Peace on Earth (19 page)

The laser-shooters had fallen, and I could hardly distinguish the individual robots, their gray blending into the surroundings. But now up the slope came, from where I don’t know, a spider as big as a shack and listing like a ship at sea. Flat as a turtle on top, it wavered on its many widespread legs, the knees higher than itself on both sides, but it proceeded methodically, heavily, carefully placing those many-jointed stilts, and approached the wall of heat. I was curious to see what would happen. Under its belly something long and dark, almost black, came into view, probably a weapon of some kind. The spider stopped at the wall of heat and stood awhile, as if thinking. All action stopped. The only thing I could hear was high squeaking in my helmet, a signal in some incomprehensible code. A strange battle, for it was primitive, resembling the struggle of Mesozoic dinosaurs on Earth millions of years ago, but at the same time it was sophisticated, because these lizards had not hatched from reptilian eggs but were robots armed with lasers and packed with electronics. The giant spider now hunkered down, its belly touching the ground, and seemed to close in upon itself. I heard nothing, but of course even if the very moon were to split open you would hear no sound, however the ground shook once, twice, three times. The tremors became continuous, till everything around me, and myself, shook with an increasingly intense vibration. The dunes in the distance strewn with the bodies of gray lizards, the slope facing me, and the black sky above it, I saw everything as through trembling glass. The outlines of objects blurred, even the stars on the horizon winked as on Earth, and I shook feverishly, like a tuning fork, and so did the boulder I clutched. I shook in every bone and finger, more and more violently, as if every part of my being were quivering jelly. The vibration was painful now, like a thousand microscopic drills at once. I tried pushing away from the boulder, to stand separate, because then it would reach me only through the soles of my boots, but I couldn’t move, my hands were paralyzed, I only watched, half-blind, as the giant spider drew itself into a dark bristling ball like a real spider dying under a magnifying glass that focuses the sun. Then everything went black and I was falling into an abyss, until I opened my eyes, covered with sweat, my throat tight, and saw the bright, friendly colors of the control panel. I had returned to the ship. Apparently a safety mechanism disconnected me at a certain level of discomfort. I rested a minute, then decided to go back, although with the hideous feeling that I might be entering a corpse. Carefully I pushed the lever, as if it could burn me, and found myself again on the moon and in the all-consuming vibration. Before the safety mechanism threw me on the ship again I saw, though not that clearly, a great mound of black fragments that were slowly tumbling down. The fortress fell, I thought, and again was back in my own body. But the fact that the remote hadn’t come apart gave me the courage to try it one more time.

Nothing shook now. All was deathly still. Among the charred lizards lay the ruins of the mysterious fortress that had blocked the way to the top of the hill. The spider that had destroyed it using resonance lay in a ball of twitching legs which straightened and bent, straightened and bent, movements that grew slower until they stopped completely. A Pyrrhic victory? I waited for another advance but nothing moved. If I hadn’t seen what I had seen, I might not even have noticed the burnt debris that littered the whole field, it blended in so with the sand. I tried to rise but couldn’t. I was not even able to move a hand. At most I managed to tilt my head in the helmet so I could see myself.

It was not a pretty sight. The boulder that had served me as a shield was split into large pieces and those were covered with a network of hairline cracks. My legs or rather what remained of them were stuck in rubble. The poor remote was an armless, legless torso. I had the eerie sensation that my head was on the moon and my body was on the ship, because even as I saw the battlefield under the black sky, I felt the seat and shoulder belts of my chair. The chair was with me yet not with me because I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t hard to figure out the reason: the remote’s sensors, without incoming data, shut down so I remained in contact only with the head which, protected by the helmet, had survived the murderous moonquake caused by the spider. Nothing more for me to do here, I thought. But I stayed, half in half out of the rubble, and looked over the sunlit field.

In the distance something was flapping in the sand, sluggishly, like a fish on a beach. One of the lizard robots. Sand rolled off its back as it hauled itself into a sitting position like a kangaroo or dinosaur, and it sat there, the last witness of a battle that no one won. The robot turned toward me and suddenly began to spin, and spun so fast, the centrifugal force made its long tail fly off. I watched, amazed, while it whirled now like a top, until pieces flew in all directions and it fell flat, flopped over a few times, and with a final somersault landed on the other bodies and was still. Although I had attended no lecture on the theory of electronic expiring, I knew that this was what I had just seen, it was so like the death spasms of a crushed beetle or caterpillar. We know how their death looks but cannot know if those last spasms signify suffering. I had had enough of this. I felt, in a way difficult to describe, that I was involved in it, even responsible. But because I hadn’t come to the moon to philosophize on moral questions, I bit down hard to disconnect myself from the pitiful remnant of LEM 3 and in the blink of an eye was back on board to tell Control what had happened this time.

