The Dragon's Dagger

Fiscal month end. Fun time for the finance group at General Components Corporation, a high-tech, high-pressure supplier for the giants of the computer industry. Gary Leger put a hand behind his sore neck and stretched way back in his chair, the first time he had been more than a foot from his terminal screen in over two hours. He looked around at the other cubicles in the common office and saw that everyone else had already gone to afternoon break, then looked up at the clock and realized that they would be back any minute.

Gary let out a profound sigh. He wanted a Coke, could really use the caffeine, but it was already three-thirty, and Rick needed this field service summary report finished before the management meeting at five. Gary looked back to the computer screen, and to the pile of notes - revenue plans, revenue forecasts, and actual monthly figures -  sitting beside the terminal. He had to input the data for three more offices, a hundred numbers for each over two pages, then hit the space bar and hope everything added up correctly on the "totals" page.

Gary hated the data entry part of it, wished that Rick would fish out a few bucks from the budget to get him an assistant just one day a month. He loved the totaling, though, and the inevitable investigations that would follow, tracking down missing revenues and delinquent credits. Gary chuckled softly as he thought of the many television shows he had seen depicting accountants as wormy, boring individuals. Gary, too, had believed the stereotype - it had seemed to fit - until, following the trail of bigger bucks, he had inadvertently stumbled into a position as an accountant. His first month-end closing, filled with the seemingly impossible task of making the numbers fit into seemingly impossible places, had changed Gary's perception, had thrown the image of the job as "boring" right out the office window.

"You look tired," came Rick's voice from behind.

"Almost done," Gary promised without even looking over his shoulder. He stretched again and pulled the next office sheet off the pile.

"Did you get a break?" Rick asked, coming over and dropping a hand on Gary's shoulder, bending low to peer at the progress on the computer screen.

"At lunch."

"Go get one," said Rick, taking the paper from Gary's hand. He pushed Gary from his seat and slid into the chair. "And take your time."

Gary stood for a moment, looking doubtful. He wasn't one to dole out his work, was a perfectionist who liked to watch over the whole procedure from beginning to end.

"I think I can handle it," Rick remarked dryly over one shoulder, and Gary winced at the notion that he was so damned predictable. When he thought about Rick's answer to his doubts, he felt even more foolish. Rick, after all, had been the one who created this spreadsheet.

"Get going if you want a break," Rick said quietly.

Gary nodded and was off, crossing by his associates as they were coming back from the break room. Their talk, predictably, was on the war, detailing the latest bombing runs over the Arab capital, and describing how the enemy was "hunkering down," as the popular phrase went.

Gary just smiled as he passed them, exchanged friendly shoulder-punches with Tom, the cost accountant, and made his way quickly to the break room. Rick had told him to take his time, and Gary knew that Rick, always concerned for his employees, had meant every word. But Gary knew, too, that the report was his responsibility, and he meant to get it done.

Someone had brought a television into the break room, turned always to CNN and the continuing war coverage. A group was around the screen when Gary entered - hell, he thought, a group was always around the screen -  watching the latest briefing, this one by the French commanders of the U.N. forces. Gary tried to phase it all out as the reporters assaulted the commanders with their typically stupid questions, most asking when the ground assault would begin.

Of course, they'll tell you the exact time, Gary thought sarcastically. Never mind that the enemy command was also tuned to CNN's continuing coverage.

Gary lucked out: it only took five quarters to coax a seventy-five-cent Coke out of the battered vending machine. He moved to a table far to the side of the TV screen and pulled up a chair. He took a pair of hand-grips from one pocket and began to squeeze, nodded admiringly at the ripples in his muscular forearm. Gary had always been in good shape, always been an athlete, but ever since his unexpected trip to the land of Faerie, he took working out much more seriously. In the land of dragons and leprechauns, Gary Leger had worn the armor and carried the weapon of an ancient hero, had battled goblins and trolls, even a dragon and an evil witch. He expected that he would go back to that enchanted land one day, wanted to go back dearly, and was determined that if the situation ever arose, his body at least would be ready for the challenge.

