At the other end, the phone rang. Nita's throat seized up. She began clearing it frantically.
Someone answered. "Hello?"
It was Dairine.
Nita's throat unseized itself. "Are you all right? Where are you?" she blurted, and then began swearing inwardly at her own stupidity.
"I'm fine," Dairine said. "And I'm right here."
"How did you get back? Never mind that, how did you get out? And you left the gate open! Do you know what could have happened if some poor janitor went in that door without looking? It's sixty below this time of year on Mars-"
"Nita," Dairine said, "you're babbling. Just go home. I'll see you later." And she hung up.
"Why that rotten little-" Nita said, and hung up the phone so hard that people on the street corner turned to look at her. Embarrassed and more annoyed than ever, she turned and headed back to where Kit was sitting. "Babbling," she muttered. "That rotten, thoughtless, I'm gonna-"
She shut her mouth. Babbling? That didn't sound like Dairine. It was too simple an insult. And why "just go home" instead of "just come home"? There's something wrong.
She stopped in front of Kit, who looked up at her from his seat on the step and made no move to get up. He was sweating and slightly pale. "That gate *as fastened to Mars real tight," he said. "I thought half of Mariner Plain was going to come with it when I uprooted the forcefields. What's the matter w'th you?
You look awful."
"Something's wrong," Nita said. "Dairine's home."
"What's awful about that? Good riddance." Then he looked at her sharply. "Wait a minute. Home?
When she's on Ordeal?"
That hadn't even occurred to Nita. "She sounded weird," Nita said. "Kit it didn't sound like her."
"We were at home for our Ordeal-at least, at the beginning. ." She shook her head. "Something's wrong. Kit, let's go see Tom and Carl." He stood up, wobbling a little. "Sounds good. Grand Central?"
"Rockefeller Center gate's closer." "Let's go."
A Senior wizard usually reaches that position through the most strenuous kind of training and field experience. All wizards, as they lose the power of their childhood and adolescence, tend to specialize in one field of wizardry or another; but the kind of wizard who's Senior material refuses to specialize too far. They are the Renaissance people of sorcery, every one of them tried repeatedly against the Lone Power, in both open combat and the subtler strife of one Power-influenced human mind against another.
Seniors are almost never the white-bearded wizards of archetype. . mostly because of their constant combats with the Lone One, which tend to kill them young. They advise other wizards on assignment, do research for them, lend them assistance in the losing battle to slow down the heat-death of the universe.
Few worlds have more than thirty or forty Seniors. At this point in Kit's and Nita's practice, Earth had twenty-four: six scattered through Asia, one in Australia and one (for the whales) in the Atlantic Ocean; three in Europe, four in Africa, and nine in the Americas-five in Central and South America (one of whom handled the Antarctic) and four in the north. Of these, one lived in Santa Cruz, one lived in Oklahoma City, and the other two lived together several miles away, in Nassau County.
Their house in Nita's town was very like their neighbors' houses. perhaps a little bigger, but that wasn't odd, since Carl worked as chief of sales for the big CBS flagship TV station in New York, and Tom was a moderately well-known freelance writer of stories and movie scripts. They looked like perfectly average people-two tall, good-looking men, one with a mustache, one without; Carl a native New Yorker, Tom an unrepentant Californian. They had all the things their neighbors had-mortgages and phone bills and pets and occasional fights: they mowed the lawn and went to work like everybody else (at least Carl did: Tom worked at home). But their lawn had as few weeds as Nita's did these days, their pets understood and sometimes spoke English and numerous other languages, their phone didn't always have a human being on the other end when it rang, and as for their fights, the reasons for some of them would have made their neighbors' mouths drop open.
Their backyard, being surrounded by a high hedge and a wall all hung witn plants, was a safe place to appear out of nothing: though as usual there was nothing to be done about the small thundercrack of air suddenly displaced by two human bodies. When Nita's and Kit's ears stopped ringing, the first thing they heard was someone shouting, "All right, whatcha drop this time?" and an answering shout of "It wasn't me, are the dogs into something?" But they weren't: the two sheepdogs, Annie and Monty, came bounding out from around the corner of the house and leapt delightedly onto Kit and Nita, slurping any part of them not covered with clothes. A little behind them came Dudley the terrier, who contented himself with bouncing around them as if he were spring-loaded and barking at the top of his little lungs.
"Had dinner yet?" Carl called from the kitchen door, which, like the dining room doors, looked out on the backyard. "Annie! Monty! Down!"
"Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!" screamed another voice from the same direction: not surprising, since its source was sitting on Carl's shoulder. This was Machu Picchu the macaw, also known (to her annoyance) as "Peach": a splendid creature all scarlet and blue, with a three-foot tail, a foul temper, and a precognitive talent that could read the future for months ahead-if Peach felt like it. Wizards' pets tend to become strange with time, and Seniors' pets even stranger than usual; and Peach had been with them longer than any of the others. It showed.
"Come on in," called one last voice: Tom. Kit and Nita pushed Annie and Monty more or less back down to dog level, and made their way into the house through the dining room doors. It was a pleasant, open place, all the rooms running freely into one another, and full of handsome functional furniture: Tom's desk and computer sat in a comfortable corner of the living room. Kit pulled a chair away from the dining table and plopped down in it, still winded from his earlier wizardry. Nita sat down next to him. Carl leaned over the table and pushed a pair of bottles of Coke at them, sitting down and cracking a third one himself. Tom, with a glass of iced coffee, sat down too.
"Hot one today," Carl said at last, putting his Coke down. Picchu sidled down his arm from his shoulder and began to gnaw thoughtfully on the neck of the bottle.
"No kidding," Kit said.
"You look awful," said Tom. "What've you two been up to?"
For answer Nita opened Kit's manual to the directory and pushed it over to Tom and Carl's side of the table. Tom read it, whistled softly, and nudged the manual toward Carl. "I saw this coming," he said, "but not this soon. Your mom and dad aren't going to be happy. Where did she go?"
"Mars," Kit said.
"Home," Nita said.
"Better start at the beginning," said Carl.
When they came to the part about the worldgate, Carl got up to go for his supervisory manual, and Tom looked at Kit with concern. "Better get him an aspirin too," Tom called after Carl.
"I'm allergic to aspirin."
"A Tylenol, then. You're going to need it. How did you manage to disalign a patent gateway all by yourself?. . But wait a minute." Tom peered at Kit. "Are you taller than you were?"
"Two inches."
"That would explain it, then. It's a hormonal surge." Tom cleared his throat and looked at Nita. "You, too, huh?"
"Hormones? Yes. Unfortunately."