Peace on Earth (4 page)

On the moon, the electronic evolution of new weapons was to begin. In this way, despite disarmament, no nation would be defenseless, because it would own a self-perfecting arsenal. And any surprise attack by an enemy, war without declaration, was impossible now, because to commence hostilities a government first had to ask the Lunar Agency for permission to use its sector on the moon. There was no way to hide this, and the side threatened would also apply for permission, and that would begin the return of the means of annihilation to Earth. The whole point was that the moon be inaccessible.

Neither people nor probes could be sent to learn what military capability a given nation had at its disposal. A clever plan, but at first the project met with strong resistance from the generals and politicians. The moon was to be a testing ground and laboratory for military evolution within the sectors allotted to the various nations. The first order of business was to make sure there was no conflict between the sectors. If a weapon developed in one sector attacked and destroyed a neighbor’s weapon, that would upset the balance of power. The day such news came from the moon, there would be an immediate return to the previous situation and very likely war, a war conducted with modest means at first but in short order the nations would all rebuild their arms industries. The programs of the moon systems, written by the Lunar Agency in conjunction with multinational commissions, contained locks to keep the sectors from attacking each other, but that protection was considered insufficient. As before, nobody trusted anybody. The Geneva Agreement had not turned men into saints or international diplomacy into a convocation of angels. For that reason, after the transporting was completed, the moon was declared off-limits to everyone. The Lunar Agency itself could not enter there. If a defense program in any of the testing ranges was destroyed or breached, all Earth would know about it in an instant, for each sector bristled with sensors that worked automatically and around the clock. They would sound the alarm if any weapon, even a metal ant, crossed the boundary into the belt that was no man’s land. But even this wasn’t guarantee enough. The guarantee was the so-called doctrine of ignorance. Each government knew that better and better weapons were being created in its sector, but it did not know their value vis-à-vis the weapons being created in the other sectors. It couldn’t know, because the course of any evolutionary process is unforeseeable. This had been proven ages before, but the rigid politicians and generals were unreceptive to scientific argument. It wasn’t logic that convinced them; it was the increasing economic ruin caused by the traditional arms race. Even a fool could see that one didn’t need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely. Since disarmament negotiations had been unsuccessful for decades, the moon project seemed the only solution. Every nation could feel it was powerful militarily because of its moon arsenal, but it had no way of knowing how its arsenal compared with those of the other nations. Since no one therefore could count on victory, no one would risk going to war.

The Achilles heel of this solution lay in the monitoring of it. The experts knew from the start that the first thing the programmers of each country would try to do is send to the moon machines capable of neutralizing the monitoring system. Not necessarily by attacking the surveillance satellites directly; it could be a more devious method, one more difficult to detect, such as invading the communication network and falsifying the data transmitted to Earth and the Lunar Agency. My memory of this seemed intact, so I felt calmer as I boarded the plane with Tarantoga. Settling into my seat, I again took to probing what I remembered.

Everyone understood that the peace depended on the monitoring, so the question was how to make the monitoring untouchable. An insoluble problem, it seemed, a
regressus ad infinitum:
One could devise a system to monitor a monitoring system, but that system itself would be vulnerable to attack, so one would have to monitor the monitor of the monitor, and so on, without end. But this dilemma was solved quite simply. They encircled the moon with two surveillance belts. The inner belt guarded the sectors; the outer belt guarded the inner belt. And the trick was: both would be independent of Earth. Thus the arms race could continue on the moon in total secrecy from all countries and all governments. The weapons would evolve, but the surveillance of them would remain unchanged for a hundred years. The whole thing, really, was quite absurd. An unknown arsenal was useless in politics. They should have simply disarmed without bringing the moon into it, but there was no mention of that possibility. Everyone knew where talk of disarmament led: nowhere. In any case, when the idea of demilitarizing Earth and militarizing the moon was accepted, it was clear that sooner or later an attempt would be made to violate the doctrine of ignorance. The newspapers from time to time ran stories under screaming headlines about surveillance machines that vanished upon detecting something; some said they were intercepted by satellites and captured. And governments accused each other of sending probes, but it was impossible to tell their origin because an electronic device is not a person: you can’t get anything out of it if it’s made properly. But then these anonymous scouts, these space spies, stopped appearing. And the human race sighed with relief, especially because of the economics, the fact that the moon weapons didn’t cost a cent now. The energy was furnished by the sun, the raw materials by the moon. Which should also help limit the evolution of weapons, because there are no lodes of metal on the moon.

