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

Unable to obtain what he wanted, Turteltaub had to operate on monkeys, which were much
more expensive than convicts, and as his grants were reduced, he feared he would end up with rats and
guinea pigs, which wasn't the same at all. Added to that, the Animal Protection League people and other
antivivisectionists broke his windows regularly. They even burned his car. The insurance company
wouldn't pay, saying he had torched his own car in order to take the animal protectionists to court,
besides the car was too old to be worth anything. Turteltaub was so boring that to shut him up I told him
about the sign language my left hand had taught my right. A mistake. He called Globus immediately, or
maybe it was Maxwell, to announce the presentation of a paper at the next neurologists' conference, a
discovery that would crush everyone. Seeing what was coming, I left Turteltaub's without saying goodbye
and went straight home. They were waiting for me in the lobby, their faces flushed and eyes burning with
the unholy fire of science. I told them I would of course be glad to accompany them to the clinic, I just
had to go up to my room to change first. While they waited for me in the lobby I climbed down the fire
escape from the eleventh floor and grabbed a taxi to the airport. Since it didn't matter to me where I went
as long as it was far from those researchers, I took the first plane out, to San Diego, and at a seedy little
hotel there full of shady characters, before even unpacking my bag, I telephoned Professor Tarantoga for
help.
Tarantoga, thank God, was home. You learn who your real friends are when the chips are down.
He flew in to San Diego that night, and when I told him everything as succinctly and precisely as I could
the good soul agreed to take me under his wing. Following his advice, I changed my hotel and started
growing a beard, meanwhile he looked for a doctor who valued the Hippocratic oath more than the fame
achieved by a rare case. We quarreled on the third day because he brought me some good news and I
thanked him only partly. He didn't appreciate the sardonic winking from my left side. I explained of
course that it wasn't I but the right hemisphere of my brain which I couldn't control. But this didn't mollify
him; he said that even if there were two of me in one body, the sneering faces that half of me was making
clearly showed that I must have harbored some animosity toward him in the past, which manifested itself
now as black ingratitude, while he was of the opinion that one was either a friend or one wasn't. A
fifty-percent friendship he had no use for. I finally managed to calm him down, and after he left I bought
an eye patch.
The specialist he found for me was in Australia, so we flew to Melbourne. Joshua McIntyre, a
professor of neurophysiology -- his father and Tarantoga's father had been best friends -- inspired
confidence immediately. He was tall, with a gray crew cut, calm, sober, and, as Tarantoga assured me,
decent. He would not use me or notify the Americans, who were frantic to find me. After the
examination, which lasted three hours, he put a decanter of whiskey on the desk and poured a glass for
me and for himself. When the atmosphere warmed up, he crossed his legs, thought for a moment, cleared
his throat, and said:
"Mr. Tichy, I will address you in the singular, which is more comfortable. There is no question
that your corpus callosum has been severed from anterior to posterior commissure, though the skull
shows no sign of trephination. . ."
"But I've told you, professor," I interrupted him, "the skull wasn't touched, it was a new weapon,
a weapon of the future, designed not to kill but only to give the opposing army a total and remote
cerebellotomy. Every soldier, his brain severed, would fall like a puppet whose strings are cut. That's
what I was told at the center whose name I cannot divulge. By accident I was standing sideways, or
sagittally, as you doctors say, with respect to the ultrasound-inducing field. But this is only conjecture.
Those robots work in secret, and the effects of the ultrasound aren't clear. . ."
"Be that as it may," said the professor, looking at me with kindly, wise eyes from behind his
gold-framed glasses. "Nonmedical circumstances need not concern us right now. As for the number of
minds in a callotomized individual, there are eighteen different theories, each supported by experimental
evidence, therefore none of them wholly wrong and none of them wholly true. You are not one, nor are
you two, nor can we speak of split personalities."
"Then how many am I?" I asked, surprised.