The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (65 page)

"The mayor signed a search warrant?"

The sheriff grinned nastily. "Mayor's home with a cold. A real bad cold that's got him incapacitated. So this was signed by three council members like the law provides. All legal and proper."

Meaning Dieter,
Wiz thought, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Well, I can't stop you from searching," he said standing aside from the door. "But I can't protect you either," he added as the sheriff and his men pushed into the hall. "This is a wizard's house, you know," he shouted to their backs as they thundered up the stairs.

For the next two hours the sheriff's men went over the house eaves to cellars. They found a notebook Wiz had lost, an old copper pan that had belonged to Widder Hackett, a number of rats and an indignant pigeon who was trying to nest in the attic, but not one bit of stolen property.

The only excitement came when Bobo decided that for some inexplicable reason the sheriff's highly polished boots belonged to him, and proceeded to mark his property in the time-honored tomcat fashion. Luckily for Bobo he was a good deal faster than the sheriff or any of his men.

Meanwhile Malkin stood around looking smug, Anna was wide-eyed with terror and Widder Hackett hurled abuse at the searchers at the top of her nonexistent lungs. Unfortunately the searchers couldn't hear her. Even more unfortunately Wiz could. By the time the sheriff's men finished, Wiz was a nervous wreck.

"Well?" the sheriff demanded as he strode into Wiz's workroom. "Are you done in here?"

The two guards who had been tapping the floor for loose boards nodded in unison and stood up. "Every place but this table," the guard in front said. "You want us to dig up the garden next?"

"What's wrong with this table?" demanded the sheriff.

"Looks as if it's magic like."

"That's my desk," Wiz added. "You'd better not touch it."

"Bah!" barked the sheriff.

"Hey, I won't be responsible . . ." Wiz began, but the sheriff was already reaching for the pile of parchments.

No one but the very brave, the very skilled or the very foolish messes with a wizard's working equipment. The sheriff might have been brave but he was certainly not at all skilled.

As soon as his hand moved over the top of the table there was a twisting in the air and a small green demon materialized below the glowing letters. A small green demon with a very large mouth. Lined with large, pointed and very sharp teeth. Before the sheriff could react the creature chomped down hard on the proferred hand.

The sheriff yelped and jerked his arm away. On the back of his hand in a neat semicircle were eight round puncture marks. "It bit me!" he screamed.

"Actually there are eight of them, so that's a byte," Wiz said, examining the wounds.

The sheriff pulled his hand back. "That's what I said!" He pointed toward the table with his good hand. "Arrest that thing!" he commanded.

The demon crouched on the edge of the table and grinned at them. It had an unusually large grin that showed off its pearly white and pointy teeth to excellent advantage. All three rows of them.

The guards shifted back and forth but made no move toward the grinning entity crouched on the table.

"I dunno," the first one demurred.

"Law says we're only supposed to arrest people," the second one said. "Don't say nothing about things like that."

"You can arrest strayed livestock," the sheriff retorted. "Well, impound them anyway." He gestured at the demon again. "
Impound
that thing."

"Don't know that it's rightly livestock," the first guard said.

"Don't think it's strayed either," his companion added.

"It's right where it's supposed to be," Wiz added helpfully.

"Well, then," said the second guard.

The sheriff was nearly beside himself with fury. "This is an outrage! A complete outrage against the majesty of the law." He was bouncing up and down and his face was so red Wiz was afraid he was going to have a stroke. He decided it was time to pour some oil on the water.

"Look sheriff, you can see there's nothing on that desk but papers. No stolen property, right? Now I'm sorry the demon hurt you, but I'm sure he won't do it again. Why don't you and your men go down into the kitchen and Anna will see to your wound."

"But, but, but . . ."

"It looks nasty, sheriff. The only cure for a demon byte is to have it flushed by a beautiful woman. I'm sure she can find some ale for you and your men while she tends to it."

