Peace on Earth (14 page)

I surveyed the moonscape through twenty-power binoculars, but it looked lifeless, uninhabited, empty. I knew that the computer arsenals in the different sectors were a good hundred feet below sea level, sea level meaning those great plains created long ago by lava flows. The arsenals had been set so deep to protect them from meteors. Nevertheless I looked with particular care at the Mare Vaporum, the Mare Tranquillitatís, and the Mare Fecunditatus (the old astronomers who named these plains of stone had some imagination), then circled the Mare Crisium and the Mare Frigoris, thinking I might see a little movement there. I had excellent binoculars and could count the gravel on the slopes of the craters, or at least rocks the size of a person’s head, but nothing stirred and that was what intrigued me. Where were those legions of armed robots, hosts of intelligent tanks, steel giants and equally death-dealing Lilliputians which had been constantly spawning for years beneath the surface? I saw nothing but stones and craters ranging from very large to small as a plate, trenches in the shiny ancient magma radiating out from Copernicus, the Huygens fault, the pole, Archimedes toward Cassini, Plato on the horizon, and everywhere the same incomprehensible desolation. Along the meridian marked by Flamsteed, Herodotus, and Rümker and through the Sinus Roris ran the widest strip of the no man’s land, and that was where I was supposed to land the first remote after putting the ship into selenosynchronous orbit. They hadn’t given me an exact spot; I was to decide that myself, choosing the safest place. Though there was no indication here, none whatever, of safety or danger. To go into selenosynchronous orbit I had to ascend, and maneuvered and maneuvered until the whole enormous sunlit moon below me stopped moving, at which point I was directly over Flamsteed, a very old crater, shallow and almost filled with volcanic tuff. I hung there a while, maybe half an hour, looking down at the rubble and deliberating.

The remotes didn’t need rockets to land. They had little braking nozzles on their legs, and gyroscopes. I could take one down at any speed I liked, using the leg jets, which could be kicked off easily after touching down, the jets and the empty fuel tank. From that moment on the remote was forever moonbound, unable to return. It was neither robot nor android, having not a thought in its head; it was, rather, a tool, an extension of me, incapable of the least initiative. And yet I was uncomfortable thinking that no matter what the outcome of my reconnaissance it was doomed, because I would have to leave it behind in this dead wilderness. It even occurred to me that maybe LEM 7 had faked its malfunction to get out of this in one piece. A ridiculous thought, because I knew perfectly well that Number 7, like all the other LEMs, was but a man-shaped shell. But this gives you some idea of my state of mind.

There was no reason to wait any longer. I examined carefully one more time the gray plateau I’d chosen for the landing, roughly estimating its distance from the northern edge of Flamsteed, then put the ship on automatic and pushed button number one. The leap of all my senses, though expected and indeed experienced so many times before, was violent. I was no longer sitting in a deep chair in front of the blinking lights of the computers and holding my binoculars, but lying on my back in a bunk as cramped as a coffin and open on only one side. I worked my way out, looked down and saw dull-gray armor, a trunk, thighs, and shins of steel, the retrojets strapped to them like holsters. I straightened slowly, feeling my magnetic shoes cling to the metal floor. Around me, in stacked bunks like the one in which I had been lying, lay the other remotes, all motionless. I could hear my own breathing but did not feel my chest moving. With difficulty I pulled first my left, then my right foot from the floor of the bay and walked to the handrail at the hatch, stood with my arms in so they wouldn’t hit an edge when I was pushed down by the ejector and went hurtling, and waited for the countdown. After a few seconds I heard the lifeless voice of the timer: “Twenty … nineteen…” I counted with it, calm now because there was no turning back. But I couldn’t help tensing a little when we reached “zero” and something soft but powerful shoved me into the open well so that I went flying like a stone. Lifting my head, I was able to see for a moment the dark shape of the ship against the darker background of the sky with its myriad dots of dimly glowing stars. As the ship disappeared in the black horizon, I felt a strong push at my feet and was wrapped in pale flame. With the retros firing, I fell much slower, but the moon still increased in size, as if trying to pull me in and devour me. Feeling the heat of the flame in uneven waves through my thick steel, I kept my arms in and, craning my neck, watched the fields of rubble, now gray-green, and the sandy slopes of Flamsteed grow before my eyes. When no more than three hundred feet separated me from the crater, I reached for the control stick at my belt and applied thrust carefully to brake more and shift direction, avoiding a great jagged rock. I aimed in order to land in sand, with both feet, but something flashed above me. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, looked up, and was dumbfounded.

