Peace on Earth it-5 Page 3

  I didn’t understand it, yet there was some sense in it. Suddenly I looked at Tarantoga with widened eyes:

  “I begin to see. Neither message, on the envelope or in the letter, has proper nouns. Did you notice?”

  “So?”

  “It understands nouns best. Whoever sent this wants to tell me something and not It…”

  As I was saying this, I pointed to my right temple with my right hand. Tarantoga got up, paced the room, drummed his fingers on the table, and said:

  “In other words, McIntyre is…”

  “Don’t say it.”

  I took a notepad from my pocket and wrote on a fresh page: “It understands what it hears better than what it reads. We’ll have to communicate, for a while, in this matter, by writing to each other. My guess is that the things I didn’t put into my report to the LA because I couldn’t remember, It remembers, and that someone knows or at least suspects this. I won’t phone M. or go back to him, because he’s probably the ‘he’ in the letter. He wanted to ask It questions. Perhaps to interrogate It. Please write your reply.”

  Tarantoga read my note and frowned. Saying nothing, he bent over the table and wrote: “But if he is from the LA, why this deviousness? The LA can contact you directly, no?”

  I wrote back: “Among those to whom I turned in NY there must have been someone from the LA. Through him they learned that I found a way to talk to It. But I left before they could try that themselves. If the anonymous letter is telling the truth, the son of the man who was your father’s friend was supposed to take over. To find out, without arousing my suspicions, what It remembers. Whereas, if they turned to me directly, officially, I could refuse to submit to such an interrogation, and they would be up a tree because legally It is not a separate person and they would need my consent to talk to It. Please use participles, pronouns, verbs, and avoid simple syntax.”

  The professor tore out the page I had written on, put it in his pocket, and wrote: “But why is it that you don’t want It to know what is now happening?”

  “To be safe. Because of what was written inside that envelope. It can’t be from the LA because the LA obviously wouldn’t warn me about itself. Someone else wrote it.”

  Tarantoga’s reply this time was brief:

  “Who?”

  “About what is taking place where I was and had the accident, many parties would love to know. The LA has plenty of competition. I believe we should avoid the company of kangaroos. Let’s get out of here. It doesn’t understand the imperative mood.”

  Tarantoga took all the pieces of paper from his pocket, rolled them into a ball with the letter and envelope, lit it with a match, and tossed it into the fireplace. He watched the paper shrivel into ash.

  “I’m on my way to a travel agent,” he said. “And what will you do now?”

  “Shave,” I said. “This beard itches like the devil and obviously is no longer needed. The faster the better, professor. Maybe there’s a night flight. And don’t tell me where we’re going.”

  As I shaved in the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I made faces. The left eye didn’t even blink. I appeared completely ordinary. When I packed, I looked at my left hand and leg now and then, but they behaved normally. At the last moment, however, as I was putting my ties on top of the folded clothes in the suitcase, the left hand took the green tie with brown dots, a tie I liked though it was quite old, and threw it on the floor. It, apparently, didn’t like it. I picked up the tie with my right hand and tried to make the left hand take part of it so we could lay it neatly in the suitcase. What happened next had happened more than once before: the arm obeyed but the fingers didn’t. They opened, and the tie fell on the bed.

  “Hopeless,” I sighed, stuffed the tie into the suitcase with my right hand, and closed the suitcase. Tarantoga appeared in the doorway, showed me two tickets without saying a word, and went to pack.

  Did I have reason to fear my right hemisphere? I could think about this without worrying, because It couldn’t know what I thought unless I told It by hand signals. Human beings are so constructed that they don’t know what they know. What a book contains can be learned from the contents page, but there’s no contents page in the head. The head is like a full bag; in order to see what’s in it you have to pull everything out, item by item. Groping for a memory in your head is like groping in a bag with your hand.

