Peace on Earth it-5 Page 11

  I didn’t realize that during my absence the press as well as television had split in two. There are papers and programs that give all the news and those that give only the good news. Until now they had been feeding me the second kind, which is why at the base I had the impression that the world had truly improved after the signing of the Geneva Agreement. You would have thought that at least the pacifists were happy, but no. A book Dr. Lopez loaned me tells the story of our new society. The author shows that Jesus was a subversive sent to undermine Jewish unity with that love thy neighbor business, on the principle of divide and conquer, which worked, and which a little later brought down the Roman Empire. Jesus himself had no idea he was a subversive, and the apostles too were in the dark, having only the best intentions although everyone knows what is paved with good intentions. The author, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, says that anyone who proclaims brotherly love and peace on earth should be immediately arrested and interrogated to see what his agenda really is. So it’s not surprising that the pacifists have changed their tactics. Some have taken up the cause of delicious animals. There has nevertheless been no decline in the consumption of pork chops. Others urge solidarity with all living things, and in the German Bundestag eighteen seats were won by the Probacteria Party which says that microbes have as much right to live as we so instead of killing them with medicine we should alter them genetically to live not on humans but on something else. There is a real groundswell of good will, with disagreement only about who is standing in its way. But there is no disagreement that the enemies of brotherly love should be exterminated root and branch.

  At Tarantoga’s I saw an interesting new encyclopedia entitled The Lexicon of Fear. It used to be, says the book, that fear had its roots in the supernatural: in spells, witches, demons, heretics, atheists, black magic, ghosts, Bohemians, and abstract art, but in the industrial age fear shifted to things more concrete. There was fear of tomatoes (carcinogenic), aspirin (stomach bleeding), coffee (birth defects), butter (saturated fat), sugar, cars, television, discotheques, pornography, birth control pills, science, cigarettes, nuclear power plants, and higher education. I wasn’t surprised by the popularity of this encyclopedia. Professor Tarantoga is of the opinion that people need two things. First, an answer to the question “Who is responsible?” and second, to the question “What is the secret?” The first answer should be brief, obvious, and unambiguous. As for the second, scientists have been annoying everyone for two hundred years with their superior knowledge. How nice to see them baffled by the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, and the emotions of plants, and how satisfying it is when a simple middle-aged woman of Paris can see the whole future of the world while on that subject the professors are as ignorant as spoons.

  People, says Tarantoga, believe what they want to believe. Take astrology for instance. Astronomers, who after all should know more than anyone about the stars, tell us that they are giant balls of incandescent gas spinning since the world began and that their influence on our fate is considerably less than the influence of a banana peel, on which you can slip and break your leg. But there is no interest in banana peels, whereas serious periodicals include horoscopes and there are even pocket computers you can consult before you invest in the stock market to find out if the stars are favorable. Anyone who says that the skin of a fruit can have more effect on a person’s future than all the planets and stars combined won’t be listened to. An individual comes into the world because his father, say, didn’t withdraw in time, thereby becoming a father. The mother-to-be, seeing what happened, took quinine and jumped from the top of the dresser to the floor but that didn’t help. So the individual is born and he finishes school and works in a store selling suspenders, or in a post office. Then suddenly he learns that that’s not the way it was at all. The planets came into conjunction, the signs of the zodiac arranged themselves carefully into a special pattern, half the sky cooperated with the other half so that he could come into being and stand behind this counter or sit behind this desk. It lifts his spirits. The whole universe revolves around him, and even if things aren’t going well, even if the stars are lined up in such a way that the suspenders manufacturer loses his shirt and the individual consequently loses his job, it’s still more comforting than to know that the stars don’t really give a damn. Knock astrology out of his head, and the belief too that the cactus on his windowsill cares about him, and what is left? Barefoot, naked despair. So says Professor Tarantoga, but I see I am digressing.

