Peace on Earth Read Free Page A

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.
    “The question is poorly phrased. Imagine twins, who from birth do nothing but saw wood with a two-handled saw. They work well together, otherwise they would be unable to saw. Take the saw from them, and they become like you in your present state.”
    “But each twin, whether he saws or not, has one and only one consciousness,” I said, disappointed. “Professor, your colleagues in America gave me plenty of such metaphors. Including the one about the twins and the saw.”
    “Of course,” said McIntyre, winking at me with his left eye, and I wondered whether he too had something severed. “My American colleagues are as green as a field of corn and their metaphors are a dime a dozen. I mention the twins one on purpose; it comes from an American and is misleading. If we were to show the brain graphically, yours would resemble a large letter Y, because you still have a homogeneous brain stem and midbrain. It’s the downstroke of the upsilon, while the arms of the letter are the divided hemispheres. Do you understand? Intuitively one can see—” the professor broke off with a groan because I kicked him in the kneecap.
    “Sorry, it wasn’t me, it was my left leg,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to…”
    McIntyre gave an understanding smile, but there was something forced about it, like the grimace of a psychiatrist who pretends that the madman biting him is a fine fellow. He pulled his chair back a little.
    “The right hemisphere does tend to be more aggressive than the left,” he said, rubbing his knee. “Would you mind keeping your legs crossed, and arms too? It will make our conversation easier…”
    “I’ve tried, but they go limp. Anyway that upsilon business, excuse me, doesn’t explain anything. Where is the consciousness—under the division, on it, over it, where?”
    “That cannot be precisely determined,” said the professor, still massaging his knee. “The brain, Mr. Tichy, is made up of a great number of functional subsystems, which in a normal person connect in various ways to perform various tasks. In your case the highest systems have been permanently disconnected and thus cannot communicate with each other.”
    “And about subsystems too I’ve heard a hundred times. I don’t want to be impolite, professor, or at least my left hemisphere, the one talking to you now, doesn’t, but I’m still in the dark. I walk normally, I eat, read, sleep, the only problem