Yes, Gary Leger would like to go back to Faerie, and he would like to take Diane with him. Gary smiled at the notion of him and Diane sprinting across the thick grass of the rolling, boulder-strewn fields, possibly with a host of drooling goblins on their heels. The goblins would get close, but they wouldn't get the pair, Gary believed, not with friends like noble Kelsey and tricky Mickey McMickey on Gary's side.

The image of Faerie waned, leaving Gary to his more tangible thoughts of Diane. He had been dating her for only three months, but he was pretty sure that this was the woman he would eventually marry. That thought scared Gary more than a little, simply because of the anticipated permanence of the arrangement in a world where nothing seemed permanent. He loved her, though. He knew that in his heart, and he could only hope that things would work out in their own, meandering course.

A couple of MIS guys, computer-heads, infiltrated the table next to Gary, one asking if he could borrow a chair from Gary's table, since most of the other chairs in the room had been dragged near to the TV screen. "Friggin' war," one of them remarked, catching Gary's attention. "We're only fighting it so we don't realize how bad the economy's getting. Wave the flag and drop it over the balance sheet."

"No kidding," agreed the other. "They're talking layoffs at the end of Q3 if the Sporand deal doesn't go through."

"Everybody's laying off," said the first guy.

Gary phased out of the bleak conversation. It was true enough. The Baby Boomers, the Yuppies, seemed to have hit a wall. Credit had finally caught up to cash flow, and Gary constantly heard the complaints - usually from spoiled adults whining that their payments on their brand-new thirty-thousand-dollar car were too steep.

In spite of the few with no reason to complain, there was a general pall over the land, and rightly so. So many people were homeless, so many others living in substandard conditions. The gloom went even deeper than that, Gary Leger, the man who had visited the magical land of Faerie, knew well. The material generation had fallen off the edge of a spiritual rift; Gary's world had become one where nothing valid existed unless you could hold it in your hand.

Even the flag - drape it over the balance sheet - had become caught up in the turmoil, Gary noted with more than a little anger. The President had called for an amendment to the Constitution outlawing flag burning, because, apparently, that tangible symbol had become more important than the ideals it supposedly symbolized. What scared Gary even more was how many people agreed with the shallow thought, how many people couldn't understand that putting restrictions on a symbol of freedom lessened the symbol rather than protected it.

Gary shook the thought away, filed it in his certainly soon to be ulcerous stomach along with a million other frustrations.

At least his personal situation was better. He had to believe that. He had come out of the dirty plastics factory into a respectable job earning twice the money and offering him a chance to use more talents than his muscles on a day-to-day basis. He had a steady girlfriend whom he cared for deeply - whom he loved, though he still had trouble admitting that to himself. So everything was fine, was perfect, for Gary Leger.

A burst of laughter from the gathering turned Gary to the television just in time to see a truck, in the gunsights of a low-flying jet, race off a bridge an instant before a smart bomb blew the bridge into tiny pieces. The technology was indeed amazing, kind of like a Nintendo game.

That thought, too, bothered Gary Leger more than a little.

He got caught up in the images as the press briefing continued, a French officer pointing to the screen and talking of the importance of this next target, a bunker. A tiny figure raced across the black-and-white image, entering the bunker a split-second before the smart bomb did its deadly work, reducing the place to rubble.

"Poor man," the French officer said to a chorus of groans, both from the reporters at the press briefing and from the gathering around the TV at General Components.

"Poor man?" Gary whispered incredulously. It wasn't that Gary held no pity for the obviously killed enemy soldier. He held plenty, for that man and for everyone else who was suffering in that desert mess. It just seemed so absolutely ridiculous to him that the French officer, the reporters, and the gathering around the screen seemed so remorseful, even surprised, that a human being had been killed.

