Peace on Earth

DOUBLED

I don’t know what to do. If I could say “I’m miserable,” it wouldn’t be so bad. I can’t say “We’re miserable” either because I can only partly speak for myself even though I’m still Ijon Tichy. I used to talk to myself while I shaved but I had to stop because of my left eye’s lewd winking. Coming back in the LEM, I didn’t realize what happened to me just before lift-off. The LEM, by the way, doesn’t have anything to do with the American NASA module manned by Armstrong and Aldrin to collect a couple of moon rocks. It was given the same name to disguise my secret mission. Damn that mission. When I returned from the Calf constellation, I intended to stay put for at least a year. But I agreed to go for the sake of mankind. I knew I might not come back. Doctor Lopez said my chance of survival was one in twenty point eight. That didn’t stop me: I’m a gambler. You only die once. Either I come back or I don’t, I said to myself. It never occurred to me that I might come back but not come back because we would come back. To explain I’ll have to release some highly classified information but I don’t care. That is, partly. I’m writing this too only partly and with great difficulty, typing with the right hand. The left I had to tie to the arm of the chair because it kept tearing the paper out of the machine. It wouldn’t listen to reason, and while I was immobilizing it, it punched me in the eye. It’s because of the doubling. Our brains all have two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum or great commissure. Two hundred million white nerve fibers connect the brain so it can put its thoughts together but not in my case. It happened on that range where the moon robots tested their new weapons. I stumbled in there by mistake. I’d accomplished my mission, had outsmarted those unliving creatures, and was on my way back to the LEM when I had to urinate. There are no urinals on the moon. They wouldn’t work anyway in a vacuum. You have a little container in your suit, just like Armstrong and Aldrin, so you can relieve yourself anytime, anywhere, but somehow I couldn’t, not there in the full sun in the middle of the Sea of Serenity. Not far from me was a solitary boulder. I went over to its shadow. How was I to know there was an ultrasound-inducing field there? While I’m urinating, I feel this little snap. Like a crack in the neck, only higher, in the middle of the skull. It was a remote callotomy. It didn’t hurt. I felt funny but the feeling passed and I continued on my way. The strangeness I attributed to an understandable excitement, considering all I had been through. The right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. That’s why I said I was writing only partly. My right hemisphere obviously doesn’t approve of what I’m writing. And I can’t say “I’m writing” — it’s my left hemisphere that’s writing. I’ll have to reach some compromise with the opposition because I can’t sit forever with my hand tied. I’ve tried to appease it but nothing works. It’s arrogant, aggressive, vulgar. Fortunately it can read only certain parts of speech, nouns mainly. I know this because I’ve been reading up on the subject. It doesn’t understand verbs or adjectives, so while it’s watching I have to express myself carefully. Will this work? I don’t know. And why is it that all the civilized behavior is in the left hemisphere?

On the moon too I was supposed to land only partly, but in an entirely different sense, because it was before the accident, before I was doubled. I was supposed to circle the moon in stationary orbit, the reconnaissance to be accomplished by my remote, which even looked like me except it was plastic with antennas. I sit in LEM 1 and LEM 2 lands with the remote. Those war robots hate people. They will kill at the drop of a hat. At least that’s what I was told. But LEM 2 malfunctioned and I decided to land to see what was going on because I was still in contact with it. Sitting in LEM 1, I suddenly had severe stomach pains, not in the flesh, that is, but by radio because, as I learned after landing, they broke LEM 2’s hatch cover, grabbed the remote, and pulled out its insides. I couldn’t disconnect because if I did, my stomach might stop hurting but I’d lose all contact with my remote and wouldn’t be able to locate it. The Sea of Serenity, where the attack took place, is like the Sahara. Also, I got the wires mixed because even though each wire is a different color there are too many of them and I couldn’t find the emergency instructions. Trying to find them with a stomachache made me so mad that instead of calling Earth I decided to land, even though I’d been warned I shouldn’t do that under any circumstances. But retreat just isn’t in my nature. Besides, the remote may have been only a machine stuffed with circuitry but I couldn’t leave it in the clutches of those robots.

I see that the more I explain, the less clear it gets. I should probably begin at the beginning. Except I don’t know what the beginning was because most of it is remembered in the right hemisphere, which I can’t get to now. There’s a lot I don’t remember, and in order to obtain even a little of that information I have to speak to my left hand with my right in sign language but it doesn’t always answer. The left hand gives me the finger for example, and that’s one of its more polite indications of a difference of opinion.

