Peace on Earth

by Stanisław Lem

  The old woman dropped her shawl on the sidewalk and turned to us. She held a short machine gun with both hands and fired a volley at the car, putting holes in the radiator and tires. The white-haired black man, not drinking beer now, was behind the wheel and with one sharp turn his truck blocked the Lincoln’s way. The shaggy mongrel sprang at the old woman but fell writhing to the asphalt, meanwhile the mailman let go of me, jumped back, took from his bag something round and black, and hurled it at the women. There was a boom and white smoke and the young woman fell to her knees behind the baby carriage which opened up and started shooting a column of foamy liquid like a huge fire extinguisher at the driver of the Lincoln who had jumped out onto the sidewalk. Before the foam covered him I saw that he was not a black man but only wore a black mask and held a revolver. The stream hit the windshield of the limousine with such force that the glass shattered and some of it hit the mailman. The fat man who gripped me from behind all this time retreated, protecting himself with my body. From the garage several people in overalls ran out and pulled him off me. All this took no more than five seconds.

  One of the cars inside the garage backed out and two men in smocks threw a net over the driver of the Lincoln, taking care not to touch him as he was covered with gluey foam. The fat man and the mailman, now handcuffed, were pushed into this car. I stood staring as the man who had opened the rear door of the Lincoln got out slowly with his hands up and walked obediently to the truck where the white-haired black man put handcuffs on him. No one even spoke to me. The car drove away. The truck holding the driver who’d been shot and his accomplice also pulled away, and the woman picked up the black shawl, brushed it off, put the machine gun back into the carriage, raised its hood, and walked on as if nothing had happened. The street was again quiet and empty. Only the large limousine with flat tires and broken headlights plus the dead dog were proof that I hadn’t dreamed this.

  Next to the department store was a low wooden house with a porch and a garden full of sunflowers. A sunburned gentleman, his hair so blond it was almost white, stood in the open window with his elbows comfortably on the windowsill and a pipe in his hand. He gave me a quiet but eloquent look that seemed to say: “You see?” Only then did I become aware of something that was even stranger than the kidnapping attempt: though my ears still rang with the shots, the screams, and the explosions, not a single window had opened and no one was looking out into the street—as if I was on an empty movie set. I stood there for a good while, not sure what to do. Buying a typewriter no longer seemed important.

  The Lunar Agency

  “Mr. Tichy,” said the director, “our people will fill you in on the details of the Mission. I would just like to give you the general picture—so you don’t miss the forest for the trees. The Geneva Agreement made four impossibilities possible. A continuing arms race at the same time as universal disarmament—that’s one. Arming at maximum speed and at no cost—that’s two. Full protection of each nation against surprise attack while each reserves the right to wage war—that’s three. And finally the liquidation of all armies despite their continued existence. No troops, but the staffs stay on and can think up anything they like. In a nutshell, we’ve instituted pacem in terris.”

  “True,” I remarked. “But I read the papers. They say we’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire. That the moon is silent and swallowing all probes because Someone has been able to enter into a secret understanding with the robots there. That an unnamed nation is behind everything that’s now happening on the moon. And that the Agency knows this.”

  “Pure drivel,” said the director. We were sitting in his enormous office. On a platform at one end stood a huge globe of the moon covered with its smallpox of craters. The sectors of the different nations, colored green, rose, yellow, and red like a political map, went from pole to pole, making the sphere look like a child’s toy or illuminated glass orange without its peel. On the wall behind the director hung the flag of the United Nations.

  “There’s a lot of that now,” he said with a pitying smile on his swarthy face. “The press prints it all, and it’s all nonsense.”

  “But that movement, those neopacifists, the lunarians, don’t they exist?”

  “Oh yes. Have you read their statement? Their program?”

  “I have. They call for negotiation with the moon…”

  “‘Negotiation!’” the director snorted with contempt. “Not negotiation, capitulation! And nobody knows to whom! Those muddled heads think the moon has become a party, that it can enter into agreements and pacts, that it’s intelligent and powerful. That up there now is some giant computer that has devoured all the sectors. Fear not only has big eyes, Mr, Tichy, it has a small brain.”

  “Yes, but can we really rule out the possibility of some sort of unification of all those weapons up there—of those armies, if they are armies? How can we be sure this hasn’t happened, if we are in the dark…?”

  “Because even in the dark we know that certain things are impossible. The sector of each country was installed as a self-evolving testing range. Take a look.” He held a small flat box. The different sectors of the moon lit up, until the globe was as bright as a Chinese lantern. “The larger areas belong to the superpowers. Of course we know what we put there: the Agency acted as transporter, after all. We also dug the foundations for the simulators. Each sector has two simulators surrounded by a production compound. The sectors cannot fight each other; it’s impossible. One simulator designs new weapons and the other works to counter them. Both are computers programmed on the sword-and-shield principle. It’s as if each nation put on the moon a computer that played chess with itself. Except that the game is played with weapons instead of chess pieces and everything can change: the moves, the pieces, the board, everything.”

