Diane Duane - The Wizard's Dilemma

But I almost forgot. Kit reached down and picked up something from the mossy rocks at his feet: a single flower, a little five-petaled thing like a white star. Kit slipped it into his pocket, and farther in, right down into the space-time claudication, sealing it there. Then he turned around to glance at Ponch— the top of the peak was so narrow that they hadn't had room to stand side by side. "Ready?"

"Yes, because I don't think I can hold it in much longer."

Together they stepped straight out into the air, out into the darkness—

—and out into Kit's backyard.

He looked around. Twilight was falling. Guess I was right to be a little concerned about the time, Kit thought. Looks like it wasn't running at the same rate in all those places. Something else to tell Tom...

He took the leash off Ponch, wound up the wizardry, and stuffed it into his pocket. Ponch immediately headed off toward the biggest of the sassafras trees to give it a good "watering."

Kit went into the house. His mother and father were eating; his dad looked up at Kit, raised his eyebrows, and said, "Son, can't you give us a hint on how long you're going to be when you go out on one of these runs? Tom couldn't tell me anything."

"Sorry, Pop," Kit said as he went past his dad, patting him on the shoulder. "I wasn't sure myself. I didn't think it'd be this long, though, and now I know what the problem is... I'll watch it next time."

"Okay. You want some macaroni and cheese?"

"In a minute."

Kit headed up the stairs in a hurry; Ponch hadn't been the only one with "holding it" on his mind. Then he went into his room to check his pocket and was delighted to find the flower right where he'd put it. Kit placed it carefully on his desk, traced a line around it with his finger, and said the six words of a spell that would hold the contents aloof from the local progress of time for twenty-four hours.

This was not a cheap spell, and the pang of the energy drain the spell cost him went straight through him. Kit had to sit down in his desk chair and get his

Saturday Afternoon and Evening

breath back. While he sat there, he reached farther into his pocket, touched his manual... and felt the fizz.

He grinned, pulled it out, paged to the back of it... and let out a long breath. The manual was showing a message that had come in only a few minutes before. / can't talk now. But can we talk later? I've got some apologizing to do.

All right, Kit thought, relieved. She's seen sense at last, and I'm not gonna rub her nose in it. There's too much serious neatness going on here. "Reply," he said to the manual. "Call me anytime: I'm ready."

And he ran down the stairs, exhilarated, to feed Ponch and have his own dinner. Just wait till she sees! Whatever's been going on with her, this is gonna take her mind off it.

I can't wait.

Saturday Evening

How SHE AND DAIRINE got their dad into the dining room and sat him down, Nita couldn't afterward remember, except for a flash of horror at the awful topsy-turviness of things. It was the parents who were supposed to be strong when the kids were scared. But now there were just the three of them, sitting there close, all of them equally scared together. Her father was hanging on to his control, and Nita held on to hers as much out of her own fear as out of sympathy; if she broke down, he might, too.

"She collapsed as she was leaving the store," her father said, staring at the table. "I thought she was kneeling down to look at one of the plants in the window, you know how she would always fuss over the display not being just right. She just seemed to kneel down... and then she leaned against the doorsill. And she didn't get up."

"What was it?" Dairine cried. "What happened to her?"

"They're not sure. She just passed out, and she wouldn't wake up. The ambulance came, and we took her over to the county hospital. They did some physical tests, and then they X-rayed her chest and her head, and put her in the ICU..." Her father trailed off. Nita saw the frightened look in his eyes as he relived some memory that terrified him. "They said they'd call when they had some news."

"I'm not waiting for that!" Dairine said. "We have to go to the hospital. Right now!" She turned as if intending to go get her jacket.

Her father caught hold of her. "Not right now, honey. The doctor told me that they need a few hours to get her stable. She's okay, but they need to do some tests, and—"

"Dad," Nita said.

He looked at her.

The terror in his eyes was awful, worse than what Nita was feeling. She wanted to grab him and hold him and pat his back and say, "It's going to be all right." But she had no idea whether it was going to be all right or not. Nita settled for grabbing him and holding him, and Dairine, too.

Then they began to wait.

The time until they went to the hospital passed in a kind of horrible disturbed silence, most of the disturbance coming from the phone, as it rang and rang and rang again, and every time, Nita's father lunged for it, hoping it was the hospital, and every time, it wasn't.

There were always people on the other end who'd heard from someone they knew about Nita's mom or had seen the ambulance at the shop. Every time Nita's dad had to explain to someone what had happened, he got more upset.

"Daddy, stop answering itl" Nita cried at one point.

"They're your mother's friends" was all he would say. "And mine. They have a right to know. And besides, what if the hospital calls?" And there was no arguing with that.

"Let us answer it," Dairine said.

"No," said their dad. "Things are hard enough for you two. You let me handle it." The phone rang again, and he went to answer it.

After that, it seemed that the phone just went on ringing all evening.

Nita was terrified. She wasn't used to not knowing what was happening, not being able to do anything— and her shock was such that she wasn't even able to make any kind of plan about what to do next. Dairine paced around the house like a caged creature, her face alternately frightened and furious, and she wouldn't talk to anybody, not even Spot, who crouched mutely near one of the chairs in the living room and simply watched her go back and forth. Nita felt actively sorry for it but didn't know what to do; Spot's relationship was exclusively with Dairine, and she didn't know how it would take to being comforted by someone else.

If comforted is even the word, Nita thought, because I wouldn't know what to say or do to make it Saturday Evening

comfortable... any more than I know what to say to Dairine. Or Dad. That was the worst of it: not being able to do anything for either of them. Again and again, after her dad hung up the phone, that deadly quiet would descend, emphasizing the voice that was not there, all of a sudden. And then the phone would ring into the silence again... and Nita felt certain that if it rang once more, she'd scream.

But finally the hospital called. Nita watched her father answer, his face naked in its changes, shifting every second between fear and uncertainty and greater fear. "Yes. This is he. Yes." He paused, turning away from where Nita sat at the dining-room table.

"She is?"

Nita's heart seized. "Uh, good."

She breathed again. And I don't even know why; I don't even know what's happening! "Yes...sure we can. About half an hour. Yes. Thanks."

He hung up, turned to Nita. Dairine was standing there by the living-room door, as intently as Nita had been. "She's still in intensive care," her dad said, "but they say she's stable now, whatever that means. Let's go."

Shortly, Nita found herself walking into a setting entirely too familiar to her from too many TV shows: all the people in pastel uniforms with stethoscopes hanging around their necks and shoved into their breast pockets, all the white jackets, the metal beds and the stretcher-trolleys in the corridors, people going places in a hurry and doing important but inexplicable things. What the TV shows had never gotten across, and what now struck itself deeply into Nita's mind, was the smell of the place. It wasn't a bad smell. It was clean enough... but that cleanliness was cold, a chilly distancing scent of disinfectant and other chemicals. The faces of the people working there were kind, mostly, but a lot of them had a strange preoccupied quality, unlike the faces of the actors on the TV shows. These people weren't acting.