We kept revising the thing, throwing it over the wall to Manufacturing and they kept throwing it right back to us for “excessive defects in implementation” or some such crap. We couldn’t buck the blame back up where it belonged because the designer was a hero and he could show the suits where his shiny new software said it worked. So we were the ground between a rock and a hard place and about all we could do was keep making useless fiddles on the implementation and distracting ourselves with the damn coffee maker.
Yes, Larry, that’s important too. Just let me finish.
So the next day, Wilson brings in his wife’s grimoire. Its title is Ye Fecretf Of Antient And Forgotten Wifdom and it’s a $19.95 paperback full of old woodcuts. Some of these things, sigils and talismans and stuff actually look kinda like microwave components on a printed circuit board—only you’ll go blind if you try to figure out what they’d do.
So we just started slapping stuff on boards, running them through our prototyper and putting power to them to see what happened. Eventually we got—well, we thought we got—lucky.
It wasn’t as simple as that. We finally figured out that what we were looking at was a four-layer design. It also turned out the line widths varied in important ways and the spacing was a little different than what it showed in the book. And of course we were completely in the dark about what frequency to operate it at. But we kept at it. We got showers of green sparks. We got blue flashes. We got clouds of stinking orange smoke. We got a board that melted into a puddle and another one that flapped around like a fish as soon as we applied power. But we kept getting closer and closer until finally we got something that produced a blue haze over the board as soon as we fed it power. I held my breath and Sanchez fiddled with the frequency generator and all of a sudden there was a blinding blue flash on the bench and there he was.
My first thought was someone had painted a Ken doll blue and dressed him in a three-piece suit. Then I realized his skin was kind of scaly under the blue and when he moved his head to look around, well…
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said in a voice that was a little high but otherwise normal. We all just stared and he cocked his head and raised an eyebrow, like he was waiting for us to say something.
“We, ah, we don’t see many demons around here.” It was inane but it was the best thing I could think of.
“And with this kind of transport you’re not going to see many more,” the little thing said, brushing itself off. “And I’m an IMP, not a DEMON.”
“Imp?” Wilson said, just to get his jaw to close.
“Interdimensional Manufacturing Partners. DEMON is one of our competitors.”
We all nodded like we understood.
“You can call me Mr. Smith,” the thing said. “Now gentlemen, suppose you tell me about your problem?”
“How do you know we have a problem?” Wilson asked.
The imp grimaced. “People like you always have a problem,” he said. “That’s why you summon probability engineering consultants like IMP. So what’s your problem?”
He looked at us, we looked at him, and the silence stretched on.
“Well, we’ve got this coffee maker—” Wilson finally begin.
“With modifications, I see. But offhand I don’t see the problem with it. It isn’t broken, is it?”
“It keeps giving us fancy coffees.”
“Can you remove the modification?”
“Well, yeah,” Wilson said slowly. “But we like the fancy coffees.”
“Then leave the modification,” Mr. Smith said with a wave of his tiny hand.
“There’s this circuit board,” Sanchez picked one up off the bench. The little creature hefted it in both hands and swiveled his head as he scanned over the surface, frowning as he did.
“Yes, this definitely presents a problem in probability engineering. Fortunately the group I represent has an experienced and efficient probability engineering staff that is well equipped to handle your needs.”
Wilson finished his espresso in one gullet-searing gulp. “You mean you can make this damn thing work?”
“Of course.” The imp looked slightly offended.
It sounded too good to be true. But hell, there was a time when a transistor sounded too good to be true. The quantum mechanical explanation for a modern transistor was weird enough, why not something like quantum engineering for probability?
Yeah Larry, we were really desperate.
So over the next couple of hours we talked price with a little blue man standing on the workbench. Smith was sharp, but Wilson and I had been around the block a few times and we caught the stuff—most of the stuff—he tried to slip by us. Finally, around quitting time we had a provisional contract between DynoDyne Aerospace and IMP Consultants.
“We don’t have to sign in blood or anything, do we?” Sanchez asked very seriously as we came to the end.
“Only if you want to,” the imp said.
No one wanted to, so we signed the thing in non-repro blue felt-tip, since that’s what Wilson happened to have in his shirt pocket.
Well, the board shop had some contracting authority. So by splitting the deal up into several pieces and hiding it under misleading names and other finagling we were able to cover it.
There was a little trouble about their first invoice. Seems accounts payable wasn’t used to getting invoices on parchment, and the letters of golden fire played hell with their optical scanner. But we were able to get all that straightened out without too much trouble.
So a couple of days later I’m sweating over the umpty-umpth revision of TMFB when the phone rings.
“This is the guard in the main lobby. There are two wombats and a koala here to see you.”
“Two wombats and a koala,” I repeated.
“Well sir, they say they’re wombats.” The guard’s voice was carefully neutral. “And the other one sure looks like a koala.”
The silence stretched on. “They say they’re here for a contract job.”
“Oh! Uh, right. I’ll be right out. Make them comfortable, will you?”
Sure enough they were waiting for me when I arrived, sitting on one of the sofas in the lobby side by side like someone’s collection of stuffed toys. Only the fact that the smaller wombat was chewing meditatively on a branch from one of the lobby’s ficus trees showed they were alive. The two salesmen who were also sitting in the lobby were working very hard at not noticing and the guard was watching them out of the corner of his eye. I noticed he had his holster strap unsnapped.
“Jack,” the larger wombat said as I approached. “These are my mates Digger and Clancy.” He glared at the smaller wombat who dropped the ficus branch and blushed. At least I think he blushed, I mean how do you tell with all that fur on a wombat?
“I wasn’t expecting you to look, uh, like this,” I said as soon as we were out of earshot of the lobby.
“Figured it was best if we looked like the natives, right?”
“But wombats and koalas live in Australia.”
The wombat looked around. “And this isn’t Australia?”
“Different continent. Besides, they’re not intelligent.”
The wombat muttered something under his breath about “bloody research department” and then shrugged. “S’all right mate. We’re used to cockups in this business. After all, it’s the job that counts, isn’t it? So let’s get on with it.”
No, I don’t really know what they did, but they did something. All of a sudden stuff started to work, and not just the coffee urn. For the first time in living memory the plotter would produce three drawings in a row without shredding one. The etch bath temperature stabilized and the manufacturer’s specs actually worked. And all the while there’s this gang of refugees from an Australian zoo over in the comer, obviously working away at I-don’t-know-what.