Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water Read Online Free Page B

caught.”
    Martin decided to never tell Roy how he had gotten caught.
    Roy continued, “I decided to use the database to give myself an advantage at work. Make my prototypes stronger. Boost the output of my team’s engine designs. I told everyone my secret was advanced computer modeling.”
    “Smart. Did it work?”
    “For a while. There was one project I’d really put my heart into. The A-12. It was a spy plane. It needed to fly very high and very fast. Later they added a seat and called it the SR-71.”
    “You worked on the Blackbird?” Martin blurted, in spite of himself.
    Roy smiled. “Is that what they call it?”
    “Yeah, eventually, I guess. It went, like, Mach three, didn’t it?”
    “Officially. It could go a bit faster if it had to.”
    Martin leaned back heavily into his seat. “Wow. The SR-71. I had a poster of it in my bedroom. I always wondered how they managed to make something like that clear back in the sixties.”
    There was a long, awkward pause, as Martin’s smile faded.
    “And now you know,” Roy said. “The damned Russians were just so much better with titanium then we were. I thought having good intelligence would prevent wars in the long run, so I found ways to make the plane work. Then I found ways to make it work better. I just got carried away.”
    “And that’s how you got caught?” Martin asked.
    Roy grimaced and said, “I moved to a different project, then they tried to build more SR-71s. It was top secret, and I wasn’t on the team anymore, so I didn’t know it was happening. They couldn’t get the titanium parts to bond. Eventually they started asking questions.”
    “And you pictured yourself having a long talk with the CIA, so you decided to get lost.”
    “Bingo. I’d read a book that had just come out. The Best Years to Live in Medieval England , by some guy named Cox. It was a gift. Anyway, I snuck into the chart room and grabbed the coordinates for the Cliffs of Dover, made a side trip to the computer room, entered the coordinates, picked a date, and that’s how I got here.”
    Martin considered this for a moment, then asked, “So where’s your computer?”
    Roy squinted. “I don’t own a computer. I’m just a guy.”
    “What about the computer you used to get here?”
    Roy kept squinting. “That’s Lockheed’s computer.”
    “Whatever,” Martin said. “Where is it?”
    “Where I left it, at the Skunk Works.”
    Martin had difficulty absorbing what he was hearing. “You didn’t bring it with you? Roy? Oh man, it was a one-way trip for you!”
    “Like I said, kid, I panicked.”
    “Without a computer here, how’d you plan to pass yourself off as a wizard?”
    “I didn’t,” Roy said, chuckling. “I figured I’d use my engineering background to make a living. I walked into that bar, they took one look at me, and assumed I was a wizard.”
    “Yeah,” Martin agreed, “I bet they did.”
    Martin spent the next hour laying out the situation for Roy in much the same way Phillip had done for him. He explained that there were communities of wizards all over Europe in this time, and in various other places, at other points in history. He told Roy that all of the wizards were guys like them, who had stumbled across the file in one of its many forms, gotten into trouble using it, and come back in time as a means of hiding.
    They spent some time puzzling over the fact that while everyone else had found the file on some corporate mainframe, Roy had found it on a magnetic memory tape, but Martin eventually dismissed the topic as just one of the many things about the file, and the universe itself, that seemed counterintuitive .
    Martin explained that women who found the file all ended up going to Atlantis, as life everywhere else wasn’t particularly hospitable for women with magic powers. Martin was just explaining about chronological pollution, and how nothing they did to the past seemed to have any effect on the future, when Roy interrupted him by