Peace on Earth

by Stanisław Lem

  Wivitch was speaking: the third group of micropes had arrived safely and I was on their screens again. So maybe they had only wanted to blind Control during the nude-woman mirage. I was plunged into thought. The moon, listening to the radio, had to know about the growing anxiety on Earth. The fear stirred by the press had infected not only the people but the governments. Though everyone realized that a nuclear strike against the moon would spell the end of peace on Earth. Therefore either a preemptive attack against the human race was imminent, or something very strange was taking place on the moon. Wivitch called me again to tell me that all the micropes would be deployed. They would come in successive clouds, wave after wave, not only from my ship but from all four comers of the world, as it were, because it had been decided to activate the reserves stockpiled under the zone of silence. I hadn’t even known they were there. I sat down in that lifeless desert and leaned back a little to take in the black sky. I couldn’t see the ship but saw the micropes, sparkling clouds descending and also approaching from all horizons. Some hung over me, swelling and billowing and glittering like a swarm of golden gnats playing in the sun. Others, the reinforcements, I could make out only now and then, when one of the stars winked out for a moment, obscured by a cloud of my microscopic guardians. They had me in their screens now at all angles. I should have got up and continued on but I was suddenly reluctant. Slow and ungainly in my heavy spacesuit, quite the opposite of the micropes, I made a good target even for someone with bad cataracts. Why did I have to be at the front of this mission anyway? Why couldn’t the swift micropes go instead, scouting ahead for me? Control agreed. A change of tactics. Swarms of golden mosquitoes sailed above me in a wide swath toward the lunar Urals.

  I walked, looking carefully in all directions, until I came to a gently rolling plain pitted with small craters filled with sand. In the sand of one crater was something that looked like a thick dead branch. I grabbed it and tugged, as if pulling a deep root from the ground. Then I used a small folding shovel that I carried strapped to my side. From the sand and dust emerged a piece of iron, burnt, perhaps a fragment of one of the countless primitive rockets that crashed here in the early days of lunar exploration. I didn’t call Control, who through the micropes could see my discovery for themselves. I pulled at the strangely bent bars until a thicker part appeared, and under that was a shinier metal. It didn’t look particularly promising, but having begun this scavenging, I pulled harder, not afraid that one of the sharp pieces might puncture my suit, because I had no need of air. But something changed. At first I didn’t understand why it was hard for me to keep my balance, then realized that my left boot was caught, gripped by flattened, curved prongs. I tried to free it, thinking I’d walked right into this one, but the foot was held fast and even the blade of my shovel didn’t help, unable to pry the prongs apart.

  “Is Wivitch there?” I asked, and waited three seconds for him to respond.

  “They have me in some kind of bear trap,” I said.

  How incredibly stupid, getting taken by something like this! I couldn’t get loose. The micropes surrounded me like excited flies as I struggled with the clamps that had closed on my boot like a vise.

  “Return to the ship,” Wivitch suggested. Or it might have been one of his assistants, because the voice sounded different.

  “I don’t want to lose the remote,” I said. “I need to cut this!”

  “You have a Carborundum saw.”

  I unhooked the flat holster at my thigh, and in fact it contained a nice little saw. I plugged its cord into the generator in my suit and bent over. Sparks flew from the spinning edge. The pincers holding my boot at the ankle began to give, practically cut all the way through, when I felt a growing heat in the boot. With all my strength I wrenched my leg away, then saw that the metal bulb from which the bars protruded like roots from a great potato was glowing red-hot. The white plastic of the boot had blackened and was cracking from the heat. I made one last effort and, suddenly released, fell backward. Blinded by forked lightning, I felt a violent blow in my chest, heard the sound of the suit tom open, and was plunged into impenetrable darkness. I didn’t lose consciousness, I was simply in darkness. After a moment I heard Wivitch:

  “Tichy, you’re on the ship. Say something! The first remote was taken out.”

