High Wizardry New Millennium Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

that?”
    “Taught a couple of guys in my class to play poker last month,” said Dairine. And off she went, heading straight for the bookstore.
    “Neets?” Kit said, tossing his manual in one hand.
    Nita thought about it. “Naah,” she said. “Let her go. Dairine!”
    “What?”
    “Just don’t leave the building!”
    “Okay.”
    “Is that safe?” Kit said.
    “What, leaving her alone? She’ll get into the Shuttle mock-up and not come out till closing time. Good thing there don’t seem to be a lot of people here today. Anyway, she did say she wouldn’t leave. If she were going to weasel out of it, she’d ‘ve just grunted or something.”
    The two of them paused to glance into the souvenir store, full of books and posters and T-shirts and hanging Enterprises—Shuttle and starship — and an impressive assortment of every kind of science. Dairine was already browsing through a fat The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars coffee-table book, almost visibly salivating. “They’ve got some plastic lightsabers over there,” Kit said over her shoulder, teasing. “With Real Action Sound…”
    “Find me a real one and we’ll talk,” Dairine said, not even looking up as she turned the pages.
    “Sounds like you’ve already got plans what to do with it.”
    She flicked a glance up at Kit that was half scowl, half smile: an expression suggesting that Kit could become part of those plans if he wasn’t careful. “Using it on Darth Vader,” she said mildly, “saving the Galaxy, no big deal…” She turned the same expression on Nita. “Don’t you two have somewhere to be?”
    Nita briefly considered the image of Dairine facing down Darth Vader, lightsaber in hand, and—after a moment’s amusement—found that, in prospect, she felt sorry for Vader. “Call us when you get bored with in here,” she said, “and we’ll go do the multimedia show.”
    “Yeah, fine,” Dairine muttered, barely noticing.
    “C’mon,” Nita said to Kit. “We’ll go down to the far end of the Museum and work our way back.”
    The two of them ambled out of the bookstore started making their way southward, through the main front-entrance hall, to the Forest Hall at the southeastern corner; then hung a right, heading westward through the New York State environment exhibit and the Hall of Oceans, and finally to what Nita most wanted to see, the Ross Hall of Meteorites. Here and there large chunks of ancient scorched rock or rock-and-metal stood about in cases or on individual pedestals arranged around circular railings. But the the centerpiece was the huge Ahnighito meteorite on its low pedestal—thirty-four tons of darkly shining nickel-iron slag, pitted with great holes like an irregularly melted lump of Swiss cheese.
    “That is really something,” Kit said as they went up the steps into the central circle where the meteorite sat.
    Nita nodded. “When they redid the place they had to build around it,” she said. “It’s too heavy to just sit on the floor. See that pedestal? It’s solid steel. Goes right down into the bedrock…”
    Nita laid her hands and cheek against it; on a hot day in New York, this was the best thing in the city to touch, for its pleasant coolness never altered, no matter how long you were in contact with it. Kit reached out and touched it too.
    “This came a long way…” he said.
    “The asteroid belt,” Nita said. “Two hundred fifty million miles or so…”
    “No,” Kit said. “Farther than that.” His voice was quiet, and Nita realized that Kit was sinking into the particular kind of wizardly “understanding” with the meteorite that was his speciality where theoretically inanimate objects were concerned. “Long, long dark times,” Kit said, his eyes closing. “Just space, and cold. And then, real slowly, light starts to grow. Then faster. It dives in toward the light, till it burns, and gas and water and metal boil off one after another. And before everything’s gone, out into