  They shot me into orbit on the 27th of October, wrapped in sensor tape like an infant in swaddling clothes. From a height of four hundred miles I observed Mother Earth and could hear the engineers at the base cheering that this time it worked. My first stage, the main booster, separated as it was supposed to, above the Atlantic, on the dot, but the second got stuck and I had to help it. I think it fell in the Andes. After the traditional good lucks and safe trips I took over the controls myself and proceeded through the most hazardous zone on the way to the moon. You have no idea how many old satellites, civilian and military, are circling Earth. Something like eighteen thousand not counting the ones that have come apart, particularly dangerous because the pieces are almost too small for radar. And then there’s a lot of ordinary garbage in space, all kinds of waste products, especially radioactive, deposited here by jet. So I flew with extreme caution until space was properly empty. Only then did I unbuckle all the belts and start checking my LEMs.

  I turned on one after the other, seeing how each felt, seeing the interior of the bay through its crystal eyes. I had nineteen remotes, but the last one was by itself in a crate marked fruit juice to fool unauthorized persons. Inside the crate was a hermetically sealed cylinder, light blue, which housed a powdered remote, Professor Lax-Gugliborc’s top-secret creation, and I was to use it only as a last resort. I knew the principle of its operation but still don’t know whether I should reveal that yet. Nor do I want to turn this account into a Gynandroics catalog or a product list of the Lunar Agency’s teleferic division. LEM 5 started shivering when I turned it on. Since it was feedback-connected to me, I shivered too, as in a fever, teeth chattering. I was supposed to inform the base at once about such defects, but I didn’t because I knew from experience what would happen. They would immediately call in a whole army of mechanics, designers, engineers, and specialists in electronic pathology, who would be angry with me for making such a big deal out of light convulsions that might go away by themselves, and they would give me contradictory instructions, connect this, disconnect that, and how many amps to zap the poor thing with because electroshock can help machines as well as people. And that would produce some new, unpredicted response, and they would tell me to wait patiently while they ran simulations of the LEM, analog and digital, and of me too, as they argued with each other constantly and now and then told me to stay calm. The team would split into two or three camps like distinguished doctors in consultation. Perhaps they would have me climb into the bay with tools and open the LEM’s belly and train the hand camera on it since all the circuitry is there and not in the head which hasn’t room. So I’d be following the baton of the experts, and if it worked, they’d take the credit, and if it didn’t, I’d get the blame.

  But I was 100,000 miles from Earth now and increasingly glad I had kept quiet about the problem, because soon there would be more than a second’s delay in communicating with the base and I’d be sure to bust something, precise movements are difficult when you’re weightless, a spark would tell them I’d caused a short, and then there would be a chorus of sour remarks. Tichy’s screwed it up, they’d say, there’s nothing we can do. So I had spared both them and myself that aggravation.

  The nearer I got to the moon, the more unnecessary the advice and cautions I was receiving over the radio, until finally I said that if they didn’t stop bothering me, I’d turn the damned thing off. I knew the moon like the palm of my hand from the days when they were considering turning it into a Disneyland. I circled
it three times in high orbit and over the Oceanus Procellarum began a slow descent. On one side I could see the Mare Imbrium and on the other the crater Eratosthenes, then Murchison and the Sinus Medi all the way to the Mare Nubium. I was now so low that the continuation of the moon’s pock-marked surface was hidden from me. I was at the lower boundary of the Zone of Silence. So far nothing unexpected had happened if you don’t count the two empty beer cans that came to life during my maneuvers. When I braked, the cans — as usual discarded in haste by our technicians — manifested themselves and began flying around the cabin, hitting the walls and my head. A greenhorn would have tried to catch them. I changed orbit and flew above the Taurus mountains. When the great Sea of Serenity stretched out before me, I was hit in the back of my helmet so sharply that I jumped. It was a tin of salted crackers that probably had gone with the beer. The base heard the noise and immediately there were questions, but I lied, explaining that I had tried to scratch my head and forgot both helmet and bulky glove. No point in getting the technicians in trouble. They always leave stuff in rockets. It’s like a law of nature.

  I flew through the zone of internal control without difficulty, because its satellites had been told by Earth to let me pass. It wasn’t in the program, but I braked hard a few times to dislodge any other mementos from the assembly-and-inspection crews. A comic book stuffed in the reserve selenography drawer fluttered out like an enormous moth. Taking a quick inventory — two beer cans, a cracker tin, a comic book — I concluded that there would be more surprises in store and I would have to stay alert.