  I blinked. I was sitting in the chair, my head on the headrest, my legs curiously bent, and holding my chest where a moment ago I had taken the blow. A painful blow, I realized only now.

  “Was it a mine…?” I asked. “A mine connected to a bear trap? Was that the best they could think up?”

  I heard voices, but they weren’t talking to me. Someone asked about the micropes.

  “There’s no video,” said someone else.

  “What? They were all destroyed by that one explosion?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Impossible or not, we have no video.”

  I was still breathing as if after a long run, regarding the face of the moon. With the tip of my finger I could cover the entire crater of Flamsteed and the plain on which I had so stupidly lost the remote.

  “What’s wrong with the micropes?” I asked at last.

  “We don’t know.”

  I looked at my watch and was surprised: I had spent almost four hours on the moon. It was after midnight, by ship time.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said with a yawn, “but I’ve had enough for today. I’m going to sleep.”

  Round Two

  I awoke rested and immediately went over the events of the day before. You always think better after a good shower, which is why I had insisted on a bathroom with running water instead of those wet towels which are no substitute for a tub. Of course there couldn’t be a tub, with the wash area no bigger than a barrel. Water rushed in on one side and was sucked out by a strong current of air on the other. In order not to drown, because water in zero gravity covers the body and face in a growing layer, I had to put on an oxygen mask before showering, which was a nuisance but better that than no shower. As we all know, even after the engineers could build rockets in their sleep, astronauts were still plagued by toilet accidents, and technology wrestled with that problem for a long time. Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn’t mention it. Urinating (for men, that is) wasn’t too bad, but defecating was solved only with the offices of a special computer, which was fine, but when that broke down you found yourself in extremity and had to improvise. In my lunar module, this computer—about the only one—worked throughout like a Swiss timepiece, thank God. Washed and refreshed, I drank my coffee from a plastic bulb and ate a raisin cake under a funnel with its suction set on high so the crumbs wouldn’t stick to my fingers or choke me. I don’t like to give up my habits. Having breakfasted properly, I took a seat at the selenograph and, gazing at the globe of the simulated moon, smiled, since they wouldn’t be inflicting advice on me for a while. I hadn’t informed Control that I was awake; they thought I was still sleeping.

  The mirror phenomenon and the naked blonde had clearly been two tests to determine who or what had landed, and apparently I had passed those tests, being allowed to wander through Flamsteed unenticed and unattacked. But the trap that turned out to be a mine didn’t fit this picture. On one hand they go to great trouble to produce a mirage in the no man’s land, all done at a distance because it is a no man’s land, and on the other they plant mines—as if I was facing an army equipped with both early-warning radar and clubs. But the mine could have been there from earlier days, though neither I nor anyone else had any idea what had taken place on the moon during all those years of hermetic isolation. Not solving this mystery, I began preparing for the next reconnaissance.

  LEM 2, in perfect working order, was the product of General Teletronics and a different model from the one I had lost so unexpectedly, poor thing. I crawled into the bay to have a look at it before I became it. I
t was exceptionally strong judging from the girth of its legs and arms, its broad back, the triple plates of armor that made a dull boom when I tapped with my finger. Apart from the apertures in the helmet it had six additional eyes, on its shoulders, hips, and knees. To outdo their competitor who designed the first LEM, General Teletronics had given their model two personal rocket systems: besides the retros ejected after landing this athlete of steel had jets fastened to its heels, shins, and even one in its behind, which was for balance—as I read in the self-congratulatory instructions—and for the execution of fifty-foot leaps. Its armor moreover gleamed like pure mercury, so that the ray of any laser would be deflected. This LEM may have been marvelous but I can’t say I was thrilled as I inspected it, because the more eyes and dials and jets and auxiliary devices there are, the more the attention they take, and being a standard-model person myself I have no more limbs and senses than anyone else. Returning to the cabin, I hooked into the remote and stood in it, acquainting myself with the complicated controls. The switch that activated the great jumps was a wired wafer you took between your teeth. But how was I to talk to Control with a switch in my mouth? Well, it was elastic and could be molded like clay and tucked inside your cheek, and you could move it between your molars when necessary. In difficult situations, warned the instructions, you should take care not to bite down too hard. There was nothing about teeth chattering from excitement. The switch tasted awful; I immediately spat it out. Possibly they had smeared it with something at the proving ground on Earth, orange or mint toothpaste. I disconnected from the remote, went into a higher orbit, and flew around the moon to target 002 between Mare Spumans and Mare Smythii while conversing with the base as politely as I could.

