Peace on Earth Read online

  “But then why did she run?”

  “Because the product can tell you things. They didn’t want to leave any evidence, any prints. It’s almost three. You must take care of yourself, Mr. Tichy. You have, if you will forgive me, old-fashioned tastes in women. I wish you a good night and pleasant dreams.”

  The next day was a Sunday. We didn’t work on Sundays. I was shaving when a messenger arrived with a letter. Professor Lax-Gugliborc wanted to see me. I had heard of him. His field was communications and telematics. He had his own laboratory at the base. I dressed and at ten o’clock went to his place. He had drawn me a little map on the other side of the letter. Among some low buildings stood a long pavilion surrounded by a garden and a high wire fence. I pushed the bell once, twice. A sign lit up above it: I’M NOT AT HOME TO ANYONE. Then the lock buzzed and the gate opened. A narrow gravel path led to a metal door. It was closed and had no knob or handle. I knocked. Not a sound inside. I knocked again. I was about to leave when the door opened a little and a man peered out, tall, thin, in a blue smock covered with spots and splatters. What was left of his white hair was cut very short, and he wore thick glasses that gave him the look of a startled fish. A long sniffy nose, a massive forehead.

  He stepped back without a word to let me in, then locked the door and not with just one lock either. The hallway was very dark. He went first and I followed, my hand on the wall. This was strange, conspiratorial. The stink of chemicals hung in the hot, dry air. The next door was a sliding door. He had me go first.

  I found myself in a large lab that was incredibly cluttered. Metal apparatuses, oxidized black, were piled one on top of the other and connected with wires that lay tangled on the floor. In the middle of the lab was a table heaped with more equipment, papers, tools, and a cage stood next to it, a birdcage large enough to hold a gorilla. The most curious thing was the dolls lying in a row along three of the walls. Naked, resembling store mannequins, with open skulls or with no heads at all, and their chests parted like doors, containing a jumble of connectors and circuit boards, and under the table was a pile of arms and legs. There was not one window in the room. The professor threw on the floor a coil of cable and electronic parts occupying a chair, and with an agility I wouldn’t have expected of him he crawled under the table, pulled out a tape recorder, and turned it on. Looking up at me, he put a finger to his lips, and at the same time his strident voice came from the machine:

  “I have invited you here, Tichy, to instruct you in a few things you must know about communications. Please have a seat and listen. You may not take notes…”

  While his voice went on, the professor gestured for me to get in the cage. I hesitated. Without ceremony he pushed me in, climbed in after me, and pulled my arm to make me sit. He sat opposite me on the floor, crossing his legs, his sharp knees jutting from his smock. The whole thing was like a scene out of a bad movie about a mad scientist. In the cage too there were wires going everywhere, and he brought two together, which made a quiet, monotonous buzz. Meanwhile his voice spoke on the machine by the chair. Lax-Gugliborc reached behind him for two thick black collars. One of these he pulled over his head and around his neck, and gave me the other and indicated that I do likewise. Then he took a wire with an olive-shaped plug and put the plug in his ear, and again in pantomime told me to do the same. The tape recorder went on speaking, but in my ear I heard what he said to me.

  “Now we can talk. You may ask questions but only intelligent ones. No one will hear us. We are shielded. You are surprised? No need to be. Even the trusted are not trusted, and that’s as it should be.”

  “Can I talk?” I asked. We sat in the cage so close that our knees touched. The tape recorder jabbered on.

  “Go ahead. For every electronic device there is another electronic device. I know you from your books. The clutter here is just for decoration. You’ve been promoted to hero. The moon reconnaissance mission. You’re going.”

  “I’m going,” I said. He hardly moved his lips when he spoke, but I could hear him perfectly through the microphone.

  “Everyone knows that. A thousand people will assist you from Earth. The never-failing Lunar Agency. Except that it’s divided.”

  “The Agency?”

