The Letter Killers Club Read online

  While mulling this matter late one afternoon, Nototti was informed that a man come from a great distance desired an interview.

  “Show him in.”

  The visitor sprang into the study, reaching the stumpy Italian in three long strides, gripped his plump palm in his own thin and tenacious phalanges, and, tooth fillings flashing over Nototti’s amazed and uptilted face, introduced himself.

  “Tutus. Engineer. You have the windmill’s vanes, I have the wind, let’s split the ground grain. Agreed?”

  “What ground grain?” Nototti leapt up, trying to wrest his hand from the prehensile phalanges.

  “Human, of course. I’ll sit down.” The guest slid his tall bony body into an armchair. “Give me your bacteria, I’ll give you my ether wind for contracting and relaxing muscles, and together we’ll rebuild all of human reality: from top to bottom—understand? We’ve been digging a tunnel from opposite ends—and here we’ve met: pickax to pickax. I’ve followed your work for a long time, though you are sparing with your publications. As am I. Still I predict: if we combine your everything with my everything, they will overthrow everything. Here are the diagrams”—Tutus produced a briefcase—“my ex for your in. Now show me your bacilli.”

  “They are rather hard to see.” Nototti tried to make light of this unexpected request.

  “Their meaning is still harder to see. But I, you see, can see it all.”

  “You run a risk,” Nototti began to stammer.

  “I’ll take my chances.” Tutus banged his briefcase on the desk. “But to business. Here’s a list of the muscles that must be emancipated from the nervous system. The innervation of vegetative processes, bits of the mental automatism apparatus, those we can let people keep. Everything else will be subject to my ether wind: I’ll set the vanes of that windmill spinning whichever way I like. Oh, my exes will produce pure grain!”

  “But one must have capital—”

  “We’ll have more than we know what to do with. You’ll see.”

  The two arrived at a sort of concordat.

  Shortly afterwards the governments of the world’s greatest powers received a brief memorandum from Nototti-Tutus marked URGENT and CONFIDENTIAL. Backed up with exact figures and diagrams, the memo proposed building exes and listed the fantastic benefits—financial and moral—to be derived from these facilities. Certain addressees never received the project, lost in some ministry; others rejected it; but in some countries—primarily those with a shaky currency, ballooning national debt, and habit of clutching at straws—the project was sent before a commission, hastily reviewed, and debated. Tutus received summonses from two capitals at once so that one of them even had to wait. At a series of secret hearings, it was decided that mechanical innervation could be used in the fight against mental illness. At the time (the time of this story), the number of insane people had grown exponentially. Science simply could not cope with this calamity: it was too bound up with the increasing mental pressures and contortions of everyday life. The danger to society was exacerbated by skyrocketing rates of antisocial psychoses: the certification of violent lunatics, incurable kleptomaniacs, erotic fetishists, potential murderers, and the like required vast sums and was a huge burden on state budgets. “To care for the millions of workers lost to illness, a nation must lose hundreds of thousands more workers, while spending more and more every year to build new asylums, maintain staffs, and so forth,” the project argued. “Rather than isolate sick people from healthy ones, why not isolate the sickness from the health in the madman’s own organism? Mental illness impairs only the nervous system; the muscular system remains intact. Inject a lunatic unable to do socially useful work with the bacteria discovered by Professor Nototti, and his muscular system—stolen from society along with his brain—will return to its rightful owner. Erect an ex, and the muscles of all madmen—switched from their own nerve centers (clearly useless, if not a danger to society) to a single central innervator like the Tutus A-2—will go to work for free for the good of society and the state. Building a relatively inexpensive ex will not only help relieve the budget of financial ballast, it will also produce an enormous supply of new manpower overnight.”

  Before long the gangly glass straws of the first ex were poking up out of the ground. The glassy metal cables and filaments stretching from its transparent stalklike stacks seemed to dissolve in air so that, the day of the inauguration and launch, when the celebratory crowd surged up to the metal barriers surrounding the gigantic exteriorizator, it saw nothing but a brumous emptiness (the day was foggy). People immediately began spinning tales about stolen funds, sham ventures, and inflated budgets. The prime minister mounted the rostrum, removed the top hat from his bald pate, and, jabbing at the emptiness, spoke at laborious length about a radiant era: beating the words out of himself like the dust from an old and threadbare carpet, the premier squinted myopically into the enclosed emptiness—and suddenly, despite his words, he thought: “What if it really doesn’t exist?” The ex later took its revenge on the premier by turning him—in the course of events—into an ex-premier.

  The crowd, disappointed and derisive, had begun to disperse when a strange sound rent the air: a soft and glassily thin tremor rising higher and higher, like the voice of a violin string stretched to breaking: the ex had begun its work.

  People rushing to work next morning noticed some odd types about town: dressed like everyone else, they walked with a jerky yet metronomic gait, rapping out exactly two steps a second; their elbows hugged their bodies, their heads looked wedged between their shoulders, while their round, fixed pupils appeared to have been screwed into place. The people rushing around on their own errands didn’t immediately realize that this was the first lot to be released from asylums—madmen whose muscles had been disconnected according to Nototti’s method then reactivated by Ex No. 1.

