Peace on Earth Page 17

  “And?” I said, because he had paused.

  “Some is the truth, some confabulation. But not done by design. You believed both what was in your report and what you put down here. When there are gaps in the memory, it is natural for a person to fill them in. One does it quite unconsciously. Anyway we don’t really know if your right brain contains a treasure.”

  “Which means?”

  “The callotomy might not have been an accident.”

  “What then?”

  “A maneuver to divert attention.”

  “By the moon?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Is this really so crucial?” I asked. “The Agency can always send more scouts.”

  “And has. You returned after six weeks. Once the diagnosis was made—your callotomy, I mean—three more people were sent.”

  “And they didn’t succeed?”

  “They succeeded in returning. All of them. Unfortunately…”

  “Yes?”

  “Their experiences were totally different from yours.”

  “Totally?”

  “It’s better for you not to know the details.”

  “But you know them, so you too, Professor Shapiro, are in danger,” I said with a smile. He nodded philosophically.

  “The scientists have a hundred different theories, but there’s general agreement that the classical remotes were no surprise to the moon. The surprise was the molecular remote, your final remote. But now this too the moon is aware of.”

  “Which means?”

  “You’ve probably already figured it out. You penetrated farther than the ones who followed you.”

  “The moon put on a show for them?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “And not for me?”

  “You got through the stage sets, at least partly.”

  “Why did they let me return?”

  “In their strategic game, it was the optimal solution to the problem. You returned, the mission completed, and at the same time did not return or complete your mission. Had you not returned at all, the Security Council would have voted against further reconnaissance.”

  “And instead, to destroy the moon?”

  “Not destroy so much as neutralize.”

  “That’s something new to me. How is it done?”

  “There’s a way. Incredibly expensive, since it’s a completely new technology. I don’t know the details. It’s better not to know them.”

  “You must have picked up something…” I muttered. “It would have to be a post-atomic technology in any case. No warheads or rockets, something more discreet. Something the moon would not be able to detect in time…”

  “For a man with only half a brain, you’re not stupid. But let’s get back to the subject, that is, to you.”

  “You want me to agree to be examined? By the Agency? Let them give my right hemisphere the third degree?”

  “It’s more complicated than you think. We have, besides your report and the tapes of the mission, certain hypotheses. One says that the individual sectors on the moon are at war. That they have not united, neither for the destruction of some by others nor to plan an attack on Earth.”

  “What exactly has happened, then?”

  “If we knew exactly, I wouldn’t have to bother you. The barriers between the sectors definitely failed. The military games have engaged each other. It’s produced unprecedented effects.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m no expert on this, but as far as I know, there are no experts on this. We’re at the mercy of conjecture under the banner of, if you’ll pardon my Latin, Ceterum censeo humanitatem preservandam esse.”

  “What is it you want of me?”

  “Nothing at the moment. You are, excuse the metaphor, a man with the plague before there were antibiotics. I came to see you because I insisted. They finally agreed. You are sort of a last resort. Who unfortunately multiplied the possibilities of what is happening on the moon. Speaking plainly, after your return we know less, not more.”

  “Less?”

  “Of course less. We’re not even sure that your right brain contains any critical information. The number of unknowns has increased.”

  “You speak like an oracle.”

  “The Lunar Agency transported to the moon and placed into sectors what it was supposed to under the Geneva Agreement. But the computer programs of that first generation remained the secret of the participating nations. The Agency wasn’t privy to them.”

  “So it was wild cards from the very beginning?”

  “Of course, because of the world’s antagonisms. The question is, is it possible to tell the difference between a program that after a few decades derails from the safeties installed by its designers and a program designed to derail in a certain way?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps computer scientists could tell.”

  “No, no one can tell except those who wrote the programs.”

  “Professor Shapiro,” I said, getting up and going to the window. “I have the impression that you are drawing me into a web. The more we talk, the cloudier the subject becomes. What has happened on the moon? We don’t know. What I experienced there, was it real? We don’t know. What was the reason for this damned callotomy of mine? We don’t know. Does half of my brain hold important information? We don’t know. I most respectfully ask you to get to the point.”

  “Most respectfully. You have been treated most respectfully up to now.”

  “Because it was in the Agency’s interest, and perhaps in the interest of others as well. Or are you telling me I was saved and protected out of the goodness of your hearts?”

  “No. Goodness doesn’t enter into it. As I said before, the stakes are too high. So high, that had we been able to extract what we want from you by torturing you to death, that would have been done long ago.”

  An unexpected thought came to me. I turned, my back to the now dark window, and smiled, crossing my arms on my chest.

  “Thank you, professor. Only now do I understand who has really been protecting me all this time.”

  “But I told you.”

  “But I know better. It is they…” And opening the window, I pointed at the moon rising above the trees, a sharp white crescent against the dark blue sky.

  The professor said nothing.