  I was flying as peacefully as a fed baby in its cradle when something happened to the selenography. It’s an excellent instrument when it’s working. There’s no reason to travel with an actual globe of the moon; you can use a hologram, which is like having the entire satellite hanging in the air not three feet from you, rotating slowly, and you can see both its sculpted surface and the boundary lines of the sectors, the nations indicated by the kind of letters that appear on cars: US, G, I, F, R, S, N. But something had gone wrong, because the sectors began changing color, all the colors of the rainbow, then the pockmarks of the craters blurred, the image shuddered, and when I frantically turned knobs, it returned as a smooth white sphere. I tried adjusting the focus, size, contrast, but the moon for a second appeared upside down then disappeared altogether and the selenograph couldn’t bring it back. I told Wivitch, and of course he said I had pushed a wrong button. After I assured him ten times that we had “a serious problem here,” because since Armstrong that’s how you put it, the experts finally got to work on the selenograph, and that took half a day. First they told me to go into an orbit above the Zone of Silence in order to rule out any interference from unknown forces or waves directed at me from the moon. When that didn’t help, they checked directly from Earth all the circuits, integrated and not, in the holograph, meanwhile I fixed myself lunch then dinner. Since it’s not easy to make a good omelette in zero gravity, I took off my helmet and earphones so the disagreements between the information scientists and the teletronicists, not to mention an ad hoc team of professors, wouldn’t distract me. After all the debating they came to the conclusion that the selenograph was broken. They also established which microcomponent had blown, but it happened to be the only one I didn’t have a spare for. They told me therefore to take my ordinary moon maps, the ones printed on paper, and tape them to the screen and use that to navigate. I found the maps but unfortunately I had four copies of the first quarter of the moon, where I’d been, and that was all. Great consternation. They told me to look again, more carefully. I searched the ship with a fine-tooth comb but found only a small comic book, pornographic, left by one of the technicians during the final preparations before takeoff.

  Control now split into two camps. One said that under such conditions I couldn’t continue the mission and should return; the other wanted to leave that decision to me. I agreed with the second camp and decided to land as planned. They could always transmit to me a television picture of the moon. Not a bad idea, except that this couldn’t be synchronized with my trajectory; they’d either show me the surface of the moon whizzing past or hardly moving at all. On top of that I would be landing at the very edge of the face visible to Earth and then proceeding to the far side, which presented another problem. They wouldn’t be able to send me a television picture directly when the ship was parked above the far hemisphere, which should have been child’s play because the picture could be relayed to me by the monitoring satellites but they refused. They refused because somehow no one had foreseen this eventuality and the satellites were programmed according to the doctrine of ignorance and therefore weren’t allowed to transmit anything to Earth or from Earth. Not anything. True, to maintain contact with me and my micropes, so-called Trojan satellites had been put into high equatorial orbit, but these were not for relaying television signals. That is, they were, but only via the micropes. There was an awful lot of discussion about this, then someone suggested they brainstorm the problem, and for the next four hours the scientists talked. They talked so much, I couldn’t stand it, and then they drifted off the subject and were talking not about how to help me but who was to blame for not having provided redundancy in the selenographic system. As usual when people work collectively, shoulder to shoulder, the blame was not individual, but the accusations flew back and forth like tennis, until finally I told them I’d handle it myself. The risk was already so tremendous that a little additional risk, it seemed to me, wouldn’t make any difference. Besides, the question of which sector I landed in, US, R, F, G, I, C, or any other letter of the alphabet, was purely academic.

