The Wizards 2: Wizard at Work

by Jack L Knapp

  T had been nodding along with the explanation.

  “I understand. You guys are going to be busy for a while!”

  “We are, T. But if you find out anything, let us know. We’ll pass our findings on to you, but for now don’t make any statements to anyone, please. The data are far too preliminary for us to go public at this time.”

  T thanked Professor Goodfellow and ended the call.

  #

  Ray:

  I got the information when T commed me. We discussed it briefly and talked about the exercises we’d done as we learned more about levitating.

  Clearly, levitating was not only a useful Talent but it appeared to be an extension of what we already did, a way of separating psychokinetics into two parts. We had been able to lift the parts of the tiltmeter installation while simultaneously pushing ourselves off from the ground. Doing both had come with a price, in that we were unable to lift as high when carrying objects as we could when we were simply levitating ourselves.

  Still, there had been a steep learning curve when I first began using telepathy, TP as T referred to it, and PK. The bubble also hadn’t been an immediate Talent but had required learning and practice before I could consider it dependable.

  There were practical things to understand about levitation too. We could travel cross-country but height above ground was limited. Our attitude in the air left us leaning forward much as a sprinter leans forward; indeed, sprinters are already leaning when they burst from the starting blocks. We found that lifting straight up, then tilting in the direction of travel, worked better.

  We had each tried moving head first and with our body parallel to the surface, but that soon resulted in neck fatigue from holding the head at an unnatural angle where we could see ahead as well as watch the ground. Speed was limited too because essentially we had the same effect moving through the air as the air would produce blowing across us on the surface. It was uncomfortable to look into the wind, whether that wind was natural or produced by our motion.

  Goggles might help; I decided to pick up several pairs, enough for each of us to use and have spares available. I would keep one in the house and a couple of them in the Volvo. There would be a pair for each of us if T was riding with me.

  I suppose Superman’s neck never gets tired and his eyes never burn; so much for childhood illusions. And he never puts his hands in his pockets when he’s flying, as we frequently did. Not heroic, I suppose, but it’s more comfortable. Your fingers get chilled from the moving air.

  I tried to call Ana Maria but got no answer. I sent a text message instead of trying voicemail. Glumly, I cleaned a few things around the house, vacuumed, and made the beds with fresh sheets and pillowcases.

  I went out for dinner and tried to pick up conversational snippets from people around me, but that Talent was still unreliable. I ran the Volvo through a car wash on the way home and parked it. A few minutes of research into the physics and geology of rifts and I was ready for bed. The research dealt more with plate boundaries and movements, and that didn’t seem to apply to our area.

  With things like subduction zones and transform faults and a concept of the surface stretching like rubber chasing around in my head, I finally went to sleep.

  #

  I woke up, brewed coffee, and checked the phone. There was no reply to the text I’d sent to Ana Maria. Maybe her phone was out of range. Coverage in Mexico can be spotty and sometimes the electric power to the cell phone company isn’t reliable.

  It might be something else too, but if she wasn’t responding to my text I didn’t know what else I could do.

  I didn’t feel like cooking, so I went out for breakfast and picked up the newspapers along the way. I read them while I waited for my breakfast to be brought; the Times reported a minor disturbance in east-central New Mexico, and Juarez was once again atwitter because the Chupacabra had struck again. Same scene as before, in essence; gang members dismembered and parts scattered around. The reason for the new interest among the Juarenses was that something similar had been reported from Chihuahua City.

  A gang member had been beheaded, but unlike the usual practice of lopping off a head with a machete, this unfortunate had lost his head by having it ripped from his body. Much of the neck had remained attached to the torso, while the head and ragged remnants of the neck had slammed into the wall. The impact had caved in the top of the skull and rendered the victim doubly dead.

  Whew. T could do that, I suppose I could too, but I doubted Shezzie could. Maybe the Chupacabra really was a kind of beast. Or maybe someone just hooked a tow truck to the head and ripped it from the body.

  T commed me as I was returning to my lonely house.

 

 

 
 

  He chuckled; not sound, just a ghostly impression through the TP, but clearly he was amused.

 

  I grinned.

