Peace on Earth it-5 Page 15

  “Hello,” came his voice. “Hello… Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I said without much enthusiasm.

  “Come over here… I have a radio too!” That sounded pretty idiotic, but I went to him. There was something military in the style of his suit. Shining metal bands across his chest. His hands held nothing. Well, that was something, I thought, approaching but more slowly. He came toward me and lifted his arms in a simple gesture of greeting an old friend.

  “Welcome! Welcome! How good of you to come at last! We can talk… you and I together… about bringing peace to the world…”

  He spoke in an effusive, vibrant, strangely penetrating voice as he came toward me through the deep sand, arms held out, and his whole bearing expressed such cordiality that I didn’t know what to think. He was now only a few steps from me, the dark glass of his helmet blazing with the sun. He embraced me, hugged me, and we stood that way on the gray slope. I tried to see his face but saw nothing, even as close as a hand’s breadth, because the glass was opaque. It wasn’t even glass, more a mask covered with glass. How could he see me then?

  “You’ll feel at home here with us, old friend…” He bumped my helmet with his as if trying to kiss me on both cheeks. “At home… we don’t want war, we are peace-loving, meek, you’ll see…” And with that he kicked me so hard that I fell on my back, and jumped on me, both knees in my stomach. I saw stars, literally, the stars of the black lunar sky, while my “friend” held my head down with his left hand and with his right pulled off his metal bands which themselves twisted into horseshoe hoops. I said nothing, dazed, as he fastened my arms to the ground one at a time with the hoops, driving them in with powerful, unhurried blows of his fist, and continued:

  “At home, old friend… We’re simple folk, kind, I like you and you like me, old friend…”

  “And not ‘my brother’?” I asked, now unable to move either arms or legs.

  “Brother?” he said thoughtfully, as if trying out the word. “So be it, brother! I’m good, you’re good, brother for brother!”

  He stood, quickly and expertly tapped my sides, legs, found my pockets, took out everything I had, the flat box of tools, the Geiger counter, the folding shovel, and frisked me again, harder this time, especially under the arms, and tried to work his fingers into the top of my boots, and during this careful search of my person not for a moment did he stop talking.

  “My brother, you said. Maybe yes, maybe no. Did one mother give birth to us? Ah, mother. Motherhood. Mother is a saint, and you’re a saint too, brother, no weapon on you, none. A clever brother… just taking a little stroll, to pick mushrooms. Lots of boletus here, but the forest is hard to see. Yes, old friend… I’ll make it better for you soon, all better. We’re simple folk, meek, and we will inherit the earth.”

  He took a kind of flat knapsack off his back and opened it. Sharp instruments gleamed. He hefted one in his hand, put it back, selected another, powerful shears like the cutters used by soldiers in battle to get through barbed wire, and turned to me, the blades sparkling in the sun. He sat on my stomach, lifted the tool, and with the words “To your health” thrust it into my chest. It hurt but not much. Evidently my remote had pain dampers. I knew that this lunar friend of mine would open me like a fish and that I should return to the ship and leave him the body to cut up, but I was so fascinated by the contrast between his words and his actions that I lay as if mesmerized.

  “Why don’t you speak?” he said, slicing through my suit with a crackling sound. Excellent shears, made of incredibly hard steel.

  “I can say something?” I asked.

  “Go ahead!”

  “Hyena.”

  “What?”

  “Jackal.”

  “You insult me, my friend? Not nice. Not friend but enemy. Treacherous. You came here unarmed to confuse me. I wished you well, but an enemy must be searched. My duty. That’s the rule. I was attacked. With no declaration of war you stepped upon this sacred ground. Your own fault. My brother, hah. Brother of a dog! Worse than a dog, and you’ll regret calling me hyena and jackal, but not for long, because memory ends with life.”

  The last of my chest welds gave way, and he began to break and pry apart things. He looked inside and hmmed.

  “Interesting little gadgets,” he said, getting up. “Fancy stuff. Our experts will figure it out. You wait here. But where can you go? Nowhere. You’re ours now, my friend!”

