Peace on Earth (13 page)

I had no doubt that in lunar orbit too something would go wrong, though the simulations and inspections had been repeated ad nauseam. But of course I didn’t know when that would happen or into what sort of mess it would put me. At the next countdown everything went fine, but this time
I
pulled the plug, because my left leg fell asleep, too tightly wrapped, and I argued on the phone with Wivitch who said the pins and needles would pass and the tape shouldn’t be any looser. But I insisted, and they had to spend an hour and a half unwinding me from my cocoon. It turned out that someone—but of course no one confessed—had used a pipe-cleaning utensil to help pull the tape and it had been forgotten under the wrapping around my shin. I asked them to let the matter drop even though I could guess who had done it, since only one of them smoked a pipe. In heroic tales of space such things never happen. An astronaut does not get the runs, nor do the amenities malfunction so that his spacesuit fills with piss. Which actually happened to the first American astronaut in his suborbital flight but out of natural historical-patriotic delicacy NASA didn’t mention it to the press.

The more care they take for your comfort, the more likely it is that some tangled bit of wire will dig under your arm or a buckle pinch in the worst possible place, driving you up the wall. When I once suggested they put remote scratchers inside the suit, they all thought it was a joke and laughed, except the seasoned astronauts who knew what I was talking about. It was I who discovered Tichy’s Law which says that the first itch occurs in a place on the body you can’t possibly reach. The itching stops only when something serious happens, because then your hair stands on end, your flesh crawls, and breaking into a cold sweat does the rest. True as this is, the authorities don’t want to hear it because it doesn’t rhyme well with One Giant Leap for Mankind. Can you imagine Armstrong climbing down the rungs of that first LEM and saying instead that his underwear was riding up? I’ve always thought that the people at Central Control who sit back in their chairs with a can of beer and give advice to the astronaut-turned-mummy, with their words of encouragement and support, should first put themselves in his shoes.

The last two weeks I spent at the base were not pleasant. There were new attempts to remove Ijon Tichy. Even after the incident with the false Marilyn Monroe they didn’t tell me that my mail was being scanned by a special machine. The technology of epistolary terrorism is so developed that a charge able to blow the addressee to pieces can be placed inside a Christmas or birthday card wishing him health and happiness. It was only after a deadly letter from Professor Tarantoga almost put me out of the picture and I raised holy hell that they showed me the machine, an armored container with slanted steel slabs to absorb explosions. Each letter is opened by pincers and examined by x ray and ultrasound to trigger the detonator if there is one. The letter in question didn’t explode and Tarantoga had actually written it, so they brought it to me and I was saved thanks to my sense of smell. The envelope reeked of mignonette or lavender, which seemed strange to me, suspicious, because Tarantoga is the last person to use perfumed stationery. No sooner did I read the words “Dear Ijon” than I began to laugh and instantly realized that although I was laughing I was not amused, and since one does not laugh for no reason, I concluded, putting two and two together, that this laughter was not natural. I did a very prudent thing then, slipping the letter under the glass that covered my desk, to read it that way. And thank God I also had a runny nose, which I blew. The Council afterward debated whether I blew my nose automatically or from an instant insight, and I myself wasn’t sure. In any case this was why I inhaled only a very small amount of the drug with which the letter had been impregnated. It was a completely new drug. The laughter it produced was the overture to hiccups so persistent that they could be stopped only by a strong narcotic. I immediately phoned Lohengrin, who at first thought I was playing some joke because while I spoke, I roared with laughter. From the neurological standpoint laughter is the first stage of a hiccup. Finally the matter became clear, the letter was taken to the laboratory by two men in masks, and Dr. Lopez and his colleagues came and gave me oxygen. When I had subsided to a chuckle, they made me read all the lead articles in the newspapers of that day and the day before.

