Strange knew what he was doing.
    All Howard himself was sure of was that he was taking a chance at adventure when it appeared. If