 

  We agreed and dropped the comm. I went off to find my Nikon, doubtless put somewhere safe when I rearranged the house to make room for Ana Maria’s stuff. Eventually I found it. The battery probably wasn’t fully charged, but I had a charger that worked through the cigar-lighter socket in the Volvo, and I picked up a spare battery from a camera shop as I headed for the Interstate. I plugged the spare into the charger and swapped it for the one in the Nikon when the charge indicator stopped blinking. That battery finished charging before I turned off the Interstate.

  I set the Nikon to NEF, their version of RAW or highest-density photos. With the spare battery and a spare memory card, I could take perhaps a thousand photos that would reveal all the detail anyone could want. The D40X wasn’t new, but with the Nikkor zoom set to 200mm and the camera in auto mode, I could take excellent quality photos from moderately long distance.

  I left the camera on the seat and covered it with my cap…no use asking for trouble…and locked the Volvo.

  T was already sitting at a table. Technically, the Owl is a restaurant as well as a bar, not that anyone remembers to include that when it gets mentioned. The restaurant is nationally ranked; the green-chile burgers made the list of top-ten and were featured during a TV cooking show. But locals, being creatures of habit, still refer to it as the Owl Bar; so much for fame.

  I ordered the green-chile cheeseburger plate and a small container of mayonnaise for the fries. So I’m weird; sue me. It’s a habit I picked up in Germany. The Germans thought I was weird when I asked for ketchup!

  We decided to take my Volvo this time. T would leave his truck parked along US 380 in San Antonio. Conrad Hilton, the founder of the hotel chain, would have recognized the parking spot. It was no more than two hundred yards from where Hilton got his start, handling baggage for railroad passengers.

  I gassed up the Volvo and we headed out. Two hours later found us parked on US 54 north of Carrizozo. We walke
d a few hundred yards into the desert, made sure it was deserted, then lifted off to begin crisscrossing the desert.

  The goggles worked very well. I suspect I was traveling fifty or even sixty miles an hour judging by the fluttering of my clothing. But it wasn’t uncomfortable and I didn’t seem to be straining my abilities, plus the speed permitted me to cover a lot of ground in a short time.

  I saw nothing of interest. The camera, complete with a spare battery and memory card that I carried in my pocket, hung unused, held against my body by the strap around the neck and pressure from the onrushing air.

  I was on my sixth pass, heading back toward the Volvo, when T commed me.

 

 

 
 

 

 

  I cranked up my speed a notch and headed for the location he’d described. Finally, I spotted a mound of dark rocks ahead, and when I commed T he popped up high enough for me to see him.

 

 

  I looked and saw what he was talking about. A subtle difference, but it appeared that T was right.

 

 

  I agreed that it was indeed lava and we began taking pictures. We finished mapping the borders of the flow, then began overflying to get pictures of the patterns formed when the fresh lava hardened into rock. I could clearly see ripples and half-circle patterns that had formed across the stone when it froze into position. I hoped the camera captured the details, but if not, perhaps I could explain it and just tell Goodfellow that we had seen the markings when we flew lower. It took us a bit less than an hour to finish the job, mostly because we had to wait for the cameras to adjust and occasionally change position to get a better photo.

 

 

 

 

 

  We descended slightly into what was indeed a crater. Interesting; I had never been that close to a volcano that had recently erupted.

  And suddenly it got more interesting.

 

  Chapter Ten

  Ray:

  I just had time to quit levitating and form my bubble. I saw a brief flash of red where T formed his, a fraction before I established my own. Expanding the bubble to a diameter that would keep me off the sharp rocks in the bottom of the small crater, I was suddenly surrounded by a dense cloud of hot vapor.

  I felt a flash of heat, closed my eyes in reflex, and then heavy acceleration tried to squash me against the bottom of my bubble.

  I opened my eyes in time to realize that I was out of the crater and tumbling across the landscape. I had been blown out of the crater like a cork from a champagne bottle, a boiling-hot champagne bottle!

  During one of my rotations I spotted T about a hundred yards away. I watched as he collapsed his bubble and managed to stabilize himself as he dropped, finally coming to a hover about twenty feet above the desert. A moment later I did the same.

 

  I confirmed that I was a bit shaky, but barely singed by the heat. The steam explosion, for such I now understood it to be, had blown me out of the crater before I could become hot enough for the eruption to kill me. Even so, it had been a close thing.

