Peace on Earth (17 page)

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.

At the top of a rise where there was hardly any of that fine sand that clings to your boots, was a stone the shape of a badly baked loaf of bread, and I don’t know why but I kicked it. Maybe out of boredom or because it was lying so apart. The stone broke instead of rolling downhill, and a piece the size of a fist flew off, leaving a surface that gleamed like quartz. Of course I knew plenty, from my briefing, about the chemical composition of the moon’s crust but couldn’t remember if it included quartz, so I picked up the fragment. It was surprisingly heavy. I held it and looked at it, and not knowing what more to do with it, tossed it away and moved on, but didn’t move on because at the last moment, as it left my hand, it glittered in the sun very curiously, as if something tiny was trembling in the concave broken place. I didn’t pick it up again, but bent over it and watched for quite a while, blinking because I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me unless something really strange was taking place in that stone piece. The surface of the break was quickly losing its shine, in a few seconds was dull, and then it began to fill out as if drawing substance impossibly from within. The stone seemed to exude a viscous sap like a cut tree. Carefully I touched it with a finger, but it was not sticky; gummy, rather, like plaster before it sets. I looked at the other, larger piece and was even more surprised. It had not only dulled but swelled out a little at the place of the break. I didn’t say anything to Wivitch, just stood there, legs apart, feeling the sun at my back, a hot pressure, it hung not far above the gently curved, white-and-black striped plain, but I didn’t take my eyes from the stone.

It was growing or, more precisely, healing. After a few minutes the two parts, the stone and the fragment I had held in my hand, no longer fit, they had both swelled until each was a lump that had no flat side from the fracture. I waited to see what would happen next but nothing more happened, as if the wound had been sealed in both places by a scar. Absurd yet true. Remembering how easily the stone had broken, because I hadn’t kicked it very hard, I looked around for more. A few, smaller, lay on the sunny slope, so I took out my folding shovel, went over and hit them, one by one, with its sharp blade. They split like overripe chestnuts and shimmered inside, until I came to an ordinary rock, because the shovel bounced off it leaving only a white line on its surface. I returned to those that had fallen in two. They were healing, there was no doubt about it. I had a little Geiger counter in a pocket on my right thigh. It registered nothing when held near the stones. This was an important find because stones don’t heal, therefore these were probably the product of some local technology and I should collect them. I was reaching for one when I remembered that I couldn’t return to the ship because that wasn’t in the Mission. Nor could I do an in-the-field chemical analysis, having no reagents. If I told Wivitch about this phenomenon, a lengthy conference would ensue, full of expert opinions, and excited scientists would forbid me to leave the spot and ask me to break as many of the stones as I could, like eggs, and observe what happened while they theorized more and more boldly, but I felt in my bones that nothing would come of it, because you have to have some idea in your head before you start experimenting. Then I heard from Wivitch, who had seen me hitting something with the shovel but apparently the picture transmitted by the micropes was not sharp enough for him to see what. I answered that it was nothing and quickly continued on my way, full of thoughts.

The ability of those injured in battle to repair themselves might be useful to warrior robots but hardly to stones. Could this mean that the computers in this locality were building weapons from the ground up, as it were? But even so, why would stone projectiles need to heal? Then the thought occurred to me that I was here, after all, not as a living being but as a nonliving remote. Could it be that the evolution of the moon weapons had proceeded along two independent lines: as the production of weapons that would attack what was nonliving, and separately, what was living? Let us assume that. Let us assume—I thought—that a device designed to destroy a nonliving weapon could not with the same efficaciousness destroy a living enemy, and that I had encountered the second type of device, one set for the landing of a man. Since I was not a man, these mines—if they were mines—failing to detect a living body inside my suit, did nothing to harm me, and only sealed themselves up. A robot scout from Earth, happening upon them, would pay no attention to healing rocks, not programmed to notice so bizarre and unforeseen a phenomenon. But I, neither man nor robot, had noticed. What then? I did not know, but if there was any truth at all in my theory, I could expect other mines, mines not for humans but for automata. I walked more slowly, placing my feet with great care, passing dune after dune, the unmoving sun behind me. The stones I came to, some larger, some smaller, I didn’t hit with the shovel or kick in case there were indeed two kinds of mines. I went on like this for a good three miles or maybe more but didn’t take out my pedometer, which was in a shin pocket so deep and narrow it was murder getting my glove in. Then, looking to the south, I saw ruins.

