"Robert A. Heinlein - Magic, Inc" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

And she tried again, going into her act with a minimum of groaning and
spitting. The ectoplasm came out freely and, sure enough, it formed into a
complete dress instead of yard goods. It was a neat- little dinner frock,
about a size sixteen, sky blue in a watered silk. It had class in a refined
way, and I knew that any jobber who saw it would be good for a sizeable
order.

Jedson grabbed it, cut off a swatch of cloth and applied his usual tests,
finishing by taking the swatch out of the microscope and touching a match to
it.

He swore. Damn it,' he said, there's no doubt about it. It's not a new
integration at all; she's just reanimated an old rag!'

Come again,' I said. What of it?'

huh? Archie, you really ought to study up a bit. What she just did isn't
really creative magic at all. This dress' - he picked it up and shook it -
had a real existence someplace at some time. She's gotten hold of a piece of
it, a scrap or maybe just a button, and applied the laws of homeopathy and
contiguity to produce a simulacrum of it.'

I understood him, for I had used it in my own business. I had once had a
section of bleachers, suitable for parades and athletic events, built on my
own grounds by old methods, using skilled master mechanics and the best
materials - no iron, of course. Then I cut it to pieces. Under the law of
contiguity, each piece remained part of the structure it had once been in.
Under the law of homeopathy, each piece was potentially the entire
structure. I would contract to handle a Fourth of July crowd, or the
spectators for a circus parade, and send out a couple of magicians armed
with as many fragments of the original stands as we needed sections of
bleachers. They .vould bind a spell to last twenty-four hours around each
piece. That way the stands cleared themselves away automatically.

I had had only one mishap with it; an apprentice magician, who had the chore
of being on hand as each section vanished and salvaging the animated
fragment for further use, happened one day to pick up the wrong piece of
wood from where one section had stood. The next time we used it, for the
Shrine convention, we found we had thrown up a brand-new four- room bungalow
at the corner of Fourteenth and Vine instead of a section of bleachers. It
could have been embarrassing, but I stuck a sign on it

MODEL HOME NOW ON DISPLAY

and ran up another section on the end.

An out-of-town concern tried to chisel me out of the business one season,
but one of their units fell, either through faulty workmanship on the
pattern or because of unskilled magic, and injured several people. Since