"James E. Gunn - The Burning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

In 1956 I exchanged some letters with John W. Campbell, the editor ofAstounding . In his characteristic
contrarian way, Campbell took the opposite position тАФ that people had a right to be upset at the
scientists, and my scientist, fleeing from their righteous anger, ought to realize this and return to give
himself up. I was convinced---or, if not convinced, persuaded, since it was Campbell who would
authorize payment, wrote тАЬWitches Must Burn,тАЭ and saw it published inAstounding in August 1956. But
the sequels I had planned got hung up on my inability to get past the ending of that short novel to the
beginning of the next. Twelve years later I finally realized why my hero had returned (it wasnтАЩt
CampbellтАЩs reason), and I wrote тАЬTrial by Fire.тАЭ Frederik Pohl accepted it. тАЬWitch HuntтАЭ followed
immediately, and the two short novels were published within a couple of months of each other тАФ тАЬTrial
by FireтАЭ in the February 1969 issue ofIf, тАЬWitch Hunt,тАЭ in the April 1969Galaxy .

That same year the World Science Fiction Convention was held in St. Louis. I took my two teen-aged
sons and a friend of my older son. There we met a charming young woman named Gail Wendroff who
had just been named science-fiction editor at Dell Books. We invited her to join us at the Hugo Awards.
She told me later that she had felt so out-of-place that she was about to return to New York. Perhaps it
was no coincidence that a year later she publishedThe Witching Hour and two years after that,The
Burning .

James Gunn

Part One
Witches Must Burn
I
The nightmare began when he was still five miles from the campus. For as long as he lived it would bethe
nightmare to him, never far from his unguarded moments. But then his life expectancy, at that moment,
was not long.

The burning of the law building started it. The building was old and dry; it burned briskly, the flames
leaping and dancing on the hill like malicious demons, spearing upward into the night, painting the other
buildings with scarlet fingers.

ThereтАЩs been an accident, he thought, and poured kerosene to the old turbine under the hood. It
responded nobly; the тАШ09 Ford lunged forward.

An instant later he realized that the other buildings were burning, too; the scarlet fingers were their own.

When he reached the edge of town, the hill was a vast bonfire. The town sprawled under it, bathed in a
sullen glare, dark-shadowed and lurid like a village in hell.

As he got closer to the campus, the streets became jammed with cars. He drove as far as he could, and
then he got out and ran. Before he reached the top of the hill, some instinct of self-preservation made him
strip off his tie and turn up his coat collar.

There were no fire trucks, no police cars. There was only the silent crowd, its dark face reddened
occasionally by a leaping flame, its ranks impenetrable, its hydra-heads impassive. Only its eyes, holding
within them their own small flames, seemed alive.

The law building was a crumbled ruin of stone and glowing coals. Beyond it was a tossing sea of fire,
melting islands within it the political science building, the library, the behavioral science building, the
Union, the journalism school, the fortress-like humanities building, the auditoriumтАж. For a moment he