Peace on Earth (9 page)

“It’s It,” I said, lifting my left hand.

“But how? Didn’t you feel anything? And for what reason?”

“No, I didn’t notice. And it wasn’t easy, either, because the pocket is on the left side. It was done nimbly, delicately, like a professional thief. But that’s the speciality of the right brain, coordination, in games, in sports. For what reason? I can only guess. It’s a nonverbal intelligence, logical but a bit childish. Perhaps in order that I lose my identity. With no identifying papers or cards a man is nameless to those who do not know him.”

“Ah … to make you disappear? But that is magical thinking.”

“Yes. And it’s not good.”

“But It only wants to help you. Which is not surprising, after all It is
also
you. Though a little isolated.”

“This is not good because Its wanting to help me means that It believes something is threatening me in this situation. We can laugh now, but the next time…”

House came to see me later that evening. I was sitting on the bed in my pajamas inspecting my left calf, which had a bad bruise.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine, but…”

And I told him about the wallet.

“Curious. You really felt nothing?”

Then I saw the bruise and remembered. As I had looked into the tachistoscope, my left leg hit against something hard. It hurt, but I paid no attention. That’s when the pocket must have been picked.

“Most interesting,” said Dr. House. “The left hand cannot perform complicated movements without alerting the muscles on the right side of the body. Therefore it was necessary to distract you.”

“With this?” I indicated the bruise.

“Precisely. The left hand and left foot worked together. When you felt the pain, you felt nothing else in that moment, and a moment was enough.”

“Does this sort of thing happen often?”

“It is extremely rare.”

“But what if someone wanted to get at me—could he use the same trick? For instance, stab me on the right so the right wouldn’t interrupt while the left was being interrogated?”

“A professional would do it differently. An injection of Amytal in the left carotid artery, and the left brain goes to sleep while the right is awake. It lasts a few minutes.”

“And that’s sufficient?”

“If not, you insert a little tube into the artery and give the Amytal in drops. After a while the right hemisphere falls asleep too, because the brain arteries are connected by the so-called collaterals. Then you have to wait a while before you can begin again.”

I rolled down my pajama leg.

“I don’t know how long I can sit here waiting for I don’t know what. A little knowledge is better than none. Why don’t you handle it, doctor?”

“But can’t you do this yourself? You’ve found a way to communicate between one hand and the other. Have you learned anything by that method?”

“Very little.”

“Does It refuse to answer questions?”

“Rather, Its answers are incomprehensible. I know only this: It remembers in a different way. Perhaps in whole pictures, whole scenes. But when It tries to put it in words, riddles result. Possibly everything should be recorded in order and treated as a kind of symbolic shorthand.”

“More a task for a cryptographer than a doctor. Suppose you took such notes. What would that give you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. And on that note I’ll say good night.” He left. I turned out the light and lay down but couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back. After a while my left hand raised itself and several times, slowly, patted my cheek. Evidently it felt sorry for me. I got up, took a Seconal, and with both Ijon Tichys extinguished I sank into oblivion.

My situation was not only bad, it was idiotic. Hiding in an insane asylum without knowing from whom. Waiting without knowing for what. I tried talking to myself by hand but although It answered more willingly than before, I couldn’t understand It. I rooted through the asylum library and filled my room with textbooks, monographs, and piles of professional journals to find out once and for all who or what I was on my right hemisphere’s side. My hand answered, making a clear effort to be cooperative, and it even learned new words and expressions which encouraged me to question further and at the same time made me uneasy. What if It became my equal or even passed me? Then I would not only have to take It into account but listen to It or maybe it would even come to a tug of war where I would not remain in the middle but be tom in two forever and struggle like a stepped-on beetle, some of whose legs pull forward while others pull back. At night I dreamed about escaping and wandering among dark crags and didn’t even know which half of me was dreaming it. What I found out from the pile of books is true: the left brain, deprived of contact with the right, grows colorless, its language becomes dry which you can tell by the infrequency of adjectives. Reading over some of my notes, I saw that that was happening to me. But aside from such details I learned nothing from the publications of the experts. There were a lot of hypotheses but none of them fit me, and I got furious with these scientists who claimed to know better than I did what it was like to be me doubled. One day, I was ready to abandon all caution and go to New York, to the Lunar Agency, but the next morning that seemed to be the last thing I should do. I hadn’t heard from Tarantoga and even though I’d asked him to wait for a sign from me, his silence too began to irritate me.