Did they really think that this whole thing was a damned Nintendo game? Gary scooped up his Coke and left the break room, shaking his head with every step. He thought of his mother, and her newest favorite cliche, "What's this world coming to?"

How very appropriate that sounded now to Gary Leger, full of frustrations he didn't understand, searching for something spiritual that seemed so out of reach and out of place.

Nestled in a mountain valley at the northeastern end of the mighty Dvergamal Mountains, the gnomish settlement of Gondabuggan was a normally peaceful place, lined with square stone shops filled with the most marvelous, if usually useless, inventions. Half the town was underground in smoothed-out burrows, the other half in squat buildings, more than half of which served as libraries or places of study. Peaceful and inquisitive; those were the two words which the gnomes themselves both considered the highest of compliments.

The Gondabuggan gnomes were far from the protection of Faerie's official militia, though, and far even from the help of the reclusive dwarfs who lived within the mountains. They had survived for centuries out here in the wild lands, and though certainly not warlike, they were not a helpless group.

Huge metallic umbrellas were now cranked up from every building, popping wide their deflective sheets and covering the whole of the gnomish town under a curtain of shining metal. Beneath the veil, great engines began turning, drawing water through a score of wide pipes from the nearby river and sending it shooting up into the air.

The dragon roared past, his flaming breath turning to steam as it crossed the spray and hit the wetted sheets of the umbrellas. Robert the mighty was not dismayed. He banked in a wide turn, confident that he could continue his fires long after the river itself had been emptied. One of the umbrellas near to the center of the small, square town detracted suddenly and as Robert veered for that apparent opening, he heard the whoosh! of three catapults. The dragon didn't understand; the gnomes in that area couldn't even see him, so what were they shooting for?

Almost immediately, the umbrella snapped back into place, completing the shield once more. Robert figured out the catapult mystery as he crossed through the area above that shield, as he crossed through the tiny bits of stinging metal chips the catapults had flung straight up into the air. Flakes ricocheted off the dragon's scales, stung his eyes, and melted in the heated areas of his flaring nostrils.

"Curses on the gnomes!" Robert roared, and his deadly breath spewed forth again. Those areas of metal shielding that were not sufficiently wetted glowed fiercely, and all the valley on the northeastern corner of Dvergamal filled with a thick veil of steam.

Robert heard several umbrellas retract, heard the sound of many catapults firing, and felt the sting of hanging metal all the way as he soared across the expanse above the protected town. The great wyrm banked again, arcing high and wide for several minutes, and then turned in a stoop, just a black speck on the misty southern horizon, but flying fast.

"Pedal! Oh, pedal, pedal, pedal!" Mugwiggen the gnome implored his Physical Assault Defense Team. A hundred gnomes on stationary bikes pumped their little legs furiously, their breath popping out in rhythmic huffs and puffs from the thin line of their mouths under their fully bearded faces. Sweat rolled down a hundred high-browed, gnomish foreheads, down a hundred long and pointy gnomish noses, to drip in widening puddles at the base of the spinning wheels.

Mugwiggen peered into his "highlooker," a long upright tube, hooked horizontally on each end, that could be rotated in complete circles. At the opposite end of the horizontal eyepiece was an angled reflective sheet, catching the images from a similar sheet near the top of the tube, that first caught the images from the horizontal top-piece. This gnomish periscope also featured several slots wherein magnifying lenses could be inserted, but Mugwiggen needed no amplification now, not with the specter of the dragon fast growing on the horizon.

The gnome took a reading on the exact angle of his scope, then looked to a chart to determine which umbrella soaring Robert would likely hit. "Fourteen D," the gnome barked to his assistant, a younger gnome whose beard barely reached his neck.

Wearing heavy gloves molded from the thick sap of the Pweth Pweth trees, the assistant lifted the end of the charged coil, connected by metal lines to resistors on the wheels of the hundred bikes, and moved in front of the appropriate slot in a switch box hooked to every umbrella in the city.

