suspect an innocent-looking baby dragon of subterfuge. I hoped.
'Now, Pervect code is very hard to break,' Zol explained, as he sat down in the child's chair and flexed his long fingers. I noticed with surprise that he fit into the seat fairly well. 'They tend to like permutations of complex numbers as their secure logarithm.'
Bunny sat on the desk beside her hero, watching him raptly. I felt a twinge of jealousy, wondering what I would have to do for anyone to admire me like that. Tananda came up and wrapped her arm around me.
'Don't worry, hot stuff,' she told me, with a little smile. 'She'll snap out of it. She likes you just the way you are.'
I flushed. Bunny was my friend. I wasn't trying to im- press her. Was I? Embarrassed, I moved off to take a look out the door. I hoped none of the Pervect Ten was going to get up in the middle of the night to work on their plans for conquest. The hall was empty. My breathing was the loudest thing at this end of the room.
Zol wasn't doing so well. Using all his fingers and thumbs he was pushing the buttons on the board so fast they chattered. I noticed that there was a small symbol in the center of each button. Since I had seen written and printed Pervish I knew they stood for letters of their alphabet, though I couldn't read them. In the screen images and words flashed. I couldn't tell what any of them meant, but one kept coming up time and time again: a big X.
'What's that mean?' I said, pointing.
'Well, in some languages it means do not enter,' Zol began, his fingers dancing along. 'In Pervish and a few others it is an archaic way of writing 'ten,' which in this case would be appropriate, but I believe it also has the added meaning of 'the unknown variable,' this being the key to the library of documents locked within this computer. There are quite a lot of them. That is one of the few facts I can glean. The rest is protected by the password, which the X indicates. Since I don't know it I have been putting in my guesses as to possible keywords. I've tried over a thousand words in every combination of capital and small-case letters, plus permutations and combinations of profit/loss formulae, which are familiar to every Pervish college graduate, but I've been unlucky so far. Still, there's hope. I'm bounded only by the number of keys here on the keyboard, and there's a finite number of combinations…'
I glanced nervously at the door. 'How long do you think it will take you?'
'Oh, well, this is not like cracking a safe, you know,' Zol stated, cheerfully as ever. 'I might stumble upon the correct key any moment now.' 'And the longest it could take?'
'Oh…' Zol paused a moment to think. 'Two or three years. At the outside.'
'We don't have three years,' Wensley whispered. 'My people are already suffering because these Pervects won't leave!'
'Naturally not,' Zol agreed. 'You Wuhses are sensitive souls. You would see the Pervects as nonparticipants in your cooperative lifestyle.' His hands never stopped moving, but suddenly images began to pour out of the magik mirror, wreathing the Kobold in colored smoke. I saw faces: Pervects, Imps, Deveels, Klahds, Wuhses and plenty of races that I didn't recognize. 'I'm trying to unlock any files that may have been left upon the desktop.'
With a skeptical expression I let my eye fall upon the otherwise clear table. Zol smiled. 'Just like the books from which you saw the little Pervect reading, there is also a desk, though it exists only inside here.'
'Ah,' I breathed, enlightened at last. 'Magik.'
'Yes, indeed,' Zol declared. 'We Kobolds thrive upon this kind of magik.'
The longer he worked, the more agitated the specters surrounding him became. The faces grew ugly and hollow-eyed, threatening him with claws and fangs. They distorted into big blobs with hair scattered on their surfaces.
'Stay away from me now,' Zol warned. 'Those are viruses. I've been inoculated, but you haven't. If they touch you they will take over your mind. Ah!'
Suddenly the whole end of the room lit up. I recoiled from it, narrowly avoiding a cluster of the blobs.
'That's the map,' I confirmed, eyeing the circling blobs.
'It's the only thing in the files that's not password protected,' Zol informed me. 'But what does it represent?'
'It's not part of Wuh,' Wensley stated.
'I don't recognize it, either,' Tananda frowned. 'It's certainly not Trollia or Klahd.' 'I'll have to compare it with maps of the other dimensions I've visited,' Zol remarked.
'How?' I asked. 'You can't memorize something like that.'
'I don't have to,' the Kobold assured me. 'Coley will remember it for us.' From his shoulder bag he removed a silverbacked book. When he opened it I saw it had no pages. It was a computer, but in miniature. He held the shiny screen toward the map. I peered at the bright surface with interest. Unlike the computers I had seen on Perv, this one featured color images as well as words. At the moment it had a picture on it of shutterbugs, those tiny denizens of Nikkonia who could capture images on the translucent cells of their wings. They looked so real I reached out to touch them and found my hand stopped by a clear barrier. The shutterbugs looked up at me and gestured impatiently for me to get out of their way. I dodged to one side. One of them held up his thumb, squinted one eye shut, then began fluttering his wings. Zol watched it until it looked up at him to signal that it had finished.
'And a backup, please.'
The second shutterbug stepped forward, framed the scene with its hands, then began fluttering. In a moment it, too, was finished. Zol clapped the covers of his miniature computer closed and put it back in his satchel.
'Now, to Kobol!'
TEN
'Interface is a breeze!'
'What a lovely place,' Bunny breathed, gazing all around her as Zol led us toward a round building I could just see above the tops of the trees. It was daylight in this part of Kobol. We had arrived in a garden surrounded by high hedges. Arched doorways carved directly into the dense green bushes led from section to section. Every plant, every tree appeared to have been planted and tended with mathematical precision. I couldn't see a leaf out of place. Even the flowerbeds were neat, not a dead or faded bloom in sight. Wensley felt nervous in such utter tidiness. He stayed by Tananda, who seemed perfectly happy to cuddle close to him. I had my hand on Gleep's collar so he wouldn't go running off through the maze. I would get in trouble if he destroyed the precise perfection of this placid scene by punching holes through the hedges.
'Yes,' Zol smiled, guiding her along the shady lanes on paths of clipped green grass. 'We always have gardens, not that most of us spend too much time in one, but they are here for our mathematicians to take mental health breaks. Numbers can become all-consuming, you know.'
'There really was no need for me to come with you,' Wensley babbled, looking around him in dismay. 'I trust your judgment. You know I do. I… someone needs to keep watch on the castle. I can do that while you are away. It would be very nice if I could go back, just for a while…'
'Don't you want to help in your own dimension's defense?' I asked, fixing him with a gaze that made him wriggle like a worm on a hook.
'Well, of course,' Wensley managed, 'but is this a matter of Wuh? It would seem to me that my people's concern is mainly with the well being of our own dimension. Not that others are unimportant, of course. Wuhses have compassion for others. We might just be concerned that you are dividing your attention. That's your business, of course. I would never be the one to tell you that you are not doing the job you promised us you would do.'
That was the most direct statement I had heard him almost make. 'This is connected to Wuh,' I assured him