  “It must have something to do with my landing,” I went on. “With the fact that I went down myself to take what the last remote found, which I could do because there was a spacesuit and lander in the bay. They put them there just in case, and I used them. True, I don’t remember what happened to me when I stood on the moon with my own two feet. I remember and don’t remember. I found the remote but I don’t think it was the molecular one. I remember that I knew why I came down: not to save it, which was impossible and made no sense, but to take something. A sample? Of what? That’s what I can’t recall. The callotomy itself I either didn’t feel or don’t remember, as with amnesia after a concussion, but when I returned to the ship and put my spacesuit back into its special closet, I remember how it was covered with a fine, soft powder. A strange powder, dry between your fingers, like salt, yet difficult to wipe off your hands. It wasn’t radioactive. But I washed as if it had been. Later I didn’t even try to find out what the stuff was, though I didn’t have the opportunity anyway to ask such questions. When I learned that my brain had been severed, I was too taken up with that trouble to think about my hour on the moon. Did you hear anything about that powder? Like talcum. Anyway, I brought something back … but what?”

  My visitor squinted at me through his pince-nez, poker-faced.

  “You’re warm,” he said. “Even hot… Yes, you brought back something… That’s probably why you returned alive despite your landing.”

  He got up and came to where I stood. We both looked at the moon, innocent and bright among the stars.

  “The molecular LEMs remained behind,” my visitor said as if to himself. “But, let us hope, destroyed bey
ond duplication! You destroyed your own although you didn’t know it, when you went to the bay for your spacesuit. That activated the autodestruct program. I can tell you this now because it no longer matters.”

  “For a neurological consultant you are remarkably well informed,” I said, my eyes still on the moon as it went behind a cloud. “Perhaps you even know what came back with me. Was that their micropes, that powder so unlike ordinary sand?…”

  “No. As far as I know, just silicon-based polymers.”

  “And not a virus?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is it so important?”

  “Because it accompanied you back.”

  “The spacesuit closet lost its hermetic seal?”

  “No. Most likely you inhaled some of the particles while in the rocket, getting out of your suit.”

  “And they’re in me?”

  “I don’t know if they still are. The fact that it wasn’t normal moon dust we learned when you ran off to Australia.”

  “Ah! Every place I’ve been has been put under a microscope?”

  “More or less.”

  “And … they were found?”

  He nodded. We were standing at the window, and the moon sailed through the clouds.

  “Does everybody know?”

  “Everybody?”

  “All the interested parties…”

  “Probably not yet. At the Agency, only a few people, and in the clinical department only I.”

  “Why did you tell me?”

  “You were on the track of it yourself, besides I want you to understand the situation.”

  “My situation?”

  “Yours and in general.”

  “So they’re keeping me under observation?”

  “I don’t know to what extent. There are different levels of secrecy here. Based on what I’ve heard from a couple of friends, completely off the record, research is still in progress and they haven’t yet ruled out the possibility that those particles are in contact with the moon…”

  “What kind of contact? Radio?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Another means of communication?”

  “I flew here to ask you a few questions and you’re grilling me.”

  “You said you came to fill me in on my situation.”

  “But I can’t answer questions to which I don’t know the answers.”

  “In a nutshell, then, I have been protected so far by the possibility that the moon is interested in my fate and can step in…?”

  Shapiro didn’t answer. The room was dark. He walked over and turned on the light, which hurt my eyes and also brought me back to earth. I pulled the curtain, took a decanter and two glasses from the bar, and poured what was left of the sherry. I gave him a glass, pointed to the armchair, and sat down.

  “Chi va piano, va sano,” the professor said unexpectedly. Only wetting his lips with the sherry, he put the glass on the desk and sat down with a sigh. “Human beings always proceed according to a model,” he said. “In a case like this, however, there are no models. And yet we must act, because no good will come of procrastination. Nor does guesswork help us any. As a neurologist I can say this much: There is short-term memory and long-term memory. The short-term turns into long-term if there are no violent disruptions. It is hard to imagine a disruption more violent than the severing of the great commissure! Therefore what happened just before and immediately after that event does not exist in your memory. As for the warfare on the moon, we don’t even know who is attacking and who is defending. No nation will ever admit that its programmers didn’t follow the directives of the Geneva Agreement, which everyone signed. But even if one of those programmers came forward and confessed, it would be of little use, because neither he nor anyone else knows what course things have taken on the moon. And you … are about as safe in this asylum as in a den of lions. You think I exaggerate? In any case you won’t be here forever.”

  “A long conversation,” I said, “and yet we go in circles. What you want is for me to put myself in your hands?” I tapped the right side of my head.

  “I think you should. I personally doubt that it will help either you or the Agency that much, but I see nothing better.”

  “Your skepticism may be only to disarm me…” I muttered to myself as if thinking aloud. “Are the effects of a callotomy absolutely irreversible?”