  Tarantoga paid the hotel bill, and as we drove to the airport at dusk and then waited in the terminal, I went over everything that had happened after my return from the Calf, to see how much I could remember. Earth had changed completely. There was total disarmament. Even the superpowers no longer had the money to continue the arms race. The more intelligent the weapons, the more they cost. That was the real reason for the Geneva Agreement. In Europe and in the United States no one wanted to enlist in the army. Men were replaced by machines, but one machine cost as much as a jet plane. Live soldiers surrendered the field to nonliving soldiers, who weren’t robots, either, but simply small computers inserted into rockets, self-firing firearms, and tanks like giant bedbugs, flat, because no space was needed for a crew, and if its computer was knocked out, a spare took over. Since command communications were vulnerable to disruption, the machines were made more and more autonomous, and therefore became more and more expensive. I couldn’t recall who came up with the idea of moving the arms race to the moon. Not in the form of weapon factories but through the so-called planet machines. These machines had been in use a couple of years for exploring the solar system. Remembering this, I noticed that a number of details were missing. Had I known them before or not? One usually knows, when one can’t remember something, whether or not one knew it in the first place, but I didn’t. I must have read about the new Geneva Agreement before my mission, but I wasn’t sure. The planet machines were built by several companies, mostly American. They were unlike anything industry had produced before. Not factories and not robots but something in between. Some resembled giant spiders. Of course there was a lot of debate, a lot of protests that they shouldn’t be armed but used only for mining and that sort of thing, but when it came to transporting the weapons to the moon, it turned out that the countries who could afford it already had self-programming mobile rocket launchers, cannon able to travel underwater, fire-throwers able to travel underground like moles, and laser artillery that could move like tanks and trigger, with salvos of intense radiation, nuclear fusion reactions that would vaporize everything, themselves included. Each country could program on Earth its own planet machines, which were then transported to the moon and placed in their respective sectors by the Lunar Agency, especially created for that purpose. The principle of parity was adhered to, how much of this and that could be put up there, and various international commissions watched over this whole military exodus. Scientists and generals from each country were allowed to verify that their devices were unloaded on the moon and in working order, then they all had to return to Earth together. In the twentieth century such a solution would have been senseless because the arms race wasn’t so much a matter of production as of research, innovation, which in those days depended entirely on people. But these new machines worked on a different principle, one borrowed from the natural evolution of plants and animals. These were systems capable of auto-optimization, speciation, and ramification, which means they could change themselves and multiply. I was pleased with myself that I had been able to remember that. Was the right hemisphere of my brain, interested mainly in women’s behinds and cake and hating green ties with brown dots, able to grasp such concepts? How could Its memory, then, be of value militarily? But if it wasn’t, I reflected, all the worse for me, because I could swear up and down that It knew nothing but no one would believe me. They’d grill It, that is grill me, and if they didn’t obtain what they wanted with the signs I taught It they’d use better teaching, better signs, and not let go for anything. The less It knew, the more trouble I was in. My life, even, might be at stake. This was not paranoia. I c
ontinued to dig into my memory.

  On the moon, the electronic evolution of new weapons was to begin. In this way, despite disarmament, no nation would be defenseless, because it would own a self-perfecting arsenal. And any surprise attack by an enemy, war without declaration, was impossible now, because to commence hostilities a government first had to ask the Lunar Agency for permission to use its sector on the moon. There was no way to hide this, and the side threatened would also apply for permission, and that would begin the return of the means of annihilation to Earth. The whole point was that the moon be inaccessible.

