Nita shut the manual, tucked it under her arm and headed out into the living room. Dairine was standing in front of the computer, keying in instruc-tions; the Apple logo came up on the monitor, followed by a screenful of green words too small for Nita to read from across the room. Her mother and father were still deep in the manual. "Mom," Nita said, "Kit and I want to go into the city, to the planetarium, is it okay? Kit's folks said he could."
340 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD Nita's mother glanced at her, considering. "Well … be back before | dark." "Stay out of Times Square," her father said without looking up, while paging through a manual open in his lap. "Do you have enough money for the train?" her mother said. "Mom," Nita said, hefting her wizard's manual in one hand, "I don't think we're going to take the train." "Oh." Her mother looked dubiously at the book. She had seen more than enough evidence of her daughter's power in the past couple of months: but Nita knew better than to think that her mother was getting comfortable about wizardry, or even used to it. "You're not going into the city to, uh, do something, are you?" "We're not on assignment, Mom, no. Not for a while, I think, after last time." "Oh. Well . . . just you be careful, Neets. Wizards are a dime a dozen as far as I'm concerned, but daughters . . ." Nita's father looked up at that. "Stay out of trouble," he said, and meant it. "Yes, sir." "Now, Betty, look right here. It says very plainly, 'Do not use disk without first—' " "That's software, Harry. They mean the diskette, not the disk drive—" Nita hurried out through the kitchen before her folks could change their minds. Kit was evidently thinking along the same lines, since he was standing in the middle of the sandy place by the backyard gate, using the stick Ponch had brought him to draw a wizard's transit circle on the ground. "I sent Ponch home," he said, setting various symbols around the circumference of the circle.