"Fourteen D!" Mugwiggen yelled into a tube, and his words echoed out of similar tubes in every corner of Gondabuggan, and warned those gnomes in section fourteen D (and those in thirteen D and fifteen D, as well), that they would be wise to get out of harm's way. Then the gnome went back to his scope, alternately eyeing charts that would allow him to predict the air speed of the soaring dragon, and the timing of the collision.

Robert swooped down over the southern edge of the compact town, narrowed his reptilian eyes to evil slits against the continuing sting of the flak. Like a great bal-lista bolt, the dragon did not swerve, dove unerringly for the targeted umbrella, which the gnomes had labeled "fourteen D."

"Threetwoone!" Mugwiggen cried rapidly, seeing that his calculations were a split-second slow. His assistant was quick on the draw, though, immediately plugging the end of the coil into the appropriate slot in the switch box. Metal sheets folded upward as the dragon smashed in, encasing Robert. The mighty wyrm wasn't immediately concerned, knowing he could easily rip his way through the flimsy barrier, shred the metal to harmless slivers.

But confident Robert didn't see the arcing current shoot up the umbrella pole, though he certainly felt the jolt as the charge fanned out along the encasing metal sheets.

Those gnomes nearest to fourteen D were deafened, some permanently, by the dragon's ensuing roar. Loose rocks in the Dvergamal Mountain range a mile away trembled at the vibrations of the titanic sound.   A hundred sweating gnomes pedaled furiously, keeping the charge steady and strong, and thrashing Robert's nostrils filled with acrid smoke as his leathery wings began to smolder.

Another roar, a crash of metal sheeting, and the dragon burst free, was hurled free, spinning into the air, trailing lines of smoke from every tip of his reptilian body. Two hundred feet up, Robert righted himself, spun right back around and loosed his flaming fury on the breached section of Gondabuggan's umbrella shielding.

Many hoses had already been turned on the vulnerable area, and the steam was blinding, but the town wouldn't escape unscathed. Fires flared to life in several buildings; metal turned to liquid and rolled down the gnomish streets.

"Which one?" Mugwiggen's assistant asked him, holding the loose coil once more.

Mugwiggen shook his head in frustration. "I cannot see for the steam!" the gnome cried in dismay, and he thought that his precious town was surely doomed.

"Free fire!" came the gnomish Mayor's command over the calling tubes. Immediately there came the sound of an umbrella snapping shut, followed by the whoosh! of a catapult. A loud thonk! thrummed over the network of open horns as a ballista sent a bolt the size of a giant's spear arcing into the air.

But the gnomes were shooting blindly, Mugwiggen knew, with hardly a chance of hitting the fast-flying wyrm. He flipped a few balls on the abacus he always kept by his side and shook his flaxen-haired and flaxenbearded head at the long, long odds he had just determined. Robert, though, drifting hundreds of feet above the steam-covered town, couldn't see any better than the gnomes. The great dragon's muscles continued to twitch involuntarily from the electrical jolt; his wings continued to trail dark smoke behind him. He was exhausted, and hurt far worse than he had anticipated from the surprisingly resourceful (even for resourceful gnomes!) defenses.   More flak filled the air about him and several huge spears whipped through the steam, arcing high into the clear blue- mountain sky, one spear nearly clipping the dragon's long, trailing tail as it rocketed past.

Robert had seen enough for this day. He angled his wings and swooped away, seeking a perch many miles to the south, confident that when he returned, his wounds would be fully healed, but the gnomish defenses would remain depleted.

"I will feast yet on the flesh of puny gnomes," the dragon snarled, his drool sizzling as it dribbled past the multitude of daggerlike fangs in the great wyrm's maw. "And on man flesh and dwarf flesh and elf flesh, as well! Oh, fool, Kelsenellenelvial Gil-Ravadry! Oh, fool to take the dagger from Robert's lair, to banish wicked Ceridwen while Robert flies free!"