  Neither people nor probes could be sent to learn what military capability a given nation had at its disposal. A clever plan, but at first the project met with strong resistance from the generals and politicians. The moon was to be a testing ground and laboratory for military evolution within the sectors allotted to the various nations. The first order of business was to make sure there was no conflict between the sectors. If a weapon developed in one sector attacked and destroyed a neighbor’s weapon, that would upset the balance of power. The day such news came from the moon, there would be an immediate return to the previous situation and very likely war, a war conducted with modest means at first but in short order the nations would all rebuild their arms industries. The programs of the moon systems, written by the Lunar Agency in conjunction with multinational commissions, contained locks to keep the sectors from attacking each other, but that protection was considered insufficient. As before, nobody trusted anybody. The Geneva Agreement had not turned men into saints or international diplomacy into a convocation of angels. For that reason, after the transporting was completed, the moon was declared off-limits to everyone. The Lunar Agency itself could not enter there. If a defense program in any of the testing ranges was destroyed or breached, all Earth would know about it in an instant, for each sector bristled with sensors that worked automatically and around the clock. They would sound the alarm if any weapon, even a metal ant, crossed the boundary into the belt that was no man’s land. But even this wasn’t guarantee enough. The guarantee was the so-called doctrine of ignorance. Each government knew that better and better weapons were being created in its sector, but it did not know their value vis-à-vis the weapons being created in the other sectors. It couldn’t know, because the course of any evolutionary process is unforeseeable. This had been proven ages before, but the rigid politicians and generals were unreceptive to scientific argument. It wasn’t logic that convinced them; it was the increasing economic ruin caused by the traditional arms race. Even a fool could see that one didn’t need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely. Since disarmament negotiations had been unsuccessful for decades, the moon project seemed the only solution. Every nation could feel it was powerful militarily because of its moon arsenal, but it had no way of knowing how its arsenal compared with those of the other nations. Since no one therefore could count on victory, no one would risk going to war.

  The Achilles heel of this solution lay in the monitoring of it. The experts knew from the start that the first thing the programmers of each country would try to do is send to the moon machines capable of neutralizing the monitoring system. Not necessarily by attacking the surveillance satellites directly; it could be a more devious method, one more difficult to detect, such as invading the communication network and falsifying the data transmitted to Earth and the Lunar Agency. My memory of this seemed intact, so I felt calmer as I boarded the plane with Tarantoga. Settling into my seat, I again took to probing what I remembered.

  Everyone understood that the peace depended on the monitoring, so the question was how to make the monitoring untouchable. An insoluble problem, it seemed, a regressus ad infinitum: One could devise a system to monitor a monitoring system, but that system itself would be vulnerable to attack, so one would have to monitor the monitor of the monitor, and so on, without end. But this dilemma was solved quite simply. They encircled the moon with two surveillance belts. The inner belt guarded the sectors; the outer belt guarded the inner belt. And the trick was: both would be independent of Earth. Thus the arms race could continue on the moon in total secrecy from all countries and all governments. The weapons would evolve, but the surveillance of them would remain unchanged for a hundred years. The whole thing, really, was quite absurd. An unknown arsenal was useless in politics. They should have simply disarmed without bringing the moon into it, but there was no mention of that possibility. Everyone knew where talk of disarmament led: nowhere. In any case, when the idea of demilitarizing Earth and militarizing the moon was accepted, it was clear that sooner or later an attempt would be made to violate the doctrine of ignorance. The newspapers from time to time ran stories under screaming headlines about surveillance machines that vanished upon detecting something; some said they were intercepted by satellites and captured. And governments accused each other of sending probes, but it was impossible to tell their origin because an electronic device is not a person: you can’t get anything out of it if it’s made properly. But then these anonymous scouts, these space spies, stopped appearing. And the human race sighed with relief, especially because of the economics, the fact that the moon weapons didn’t cost a cent now. The energy was furnished by the sun, the raw materials by the moon. Which should also help limit the evolution of weapons, because there are no lodes of metal on the moon.

  The generals had expressed the concern that weapons adapted to lunar conditions might not work on Earth. I couldn’t recall how the gravity was increased, though they must have explained that to me at the LA. Tarantoga and I were flying BOAC. The night outside the windows was Stygian, and I thought, amused, that I had no idea where we were going. Should I ask Tarantoga? On the other hand, perhaps it would be better if we were to part company. In this awful situation, perhaps I should be silent and fend for myself. A good thing It couldn’t read my thoughts. As if I carried an enemy in my head, though of course it was no enemy.