Tarantoga, to whom I showed these notes, said that I describe all who worked on my mission and kept watch over me as either idiots or bunglers. Whereas the General Theory of Systems proves mathematically that there exists no element or part that is infallible, and even if you reduce fallibility to one in a million, in other words provide that a given part will break down only once in a million times, a system containing a million parts
must
fail because one of the million will fail. But the lunar system I belonged to was made up of not one but eighteen million components, therefore the idiot bungler responsible for the majority of my problems was
the world,
because if all the experts stood on their heads and were geniuses every one, the situation could only be worse, never better. Probably true. On the other hand, I was the one who suffered as a result of all those unavoidable breakdowns, and anyway psychologically, when you’re in a fix, you don’t curse the atoms or electrons but specific individuals so my radio tantrums were also unavoidable.

Control pinned their hopes on the last LEM because it was a miracle of technology and guaranteed the maximum safety. It was a remote in powdered form. Instead of a steel athlete you had a container filled with microscopic grains, each grain of such concentrated intelligence it rivaled a supercomputer. In the presence of certain impulses these particles came together to form a LEM. I could land as a thin cloud of molecules, could coalesce if necessary in the form of a robot of human shape, but I could just as easily become one of forty-nine other programmed things, and even if eighty-five percent of the grains were destroyed, the rest would be enough to carry on. The science behind such a remote, called a dispersant, was so advanced that Einstein, von Neumann, the entire physics department of M.I.T., and Rabindranath Tagore working together would have had a problem with it, so I didn’t even try to figure it out. All I knew was that they’d embodied me in thirty billion separate particles, particles more versatile than the cells of a living organism, and there was unimaginable redundancy for joining these in various combinations which could all be turned back to dust at the push of a button, dust so scattered you couldn’t see it, and each particle incorporating stealth technology, making it undetectable by radar or laser or anything except gamma rays. If I was ambushed I could disperse myself, retreat, and reform in whatever way I liked. What one experiences as a cloud spread over several thousand cubic feet is impossible to put into words. To know it, you have to be such a cloud. If I lost my vision, or to be more precise my optical sensors, I could replace them with any other organ, and the same for arms, legs, tentacles, tools. I just had to be careful not to become lost in the wealth of possibilities. This time, I would have only myself to blame if I failed. The scientists thus washed their hands of responsibility if the remote malfunctioned. I can’t say this made me happy.

I landed at the equator on the other side of the moon, smack in the middle of the Japanese sector, as a centaur, that is as a being with four extremities plus two arms attached to the upper trunk, with an additional device that surrounded me like an intelligent gas, so actually there was not much resemblance to the mythological creature. Even though I had familiarized myself with this powdered remote too at the Lunar Agency’s testing range, I first crawled into the bay to check it out. It was indeed fascinating to watch that pile of glittering powder begin to move when you turned on a program, and flow, and connect, and mold itself to make the given shape, and how when you turned off the field (electromagnetic or possibly something else), it flew apart like a kicked sand castle. This ability to fly apart at any moment was supposed to make me feel secure. The sensation was quite unpleasant, like a strong vertigo combined with the shakes, but there was nothing I could do about that. At least it only lasted until I assumed a new form. The one thing that could destroy me was a thermonuclear explosion and even that had to be up close. I asked if it was possible for me to disperse completely due to a malfunction but they never gave me a straight answer. As an experiment I tried to run two programs at once, becoming at the same time a humanoid giant and a nine-foot caterpillar with a flattened head and enormous pincers, but it didn’t work because the selector worked on an either/ or principle.

This time I stood on lunar soil without the rear guard of the micropes, because I was myself in a sense a multitude of eyes, pulling after me a flowing gauzy train of transmitters. Possessing an inquiring mind, I had asked what would happen if it turned out that similar protean robots had been developed on the moon. They couldn’t answer that though on the testing range they had pitted two, even three such robots against each other, which mixed like clouds going in different directions. The clouds preserved ninety percent of their identity. Ninety percent of an identity is probably also something you have to experience to understand. This reconnaissance, at any rate, started without any trouble. I trotted forward, not even having to turn my head because I could see on all sides at once, the rear included, like a bee, which has round eyes and sees out of thousands of ommatidia at the same time.