Finally I decided to pull myself together like the old, whole Ijon Tichy. I would go to Berlin, a small town about two miles from the asylum, to buy a typewriter so I could cross-examine my left hand and type its answers until I had enough of them to see if there was any sense there. It was possible of course that I was a right-sided moron and it was only my personal vanity that kept me from seeing this. Blair, Goddeck, Shapiro, Rosenkrantz, Bombardino, and McCloskey held that in the muteness of the right hemisphere lay an unplumbed depth of talent, intuition, instinct, perhaps even a kind of genius, for this region contained all the wonders that left-handed rationalism refused to acknowledge: telepathy, clairvoyance, the traveling of the spirit to other planes, and visions, and states of mystic transport and enlightenment. But Kleist, Zuckerkandel, Pinotti, Veehold, Meyer, Ottitchkin, Nüerlö, and eighty other experts said nonsense. Yes, a sounding board, an organizer of emotions, an associative system, an echo chamber of thought, and perhaps some memory, but nothing that could be put in words, for the right brain was a nonlogical freak, an eccentric, a dreamer, a boaster, a hermit, a soul but in the raw state, it was flour and yeast but only the left brain could bake the bread. And a third opinion ran thus: the right was the engine, the left the steering mechanism. The right was therefore at a distance from the world and so had to be led, translated into human speech, commented upon, disciplined, and made into a person by the left brain.

House offered me the use of his car. He was not surprised by my plan and did not try to dissuade me. On a scrap of paper he drew a map of the main street and made a cross where the department store was. But I wouldn’t make it today, he said, because it was Saturday and the store closed at 1:00. I spent all Sunday in the park avoiding Adelaide. On Monday I couldn’t find House anywhere so I took the bus that left every hour. It was nearly empty: the black driver, and two children licking ice-cream cones. The town, a few miles from the asylum, was an old-fashioned American town. One wide street, houses with low hedges, gardens, fences, mailboxes, telephone poles, and a couple of larger buildings at the comer. A mailman stood talking to a fat, sweaty man in a flowery shirt whose dog, a big shaggy mongrel, was lifting its leg on a lamp post. I got out not far from them, and when the bus drove off in a cloud of foul smoke, I looked for the department store Dr. House had told me of. It was on the other side of the street, large and with big windows. Two employees in uniform were loading boxes by motor cart onto a truck. The sun beat down. The truck driver, sitting with his door open, drank beer from a can, not his first because there were empty cans at his feet. He was a black man completely white-haired though his face was not old. On the sunny side of the street walked two women, the younger pushing a baby carriage with the top up, the older peering into the carriage and saying something. Despite the heat she wore a black wool shawl over her head and shoulders. The women passed a car repair shop with its doors open and a couple of shining cars inside, you could hear the whoosh of water and hiss of air. I noted all this as I stepped from the curb to cross the street to the department store. I stopped because a long dark-green Lincoln that was parked about fifty feet away suddenly moved in my direction. The front windshield was so tinted I couldn’t see the driver. I got back up on the curb to let him pass but he braked sharply in front of me. I thought he wanted to ask me something, but someone grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth with his hand. I was so surprised that I didn’t even try to defend myself. A man sitting in the back seat opened the car door, and I started to struggle but I couldn’t make a sound. The mailman dived at us and grabbed me by the legs. Then there was a sharp crack and in an instant the whole scene changed.