  The reason the Lunar Agency, a supranational organization set up by the UN, turned to me? Its double-guard system had worked too well. We knew that the borders between the sectors had not been disturbed, but that was all we knew. In certain nervous, imaginative minds rose the specter of an attack upon Earth by the nonliving forces of the moon. The military sectors’ inability to exchange information might be only temporary. The sectors might learn to communicate through ground tremors, seismically, making the vibrations in the rock look like natural moon-quakes. The self-engineered and self-improving weapons might all join and one day unleash their monstrous power against Earth. Why should they want to do this? How would it benefit a nonliving army to reduce Earth to ashes? It wouldn’t, of course, but cancer, everpresent in the organisms of higher animals and human beings, is an inevitable albeit disadvantageous consequence of evolution. People began to talk and write about this lunar cancer, and there were seminars, articles, novels, and films on the subject, and the fear of atomic annihilation, which had been dispelled on Earth, returned in a new form. The surveillance system included seismographs, and certain scientists reported that the frequency of tremors in the moon’s crust was increasing, and seismic readings were analyzed for hidden codes, and fear grew. To calm the public, the Lunar Agency said in communiques that the odds of this happening were one in two hundred million, but no one believed that calculation. The fear finally reached the politicians, and they began to demand periodic inspection of the sectors and not just of their borders. The Agency spokesmen explained that any such inspection could not rule out the possibility of espionage to learn the current state of the lunar arsenals. After long meetings and complex negotiation the LA finally received authorization to reconnoiter.

  Reconnaissance, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. None of the probes returned. Not a peep from them by radio. Specially armored landers were sent, with television cameras. The observation satellite showed that they indeed landed, and exactly on target, in the Mare Imbrium, in the Mare Frigo
ris, in the Mare Nectaris, and in the no man’s land between the sectors. But not one of them sent back a picture. As if the ground of the moon had swallowed them. Understandably, this caused panic. A state of emergency. The papers urged that the moon be preemptively bombed with hydrogen bombs just to play it safe. But that couldn’t happen unless a missile was built and atomic warheads again manufactured. Out of this fear and confusion my mission was born.

  We were flying above thick clouds, their mounds tinged with pink from the morning sun still hidden below the horizon. Why, I wondered, did I remember the terrestrial things so well, while remembering so little of what happened on the moon? I knew some reasons. It wasn’t for nothing that I’d read all those medical books when I got back. There are two kinds of memory, temporary and permanent. Severing the great commissure does not affect what the brain has already accumulated, but fresh memories evaporate, do not become permanent. What evaporates particularly is what the patient experienced shortly before the operation. Therefore I didn’t remember most of what happened to me those seven weeks on the moon, when I went from sector to sector. All that remained in my head was an aura of strangeness, nothing I could put into words, into a report. Strangeness, and yet it was not threatening, or so it seemed to me. No dark conspiracy against Earth. I felt certain of that. But could I swear that what I felt and knew was the whole story? Perhaps It knew more.

  Tarantoga was silent, only glancing at me from time to time. As usual on eastward flights, with the Pacific beneath us, the calendar tripped and dropped a day. BOAC was belt-tightening, apparently, because all we got to eat was chicken salad. We landed in Miami. It was early in the afternoon. Customs dogs sniffed our suitcases. We stepped out into the heat. Melbourne had been much cooler. A rental car was waiting for us; Tarantoga must have ordered it in Melbourne. We put our luggage in the trunk and set off down a highway full of traffic, and still said nothing, because I had asked the professor not to tell me our destination. Overcaution, perhaps, but I would stick to that policy until a better one suggested itself. And he didn’t need to say anything, because after more than two hours on back roads we arrived at a large white building surrounded by pavilions, palms, and cacti, and I knew at once that my trusted friend had brought me to an insane asylum. Not a bad place to hide, I thought. In the car, I had looked over my shoulder now and then to see if we were being followed, but it never entered my head that I was such an important, valuable person that they would follow me by a method less conventional, not found in any spy novel. From a modern satellite not only can a car be observed but wooden matches counted on a garden table. That never entered my head — more precisely the half of my head that could understand without sign language the mess Ijon Tichy had got himself into.