  T was shook up too. I think he had developed a sense of invulnerability that had grown during his combat experiences and the later confrontations with the gangs.

  Neither of us had any such illusion now; we could indeed be killed, despite the Talents we could employ. Only T’s barely-useful PreCog Talent had saved us, by warning him and giving us time to form the bubbles that had saved us.

  Had we not been able to keep the steam a couple of yards away from our bodies, we’d have been boiled like lobsters.

  The eruption had been as brief as it had been hot, barely a hiccup after a small amount of water had contacted the still-hot rocks and flashed into steam. It was time for us to leave before it happened again. Next time, it might be much worse.

  T and I were linked now and the information flashed between us faster than we could have spoken.

  I grabbed my camera and held it tightly as I accelerated up and away from the small maar volcano. I had risked more than I knew to get those photos, and I didn’t want to take a chance on losing them now. T had his own camera clutched tight and was perhaps twenty feet in the lead when we leveled off, two hundred feet up at a guess and probably a quarter-mile away from the now-quiescent volcano.

  The desert around us was still again but it no longer felt benign. Instead, it seemed to be waiting, brooding over possible future catastrophes and simply waiting for the right time to let them happen.

  We held that attitude until the Volvo came into sight. T slowed down and began descending and I mirrored his actions. Shortly after, we were in the car and heading southwest on US 54.

  #

  The queasy feeling that had built during my tumbling would no longer be denied and I pulled off to the roadside, barely in time to open the door and vomit. The rest of the chile-cheeseburger came up but there was nothing else, and the heaves subsided. It might have been the result of the tumbling, and it might have been the result of the sudden adrenaline spike.

  People react to stress and fear in different ways.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and then wiped that across my trousers. I was still shaky and it seemed the thing to do at the time.

  We turned northwest on State 380 and drove through the lava fields. Fortunately, nothing appeared to have happened here. Perhaps there had been movement of part of the magma body toward the north.

  Finally, I felt ready to talk.

  “Whew. That was closer than I liked.”

  “Yeah.” Well, T was a recent infantry combat vet. Perhaps he had become inured to danger.

  “Kind of reminds us that we still need to be careful, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah.”

  I guess T didn’t feel like talking, so I shut up and kept driving. He could initiate the next conversation when he was ready.

  As it happened, we drove the rest of the way in silence. I parked the Volvo in an empty space behind T’s truck.

  He finally spoke. “I’m going to download the photos to my computer, and you can send yours to me via email. I’ll zip them into a folder and send that to Professor Goodfellow. He can share them with Doctor Wang. I’ll add a description
of the small steam burst but without mentioning how close we were to it!”

  “Good idea. I wouldn’t want to face anyone right now either. Your face is pretty red.”

  He took a close look at me.

  “You might be a little red, but I was deeper in the crater than you were when that thing blew. I guess it’s a good thing that I got my bubble expanded more than you managed with yours. Reaction time…I was building the bubble while I warned you. The pressure tossed me higher, but it pushed you further away from the crater. I think you were off to the side a bit, not in the direct steam blast, and that kicked you away as well as up.”

  “Closer than I wanted to be. But I’m hungry now. I’ll get a burger and fries and then head for El Paso.”

  “I can eat too. The bar’s dark, so no one will notice my red face. I’ll let Shezzie know what to expect before I get home, and I’ll lay low until the redness fades.”

  We went in and sat down. T had the same as before, a chile cheeseburger. I ordered mine without chile and got a funny look from the waitress.

  Hey, my stomach was still feeling a bit sensitive!

  #

  T went north on I-25 and I turned south. The Volvo got a workout on the way home, rarely dropping below 80 mph. This visit to New Mexico was memorable, if not exactly fun.

  I plugged the camera into the computer and downloaded the photos. A few were unusable, and it appeared that I had convulsively squeezed the button when I began forming my bubble. I had no memory of that happening, but apparently I had been pointing it toward the wall of the crater. The upper part of the photo was cloudy gray, while the lower part showed the basalt wall clearly.

  Perhaps the steam had only begun to condense as it expanded and cooled after erupting.

  I kept that one separate to send to T. The others I zipped into a folder. I backed the folder up to a thumb drive before deleting them from the camera.