The generals had expressed the concern that weapons adapted to lunar conditions might not work on Earth. I couldn’t recall how the gravity was increased, though they must have explained that to me at the LA. Tarantoga and I were flying BOAC. The night outside the windows was Stygian, and I thought, amused, that I had no idea where we were going. Should I ask Tarantoga? On the other hand, perhaps it would be better if we were to part company. In this awful situation, perhaps I should be silent and fend for myself. A good thing It couldn’t read my thoughts. As if I carried an enemy in my head, though of course it was no enemy.

The reason the Lunar Agency, a supranational organization set up by the UN, turned to me? Its double-guard system had worked
too well
We knew that the borders between the sectors had not been disturbed, but that was all we knew. In certain nervous, imaginative minds rose the specter of an attack upon Earth by the nonliving forces of the moon. The military sectors’ inability to exchange information might be only temporary. The sectors might learn to communicate through ground tremors, seismically, making the vibrations in the rock look like natural moonquakes. The self-engineered and self-improving weapons might all join and one day unleash their monstrous power against Earth, Why should they want to do this? How would it benefit a nonliving army to reduce Earth to ashes? It wouldn’t, of course, but cancer, everpresent in the organisms of higher animals and human beings, is an inevitable albeit disadvantageous consequence of evolution. People began to talk and write about this lunar cancer, and there were seminars, articles, novels, and films on the subject, and the fear of atomic annihilation, which had been dispelled on Earth, returned in a new form. The surveillance system included seismographs, and certain scientists reported that the frequency of tremors in the moon’s crust was increasing, and seismic readings were analyzed for hidden codes, and fear grew. To calm the public, the Lunar Agency said in communiqués that the odds of this happening were one in two hundred million, but no one believed that calculation. The fear finally reached the politicians, and they began to demand periodic inspection of the sectors and not just of their borders. The Agency spokesmen explained that any such inspection could not rule out the possibility of espionage to learn the current state of the lunar arsenals. After long meetings and complex negotiation the LA finally received authorization to reconnoiter.

Reconnaissance, it turned out, wasn’t so easy. None of the probes returned. Not a peep from them by radio. Specially armored landers were sent, with television cameras. The observation satellite showed that they indeed landed, and exactly on target, in the Mare Imbrium, in the Mare Frigoris, in the Mare Nectaris, and in the no man’s land between the sectors. But not one of them sent back a picture. As if the ground of the moon had swallowed them. Understandably, this caused panic. A state of emergency. The papers urged that the moon be preemptively bombed with hydrogen bombs just to play it safe. But that couldn’t happen unless a missile was built and atomic warheads again manufactured. Out of this fear and confusion my mission was born.

We were flying above thick clouds, their mounds tinged with pink from the morning sun still hidden below the horizon. Why, I wondered, did I remember the terrestrial things so well, while remembering so little of what happened on the moon? I knew some reasons. It wasn’t for nothing that I’d read all those medical books when I got back. There are two kinds of memory, temporary and permanent. Severing the great commissure does not affect what the brain has already accumulated, but fresh memories evaporate, do not become permanent. What evaporates particularly is what the patient experienced shortly before the operation. Therefore I didn’t remember most of what happened to me those seven weeks on the moon, when I went from sector to sector. All that remained in my head was an aura of strangeness, nothing I could put into words, into a report. Strangeness, and yet it was not threatening, or so it seemed to me. No dark conspiracy against Earth. I felt certain of that. But could I swear that what I felt and knew was the whole story? Perhaps It knew more.

