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

unlucky but I wasn't going to wait around to find out. "That does it," I said, standing up. "I'm getting out
of here."
She yanked me back into my seat by my coattail. "Sit down," she whispered, looking at the
people sitting around us. "You'll attract attention, and that could be dangerous. Don't try to leave now.
They'd get suspicious. And they don't take chances. I won't give you away. Wait until the recess, and
then you can walk out inconspicuously along with everybody else."
I pointed a shaky finger at the program. "But this isтАФthis isтАФ"
She looked at me, and her eyes were wide and blue and innocent. "It's only magic."
"Magic! Real, honest-to-God magic?"
"Of course. What did you think it was?"
Magic? No, that was impossible. I couldn't accept that. Madness was more like it. And for me
the only question was who was crazy: Ariel, the others, or me? She didn't look crazy. The rest of them
didn't look crazy. They looked like handsome, intelligent people gathered together to discuss their
profession. Whatever it was. Not magic. Oh, no! Not in the nineteen seventies. Not in a big metropolitan
hotel surrounded by the everyday details of transient life, by bellhops and maids and waiters and people
coming and going. Not with the sun shining and cars in a traffic jam outside and people working and
eating and sleeping and going to football games and watching television and making love.
Spells and magic wands and graveyard dust. Witchcraft and formulae and sorcery.
"Ouch!" I said.
"What's the matter?" Ariel asked.
I rubbed my thigh. I was awake, all right. That was bad news. If I wasn't asleep and they weren't
crazy, then I was the one who had gone round the bend.
But I didn't feel crazy, just baffled and bewildered.
And then the man called Solomon the Magus was on his feet, standing behind the lectern.
Solomon the Magus. Not Solomon Magus. I began to understand a little more. Magus was his title, and
the Magi were the society. He was the Magician of the magicians, like the Shah of shahs. Magus was the
singular form of magi. Magicians all.
Everyone was seated. All the seats were filled. It was strange, I thought. Nobody was absent
because of illness or the press of business or any of the other reasons which kept people away. Not even
death, I thought, remembering Gabriel. Maybe nobody dared to be absent. Something might happen
while they were gone; something might happen to them if they were gone.
Against the black drape Solomon's face and triangular expanse of shirt front floated unsupported
in space, and his disembodied hands hovered in the air for silence. Silence fell.
He began to speak. His voice was low and resonant and clear, and I couldn't understand a word
he said. His fluttering hands gestured a strange accompaniment like pale butterflies in a mating dance. He
finished, smiled, and then launched into a general welcoming speech to the society that I understood
perfectly and wished I hadn't. It could have been repeated word for word to any professional gathering
anywhere in the country.
Ariel leaned toward me. "The first thing he did was an Egyptian spell," she whispered. "A
standard thingтАФasking that we be blessed every day."
"Damned decent of him," I growled, but the sarcasm was to hide the fact that I did feel happier.
Well, not happier exactly. There was a better word for it, but I didn't want to use it. Blessed.
The first four speakers on the program were as dry as only the learned can be when they are
discussing their specialties in front of other specialists and wanted to be careful not to appear
unsophisticated and unprofessional. Even the audience of initiates grew restless as the speakers
expounded their technicalities and quibbled over minutiae.
All except me. I sat in a state of shock. They were being dull about magic. They were being
pedantic about sorcery. Behind everything they said, justifying their dullness and their pedantry, lay a
pragmatic belief in the existence of magic as a physical, usable force. It was like a seventeenth-century
man walking into a meeting of electrical engineers or an early-twentieth-century man listening to the