by The Cool War
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:
“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.
In order to get to the sand-colored headquarters of A1 Halwani Hydro Fuels, Ltd., Leota and Hake had to walk along the esplanade, with the narrow beach to one side and, beyond it, the indigo bay and the stately Sword of Islam at anchor a quarter of a mile out. Leota did not look up. Hake studied the yacht carefully. Although it was a three-masted schooner,. with gay flags in the rigging, he knew that inside the narrow hull were engines and enough technology to exempt it from any problems of wind or currents. He could see the big globe of hydrogen fuel. He could also see figures moving about on its decks, but there was no way of telling which was who. Whether they could see him was a whole other question. He did not really think they could, or not well enough to identify either him or Leota under the headdresses. But he was glad enough to push through the revolving door and enter the Hydro Fuels waiting room.
The employment office was almost empty, and the elderly woman at the desk handed them applications. They sat down at a plastic writing desk and began to fill them out.
The questions on the forms were in four languages, and fortunately for Leota English was one of them. Hake took pride in filling his own in Arabic, drawing the flowing curlicues as neatly as the lettering on an engineering sketch. There were not very many questions. Hake copied the details of his fictitious biography out of the Xeroxed resume Jessie Tunman had made for him—how long ago was that? Only four days? And then the intercom on the receptionist’s desk rattled. “Send them in, Sabika,” said somebody’s voice, and they got up to be interviewed.
The personnel director was male, young and one-legged, and the nameplate on his desk said Robling. He hopped around to get them seated, grinned at them as he propped his crutch on the edge of his desk, and studied the forms. “Nice to see a couple of Americans here, Bill,” he said, “but what are you doing in those getups?”
“We, uh, converted,” Horny Hake said, after realizing that “Bill” referred to the name on his papers. “We’re not real religious, though,” he added.
“None of my business,” Robling said cheerfully. “All I do is match people to jobs, and looks like you’ve got some good experience. Not too many people show up here with a hydrogen-cracking background.”
“Uh-huh,” Hake said, and recited the invented information on the documents. “That was in Iceland, three years ago. It’s geothermal there, but I suppose it’s pretty much like solar.”
“Close enough. We have a lot of turnover here, of course. People come in, work a while, build up a stake. Then they take life easy for a while. But something ought to open up for you. Maybe in two, three weeks—”
“No sooner than that? I really need a job now,” Hake said.
“Like that? Well—there’s no job right this minute, but if you’re short of money maybe I could help out.”
“It’s not the money. It’s just that—” It’s just that I have to start work on your project so I can wreck it for the Team; but Hake couldn’t say that. “It’s just that I want to get to work.”
The personnel director’s eyebrows went up; evidently that was not a common attitude among the drifters. “Well, that’s a good trait, anyway up to a point. But the only vacancies we have at the moment are pushing a broom.”
“I’ll push a broom.”
“No, no I You’re overqualified. You wouldn’t be happy, and then when something did open up it’d make trouble to jump you over the others. Still—” Struck by a thought, the man picked up Leota’s questionnaire. He scanned it and nodded. “We could put your lady on the payroll for that. She’s not overqualified.” He glanced at the form again and snapped his fingers. “Penn,” he said. “Yeah. Did you look at the bulletin board outside? Because I think there’s a message for you.”
“Who from?” Hake asked, off balance.
“Well, I don’t know. We get all kinds of drif— all kinds of transients coming through here, and people leave messages. Only reason I noticed yours is that it’s kind of a famous name. William Penn, I mean.” He was nice enough not to smile. “So what do you say?”
Hake opened his mouth, but Leota was ahead of him. “I’ll take it.”
“Right. Uh, you said you weren’t real religious, but does that mean you can take the veil off? Because we’ll need a picture of you for the ID.”
“That’ll be fine,” Leota said, loosening the headdress. “Do you want to take it in here? All right. Honey? Why don’t you check the message board and wait for me outside?”
There was no one in the waiting room but the receptionist and a skinny old Yemeni, with crossed (but empty) cartridge belts across his blouse, absorbed in an Arabic-language crossword puzzle. Hake moved toward the pinboard behind the receptionist’s desk and scanned the tacked-up messages. “Milt and Terri, Judy and Art were here and are heading for Goa.” “Patty from South Nor-walk, call your mother.” The one that was meant for him was a small envelope with the name “William E. Penn” neatly typed on the outside. Inside, it said:
You are invited for cocktails aboard the Sword of Islam. The boatman will furnish you transportation as soon as you get this.
Hake folded the note back into its envelope, thinking grim thoughts. Whatever else might happen, he was not letting Leota back on that yacht.
He turned as the door to the personnel office opened, and there was Leota, standing in the doorway. She stopped in the open door, hesitated and then beckoned to him. He could not see her expression through the headdress.
As he approached, she caught his arm, drew him inside and closed the door. “There’s another exit past the camera room,” she said. “I’m sure Mr. Robling won’t mind if we us
e it?”
The personnel director looked them over for a moment, then ghrugged. “Why not?”
Down a cement-tiled hall, out through a metal door, into the stark sunlight. “What’s the matter?” Hake demanded.
“Don’t linger, Horny. That fellow in there is one of the Reddis. I don’t think we want to talk to him.”
“Christ.” They hurried around a corner, then paused where they could see the Hydro Fuels building. “If we go back to the hotel he’ll find us. He must have followed us from there.” He handed her the note. “This was what was waiting for me.”
She read it quickly, and then said, “Wow.”
“That’s about the size of it, yes,” he agreed. “We can’t go back to the hotel because of the Reddis, and we can’t go to the yacht because of the sheik. You know what, Leota? We don’t have a lot of options.”
She stared through the veil at the building. Apparently Reddi was still inside. “Horny?” she said.
“What?”
“You got your pronouns wrong. It isn’t ‘we.’ It’s you that can’t go back to the hotel, and me that doesn’t want to go to the yacht. The other way around, there’s no problem.”
“What do you mean, no problem? Those guys are mean, Leota. I’m not letting you face up to them by yourself.”
Her eyes were on him, and once again he wished he could see her face. She said sharply, “I’ve told you before, Horny, I don’t play this big strong man and little weak woman game. I was dealing with the Reddis when you were still running covered-dish dinners in New Jersey. You go on to the yacht. Call me at the hotel when you get a chance.”
“And what do you think you’re going to do?”
“I’m going back in the waiting room and talk to Reddi. And you can’t stop me.” And he couldn’t, because she picked up her skirts and ran, the intricately decorated backs of her legs flashing under the flopping hem of her gown.
There wasn’t just one boatman, there were five of them, and they were armed. Desert Arabs often carry rifles for decoration, like a walking stick or a rolled umbrella. Hake did not think these rifles were ornamental. He paused on the broad, dead esplanade, but there were no more alternatives in sight than there ever had been. He handed over his letter and got into the covered launch. None of the few strollers on the boulevard paid attention as the high whine of the inertial drive changed pitch when the helmsman clutched in the propellor. Two of the other boatmen cast off the moorings, and they pulled away from the little floating dock.