by James Gunn
Terms swirled around me. Demonstrations went on in front of my eyes. Spells, rites, the condition of the performer. Faith and works. Sir James Frazer. The reservoir of psychic power. Twisting columns of smoke assumed subhuman, leering faces; a beautiful girl in a bathing suit materialized out of the air and posed prettily for the audience; a tall, cool drink appeared in a speaker’s hand and was drained thirstily.
Contagion. The association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. The part is equal to the whole. Hair. Nail clippings. The law of contact.
Imitation. The association of ideas by similarity. An effect can be produced by imitating it. Wax images. Homeopathy. The law of similarity.
Demonstrations. I held onto my seat.
The final speaker of the morning 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, rosy-cheeked, with 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 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 overboard — if they had not been purposefully jettisoned for something darker and less significant.
The audience murmured. There was a note of uneasiness in it. The speaker peered over the lectern benignly.
“Who’s that?” I whispered to Ariel.
She was sitting up very straight, her eyes roaming over the audience. “Uriel,” she said, and sighed.
In spite of this, Uriel said, he had been going ahead with the research as originally planned, and he now proposed to give the society a summary of the results.
He asked for a blackboard, and, like every other lecturer I’ve ever seen, he had trouble getting it on the stage. Two young men struggled with it, stumbling, juggling, catching the feet on unsuspected projections. When it was finally in place, it effectively barred 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 tittered.
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 observed. “That is quickly remedied. You are all familiar with the usual verbal formula, which sometimes works and more often does not. Mathematically it is done like this.”
He drew two crude arrows on the blackboard. They pointed down at the floor. Above them he scribbled a formula that looked vaguely familiar to me, filled with elongated “f’s” and little triangles which were, I supposed, the Greek letter delta. The moment Uriel wrote down the last symbol the board stopped jiggling.
“Now,” he said, like a patient professor with a backward class, “let us proceed.”
And then he launched, unfortunately, into a history of calculus, beginning with Newton and Leibnitz, which bored everyone in the audience except a few who may have been professional mathematicians. And me. A little of my college mathematics came back, and the idea fascinated me. This was the first thing I could really understand. Magic as a science and mathematics as the key to it.
“The merit of calculus,” Uriel concluded, “is that it expresses concisely and accurately what verbal equivalents only approximate. Accuracy is what is needed, accuracy and limitation. How many times have you summoned something, a glass, say, from the kitchen, only to have your table littered with glasses? Accuracy. Accuracy and limitation. If you want to improve your formulae, know your calculus.”
And he turned to the blackboard, scribbled a formula on it and the blackboard disappeared. Just like that. Without smoke, curtains or prestidigitation. I blinked. There was a smattering of applause. He nodded and trotted off the stage.
Ariel was clapping beside me.
“They didn’t seem to like that very much,” I whispered.
“Oh, they’re too lazy to learn anything that complicated. It’s a wonderful help, really, and Uriel’s a dear, getting up every year and trying to help them. And they just laugh at him behind his back.”
Those who had not sneaked out during Uriel’s talk were getting up to leave. The morning session was over. We got up, too. I walked, dazed, into the corridor with Ariel. I didn’t believe it. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t believe it. But I had heard it and seen it. It was true. These weren’t stage magicians with their illusions and distracting patter. They were the real thing. In the middle of the twentieth century. They practiced magic, and it worked, and they held conventions, just like veterans and dentists and lawyers and a thousand other groups and professions.
And they were less suspected than if they had met atop Brocken on Walpurgis Night.
“Ariel!” I said. “Ariel!” She was getting away from me, and she was my one bridge to reality. “I’ve got to talk with you.”
“My company comes high,” she said.
I frowned. “How much?”
“A steak,” she said. “About that thick.” She held out her fingers two inches apart.
“Sold.”
There were fifty people waiting for the elevators. “Let’s walk,” Ariel suggested.
We started down the stairs.
“What’s to stop me from telling the world?” I asked abruptly.
“Who’d believe you?”
“Nobody,” I said gloomily. It was obvious what would happen. Magicians? Sure, Casey. I know just the person who should hear all about it. Come along. Come along quietly. Don’t get violent. “It works,” I said. “It would be worth millions if it were brought out into the open.”
“If you had a mint,” Ariel asked, “would you rent it out?”
“But some of the things that are useless to most people are invaluable to others. Like rain. Nobody normally has much use for rain except a farmer or a city with an empty reservoir.”
“All today’s rainmakers don’t use silver iodide or dry ice,” she said, smiling. “The most successful sprinkle water on the dust. Secretly, of course.”
I awoke to the fact that we had been walking down these steps for a long time, and I saw that they continued downward without turning until they vanished in the murk of the distance. I looked back the way we had come. The steps went up and up, unending. The walls were smooth and unbroken.