  The organisms in this first series had been treated with vibrophags; painlessly separated from the brain and properly adjusted, the musculature of every one of these new persons was now a natural antenna which, tuned to the gigantic innervator’s ether will, performed a common mechanical task.

  Come evening the rumor about ether-wind-activated persons had gone around the whole city; excited citizens congregated on street corners and hallooed greetings to them as they returned from work, but they, without reacting in any way, walked on—two steps a second—with the same jerky gait, elbows hugging their bodies. Mothers hid their children from them: they were mad, after all—who knew what they might do! The mothers were told not to worry: foolproof and fail-safe.

  At one crossroads a strange scene took place: an old woman recognized her son in one of the new persons walking past. He had been taken away in a straitjacket two years before. With a cry of joy she rushed up to him, calling his name. But the ex-activated man strode past, shoes evenly pounding the pavement; not a muscle in his face twitched, not a sound parted his clenched teeth: the ether wind blew where it would. The old woman became hysterical and had to be carried home.

  This first series of “ex-persons,” as someone referred to them in jest, could manage only the simplest movements; they could walk, they could raise or lower a lever—that was all. But within a few weeks, thanks to the gradual introduction of a differential gear, the processing of an asylum’s human contents had become more advanced; life organized according to the Nototti-Tutus system had become more complex: now one saw bootblacks who brushed boots—up, down, up, down—with an exanimate methodicalness; at a fashionable hotel an ex-activated doorman drew crowds of curiosity seekers to the entrance where he stood from morning till night with his hand on the door handle, now pulling it open, now pushing it shut with short sharp jerks. Still, the builders of the first innervator had not anticipated every contingency. At any rate, not this one: one day the famous columnist Tummins, then a guest at the hotel, was coming distractedly downstairs; his eyes kept fastening on things and faces as he searched for a theme for his next column; his pupils happened to fasten on
those of the doorman, who had automatically opened the door for him; those pupils made Tummins back away—he banged into the wall and, still staring at the phenomenon, muttered musingly, “My theme.”

  Soon this very popular writer came out with a column entitled: “In Defense of In.” It deftly described the encounter of two pairs of pupils: from here and from there. Tummins invited all citizens—builders of exes, first of all—to look into the eyes of mechanized persons more often; then they would understand that one cannot attempt what exes attempt. One cannot force a person to live an alien, manufactured life. Man is a free being. Even madmen have a right to their madness. It is dangerous to entrust functions of will to a machine: we still don’t know what that mechanical will may want. Tummins’s impassioned article ended with the slogan: IN AGAINST EX.

  In response, an editorial appeared on the front page of an official organ; rumor attributed it to Tutus. The unsigned piece found Tummins’s hysterical outbursts about a pair of pupils untimely given the goal of saving an entire social organism; his tirades about “free will” were several centuries too late—and even faintly risible in an age of scientifically substantiated determinism;* it was vital that the mentally ill, whose antisocial will was a danger to society, be given not freedom of will (this too would have to be manufactured since no such thing existed in nature), but freedom from will. The government intended to pursue this course unflinchingly and unflaggingly, producing more and more ex-activated persons.

  But Tummins would not let the matter drop: he responded to all arguments with counterarguments and, not content with the press debate, organized the Good Old Brain Society, a group of sympathizers who attended protest meetings wearing badges that depicted the brain’s two hemispheres stamped with the slogan: IN CONTRA EX. When the government began construction, next to Ex No. 1, of the new and improved Ex No. 2, Good Old Brain backers turned out in force and threatened to destroy the machine. Troops were sent to quell the protest, and in their support, as if to prove the ex’s ability to defend itself, armed detachments of ex-persons marched through the streets, methodically rapping out two steps a second.

  Tummins’s organization braced for more repressions—arrests, mainly—but none followed. At a secret meeting of ministers, Tutus, who had gradually amassed more and more power, pushed through a resolution whose implementation was entrusted to an ex. Tummins then disappeared—not for long, just a few days—after which he abruptly changed his contra to pro. Tummins had sold out, people said, he was acting under threat of death, and so on. None of this was true: Tummins had simply been activated by an ex. A super-sophisticated differentiator, which had mastered the great man’s speech patterns and taken possession of his pen, was forcing him to go back on his words. In his heart, Tummins still cursed and hated all exes; meanwhile his muscles, separated from his psyche, fashioned fiery and effective rhetoric in favor of building more ethical machines. Tummins’s admirers refused to believe in his betrayal and insisted that these writings were forgeries or fakes, but his longhand manuscripts, photographically reproduced and displayed in a glass case at City Hall, silenced even the most arrant skeptics. The beheaded Brain Society gradually disbanded, especially since the future, thanks to the construction of more machines, now looked so inviting to so many. Military service, for example, would be shifted from the shoulders of healthy citizens onto the shoulders of exactivated madmen; the government said that as a matter of social ethics and hygiene it made more sense to sacrifice the unfit than the fit. As a result, calling these machines “ethical,” which had struck many healthy people as unnatural and ridiculous, now seemed justified and not at all ridiculous.