White against the black sky and no more than thirty feet above me, a man in a heavy spacesuit descended, wrapped from feet to waist in the pale flame of retrojets and with his hand on the control stick at his belt. He fell, slowing, his body straight, until he was even with me, and hit the ground at the exact moment I felt it under my own feet. We stood five or six steps apart, like two statues, as though he too was astounded not to be alone. He was exactly my height. Gray smoke from the nozzles by his knees curled around his large moon boots. I sensed he was staring at me, though I couldn’t see his face behind the shaded glass of his white helmet. My head was in a whirl. At first I thought this must be remote Number 2 which had been pushed from the ship after me by mistake, a malfunction, but then I saw the large black #1 on its chest. But that was my number, and I was pretty sure there were no other Number 1s on board. I stepped forward to see his face through the glass, and at the same time he stepped toward me. When we were quite close, I froze and my hair stood on end because I could see through the glass now and there was no one inside. In the helmet, two small black bars pointing at me, nothing more. I shrank back and lost my balance and almost fell, forgetting that one has to move slowly in low gravity, and he did exactly the same. I began to understand. I held my control stick in my right hand; he held his in his left. When I raised my hand slowly, so did he, and when I moved my leg, so did he, therefore it was clear (although nothing really was clear) that this was my mirror image. To make sure, I forced myself to approach him, and he approached me, until our suits practically met. Slowly, as if reaching to touch a hot iron, I put my hand on his chest and he did likewise to me, I with my right and he with his left. My large five-fingered glove went through him, disappearing, and his hand disappeared in me up to the wrist. I had no doubt now that I was alone and standing in front of a reflection, though there was no trace of a mirror to be seen. We stood there, and I began to look not at him but at his surroundings and noticed, behind him and to the side, a jagged rock jutting from the gray sand, the same rock I had avoided a minute ago while landing. But the rock was behind me, of that I was absolutely certain, thus I faced not only my own image but the image of everything around me. Now I looked for the place where the mirroring ended, because it had to end somewhere and merge with the shallow dunes, but I could not find the boundary, the seam. Not knowing what to do next, I retreated, and he too went backward like a crab, until we were so far apart that he seemed a little smaller. Then, I don’t know why, I turned and walked toward the low sun which blinded me in spite of my antiglare glass. Taking thirty or forty steps with that uncertain ducklike waddle one can’t avoid on the moon, I stopped and looked back at myself. He stood at the top of a small dune and, sure enough, had turned to face me.

Further experiments were unnecessary. I may have stood there like an idiot but my brain was working feverishly. It dawned on me, only now, that the reconnaissance probes sent by the Lunar Agency to the moon had been armed. No one ever said anything specific about that, and I stupidly didn’t inquire further. But of course: If the probes were armed with lasers, their sudden silence after landing might have a simple explanation. I had to find out what kind of lasers, but how? There was no direct communication between me and the base on Earth, only via the ship that hung high above me in stationary orbit. I was indeed on that ship in my physical person, but standing in the Flamsteed crater here as a remote. To talk to Control, I had to turn my transmitter back on, having deliberately switched it off just before leaving the ship so they wouldn’t ruin my concentration during the descent with their advice which no doubt would have come thick and fast had I remained in radio contact with them according to instructions. So I turned the volume knob on my chest and called Earth. The response would come with a three-second delay, I knew, and those seconds seemed like ages. At last I heard the voice of Wivitch. He had a million questions but I told him to be quiet, saying only that I had landed without mishap and was at the target 000 and nothing was attacking me. On the subject of the other remote I was silent.

“Please answer one question, it’s very important,” I said, trying to sound phlegmatic, “The remotes that were sent here before me carried lasers. What kind? Neodymium?”