Tarantoga was silent, only glancing at me from time to time. As usual on eastward flights, with the Pacific beneath us, the calendar tripped and dropped a day. BOAC was belt-tightening, apparently, because all we got to eat was chicken salad. We landed in Miami. It was early in the afternoon. Customs dogs sniffed our suitcases. We stepped out into the heat. Melbourne had been much cooler. A rental car was waiting for us; Tarantoga must have ordered it in Melbourne. We put our luggage in the trunk and set off down a highway full of traffic, and still said nothing, because I had asked the professor not to tell me our destination. Overcaution, perhaps, but I would stick to that policy until a better one suggested itself. And he didn’t need to say anything, because after more than two hours on back roads we arrived at a large white building surrounded by pavilions, palms, and cacti, and I knew at once that my trusted friend had brought me to an insane asylum. Not a bad place to hide, I thought. In the car, I had looked over my shoulder now and then to see if we were being followed, but it never entered my head that I was such an important, valuable person that they would follow me by a method less conventional, not found in any spy novel. From a modern satellite not only can a car be observed but wooden matches counted on a garden table. That never entered my head—more precisely the half of my head that could understand without sign language the mess Ijon Tichy had got himself into.

The worst mess in my life. I got into it quite by accident, while trying to see Professor Tarantoga after my return from Encia. He wasn’t at home; he’d flown to Australia for some reason. He’d be back in a few days. Since he had a special kind of primrose that demanded constant watering, he asked his cousin to apartment-sit for him. Not the cousin who collects public-toilet graffiti around the world; another cousin, a paleobotanist. Tarantoga has a lot of cousins. I didn’t know this one. When I saw that he was in a bathrobe and had just risen from a typewriter, I apologized and turned to leave, but he said no, I wasn’t interrupting anything, I had arrived just in time: he was writing a difficult, trail-blazing book and he always liked to marshal his thoughts by telling someone, even a stranger, the idea of the chapter at hand. I feared he was writing some botanical treatise and would fill my head with weeds, bulbs, and perennials, but thank heaven it wasn’t like that. It was actually quite interesting. From the dawn of history, he said, in the savage tribes there were unconventional individuals, no doubt considered mad, who tried to eat whatever their eyes fell on: leaves, sprouts, stems, roots both fresh and dried, and all kinds of vegetation. They must have dropped like flies because so many plants are poisonous. Which didn’t deter the next generation of nonconformists, who carried on this dangerous work. It is only thanks to them that we know today how to use laurel leaves and nutmeg, that asparagus and spinach are worth the trouble, and that it’s better to give wild berries a wide berth. Tarantoga’s cousin acquainted me with the fact, ignored by world science, that to find which plant was the best to smoke, these Sisyphuses of antiquity had to gather, dry, ferment, roll, and turn into ash a good forty-seven thousand varieties of leaf before they discovered tobacco, because there was no sign on any sprig or branch that said
this
one will be good for cigars and snuff. Over many centuries whole armies of these prehistoric saints took into their mouths, bit, chewed, tasted, and swallowed everything that grew by a fence or from a tree, and this in every conceivable way, cooked and raw, with water and without, strained and unstrained, and in countless combinations, thanks to which we know today that cabbage goes with pork and beets with rabbit. The fact that in certain regions it’s not beets but red cabbage that goes with hare Tarantoga’s cousin attributes to the early rise of nationalities. One cannot imagine a Slav, for example, without borscht. Each nationality had its own experimentalists, and when they finally decided on beets, its descendants remained loyal to beets even though their neighbors turned up their noses at that vegetable. Tarantoga’s cousin plans to write another book, later, about cultural differences in gastronomy and the influence of national character (the correlation between mint sauce and English spleen, for example, in the case of the loin chop). He will disclose in it why the Chinese, who have been so many for so long, eat prechopped food with chopsticks and always have rice.