I’d like to give it a good smack but the problem is, while the right hand is stronger than the left, the legs are equal, and what’s worse, I have a corn on the little toe of my right foot and the left foot knows about it. When that trouble started on the bus and I shoved my left hand forcibly into my pocket, its foot took revenge by stomping on the corn so hard, I saw stars. I don’t know if it’s a loss of intelligence caused by the doubling but I can see I’m writing nonsense. The foot of my left hand is, of course, my left foot. There are times my unfortunate body falls into two enemy camps.

I interrupted my writing to kick myself. That is, my left foot kicked my right so it wasn’t I, or it was only partly I, but grammar simply can’t describe this situation. I started taking off my shoes but stopped. A person, even in such straits, shouldn’t make a fool of himself. Was I supposed to twist my own arm to learn what the problem was with the wires and the emergency instructions? True, I had beaten myself in the past but the circumstances were different. Once in that time loop, when the today me was against the yesterday me, and once to counteract the poison of the benignimizers in that hotel in Costa Rica. I had beaten myself black and blue, but remained myself, indivisible. It wasn’t so unusual. Didn’t people in the Middle Ages flog themselves? But no one now can put himself in my shoes. It’s impossible. I can’t even say that there are two of me because there aren’t. Or there are but only partly. If you want to know what happened to me, you’ll have to read this whole story, word by word, even when it doesn’t make sense. The sense will come, though probably not completely because you can get to the bottom of it only by callotomy, just as you can’t know what it’s like to be an otter, say, or a turtle without being turned into an otter or a turtle, and then you can’t communicate it because animals don’t talk or write. Normal people, of which I was one most of my life, don’t understand how a split-brain person can be himself and look like himself and speak about himself in the first person singular and walk normally and talk coherently while his right hemisphere doesn’t know what his left hemisphere is doing (except for mushroom barley soup in my case). Some say that callotomy must have existed in Biblical times because it is written that the left hand needn’t know what the right hand is doing, but I always thought that was a figure of speech.

One character followed me for two months trying to wring the truth out of me. He would visit me at the most uncivil hours to ask me how many of me there really were. The medical textbooks I gave him didn’t help him any more than they had helped me. I loaned him the books only to get rid of him. How did I meet him? I had gone to buy shoes without laces, the kind with Velcro on the top, because if my left side didn’t want to go for a walk, it was impossible to tie my shoes. As soon as I’d tie a shoe, my left hand would untie it. So I went to buy a pair of running shoes with Velcro fasteners, not that I’m one of those jogging types, I just wanted to teach the right hemisphere of my brain a lesson because at that time I couldn’t communicate with it at all and I was furious and covered with bruises. I muttered something to the salesman to excuse my erratic behavior which wasn’t actually mine. Then, as he knelt before me with the shoehorn, I grabbed his nose with my left hand. My left hand, that is, grabbed his nose, and I tried to explain this to him, the difference, figuring that even if he thought I was deranged (how could a shoe salesman know anything about callotomy?) he would still sell me the shoes. No reason for a madman to go barefoot. Unfortunately the salesman was a philosophy student working part-time in the shoe store and he was fascinated.

“Mr. Tichy!” he now yelled in my apartment. “According to logic, you’re either singular or you’re plural! If your right hand is pulling up your pants and the left hand interferes, it means that behind each stands a separate half of the brain that thinks its own thoughts and refuses to cooperate with the other. Because hands and feet don’t go around fighting each other on their own!”

That’s when I gave him the Gazzanigi. The best research done on the split brain and the results of that operation are in Professor Gazzanigi’s book, The Bisected Brain, published in 1970 by Appleton Century Crofts, Educational Division, at the Meredith Corporation, and may my brain never grow together again if I’m inventing Michael Gazzanigi or his father to whom he dedicated his monograph and whose name is Dante Achilles Gazzanigi, also a doctor (M.D.). If you don’t believe me, go to the nearest medical bookstore and ask for a copy.

The man who hounded me asking over and over what it’s like living as two learned nothing from me. All he accomplished was to drive both my hemispheres to unanimous fury because I grabbed him with both hands by the neck and threw him out the door. This brief armistice of my dissociated being sometimes occurs, but I don’t know why.

