Now USC It. . .

With a flip of his wrist, college freshman Thomas Meier performs the most amazing sleight-of-hand trick imaginable:

He causes the noisy crowd in his dormitory hallway to vanish.

Actually, the raucous USC students who moments before were laughing and shouting on the third floor of Trojan Hall have disappeared into a neighboring dorm room. They have gathered to watch Meier click on a videotape that shows him winning a world magic championship two months ago in Germany.

The crowd falls silent as the nine-minute television clip starts. Meier’s first trick involves disappearing coins, but his second one is more complicated. He forces a deck of cards into a balloon and then pops it, sending 51 cards flying into the air. That reveals a second balloon that has been hidden inside the first one. It contains the deck’s final card--one that was earlier marked by an audience member.

Then comes the finale.

Meier makes a finger ring that he earlier borrowed from the same audience member reappear. But he does it in a spectacular fashion: It shows up frozen solid in an ice cube that is floating inside a glass of drinking water on a table on the stage.

The thousand or so magicians and magic fans in the German audience watching the Federation International Des Societes Magiques contest go wild with applause. Those in the USC dorm are left almost speechless.

“I have no idea how he did that,” admitted freshman engineering student Paul Bendemire, who contributed his television set for the impromptu dorm screening the other day.

Added cinema student Sunny Lee, shaking his head in disbelief: “I stared at his hands and couldn’t figure it out.”

Dorm life hasn’t been the same since Meier materialized on the USC campus.

But the hubbub doesn’t faze the 18-year-old, who has been entertaining his peers since age 5.

He said he put on his first show in kindergarten--creating the illusion that he was levitating off the kindergarten classroom floor.

“I found that effect in a book at the library,” Meier said. “The kids were amazed.”

His interest in magic had been kindled as a preschooler by professional magician Doug Henning, who at the time lived across the street from Meier’s family in Pacific Palisades.

“He pulled a coin out of my ear,” Meier said. “I couldn’t imagine how something like that was possible. I wanted to be able to do it myself--to create things that ought to be impossible.”

He started out with a Fisher-Price toy magic set. By the time he was a teenager, Meier was reading every book on magic he could get his hands on and was performing his own tricks for neighbors and in local talent contests.

That led to an invitation to become a junior member of the Magic Castle, the famous private club for magicians in Hollywood. At the same time, Meier signed up for magic lessons from professional magician Loren Christopher Michaels of Costa Mesa.

Meier spent a year and a half devising and polishing the act that won first-place honors in two U.S. magic competitions to qualify him for the Dresden, Germany, contest.

Conducted every three years and considered by some to be the “Olympics of magic,” the world championship featured 160 competitors and drew a crowd of 2,400 magicians. Most of those competing in eight categories were adults and professionals. Meier won the first-place trophy for close-up magic on July 12.

Back in Los Angeles, he enrolled last month as a physics major at USC.

But the bookshelf on the dormitory study desk tucked beneath his upper-level bunk bed is crammed with magic books in addition to calculus, psychology and science texts. And a deck of cards is never far away.

All of which has put Meier, a modest, slightly built, bespectacled young man, at a crossroads as he conjures up the future.

Some of his friends--those who have seen him toss a sugar packet into the air in the campus cafeteria and stab it with his finger, or have watched him bounce a chemistry lab beaker off the floor without breaking it--predict a life in show business is ahead for him.

“You’ll see him spinning a card on his finger and he says, ‘Look, I’ll spin it into a different card,’ and he does it,” marveled roommate Stephen Woods, an 18-year-old cinema-television production major. “The other night I came back here at 11:30 and 15 people were in the room watching him.”

Business major Eugene Lee, 18, envisions Meier playing Las Vegas with a Claudia Schiffer on his arm.

“If he wanted to, he could be making big bucks,” Lee said.

Meier’s parents cringe at that kind of talk.

“We’d still prefer that he study and get something under his cap,” Ruth Meier said.

Heinz Meier, an architect, said he hopes USC will provide his son with “a guided situation from people who are intellectually stimulating.

“It’s too early to become a full-time performer. The world of ideas is a world you have to study and contemplate,” the father said.

Meier’s magic mentors say the world championship could help launch his career if he decides to perform professionally.

But USC, with its strong entertainment-industry ties and numerous stage-and-screen courses, could end up enhancing Meier’s act, said magician Bob Dorian, head of the Magic Castle’s junior group.

Said magic teacher Michaels: “Thomas has asked me numerous times what he should do with his life. I want him to be happy. I tell him magic can coexist with another career.”

So people will have to wait to see what Meier has up his sleeve next.