It didn’t make much of an impression on me because there are so many piles of rock on the moon that from a distance look like the ruins of buildings. Still, I changed direction and waded through deeper sand, expecting that grouping of rocks to reveal its true, random nature, but it didn’t. On the contrary, the closer I got, the more definitely it looked like the half-broken façade of a low building, and the black places weren’t shadows but holes, maybe not as regular as windows but on the moon no one had ever come across such large holes in rock and certainly not in a row. The sand stopped giving way beneath me, and my boots hit something rough, pitted, and glassy, like lava except it wasn’t lava but perhaps sand that had been raised to an extremely high temperature then cooled. I wasn’t mistaken because this surface was dazzling in the sun and covered the entire slope that led to the ruins. A high dune lay in front of them, and when I reached the top of it I had a perfect view and understood why I hadn’t seen them from orbit. The ruins were deep in rubble. If these were truly houses, then the rubble came up to the windows. From a distance of about three hundred yards they resembled something familiar from photographs: stone foundations after an earthquake, for example in Iran. From orbit you would see them only near the terminator, the low sun shining through the window openings, which were misshapen as if from an explosion. But I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that this was merely a peculiar rock formation. I went closer. Feeling very uneasy, I took out my Geiger counter and plugged it into my suit so I could hear if the ground was radioactive. It was plenty radioactive but not until halfway down the dune. When I stepped onto the rubble that surrounded the squat houses with jagged walls and no roofs (now quite positive this was not the product of natural forces), I heard the counter’s rapid clatter. The rubble didn’t move under my feet as normal rubble would, it was as if all fused by the intense heat of an explosion. I was at the first house now but couldn’t inspect it properly because I had to watch every step, placing my heavy boots carefully among the pointy ledges of that great heap so I wouldn’t slip and become stuck between two boulders, which wouldn’t have been difficult. Higher up, on a level with a nearby ruin, the rubble changed to a glaze covered with black streaks like soot. It was easier to walk, and I went to a window, an irregular opening with hanging stones at the top. I looked inside and saw—though not at once, because it was so dark—long objects lying haphazardly. Reluctant to crawl through the broken window because my remote, a massive thing, might get wedged, I looked for a door. If there were windows here, why not a door. But I didn’t find one. Walking around the house, which was grotesquely squashed as if by some tremendous force, I discovered a crack in a side wall, wide enough to let me in if I hunkered down. On the moon, where sun and shadow coexist without intermediaries, the contrast is too much for the human eye even when relayed by a remote. I crawled groping into a corner of the room, pressed my back against the wall, and closed my eyes until they grew accustomed to the dark. I counted to a hundred, then looked around.

The interior was like a cave without a ceiling, which didn’t mean light from above because the lunar sky is as black as night. And the sunlight through the window was not visible as a shaft because there was no air or dust to diffuse it. The sun remained outside, present only as a blazing white patch on the wall opposite the corner where I stood. In its reflection, at my feet, lay three corpses. That’s what I thought in the first moment, because although blackened and distorted they had legs, arms, and one even had a head. Blinking and shielding my eyes from the patch of sun, I knelt over the nearest one. It was not a human body, nor any kind of mortal remains, for what has never been alive cannot die. The form sprawled before me was a manikin but probably not a robot, because its torn-open trunk was completely empty. There were only a few bits of rubble and sand inside. Cautiously I pulled at the thing’s shoulder. It was surprisingly light, as if made of styrofoam, and black as coal, and headless, but then I saw the head by the wall—it was upright on its severed neck and regarded me with its three empty eyesockets. Naturally I wondered: why three and not two? The third eye was a round cavity positioned where on a man you would have the bridge of the nose, but this curious manikin surely never had a nose because on the moon there would have been no point. The other manikins were also only roughly humanoid. Although the destruction of the house had greatly deformed them, you could see that even to begin with they had been only approximations to the human shape. Their legs were too long, about one and a half times the length of the torso, and their arms were too thin and attached not to the shoulders but oddly, one to the chest, the other to the back. Which must have been by design because the explosion, shock wave, and cave-in could have contorted the limbs of one like that but not all of them in the same way. Having an arm in front and an arm in back might be, who knows, advantageous in certain situations.

Squatting opposite the sharp patch of sun and in the darkness with three manikin corpses, I realized that aside from the rapid clicking of the Geiger counter I was hearing nothing—that for at least a few minutes the voice of Wivitch had not reached me. The last time I spoke to him was from the top of the dune that overlooked the ruins, and I had said nothing about my discovery, wanting to make sure first that it wasn’t an illusion. I called Control, but heard only the alarm-rattle of my counter. The radiation level was high, but I didn’t bother to take a reading because as a remote I didn’t have to worry, then suddenly it occurred to me that it was some ionized gas given off by these irradiated broken stones which had cut off my radio communication, and that at any moment resonant absorption could cut my contact with my ship. A stab of fear that I would be stranded here forever, which was stupid because if I lost contact with my ship, only the remote would remain in this rubble and ruins while I found myself back on board. But so far I felt no lessening whatever of control over the remote. My ship must have been hovering right over the house, maintaining the orbit that kept it near the zenith above me. No one of course had foreseen such a discovery or such a situation, but the zenith position is optimal for maneuvering a remote, since the distance between it and its operator is smallest and thus so is the response time. Without an atmosphere the concentration of ionized gas (perhaps from vaporization after the explosion) could not be great. Was it also interfering with communication between the base and the micropes? I didn’t know and wasn’t concerned about that at the moment; what intrigued me was what had happened here and why.

I dragged the biggest corpse, the one with the head, backward through the crack in the wall. Outside, the radio still didn’t work, but I was more interested in this poor thing that had never lived, true, but for all its ghastliness made a most pathetic impression. He must have been nine feet tall, or maybe a little less, was thin, and the head was elongated, it had three eyes, no nose or mouth, a narrow neck, and the hands were prehensile, but I couldn’t count the fingers because the material from which he was made had melted the most there. He was covered with tarry cinders. It must have been hot, I thought, and only then did it occur to me that this could have been a group of buildings like those they once set up on Earth to study the effects of nuclear explosions, it was in Nevada and someplace else too, with houses, courtyards, stores, and streets, but animals were used for people, sheep and goats I think, and especially pigs because like us they don’t have fur and therefore suffer the same kind of burns we do. Had this been such a test site? If I knew the force of the blast that turned these buildings into rubble, I could determine from the present level of radioactivity how long ago that happened, but the physicists could also probably calculate it from the mix of isotopes here, so I put a little gravel into the thigh pocket of my suit, then remembered angrily, again, that I wouldn’t be returning to the ship. But it was necessary to date the explosion, even if only approximately. I decided to leave the contaminated area, reestablish contact with Control, and tell them about this, letting the physicists solve the problem of how to analyze the specimen I’d taken.