  “If it was done surgically, the severed white matter would definitely not grow back. But your skull, I believe, was not cut into…?”

  “I see,” I answered after a moment of thought. “You offer the hope that something different could have happened to me. Either to tempt me, or you believe it a little yourself…”

  “And your decision?”

  “I’ll tell you within forty-eight hours. All right?”

  He nodded and pointed at the card on the blotter.

  “My number.”

  “You mean we’ll do this in the open?”

  “Yes and no. No one will pick up the receiver. You will wait ten rings and phone again after one minute. And wait ten rings again and hang up.”

  “And that will mean I agree?”

  He nodded and rose. “We’ll take care of the rest. But now I must go. Good night.”

  After he left, I stood awhile in the middle of the room, staring vacantly at the curtain. Suddenly the ceiling light went out. The bulb blew, I thought, but when I looked out the window, I saw that all the buildings of the asylum were dark. Even the distant lights on the ramp to the highway were out. It had to be a power failure. My watch said eleven. I didn’t feel like hunting for a flashlight or candles, so I opened the curtain and in the weak light of the moon undressed and took a shower in my small bathroom. Deciding to put on a bathrobe instead of pajamas, I opened the closet door and froze. Someone was standing there, fat, short, almost completely bald, as rigid as a statue, his finger to his lips. It was Kramer.

  “Adelaide,” I said but stopped because he shook his finger sharply. He pointed at the window. When I didn’t move, he got down and crawled on all fours around the desk and to the window, and carefully reached up and closed the curtain. It was so dark that I could hardly see him return to the closet, still on his hands and knees, and take out something rectangular and flat, but when my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw that Kramer was opening a briefcase, sorting through strings or wires, connecting something, then there was a snap, and, sitting on the rug, he whispered:

  “Come over here, Tichy, and we’ll talk…”

  I sat beside him, too surprised to say anything. Kramer moved closer, his knees touching mine, and said quietly:

  “We have at least three-quarters of an hour before the power goes back on. Some of the bugging devices are on batteries but they’re low-tech and we have first-class screening. Tichy, you can keep calling me Kramer, Kramer will do…”

  “Who are you?” I asked, and heard him chuckle.

  “Your guardian angel.”

  “But haven’t you been here a long time? How could you know I would come to this asylum? Surely Tarantoga…”

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” Kramer replied mildly. “There are more important things for you to think about, Tichy. For example, I would not advise you to do what Shapiro says. That would be the worst thing you could do.”

  I was silent, and Kramer chuckled again. He was obviously in a good mood. His voice was different, not as drawling as before, and there was nothing asinine about the man now.

  “You think I am an ‘agent of a foreign power,’ yes?” he said, clapping me on the back. “I understand, you are suspicious in eighteen different ways, but let me appeal to your reason. Suppose you take Professor Shapiro’s advice. They’ll get you in their clutches, without torture, God forbid, no, in their clinic you’ll be treated like the President himself. They’ll pull something out of the right side of your head, or they won’t, either way it will make no difference, because the verdict has already been delivered.”

  “Wh
at verdict?”

  “The diagnosis, the results of the scientific auscultation, through your arm, leg, foot, who cares? Please don’t interrupt, I’m telling you everything. Everything that’s known.”

  He paused, as if waiting for my go-ahead. We were sitting in the dark. Suddenly I said:

  “Dr. House might come.”

  “He won’t. No one will come, don’t fret about that. We’re not playing cowboys and Indians here. Pay attention now. On the moon the programs of different parties have been going after each other. Who started it is not important, at least not now. To put it very simply, there’s a cancer proliferating there. The mutual production of chaos, the interpenetration of weapons both hardware and software, the blows and counterblows, call it what you like.”

  “The moon has gone mad?”

  “In a sense, yes. When the programs as well as what they created were destroyed, altogether new processes began, processes no one on Earth foresaw.”

  “What were they?”

  Kramer sighed.

  “I’d light a cigarette now,” he said, “but can’t, because you don’t smoke. What were they? You brought back the first evidence.”

  “That dust on my spacesuit?”

  “It’s silicon polymers, the beginning, the scientists say, of an orthogenesis, the birth of nonliving organisms. What’s taking place up there is no threat to Earth, and yet for that very reason the Agency sees a threat.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Agency stands guard over the doctrine of ignorance. There are nations that seek the end of that doctrine, of the whole business of packing weapons off to the moon. But it’s more complicated than that. Different interest groups exist, and some would like to see a growing panic under the rubric of The Moon Invades Earth, so that a coalition will form, in the UN or outside it, to strike preemptively, whether in the traditional way, which means thermonuclear, or with that new quantum gravity collapsar technology, don’t ask me about it now, I’ll tell you later. What they want is to arm on a grand scale, a global scale, for if a true invasion threatens, it would be necessary to crush it before it begins.”

  “And the Agency doesn’t want that?”