The way that the individual nations programmed their weapon factories was known only to them, but from the Japanese particularly, famous for their ingenuity, I expected unpleasant surprises. Professor Hakagawa, a member of our team at Control, had no more idea than any of us what monsters the Japanese computers might hatch, but he warned me to stay on my toes and not be taken in by appearances. Not knowing how to tell appearance from reality, I cantered across the monotonous, flat terrain. At the horizon rose the embankment of a large crater, and Wivitch, Hakagawa, and the rest of them were delighted with the picture relayed to Earth by the Trojan satellites because it was razor-sharp. After an hour I observed some low shoots among the rocks and in the sand, and they turned in my direction. They looked like the withered leaves of potato plants. I asked if I should pull up a clump, but nobody wanted to make the decision for me, some said I definitely should and others said I’d better not. I leaned my centaur’s body over one of the larger plants and tried to pick a pliant stem. Nothing happened, so I lifted it to my eyes. It began writhing like a snake and coiled itself tight around my wrist, but after trying a couple of things I discovered that if you stroked it lightly, like tickling with a finger, it let go. I felt stupid addressing potato leaves though I knew this had nothing to do with the vegetable kingdom, but I gave it a try anyway. There was no answer, not that I expected one. I shook off the tendrils, which squirmed like worms, and galloped on. The area looked like a poorly kept garden, a bucolic scene, but I was prepared for an attack at any moment and even provoked those pseudoplants, stepping on them with my hooves (which are what my boots looked like; had I wanted, I could have made them cloven hooves). Then I came to a patch of another dead vegetable, in long rows, and before each row stood a large sign with the words
STOP
!
HALT
!
ARRÊTE
! and so on in some twenty tongues including Malay and Hebrew. Despite this I plunged ahead into the field. Farther on, tiny pale-blue flies swarmed in circles near the ground, and when they saw me they arranged themselves into the letters
DANGER
!
OПACHOCTБ
!
GEFAHR
!
PERÌCOLO
!
YOU ARE ENTERING JAPANESE PINTELOU
! I called Control, but no one, not even Hakagawa, knew what
PINTELOU
meant. I encountered my first problem, because when I pushed through these trembling letters they stuck to me and began crawling over my body like ants. They did me no harm, however. I flicked them off with my tail (showing its usefulness for the first time) and ran down a furrow between two patches until I came to the edge of the crater. The plants continued into a gully and on, deeper, into a wide ravine, its bottom hidden in moon shadow as black as coal.

Suddenly a large tank came at me out of that darkness, squat, huge, its wide treads grinding and rumbling, which was odd because one can’t hear on the moon, there’s no air to carry the sound waves. Nevertheless I heard the noise, heard even the gravel crunching under the steel tracks. The tank bore down on me. Behind it appeared a long column of other tanks. I would gladly have stepped aside to let them pass, but it was too narrow where I stood, I was going to disperse but when the first tank reached me, it went through like fog, making everything a little darker for a couple of seconds. More phantoms, I thought, and let the next tanks roll through me. After them came a line of soldiers, ordinary soldiers, with almond eyes, bayonets fixed on short rifles, and among them walked an officer with a saber and a flag that displayed the rising sun. They all went through me like smoke, and I was alone again. It grew darker in the deepening ravine so I turned on my lights, which bordered all my eyes, and proceeding more slowly I came to the mouth of a cave behind a rampart of scrap iron. The opening was too low for me, so in order not to have to keep stooping I changed into a dachshund-centaur, which sounds stupid but is descriptive because my legs shortened and my belly brushed stones as I entered the moon’s interior, going where no human being had ever set foot though my feet weren’t exactly human either. I stumbled more and more, my hooves slipping on gravel, when I remembered what I was capable of and turned them into padded paws that held the floor like a lion’s or tiger’s. I felt more at home in my new body but didn’t have time to play games. Lighting up the irregularly cut walls of the cave, I reached a grating that filled the entire passageway, and I thought how polite these Japanese weapons were to intruders because on the ceiling above the grating glowed the large sign:
NOT ENTERING
!
NOT TO TRESPASS THIS BARRIER
!
YOU HAVE WARNING TO KEEP OUT
! and beyond the bars floated a phosphorescent skull and cross-bones with the words
DEATH IS VERY PERMANENT CONDITION
. That didn’t deter me. I went to powder, passed through the grating, and pulled myself together on the other side. The natural stone of the corridor gave way to an oval tunnel, its walls bright and smooth like ceramic. I tapped it with a finger, and from the place I touched a small root emerged and flattened into a plaque that read
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN
. It was clear they weren’t joking but I hadn’t come this far to retreat now, so I proceeded on quiet paws, feeling my tail following softly, ready to come to my assistance at any moment. It didn’t bother me that Control couldn’t see me. The radio had fallen silent, and I could hear only a low, plaintive sound, like keening. I came to a wider place where the tunnel forked. Above the left passage glowed a neon
THIS IS LAST WARNING
but over the right there was no sign so I went left of course and saw white: a wall, and an enormous armored door with a row of locks and keyholes, like a door to a sultan’s treasure. I clouded my right hand and slipped it through one of the keyholes. It was darker than midnight inside. I felt around, then slipped my whole body through in the form of a mist or aerosol, hoping that intruders flowing through keyholes was something the Japanese or rather their machines hadn’t foreseen. I had difficulty breathing but only figuratively because I didn’t breathe. I lit up the place not only with the lights around all my eyes but also with my whole self, like a glowworm, remembering the versatility of this LEM. So much light blinded me at first, but I soon grew accustomed to it.