LOST MAGIC

By PICO IYER/ATLANTA

Centennial Olympic Park was supposed to be the village green of the Games, a global common ground where everyone could congregate and share the bonds symbolized by five interwoven rings. Last week our minds needed such a venue. There was a lot of magic and malice we had to reconcile: the triumphs of will and spirit in Atlanta, the gruesome carnage and fear that fell from Flight 800 over Long Island.

And then, with a soul-shattering pop, Olympic Park was where the two emotions collided.

There is a grim economy to the way a terrorist works, born of a dark arithmetic: fear rises exponentially. One whisper can undo a city. The very group that gave us the word assassin--a secret band of loyalists gathered around Hasan i Sabbah, the "Old Man of the Mountain," in Persia 900 years ago--mastered the basic law of terror: that even the smallest threat can ripple out to touch those a thousand miles away. Iago gave us the evidence: plant uncertainty in a shaky mind, and suspicion spreads like blood across a handkerchief.

That is very much what Atlanta, and the world, is facing now, as the magic that was supposed to surround the Centennial Games was undone in two moments, when a plane suddenly plunged and when a strong shuddering left every flag hanging at half-staff. It takes only a small bomb, and anxieties run like a fuse. After the explosion in the dead of night, every tremble became an aftershock. A volunteer touched a microphone, and everybody jumped. A box of paper on the floor prompted worried looks. As people looked over their shoulders, a shiver led to a global disquiet.

The organizers of the Games were stranded in a terrible position, between denying the pleasure that was their reason for being here and denying the pain that was now an insoluble fact. To continue with the Games in the shadow of death was to hold a party where everyone wore black. Yet to give up on the Centennial Olympics was to concede victory to the very forces that would darken us. The city was stuck like a runaway in a tunnel of fire.

At some point too the motive and the forces of motiveless malignity converge; it doesn't matter whether an explosion is touched off by a fanatic or a mischief maker--the cause is buried by the effect. A bomb is like the physical equivalent of an insinuation--an anonymous, handwritten note that says, "Just when you thought you were safe..." Terror now lurks in the shadows like a stranger in a dark ramp behind the parade of nations.

So even as the Games soldiered on this week, the early winners were the forces of disruption, which, instead of unity, had brought fear. The great promise of sports is that it will take us away, for a moment, from politics and usher us into a green sanctuary where hopes are fresh and struggles have no dire consequences except for gold and silver. And the meaning of the Olympics is that it puts things in a different perspective, in which sprites become giants and heroes become people once again. But the malign calculation of the bomb gave all such shifts a deadly tilt, as if to invert the Shakespearean affirmation: one touch of malice makes the whole world spin.