Despite the unexpected setback, the wyrm let out a roar of victory and beat his smoking wings, soaring like the wind to the protective peaks in the south.

On a high plateau, a flat-tipped uprighted finger of rock in the greater peaks four miles to the southwest of Gondabuggan, a handful of gnomes put down their spyglasses and breathed a sincere sigh of relief, a sigh only a bit tainted by the lines of darker smoke rising from the distant city to mix in with the veil of white steam.

"It would seem as if we have held the wyrm back," said Gerbil Hamsmacker, a three-foot-tall, pot-bellied gnome with an ample gray beard, tinged with orange, and sparkling, inquisitive blue eyes. "Heeyah hoorah for Gondabuggan!"

"Heeyah hoorah!" the other gnomes cried on cue, and the group gathered in a circle, all with one hand extended so that their knuckles were all together like a central hub, and giving the thumbs-up signal.

The cheer ended as abruptly as it had begun, with the gnomes turning away from each other and going back to the business at hand.

"Held him back?" came a call from the top of the next plateau, fifty feet west and thirty down from the highest group. The two gnomes down there returned the thumbs-up signal, gave a hearty "Heeyah!" and rushed to the back edge of their platform, calling down to the next group, farther to the west and farther down from them. And so the victory signal was sent to the next group and to the fifth, and final, group, some two hundred feet west and one hundred feet down from the original watchers at the top plateau.

Certainly these five flat-topped and roughly evenly spaced and evenly descending pillars of stone seemed an unusual formation in the wild mountains - until one understood that the gnomes, with their incredible machines and explosives, had played more than a little hand in creating them. Gerbil had needed the pillars for his latest invention, and so the piece, the Mountain Messenger, now stood, a long and hollow tube running from finger to finger, supported by metal brackets at each plateau. It resembled a gigantic Alpine horn, though it was not flared on the end, but instead of issuing booming notes, this contraption spat out packages. In Gerbil's original proposal to the Gondabuggan Invention Approval Committee, the Mountain Messenger had been designed as a long-range delivery service for parcels to the mostly human towns of Drochit and Braemar on the western side of the rugged Dvergamal Mountains. In truth, though, the Mountain Messenger, like almost every gnomish invention, had been built just to see if it could work. The first trials had not been promising, with dummy loads lost in the mountains and never retrieved, and with one load even clipping the top of the town chapel in Drochit. Constant monitoring and painstaking calculations, fine-tuning the explosive charges along the length of the M&M (as the express had come to be called) and the amount of Earth-pull reversal solution coating the delivery packages, had actually made the contraption quite accurate, cross-winds permitting. At the present time, the gnomes could skid one of their delivery balls down the side of a sloping field north of Drochit, some forty miles across the mountains to the west, eight out of ten tries.

Never before, though, had one of those three-foot-diameter delivery balls been packed with a living creature, let alone a gnome. "I do so envy you!" young Budaboo, a dimple-faced female gnome with quite a statuesque figure in spite of her three-foot height, said to Gerbil as the older gnome continued to check his packing on the lower hemisphere of the split-open metal ball. "To be the first M&M'onaut!"

"I built it, after all," Gerbil said humbly.

"But you might even be squashed like a fly in one of Yammer's Splat-oMallets!" the younger gnome squeaked excitedly, hopping up and down so that her ample chest bounced like the landing delivery balls. "Your name would then be forever etched into the Plaque of Proud and Dead Inventors in the University!"

"Indeed," Gerbil said solemnly, and he managed a weak smile as he remembered when he, too, as a younger gnome, had thought that distinction to be the ultimate of gnomish goals.

