"That's right," Dortmunder said.

"And when we put it all in the computer," Kelp told him, "then we say to it, 'Plot us out the best route for the tunnel.' And then we follow that route, and it takes us right to the box."

"Sounds easy," May said.

"Whenever things sound easy," Dortmunder said, "it turns out there's one part you didn't hear."

"Could be," Kelp said, unruffled. "Could be, we'll give the model to the computer and ask it about the tunnel, and it'll say the tunnel doesn't work, too much water around, too much mud, too far to go, whatever."

"Be sure to put all that last part in," Dortmunder told him, "when you're putting in the rest of the garbage."

"We're not going to put garbage in," Kelp corrected him. "We're going to input quality data, John, believe me. In fact," he said, suddenly even more peppy and enthusiastic, "I know just the guy to work with on this program."

"Somebody else?" Dortmunder asked him. "One of us?"

Kelp shook his head. "Wally's a computer freak," he explained. "I won't tell him what we're trying for, I'll just give it to him like as a computer problem."

"Do I know this Wally?"

"No, John," Kelp said, "you don't travel in the same circles. Wally's kind of offbeat. He can only communicate by keyboard."

"And what if he communicates by keyboard with the law?"

"No, I'm telling you that's all right," Kelp insisted. "Wally's a very unworldly guy. And he'll save us weeks on this thing."

"Weeks?" Dortmunder said, startled. "How long is this gonna take?"

"Just a few days," Kelp promised. "With Wally aboard, just a very few days."

"Because," Dortmunder pointed out, "until we have this figured out, we have Tom Jimson living here."

"That's right," May said.

"And if he decides to stop living here," Dortmunder went on, "it's because he's gone back upstate to make a flood."

"The Jimson flood," said a cold voice from the doorway. They all looked up, and there was Tom, as cold and gray as ever, standing in the doorway and looking from face to face. A wrinkle in his own face might have been intended as an ironic smile. "Sounds like an old folk song," he said, his lips not moving. " 'The Famous Jimson Flood.' "

"I think that was Jamestown," Kelp said.

Tom considered that, and considered Kelp, too. "You may be right," he decided, and turned to Dortmunder. "You spreading my business around, Al?"

Getting to his feet, Dortmunder said, "Tom Jimson, this is Andy Kelp. Andy and I work together."

Tom nodded, and looked Kelp up and down. "So you're gonna help me realize my dream of retirement," he said.

Kelp grinned; he acted as though he liked Tom Jimson. Still comfortably sprawled on the sofa, "That's what I'm here for," he said. "John and May and me, we've been talking about different approaches, different ways to do things."

"Dynamite's very sure," Tom told him.

"Well, I don't know about that," Kelp said. "That water's been in place there twenty years, more or less. What happens when you make a sudden tidal wave out of it? Think it might roil up the bottom, maybe mess things up down there, make it harder to find that box of yours?"

Dortmunder, standing there in the middle of the room like somebody waiting for a bus, now turned and gazed on Andy Kelp with new respect. "I never thought of that," he said.

"I did," Tom said. "The way I figure to blow that dam, you won't have no tidal wave. At least, not up in the reservoir. Down below there, in East Dudson and Dudson Center and Dudson Falls, down there you might have yourself a tidal wave, but we don't give a s.h.i.t about that, now, do we?"

No one saw any reason to answer that. May, also getting to her feet, standing beside Dortmunder like an early sketch for Grant Wood's Urban Gothic (abandoned), said, "Would you like a beer, Tom?"

"No," Tom said. "I'm used to regular hours. Good night."

Kelp, still with his amiable smile, said, "You off to bed?"

"Not till you get up from it," Tom told him, and stood there looking at Kelp.

Who finally caught on: "Oh, you sleep here," he said, whapping his palm against the sofa cushion beside him.

"Yeah, I do," Tom agreed, and went on looking at Kelp.

May said, "Let me get you sheets and a pillowcase."

"Don't need them," Tom said as Kelp slowly unwound himself and got to his feet, still smiling, casually holding his beer can.

"Well, you need something," May insisted.

"A blanket," he told her. "And a towel for the morning."

