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

and decide policy."
I looked down the stairs receding infinitely and thought that hell was not hot and red but gray and
unchanging. "Nice friends," I said.
"It wasn't the first members," she said. "Most of them are gone now. The society grew. It got out
of hand. One member would present a friend of his for consideration. Some members died and were
replaced by othersтАФall without anyone knowing, we think. And there always have been a certain
number of practicing magicians and witches in any period. Not adepts, you understand, but aware of the
power and able to get results occasionally. The society was broadcasting a lot of psychic energy. Magic
does that, you know. It has to get energy from somewhere. Uriel has been speculating recently about an
alternate universe, in another dimension. When that energy is released, it sets off vibrations if you're
sensitive to that sort of thing."
The sort of feeling, I thought, that one gets walking into a haunted house or by a cemetery
at midnight. Or just the feeling of power, the charisma, around certain people.
"The practicing magicians and witches demanded that they be admitted to the society," Ariel said,
"and Father decided it would be better to have them where they could be watched and where they would
have to obey certain rules of behavior for the use of the Art. ButтАФ"
She stopped. I looked up and saw her eyes filling with tears, and I remembered that her father
had died, perhaps recently. As I watched, one tear spilled over and ran down her cheek. I handed her
my handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and smiled at me as she handed it back. She looked very
appealing at that moment, and I would have done a great deal to keep tears from ever clouding those
blue eyes again. I stopped short of magic.
"That was silly," she said.
"Not at all," I said. I wanted to put my arm around her and I did. It felt good, and she seemed to
like it there. "Go on if you can."
"I'm all right," she said, and after a moment she continued. "It didn't work out the way Father
planned. Gradually the others took control and turned the society in other directions. Instead of a
professional society, it became a social group without any real power. Now the Art is being used for all
sorts of personal gratifications. Well, last year Father, as Magus, proposed that it was time to make the
Art public. Private research had done as much as it could, he said. The Art could best be furthered by
general participation and discussion."
In spite of all my earlier doubts, I began to imagine all the ways in which the Art could be used to
solve our problems. It could extend our medical resources, maybe even cure diseases now considered
beyond treatment. It could solve our energy problems; it could clean up pollution.... I imagined snapping
my fingers and sending all the junk thrown out of automobiles right back into those cars, removing the
chemicals from the streams, taking the soot and lead and various oxides of sulfur and nitrogen out of the
air and depositing them where they could be reused. It could eliminate radioactive wastes. It could feed
and clothe the poor, maybe even educate the illiterate, perhaps even help the disadvantaged nations of
the world to achieve a standard of living that would encourage them to control their own birth rates, all
without industrialization and pollution and using up scarce resources....
"Father was voted down," Ariel said. "So he gave the members an ultimatum. He would give
them a year to think about it. If they didn't come up with a better proposal in that time, he and Uriel
would reveal the Art."
"And then?" I asked, but I knew the answer,
"He died a month ago."
"Murder?"
"He just seemed to waste away," she said. "Come on." She got up. My arm fell away. In her
hands was a V-shaped wire made of bobby pins bent and hooked together. She held the two ends,
muttered something under her breath, and walked up a few steps holding the wire horizontally in front of
her. Or maybe, I got the uneasy feeling, it was pulling her.
She stopped and turned toward one blank gray wall. I scrambled up after her. She moved her