The young philosopher then telephoned me in the middle of the night, hoping that half-asleep I would spill my incredible secret. He asked me, ignoring the colorful language I was hurling at him, to place the receiver first to the left ear then to the right. He said it wasn’t his questions that were idiotic but the state I was in, which defied all anthropological and existential concepts of man as a rational being conscious of his own rationality. He’d probably just finished his finals, that philosophy student, because he threw Hegel at me and Descartes (I think therefore I am, not we think therefore we are), and Husserl and Heidegger, to prove that my condition was impossible because it contradicted the greatest minds who for thousands of years, beginning with the Greeks, studied the conscious ego, and here comes someone with a severed commissure of the brain, as fit as a fiddle except his right hand doesn’t know what his left hand is doing, likewise with the legs, and while some experts say that he has consciousness on the left side only and that the right is a soulless computer, others believe he has two consciousnesses but the right one can’t speak because the Broca’s area is in the left frontal lobe, but a third group proposes two partially 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.

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.

“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 is I have to keep an eye on my left hand and leg because without warning they’ll misbehave. What I want to know is who is misbehaving. If it’s my brain, why am I unaware of it?”

“Because the hemisphere that’s doing it is mute, Mr. Tichy. The center of speech resides in the left —”

On the floor between us lay wires from the different instruments McIntyre had used to examine me. I had noticed my left foot playing with these wires. It looped one, thick and shiny black, around its ankle, but I didn’t think much about this until suddenly the foot jerked sharply backward and the wire turned out to be wound around the legs of the chair upon which the professor was sitting. The chair reared and the professor crashed to the linoleum. But he was an experienced doctor and disciplined scientist because he picked himself up from the floor and said in an even voice:

“It’s nothing. Please don’t be concerned. The right hemisphere is the one with spatial ability, so it’s adept at this type of function. I would ask you again, Mr. Tichy, to sit well away from the desk, the wires, everything. It will facilitate our deliberation as to the therapy indicated.”

“I only want to know where my consciousness is,” I replied, freeing the wire from my foot, which wasn’t easy because the foot pressed hard on the floor. “Was it I who pulled your chair out from under you, and if not I, then who?"

“Your lower left extremity, governed by the right hemisphere.” The professor adjusted his glasses on his nose, moved his chair farther away from me, and after a moment’s hesitation stood behind the chair instead of sitting down. Which of my hemispheres suspected that the next time he might counterattack?

“We could go on like this until Judgment Day,” I said, feeling my left side tense up. Uneasy, I crossed my legs and my arms. McIntyre, watching me carefully, continued in a pleasant voice.

“The left hemisphere is dominant thanks to the speech center. Talking with you now, I’m speaking to it; the right side can only listen in. Its capacity for language is extremely limited.”

“Perhaps in others but not in me,” I said, holding my left wrist with my right hand, to be safe. “It’s mute, yes, but I’ve taught it sign language, you see. Which wasn’t easy.”

“Impossible!”

The gleam in the professor’s eyes, I had seen it before in his American colleagues, and immediately regretted telling him the truth. But it was too late now.

“The right hemisphere can’t conjugate verbs! That’s been proved…”

“Doesn’t matter. Verbs are unnecessary.”

“All right, then. Ask it, please, I mean ask yourself, what it thinks of our conversation? Can you do that?”

I put my right hand in the left one, patting it a few times to pacify it, because that was the best way to begin, then made signs, touching the palm of my left hand. Its fingers began to move. I watched them for a while, then, trying to hide my anger, put the left hand on my knee, though it resisted. Of course it pinched me hard on the thigh. I didn’t retaliate, not wanting to wrestle with myself in front of the professor.

“Well, what did it say?” he asked, imprudently leaning forward from behind the chair.

“Nothing really.”

“But I saw myself that it made signs. They weren’t coherent?”

“Coherent, yes, very coherent, but nothing important.”

“Tell me! In science everything is important.”

“It said I’m an asshole.”

The professor didn’t even smile, he was so impressed.

“Really? Ask it about me now.”

“If you wish.”

Again I addressed my left hand, and pointed at the professor. This time I didn’t have to pat it; it replied immediately.

“Well?”

“You’re an asshole too.”

“Is that what it said?”

“Yes. It may not be able to handle verbs but it can make itself understood. I still don’t know who is speaking. Speaking with fingers or lips, it makes no difference. In my head, is there an I and an It as well? And if an It, how is it I don’t experience what it experiences even though it’s in my head and part of my brain? It’s not external, after all. If my consciousness was doubled and everything confused, I could understand that — but this, no. Where did it come from, this It? Is it also Ijon Tichy? And if so, why do I have to speak to it indirectly, by signs, professor? And why does it cause me so much trouble?” No longer seeing any sense in reticence, I told him all about the scenes on the subway and the bus. He was fascinated.

