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

the lectern.
At times it was all I could do to hold onto my seat with both hands.
The next to the last speaker on the morning program climbed slowly to the stage from the floor.
For some reason he had not been given a seat with the rest of the speakers. He was a little man with rosy
cheeks and a fringe of white hair encircling a bald spot that gleamed pinkly from the stage as he bent over
a thick, bound manuscript.
He looked out over the audience hopefully, nodding to the smattering of applause, and read a
few introductory paragraphs in a high, sprightly voice. His thesis was that developments in higher
mathematics had made psychic phenomena truly controllable for the first time in history. He implied that
the society had been founded on this theory, that its purpose had been to develop the theory into a
workable science, and he suggested that these things had been allowed to slip overboardтАФif they had
not been purposefully jettisoned for something darker and less significant.
The audience murmured. There was a note of uneasiness in it, as if a mild-mannered man had put
down his glass in a bar and suddenly announced that he could lick any man in the house. I looked at
Solomon's face, but it hadn't changed expression. The speaker peered over the lectern benignly.
"Who's that?" I whispered to Ariel.
She was sitting up straight, her eyes studying the reaction of the audience. I thought she looked
disappointed. "Uriel," she said, and sighed.
Ariel, Uriel. Was there a connection?
In spite of his perceptions of the ways in which the society's direction had been altered, Uriel
said, he had moved ahead with the research as originally planned, and he now proposed to give the
society a summary of his results.
He asked for a blackboard, andтАФlike every other lecturer I've ever seenтАФhe had trouble getting
it onto the stage. Two young men struggled with it, stumbling, juggling, catching their feet on unsuspected
projections. The audience began to laugh at then- antics, and then at Uriel. Uriel endured it all with
beatific patience.
When the blackboard was finally in place, it blocked Solomon and the previous speakers from
the view of the audience, but the board seemed to have a life of its own. It kept jiggling and jumping
while Uriel was trying to write on it.
The audience laughed again.
Uriel stepped back and turned his head to scan the upturned faces below him. He sighed as if he
were accustomed to this sort of thing. "We have practical jokers," he said. "That is quickly remedied.
You are all familiar with the usual verbal formula"тАФfrom the blank faces around me I suspected that they
were not as familiar with the verbal formula as Uriel supposedтАФ"which sometimes works and more often
does not. Mathematics, the language of precision, does it like this."
He drew two crude arrows on the blackboard, pointing toward the floor. It was not all that easy
to write on, the way it was moving around. Above the arrows he scribbled a formula that looked familiar
to me, filled with elongated ╞Тs and little triangles which were, I supposed, the Greek letter delta. The
moment Uriel wrote down the last symbol the board settled down solidly on its feet like a mule
determined to move no more.
"Now," he said, like a patient professor with a backward class, "let us proceed."
And then he launched, unfortunately, into a history of the calculus, beginning with Newton and
Liebnitz, which bored everyone in the audience except for a few who may have been professional
mathematicians. And me. My college mathematics came back to me. The idea that Uriel was trying to get
across to his audience was fascinating in its concept and even more so in its implications. Magic as a
science and mathematics as the key tool. This was the first thing I could really understand.
"The merit of calculus," Uriel concluded, "is that it expresses concisely and accurately what verbal
equivalents only approximate. Accuracy is what is needed for the proper control of the magical
forcesтАФaccuracy and limitation. How many times have you summoned somethingтАФa glass, sayтАФfrom
the kitchen, only to have your table littered with glasses. Accuracy. Accuracy and limitation. If you wish