Panicky, I turned to Ariel. “Where the hell are we?”
“Oh, dear,” she said, looking around. “It looks very much like a trap.”
“A trap?” I shouted.
“A maze.” She caught my hand and patted it. “There’s really nothing to be alarmed about. It’s very simple. We’ll just have to sit down until I can get my bearings. People have starved in these, of course, but there’s really no danger as long as you keep your head.”
She sank down on a step. I collapsed beside her. She took some bobby pins out of her hair and began to bend them.
“You can talk if you wish,” she said, her hands busy. “It won’t disturb me.”
“How long have people been able to do things like this?” I asked shakily.
“Not long. Unless you count the Chaldeans and the Minoans, and we can’t be certain about them. In recorded history, it has been a haphazard business. Someone might stumble on the right formula and procedure, but he wouldn’t tell, and the knowledge would die with him. The groundwork wasn’t laid until my father and Uriel began experimenting with mathematical expressions of old spells.”
“How did the rest of them get into the act?”
“Uriel wanted to give it to the world, publish it in a mathematical journal, you know. That sort of thing. But Father said they would be laughed at and locked up. He wanted e
verything investigated and documented before they disclosed anything. So he and Uriel recruited a few trusted friends and formed the society to compare results and present papers and decide policy.”
I looked far down the steps and shivered. “Nice friends.”
“It grew,” she said ruefully. “One member would present a friend of his for consideration. And then there have always been a certain number of practicing magicians and witches, in any period. Not adepts, you understand, but getting results occasionally. They found out about the society. It couldn’t be hidden from them. They demanded admittance, and Father decided it would be better to have them where they could be watched and where they would have to obey the rules. But — ”
She stopped. I looked up. Her eyes were filled with tears. As I watched, one 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.
“That was silly,” she said.
“Go on.”
“But it didn’t work out that way. Gradually the others took control and turned the society in other directions. Now it’s just a social group without any real power, and the Art is used for all sorts of personal gratifications. So last year Father, as Magus, proposed that it was time to make the Art public. Private research had done its part. The Art could best be furthered by general participation and discussion. He was voted down. He gave them an ultimatum. He would give them a year to think about it. If they didn’t agree in that time, he and Uriel would reveal it.”
“And then?” I prompted with a shiver of premonition.
“A month later he died.”
“Murder?” I exclaimed.
“He just seemed to wither away,” she said. “Come on.” She got up. In her hands was a V-shaped wire made of bobby pins twisted together. She held the two ends, muttered something under her breath and walked up a few steps holding the wire stiffly out in front of her. Or maybe it was pulling her.
She stopped and turned toward one blank wall. I scrambled up after her, just in time to see her step through the wall. I stared at the wall with startled eyes. I was alone.
A white hand reached out from the wall, like the Lady in the Lake reaching up for Excalibur. It took my hand and led me forward. I closed my eyes as the wall approached. When I opened them, I was in the hotel lobby.
I looked back. The open stairs went up to a landing, turned and ascended toward the mezzanine. I faced Ariel. My knees were trembling but I managed to keep my voice steady.
“What would have happened if we had kept going down?”
But that was one question she refused to answer.
Ariel got her steak. It was broiled, medium-rare, and she ate with an appetite that was a pleasure to watch. I was growing quite fond of Ariel. She was pretty, talented, natural —
I started talking quickly. I had remembered her talent.
“People don’t just wither away,” I said.
“Just before he died, Father told Uriel that somebody had said a Mass of St. S≥caire for him. But by then his mind was wandering.”
“A what?”
“A Black Mass. He said that he’d been wrong. They should have given the Art to the world as soon as they had proof.”
“Or, better yet, burned it,” I said gloomily.
“They thought of that. But somebody else would have discovered it. Somebody less scrupulous. Like some of the people who wormed their way into the society.”
I returned to her father. The subject had a horrible fascination for me. “Can they do that? Make a man wither away?”
She shrugged. “Father was always so careful. He burned his nail clippings and hair combings. We haven’t dared experiment with things like that, Gabriel, but some — ”
“My name isn’t Gabriel,” I said disgustedly. “It’s — ”
“Sh-h-h,” she said, looking around fearfully. “You mustn’t speak your real name. Anyone who knows it has power over you. That must have been what happened to Father. Several people knew his name. One of them must have mentioned it.”
“To whom?”
She looked cautiously around the restaurant again. “To Solomon. He’s always been Father’s rival, and he was the leader of the party that opposed making the Art public. And now that Father is dead, Solomon has made himself Magus. No one will ever again suggest releasing the Art.”
“But couldn’t anybody talk? Couldn’t you and Uriel tell the newspapers or somebody?”
