Free The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Page A

wireless ideomotors. Tutus himself was soon all tangled up in his own field of expertise: the problem was that physiological innervation resisted impulses relayed through the ether even more fiercely than those straight from a machine. Close to despair after many repeat experiments, Tutus finally realized that only by isolating a subject’s musculature from the nervous system, only by separating one from the other, could the ideomotor take full control of the subject’s actions and behavior.
    It was at this point that he became aware of the experiments of two Italian bacteriologists, by name Nototti. Nototti the Elder, well before the work of Tutus, had discovered “brain parasites.” Even before that, science had half established the existence of myelophags—formed elements which, by absorbing the pulp of peripheral nerves, * caused neuritis. * But we can assume that Nototti, taking full advantage of microscopy and chemotaxis, * was the first to come across this highly complex and elusive fauna of the brain. By imitating patient gardeners, as he liked to say, Nototti obtained various species and subspecies of brain bacteria, which he collected in the form of ordinary gelatinous cultures inside sealed flasks. He could not do in his glass bacteria-breeders what Mendel * had done with pollen: for one thing, the bacteria were infinitely smaller than grains of pollen; for another, the asexuality of microorganisms ruled out hybridization. But he did have this advantage: bacteria that settled on, say, nodes of Ranvier, * the thinnest parts of a neurofibril, * produced in twenty-four hours roughly as many generations as had humanity since the time of Christ. Thus in possession of a more compact time, as Nototti put it, he could, by gradually changing the thermal and chemical effects, achieve results in the world of bacteria that in experiments with domesticated animals would require millennia. In short, Nototti managed to create a special species of microorganisms that parasitized the brain; he called them vibrophags . Injected under the meninges, * vibrophags proliferated and attacked, as caterpillars do the branches of fruit trees, the branchings of outflowing nerves, clustering mainly where nerves emerged from under the cerebral cortex. Vibrophags were neither parasites nor saprophytes, * in the exact sense of the word: stealing inside a neurilemma, * these infinitesimal predators devoured not matter but energy, they fed on vibrations, on the energy-producing discharge of nerve cells; clogging all the exits for nervous energy, blocking up all the brain’s windows on the world, these bacteria intercepted the brain’s signals and discharges, using them to fuel their own miniscule bodies. This discovery allowed Nototti the Elder to embark, at long last, on the experiment for which he had been preparing all his life. This man with the neck of a bull and the voice of a eunuch had always hoped to find a scientific basis for the philosophical legend, long buried and forgotten, concerning “innate ideas.” * “Send an army of my vibrophags into the newborn brain in advance of its first sensations,” thought Nototti, “and they, without harming the brain’s material substance and its offshoots, will bar the way, they will intercept the world flowing in along nerve wires to the brain; provided we have immunized (as far as possible) the motor nerves, especially the articulation apparatus, the soul will then confide its ideae innatae .”
    This cruel eccentric (most eccentrics are cruel), while discovering invisibilities, was blind to the obvious. A believer in tattered Cartesian ghosts, * Nototti began conducting his risky experiments on infants at the inoculation center affiliated with his laboratory. The result was an absurd court trial—“horrific,” the papers called it. The old scientist was convicted in the deaths of dozens of children; having begun in a laboratory, he