The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition Read Free Page A

weather had been getting too cool for swimming, especially this late in the day. Nita turned again, looking southward, toward the bay. At the seaward end of the jetty was the black-and-white painted metal tower that held up the flashing red Jones Inlet light, and at its base a small shape in a dark blue windbreaker and jeans was lying flat on the concrete pediment to which the tower was fastened, looking over the edge of the pediment, away from Nita.
    She headed down the jetty toward him, picking her way carefully over the big uneven rocks and wondering at first, Is he all right? But as she came near, Kit looked up over his shoulder at her with an idle expression. “Hey,” he said.
    Nita climbed up onto the cracked guano-stained concrete beside him and looked down over the edge, where the rocks fell steeply away. “What’re you doing?” she said. “The barnacles complaining about the water temperature again?”
    “Nope, just keeping a low profile,” Kit said. “I don’t feel like spending the effort to be invisible right now, with work coming up, and there’ve been some boats going through the inlet. Might be something happening at the Marine Theater later… it’s been a little busy.”
    “Okay.” She sat down next to him. “Any sign of S’reee yet?”
    “Nothing so far, but it’s only a few minutes after when we were supposed to meet. Maybe she got held up. Whatcha got?”
    “Here,” Nita said, and opened her manual. Kit sat up and flipped his open, too, then paged through it until he came to the “blank” pages in the back where research work and spells in progress stored themselves.
    Nita looked over his shoulder and saw the first blank page fill itself in with the spell she had constructed that afternoon, spilling itself down the page, section by section, until that page was full, and the continued-on-next-page symbol presented itself in the lower right-hand corner, blinking slowly. “I had an idea,” she said, “about the chemical-reaction calls. I thought that maybe the precipitates weren’t going to behave right—”
    “Okay, okay, give me a minute to look at it,” Kit said. “It’s pretty complicated.”
    Nita nodded and looked out to sea, gazing at the blinding golden roil and shimmer of light on the Great South Bay. These waters might look pretty, but they were a mess. New York and the bedroom communities around it, all up and down Long Island and the Jersey shore, pumped terrible amounts of sewage into the coastal waters, and though the sewage was supposed to be treated, the treatment wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. There was also a fair amount of illegal dumping of garbage and sewage going on. Various wizards, independently and in groups, had worked on the problem over many years; but the nature of the problem kept changing as the population of the New York metropolitan area increased and the kinds of pollution shifted.
    Nita and Kit were more than usually concerned about the problem, as they had friends who had to live in this water. Since shortly before Nita had had to go away for the summer, they’d been trying to construct a wizardry to pull the pollution out of the local waters on an ongoing basis. If it worked, maybe the scheme could be extended up and down the coast. But the problem was getting it to work in the first place. Their efforts so far hadn’t been incredibly successful.
    Kit was looking at the second full page of Nita’s work. Now he turned it over and looked at the third page, the last one. “This,” he said, tapping a section near the end, “is pretty slick.”
    “Thanks.”
    “But the rest of this—” Kit shook his head, turned back to the first two pages, and touched four or five other sections, one after another, so that they grayed out. “I don’t see why we need these. This whole contrareplication routine would be great—if the chemicals in the pollution knew how to reproduce themselves. But since they don’t, it’s a lot of power