The sheriff glared at the demon, who glared back. He glared at Wiz, who smiled. Then he glared at his two subordinates. Without a word he turned and stalked out of the room with the guards close on his heels.

Wiz collapsed against the wall and let his breath out in a great
whoosh
.

"Don't know what you're so worried about," Widder Hackett's voice rasped in his ear. "Malkin had the stuff out of the house before they got in the door."

"What'd she do with it?"

"Buried it in the garden."

"The garden?" Wiz yelped. "Didn't you hear them say they were going to dig up the garden?"

"I didn't say
our
garden," the Widder Hackett said gleefully. "Old Trescott's garden next door." She cackled so hard she went into a coughing fit. "Oh, I'd love to see the look on Mrs. High-and-Mighty's face if they was to dig up the loot under her cherry tree. Say, why don't you . . ."

"Uh, let's save that for an emergency, shall we?" Wiz said hastily.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic.

—Clarke's Law 
 

 

Any sufficiently advanced magic is
indistinguishable from technology.

—Anderson's Reformulation of Clarke's Law 
 

 

Any sufficiently advanced anything is
indistinguishable from utter nonsense.

—Digby's Generalization of Clarke's Law 
 

 

Especially if it is sufficiently advanced
nonsense to begin with.

—Zumwalt's Corollary to Digby's
Generalization of Clarke's Law
 

The council kept Wiz and Malkin waiting for over an hour. While Wiz fidgeted in a too-hard chair in the hall and Malkin ostentatiously checked the place for escape routes, the councilors met behind closed doors. Every so often the sound of shouting or an especially ringing bit of oratory would penetrate through the thick carved doors. Wiz fiddled with his notes and tried not to think about the corners he had to cut.

Some of the pieces, such as the buzzword generator, were beautiful. But other details he had been forced to leave to demons because of the time he lost to the sheriff and his searchers.

True to his word, the sheriff had spent most of the rest of the day digging up the garden. Or, more correctly, the sheriff lounged under a tree while his men dug holes more or less at random in the garden. They didn't find anything but they didn't quit until nearly sundown. Wiz was on pins and needles all day, afraid there was something Malkin had overlooked. But in her own way Malkin was as thoroughly professional as Wiz. There was nothing and the sheriff left empty-handed.

At last the doors swung open and the usher beckoned them within. The expression on the man's face did nothing for Wiz's confidence.

The council was seated around a long U-shaped table. Their mood was a cross between a lynch mob and the crowd at a formal execution. Which is to say some of them were looking forward to what they were going to do, some of them would reluctantly do their duty and some of them were there for the show.

Wiz started talking before he even reached the center of the U. "Gentlemen, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to come before you today," he said as he strode into the room. His confidence was of a piece with his sincerity, but so far they seemed to be buying it.

He gestured grandly and the daylight streaming in through the windows dimmed to twilight. Another gesture and a demon appeared at the back of the room with a slide projector. The projector was already on and a slide flashed on the wall bearing the words "Success And Prosperity" in vivid red and yellow on a bright blue background—a combination carefully chosen to be arresting without quite giving the viewers a headache. There was a brief murmur from the council and Wiz charged on before they could recover.

"My research has shown that you face a unique set of opportunities. To meet them I propose a dynamic, proactive reinvention of the organization to empower the teams using 60-second skills to address for success the strategic planning requirements in light of the Theory Z competitive strategy in time to produce a win-win-win situation."

Maybe I shouldn't have spent so much time on the buzzword generator,
Wiz thought. But damn! The output was lovely. If the slide-picking demon had done its job nearly as well, they just might,
might
get out of this with a whole skin.

All the while the demon was flashing slides on the wall, medieval streets crammed with modern tourists, waving fields of grain, several interior shots of the Cloisters medieval museum in New York City. Happy children. Wiz thought he glimpsed a shot of Mickey Mouse at Disneyland but he wasn't sure.

