Peace on Earth (11 page)

“Surely you know the reason, Mr. Tichy,” he said, offering me a glass of sherry. He was small, thin, and hairless as a knee. “We can’t do it from Earth. A quarter of a million miles means a three-second round-trip delay in transmission. You’ll descend as much as possible, to a thousand miles, the lower ceiling of the zone of Silence.”

“That’s not what I mean. If we know in advance that the remote won’t last a minute, we could send it from here with micropes to record its end.”

“We’ve done that.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“And the micropes?”

“They showed a little dust.”

“Can’t we send, instead of a remote, something with real armor?”

“What do you consider real armor?”

“I don’t know, perhaps a sphere like the kind once used in deep-sea exploration. With windows, sensors, and so on.”

“That was also done. Not exactly as you’ve described but near enough.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“What happened to it?”

“It’s still there. We lost communication with it.”

“Why?”

“That’s the big question, isn’t it? If we knew the answer, we wouldn’t have to put you to all this trouble.”

There were other conversations along the same lines. After completion of the second phase of my training, I was given a little leave. I’d been living three months now on the carefully guarded base and wanted to get away for one evening at least. So I went to the security director for a pass. He was a pallid, melancholy civilian in a short-sleeved shirt who listened sympathetically and said:

“I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t let you go.”

“What? Why not?”

“Those are my orders. Officially that’s all I know.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially also. I imagine they’re afraid for you.”

“On the moon, I understand, but
here?”

“Here even more.”

“Does that mean I can’t leave here until the launch?”

“Unfortunately.”

“In that case,” I said very quietly, very politely, which I do when I’m furious, “I’m not flying anywhere. There was no talk of this. I agreed to risk my neck but not to sit in prison. This is a volunteer flight. Well, I hereby unvolunteer. Or do you intend to put me in the rocket kicking and screaming?”

“What are you saying?”

I stuck to my guns and finally got the pass. I wanted to feel like an ordinary person, walk in a city crowd, perhaps go to the movies, but most of all eat in a decent restaurant instead of a canteen with people discussing second by second Ijon Tichy’s last moments in a remote that bursts like fireworks. Dr. Lopez gave me his car and I left the base at dusk. As I turned onto the highway I saw in my headlights someone standing, hand raised, by a small car with its blinkers on. I stopped. It was a young woman in white slacks and white sweater, a blonde, with grease on her face. She said her motor was dead, it wouldn’t turn over, so I offered to take her to town. As she got her coat out of the car, I noticed a large man in the front seat. He was motionless, as if made of wood. I looked at him more closely.

“That’s my remote,” she explained. “He’s broken. Everything breaks on me. I was taking him to be fixed.”

She had a husky voice and spoke almost like a child. I had heard that voice before somewhere. I opened the door to let her in, and before the car light went out I saw her face. She was incredibly like Marilyn Monroe, a movie star of the last century. The same face, the same innocence in the eyes and mouth. She asked if we could stop at some restaurant so she could wash. I moved to the slow lane, and we passed bright signs.

“There’s a small Italian restaurant up ahead, really quite good,” she said.

And indeed, neon flashed:
RISTORANTE
. I parked, and we entered a dark room. On a few small tables there were candles. The young woman went to the ladies’ room. I stood for a moment undecided, then finally sat down in a corner booth. The place was nearly empty. Against the usual background of colored bottles a red-headed bartender wiped glasses, and near him brass-covered swinging doors led to the kitchen. In the next booth a man was bent over a notebook beside his plate, writing something. The woman came back.

“I’m starved,” she said. “I stood outside for over an hour. No one would stop. Can we eat something? My treat.”

“All right,” I replied.