  The whole idea of the nationality of the robots inhabiting the moon, who knows in what generation now, was absurd. As you know—or may not—the most difficult task of military automation programming turned out to be the identification of the enemy. On Earth this was not a big problem; that’s what uniforms were for, flags, colorful insignia on the wings of airplanes, helmet styles, and it wasn’t all that hard to tell if a prisoner of war spoke Dutch or Chinese. With machines it was a different story. Therefore two strategies emerged: the Friend strategy and the Foe strategy. The first advocated the use of a multitude of sensors, analytical filters, differential selectors, and other such recognition devices; whereas the second was simplicity itself—the enemy was whoever or whatever didn’t know the password and so had to be destroyed. But nobody knew what course the autoevolution of weapons on the moon had taken, or what kind of tactical programs had developed to distinguish friend from foe. Though of course friend and foe are highly relative terms. You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there’s no way to tell if that grandmother’s Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus. Moreover, the automation of the armies eliminated ideology. An attacking robot follows its program, acting in accordance with focalization and optimization algorithms, differential diagnostics, and game theory—not patriotism. Military mathematics and weapons automation, moreover, if they had their apostles, they also had their apostates. The former maintained there were programs that could ensure perfect loyalty in a war robot so that nothing could turn it to treason; the latter said nonsense, because there is no code that can’t be cracked and no security system that can’t be subverted, just look at the history of computer crime. A hundred and fourteen programmers protected Chase Manhattan Bank’s information centers from entry by unauthorized persons, and a bright young kid armed with nothing but a hand calculator and an ordinary telephone broke into that inner sanctum as a joke and left a calling card: auditors wanting to check a balance, before each CREDIT and DEBIT command had to type PEEKABOO. Of course the experts immediately devised a different, much more complicated, unbreakable program. I don’t remember now who broke that one. B
ut this has no bearing on round two of my mad mission.

  I don’t know the name of the crater I landed in. From the north it resembled Helvetius but not from the south. I had examined this second landing site from orbit although not that carefully. It didn’t matter to me whether or not it had been a no man’s land once. I could have determined the coordinates, playing at the astrograph and doing declinations from this star and that, but I decided to save that for later. LEM 2 was a lot better than I thought it would be, but it did have one problem, the temperature control worked in only two positions, so I had to keep turning the switch, jumping back and forth between oven and icebox which made my nose run. But why was I still sitting in the ship, putting off the landing? It wasn’t fear, I suddenly understood, but the fact that I didn’t know the name of the crater where I would be landing. As if a name had special significance. Which no doubt explains the zeal with which astronomers christened every surface feature of the moon and Mars, and why they fell into despair when they discovered on other planets so many mountains and valleys and had no more names left that sounded good.

  The area was flat except for the northern horizon where a line of ash-gray vertical rocks stood against the black sky. I slogged with difficulty through abundant sand, checking from time to time to see if the micropes were still with me. They hovered so high above that only occasionally could I see them sparkle, distinguished from the stars by their movement. I was near the terminator, the night side of the moon about two miles ahead of me. The sun, very low, touching the horizon at my back, cut the plain with long parallel shadows. Every depression in the ground, even small ones, was filled with such darkness that it was like stepping into water. Hot and cold by turns, I walked stubbornly on, in the direction of my own giant shadow. I could talk with Control but had nothing to say. Every few minutes Wivitch asked me how I was doing and what I saw, and I answered: all right, and nothing. On a sloping dune lay a stack of large flat stones, and I went toward them, seeing a glint of something metallic there. It was the shell of an old rocket, clearly from the days of the first moon shots. I lifted it, looked at it, dropped it, and walked on.