  “You mean,” I asked, surprised, “there’s nothing up there but computers simulating an arms race? Then how is this a threat to Earth? Surely the simulation of a weapon no more dangerous than a piece of paper…”

  “Oh no! The weapons that survive selection go into real production. The whole problem is when. You see, the simulators design not just a new weapon but a whole new system of warfare. These are, of course, nonhuman systems. The soldier becomes one with the weapon. Think of natural evolution, the struggle for existence, Darwin. One simulator designs, say, a kind of predator, and the other finds its weakness in order to destroy it. Then the first simulator thinks up something new, and the second parries that too. In principle a contest like this, with endless improvements, could go on for a million years—but each sector after a certain time must begin actual production of the weapons. The time—and the effectiveness required of the prototypes—was determined in advance by the programmers of each nation. Because each nation wanted to have an arsenal of real weapons on the moon, not just simulations like blueprints on paper. Therein lies the rub, the contradiction. Do you understand?”

  “Not entirely. What contradiction?”

  “Simulated evolution proceeds much more swiftly than natural evolution. He who waits longer obtains the better weapon. But for as long as he waits, he is defenseless. While the one who accepts a shorter simulation run will obtain his weapon sooner. We call this the coefficient of risk. Every nation, placing its military might on the moon, had to decide first whether it wanted better weapons later or poorer weapons sooner.”

  “Curious,” I said. “And what happens when sooner or later production begins? The weapons are stockpiled?”

  “Some of them, perhaps. But only some. Because then an actual, not a simulated, battle begins—of course only within the given sector.”

  “Something like maneuvers?”

  “No. On maneuvers the fighting is an exercise, soldiers don’t die, whereas there”—the director pointed to the colorful moon—“genuine combat is taking place. But always within the borders of each sector. Neighbor cannot attack neighbor…”

  “So the weapons attack and destroy each other in the computer first, and
then for real. And what then?”

  “Good question! No one knows. There are basically two possibilities. Either the arms race reaches a limit or it doesn’t. If it does, this means ‘an ultimate weapon’ exists and that the simulated arms race has finally arrived at it. The weapon cannot defeat itself, and thus ensues a state of permanent equilibrium. An end to progress. The lunar arsenals fill with that weapon, which has passed the final test, and nothing more happens. This is what we would like.”

  “But it isn’t so?”

  “Most likely not. In the first place, natural evolution has no end. It hasn’t because no ‘ultimate’ organism exists, that is, one which is perfect in survivability. Every species contains a weakness. Secondly, the evolution on the moon is artificial, not natural. And it’s certain that each sector monitors what is happening in the others and reacts to that in its own way. Military equilibrium is different from biological equilibrium. A living species must not be too successful in its struggle against competitors. Why? Germs that are too virulent kill all their hosts and so perish with them. Therefore in Nature equilibrium is set at a point below annihilation. Otherwise evolution would be suicidal. But research and development in weapons seeks to crush the enemy. Weapons have no instinct of self-preservation.”

  “Just a minute,” I said, taken by a sudden thought. “Each nation could in secret build for itself the exact same computer complex on Earth as the one it put on the moon, and by watching the copy, it would know what the original was doing…”

  “Ah, no,” said the director with a sad smile. “That is not possible. The course of evolution cannot be foreseen. We learned this the hard way.”

  “How?”

  “As you said. We used identical computers in our research lab and identical programs and let them go. Plenty of evolution, but divergent. It’s as if you wanted to predict the outcome of a chess tournament in Moscow between a hundred grand-master computers by simulating the games on a hundred identical computers in New York. What would you learn about the Moscow games? Absolutely nothing. Because no player, man or computer, always makes the same moves. Of course the politicians wanted us to provide them with such simulators, but it didn’t give them anything.”

  “But if nothing so far has helped and all your probes disappeared like stones in water, how can I hope to succeed?”

  “You will have devices no one has had before. My assistants will give you the details. Good luck…”

