"Linda Evans - Time Scout 5 - License Invoked" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

bumped her way out toward the lift to wait for the car.

Gamble's attitude was similar to the others in the small branch, and to
everyone else in British Intelligence. The government most fervently
did not believe in magic. They felt there had to be a mundane
explanation for anything that happened. Even that which was completely
inexplicable was told off as having a cause that they were not yet able
to ascertain, just that it wasn't and never could be magic. Well, they
were wrong.

Elizabeth often wondered what Mike and the others would say if she told
them that she knew poltergeists and visitations and, indeed, magic,
were real. An admission like that would tag her as a genuine loony, and
she'd lose the credibility she had established painstakingly over the
last six years. Salaries in the public sector were by no means
generous. She needed to stay on the promotable track in these budget-
conscious days. So she laughed when the others laughed, and made
disparaging comments about the trippers who mooned around Stonehenge
and Britain's other mystic sites. All of them had their government-
issue wands, bells, and censers, and an officially sanctioned grimoire
full of exorcisms, invocations, and exhortations that everyone used but
considered to be a huge joke. The spells didn't work for most of them.
Any actual effect was put off to coincidence.

If the official word was that these things did not really exist, it was
fine with her. Some day the opportunity might come along that would
prove to the scoffers once and indisputably for all that magic was
real. The best way to do that would be to find some real magic and
bring it to her superiors' attention. But her superiors, like the rest
of the world, did not really want her to find any. It was much more
comfortable to keep the department going on speculation, hope and fear.

She hoped sincerely that the Irish singer was not really mutilating
herself, or being attacked by another person whom she was shielding. In
order to justify OOPSI's actions -- and budget -- Elizabeth needed to
produce results of some kind, but on that point the department was
torn. To uncover magic would justify their funding forever, but they
were not prepared to handle the publicity attendant on proving that
magic existed. It was a conundrum. Elizabeth wanted to succeed in her
mission. She half-hoped she could offer up a magical result, so that
there would be less scepticism around the office, opening the door so
that one day she could come out of the broom closet, so to speak, as a
genuine practitioner. She suspected that her q.v. in the office files
included mention of her grandmother and female ancestresses stretching
back to the Ice Age, but nothing official had ever been said to her
about it. The others were mostly here because they were fans of
speculative fiction or wanted a cushy government position that didn't
require much work except to visit suspected sites and look knowing.

In the meantime, she was on her way to her very first international