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administrator so those
people in Support can't pull the wool over our eyes. But his
Vohlmanness keeps cracking these weird jokes about devils and knives
and things. Is he one of them satanists we got briefed on four years
ago, do you suppose?"
    I boggle as discreetly as I can manage. "I'm not
sure you should be in this course. The material gets technical quickly
and it can be dangerous if you're not familiar with the appropriate
laboratory safety precautions. Are you sure you want to stay here?"
    "Sure? I'm sure! 'Course I'm sure. But I ain't
too happy with the content. For one thing, where's all the stuff about
license terms and support? That comes first. I mean, pacts with the
devil is all very well, but I need to know who to phone for real
technical support. And has CESG certified all this stuff for use on
government networks?"
    I sigh. "Go have a word with Dr. Vohlman," I
suggest, and—a trifle rudely—turn away. I know there's always one
person who's in the wrong course, but we're two days in and he still
hasn't figured it out—that's got to be some kind of record, hasn't it?
    Everyone drinks up and the smokers magically
reappear from wherever they vanished to and we troop back into the
lecture theatre. Teacher—Dr. Vohlman—has rolled an archaic test bench
in; it looks like a couple of Tesla coils
fucking a Wheatstone bridge next to what I'll swear is a distributor
hub nicked from an old Morris Minor. The wiring on the pentacle is
solid silver, tarnished black with age.
    "Right, better put your coffee cups down now,
because we're going to actually put some of the stuff we were
discussing before break into practice."
    Vohlman is all business, attacking his
curriculum with the gusto of a born schoolteacher. "We're going to try
a lesser summoning, a type three invocation using these coordinates
I've sketched on the blackboard. This should raise a primary
manifestation of nameless horror, but it'll be a fairly tractable nameless horror as long as we observe sensible precautions. There will
be unpleasant visual distortions and some protosapient wittering, but
it's no more intelligent than a News of the World reporter—not
really smart enough to be dangerous. That's not to say that it's safe,
though—you can kill yourself quite easily by treating the equipment
with disrespect. Just in case you've forgotten, this current is
carrying fifteen amps at six hundred volts, and the baseboard is
insulated and oriented correctly along a north-south magnetic axis. The
geometry we're using for this run is a modified Minkowski space that we
can derive by setting pi to four; there's no fractal dimension
involved, but things are complicated slightly because the space to
which we're mapping this diagram has a luminiferous aether. Gather
round, please, you need to be inside the security cordon when I power
up the circuit. Manesh, if you could switch on the ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY sign … "
    We gather round the test bench. I hover near the
back. I've seen similar experiments before: in fact, I've done much
more exotic ones in the basement back at Chateau Cthulhu. Compared to
the insanely complex summonings Brains assembles inside his laser grid
this is introductory level stuff, just an official checkpoint on my
personnel record. (Did I tell you about the friend of mine who was
turned down for a job as a trainee scientific officer because he was
unqualified? His Ph.D. was no good—the job
description said "three GCSE passes" and he'd long since lost all his
high school certificates. That's the way the civil service works.)
    Still, it's interesting to watch the other
students in this course. Babs, blonde bubble-and-squeak with big-framed
spectacles, is treating the bench like an unexploded bomb; I think
she's new to this and still too much under the influence of The
Exorcist, probably expects heads to start spinning round and green
slime to start spewing at any moment. (Vohlman should have told the
students that's what we keep the