Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

"Don’t worry, it will work out." He glanced over Gilligan’s shoulder toward the rear of the plane. "As long as that talking lizard isn’t around. I’m a good bullshitter, but I’m not that good."

That’s okay, " Jerry told him. " She won’t be there when the cops arrive and neither will we."

"Well, let’s do it people," Charlie said. "I hear sirens and I don’t think they’re fire engines." He looked at Gilligan. "You take the right-hand seat with me. The rest of you get in the back.

That ground isn’t that smooth," Gilligan said as Charlie refolded the map.

"We’re gonna land pretty rough."

"Nahh, don’t worry," Charlie said. They built these things in a tractor factory."

"Actually tank factory," Kuznetzov told him. Tractor factory was cover story." The sirens were getting closer. Jerry looked back toward where the truck was parked.

"Now what?" Kuznetsov demanded.

"I was just thinking. We really should turn the truck back in. Or at least call them to tell them where they can pick it up."

"Jerry."

"Yeah?"

"Shut up and get in the damn plane."

As Jerry scrambled aboard and Vasily slammed the door behind him, Charlie reached down and hit the starter. The big Kuznetsov radial chuffed two or three times as compressed air from the starter tank turned it over. Then one cylinder caught and fired, then two more and then the aircraft was filled with the roar of the engine.

Slowly, the plane turned out of its tie-down spot and started down the taxiway. Charlie used the rudder pedals to wiggle the nose from side to side so he could make sure the way was clear. From instinct Mick swiveled his head to check for possible interference. The older man was talking into his headset, obviously communicating with the tower, but Mick couldn’t make out the words over the engine.

They reached the turn-in and Charlie ran up the engine while standing on the brakes, scanning the gauges as he did so. Satisfied, he backed off on the throttle and turned the plane onto the runway.

"Okay folks, here we go," Charlie bellowed over his shoulder and shoved the throttle forward again. The engine noise rose to a crescendo and the big biplane began to gather speed. Out his side window Mick could see a couple of police cars coming out onto the field with their red and blue lights flashing. If those damn police cars don’t interfere, he thought.

It occurred to Mick, who hadn’t had so much as a parking ticket since he sold his sports car, that he was now involved in about half a dozen felonies. He found it was an odd sensation. He also realized he didn’t much care, not if it got him back to Karin and a place where magic and dragons ruled the skies. The police never had a chance. In what Mick thought was a suicidally short distance, at what he was sure was an insanely low airspeed, Charlie hauled back on the wheel and the plane swooped into the air, hanging on the big prop. Lift and thrust battled drag and gravity and for a stomach-churning instant Mick was sure gravity would win. Then the plane seemed to find itself, steadied, and began to climb like a contented cow on a hilly pasture. Now the only way to stop them was to shoot them down, Mick thought.

Then he remembered that could very easily happen.

It was the flies, Peter Hanborn told himself. I’m being punished for the flies. He was a thin, serious man with intent brown eyes behind heavy spectacles. He was not yet thirty but his increasing baldness made him look ten years older. Just now he felt about a hundred years older.

Well, damn it, an endangered species is an endangered species. And the Southern Nevada Garbage Fly was certainly endangered. He still didn’t regret his attempt to get the fly listed under the Endangered Species Act, despite the hundreds of editorials, two Congressional inquires and thousands of angry letters which had deluged his department as a result. To this day he didn’t accept the taxonomists’ opinion that his proposed endangered species was really just a sub-population of ordinary house flies with a slightly different distribution of characteristics as a result of generations of breeding in a landfill in the middle of the desert.

But that didn’t mean he was looking forward to this. He glanced over at McWilliams, the government’s counsel for the petition. The older man seemed as cool and unruffled as if this were an ordinary case instead of this, this travesty. At least I had solid population data when I made my proposal, Hanborn thought. This thing wasn’t even supported by a headline in the National Enquirer.

Not mat there wouldn’t be headlines in the Enquirer, not to mention the Weekly World News and every fringe publication from here to London. Twisting around to look at the half-dozen spectators on the hard wooden benches he wondered which of them was the stringer for the tabloids.

The state was opposing the motion, naturally. They considered it such an open-and-shut case they sent their newest attorney, a kid named Sculley, to handle it. It didn’t help that Sculley looked and acted like Jimmy Olsen from the old Superman comics.

Hanborn was so sunk in his own misery he missed the bailiff entering the courtroom and had to scramble awkwardly at his announcement.

"All rise. Court is now in session. The honorable Judge Margaret Schumann presiding."

Judge Schumann was a tall, slender woman with iron-gray hair and a demeanor to match. "Be seated."

It had to be Maximum Mazie, Hanborn thought miserably as he sagged back in his seat. Now there was a very real possibility he would not only be a

laughingstock, he would go to jail as well. He slumped even further until he was almost sitting on his shoulder-blades.

Judge Schumann was oblivious. "Counsel ready?" she asked, flipping through her copy of the petition. Both lawyers rose and nodded. "Let’s begin then. Now the government," she gestured at McWilliams, "wants an injunction to protect a new and possibly endangered species. The state opposes, is that correct?"

"It is, your honor," Sculley said. "We feel:"

"We’ll get to what you feel in a minute, Mr. Sculley." She kept her attention on McWilliams. "Doesn’t the Endangered Species Act have provisions for emergency listing of a species?"

"It does your honor," McWilliams said, "but we are asking for protection for this animal until the emergency provisions can be invoked. We have reason to believe that the few surviving members of the species, perhaps the entire remnant population, is in immediate and dire danger."

"Your honor," Sculley cut in. "The state contends that if this animal does in fact exist there is absolutely no evidence to show that it is entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act. Further, the thing, if it exists, is dangerous and the state must be able to protect its citizens."

Judge Margaret (Maximum Mazie) Schumann hadn’t made it to the federal bench without a finely tuned set of antennae. These endangered species cases were tricky. They usually meant someone was trying to build something someone else didn’t like. In Las Vegas, where development was nearly as big an industry as gambling, that usually meant a lot of money was at stake. It was even worse when you were asked to issue an injunction for an animal that wasn’t even officially listed as endangered. Besides which she recognized the clown sitting beside the government’s lawyer as the nut who tried to get the flies at the local landfill declared an endangered species.