She said thoughtfully, “The Reddis wouldn’t let us. We owe them. They’d find us, even if your friends didn’t.”
“So we give the Reddis what they want. The Team—” Hake shrugged. “I guess they would catch us, sooner or later,” he admitted. “But what a great time we could have until they did!”
“Is that what you want to do?”
Hake said slowly, “Leota, I don’t know what I want to do. I know what would be nice. That would be to marry you and take you back to Long Branch, and get busy being minister of my church again. I don’t see any way to do that.”
She looked at him appraisingly, but did not speak.
“Even better. We could change the world. Get rid of all this crumminess. Expose the Team, and put the Reddis out of business, and make everything clean and decent again. I don’t see any way to do that, either. I know how all that is supposed to go, I’ve seen it in the movies. We defeat the Bad Guys, and the town sees the error of its ways, and I become the new marshal and we live happily ever after. Only it doesn’t work that way. The Bad Guys don’t think they’re bad, and I don’t know how to defeat them. Mess them up a little bit, sure. But sooner or later they’ll just wipe us out, and everything will be the same as before.”
“So what you’re saying is we should have a good time and forget about principle?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding, “that seems to be what it comes down to. Have you got any better ideas?”
Leota sat up straight in the middle of the bed, legs curled under her in the half-lotus position, looking at him in silence. After a long time, she said, “I wish I did.”
Hake waited, but she didn’t add anything to what she had said. He felt cheated, and realized that he had expected more from her. He said belligerently, “So you’re giving up too!”
“Shouldn’t I?” She was beginning to cry. Hake moved toward her but she shook him away. “Give me a minute,” she said, drying her eyes. She gazed out at the bright harbor, marshalling her thoughts. “When I was in school,” she began, “and I first got an idea of what was going on, it all looked simple. We got our little group going, the Nader’s Raiders of international skullduggery, and it was really exciting. But the whole group’s gone now. I’m the only survivor. Some got scared off, two wound up in jail, and it isn’t fun any more. Sometimes I get help from volunteers. Sometimes I work with people like the Reddis. Usually I’m all by myself.”
“Sounds like a lonely life.”
“It’s a discouraging life. The world isn’t getting any better from anything I do. Mostly it seems to be getting worse. And every time I think I get a handle on the roots and causes of it all, it turns out wrong. Like hypnotism. I thought that might account for it and, do you see, if it did, then there might be something I could do. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t even account for the way I acted in Hassabou’s harem.”
Hake got up awkwardly to stare out the window with her. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear any details of how Leota had acted in Hassabou’s harem. He said, “Why didn’t you go public?”
“Aw, Horny. First thing I thought of.”
“So did you try it?”
“Ha! Did we not! My PoliSci professor had a friend on a TV station in Minneapolis, and she got us a five-minute spot on the news. We taped it. Everything we knew, or deduced—but it never got on the air. And the Team got on us. The professor lost tenure—for ‘corrupting a student’— me! And I took off. The trouble was the station wouldn’t believe us, and the people who did believe us called Washington to check.” She moved restlessly around the room; then, facing him, “For that matter, why didn’t you?”
He said, “Well, I thought of it. As a matter of fact, I left some stuff in New Jersey—a complete tape of everything I knew up to the time I got back from Rome.” He told her about International Pets and Flowers and his visits to Lo-Wate Bottling Co., and about The Incredible Art. She listened with some hope.
“Well, it’s a try at least,” she conceded. “Is there anything in the tape that you could call objective proof? No. Well, there’s the rub, Horny. Of course,” she said thoughtfully, “this fellow’s in entertainment, so he’s got more media access than you or I. Maybe somebody might listen —especially if it comes out the way you told him, and you get killed or something.”
“Now, that’s a cheerful thought.” They were both silent for a moment, thinking about that cheerful thought. “I told him about you,” he mentioned.
“Oh? Saying what?”
“Well, not about you personally, so much, but I asked him about hypnotism. He knows a lot about it. In fact, he gave me some tapes. Do you want to look at them?”
“What good would they do?”
“Maybe none, how do I know? But we don’t have an awful lot else to do, do we?”
She sighed, and smiled, and came over to kiss him. “Sorry, Horny. I guess I’m still up tight. Let’s see if that TV set has a viewer.”
It did—for, Hake thought, the primary purpose of displaying the equivalent of filthy postcards. But it would work as well for Art’s tapes and fiches. He pulled them out of the bottom of his knapsack and stuck one at random into the scanner.
The first panel was a page of a technical journal, with a paper by two people on the resemblance between sleep and hypnotism. It seemed that people who napped easily were, by and large, also easily hypnotizable.
Hake looked at Leota. Leota shrugged. “I don’t take naps very often,” she said. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything, anyway.”
“Let’s try another,” Hake said, and dumped the rest of the microfiches on the floor. Among them was a cassette, home-made by The Incredible Art. Hake clicked it into the player and turned it on, and Art’s voice came to them.
“I don’t know how much of this stuff is going to be useful to you, Horny,” it said, “but here’s the whole thing. What I started with was my own magic act. You remember how I did it. I get maybe thirty people to come up on the stage and I give them the usual ‘you are getting sleepy-sleepy -sleepy’ stuff. Most of them will act as if they’re really going to sleep. The ones that don’t I scoot right off stage, so I have maybe twenty left. Then I command them to try to raise their arms, but I tell them they can’t. The ones that don’t respond, off. So I have about a dozen. I keep going until I have maybe half a dozen that will do any damn thing I tell them to.
“Now, are they hypnotized? Beats me, Horny. I wondered about that, so I looked in the literature and this is some of the stuff I found. The key papers are, hold your breath, Hypnosis, Suggestion and Altered States of Consciousness: Experimental Evaluation of the New Cognitive-Behavioral Theory and the Traditional Trance-State Theory of ‘Hypnosis’—that’s in quotes, quote Hypnosis unquote— by Barber and Wilson, and Hypnosis from the Standpoint of a Contextualist, by Coe and Sarbin.
“Read them if yqu want to. I’ll tell you what they say—- or, anyway, what I think they say. The Barber and Wilson paper is about an experiment they did. They took a bunch of volunteers and divided them up into three parts. One third they did nothing special for; they were controls. One third they hypnotized, putting them into trance state in the good old-fashioned way and giving them suggestions. The last third they just talked to. They didn’t hypnotize them. There was no trance state. They didn’t even ask them to do anything. They just said things like, ‘Have you ever thought of what it would be like to not feel pain, or to remember your first day in school, or to be unable to raise your arm? If you want to, maybe you’ll think about these things.’ They call it ‘thinking with.’ So then they did the experiments. Arm heaviness, finger anesthesia, water hallucination—I think there were ten different things they tried. And then they matched the responses of the three groups, scoring them so that the highest response—the ‘most hypnotized,’ you would call it—would be 40, and the total bomb-outs, no response at all, would be zero. No group came out with zero, in fact no individual did. They took a score of 22 as the cut-off point, and this is what they found out: