“But it might not be phoney,” insisted Penfield. “Magic and witchcraft are really pretty late in our world. They began to be talked about at the same time and on the same terms as alchemy, everything surrounded by superstition, lying and plain ignorance. In this world we’re imagining, somebody might have found the key to something as basic in that field as gunpowder was to the physical sciences. Some people say we almost made the discovery here. You know the story about this house?”
McCall nodded, but Hodge said: “No. What is it? Another ghost story?”
“Not quite. The old part of the house, the one where the bedrooms are now, is supposed to have been built by one of the Salem witches. Not one of those they hanged on false charges, but a perfectly genuine witch, who got away before she was suspected—as a real witch probably would. The story is that she came here and set up business among the Indians, and as they weren’t very expert at carpentry, she helped them build that part of the house with spells, so it would be eternal. The old beams haven’t a bit of iron in them; they’re all held together with pegs and haven’t rotted a bit. There’s also a story that if you make the proper preparations at night, something beyond the normal will happen. I’ve never done the right thing myself, apparently.”
“You probably won’t,” said Hodge. “The essence of the whole witchcraft business is uncertainty. Haven’t you noticed that in all the legends, the spells never quite come off when they’re needed?”
“That’s probably because there isn’t any science of witchcraft, with predictable results,” said McCall.
Penfield said: “It may be for another reason, too. Have you ever noticed that magic is the only form of human activity which is dominated by women? The really scary creatures are all witches; when a man becomes a magician, he’s either possessed of a devil or is a glorified juggler. Our theoretical world would have to start by being a matriarchy.”
“Or contain the relics of one,” said Hodge. “Matriarchies are socially unstable.”
“So is everything,” said McCall. “Flow and change from one form to another is a characteristic of life—or maybe a definition of life. That goes for your witchcraft, too. It would change form, there’d be resistance to it, and an effort to find something to replace it.”
“Or to remove the disabilities,” said Hodge. “The difficulty with any power we don’t really know about is not to define the power itself, but to discover its limitations. If witchcraft were really practical, there would be some fairly severe penalties going with it, not legally I mean, but personally, as a result of the practice. Or to put the thing in your terms, McCall, if there weren’t any drawbacks, being a witch would have such high selection value that before long every female alive would be a practicing witch.”
McCall carefully poured more port. “Hodge,” he said, “you’re wonderful, and I love you. But that’s typical of the way you put things. You cover up a weak point by following it with one that attracts everyone’s attention away from the feebleness of your real case. Penalties for everything? What’s the penalty for having an electric icebox?”