Free The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Page B

finished in prison. His works, discredited and washed away by the blood of his victims, were forsaken and forgotten.
    Then Nototti the Younger, anxious to restore the family’s good name, began conducting experiments a contrario : whereas the father had tried to seal the brain’s entrances, the son now sought to plug all the exits with corks of live bacteria. Nototti the Younger, oppressed by the act that had disgraced his father, seemed to want to do away with all acts for all time. Perhaps no man was more averse to the ideas of Anonym, who had preached the enrichment of actuality with actions, and yet he was just the man to put Anonym’s thoughts into practice.
    Young Nototti soon obtained a new variety of vibrophag: this variety parasitized only the motor nerves, insinuating itself between will and muscle. But this stubborn man was not satisfied: in studying the chemical processes inside motor nerve fibers, Nototti ascertained the barely perceptible difference between the chemotaxes of separate nerve trunks: he discovered an astonishing fact: the fibers regulating a person’s voluntary movements produced chemical reactions somewhat unlike those of sympathetic-system fibers * and innervators not involved in volitional effort. Old man Nototti, who loved old philosophical blueprints, would likely have set about trying to prove the long-discarded doctrine of free will, * but his son, who disliked metaphysical reminiscences, forged ahead, without a backward glance at any blueprints; again using chemotaxis, he lured his vibrophags to the voluntary-innervation system, and when he had determined the characteristics of this new subspecies, he christened this peculiar microculture actiophags, or, as he later described them, “facteaters.” Now, without risk of rotting in prison, he might inject “facteaters” into nervous-system fibrils. Still, his father’s fate and possibly his own experience with the problem of liquidating acts had made Nototti the Younger extremely cautious: taking the usual route that leads from rabbits and guinea pigs to Homo sapiens , he hesitated before sapiens .
    While mulling this matter late one afternoon, Nototti was informed that a man come from a great distance desired an interview.
    â€œShow 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.
    â€œTutus. Engineer. You have the windmill’s vanes, I have the wind, let’s split the ground grain. Agreed?”
    â€œWhat ground grain?” Nototti leapt up, trying to wrest his hand from the prehensile phalanges.
    â€œHuman, 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.”
    â€œThey are rather hard to see.” Nototti tried to make light of this unexpected request.
    â€œTheir meaning is still harder to see. But I, you see, can see it all.”
    â€œYou run a risk,” Nototti began to stammer.
    â€œI’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