“Blondes only?”

“Mainly. They can be bleached blondes.”

“Is this still going on?”

“Not on the bus.”

“Elsewhere?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t tried. I mean, I haven’t given it the opportunity. If you must know, I was slapped several times. It embarrassed and angered me, being slapped, because I wasn’t guilty, yet at the same time I was pleased. But once a woman slapped me and the slap landed fully on the left cheek, and when that happened I didn’t feel the slightest pleasure. I thought this over and finally figured out the reason.”

“But of course!” cried the professor. “When the left-hemisphere Tichy was slapped on the cheek for the right-hemisphere Tichy, the right-hemisphere Tichy was pleased. But when the slap was wholly on the left, it didn’t like that at all.”

“Exactly. So there is some sort of communication in my unfortunate head, but it appears to be more emotional than rational. Emotions too are experience, though not conscious experience. But how can experience be unconscious? No, that Eccles with his automatic reflexes was all wet. To see an attractive girl in a crowd, and maneuver yourself close to her, and pinch her — that’s a whole premeditated plan of attack, not a bunch of mindless reflexes. But whose plan? Who thinks it, who is conscious of it, if it’s not mine?"

“It can be explained,” said the professor, excited. “The light of a candle is visible in the dark but not in the sun. The right brain may have consciousness, but a consciousness as feeble as candlelight, extinguished by the dominant consciousness of the left brain. It’s entirely possible that —”

The professor ducked, avoiding a shoe in the head. My left foot had slipped it off, propped the heel against a chair leg, then kicked it so hard that the shoe flew like a missile and crashed into the wall, missing him by a hair.

“You may be right,” I remarked, “but the right hemisphere is damned touchy.”

“Perhaps it feels threatened by our conversation, not fully understanding it or misunderstanding it,” said the professor. “Perhaps we should address it directly.”

“You mean, the way I do it? That’s possible. But what do you want to say to it?”

“That will depend on its response. Yours, Mr. Tichy, is a unique situation. There’s never been a person completely sound of mind, and not an ordinary mind at that, who underwent a callotomy.”

“Let me make myself clear,” I answered, stroking the back of my left hand to calm it because it was starting to move, flexing the fingers, which worried me. “I am not interested in sacrificing myself for science. If you or someone else enters into communication with It — you know what I mean — that could turn out to be harmful to me, let alone damned unpleasant, if, say, it becomes more independent.”

“That’s quite impossible,” declared the professor, a little too confidently, I thought. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a piece of flannel. His eyes did not have that helpless expression of most people who can’t see without their glasses. He gave me a sharp look as if he didn’t need them at all, then immediately dropped his eyes.

“What happens is always quite impossible,” I said, weighing my words. “The whole history of mankind consists of impossibilities, and the history of science too. A certain young philosopher told me that my condition is an impossibility, contradicting all established thought, which says that consciousness is an indivisible thing. The so-called split personality is essentially a consciousness that alternates between different states joined imperfectly by memory and a sense of identity. It’s not a cake that can be cut into pieces!”

“I see you’ve been reading the literature,” observed the professor, putting on his glasses. He added something I didn’t hear. I was going to go on but stopped because my left hand was putting its fingers into my right palm, making signs. That had never happened before. McIntyre saw me looking at my hands and understood immediately.

“Is It speaking?” he whispered as if not wanting to be overheard.

“Yes.”

The message surprised me, but I relayed it:

“It wants a piece of cake.”

The joy on the professor’s face made my blood run cold. Assuring the left hand that if it was patient it would have cake, I said to the professor:

“From your scientific point of view it would be wonderful if It became more independent. I don’t hold that against you, I understand how fantastic it would be having two fully developed individuals in a single body, so much to learn, so many experiments to run, and all that. But I’m not thrilled by the thought of having a democracy established in my head. I want to be less plural, not more.”

“You are giving me a vote of no confidence? Well, I can understand that.” The professor smiled sympathetically. “First let me assure you that all this information will remain confidential. My professional oath of secrecy. Beyond that, I will suggest no therapy for you. You must do what you believe is best. I hope you’ll think it over carefully. Will you be in Melbourne long?”

“I don’t know yet. In any case, I’ll call you.”

Tarantoga, sitting in the waiting room, jumped up when he saw me.

“Well? Professor…? Ijon…?”

“No decisions have been made,” said McIntyre in an official tone. “Mr. Tichy has various things to consider. I am at his service.”