  The enclave of exes grew and grew. Surely it was time to ask: Why were there so many of them? Weren’t there too many, if they were meant only for madmen? But the excitement of building had everyone in thrall. It was as if the ether wind, overstepping its bounds, had swept away all the criticism and skepticism in the world. I’m afraid it may sweep me and my words …

  Das suddenly stopped rapping out dashes and dots with his stick. He seemed stuck and regarded us uneasily with his round lenses.

  “Yes, I nearly missed the switch: my theme—as I see it—may now take one of two tracks. It may perfect the exes and turn their ether blasts into a whirlwind against which all physiological innervations are powerless, and then … But then I would have to give up my ancillary theme of ‘facteaters.’ That won’t do: an image, once introduced, must exist to the end. The structure of a plot is like that of an ex: activation is possible, deactivation is not. So I will try to sail through my theme against the wind. Now then.”

  Work in Nototti’s bacteriological laboratory continued without respite. Trusting his assistants to obtain a hardier variety of vibrophag, he undertook to determine whether a person could be immunized against facteaters. Soon both tasks had been more or less completed: on the one hand, his assistants had obtained an extremely resistant variety able to withstand water loss, fluctuations in temperature, and brief periods outside the brain, in any environment; on the other hand, Nototti had discovered a new chemical compound (“init”) which, when introduced into the bloodstream, penetrated the brain and, without damaging it, killed vibrophags while immunizing the organism against them in perpetuity. During preliminary trials, several violent lunatics who had been ex-activated were injected with init: their old illness came gushing out of their brains and flooded their muscles. The bedlamites, thrashing furiously about on the laboratory floor, were promptly destroyed, and the trials pronounced a success. Tutus instructed Professor Nototti to start manufacturing init. At the next secret meeting of the Supreme Government Council, Tutus, tooth fillings agleam, reported.

  “I would consider myself mad were I to agree to confine the use of ether wind to madmen alone. The invisible forest of exes is growing daily. I long ago renounced the artificial method of tuning muscular systems. Any musculature, if isolated from the brain, may be innervated to the right frequency. Each of our exes is designed for a specific frequency and, once up and running, will activate a whole series of people tuned to that frequency. Assuming, of course, that their muscular receivers have been cut off from internal innervation, from that damned ‘good old brain’ with which we have had and, I fear, will have still a great deal of trouble. To sum up: our country, as we all know, supplies world markets with all sorts of canned foods, extracts, dried fruits, and compressed nutrients. This new variety of vibrophag is sufficiently robust to withstand compression, dehydration, etc., etc., so as to reach the organisms of our worldwide consumers, thence to be whisked by the blood to the brain and … Init shall be kept, of course, strictly for our own use. I needn’t describe to you, statesmen, what we stand to gain from all of this and the new world we are bound to find between init and ex.”

  In no time, countless vibrophag cultures—pressed into bouillon cubes, dried and frozen inside all sorts of comestibles, sealed into millions of cans—were on the way to the millions of trusting mouths that would swallow themselves themselves, if I may so express it. The first grams of init, made extremely slowly by Nototti with no assistants present, did not go beyond a small circle of top government officials and their retinue: having consigned all lunatics to the exes, they had decided to immunize the sanest people first—themselves, that is—against possible activation by a machine. In future, as more grams and scruples became available, init would be allocated by the center to all authorized citizens in the regions whose money had gone to build all the exes, but … But then Nototti dropped dead. He was found with a swollen neck and bulging white eyes among the glass retorts in his secret laboratory. No notes or formulas for init turned up. The phial containing the few grams of init that Nototti always carried with him—unbeknownst to anyone but Tutus and members of the Privy Council—had also vanished. Even Tutus was anxious and perplexed. At an emergency meeting of the council, this man, who had been accustomed only to answer or not to answer, posed his first question: “What is to be done?”


  The very youngest member, by name Zes, stood up.

  “Why not Zez?” Zez leapt up, surveying us all with a puzzled smile.

  The conceivers exchanged glances.

  But Das went on rapping out his dots.

  So then. As I was saying, a certain Zes stood up: until now he had done little to distinguish himself. He was intelligent, but cruel—that traditional villain essential to any fantastic narrative forced to replace personalities with cardboard cutouts. Yes. He had the answer: Launch the exes. All of them. Without delay.

  The council members shifted in their seats. Tutus objected.

  “But see here, the immunization program hasn’t been implemented. Therefore the exes could activate even—”

  “So much the better. The fewer the managers, the greater the manageability. And then: oughtn’t we to consider the fact of the init’s disappearance? Our plans, including the secret of init, could fall—if they haven’t already—into the wrong hands. If we delay, rumors about our plans will slip across the border, and even before that our compatriots, if they have any sense at all, will make short work of the exes, and of us: or do you think they’ll forgive us our immunity?”