The Magicians

by James Gunn

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, and—like every other lecturer I've ever seen—he 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 their 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"—from the blank faces around me I suspected that they were not as familiar with the verbal formula as Uriel supposed—"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 fs 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 Leibnitz, which bored everyone in the audience except 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 forces—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 wish to improve your formula, 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 illusion. I blinked. The applause was perfunctory. Uriel nodded, his bald head beaming pinkly, and trotted off the stage.

  Ariel was clapping enthusiastically beside me.

  “They didn't seem to like that very much,” I whispered to her.

  “Oh, they're too lazy to learn anything that complicated, and some of them just aren't very bright. 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."

  Solomon announced that because the morning session had run long—every program I have ever been a party to has run long—the lecture on possession would be postponed until the afternoon session. But those who had not sneaked out during Uriel's talk were already getting up to leave. The morning session was over; it was time for lunch. 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 illusionists with their tricks and distracting patter. They were the real thing. In the last quarter-century of the twentieth century. They practiced magic, and it worked, and they held conventions, just like veterans and dentists and lawyers and economists and physicists and a thousand other groups and professions.

  And nobody suspected. They were less suspected than if they had met atop Brocken on Walpurgis Night.

  Chapter 4

  The chief enemy of life is not death, but forgetfulness, stupidity. We lose direction too easily. This is the great penalty that life paid for descending into matter: a kind of partial amnesia.

  - Colin Wilson, The Occult

  “Ariel!” I called. “Ariel!” She was getting away from me, and she was my one bridge to reality. “I've got to talk to you.” She hesitated and then turned back. I was getting fond of the way she looked at me.

  “My consulting fee is high,” she said.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “A steak,” she said. “About that thick.” She held out a finger and a thumb about two inches apart.

  “For lunch?” I asked. “I thought girls were supposed to be on diets, eating salads with no dressing, things like that."

  “Not this girl,” she said. “Magic uses up lots of energy."

  I looked at her quickly to see if she was joking, but I couldn't tell. She didn't look like a witch; she looked like the girl who lived next door. Prettier, maybe. That kind of witchcraft I could handle. “Okay,” I said. “I guess the budget can handle that if you can handle the steak."

  Fifty people were waiting for the elevators. “Let's walk down,” Ariel suggested.

  I held open the door that opened onto the gray stairwell, and we started down anonymous gray steps.

  “What's to keep me from telling the world about the strange things I've seen here today?” I asked abruptly. “And what would happen to your happy little society if I told?"

  “The answer to both questions,” she said, “is—nothing. Who'd believe you?"

  “Nobody,” I said gloomily. I knew what would happen. Magicians? In the Crystal Room? Witchcraft? Covens? Spells? Sorcery? Sure, Casey. I know just the person who should hear all about it. Come along. Come along quietly. Don't get violent. “The crazy thing about it,” I said, “is it works. Why do you keep it hidden? It would be worth millions if you could bring it out in the open. Patents. Services."

  “If you had a mint,” Ariel asked, “would you rent it out?"

  “I don't understand."

  “The members of our society are the most successful people in the world,” Ariel said. “Why not? They're one up on everybody else.” Her voice sounded a little bitter. “They are businessmen and lawyers and politicians, a physician or two, nurses, actors and actresses, entrepreneurs, gamblers, maybe politicians, and for all I know kings and queens. If their normal abilities don't get them ahead, they can always use the power. They can jinx the opposition, bless their own enterprises, use spells, perform rites, change their appearances, heal the sick, win the case—"

  “But people like that I'd recognize!” I protested. “Their pictures would be in the papers; they'd be interviewed on television; they'd be on talk shows—"

  “I told you they could change their appearance,” Ariel said. “If you could see them as they really are you could recognize half of them, I'm sure. The last place any of them would want to be recognized, however, is here. Of course we can make some guesses about people in the world who are unusually lucky, who win success far beyond their abilities. But nobody knows for sure; good fortune may strike without the intervention of magic; some people have a natural pipeline to the psychic reservoir."

  I thought of a world in which the most powerful men and women were sorcerers, and shuddered. “But I thought magicians and wi
tches were—"

  “Ugly people who lived in poverty and filth and waited for people in need of their services to come skulking around to their huts or tents?” She laughed. “Why should initiates wait to be paid by other people for making them rich or loved or powerful? It never did make sense."

  “That's right,” I said and awoke to the fact that we had been walking down these steps for a long time. I looked down the way we were going and saw the steps continuing downward without turning until they vanished in the murky distance. I looked back the way we had come. The steps went up and up, unending. The walls were smooth and gray and unbroken.

  I turned to Ariel in panic. “What's happened? Where in the hell are we?"

  “Oh, dear,” she said, looking around. “You may be right. About our location. It looks very much like a trap."

