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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
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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.
Men might explain their victories by compiled statistics on armament; by the
imponderable value of one man; perhaps by the precise pathway chosen by a
surgeon's knife.
But for some victories no realistic explanation could be found. On one lonely
world decades of careless safety had left the people almost without defense;
then at last a berserker with all its power came upon them.
Behold and share their laughter!
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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
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