She grew pale. “Oh, we couldn’t! You don’t know what Solomon could do! Only Father had a chance of defying him, and Father is dead. Did you notice how feeble Uriel looked today. I’m scared, Gabriel. If Uriel goes, I’ll be all alone.”
“But if you had his name,” I said slowly, “you’d have a weapon against him. He would be helpless.”
“That’s right,” she said eagerly. “Could you do that? Could you find out his name, Gabriel? I’d pay you. I’d — ”
I frowned. “What do you think I am?”
She paused as if she were considering the question for the first time. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “What are you?”
“A private detective,” I said. “And I’ve got a client.”
“It isn’t Solomon, is it?” she asked quickly.
I thought about it for a moment and shook my head. “No, it isn’t Solomon.”
“Then couldn’t you do this, too? What does your other client want?”
“The same as you.”
“Then it wouldn’t hurt to tell me, would it, Gabriel?” she said anxiously. “Please, Gabriel.” Her blue eyes pleaded with me. I looked into them as long as I dared. My eyes fell away.
“I guess not,” I said.
She breathed again. “Who is your other client?”
I shrugged. “A Mrs. Peabody. A little old lady. Know her?”
She shook her head impatiently. “It could be anybody. Don’t you see? We all go under assumed names when we’re together, and most of us change our appearances, too, so that we won’t be recognized.”
I sat up straight. “You mean that you don’t really look like this?”
“Oh, not me,” she said. She smiled innocently. “Everybody knows me.”
“That makes it even tougher to pin down Solomon. No name. No face. If we assume he’s American, male and adult, we only have about sixty million people to choose from.” Suddenly I snapped my fingers and got up.
“What’s the matter?”
“Idea.”
I breezed into the lobby and up to the desk. Charlie looked up respectfully, but his face fell into more familiar lines as he recognized me.
“The fellow who told you how to put that notice on the board,” I said. “Is he registered here?”
Charlie scowled at me. Tricks?” he said.
“No tricks. Scout’s honor!”
“Penthouse,” he said.
“How’d he register?”
Charlie shuffled through a stack of cards and flipped one out on the desk. I looked at it hopefully. Then my heart sank down in the pit of my stomach. In bold black letters on the card was printed the name: “SOLOMON MAGUS.”
He was bold and confident. He flaunted himself and the society in the face of the world, sure of its blindness. But did his daring approach the foolhardy? Was he getting overbold, overconfident? It was a key to his character. It might be the key to his downfall.
I wondered what he was building himself up to.
“Thanks,” I said, and went back to Ariel. “What was the meaning of that trap?” I asked. “Why did they do it?”
She put down her coffee cup. “That was a warning.”
“To you or to me?”
“I’d thought it was to me,” she said slowly. “But now — ”
“Yeah,” I said. “Be good or else.”
“What are you going to do?” Ariel asked, her eyes fixed on me.
“I don’t like warnings,” I said.
Ariel and I parted after agreeing that it would be
safer if we weren’t seen together again. I sat through the afternoon program alone. It made a difference.
I was more attentive and more frightened. Magic! It was real and prosaic, and the latter was the worst of the two. It was a casual, everyday thing, done by the light of the sun; they accepted it, like the water that comes out of a pipe when you twist a faucet or the lights that come on when you flick a switch or the voice that comes out of a telephone. It was something you lived with.
A man talked about familiars and their practical uses. An unseen hand turned the pages of his manuscript; a glass raised itself to his mouth. I thought to myself that it could have been done just as easily and with perhaps less effort by hand.
“Proof!” someone shouted from the audience.
Solomon was beside the speaker. He was lean, dark and compelling. “Will the person who spoke stand and make his objection clear?”
Uriel stood up. I saw his pink bald spot gleaming. “What proof does the speaker have of the existence of familiars? Where does this mysterious intelligence come from?”
“You’ve just seen — ” the speaker began, motioning to the glass and the manuscript.
“Telekinesis.” Uriel scoffed. “Anyone here could do that without predicating a familiar.”
The leaves of the manuscript fluttered wildly. The glass rose in the air, spun rapidly and dropped gently to the lectern.
“Child’s play,” Uriel snorted.
“What point do you wish to make?” Solomon asked, frowning.
“I wish to register a protest against the trend of this ‘covention,’ as you insist on calling it. Covens. Familiars. Is this the type of research the society should approve? Is this the kind of investigation the society was set up to consider? It smacks, sir, of rank superstition.”
A murmur ran through the audience.
“Then you do not believe in the spirit world?” Solomon asked with quiet malice.
“No, sir,” Uriel said. “I do not. And I do not believe in slipshod investigations and wild surmises without any scientific basis. I ask a vote of disapproval.”
Solomon looked out over the audience with a dark, cold eye. “Is there a second?”