“You found their remains? Are they burned? Where are they?”

“Please don’t answer a question with questions,” I said, interrupting. “Since it’s my first communication from the moon, this is obviously important. What kind of lasers did the two recon pilots have? Were they the same?”

A moment of silence. Standing stockstill, under the heavy black sky and beside the shallow crater filled with sand, I saw the line of my footprints across three sloping dunes to the fourth, where my reflection stood. I kept him in sight while listening to the indistinct voices in my helmet. Wivitch came back with the information.

“The automata had the same lasers as the pilots,” his voice suddenly rang in my ear, making me jump. “Model E-M-9. Nine percent emission in the x-ray and gamma range, the rest in blue.”

“Visible light? Ultraviolet too?”

“Yes. The E-M series all have continuous spectra. Why?”

“Just a minute. Maximum emission in the bands above visible light?”

“Yes.”

“What percent?”

Again silence. I waited patiently, feeling the left side of my suit, where the sun was, slowly warm up.

“Ninety-one percent. Tichy, what’s going on?”

“Wait.”

This information puzzled me at first because I remembered that the emission spectrum of the lasers that destroyed our probes was different. More in the red. Could the device have been a mirror even so? Then I remembered that with nonlinear optics a reflected ray need not have the same frequency as the one incident. Even in the case of ordinary glass. Though this wasn’t glass here, of course. Whatever reflected laser beams could also move them in the spectrum toward the red. I couldn’t ask to talk to physicists now—later maybe—so I racked my brain for what I remembered of optics. To turn high-energy radiation into visible light didn’t require additional energy, it just needed some energy absorption. It was therefore easier. I could stay with the mirror hypothesis without looking for miracles. I felt better. I started to figure out where I was by the stars. The French sector was about five miles to the east, and less than a mile behind me was the American sector.

“Wivitch? Do you read me? Moon here.”

“Yes. Tichy! There have been no flashes. Why did you ask about lasers?”

“Are you recording me?”

“Of course. Every word.”

I could hear the exasperation in his voice.

“Listen. What I’m about to say is important. I am standing in the Flamsteed crater. I am looking east, in the direction of the French sector. There is a mirror in front of me. I repeat: a mirror. Not an ordinary mirror but something that reflects only me and my surroundings. I don’t know what it is. I see myself exactly, that is I see remote Number 1 at a distance of approximately two hundred and forty paces. The image landed with me. I don’t know how high this reflecting area extends, because while landing I was looking downward, at my feet. I first saw the double right above the crater, very close. It was a little higher than me, also larger. But when it stood in front of me, it was exactly my size. The mirror may be able to enlarge the images. I think that’s why the moon robots that destroyed those remotes seemed so incredibly squat. I tried touching my double. My hand went right through, there was no resistance. If I’d had a laser and shot at it, that would have been the end of me, I’d have received the whole reflected charge. I don’t know what happens next. I can’t see where the mirror ends. That’s it for now. I’ve told you all I know. If you’re quiet, I’ll keep the radio on, but if there’s a lot of talking, off it goes, because I don’t want distractions. Which is it to be?”

“Keep it on, keep it on…”

“Then be quiet.”

I could hear Wivitch breathing heavily, each huff with a three-second delay, two hundred and forty thousand miles above me, because Earth stood high in the black sky, almost at the zenith, a gentle blue among the stars. The sun, on the other hand, was low, and as I watched my double in the white spacesuit I could see the long shadow from me stretching across the dunes. A little crackling in the earphones, but there was silence. I could hear my own breathing, realizing it was me on the ship, yet I heard it as if I were standing in my own body here in Flamsteed. We had expected surprises but not in the no man’s land. Apparently they used this mirror trick to make every intruder, living or nonliving, self-destruct upon landing, before he could start sniffing around. Clever. More, intelligent. But inauspicious for me. No doubt much more was in store. I wouldn’t have minded returning to the ship to think over the situation and discuss it with Control—it was easy to leave the remote, just break the safety glass on my chest and turn a knob—but I wasn’t about to do that. Besides, I was in no greater danger here than on the ship. What then, look for the source of the mirror? And if I found it? The image would disappear, that was all.