Peace on Earth Read Free

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 Klössenfänger 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.
    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