  I surveyed the moonscape through twenty-power binoculars, but it looked lifeless, uninhabited, empty. I knew that the computer arsenals in the different sectors were a good hundred feet below sea level, sea level meaning those great plains created long ago by lava flows. The arsenals had been set so deep to protect them from meteors. Nevertheless I looked with particular care at the Mare Vaporum, the Mare Tranquillitatis, and the Mare Fecunditatus (the old astronomers who named these plains of stone had some imagination), then circled the Mare Crisium and the Mare Frigoris, thinking I might see a little movement there. I had excellent binoculars and could count the gravel on the slopes of the craters, or at least rocks the size of a person’s head, but nothing stirred and that was what intrigued me. Where were those legions of armed robots, hosts of intelligent tanks, steel giants and equally death-dealing Lilliputians which had been constantly spawning for years beneath the surface? I saw nothing but stones and craters ranging from very large to small as a plate, trenches in the shiny ancient magma radiating out from Copernicus, the Huygens fault, the pole, Archimedes toward Cassini, Plato on the horizon, and everywhere the same incomprehensible desolation. Along the meridian marked by Flamsteed, Herodotus, and Rümker and through the Sinus Roris ran the widest strip of the no man’s land, and that was where I was supposed to land the first remote after putting the ship into selenosynchronous orbit. They hadn’t given me an exact spot; I was to decide that myself, choosing the safest place. Though there was no indication here, none whatever, of safety or danger. To go into selenosynchronous orbit I had to ascend, and maneuvered and maneuvered until the whole enormous sunlit moon below me stopped moving, at which point I was directly over Flamsteed, a very old crater, shallow and almost filled with volcanic tuff. I hung there a while, maybe half an hour, looking down at the rubble and deliberating.

  The remotes didn’t need rockets to land. They had little braking nozzles on their legs, and gyroscopes. I could take one down at any speed I liked, using the leg jets, which could be kicked off easily after touching down, the jets and the empty fuel tank. From that moment on the remote was forever moonbound, unable to return. It was neither robot nor android, having not a thought in its head; it was, rather, a tool, an extension of me, incapable of the least initiative. And yet I was uncomfortable thinking that no matter what the outcome of my reconnaissance it was doomed, because I would have to leave it behind in this dead wilderness. It even occurred to me that maybe LEM 7 had faked its malfunction to get out of this in one piece. A ridiculous thought, because I knew perfectly well that Number 7, like all the other LEMs, was but a man-shaped shell. But this gives you some idea of my state of mind.

  There was no reason to wait any longer. I examined carefully one more time the gray plateau I’d chosen for the landing, roughly estimating its distance from the northern edge of Flamsteed, then put the ship on automatic and pushed button number one. The leap of all my senses, though expected and indeed experienced so many times before, was violent. I was no longer sitting in a deep chair in front of the blinking lights of the computers and holding my binoculars, but lying on my back in a bunk as cramped as a coffin and open on only one side. I worked my way out, looked down and saw dull-gray armor, a trunk, thighs, and shins of steel, the retrojets strapped to them like holsters. I straightened slowly, feeling my magnetic shoes cling to the metal floor. Around me, in stacked bunks like the one in which I had been lying, lay the other remotes, all motionless. I could hear my own breathing but did not feel my chest moving. With difficulty I pulled first my left, then my right foot from the floor of the bay and walked to the handrail at the hatch, stood with my arms in so they wouldn’t hit an edge when I was pushed down by the ejector and went hurtling, and waited for the countdown. After a few seconds I heard the lifeless voice of the timer: “Twenty … nineteen ...” I counted with it, calm now because there was no turning back. But I couldn’t help tensing a little when we reached “zero” and something soft but powerful shoved me into the open well so that I went flying like a stone. Lifting my head, I was able to see for a moment the dark shape of the ship against the darker background of the sky with its myriad dots of dimly glowing stars. As the ship disappeared in the black horizon, I felt a strong push at my feet and was wrapped in pale flame. With the retros firing, I fell much slower, but the moon still increased in size, as if trying to pull me in and devour me. Feeling the heat of the flame in uneven waves through my thick steel, I kept my arms in and, craning my neck, watched the fields of rubble, now gray-green, and the sandy slopes of Flamsteed grow before my eyes. When no more than three hundred feet separated me from the crater, I reached for the control stick at my belt and applied thrust carefully to brake more and shift direction, avoiding a great jagged rock. I aimed in order to land in sand, with both feet, but something flashed above me. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, looked up, and was dumbfounded.