  The ground shook. Turning my head to the side as far as I could, I saw others like him. They marched in formation, goose-stepping the dust up. My executioner stood at attention, preparing to make his report, I supposed.

  “Tichy, answer, where are you?” roared in my ears. “The sound is back. Wivitch here. Control. Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  Some of this must have been overheard by the soldiers, because they broke into a run.

  “Do you know what sector you’re in?” Wivitch asked.

  “Yes. I’ve just realized. They’ve taken me prisoner! I’m cut open!”

  “Which country?” Wivitch began, but my executioner drowned him out.

  “Emergency!” he shouted. “Seize him!”

  “Tichy!” cried Wivitch from far away. “Don’t let them take you!”

  I understood. Letting Earth’s latest technology fall into robot hands was to be avoided at all cost. I couldn’t move even a finger, but there was still a way. I bit down as hard as I could, heard a snap like an overwound spring, and was plunged into total darkness. Instead of sand under my back was the soft upholstery of my chair. I was on the ship. A little dizzy, I couldn’t find the right button immediately, but then saw it. I broke the plastic cover and hit the red button with my fist so the remote would not be examined by them. Below, a pound of ecrasite blew it to smithereens. I felt sorry for the LEM but I had to do it. And so ended the second reconnaissance.

  CARNAGE

  Of the next ten landings I have memories as fragmentary as they are unpleasant. The third reconnaissance lasted the longest, three hours, even though I came down in the middle of a pitched battle between robots that looked like prehistoric lizards. They were so busy fighting, they didn’t notice me when I descended on the battlefield in a halo of fire, white as an angel though without wings. Still aloft, I understood why this region had seemed empty from the ship. The robots were camouflaged; on their backs they had a knobby design that was like scattered stones in sand. They slithered with terrible speed. At first I didn’t know what to do; there were no bullets whizzing past, no explosives, but the laser flashes were blinding. I lumbered quickly to some large white rocks, because this was the only cover in reach. Peering out from behind a boulder, I watched the battle.

  I couldn’t tell who was fighting whom. The lizard robots, which resembled caimans, were attacking up a shallow slope in my direction, hopping. But the enemy seemed to be among them, in their ranks, perhaps the enemy had parachuted in, because I saw some lizards struggling with others and they looked exactly the same. At one point three that were pursuing one came quite close. They caught it but couldn’t hold it because it shook off all its legs and escaped, writhing like a snake. I hadn’t expected such primitive combat, with tails and legs being torn off, and I waited for them to get around to me, but somehow in the heat of battle I was ignored. A line of soldiers advanced on the slope, spitting laser fire from mouths funnel-shaped like blunderbusses. But something odd was happening higher up on the slope. The robots in front, covered by the fire of those behind, slowed about halfway up and began to change color. Their sandy backs darkened, then were covered with gray smoke as though from an invisible flame, and then they ignited. But there were no flashes from the other side, so it could hardly have been lasers. The slope was now strewn with charred and melted machines, but new troops came and went rushing to their doom.

  It was only when I turned on my telesights that I saw what they were attacking. At the top of the hill was something huge and unmoving like
a fortress, but a peculiar fortress because it was all mirrors. Or maybe not mirrors but screens of some kind, which in the top half showed the black sky with stars and in the bottom the sandy slope strewn with debris. Unless they were both mirrors and screens at the same time. The lasers had no effect on the fortress, were deflected, meanwhile lower, where the biggest pile of robot corpses lay, the temperature of the rock was over three and a half thousand degrees according to the bolometer in my helmet. A force field heating by induction or something like that, I thought, pressing tight to the boulder that was my shield. The lizards attacked, and the mirror-screen thing surrounded itself with an invisible wall of heat, fine, meanwhile what was I supposed to do, defenseless as an infant caught in a wave of charging tanks? I didn’t have to report all this to Control because my third remote was followed by a special rocket that looked like an ordinary rock. It impersonated a meteor, except that this meteor didn’t fall but hung two miles above me.