  For three months I wore myself out on the training instruments at the Lunar Agency and I can tell you that at the end of it I knew telematics like the palm of my hand. It’s the art of operating by remote. You have to strip completely and pull on an elastic suit a little like a wet suit but thinner and shining like mercury because it’s made of wires lighter than a spider’s web. They’re the electrodes. They cling to the body, transmitting the electrical changes in your muscles to the remote which uses them to repeat exactly your every movement. That’s not odd, the odd part is that you not only see with the eyes of the remote but you feel what you would feel if you were in its place. If it picks up a stone, you feel the shape and weight as if you had it in your own hand. You feel every step, every stumble, and when the remote bumps into something too hard, you feel pain. I thought that was a malfunction, but the chief of my training program, Dr. Lopez, told me it has to be that way. Otherwise the remote will be constantly damaged. If the pain is great, you can disconnect the channel, but it’s better to lower the intensity with the modulator instead so you don’t lose contact with the remote. A person in an artificial skin loses all sense of himself and identifies entirely with the remote. I trained on different models. A remote doesn’t need to be man-sized or -shaped; it can be smaller than an elf or larger than a Goliath but that causes certain problems. If instead of legs it has, say, a tractor tread, you lose the feeling of direct contact with the ground, a little like driving a car or a tank. When the remote is enormous, you have to move very slowly because its limbs might weigh several tons each and possess no less inertia on the moon than on Earth. I experienced this with a two-hundred-ton remote and it was like walking underwater. But such a remote presents a target the size of a tower. I also used tiny remotes resembling insects. It was quite amusing, but from that vantagepoint every pebble is a mountain and it’s hard to get your bearings. The heavier moon remotes were grotesque. Squat, with short legs to keep the center of gravity as low as possible. My LEM maintained its balance better than a man in a spacesuit because it didn’t totter, and the arms were long like an orangutan’s. Those arms turned out to be useful in twenty-meter leaps. I particularly wanted to hear which models had been used in the previous reconnaissance attempts and how they had functioned. To brief me on those unsuccessful expeditions my tutors had to get special permission from the director because all this was top-secret. The whole Mission was top-secret and so was the fact that the earlier ones had failed. The point was not to fan the flames of panic which was spread by the press with its speculations. Central Control gave me the cover of adviser to the Lunar Agency and I had to avoid journalists like the plague. I was finally able to interview the two reconnaissance pilots who had returned in one piece but I never laid eyes on them, talking with them by telephone. Each had changed not only his name but also his face so that his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

  The first pilot reached the zone of Radio Silence with no difficulty and went into stationary orbit some two thousand miles above the Mare Nubium, sending down an armored remote that landed in a completely deserted region. It was attacked before it took a hundred steps. I tried to get some details out of him, but he just repeated the same thing. The remote was walking alone on the flat plain of the Mare Nubium, having first checked the area in a radius of several hundred kilometers and detecting nothing suspicious, when an enormous robot, at least twice the size of the LEM, appeared to one side, very close, and opened fire. There was a blinding, silent flash and that was all. The pilot photographed the place from orbit afterwards, and there beside a small crater lay the remains of the remote, melted into a lump of metallic slag.

  Around it was nothing but the empty plain.

  The second pilot had two remotes but one began somersaulting after it left the ship and broke up on the rocks. The other one was a double, called twins. Twins are a pair of telemates operated by one person. They do everything in tandem, one staying a hundred meters behind the other to see what attacks it. Both were protected moreover by micropes, which are microscopic cyclops, a sort of television camera made of a swarm of sensors no bigger than flies and each equipped with a minuscule lens. The whole cloud of micropes accompanied the twin remotes at an altitude of a mile above the surface of the moon in order to keep them and their surroundings too in sight. The pilot operates the remote but the micropes send their pictures directly to Central Control on Earth. The result of all this careful planning was miserable. Both remotes were destroyed in the same moment, with hardly time for them to stand straight in the lunar dust. The pilot told me they were attacked by two robots of singular build, low to the ground, humpbacked, and extremely pudgy. These appeared out of thin air and took immediate aim. He lifted his gun but didn’t have time to pull the trigger. He saw a blue-white flash, laser for sure, and found himself back on the ship. He photographed the remains of the remotes, and Control confirmed his report. The remotes had become incandescent as they were hit by a laser of great power, but the source of the beam could not be determined. I watched the film of what the micropes recorded and also examined pictures of the last moment, magnified to the maximum. The computer analyzed the image of every stone in a radius of two kilometers which is the lunar horizon because you can only go in a straight line with a laser. It was mystifying. The two remotes landed well, not even staggering, and began marching one after the other in slow motion, when suddenly they lifted their guns as one man, though the camera showed nothing, and opened fire, and were hit, one in the chest, the other a little lower. The bolts of light blew them apart i
n a cloud of dust and burning metal. Although the pictures were analyzed from every angle, it was impossible to find the place from which the lasers were fired. The desolation in the pictures was greater than the Sahara, and both the attackers and their weapons remained invisible. But the pilot insisted that at the moment of the attack he saw two grotesquely humpbacked robots where a second earlier there was nothing. They came out of nowhere, took aim, fired, and vanished. He didn’t see them vanish, of course, because the eyes of his remotes were vaporized, but from the ship he observed the settling cloud of dust and glowing cinders in the place of his defeat.

  I had learned little, yet something of significance: that one could return from the Mission in one piece. Regarding these mysterious attacks, there were a number of hypotheses, including one that said that on the moon something had taken control of both remotes, making them destroy themselves with mutual fire. The enlarged pictures, however, showed that they hadn’t aimed at each other but to the side, and that the laser response to their shots—the measurement made was very precise—was practically simultaneous, one tenth of one millionth of a second after. Spectroscopic analysis of the burning metal of the remotes showed that the lasers used by the moon robots had the same power as that of the twins but a different frequency.