Being a man of my word, I asked the taxi driver to stop at a bakery on the way, and bought a piece of cake and had to eat it immediately in the car because It insisted, even though I wasn’t in the mood for anything sweet. But I had decided, for the present at least, not to torment myself with questions such as who wanted the cake, since no one but me could answer a question like that, and I couldn’t.

Tarantoga and I had adjoining rooms, so I went to his and filled him in on what happened with McIntyre. My hand interrupted me several times because it was dissatisfied. The cake had been flavored with licorice, which I can’t stand. I ate it anyway, thinking I was doing it for It, but apparently It and I — or I and I — have the same taste. Which is understandable, in that the hand can’t eat by itself and It and I do have a mouth, palate, and tongue in common. I had the feeling I was in a dream, part nightmare, part comedy, and carrying not an infant exactly but a small, spoiled, precocious child. I remembered one psychologist’s theory that small children didn’t have a continuous consciousness because the fibers of the commissure were still undeveloped.

“A letter for you.” With these words Tarantoga brought me out of my reverie. I was surprised: no one knew where I was. The letter was postmarked Mexico City, airmail, no return address. In the envelope was a square of paper with the typed words: “He’s from the LA.”

Nothing more. I turned the paper over. It was blank. Tarantoga took it, looked at it, and then at me:

“What does this mean? Do you understand it?”

“No. Yes… the LA is the Lunar Agency. They were the ones who sent me.”

“To the moon?”

“Yes. On a reconnaissance mission. I was supposed to submit a report afterward.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. I wrote what I remembered. And gave it to the barber.”

“Barber?”

“That was the arrangement. Instead of going to them. But who is ‘he’? It must be McIntyre. I haven’t seen anyone else here.”

“Wait. I don’t understand. What was in the report?”

“I can’t tell that even to you. It’s top-secret. But there wasn’t much in it. I forgot a great deal.”

“After your accident?”

“Yes. What are you doing, professor?”

Tarantoga turned the torn envelope over. Someone had printed in pencil, inside: “Burn this. Don’t let the right sink the left.”

I didn’t understand it, yet there was some sense in it. Suddenly I looked at Tarantoga with widened eyes:

“I begin to see. Neither message, on the envelope or in the letter, has proper nouns. Did you notice?”

“So?”

“It understands nouns best. Whoever sent this wants to tell me something and not It…”

As I was saying this, I pointed to my right temple with my right hand. Tarantoga got up, paced the room, drummed his fingers on the table, and said:

“In other words, McIntyre is…”

“Don’t say it.”

I took a notepad from my pocket and wrote on a fresh page: “It understands what it hears better than what it reads. We’ll have to communicate, for a while, in this matter, by writing to each other. My guess is that the things I didn’t put into my report to the LA because I couldn’t remember, It remembers, and that someone knows or at least suspects this. I won’t phone M. or go back to him, because he’s probably the ‘he’ in the letter. He wanted to ask It questions. Perhaps to interrogate It. Please write your reply.”

Tarantoga read my note and frowned. Saying nothing, he bent over the table and wrote: “But if he is from the LA, why this deviousness? The LA can contact you directly, no?”

I wrote back: “Among those to whom I turned in NY there must have been someone from the LA. Through him they learned that I found a way to talk to It. But I left before they could try that themselves. If the anonymous letter is telling the truth, the son of the man who was your father’s friend was supposed to take over. To find out, without arousing my suspicions, what It remembers. Whereas, if they turned to me directly, officially, I could refuse to submit to such an interrogation, and they would be up a tree because legally It is not a separate person and they would need my consent to talk to It. Please use participles, pronouns, verbs, and avoid simple syntax.”

The professor tore out the page I had written on, put it in his pocket, and wrote: “But why is it that you don’t want It to know what is now happening?”

“To be safe. Because of what was written inside that envelope. It can’t be from the LA because the LA obviously wouldn’t warn me about itself. Someone else wrote it.”

Tarantoga’s reply this time was brief:

“Who?”

“About what is taking place where I was and had the accident, many parties would love to know. The LA has plenty of competition. I believe we should avoid the company of kangaroos. Let’s get out of here. It doesn’t understand the imperative mood.”

Tarantoga took all the pieces of paper from his pocket, rolled them into a ball with the letter and envelope, lit it with a match, and tossed it into the fireplace. He watched the paper shrivel into ash.

“I’m on my way to a travel agent,” he said. “And what will you do now?”