  Something touched my thigh. I looked down and froze. It was one of the legs of the robot that a moment ago had turned into a snake. The leg had inched its way to the boulder where I was hiding and had come upon me. In this blindly twitching thing with three sharp claws and sandy camouflage there was something both repulsive and pathetic. It tried to attach itself to my thigh but of course couldn’t, finding no purchase. I picked it up with disgust and threw it as far from me as I could. It came back. So instead of observing the battle I had to fight with that leg, because it was trying to climb up me again, ineffectually, as if it was drunk. And now the others will come, I thought, and the situation will be really ridiculous. I threw it. At least Control was silent, because any conversation might be overheard, which would be bad for me. Crouching in the shadow of my boulder, I gripped my shovel and waited for the leg, and thought darkly that all I needed was for the damned thing to have some radio transmitter too. Contracting and lengthening in turn, it reached my knees because I was kneeling, and I held it down with one hand and with the other started chopping with the shovel. Instead of taking notes on robot warfare Ijon Tichy sits on the moon making lizard-leg hamburger. Wonderful. Finally I must have hit a sensitive spot because it rolled over and stiffened. I got up then and peered around the boulder.

  The laser-shooters had fallen, and I could hardly distinguish the individual robots, their gray blending into the surroundings. But now up the slope came, from where I don’t know, a spider as big as a shack and listing like a ship at sea. Flat as a turtle on top, it wavered on its many widespread legs, the knees higher than itself on both sides, but it proceeded methodically, heavily, carefully placing those many-jointed stilts, and approached the wall of heat. I was curious to see what would happen. Under its belly something long and dark, almost black, came into view, probably a weapon of some kind. The spider stopped at the wall of heat and stood awhile, as if thinking. All action stopped. The only thing I could hear was high squeaking in my helmet, a signal in some incomprehensible code. A strange battle, for it was primitive, resembling the struggle of Mesozoic dinosaurs on Earth millions of years ago, but at the same time it was sophisticated, because these lizards had not hatched from reptilian eggs but were robots armed with lasers and packed with electronics. The giant spider now hunkered down, its belly touching the ground, and seemed to close in upon itself. I heard nothing, but of course even if the very moon were to split open you would hear no sound, however the ground shook once, twice, three times. The tremors became continuous, till everything around me, and myself, shook with an increasingly intense vibration. The dunes in the distance strewn with the bodies of gray lizards, the slope facing me, and the black sky above it, I saw everything as through trembling glass. The outlines of objects blurred, even the stars on the horizon winked as on Earth, and I shook feverishly, like a tuning fork, and so did the boulder I clutched. I shook in every bone and finger, more and more violently, as if every part of my being were quivering jelly. The vibration was painful now, like a thousand microscopic drills at once. I tried pushing away from the boulder, to stand separate, because then it would reach me only through the soles of my boots, but I couldn’t move, my hands were paralyzed, I only watched, half-blind, as the giant spider drew itself into a dark bristling ball like a real spider dying under a magnifying glass that focuses the sun. Then everything went black and I was falling into an abyss, until I opened my eyes, covered with sweat, my throat tight, and saw the bright, friendly colors of the control panel. I had returned to the ship. Apparently a safety mechanism disconnected me at a certain level of discomfort. I rested a minute, then decided to go back, although with the hideous feeling that I might be entering a corpse. Carefully I pushed the lever, as if it could burn me, and found myself again on the moon and in the all-consuming vibration. Before the safety mechanism threw me on the ship again I saw, though not that clearly, a great mound of black fragments that were slowly rumbling down. The fortress fell, I thought, and again was back in my own body. But the fact that the remote hadn’t come apart gave me the courage to try it one more time.

  Nothing shook now. All was deathly still. Among the charred lizards lay the ruins of the mysterious fortress that had blocked the way to the top of the hill. The spider that had destroyed it using resonance lay in a ball of twitching legs which straightened and bent, straightened and bent, movements that grew slower until they stopped completely. A Pyrrhic victory? I waited for another advance but nothing moved. If I hadn’t seen what I had seen, I might not even have noticed the burnt debris that littered the whole field, it blended in so with the sand. I tried to rise but couldn’t. I was not even able to move a hand. At most I managed to tilt my head in the helmet so I could see myself.