The old woman dropped her shawl on the sidewalk and turned to us. She held a short machine gun with both hands and fired a volley at the car, putting holes in the radiator and tires. The white-haired black man, not drinking beer now, was behind the wheel and with one sharp turn his truck blocked the Lincoln’s way. The shaggy mongrel sprang at the old woman but fell writhing to the asphalt, meanwhile the mailman let go of me, jumped back, took from his bag something round and black, and hurled it at the women. There was a boom and white smoke and the young woman fell to her knees behind the baby carriage which opened up and started shooting a column of foamy liquid like a huge fire extinguisher at the driver of the Lincoln who had jumped out onto the sidewalk. Before the foam covered him I saw that he was not a black man but only wore a black mask and held a revolver. The stream hit the windshield of the limousine with such force that the glass shattered and some of it hit the mailman. The fat man who gripped me from behind all this time retreated, protecting himself with my body. From the garage several people in overalls ran out and pulled him off me. All this took no more than five seconds.

One of the cars inside the garage backed out and two men in smocks threw a net over the driver of the Lincoln, taking care not to touch him as he was covered with gluey foam. The fat man and the mailman, now handcuffed, were pushed into this car. I stood staring as the man who had opened the rear door of the Lincoln got out slowly with his hands up and walked obediently to the truck where the white-haired black man put handcuffs on him. No one even spoke to me. The car drove away. The truck holding the driver who’d been shot and his accomplice also pulled away, and the woman picked up the black shawl, brushed it off, put the machine gun back into the carriage, raised its hood, and walked on as if nothing had happened. The street was again quiet and empty. Only the large limousine with flat tires and broken headlights plus the dead dog were proof that I hadn’t dreamed this.

Next to the department store was a low wooden house with a porch and a garden full of sunflowers. A sunburned gentleman, his hair so blond it was almost white, stood in the open window with his elbows comfortably on the windowsill and a pipe in his hand. He gave me a quiet but eloquent look that seemed to say: “You see?” Only then did I become aware of something that was even stranger than the kidnapping attempt: though my ears still rang with the shots, the screams, and the explosions, not a single window had opened and no one was looking out into the street—as if I was on an empty movie set. I stood there for a good while, not sure what to do. Buying a typewriter no longer seemed important.

“Mr. Tichy,” said the director, “our people will fill you in on the details of the Mission. I would just like to give you the general picture—so you don’t miss the forest for the trees. The Geneva Agreement made four impossibilities possible. A continuing arms race at the same time as universal disarmament—that’s one. Arming at maximum speed and at no cost—that’s two. Full protection of each nation against surprise attack while each reserves the right to wage war—that’s three. And finally the liquidation of all armies despite their continued existence. No troops, but the staffs stay on and can think up anything they like. In a nutshell, we’ve instituted
pacem in terris.”

“True,” I remarked. “But I read the papers. They say we’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire. That the moon is silent and swallowing all probes because Someone has been able to enter into a secret understanding with the robots there. That an unnamed nation is behind everything that’s now happening on the moon. And that the Agency knows this.”

“Pure drivel,” said the director. We were sitting in his enormous office. On a platform at one end stood a huge globe of the moon covered with its smallpox of craters. The sectors of the different nations, colored green, rose, yellow, and red like a political map, went from pole to pole, making the sphere look like a child’s toy or illuminated glass orange without its peel. On the wall behind the director hung the flag of the United Nations.

“There’s a lot of that now,” he said with a pitying smile on his swarthy face. “The press prints it all, and it’s all nonsense.”

“But that movement, those neopacifists, the lunarians, don’t they exist?”

“Oh yes. Have you read their statement? Their program?”

“I have. They call for negotiation with the moon…”

“‘Negotiation!’” the director snorted with contempt. “Not negotiation, capitulation! And nobody knows to whom! Those muddled heads think the moon has become a party, that it can enter into agreements and pacts, that it’s intelligent and powerful. That up there now is some giant computer that has devoured all the sectors. Fear not only has big eyes, Mr, Tichy, it has a small brain.”

“Yes, but can we really rule out the possibility of some sort of unification of all those weapons up there—of those armies, if they are armies? How can we be sure this hasn’t happened, if we are in the dark…?”