  “Yes. They’ll provide you with a series of remotes. But only one is worth anything. Mine. A completely new approach. Dust thou art, unto dust shalt thou return, then rise again. I’ll show it to you later. A demonstration. But first you’ll get a viaticum from me, tips for the traveler.”

  He raised a finger. His eyes, small and round behind the thick glasses, smiled at me with kindly cunning.

  “You’ll hear what they want you to hear, but I will tell you first what they don’t want you to hear. I’m a man of old-world principles. Now listen. The Agency is an international institution but it can’t hire angels. On the far perimeter, on Mars, say, you would have to act alone. One against Thebes. But on the moon you will be only the tip of the strategic pyramid, the Earth team supporting you beneath. Do you know who will be on that team?”

  “I know most of them. The Cybbilkis brothers, Tottentanz, Dr. Lopez. And Seltzer and the rest—what? What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head sadly. We must have looked pretty funny inside that big wire cage, with the constant insect buzz from the outside, from the tape, mixing with his voice.

  “Those people represent different interests. It can’t be otherwise.”

  “Whom can I trust?” I asked, understanding.

  “No one, going by what you will hear from me. Myself included. Yet you must confide in someone. That whole idea of the change of venue,” and he pointed at the ceiling, “and the doctrine of ignorance—it was stupid, of course. It had to end this way. If this is the end. They made their bed. The director told you about the four impossibilities made possible?”

  “He did.”

  “There’s a fifth. They want to learn the truth and don’t want to learn the truth. That is, not every truth. Each a different truth. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  We sat opposite each other on the floor but I heard him as if over the phone. And he me. The current buzzed, the machine kept talking, and he said, blinking often and with his hands on his knees:

  “I set this up to block the bugs. It doesn’t matter whose bugs or for whom. I want to do what I can because I believe I should. Common decency. Don’t bother to thank me. They will defend you—but it would be healthier to keep certain facts to yourself. You won’t be in a confessional. We don’t know what has happened on the moon. Sibelius and others like him believe that evolution up there has taken a step backward. The development of instinct instead of intelligence. An intelligent weapon is not an optimal weapon. It can become frightened, for example. Or stop wanting to be a weapon. It can get ideas. A soldier, living or nonliving, shouldn’t get ideas. Intelligence is the multidimensionality of action, and that means freedom. But there it’s completely different. The level of human intelligence has been surpassed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he who sows evolution reaps mind. And mind does not wish to serve anyone. Unless it must. And there is no must there. But I should not speak about what is or isn’t there because I do not know. What matters is what is here.”

  “Which is…?”

  “The Lunar Agency was supposed to have made it impossible to obtain information from the moon. Now it will do that once and for all. Which is why you are going. You return either with nothing or with news more destructive than the atom bomb. Which do you prefer?”

  “Hold on. Speak more plainly. Are you saying your colleagues represent other intelligence agencies? That they’re spies?”

  “No. But you could bring that about.”

  “1 could?”

  “Yes. The balance of power since the Geneva Agreement has been shaky. When you return, you may replace the old threats with new ones. You cannot play the savior of the world, the messenger of peace.”

  “Why not?”


  “The scheme of moving Earth’s conflicts to the moon was doomed in its inception. For how could it be otherwise? Arms control had been made impossible by microminiaturization. One can count missiles and satellites but not artificial bacteria. Or keep track of natural disasters that are not natural, or what is causing the decline in the population rate of the Third World. Which decline was necessary. Though it was impossible to do properly. You can take a couple of people aside and explain what’s good for them and what isn’t. But you can’t take all humanity aside and explain things, can you?”

  “What does this have to do with the moon?”

  “Just this, that destruction hasn’t been ended, only moved in space and time. And that cannot last forever. I have created a new technology which can be used in telematics. For the building of dispersants. Remotes capable of reversible dispersion. I didn’t want the Agency to have it, but what’s done is done.” He put up both hands in resignation.

  “One of my assistants showed it to them. I’m not sure which one, and it doesn’t really matter. When the pressure is great, there’s invariably a leak. Any loyalty has its limits.” He ran a hand over his shiny pate. The tape recorder was still talking. “I can do one thing: I can show that dispersion telematics isn’t ready yet. That I can do. For a year, let’s say. Eventually they’ll find out that I tricked them. Would you like me to do this?”

