Alys Brant saw Hake walking down the aisle and waved the fingers of one hand. That was all she could wave; she was strapped into one of Art’s illusions, rehearsing to be The Woman Sawed in Half, and her hands were crossed tightly on her breast to stay as far as possible away from the screeching, spinning buzz saw that seemed to be slicing through her belly. When The Incredible Art saw whom she was greeting he stopped the saw, levered it up and away from her and began to extract her. “Hi, Horny,” he called. “Help me get this thing back of the curtain.”
Art was built to be a magician, or to look like one: six foot three and weighing a fast hundred and forty-five pounds, narrow face, piercing eyes. He wore his blond hair in General Custer flowing waves, beard and mustache the same; he looked like a skinny Scandinavian devil and had cultivated a voice an octave below Mephistopheles’. Wraith-thin, he was astonishingly strong. The prop weighed as much as a piano, and although it was on rollers Hake was puffing by the time they had it out of sight, while The Incredible Art was incredibly not even sweating. “Hate to have to do that by myself, Horny,” he observed, wrapping his long arms around one end of it and tugging it a few more inches out of the way. “Guess I’m ready for ‘em now.”
Alys returned, slinky in diaphanous harem top and pants. “That saw always makes me have to pee,” she confided. She was braless under the filmy bolero, Hake saw— and, he was pretty sure, pantyless below, too, although the way the gauze draped around her it was hard to be sure. He found the illusion both exciting and uncomfortable. His glands had not yet resigned themselves to missing out on the nurse, and when Alys began admiringly to trace his pectorals with one hand and his latissimus dorsi with the other they stirred with new hope. The woman’s signals were maddeningly contradictory! Hake formed phrases in his mind, like, If you’re so horny for Horny, honey, where were you in Europe? But, fairly, he admitted to himself that his signals to her had to be equally contrary and obscure, because his drives and prohibitions baffled them. He escaped when the theater began to fill, helped by the fact that among the earliest arrivals were the other three from Alys’s family, Ted Brant looking annoyed, Walter Sturgis worried, Sue-Ellen reproachful. Hake took a seat as far from them at the opposite end of the first row as he could manage. It would have been better to sit naturally and suspicion-allayingly next to them. But he didn’t feel up to it.
The Incredible Art’s performance included all the standards Hake remembered from every other magic show he had ever seen, from vanishing billiard balls to producing live pigeons from Alys’s bodice, after he had finished sawing her in half. The audience was half children—and the other half grownups volunteering to be childish again for one night—and they ate it all up. As they always had. Six thousand dollars in admissions had funneled into the church treasury, the people were having a ball, and Hake allowed himself to feel good.
And therefore unwary; and when The Incredible Art began calling volunteers up from the audience for his last and greatest feat, Hake allowed himself to be swept with the flow.
“And now,” the magician boomed compellingly, “for a final demonstration of The Incredible Art of The Incredible Art, I am going to try an experiment in hypnotism. I have here thirty volunteers, selected at random. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to tell the audience: Have any of you been rehearsed, coached or instructed in any way as to what you are supposed to do up here?”
All thirty heads waggled “no,” Hake’s among them.
‘Then I want all of you to let your heads hang forward, chins on your chests. Close your eyes. You are growing sleepy. Your eyes are closed, and you feel sleepy. I am going to count backwards from five, and when I say ‘zero* you will be asleep: Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
Hake was not sure he felt sleepy, but he did seem to be comfortable enough as he was. He heard sounds of movement on the stage, and peered through a slitted eye to observe Art quietly shepherding half a dozen of the volunteers back into the audience; evidently they had looked up and shown they were awake. “Now the rest of you,” Art rumbled. “Keep your eyes closed, but raise your heads. Do not open your eyes until I say ‘open.’ At that time you will be fully aware of what is going on, but you will not remember any of it after you leave this stage. Now, open!”
Hypnosis, Hake thought, was not all that different from the rest of life. He didn’t feel changed, but he found himself compliantly raising an arm, then squatting on the floor, then performing a little dance. It was as easy to do what he was told as to break the pattern of obedience. So why not do it? Still, it was strange. He tried to remember what being hypnotized had felt like, back in the hospital when his whole chest and torso were flaming with pain after surgery. Not much. Not anything, really, except that after the anesthesiologist had made her passes the pain had seemed a little less important. It „was… strange. So he went on doing what The Incredible Art told him to do, along with the other survivors on the stage, his mind and senses open to taste this new experience, until Art began pairing them off into waltzing couples. That Hake perceived as somehow threatening. He broke stride, and Art waved him off the stage. Of the original thirty, only six people stayed there through the end. Somehow, Hake was not surprised that one of them was Alys.
At the party afterward, The Incredible Art was riffling cards in a series of buck-eye shuffles for some of the kids. Hake, drink in hand, drifted over to him. “I was never hypnotized that way before,” he offered, still trying to analyze his feelings about it.
“You weren’t then either,” said Art, tapping the deck and popping all four aces into the hands of a ten-year-old girl.
“I wasn’t? But— But I found myself doing things without any real control.”
“Did you?” Art fanned the deck, displaying fifty-two cards neatly ordered into suits and denominations, and then put it away. “I don’t know what you did do,” he admitted. “I’ve done that show a hundred times. If I get enough people up on the stage, a few of them will do everything I tell them to. The rest I lose.”
From behind Hake, Jessie Tunman said triumphantly, “Then it’s just a trick!”
“If you say so, Jessie.” The Incredible Art grinned like a tiger behind the blond mask of hair. “But I think what you mean is when I do it it’s a trick, when somebody else does it it’s science, right?”
“The phenomenon of hypnotism is well established in psychological literature,” she said stiffly. “There’s a point at which being a skeptic betrays simply an unwillingness to accept the evidence, Mr. Art.”
“Now you’re talking about flying saucers,” he said. They had had this argument before. “You’re going to tell me that with all the recorded sightings only a prejudiced bigot would say they don’t exist, right?”
“No. I wasn’t going to tell you anything, Mr. Art. It’s no concern of mine what you believe in or don’t believe in. But there are things your much vaunted rationalism just can’t explain. UFOlogy went through all this in the Sixties. One guy said the UFOs were weather balloons, another said meteorites. People said any crazy thing that came into their heads, rather than accept the reality of visitors from some other place in the universe. Dust devils, the planet Venus, even swamp gas! Nobody could face up to the simple facts.”