A fat man sitting at the bar with his back to us stared at his glass. He held a big black umbrella between his knees. The waiter appeared, took our order while balancing a tray of dirty dishes, and, kicking open the swinging doors, went into the kitchen. The blonde said nothing; she took a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her pocket, lit one from the candle, and held the pack out to me. I shook my head no. I tried not to stare at her. She did not differ from Marilyn Monroe in any way. Strange, since so many women have tried and failed. Monroe was inimitable though hers was neither a great nor an exotic beauty. Many books were written about her but none ever captured that mixture of child and woman which made her different from the rest. Looking at pictures of her once when I was still in Europe, I thought that this was more than a girlish woman, with her constant surprise and joy of a capricious child and the hidden despair or fear, like someone who has no one to confess her sins to. My companion inhaled from her cigarette deeply and blew the smoke slowly at the candle flickering between us. No, it was not a similarity, it was an exact replica. All kinds of suspicions came to me because I wasn’t born yesterday, for example why did she keep her cigarettes in her pocket: women never do that. She had a purse after all, and a big one, bulging, which she had hung on the arm of her chair. The waiter brought the pizza but forgot the Chianti, he apologized and rushed away. Another waiter brought it. Although the restaurant was run tavern-style and the waiters wore large napkins to their knees like aprons, this waiter held his napkin in the crook of his arm. He didn’t leave after he filled our glasses but only stepped back and stood just behind the partition. I could see him there because the brass doors acted like a mirror. The blonde couldn’t see him from where she sat. The pizza was all right but the crust was hard. We ate in silence. Pushing aside her plate, she reached for another Camel.

“What is your name?” I asked. I wanted to hear another name, to weaken the impression that this was
she.

“Let’s drink first,” she said in her hoarse voice. And took both our glasses and switched them.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“A superstition I have.”

She didn’t smile.

“To our health!”

With these words she raised the glass to her lips. I also. The pizza had been peppery and I would have emptied the glass in one draught, but with a crack and a whirl something knocked it out of my hand. The wine spilled on the woman, staining her white sweater like blood. It was the waiter who did this. I wanted to jump up but couldn’t, my legs were too far under the table, and by the time I got free, a lot was happening. The waiter without the apron seized the blonde by the arm. She pulled away and took her purse in both hands as if to shield her face with it. The bartender ran out from behind the counter. The sleepy, bald fat man tripped him, and he fell with a crash. The woman did something with her purse, and a stream of white foam shot from it as from a fire extinguisher. The waiter jumped back and clutched his face covered with white that dripped down his vest. The blonde aimed a white stream at the other waiter, who fell screaming through the swinging doors, hit. Both desperately rubbed their foamy eyes like slapstick actors who had taken cream pies in the face. We were now in a white fog because the foam gave off an acrid gas that filled the room. The blonde, with a quick glance left and right at the two waiters put out of action, turned her purse at me. I was next. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t try to cover myself. Something large and black appeared before me and boomed like a drum. It was the fat man shielding me with the open umbrella. The purse went sailing to the center of the room and ignited, thick dark smoke pouring from it and mixing with the white fog. The bartender sprang from the floor and ran along the counter toward the kitchen doors, which were still swinging. The blonde had disappeared through them. The fat man threw the open umbrella at the feet of the bartender, who jumped over it, lost his balance, careened into the glass behind the bar, which fell with a great crash as he dove into the kitchen. I looked at the battlefield. The charred purse smoldered between the tables. The white fog thinned out, still stinging my eyes. Around the open umbrella on the floor lay pieces of glass, broken plates, cups, and pizza, all covered with sticky foam and spilled wine. This all happened so fast that the Chianti bottle was still rolling in its basket, until it hit the wall. From the next booth someone rose—the man who had been writing in his notebook and drinking beer. I recognized him at once. It was the pallid civilian I’d quarreled with at the base a couple of hours ago. He lifted his melancholy eyebrows and said:

“Was it worth fighting for that pass, Mr. Tichy?”

“A tightly rolled cloth napkin at close range can stop a bullet,” said Leon Grün thoughtfully. He was the security chief and known as Lohengrin. “The French
flics
knew this when they were still in long capes. And neither a Parabellum nor a Beretta would fit into a handbag. She could have had a larger bag, but the bigger the piece, the longer it takes to get it out. Nevertheless I advised Truffles to take an umbrella. And I was right, as you saw. Sodium pectate, wasn’t it, doctor?” The chemist he turned to scratched behind his ear. We were back at the base, in a smoky room full of people, well after midnight.