"Oh, how I would love the honor of being squashed," Budaboo continued. Gerbil glanced over one stocky shoulder to regard the excited youngster. Gerbil easily guessed where pestering and manipulative Budaboo's flattery was heading. She was an ambitious one, like most young gnomes, and blessed with an intelligence uncommon even among the exceptionally intelligent race. "You cannot go," he said bluntly.   Budaboo, thoroughly deflated, slumped her rounded shoulders and limped away to check on the cranking progress of the huge crossbow, the initial launching mechanism.

When he was finally convinced that he had his traveling gear, including a quadricycle, properly packed, Gerbil took out his spyglass and gave one last glance at Gondabuggan. The steam and smoke had cleared and the gnome could see the buckled umbrella, and another one with several metal sheets melted off. At least one of the stone buildings beneath the opening had been flattened, its wooden supports charred, but as far as the distant gnome could see, there appeared to be no casualties. He couldn't be sure, of course, and even if his hopes proved true, Gerbil suspected that merciless Robert would soon return.

He shook his head, called to his companions, and curled into the last open area of the ball's lower hemisphere, securing the flat, sappy ends of a breathing tube around his lips.

Led by Budaboo, the other gnomes efficiently lined up the other half of the ball and slowly lowered it into place - not an easy feat since the ball had two outer layers, a hard shell for handling the explosions and the impact, and a rotating inner shell that would soften the spin and the jolts for contents. Of the intricate details and calculations needed for the Mountain Messenger, the delivery balls themselves had proven the most difficult for Gerbil, and had required the assistance of the entire staff of GAPLA, the Gondabuggan Application of Physical Laws Academy.

Using a sealed tube with twin earpieces and a hollowed interior, Budaboo listened carefully for all six of the inner hinges to click. That done, the young female set the timer that would release the hinges, giving it an extra three minutes, just to be sure that the ball would have stopped bouncing and rolling before it popped open.

Other gnomes opened a small hole and inserted a hose through both layers of the ball's shell. On cue, two of the gnomes simultaneously opened valves in joining hoses, while a third pumped away on a connected bike. The materials mixed together and rushed into the ball, becoming a fastcoagulating foam that would further secure everything within the capsule, and contained as well the needed potion for keeping the ball aloft. Then the gnomes gathered together flat-ended levers and rolled the ball up a slope and into place right in front of the cranked crossbow's heavy line. A leather pouch, connected to that line, was wrapped halfway around the ball and the signals began, the duo of gnomes on each of the successive four plateaus scrambling to light torches and insert them into hanging arms on either side of the tube.

"Heavy load," one of the gnomes on the top plateau remarked. "Gerbil has put on some weight."

"The charges have been adjusted accordingly," Budaboo assured him, and she looked to the trigger man.

"Stand clear!" the gunner called through a horn, and the gnomes on the lower plateaus scrambled for trap doors built into their platforms and disappeared from sight.

Budaboo took out her spyglass and examined the lines of torches, four on each side, to ensure that the gusting wind had not blown any out. If only one side of the twin explosives anywhere along the length of the M&M fired, Gerbil's ball would pick up an unwelcome rotation that would curve it wildly to soar far wide of the intended mark, probably to smash into a mountain wall.

"As you will," Budaboo said to the trigger man, seeing that everything was in place. "Lucky Gerbil," she whispered under her breath, wishing that she might have been the first M&M'onaut.

The trigger man heaved a lever and the giant crossbow snapped, rifling the delivery ball down the tube. Bells attached to the tube near to the first plateau tinkled, and the levers holding the torches dropped, flames on each side hitting the tightly packed charges at precisely the moment Gerbil's ball zipped past. Before the sound of the explosions had even begun to ebb, the other six charges went off in rapid succession and with a humongous thwoosh! the delivery ball soared out of the M&M and flew out of sight on its trip across Dvergamal.

"Forty miles out and three down to a bouncing stop along the field north of Drochit," one of the gnomes on the top plateau remarked. "Unless a crosswind catches him and slams him against a stony mountainside," added another.

"Lucky Gerbil," muttered Budaboo, and she could only hope that Gondabuggan would need another messenger when Robert returned.