“Coming up,” May said, and left the room, with alacrity.

“Well,” Dortmunder said, having trouble exiting, “see you in the morning.”

“That’s right,” Tom said.

“Nice to meet you,” Kelp said.

Tom paid no attention to that. Crossing to the sofa, he moved the coffee table off to one side, then yawned and started taking wads of bank-banded bills out of his various pockets, dropping them on the coffee table. Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance.

May came back in, gave the money on the moved coffee table a look, and put an old moth-eaten tan blanket and a pretty good Holiday Inn towel on the sofa. “Here you are,” she said.

“Thanks,” Tom said. He put a.32 Smith & Wesson Terrier on the coffee table with the money, then switched off the floor lamp at one end of the sofa and turned to look at the other three.

“Good night, Tom,” Dortmunder said.

But Tom was finished being polite for today. He stood there and looked at them, and they turned and went out to the hall, May closing the door behind them.

Murmuring, not quite whispering, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “You wanna come out to the kitchen?”

“No, thanks,” Kelp whispered. “I’ll call you in the morning after I talk to Wally.”

“Good night, Andy,” May said. “Thanks for helping.”

“I didn’t do anything yet,” Kelp pointed out as he opened the closet door and took out his bulky heavy pea coat. Grinning at Dortmunder, he said, “But the old PC and me, we’ll do what we can.”

“Mm,” said Dortmunder.

As Kelp turned toward the front door, the living room door opened and Tom stuck his gray head out. “Tunnel won’t work,” he said, and withdrew his head and shut the door.

The three looked wide-eyed at one another. They moved away in a group to huddle together by the front door, as far as possible from the living room. May whispered, “How long was he listening?”

Dortmunder whispered, “We’ll never know.”

Kelp rolled his eyes at that and whispered, “Let’s hope we’ll never know. Talk to you tomorrow.”

He left, and Dortmunder started attaching all the locks to the front door. Then he stopped and looked at his hands, and looked at the locks, and whispered, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

EIGHT

You roll aside the two giant boulders and the tree trunk. You find the entrance to a cave, covered by a furry hide curtain. You thrust this aside and see before you the lair of the Thousand-Toothed Ogre.

Wally Knurr wiped sweat from his brow. Careful, now; this could be a trap. Fat fingers tense over the keyboard, he spat out:

Describe this lair.

A forty-foot cube with a domed ceiling. The rock walls have been fused into black ice by the molten breath of the Nether Dragon. On fur-covered couches loll a half-dozen well-armed Lizard Men, members of the Sultan’s Personal Guard. Against the far wall, Princess Labia is tied to a giant wheel, slowly rotating.

Are the Lizard Men my enemies?

Not in this encounter.

Are the Lizard Men my allies?

Only if you show them the proper authorization.

Hmmm, Wally thought. I’ll have to do a personal inventory soon, I’m not sure how much junk I’ve accumulated. But first, the question is, do I enter this damn cave? Well, I’ve got to, sooner or later. I can’t go back down through the Valley of Sereness, and there’s nothing farther up this mountain. But let’s not just leap in here. Eyes burning, shoulders rigid, he typed:

Do I still have my Sword of Fire and Ice?

Yes.

I thrust it into the cave entrance, slicing up and down from top to bottom, and also from side to side.

Iron arrows shoot from concealed tubes on both sides of the entrance. Hitting nothing but the opposite wall, they fall to the ground.

Aha, Wally thought, just what I figured. Okay, Ogre, here I come.

Enter

Bzzzzzztt.

Doorbell. Drat. Is it that late? Leaving Princess Labia to twist slowly slowly in the lair, Wally ran his fingers like a trained-dog act in fast forward over the keyboard, changing the menu, bringing up the current Eastern Daylight Time—

15:30

— and his appointment book for today, which was blank except for the notation: 15:30—Andy Kelp and his friend to view the reservoir. Oh, well, that could be fun, too.

Lifting his hands from the keyboard, withdrawing his eyes from the video display, pushing his swivel chair back from the system desk, and getting to his feet, Wally felt the usual aches all through his shoulders and neck and lower back. The pains of battle, of intense concentration for hours at a time, of occasional victory and sudden crushing defeat, were familiar to him, and he bore them without complaint; in fact, with a kind of quiet pride. He could stand up to it.

At twenty-four, Wally Knurr was well on his way to becoming a character in one of his own interactive fictions. (He wrote them as well as consuming them, and so far had sold two of his creations: Mist Maidens of Morg to Astral Rainbow Productions, Mill Valley, California; and Centaur! to Futurogical Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts.) A round soft creature as milky white as vanilla yogurt, Wally was four feet six inches tall and weighed 285 pounds, very little of it muscle. His eagerly melting eyes, like blue-yolked soft-boiled eggs, blinked trustingly through thick spectacles, and the only other bit of color about him was the moist red of his far-too-generous mouth. While his brain was without doubt a wonderful contrivance, even more wonderful than the several computer systems filling this living room, its case was not top quality.

From infancy, Wally Knurr had known his physical appearance was outside the usual spectrum of facades found acceptable by the majority of people. Most of us can find some corner of the planet where our visages fit more or less compatibly with the local array of humankind, but for Wally the only faint hope was space travel; perhaps elsewhere in the solar system he would find short, fat, moist creatures like himself. In the meantime, his was a life of solitude, as though he’d been marooned on Earth rather than born here. Most people looked at him, thought, “funny-looking,” and went on about their business.

It was while doing a part-time stint as a salesman in the electronics department at Macy’s as a Christmas season extra four years ago that Wally had at last found his great love and personal salvation: the personal computer. You could play games on it. You could play math games on it. You could talk to it, and it would talk back. It was a friend you could plug in, and it would stay at home with you. You could do serious things with it and frivolous things with it. You could store and retrieve, you could compose music, commit architectural renderings, and balance your checkbook. You could desktop publish. Through the wonders of interactive fiction, you could take part in pulp stories. To Wally, the personal computer became the universe, and he was that universe’s life form. And in there, he didn’t look funny.

At the New School, where Wally had once taken a basic course in computers, he now sometimes taught a more advanced course in the same thing, and it was in that course he first met an enthusiast as open to the possibilities of this new marvel of the age as himself. The fellow’s name was Andy Kelp, and Wally was delighted they’d met. In the first place, Andy was the only person he knew who was willing to talk computer talk as long and as steadily as Wally himself. In the second place, Andy was one of those rare people who didn’t seem to notice that Wally looked funny. And in the third place, Andy was incredibly generous; just mention a new piece of software, a program, a game, a new printer, anything, and the first thing you knew here was Andy, carrying it, bringing it into Wally’s apartment, saying, “No, don’t worry about it. I get a special deal.” Wally had no idea what Andy did for a living, but it must be something really lucrative.