I didn’t realize that during my absence the press as well as television had split in two. There are papers and programs that give all the news and those that give only the good news. Until now they had been feeding me the second kind, which is why at the base I had the impression that the world had truly improved after the signing of the Geneva Agreement. You would have thought that at least the pacifists were happy, but no, A book Dr. Lopez loaned me tells the story of our new society. The author shows that Jesus was a subversive sent to undermine Jewish unity with that love thy neighbor business, on the principle of divide and conquer, which worked, and which a little later brought down the Roman Empire. Jesus himself had no idea he was a subversive, and the apostles too were in the dark, having only the best intentions although everyone knows what is paved with good intentions. The author, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, says that anyone who proclaims brotherly love and peace on earth should be immediately arrested and interrogated to see what his agenda really is. So it’s not surprising that the pacifists have changed their tactics. Some have taken up the cause of delicious animals. There has nevertheless been no decline in the consumption of pork chops. Others urge solidarity with all living things, and in the German Bundestag eighteen seats were won by the Probacteria Party which says that microbes have as much right to live as we so instead of killing them with medicine we should alter them genetically to live not on humans but on something else. There is a real groundswell of good will, with disagreement only about who is standing in its way. But there is no disagreement that the enemies of brotherly love should be exterminated root and branch.

At Tarantoga’s I saw an interesting new encyclopedia entitled
The Lexicon of Fear.
It used to be, says the book, that fear had its roots in the supernatural: in spells, witches, demons, heretics, atheists, black magic, ghosts, Bohemians, and abstract art, but in the industrial age fear shifted to things more concrete. There was fear of tomatoes (carcinogenic), aspirin (stomach bleeding), coffee (birth defects), butter (saturated fat), sugar, cars, television, discotheques, pornography, birth control pills, science, cigarettes, nuclear power plants, and higher education. I wasn’t surprised by the popularity of this encyclopedia. Professor Tarantoga is of the opinion that people need two things. First, an answer to the question “Who is responsible?” and second, to the question “What is the secret?” The first answer should be brief, obvious, and unambiguous. As for the second, scientists have been annoying everyone for two hundred years with their superior knowledge. How nice to see them baffled by the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, and the emotions of plants, and how satisfying it is when a simple middle-aged woman of Paris can see the whole future of the world while on that subject the professors are as ignorant as spoons.

People, says Tarantoga, believe what they want to believe. Take astrology for instance. Astronomers, who after all should know more than anyone about the stars, tell us that they are giant balls of incandescent gas spinning since the world began and that their influence on our fate is considerably less than the influence of a banana peel, on which you can slip and break your leg. But there is no interest in banana peels, whereas serious periodicals include horoscopes and there are even pocket computers you can consult before you invest in the stock market to find out if the stars are favorable. Anyone who says that the skin of a fruit can have more effect on a person’s future than all the planets and stars combined won’t be listened to. An individual comes into the world because his father, say, didn’t withdraw in time, thereby becoming a father. The mother-to-be, seeing what happened, took quinine and jumped from the top of the dresser to the floor but that didn’t help. So the individual is born and he finishes school and works in a store selling suspenders, or in a post office. Then suddenly he learns that that’s not the way it was at all. The planets came into conjunction, the signs of the zodiac arranged themselves carefully into a special pattern, half the sky cooperated with the other half so that he could come into being and stand behind this counter or sit behind this desk. It lifts his spirits. The whole universe revolves around him, and even if things aren’t going well, even if the stars are lined up in such a way that the suspenders manufacturer loses his shirt and the individual consequently loses his job, it’s still more comforting than to know that the stars don’t really give a damn. Knock astrology out of his head, and the belief too that the cactus on his windowsill cares about him, and what is left? Barefoot, naked despair. So says Professor Tarantoga, but I see I am digressing.

They shot me into orbit on the 27th of October, wrapped in sensor tape like an infant in swaddling clothes. From a height of four hundred miles I observed Mother Earth and could hear the engineers at the base cheering that this time it worked. My first stage, the main booster, separated as it was supposed to, above the Atlantic, on the dot, but the second got stuck and I had to help it. I think it fell in the Andes. After the traditional good lucks and safe trips I took over the controls myself and proceeded through the most hazardous zone on the way to the moon. You have no idea how many old satellites, civilian and military, are circling Earth. Something like eighteen thousand not counting the ones that have come apart, particularly dangerous because the pieces are almost too small for radar. And then there’s a lot of ordinary garbage in space, all kinds of waste products, especially radioactive, deposited here by jet. So I flew with extreme caution until space was properly empty. Only then did I unbuckle all the belts and start checking my LEMs.