“Shave,” I said. “This beard itches like the devil and obviously is no longer needed. The faster the better, professor. Maybe there’s a night flight. And don’t tell me where we’re going.”

As I shaved in the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I made faces. The left eye didn’t even blink. I appeared completely ordinary. When I packed, I looked at my left hand and leg now and then, but they behaved normally. At the last moment, however, as I was putting my ties on top of the folded clothes in the suitcase, the left hand took the green tie with brown dots, a tie I liked though it was quite old, and threw it on the floor. It, apparently, didn’t like it. I picked up the tie with my right hand and tried to make the left hand take part of it so we could lay it neatly in the suitcase. What happened next had happened more than once before: the arm obeyed but the fingers didn’t. They opened, and the tie fell on the bed.

“Hopeless,” I sighed, stuffed the tie into the suitcase with my right hand, and closed the suitcase. Tarantoga appeared in the doorway, showed me two tickets without saying a word, and went to pack.

Did I have reason to fear my right hemisphere? I could think about this without worrying, because It couldn’t know what I thought unless I told It by hand signals. Human beings are so constructed that they don’t know what they know. What a book contains can be learned from the contents page, but there’s no contents page in the head. The head is like a full bag; in order to see what’s in it you have to pull everything out, item by item. Groping for a memory in your head is like groping in a bag with your hand.

Tarantoga paid the hotel bill, and as we drove to the airport at dusk and then waited in the terminal, I went over everything that had happened after my return from the Calf, to see how much I could remember. Earth had changed completely. There was total disarmament. Even the superpowers no longer had the money to continue the arms race. The more intelligent the weapons, the more they cost. That was the real reason for the Geneva Agreement. In Europe and in the United States no one wanted to enlist in the army. Men were replaced by machines, but one machine cost as much as a jet plane. Live soldiers surrendered the field to nonliving soldiers, who weren’t robots, either, but simply small computers inserted into rockets, self-firing firearms, and tanks like giant bedbugs, flat, because no space was needed for a crew, and if its computer was knocked out, a spare took over. Since command communications were vulnerable to disruption, the machines were made more and more autonomous, and therefore became more and more expensive. I couldn’t recall who came up with the idea of moving the arms race to the moon. Not in the form of weapon factories but through the so-called planet machines. These machines had been in use a couple of years for exploring the solar system. Remembering this, I noticed that a number of details were missing. Had I known them before or not? One usually knows, when one can’t remember something, whether or not one knew it in the first place, but I didn’t. I must have read about the new Geneva Agreement before my mission, but I wasn’t sure. The planet machines were built by several companies, mostly American. They were unlike anything industry had produced before. Not factories and not robots but something in between. Some resembled giant spiders. Of course there was a lot of debate, a lot of protests that they shouldn’t be armed but used only for mining and that sort of thing, but when it came to transporting the weapons to the moon, it turned out that the countries who could afford it already had self-programming mobile rocket launchers, cannon able to travel underwater, fire-throwers able to travel underground like moles, and laser artillery that could move like tanks and trigger, with salvos of intense radiation, nuclear fusion reactions that would vaporize everything, themselves included. Each country could program on Earth its own planet machines, which were then transported to the moon and placed in their respective sectors by the Lunar Agency, especially created for that purpose. The principle of parity was adhered to, how much of this and that could be put up there, and various international commissions watched over this whole military exodus. Scientists and generals from each country were allowed to verify that their devices were unloaded on the moon and in working order, then they all had to return to Earth together. In the twentieth century such a solution would have been senseless because the arms race wasn’t so much a matter of production as of research, innovation, which in those days depended entirely on people. But these new machines worked on a different principle, one borrowed from the natural evolution of plants and animals. These were systems capable of auto-optimization, speciation, and ramification, which means they could change themselves and multiply. I was pleased with myself that I had been able to remember that. Was the right hemisphere of my brain, interested mainly in women’s behinds and cake and hating green ties with brown dots, able to grasp such concepts? How could Its memory, then, be of value militarily? But if it wasn’t, I reflected, all the worse for me, because I could swear up and down that It knew nothing but no one would believe me. They’d grill It, that is grill me, and if they didn’t obtain what they wanted with the signs I taught It they’d use better teaching, better signs, and not let go for anything. The less It knew, the more trouble I was in. My life, even, might be at stake. This was not paranoia. I continued to dig into my memory.