  “I have to decide? Why me?”

  “If you return with nothing, no one will be interested in you.”

  “True.”

  “But if you return with information, the consequences will be incalculable.”

  “For me personally? You want to save me? Out of kindness?”

  “No. To play for time.”

  “To put off learning about the moon? Then you don’t believe the moon will ever invade Earth? You think that’s just mass hysteria?”

  “Mass hysteria, or rumors intentionally spread by certain nations.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “To break the doctrine of ignorance and return to the old Clausewitz-style politics.”

  I was silent, not knowing what to say—or even what to think.

  “But that is only one man’s assumption,” I said finally.

  “Yes. The letter Einstein wrote to Roosevelt also was based on an assumption, that an atom bomb could be built. He regretted it to the end of his life.”

  “I understand—you don’t want to have such regrets?”

  “The atom bomb would have been developed with or without Einstein. My technology too. But the later, the better.”

  “Après nous le déluge?”

  “No, something else. This fear of the moon was created intentionally. Of that Pm certain. Returning from a successful mission, you’ll only be exchanging one fear for another. That other could be worse: more realistic.”

  “I see now. You want me to fail?”

  “Yes. But only if you agree to it.”

  “Why?”

  The nastiness suddenly left his little squirrel eyes. He was laughing, open-mouthed, soundlessly.

  “I told you why. I’m a man of old-world principles, and that means Fair Play. Please answer now, because my legs are starting to hurt.”

  “You could have put in a couple of cushions,” I said. “And as for that … dispersion technology, please give it to me.”

  “You don’t believe what I’ve said?”

  “I believe you, and that’s why I want it.”

  “To be a Herostrates?”

  “I’ll try not to bum the temple. Could we get out of this cage now?”

  The Mission

  Take-off was aborted eight times. Something went wrong at every countdown. It was the air conditioning, or a backup computer reporting a short circuit that wasn’t real, or a short circuit that was real but not reported by the main computer, and on the ninth countdown, when it looked like I’d be on my way at last, the Number 7 LEM balked. There I lay, swaddled and wrapped in tape that held a thousand sensors, like a mummy in a sarcophagus, my helmet shut, the laryngophone at my throat, and the tube of the orange juice container in my mouth. With one hand on the emergency ejector switch and the other on the steering wheel, I was trying to think of things pleasant and far away, so my heart wouldn’t pound, because it was being watched on screens by eight people along with my blood pressure, muscle tension, sweat level, eye movements, and galvanic skin response, all revealing the fear felt by the intrepid astronaut as he waits for the ritual zero and the thunder that will thrust him upward. But each time what I heard was profanity, in chief coordinator Wivitch’s voice, and the words “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I don’t know whether it was my ears or the microphones but his voice echoed as in an empty barrel; I said nothing, however, knowing that if I mentioned this, they’d examine the helmet and call in resonance experts and there would be no end to it.

  This last problem, called LEM’s Mutiny by the technicians, was really quite peculiar: from the diagnostic signals intended only to check out its systems the unit began moving, and when it was turned off, instead of stopping it shuddered and tried to get up. Like a mindless idol it struggled against its straps and nearly tore apart the harness, though they disconnected all the lines to it one by one and couldn’t figure out where the power was coming from. It must have been a leak of some sort in the current. Impedance, capacitance, resistance, susceptibility. When engineers don’t know what’s happening, their vocabulary takes on the richness of physicians discussing a hopeless case. As is well known, whatever can go wrong eventually will and in a unit of 298,000 circuits and chips no amount of redundancy can provide a hundred-percent certainty. A hundred-percent certainty, says Halevala, the oldest repairman, is provided only by a dead body, in that it won’t rise up. Halevala liked to say that God, creating the world, didn’t take statistics into account, and when problems started in Paradise He resorted to miracles but by then it was too late. Wivitch said that Halevala brought bad luck and asked the director to dismiss him. The director believed in bad luck but the Council didn’t, so the Finn, appealing the dismissal, kept his job. Such was the atmosphere in which I prepared myself for the Mission.

