ver the cries of
the others.

Dave reached for a heavy hammer, meaning to follow. The old Sather
seemed to sense it without looking back. "Fix the engine, Dave Hanson,"
he called.

It made sense. The others could do the fighting, but only he had
training with such mechanisms. He turned back to his work, just as the
warlocks began rallying behind Sather Karf, grabbing up what weapons
they could find. There was no magic in this fight. Sticks, stones,
hammers and knives were all that remained workable.

Dave Hanson bent over the gears, cursing. Now there was another rumble
of thunder from the falling sky. The half-light from the reflected
sunlight dimmed, and the ground shook violently. Another set of gears
broke from the housing. Hanson caught up a bit of sun-stuff on the sharp
point of the awl and brought it closer, until it burned his hands. But
he had seen enough. The mechanism was ruined beyond his chance to repair
it in time.

He slapped the cover shut and stuck the sun-tipped awl where it would
light as much of the orrery as possible. As always, the skills of his
own world had failed. To the blazes with it, then--when in magic land,
magic had to do.

He thought of calling Ser Perth or Sather Karf, but there was no time
for that, and they could hardly have heard him over the sounds of the
desperate fight going on.

He bent to the floor, searching until he found a ball of the sky
material that had been pinched off when the little opening was sealed.
Further hunting gave him a few bits of dust from the star bits and some
of the junk that had gone into shaping the planets. He brushed in some
dirt from the ground that had been touched by the sun stuff and was
still glowing faintly. He wasn't at all sure of how much he could
extrapolate from what he'd read in the book on Applied Semantics, but he
knew he needed a control--a symbol of the symbol, in this case. It was
crude, but it might serve to represent the orrery.

He clutched it in his hand and touched it against the orrery, trying to
remember the formula for the giving of a true name. He had to improvise,
but he got through a rough version of it, until he came to the end: "I
who created you name you--" What the deuce did he name it? "I name you
Rumpelstilsken and order you to obey me when I call you by your name."

He clutched the blob of material tighter in his hand, mentally trying to
shape an order that wouldn't backfire, as such orders seemed to in the