On the moon, the electronic evolution of new weapons was to begin. In this way, despite disarmament, no nation would be defenseless, because it would own a self-perfecting arsenal. And any surprise attack by an enemy, war without declaration, was impossible now, because to commence hostilities a government first had to ask the Lunar Agency for permission to use its sector on the moon. There was no way to hide this, and the side threatened would also apply for permission, and that would begin the return of the means of annihilation to Earth. The whole point was that the moon be inaccessible.

Neither people nor probes could be sent to learn what military capability a given nation had at its disposal. A clever plan, but at first the project met with strong resistance from the generals and politicians. The moon was to be a testing ground and laboratory for military evolution within the sectors allotted to the various nations. The first order of business was to make sure there was no conflict between the sectors. If a weapon developed in one sector attacked and destroyed a neighbor’s weapon, that would upset the balance of power. The day such news came from the moon, there would be an immediate return to the previous situation and very likely war, a war conducted with modest means at first but in short order the nations would all rebuild their arms industries. The programs of the moon systems, written by the Lunar Agency in conjunction with multinational commissions, contained locks to keep the sectors from attacking each other, but that protection was considered insufficient. As before, nobody trusted anybody. The Geneva Agreement had not turned men into saints or international diplomacy into a convocation of angels. For that reason, after the transporting was completed, the moon was declared off-limits to everyone. The Lunar Agency itself could not enter there. If a defense program in any of the testing ranges was destroyed or breached, all Earth would know about it in an instant, for each sector bristled with sensors that worked automatically and around the clock. They would sound the alarm if any weapon, even a metal ant, crossed the boundary into the belt that was no man’s land. But even this wasn’t guarantee enough. The guarantee was the so-called doctrine of ignorance. Each government knew that better and better weapons were being created in its sector, but it did not know their value vis-à-vis the weapons being created in the other sectors. It couldn’t know, because the course of any evolutionary process is unforeseeable. This had been proven ages before, but the rigid politicians and generals were unreceptive to scientific argument. It wasn’t logic that convinced them; it was the increasing economic ruin caused by the traditional arms race. Even a fool could see that one didn’t need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely. Since disarmament negotiations had been unsuccessful for decades, the moon project seemed the only solution. Every nation could feel it was powerful militarily because of its moon arsenal, but it had no way of knowing how its arsenal compared with those of the other nations. Since no one therefore could count on victory, no one would risk going to war.

The Achilles heel of this solution lay in the monitoring of it. The experts knew from the start that the first thing the programmers of each country would try to do is send to the moon machines capable of neutralizing the monitoring system. Not necessarily by attacking the surveillance satellites directly; it could be a more devious method, one more difficult to detect, such as invading the communication network and falsifying the data transmitted to Earth and the Lunar Agency. My memory of this seemed intact, so I felt calmer as I boarded the plane with Tarantoga. Settling into my seat, I again took to probing what I remembered.

Everyone understood that the peace depended on the monitoring, so the question was how to make the monitoring untouchable. An insoluble problem, it seemed, a regressus ad infinitum: One could devise a system to monitor a monitoring system, but that system itself would be vulnerable to attack, so one would have to monitor the monitor of the monitor, and so on, without end. But this dilemma was solved quite simply. They encircled the moon with two surveillance belts. The inner belt guarded the sectors; the outer belt guarded the inner belt. And the trick was: both would be independent of Earth. Thus the arms race could continue on the moon in total secrecy from all countries and all governments. The weapons would evolve, but the surveillance of them would remain unchanged for a hundred years. The whole thing, really, was quite absurd. An unknown arsenal was useless in politics. They should have simply disarmed without bringing the moon into it, but there was no mention of that possibility. Everyone knew where talk of disarmament led: nowhere. In any case, when the idea of demilitarizing Earth and militarizing the moon was accepted, it was clear that sooner or later an attempt would be made to violate the doctrine of ignorance. The newspapers from time to time ran stories under screaming headlines about surveillance machines that vanished upon detecting something; some said they were intercepted by satellites and captured. And governments accused each other of sending probes, but it was impossible to tell their origin because an electronic device is not a person: you can’t get anything out of it if it’s made properly. But then these anonymous scouts, these space spies, stopped appearing. And the human race sighed with relief, especially because of the economics, the fact that the moon weapons didn’t cost a cent now. The energy was furnished by the sun, the raw materials by the moon. Which should also help limit the evolution of weapons, because there are no lodes of metal on the moon.