I turned on one after the other, seeing how each felt, seeing the interior of the bay through its crystal eyes. I had nineteen remotes, but the last one was by itself in a crate marked
FRUIT JUICE
to fool unauthorized persons. Inside the crate was a hermetically sealed cylinder, light blue, which housed a powdered
remote,
Professor Lax-Gugliborc’s top-secret creation, and I was to use it only as a last resort, I knew the principle of its operation but still don’t know whether I should reveal that yet. Nor do I want to turn this account into a Gynandroics catalog or a product list of the Lunar Agency’s teleferic division. LEM 5 started shivering when I turned it on. Since it was feedback-connected to me, I shivered too, as in a fever, teeth chattering. I was supposed to inform the base at once about such defects, but I didn’t because I knew from experience what would happen. They would immediately call in a whole army of mechanics, designers, engineers, and specialists in electronic pathology, who would be angry with me for making such a big deal out of light convulsions that might go away by themselves, and they would give me contradictory instructions, connect this, disconnect that, and how many amps to zap the poor thing with because electroshock can help machines as well as people. And that would produce some new, unpredicted response, and they would tell me to wait patiently while they ran simulations of the LEM, analog and digital, and of me too, as they argued with each other constantly and now and then told me to stay calm. The team would split into two or three camps like distinguished doctors in consultation. Perhaps they would have me climb into the bay with tools and open the LEM’s belly and train the hand camera on it since all the circuitry is there and not in the head which hasn’t room. So I’d be following the baton of the experts, and if it worked, they’d take the credit, and if it didn’t, I’d get the blame.

But I was 100,000 miles from Earth now and increasingly glad I had kept quiet about the problem, because soon there would be more than a second’s delay in communicating with the base and I’d be sure to bust something, precise movements are difficult when you’re weightless, a spark would tell them I’d caused a short, and then there would be a chorus of sour remarks. Tichy’s screwed it up, they’d say, there’s nothing we can do. So I had spared both them and myself that aggravation.

The nearer I got to the moon, the more unnecessary the advice and cautions I was receiving over the radio, until finally I said that if they didn’t stop bothering me, I’d turn the damned thing off. I knew the moon like the palm of my hand from the days when they were considering turning it into a Disneyland. I circled it three times in high orbit and over the Oceanus Procellarum began a slow descent. On one side I could see the Mare Imbrium and on the other the crater Eratosthenes, then Murchison and the Sinus Medi all the way to the Mare Nubium. I was now so low that the continuation of the moon’s pock-marked surface was hidden from me. I was at the lower boundary of the Zone of Silence. So far nothing unexpected had happened if you don’t count the two empty beer cans that came to life during my maneuvers. When I braked, the cans—as usual discarded in haste by our technicians—manifested themselves and began flying around the cabin, hitting the walls and my head. A greenhorn would have tried to catch them. I changed orbit and flew above the Taurus mountains. When the great Sea of Serenity stretched out before me, I was hit in the back of my helmet so sharply that I jumped. It was a tin of salted crackers that probably had gone with the beer. The base heard the noise and immediately there were questions, but I lied, explaining that I had tried to scratch my head and forgot both helmet and bulky glove. No point in getting the technicians in trouble. They
always
leave stuff in rockets. It’s like a law of nature.

I flew through the zone of internal control without difficulty, because its satellites had been told by Earth to let me pass. It wasn’t in the program, but I braked hard a few times to dislodge any other mementos from the assembly-and-inspection crews. A comic book stuffed in the reserve selenography drawer fluttered out like an enormous moth. Taking a quick inventory—two beer cans, a cracker tin, a comic book—I concluded that there would be more surprises in store and I would have to stay alert.