"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 l.a.b.i.a 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 acc.u.mulated. But first, the question is, do I enter this d.a.m.n 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 l.a.b.i.a 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, Ma.s.sachusetts.) 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

Five days earlier, Andy had brought him this problem of the reservoir and the ring-just like an episode in interactive fiction! - and he'd leaped to the challenge. Andy gave him before and after topographical maps of the territory, and Wally's software already included a number of useful informational programs-weights and measures, physical properties, encyclopedia entries, things like that-and all he had to do to get whatever other software he needed was to look it up in the manufacturer's catalogue, give Andy the name and stock number, and the next day there Andy would be, grinning as he took the fresh package out of that amazing many-pocketed pea coat of his. (Wally had been trying recently to figure out how to make an interactive fiction out of a journey through that pea coat.) In any event, late last night Wally had finished the reservoir program and was really quite pleased with it. Andy had already told him, "Call me any time, day or night. If I'm asleep or not around, the machine'll take it," so Wally had phoned the instant the program was ready, expecting to leave a message on the machine. But Andy himself had answered the call, whispering because, as he said, "My cat's asleep."

Andy had been very pleased to hear the reservoir program was ready and had wanted to come over and see it as soon as possible. Wally himself, of course, was available at any time, so it was Andy's own complicated schedule that had kept him away until three-thirty this afternoon. "I'll be bringing a couple of pals of mine," he'd said. "They're very interested in this project. From a theoretical point of view." So this would be him. Them.

Nice. Wally buzzed his guests in through the downstairs door, and went off to get the cheese and crackers.

NINE.

Dortmunder and Tom followed Kelp up the dingy metal stairs three flights to a battered metal door, where Kelp cheerily poked another bell b.u.t.ton. Looking at the scars and dents on the door, Tom said, "Why do people bother breakin into a place like this?"

"Maybe they forgot their keys," Kelp suggested, and the door opened, and one of the Seven Dwarfs looked out. Well, no; a previously unknown Eighth Dwarf: Fatty.

"Come on in," Fatty said, smiling wetly in welcome and gesturing them in with a stubby-fingered hand at the end of a stubby arm.

They went on in, and Kelp said, "Wally Knurr, these are my pals John and Tom."

"Nice to meet you," Fatty said. (No; Wally said. If I think of him as Fatty, Dortmunder told himself, sooner or later I'll call him Fatty. Sure as anything. The best thing is, get rid of the risk right now.) Wally's living room looked like a discount dealer's repair department, with display terminals and printers and keyboards and memory units and floppy disks all over the place, sitting on tables, on wooden chairs, on windowsills, on the floor. One little s.p.a.ce had not as yet been invaded, this s.p.a.ce containing a sofa, a couple of mismatched chairs, a couple of lamps, and a coffee table with a tray of cheese and crackers on it. Pointing to this latter, Wally said, "I put out some cheese and crackers here. Would you all like a c.o.ke? Beer?"

"I want," Tom Jimson told him, "to see this reservoir thing you did."

Wally blinked, undergoing the normal human reaction to the presence of Tom Jimson, and Kelp moved in smoothly, saying, "We're all excited to see this, Wally. We'll sit around afterward, okay? I mean, to do all this in five days. Wow, Wally."

Wally ducked his head, giggling with embarra.s.sed pleasure. Looking at him, Dortmunder wondered just how old the little guy was. In some ways he was a grown-up, if not very far up, but in other ways be was like a grade-school kid. However old he was, though, Kelp sure knew how to handle him, because Wally immediately forgot all about his cheese and crackers and said, "Oh, sure, of course you want to see that. Come on."

He led them across to a complete PC system on its own desk, with a worn-looking cushioned swivel chair in front. Seating himself at this, he ma.s.saged his pudgy fingers together for an instant, like a concert pianist, and then began to play the machine.

Jesus, that was something. Dortmunder had never seen anything like it, not even at a travel agency. The little man hunched over the keyboard, eyes fixed on the screen while his fingers led their own existence down below, poking, sliding, jumping, tap-dancing over the keys. And after a preliminary few displays of columns of numbers, or of ma.s.ses of words that went by too fast to be read, here came a picture.

The valley. The valley as it was before the dam was built, seen from just above the highest hilltop to its south. The picture wasn't realistic, was very cartoony, with dividing lines that were too regular and right-angled, perspective that was just a little off, and all primary colors (mostly green), but it was d.a.m.n effective anyway. You looked at that TV screen and you knew you were looking at an actual valley from the air. "Hmm," Dortmunder said.

"Now, your town," Wally said, his sausage fingers moving on the keys, "was Putkin's Corners. The big one."