“For the control group, 55 percent of the subjects scored 23 or better—so even if there isn’t any preparation at all, a lot of people will act as if they’re hypnotized anyway.
“For the hypnotized, trance-state group, 45 percent scored 23 or better. Forty-five percent! Less than the controls.
“And for the thinking-with group, you know how many scored 23 or better? A hundred percent. All of them.”
The voice on the tape paused for a moment, and then continued. “Ah, here it is. So then I did some more reading, and I came across the Coe and Sarbin piece. They have a theory about hypnotism. They call it the ‘dramaturgic’ view, i.e., hypnotic subjects are acting out a part. You ought to read the paper, but, here, let me just read what it says at the end. ‘We underscore the proposition (long overlooked) that the counterfactual statements in the hypnotist’s induction are cues to the subject that a dramatistic plot is in the making. The subject may respond to the cues as an invitation to join in the miniature drama. If he accepts the invitation, he will employ whatever skills he possesses in order to enhance his credibility in enacting the role of hypnotized person.’
“Get it? They’re playing a part. And what makes me think there’s something to it is, I know that’s what I do when I get up on a stage. I play a part. I’m not me, the fellow who. lives in Rumson, New Jersey, and keeps parakeets. I’m The Incredible Art. If you look at it in one way, I’m sort of hypnotizing myself into behaving, what do they call it, counterfactually. And not just me. All actors. They get up there night after night. The corns don’t hurt, the cough doesn’t hack, whether they’re exhausted or not the step is spry—until the curtain comes down, and that glorious, radiant creature schlumps away to the dressing room and the Bromo-Seltzer and the Preparation H.”
He was silent for a moment. Then, “Well, there it is. I hope you find the stuff interesting. If you ever get through all this, come by the house and have a drink and we’ll talk it over.”
“The more I try to understand what’s really happening in the world,” Hake said, getting up to click off the player, “the more I find out I don’t know anything. The hell with it.”
Leota curled her legs under her on the bed, straightened her back and stared him down. “What do you mean, the hell with it?”
“I mean I get lost in the complications. And I don’t have time for them. I was supposed to apply for a job two hours ago.”
She flared, “Do you think I’m going to marry a nincompoop?”
“Who said anything about getting married?”
“You did! Just a few minutes ago. And I even thought about it, but I made that mistake once and I’m not going to do it again.”
Hake was getting angry, too. “I’m Hornswell Hake, minister,” he snarled, “and I do the best I can. I can’t do everything. I don’t know everything. I wish Art were here —he knows more about some of this stuff than I do. I wish I could see what’s right and best—but I can’t. If that makes me a nincompoop I’ll just have to live with it.”
Leota stood up for emphasis, moving toward the window. She said, “Anybody can do the right thing when it’s perfectly clear what the right thing is! But how do you ever know that? You don’t, and you have to act anyway.”
“I know that.”
“Then—”
“Then,” he said, “I do what I can see I damn better do, which is to get my tail over to the place I was supposed to be at two hours ago and apply for that job.”
They stared at each other for a moment, then Leota broke eye contact. She turned and gazed out the window.
A sudden rigidity in her stance, the way she held her head, the set of her shoulders, alarmed Hake. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.
She said, “Did I ever tell you how we left Rome?”
“What’s that got to do with what we’re talking about?”
“Hassabou wouldn’t live in a hotel. Not him. He had his yacht at Ostia. One day we just went for a sail—and didn’t come back. When the yacht got to Benghazi his boys took me to the airport. With a knife at my throat. Come look.”
Hake peered out the window, past the bright gold mosque and the minarets toward the harbor. “See the sailing yacht out there, the big one? That’s the Sword of Islam. It’s Hassabou’s yacht.”
XIV
One more complication was not even important in Hake’s head; there were so many, too many, already that it didn’t matter. Obviously Leota was at risk in one additional way. Hake had no way to solve that problem, but he could ease it. He left Leota in the room just long enough to buy her some new clothes. In cloak, ankle-length skirt and hatta w-‘aqqal she was stifling in A1 Halwani’s noonday heat, but not recognizable.
They did not speak as they strolled toward the employment office of the hydrogen-power company. Leota walked a traditional two paces behind him, head demurely down. s Hake, in burnoose and caftan, was almost as hot as she, but would have been no better off in any other costume—- the desert people, or the men among them anyway, had long since found that loose, enveloping garments were more protection against the heat than exposed skin. And there was no cultural prohibition against Hake’s looking around him as they walked—for people from the Team, for the sheik’s men, for the Reddis, and even just to sightsee.
The surprising thing, once he saw it, was that A1 Halwani had no fire hydrants. It had no sewers and no water pipes, either, though that was not as apparent. Fat electric tankers carried drinking water to each building’s cisterns from the distillation plants outside the city, and the sewage went right into the thirsty ground. There were spots of green near some of the older buildings, where the outflow from the plumbing nourished growth.
Three hundred years ago this whole part of the world had been uninhabited, bar an occasional wandering tribe or caravan of traders. Then the droughts and famines of central Arabia drove some of the nomads south, just in time to be on the scene when Europe bestirred itself and reached out for colonies. There were no national boundaries. There were no nations, or not until the British named them and drew lines on maps for the convenience of the file clerks in Whitehall. High Commissioners like Sir Percy Cox decreed this patch of sand for Kuwait, and that for Ibn Saud, and these arguable patches in between for no one, or for both neighbors in common; and so it was.
Then oil came, and those extemporized lines became intensely important. A quarter of an inch this way or that on a map meant a billion dollars in revenues.
Then the Israelis came, with their shaped nuclear charges. And no one cared any more.
The cities that had bloomed overnight into Chicagos and Parises became ghost towns. Abadan and Dubai, Kuwait and Basra began to dry up again. The shiny western buildings with their plate-glass walls and ever-running air-conditioners stood empty and began to die. The traditional Moslem architecture, thick-walled, pierced with ventilating slits, survived. And the migrants from all over the Arab world began to move home. Or move on. What was left was a hodge-podge of tribes and nationalities; and then the westerners began to move in, the hippies and the wanderers, the turned-off and the dissatisfied, the adventurous and the stoned. The American colonies had been built out of just such migrants two centuries before. A1 Halwani was the Philadelphia or the Boston of the new frontier, crude, unrulyj polyglot—and promising.