“Who knows? Sodium pectate or another salt in aerosol form with free radicals. Radicals of ammonia plus an emulsifier and an additive to reduce surface tension. At high pressure—a minimum of fifty atmospheres. A lot of it could fit in that purse. They obviously have experts.”

“Who?” I asked, but no one seemed to hear me.

“What was the purpose? Why did they do it?” I asked, louder this time.

“To put you out of commission. To blind you,” said Lohengrin pleasantly. He lit a cigarette but immediately ground it out in the ashtray with disgust. “Give me something to drink. I’ve smoked too much. You’ve cost us a lot of trouble, Tichy. To put together protection like that in half an hour wasn’t easy.”

“I was to be blinded? Temporarily or permanently?”

“Hard to say. It’s extremely caustic stuff, you know. Possibly a cornea transplant could have saved you.”

“And those two? The waiters?”

“Our man managed to close his eyes in time. A good reflex. But the purse was a bit of a novelty.”

“But why did that … false waiter knock the glass out of my hand?”

“I haven’t spoken with him. He’s not able to talk yet. I assume it was because she changed glasses.”

“There was something in my glass?”

“A ninety-five percent likelihood. Why else would she have done it?”

“But she drank the wine too—I saw her.”

“Not the wine, the glass. Wasn’t she playing with the glass before the waiter came?”

“I’m not sure. Wait, yes, she was. She turned it around in her fingers.”

“Well, there you are. We’re waiting for the lab test results. Only chromatography or mass spectrometry will work because there is so little material left.”

“Poison?”

“I’d say so. You were to have been put out of the picture: neutralized, but not necessarily killed. Probably not killed. Put yourself in their place. A corpse means news coverage, theories, an autopsy, talk. But a psychosis, that’s a different story. Gives more elegant results. There are plenty of such drugs today. States of depression, dementia, hallucinations. I think that if you had drunk the wine, you wouldn’t have felt a thing then. Only tomorrow, or later. The more delayed the effect, the more it looks like a real psychosis. Who can’t go insane these days? Anybody can. Starting with me, Mr. Tichy.”

“And the foam? The spray?”

“The spray was the last resort. The spare tire in the trunk. She used it because she had to.”

“Who are the
they
we’re talking about?”

Lohengrin smiled. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief that was not the cleanest, looked at it with a grimace, put it back in his pocket, and said:

“You are naive. Not everyone is as thrilled about your nomination as we, Mr. Tichy.”

“Do I have an alternate? I never asked… Do you have someone in reserve? Through him, we might be able to learn who…”

“No. There is
not one
alternate now. There are many with similar scores, but we’d have to start a whole new selection process.”

“One more thing,” I said, a little embarrassed. “Where did that woman come from?”

“About that we know something,” Lohengrin said evenly. “Your European apartment was gone through a couple of weeks ago. Nothing taken but everything examined. That’s where they got it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your library. You have a biography of Marilyn Monroe and two picture albums of her. The proclivity is obvious.”

“You searched my apartment and didn’t tell me?”

“Everything was put back in place, even dusted, and as for searching, we weren’t the first. You can see it was a good thing our men learned about the books. We didn’t tell you so as not to upset you. You have enough on your mind as it is. Maximum concentration is essential. We are collectively, you see, your nursemaid,” and he swept his arm to include everyone present: the fat man now without an umbrella, the chemist, and three silent men leaning against the wall.

“So when you demanded the pass, I thought it best not to tell you about your apartment, because that wouldn’t have stopped you. Would it have?”

“I guess not.”

“So you see.”

“All right But the uncanny resemblance. Was she—human?”

“Yes and no. Not directly. Do you want to see her? She’s lying in that room.” He pointed to the door behind him. For a second I had the mad thought that Marilyn Monroe had died a second death.

“A product of Gynandroics?” I asked slowly.