Read Online The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Free Book Online Page B

and beckoned to him from the sidewalk: mine—not hers—mine—don’t buy theirs—mine are cheaper! An automobile bearing down on the bemused man slammed to a halt—an irate chauffeur shouted through the glass, threatening to flatten him into a pancake. But the man, tearing his eyes away from the batiste and his soles away from the pavement, continued on his way without turning into either a pancake or a customer. And if the hectic youth who mistook our passer for someone else—racing up, then away—had been able to see through eyes to what is behind them, he would have understood once and for all: everyone always mistakes everyone for someone else.
    But neither the youth, nor the chauffeur, nor the hawkers, whose eyes had been caught by the passing eccentric, saw or suspected that at that very second into that very head had sprung the idea of exes. The associations in the head of the mysterious passer, who left nothing to posterity but odd pages from untitled drafts, went like this: “Wind—separation and inflation of outer forms—ether wind—separation, exteriorization, inflation of inner forms of thought—vibrations, vibrograms inside cranium; blast of ether wind drives entire ‘I’ out, into world—and to hell with the straps.” This flight of associations then landed in a vise; logic set to work and experience accrued over decades bestirred itself: “We must socialize psyches; if a blast of air can blow the hat off my head and drive it before me, then why not blow the entire psychic contents hiding inside people’s heads out from under their craniums with a controlled stream of ether; why not turn every in , damn it, into an ex ?”
    The man beset by the idea of exes was an idealist, a dreamer; his somewhat patchy erudition could not activate ideas, could not harness dreams. Legend has it that this Anonym, who left people his brilliant outlines, died in poverty and obscurity and that his formulas and drawings, largely naïve and practically useless, passed from hand to hand until finally falling into the hands of engineer Tutus. For Tutus, thinking was synonymous with model-building, things propelled his thoughts as the wind does a sail; while still in his youth he became interested in the old ideomotor principle * and immediately built a model ideomotor, a machine that replaces the physiological contraction of a muscle with a mechanical one. Even before encountering Anonym’s drafts, Tutus had refined ancient experiments with tetanus in frogs by means of his own bold and exact tests. For example, by connecting the weak web of muscles cradling the frog’s eye to his ideomotor, Tutus could make the eye move this way or that; or he could arrest the eye while fixed on an object, causing it to fill with tears, and the eyelid to open and close. But these rather crude experiments in creating what Tutus called an “artificial observer” proved little, since the physiological innervation * from the frog’s nerve centers continued to function, interfering with the artificial innervation from the machine. Anonym’s ideas had the immediate effect of broadening Tutus’s outlook and the scope of his experiments: he realized that the machine must take control of those human movements and muscular contractions that had a clear social significance. Anonym maintained that reality, whose component parts are actions, had “too many parts and too small a sum.” Only by taking innervation away from separately functioning nervous systems and giving it to a single, central innervator, said Anonym, could one organize reality according to plan and put paid to that amateurish “I.” By replacing the jolts from individual wills with the jolts from one “ethical machine” built according to the latest advances in morals and technology, one could make everyone give everything back: a complete ex .
    Even earlier, while