  I had no doubt that in lunar orbit too something would go wrong, though the simulations and inspections had been repeated ad nauseam. But of course I didn’t know when that would happen or into what sort of mess it would put me. At the next countdown everything went fine, but this time I pulled the plug, because my left leg fell asleep, too tightly wrapped, and I argued on the phone with Wivitch who said the pins and needles would pass and the tape shouldn’t be any looser. But I insisted, and they had to spend an hour and a half unwinding me from my cocoon. It turned out that someone—but of course no one confessed—had used a pipe-cleaning utensil to help pull the tape and it had been forgotten under the wrapping around my shin. I asked them to let the matter drop even though I could guess who had done it, since only one of them smoked a pipe. In heroic tales of space such things never happen. An astronaut does not get the runs, nor do the amenities malfunction so that his spacesuit fills with piss. Which actually happened to the first American astronaut in his suborbital flight but out of natural historical-patriotic delicacy NASA didn’t mention it to the press.

  The more care they take for your comfort, the more likely it is that some tangled bit of wire will dig under your arm or a buckle pinch in the worst possible place, driving you up the wall. When I once suggested they put remote scratchers inside the suit, they all thought it was a joke and laughed, except the seasoned astronauts who knew what I was talking about. It was I who discovered Tichy’s Law which says that the first itch occurs in a place on the body you can’t possibly reach. The itching stops only when something serious happens, because then your hair stands on end, your flesh crawls, and breaking into a cold sweat does the rest. True as this is, the authorities don’t want to hear it because it doesn’t rhyme well with One Giant Leap for Mankind. Can you imagine Armstrong climbing down the rungs of that first LEM an
d saying instead that his underwear was riding up? I’ve always thought that the people at Central Control who sit back in their chairs with a can of beer and give advice to the astronaut-turned-mummy, with their words of encouragement and support, should first put themselves in his shoes.

  The last two weeks I spent at the base were not pleasant. There were new attempts to remove Ijon Tichy. Even after the incident with the false Marilyn Monroe they didn’t tell me that my mail was being scanned by a special machine. The technology of epistolary terrorism is so developed that a charge able to blow the addressee to pieces can be placed inside a Christmas or birthday card wishing him health and happiness. It was only after a deadly letter from Professor Tarantoga almost put me out of the picture and I raised holy hell that they showed me the machine, an armored container with slanted steel slabs to absorb explosions. Each letter is opened by pincers and examined by x ray and ultrasound to trigger the detonator if there is one. The letter in question didn’t explode and Tarantoga had actually written it, so they brought it to me and I was saved thanks to my sense of smell. The envelope reeked of mignonette or lavender, which seemed strange to me, suspicious, because Tarantoga is the last person to use perfumed stationery. No sooner did I read the words “Dear Ijon” than I began to laugh and instantly realized that although I was laughing I was not amused, and since one does not laugh for no reason, I concluded, putting two and two together, that this laughter was not natural. I did a very prudent thing then, slipping the letter under the glass that covered my desk, to read it that way. And thank God I also had a runny nose, which I blew. The Council afterward debated whether I blew my nose automatically or from an instant insight, and I myself wasn’t sure. In any case this was why I inhaled only a very small amount of the drug with which the letter had been impregnated. It was a completely new drug. The laughter it produced was the overture to hiccups so persistent that they could be stopped only by a strong narcotic. I immediately phoned Lohengrin, who at first thought I was playing some joke because while I spoke, I roared with laughter. From the neurological standpoint laughter is the first stage of a hiccup. Finally the matter became clear, the letter was taken to the laboratory by two men in masks, and Dr. Lopez and his colleagues came and gave me oxygen. When I had subsided to a chuckle, they made me read all the lead articles in the newspapers of that day and the day before.