  White against the black sky and no more than thirty feet above me, a man in a heavy spacesuit descended, wrapped from feet to waist in the pale flame of retrojets and with his hand on the control stick at his belt. He fell, slowing, his body straight, until he was even with me, and hit the ground at the exact moment I felt it under my own feet. We stood five or six steps apart, like two statues, as though he too was astounded not to be alone. He was exactly my height. Gray smoke from the nozzles by his knees curled around his large moon boots. I sensed he was staring at me, though I couldn’t see his face behind the shaded glass of his white helmet. My head was in a whirl. At first I thought this must be remote Number 2 which had been pushed from the ship after me by mistake, a malfunction, but then I saw the large black #1 on its chest. But that was my number, and I was pretty sure there were no other Number 1s on board. I stepped forward to see his face through the glass, and at the same time he stepped toward me. When we were quite close, I froze and my hair stood on end because I could see through the glass now and there was no one inside. In the helmet, two small black bars pointing at me, nothing more. I shrank back and lost my balance and almost fell, forgetting that one has to move slowly in low gravity, and he did exactly the same. I began to understand. I held my control stick in my right hand; he held his in his left. When I raised my hand slowly, so did he, and when I moved my leg, so did he, therefore it was clear (although nothing really was clear) that this was my mirror image. To make sure, I forced myself to approach him, and he approached me, until our suits practically met. Slowly
, as if reaching to touch a hot iron, I put my hand on his chest and he did likewise to me, I with my right and he with his left. My large five-fingered glove went through him, disappearing, and his hand disappeared in me up to the wrist. I had no doubt now that I was alone and standing in front of a reflection, though there was no trace of a mirror to be seen. We stood there, and I began to look not at him but at his surroundings and noticed, behind him and to the side, a jagged rock jutting from the gray sand, the same rock I had avoided a minute ago while landing. But the rock was behind me, of that I was absolutely certain, thus I faced not only my own image but the image of everything around me. Now I looked for the place where the mirroring ended, because it had to end somewhere and merge with the shallow dunes, but I could not find the boundary, the seam. Not knowing what to do next, I retreated, and he too went backward like a crab, until we were so far apart that he seemed a little smaller. Then, I don’t know why, I turned and walked toward the low sun which blinded me in spite of my antiglare glass. Taking thirty or forty steps with that uncertain ducklike waddle one can’t avoid on the moon, I stopped and looked back at myself. He stood at the top of a small dune and, sure enough, had turned to face me.

  Further experiments were unnecessary. I may have stood there like an idiot but my brain was working feverishly. It dawned on me, only now, that the reconnaissance probes sent by the Lunar Agency to the moon had been armed. No one ever said anything specific about that, and I stupidly didn’t inquire further. But of course: If the probes were armed with lasers, their sudden silence after landing might have a simple explanation. I had to find out what kind of lasers, but how? There was no direct communication between me and the base on Earth, only via the ship that hung high above me in stationary orbit. I was indeed on that ship in my physical person, but standing in the Flamsteed crater here as a remote. To talk to Control, I had to turn my transmitter back on, having deliberately switched it off just before leaving the ship so they wouldn’t ruin my concentration during the descent with their advice which no doubt would have come thick and fast had I remained in radio contact with them according to instructions. So I turned the volume knob on my chest and called Earth. The response would come with a three-second delay, I knew, and those seconds seemed like ages. At last I heard the voice of Wivitch. He had a million questions but I told him to be quiet, saying only that I had landed without mishap and was at the target 000 and nothing was attacking me. On the subject of the other remote I was silent.