  It was not a pretty sight. The boulder that had served me as a shield was split into large pieces and those were covered with a network of hairline cracks. My legs or rather what remained of them were stuck in rubble. The poor remote was an armless, legless torso. I had the eerie sensation that my head was on the moon and my body was on the ship, because even as I saw the battlefield under the black sky, I felt the seat and shoulder belts of my chair. The chair was with me yet not with me because I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t hard to figure out the reason: the remote’s sensors, without incoming data, shut down so I remained in contact only with the head which, protected by the helmet, had survived the murderous moonquake caused by the spider. Nothing more for me to do here, I thought. But I stayed, half in half out of the rubble, and looked over the sunlit field.

  In the distance something was flapping in the sand, sluggishly, like a fish on a beach. One of the lizard robots. Sand rolled off its back as it hauled itself into a sitting position like a kangaroo or dinosaur, and it sat there, the last witness of a battle that no one won. The robot turned toward me and suddenly began to spin, and spun so fast, the centrifugal force made its long tail fly off. I watched, amazed, while it whirled now like a top, until pieces flew in all directions and it fell flat, flopped over a few times, and with a final somersault landed on the other bodies and was still. Although I had attended no lecture on the theory of electronic expiring, I knew that this was what I had just seen, it was so like the death spasms of a crushed beetle or caterpillar. We know how their death looks but cannot know if those last spasms signify suffering. I had had enough of this. I felt, in a way difficult to describe, that I was involved in it, even responsible. But because I hadn’t come to the moon to philosophize on moral questions, I bit down hard to disconnect myself from the pitiful remnant of LEM 3 and in the blink of an eye was back on board to tell Control what had happened this time.

  INVISIBLE

  Tarantoga, to whom I showed these notes, said that I describe all who worked on my mission and kept watch over me as either idiots or bunglers. Whereas the General Theory of Systems proves mathematically that there exists no element or part that is infallible, and even if you reduce fallibility to one in a million, in other words provide that a given part will break down only once in a million times, a system containing a mil
lion parts must fail because one of the million will fail. But the lunar system I belonged to was made up of not one but eighteen million components, therefore the idiot bungler responsible for the majority of my problems was the world, because if all the experts stood on their heads and were geniuses every one, the situation could only be worse, never better. Probably true. On the other hand, I was the one who suffered as a result of all those unavoidable breakdowns, and anyway psychologically, when you’re in a fix, you don’t curse the atoms or electrons but specific individuals so my radio tantrums were also unavoidable.

  Control pinned their hopes on the last LEM because it was a miracle of technology and guaranteed the maximum safety. It was a remote in powdered form. Instead of a steel athlete you had a container filled with microscopic grains, each grain of such concentrated intelligence it rivaled a supercomputer. In the presence of certain impulses these particles came together to form a LEM. I could land as a thin cloud of molecules, could coalesce if necessary in the form of a robot of human shape, but I could just as easily become one of forty-nine other programmed things, and even if eighty-five percent of the grains were destroyed, the rest would be enough to carry on. The science behind such a remote, called a dispersant, was so advanced that Einstein, von Neumann, the entire physics department of M.I.T., and Rabindranath Tagore working together would have had a problem with it, so I didn’t even try to figure it out. All I knew was that they’d embodied me in thirty billion separate particles, particles more versatile than the cells of a living organism, and there was unimaginable redundancy for joining these in various combinations which could all be turned back to dust at the push of a button, dust so scattered you couldn’t see it, and each particle incorporating stealth technology, making it undetectable by radar or laser or anything except gamma rays. If I was ambushed I could disperse myself, retreat, and reform in whatever way I liked. What one experiences as a cloud spread over several thousand cubic feet is impossible to put into words. To know it, you have to be such a cloud. If I lost my vision, or to be more precise my optical sensors, I could replace them with any other organ, and the same for arms, legs, tentacles, tools. I just had to be careful not to become lost in the wealth of possibilities. This time, I would have only myself to blame if I failed. The scientists thus washed their hands of responsibility if the remote malfunctioned. I can’t say this made me happy.