"Stanislaw Lem - Ijon Tichy 05 - Peace on Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

separated egos. "You can't jump off a train in pieces," he yelled at me, "or die in pieces, and you can't
think in pieces either!" I stopped throwing him out because I felt sorry for him. In his desperation he tried
to bribe me. Eight hundred and forty dollars, he swore that was all he had, what he'd saved for a vacation
with his girl, but he was prepared to part with it and with her as well if I told him who was thinking with
my right hemisphere when I didn't know what it was thinking. I sent him to Professor Eccles, an advocate
of left brain consciousness who believes the right side doesn't think at all, but the student didn't buy that,
knowing that I had painstakingly taught sign language to my right hemisphere. He wanted me to go to
Eccles and tell him he was wrong. The student now read medical papers instead of going to his classes in
the evening. Learning that the nerve pathways are crossed, he searched through the fattest textbooks to
find out why in the hell that crossing happened so that the right brain controls the left half of the body and
vice versa, but of course there was no answer to that question. The crossing either benefits us as human
beings, he reasoned, or it doesn't. He read books by psychiatrists and found one who said that
consciousness is in the left hemisphere and the subconscious in the right, but I was able to get that notion
out of his head. I had read more than he, naturally. Tired of struggling with myself and now with this
student burning with the thirst for knowledge, I left, I fled to New York -- and jumped from the frying
pan into the fire.
I rented a studio apartment near Manhattan and took the subway or bus to the public library to
read Yozatitz, Werner, Tucker, Woods, Shapiro, Riklana, Schwartz, Szwarc, and Shvarts, and
Sai-Mai-Halassza, Rossi, Lishman, Kenyon, Harvey, Fischer, Cohen, Brumbach, and about thirty
different Rappaports. Almost every trip caused a scene, because I pinched the prettier women,
particularly blondes. It was my left hand of course that did the pinching but try to explain that in a few
words. Now and then I was slapped in the face, but the worst part was that most of the women accosted
didn't seem to mind at all. On the contrary they considered it an overture, a pass, which was the last thing
on my mind.
I could see I was getting nowhere trying to extricate myself single-handed from this nightmare, so
I finally contacted a group of leading authorities in the field. These scientists were only too happy to study
me. I was examined, x-rayed, scanned, subjected to positron emission tomography and magnetic
resonance imaging, covered by four hundred electrodes, strapped to a special chair, and asked to look
through a slit at pictures of apples, dogs, forks, combs, old people, tables, mice, mushrooms, cigars,
glasses, nude women, and babies, after which they told me what I already knew: that when they showed
me a billiard ball so that only my left hemisphere could see it and at the same time put my right hand into a
bag with many objects, I wasn't able to choose the ball, and vice versa. They said I was an uninteresting
case, but I said nothing about the sign language. I wanted, after all, to learn something about myself from
them; I didn't care about adding to their knowledge.
I turned then to Professor S. Turteltaub, a loner, but instead of shedding light on my condition all
he did was tell me what a pack of wolves, thieves, and parasites all the others were. Thinking his
contempt for them was on scientific grounds, I listened with interest, but Turteltaub, it turned out, was
angry only because they had rejected his project. The last time I saw Drs. Globus and Savodnisky, or
whatever their names were -- there were so many of them -- they were offended when I told them I was
seeing Dr. Turteltaub. They informed me that he had been expelled from their research group on ethical
grounds. Turteltaub wanted to offer murderers sentenced to death or life imprisonment the chance to
submit to callotomy instead. He argued that since callotomization was performed only on severe
epileptics, it was not known whether the effect of cutting the commissure would be the same in normal
people. And a normal man sentenced to the electric chair for murdering his mother-in-law, for example,
would certainly prefer to have his corpus callosum cut. But Supreme Court Judge Klössenfanger spoke
against this, because if Turteltaub murdered his mother-in-law in cold blood, that could be the decision of
his left hemisphere alone, the right hemisphere knowing nothing about it, or knowing and protesting but
being overruled, and if the murder occurred anyway after such an inner conflict, it would be difficult
indeed to condemn one hemisphere while exonerating the other. In effect fifty-percent of the murderer
would be sentenced to death.