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

I started after him.
"CaseyтАФ" Charlie began. He was warning me.
I waved a reassuring hand back at him without looking and followed the back that was
disappearing into the dark interior of an elevator that stood open. Above the opening a lighted sign that
read "This Car Up" blinked dark. As the man I was following turned around, a heavy brass door closed
between us. For a moment, before it closed, he looked directly at me.
His eyes were deep and black and shiny. And I had the foolish notion that they still stared at me
through the closed brass door, seeing, weighing, and discarding contemptuously before they turned their
shocking intensity on something more worthy of their attention.
The afterimage vanished. I shook myself and looked quickly at the bank of lights which registered
the position of every car in the row of elevators. The light moved past M, A, and B, stopped at C, and
then continued upward: 4, 5, 6...
I shook myself, pulled my eyes from the hypnotic display, and stepped through the open doors of
the car that was identified as the next one to head upward into the mysteries above. The doors closed,
and I touched the button marked C. It lit up almost before my finger pressed it, a kind of electronic magic
that always surprised me.
We slid silently upward. Bricks alternated with painted metal. The car was filled with the cloying
smell of a scented deodorant the management used to kill the scent of elevator shafts too long uncleaned.
M, A, B. The first stop was mine. The doors parted in front of me and closed behind me, and I was in a
red-carpeted hall facing a cream-colored corridor wall. Painted on the wall in gold was an arrow pointing
to my right Above it were two words: Crystal Room.
I looked to my right. The Crystal Room had double doors, but only one of them was open. A
dark back was just going through it. The young man who stood beside the door, neatly clothed in a
camel-colored leisure suit, nodded respectfully to the man who was entering. A gatekeeper. The party
was private.
Keeper of the crystal door. Inside was something called a "covention" that sent unreasonable
shivers up my back. And inside now was a nameless manтАФI couldn't mistake that back, as certain of its
powers as any emperorтАФwhose name was worth a thousand dollars to me and who had eyes like
polished obsidian daggers.
I shrugged the flat automatic in the shoulder holster into a more comfortable position and with
that as assurance started after the guy who wore evening clothes in the morning. I nodded familiarly to the
doorkeeper, who had broad shoulders, short hair, and a pleasant, sunburned face, and I started through
the doorway.
I stopped abruptly, as if I had walked into a glass wall. I rubbed my nose ruefully.
"Where's your name card?" the doorkeeper asked.
I looked at his left breast pocket. On a gummed card, with some other writing around it, a single
name was printed: Charon. That's funny, I thought. Charon was the name of the ferryman who took dead
souls across the river Styx to Hell; what a name for a gatekeeper. But while I was thinking I said, "Name
card?" I snapped my finger. "I knew I forgot something. But you know me. Casey from Kansas City?
Met you last year. Don't you remember my face?"
He frowned as if I had said something ridiculous. "How would I remember your face?"
That stopped me. He didn't say he didn't remember my face but that he couldn't; he didn't expect
to.
I began rummaging hopefully through the pockets of my brown tweed suit. "Maybe I've got the
card in my pocket," I said. There was only one way to go from hereтАФback the way I had comeтАФbut I
could make it graceful in the unlikely possibility that I ever came back. And then I felt something slick and
rectangular in my right-hand coat pocket. Slowly I pulled it out. It was a name card.
The young man looked at it and nodded. "Gabriel," he said. "Wear it from now on. I can't let
anybody in without a name card."
I nodded mechanically and walked cautiously into the large room, but the invisible wall was gone.