The generals had expressed the concern that weapons adapted to lunar conditions might not work on Earth. I couldn’t recall how the gravity was increased, though they must have explained that to me at the LA. Tarantoga and I were flying BOAC. The night outside the windows was Stygian, and I thought, amused, that I had no idea where we were going. Should I ask Tarantoga? On the other hand, perhaps it would be better if we were to part company. In this awful situation, perhaps I should be silent and fend for myself. A good thing It couldn’t read my thoughts. As if I carried an enemy in my head, though of course it was no enemy.

The reason the Lunar Agency, a supranational organization set up by the UN, turned to me? Its double-guard system had worked too well. We knew that the borders between the sectors had not been disturbed, but that was all we knew. In certain nervous, imaginative minds rose the specter of an attack upon Earth by the nonliving forces of the moon. The military sectors’ inability to exchange information might be only temporary. The sectors might learn to communicate through ground tremors, seismically, making the vibrations in the rock look like natural moon-quakes. The self-engineered and self-improving weapons might all join and one day unleash their monstrous power against Earth. Why should they want to do this? How would it benefit a nonliving army to reduce Earth to ashes? It wouldn’t, of course, but cancer, everpresent in the organisms of higher animals and human beings, is an inevitable albeit disadvantageous consequence of evolution. People began to talk and write about this lunar cancer, and there were seminars, articles, novels, and films on the subject, and the fear of atomic annihilation, which had been dispelled on Earth, returned in a new form. The surveillance system included seismographs, and certain scientists reported that the frequency of tremors in the moon’s crust was increasing, and seismic readings were analyzed for hidden codes, and fear grew. To calm the public, the Lunar Agency said in communiques that the odds of this happening were one in two hundred million, but no one believed that calculation. The fear finally reached the politicians, and they began to demand periodic inspection of the sectors and not just of their borders. The Agency spokesmen explained that any such inspection could not rule out the possibility of espionage to learn the current state of the lunar arsenals. After long meetings and complex negotiation the LA finally received authorization to reconnoiter.

Reconnaissance, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. None of the probes returned. Not a peep from them by radio. Specially armored landers were sent, with television cameras. The observation satellite showed that they indeed landed, and exactly on target, in the Mare Imbrium, in the Mare Frigoris, in the Mare Nectaris, and in the no man’s land between the sectors. But not one of them sent back a picture. As if the ground of the moon had swallowed them. Understandably, this caused panic. A state of emergency. The papers urged that the moon be preemptively bombed with hydrogen bombs just to play it safe. But that couldn’t happen unless a missile was built and atomic warheads again manufactured. Out of this fear and confusion my mission was born.

We were flying above thick clouds, their mounds tinged with pink from the morning sun still hidden below the horizon. Why, I wondered, did I remember the terrestrial things so well, while remembering so little of what happened on the moon? I knew some reasons. It wasn’t for nothing that I’d read all those medical books when I got back. There are two kinds of memory, temporary and permanent. Severing the great commissure does not affect what the brain has already accumulated, but fresh memories evaporate, do not become permanent. What evaporates particularly is what the patient experienced shortly before the operation. Therefore I didn’t remember most of what happened to me those seven weeks on the moon, when I went from sector to sector. All that remained in my head was an aura of strangeness, nothing I could put into words, into a report. Strangeness, and yet it was not threatening, or so it seemed to me. No dark conspiracy against Earth. I felt certain of that. But could I swear that what I felt and knew was the whole story? Perhaps It knew more.

Tarantoga was silent, only glancing at me from time to time. As usual on eastward flights, with the Pacific beneath us, the calendar tripped and dropped a day. BOAC was belt-tightening, apparently, because all we got to eat was chicken salad. We landed in Miami. It was early in the afternoon. Customs dogs sniffed our suitcases. We stepped out into the heat. Melbourne had been much cooler. A rental car was waiting for us; Tarantoga must have ordered it in Melbourne. We put our luggage in the trunk and set off down a highway full of traffic, and still said nothing, because I had asked the professor not to tell me our destination. Overcaution, perhaps, but I would stick to that policy until a better one suggested itself. And he didn’t need to say anything, because after more than two hours on back roads we arrived at a large white building surrounded by pavilions, palms, and cacti, and I knew at once that my trusted friend had brought me to an insane asylum. Not a bad place to hide, I thought. In the car, I had looked over my shoulder now and then to see if we were being followed, but it never entered my head that I was such an important, valuable person that they would follow me by a method less conventional, not found in any spy novel. From a modern satellite not only can a car be observed but wooden matches counted on a garden table. That never entered my head — more precisely the half of my head that could understand without sign language the mess Ijon Tichy had got himself into.