  “A trap?"

  “A kind of maze,” she said. She caught my hand and patted it. I would have felt more reassured if I had not felt so much like a child. “There's really nothing to get alarmed about,” she continued. “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 in them as long as you keep your head."

  That was easier advice to give than to take. I did not react calmly to the notion of starving to death on these stairs.

  She sank down on a step. I collapsed beside her. For the first time in years I wished I was back teaching Silas Marner to reluctant students.

  Ariel took some objects from her purse and put them down on the step beside her: colorless lipstick, some eye makeup, fingernail clippers, keys, pen, checkbook, penlight, and assorted junk. Finally she turned the purse upside down and shook some bobby pins out of the bottom. She replaced the rest of the objects and began to bend the bobby pins. “Talk if you wish,” she said, her hands busy. “It won't disturb me."

  “How—” I began, and then started again. “How long have people been able to do these kinds of things?"

  “Not long. Not unless you count the Chaldeans and the Minoans. They were said to have magicians, but we can't be certain. Of course there are legends and myths and folk tales; some reality may lie behind them, no matter how slight. If we believe them, magic has been part of human experience since man first began to personify natural forces and see spirits in all living things. Death released those spirits to wander around; they could be used for good purposes or bad, and natural forces could be controlled."

  What if the myths were true? I asked myself, credulous for a moment, and then I rejected all such possibilities. That was nothing but superstition. What I was concerned about was some new kind of science. “I mean the kind of things I saw happening up in the Crystal Room."

  “That was magic, too,” she said. “You'll never understand it unless the evidence of your eyes can dent your hardheaded materialism. And until you understand how this side of man has been suppressed by science and technology, how doing things with one's mind and hands replaced mysticism as a search for truth and power. Because there was a search down through recorded history. The wisest of men pursued it, believed in it, even testified to their success. The alchemists seeking not just the philosopher's stone but God. Responsible men like the Dutch physician Helvetius, a German professor, Wolfgang Dienheim, and the Swiss philosopher Jacob Zwinger all testified to seeing gold made before their eyes."

  I thought about it and found the whole narrative pretty unconvincing. That kind of success could have changed the entire history of Western civilization. The reason we had rejected magic for science was that all evidences of the success of magic were deception—or self-deception, delusion, mass hypnosis...

  “You're probably asking yourself why it didn't catch on if it was so successful,” she said. I started, but she went on without comment. “It must have been a haphazard business, this searching after secret power, and those who stumbled on the right formula or procedure believed that they were uniquely blessed, the chosen, the elect. They didn't want to share their discoveries with their neighbors, even if they could do so without being feared or hated, accused of witchcraft or demonology. They might hint at it—for they were human enough to want to seem brave and powerful—but they wouldn't ever set anything down except in parable and symbol. Their knowledge would die with them. Secrecy became a way of life. Everyone had to start from zero."

  Secrecy could explain a lot of things, I thought. But it was also a good way to hide the falseness of superstition.

  “In The Doctrine and Ritual of Magic, Eliphaz Levi wrote, ‘To attain the sanctum regnum, in other words, the knowledge and power of the magi, there are four indispensable conditions—an intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity which nothing can check, a will which nothing can break, and a discretion which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate. TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENCE—such are the four words of the magus....’ Of course he went ahead and wrote about them."

  “In the program,” I said, “a lot of old books of magic and spells were advertised. If secrecy was so important—"

  “They couldn't keep entirely quiet about it,” Ariel said. “Human nature being what it is, they had to boast a little, to hint that they had been in personal contact with God or Satan and had forced them to do the magician's will. But those who did write about their successes, who weren't outright fakers, or self-deluded fools, put them down in such cryptic language that nobody else could duplicate their work until my father and Uriel began experimenting with mathematical equivalences."

  “Your father and Uriel were the discoverers of the new art, then,” I said. I was getting nervous sitting here on these gray anonymous stairs, but talking was better than thinking about it. “How did the rest of those unscientific people get into the group? What happened to secrecy?"

  “This isn't the Dark Ages, you know,” Ariel said. “And my father and Uriel belonged to a different tradition. They were both mathematics professors at a large state university, and Uriel wanted to give it to the world. He wanted to publish their results in a mathematical journal. It would make them famous, he said."

  Famous! I thought.

  “He always was a bit unworldly,” she said. “But they were only junior faculty members. They had no reputations as scholars, and Father told Uriel they would just be laughed at and locked up. He was always much more practical and decisive, and he convinced his brother-in-law, my uncle. A few tricks wouldn't convince anybody, he told Uriel. Illusion, they'd say; or hypnosis."

  My face felt hot. I had thought of that myself in my need for explanations.

  “Father wanted everything 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 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 others—all 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 o
f behavior for the use of the Art. But—"

  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."