“I know. When you get a stroke, the clot is on the opposite side from the paralysis.”
“Correct.” Doc raised his chin. “T, I split your brain, right side from left. That’s as simply as I can put it. It’s an old but effective procedure for treating severe epilepsy, and the best I could do for you here. I’ll take an oath on that, or a lie test—”
“Shuddup! I’ll give you a lie test!” T strode shakily forward. “What’s gonna happen to me?”
“As a surgeon, I can say only that you may reasonably expect many years of practically normal life.”
“Normal!” T took another step, raising his whip. “Why’d you patch my good eye, and start calling me Thaddeus?”
“That was my idea,” interrupted the old man, in a quavery voice. “I thought—in a man like yourself, there had to be someone, some component, like Thad. With the psychological pressure we’re under here, I thought Thad just might come out, if we gave him a chance in your right hemisphere. It was my idea. If it hurt you any, blame me.”
“I will.” But T seemed, for the moment, more interested than enraged. “Who is this Thaddeus?”
“You are,” said the doctor. “We couldn’t put anyone else into your skull.”
“Jude Thaddeus,” said the old man, “was a contemporary of Judas Iscariot. A similarity of names, but—” He shrugged.
T made a snorting sound, a single laugh. “You figured there was good in me, huh? It just had to come out sometime? Why, I’d say you were crazy—but you’re not. Thaddeus was real. He was here in my head for a while. Maybe he’s still there, hiding. How do I get at him, huh?” T raised his right hand and jabbed a finger gently at the corner of his right eye.”Ow. I don’t like to be hurt. I got a delicate nervous system. Doc, how come his eye is on the right side if everything crosses over? And if it’s his eye, how come I feel what happens to it?”
“His eye is on the right because I divided the optic chiasm, too. It’s a somewhat complicated—”
“Never mind. We’ll show Thaddeus who’s boss. He can watch with the rest of you. Hey, Blacky, c’mere. We haven’t played together for a while, have we?”
“No,” the girl whispered. She hugged her arms around herself, nearly fainting. But she walked toward T. Two months as his slaves had taught them all that obedience was easiest.
“You like this punk Thad, huh?” T whispered, when she halted before him. “You think his face is all right, do you? How about my face? Look at me!”
T saw his own left hand reach out and touch the girl’s cheek, gently and lovingly. He could see in her startled face that she felt Thaddeus in the hand; never had her eyes looked this way at T before. T cried out and raised his whip to strike her, and his left hand flew across his body to seize his own right wrist, like a terrier clamping jaws on a snake.
T’s right hand still gripped the whip, but he thought the bones of his wrist were cracking. His legs tangled each other and he fell. He tried to shout for help, and could utter only a roaring noise. His robots stood watching. It seemed a long time before the doctor’s face loomed over him, and a black patch descended gently upon his left eye.
Now I understand more deeply, and I accept. At first I wanted the doctor to remove my left eye, and the old man agreed, quoting some ancient Believers’ book to the effect that an offending eye should be plucked out. An eye would be a small price to rid myself of T.
But after some thought, the doctor refused. “T is yourself,” he said at last. “I can’t point to him with my scalpel and cut him out, although it seems I helped to separate the two of you. Now you control both sides of the body; once he did.” The doctor smiled wearily. “Imagine a committee of three, a troika inside your skull. Thaddeus is one, T another—and the third is the person, the force, that casts the deciding vote. You. That’s best I can tell you.”
And the old man nodded.
Mostly, I do without the eyepatch now. Reading and speaking are easier when I use my long-dominant left brain, and I am still Thaddeus—perhaps because I choose to be Thaddeus. Could it be that terribly simple?
Periodically I talk with the berserker, which still trusts in T’s greedy outlawry. It means to counterfeit much money, coins and notes, for me to take in a launch to a highly civilized planet, relying on my evil to weaken men there and set them against each other.
But the berserker is too badly damaged to watch its prisoners steadily, or it does not bother. With my freedom to move about I have welded some of the silver coins into a ring, and chilled this ring to superconductivity in a chamber near the berserker’s unliving heart. Halsted tells me we can use this ring, carrying a permanent electric current, to trigger the C-plus drive of the launch that is our prison, and tear our berserker open from inside. We may damage it enough to save ourselves. Or we may all be killed.
But while I live, I Thaddeus, rule myself; and both my hands are gentle, touching long black hair.
MR. JESTER
Defeated in battle, the berserker-computers saw that refitting, repair, and the construction of new machines were necessary. They sought out sunless, hidden places, where minerals were available but where men—who were now as often the hunters as the hunted—were not likely to show up. And in such secret places they set up automated shipyards.
To one such concealed shipyard, seeking repair, there came a berserker. Its hull had been torn open in a recent fight, and it had suffered severe internal damage. It collapsed rather than landed on the dark planetoid, beside the half-finished hull of a new machine. Before emergency repairs could be started, the engines of the damaged machine failed, its emergency power failed, and like a wounded living thing it died.
The shipyard-computers were capable of wide improvisation. They surveyed the extent of the damage, weighed various courses of action, and then swiftly began to cannibalize. Instead of embodying the deadly purpose of the new machine in a new force-field brain, following the replication-instructions of the Builders, they took the old brain with many another part from the wreck.
The Builders had not foreseen that this might happen, and so the shipyard-computers did not know that in the force-field brain of each original berserker there was a safety switch. The switch was there because the original machines had been launched by living Builders, who had wanted to survive while testing their own life-destroying creations.
When the brain was moved from one hull to another, the safety switch reset itself.
The old brain awoke in control of a mighty new machine, of weapons that could sterilize a planet, of new engines to hurl the whole mass far faster than light.
But there was, of course, no Builder present, and no timer, to turn off the simple safety switch.
The jester—the accused jester, but he was as good as convicted—was on the carpet. He stood facing a row of stiff necks and granite faces, behind a long table. On either side of him was a tridi camera. His offenses had been so unusually offensive that the Committee of Duly Constituted Authority themselves, the very rulers of Planet A, were sitting to pass judgment on his case.
Perhaps the Committee members had another reason for this session: planet-wide elections were due in a month. No member wanted to miss the chance for a nonpolitical tridi appearance that would not have to be offset by a grant of equal time for the new Liberal party opposition.
“I have this further item of evidence to present,” the Minister of Communication was saying, from his seat on the Committee side of the long table. He held up what appeared at first to be an official pedestrian-control sign, having steady black letters on a blank white background. But the sign read: Unauthorized Personnel Only.
“When a sign is put up,” said the MiniCom, “the first day, a lot of people read it.” He paused, listening to