The torrent of words and pictures had the desired effect. Everyone was so stunned no one thought to ask about dragons.

"Clearly," Wiz continued, "what is called for is to install a reorganization that promotes a new strategic vision, a tightly focused vision that energizes the new tomorrow.

"While continuing the traditions of the past—" the mayor smiled and nodded "—we must meet the challenges of the future—" it was Dieter's turn to smile "—and provide bold new approaches to the organization's needs." That brought a nod from Rolf.

"We must empower ourselves to consistently use our organizational resources to install this vision. This means using team management-focused techniques to create the need to change and to produce organizational systems which reinforce the vision."

The picture on the screen showed a USDA map of the United States with the dates of the average last frosts marked.

"That doesn't look like anything around here," one of the more alert councilmen put in.

"Those are magical isoclines," Wiz said hastily.

"Still don't look like the country around here."

"It's a transmorphic projection. Maybe we'd better come back to this later. Next."

The next slide was a pie chart, showing sales of Sara Lee pies for 1993.

The trouble with trusting a demon's judgment, Wiz realized belatedly, is that it doesn't have any. He was damn glad none of his audience could read English.

Wiz smiled brightly. "By now you are doubtless interested in the specifics of my recommended action plan. As soon as I have finished, my assistant," a nod to Malkin, "will distribute copies of the white paper emphasizing the highlights. Meanwhile, let us examine the critical challenges we must meet to empower our vision of empowerment."

The demon flashed up a slide showing someone going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

"The first challenge is organizational. The traditional organization emphasizes musty, sterile parliamentarianism at the expense of action which would clearly reflect the true makeup of the council." That brought nods from the mayor, Dieter and Rolf, all of whom were absolutely convinced the council was really behind them.

"This means your present decision-making process is diffuse and suboptimal. We must proactively react to counteract this tendency with a broader vision which is only available at the top." The mayor beamed and Dieter frowned.

"However, given the present organization this is clearly impossible because of the workload such a top-down environment imposes on the mayor. Therefore the key to repositioning the products and services to build a corporate advantage is install an action-direction vision by creatively teaming together. To that end, we create an Office of the Mayor to actualize the latency by creative teaming. Working directly with the mayor on this critical team will be innovation powerhouses representing the major resources within the present council. While the mayor will clearly be the team leader he will benefit from the synergy and creative flow of ideas from the team structure."

Again smiles from the critical three. The mayor saw it as a way to subordinate his main rivals to him and the other two saw it as giving them a power base close to the top. That alone should guarantee absolute gridlock, Wiz thought as he paused for breath.

That was a mistake. "What about the rest of the council?" demanded one of the councilmen off to the side. "What about money?" demanded another.

"Yes, money. What about money? What about taxes?" several other voices chimed in.

"I'm glad you raised that critical point," Wiz said brightly. "That is the second platform of my recommendations, but perhaps we can deal with it out of turn.

"The important fiscal consideration is to provide revenue enhancement without increasing taxes. In fact, as you can see clearly from this revenue elasticity chart—" up went a phase diagram of the melting point of lead-tin-antimony solder alloys "—the projected revenue needs can be met with a decrease in current taxes.

"Clearly what is needed is a proactive, projective infrastructure investment of the revenue stream."

"There ain't no revenue," one of the councilors objected.

"That is precisely why you apply the revenues projectively," Wiz assured him. "As you can see from this next chart—" up flashed a bar chart showing the amount of track laid by the Indian railways from 1850 to 1900 "—the revenues can be applied to development in a fashion which will encourage and develop the trade."

That produced an approving mutter from Dieter's faction. The mayor's people sat in puzzled silence and Rolf's followers looked to their leader for their cue.

"Let us go back to the organization for a moment," Rolf said smoothly. "I believe there is more."

"There is indeed," Wiz said, relieved that he didn't have to do his New Age Bugaloo around the difference between "revenue enhancement" and "tax increase."