Peace on Earth (15 page)

They say you get your best ideas when you’re taking a walk. I started moving, not exactly the way one strolls but with that slightly drunken moon stride, first one foot forward as on Earth but then both feet together, hopping like a sparrow. Or rather like an oversized ball that bounces and between bounces sails for a while above the sandy ground. Having covered some distance in this manner from where I had landed, I stopped to look back at myself. I saw a small figure on the horizon and was dumbfounded for the second time. Even far away I could see that it was no longer myself in white but someone else. Someone slender, graceful, the head shining brightly in the sun. A human figure on the moon without a spacesuit! And completely naked. Robinson Crusoe seeing Friday couldn’t have been more astounded than I. I quickly raised both arms but the creature did not follow suit. It was not my reflection. It had golden hair that fell over its shoulders, a white body, long legs, and it came toward me without haste and as if without any particular purpose, and not waddling and halting either but smoothly, as one walks on the beach. Thinking “beach,” I realized it was a woman. A young woman, and with not a stitch on her. In her hands she held something large and multicolored, and it covered her breasts. She approached not directly but at an angle, as if to pass me at a modest distance. I almost called Wivitch but bit my tongue. He wouldn’t believe me. He’d think I was hallucinating. I didn’t move, searching her face, wishing desperately I knew what to do but I didn’t. The only thing I was sure of was that my eyes weren’t deceiving me, nor my brain. I don’t know why but it seemed to me that everything depended on her face. If it was Marilyn Monroe again, as at that Italian restaurant, then I would have to doubt the evidence of my senses, because how could any wave or force get into my memory and obtain precisely that image? I wasn’t even standing here on this lifeless ground in my own person, I was sitting in the ship, strapped to the armchair at the controls, but even if I were here myself, what could enter my head with such perfect accuracy? Apparently, I thought, there were different kinds of impossibility, some greater and some lesser.

She was the siren of the islands that Odysseus passed. Luring men to their death. I don’t know what made me think of that. I stood, and she kept coming, now and then lowering her face framed by flowing hair to sniff the flowers she held, though on the moon one can’t smell anything. She paid no attention to me. But no matter what her appearance or actions, the mechanism inside her had to function logically, following logical programs. That had to be my point of departure. The invisible mirror was to put every armed intruder out of action. Seeing an opponent, the intruder would pull its gun to defend itself, though not to attack, its purpose being only reconnaissance. But when the other also drew its gun, the intruder would shoot, because if it allowed itself to be destroyed, it would not be carrying out its information-gathering program. But I did not produce a weapon. Instead I called Earth and told Wivitch what I saw. Were my words overheard? Almost certainly. An enormous, truly criminal oversight on the part of the whole project was that no one had thought to shield Tichy’s communication with the base, which wouldn’t have been that hard to do. A device built into my radio could have converted what was said into an unintelligible code. The underground military computers knew human speech, and even if they weren’t given it to begin with, it was child’s play for them to learn it, all they had to do was listen to Earth’s tens of thousands of radio stations. Not to mention television programs, which is no doubt where the naked woman came from like Venus riding the sea foam. All very logical. If it’s not a robot because it doesn’t shoot and doesn’t even inspect its double, which surely would be the first thing a robot would do upon landing, then it’s a man. And if it’s a man, then it must be a male because people wouldn’t send a female first on such a mission. And the Achilles heel of every male has been revealed ad nauseam on television, to wit, the opposite sex. Whatever I did, therefore, I shouldn’t approach the siren. How dearly I would pay if I did I didn’t need to determine by experiment. Her face couldn’t be Marilyn Monroe’s, also, because no one knew about that episode, which was top-secret. Unless some of the moon-weapon makers had spies inside the Lunar Agency… No, inconceivable.

She walked slowly and that is why I had time for all this thought, but now only a few dozen steps separated us. Not once did she look in my direction. I wondered if her bare feet left prints in the sand, but couldn’t tell. If she left prints, that would be worse, for it would indicate an awesome level of technology for this mirage. When I saw her face, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was not Marilyn Monroe, though her features did seem familiar, probably taken from a movie because she was not only young but beautiful. She walked even slower, as if undecided whether or not to stop and lie down in the sun as on the beach. The flowers no longer hid her breasts; she held them lower. She looked around until she found a large, slanted rock with a smooth surface, sat on it, and let the flowers fall. They looked strange, red, yellow, and blue in that lifeless, gray-white moonscape. She sat sideways, and I thought furiously, trying to answer the question of what her creators or operators expected of me now, as a man, because whatever it was I should be very careful not to do it. Had I told Wivitch about this meeting, that would have served
their
purpose, because he wouldn’t have believed me, not he or anyone else at Control, though of course they wouldn’t have said that. Convinced that I was raving, they would have ordered me to abandon remote Number 1 like an empty shell and return to the ship, and to proceed to target 002 or 003 on the moon’s other hemisphere and repeat the whole landing procedure from the beginning, meanwhile they would have held an emergency psychiatric meeting to decide which pills the deranged Ijon Tichy should take from the ship’s medicine cabinet. It was well stocked but I hadn’t opened it yet. Having lost credibility with the earthly powers that be, I would have thereby had ninety percent less chance of succeeding in my mission, which would have suited the creators of the mirage, for this hid their activity from Earth as effectively as their earlier destruction of the lunar spy satellites. Therefore I should not consult with Control. Nor did sex enter into it. Surely they knew enough about humans not to expect a live scout to make advances to a naked woman in a moon crater. But he would definitely want to have a closer look, to see if she was maybe a physical manifestation and not just a holograph. Obviously we were not talking about a real woman. If I touched her, I might not survive that touch. A mine for humans, built on the principle of sexual attraction. I was in a quandary. Telling Control was no good, not telling Control was bad too, and personally investigating this moon siren was risky to say the least. So I had to do what no man would do, on Earth or the moon, when he encountered a gorgeous naked blonde. I had to do something the program of this trap could not foresee.

Looking around, I saw a boulder split in half about a dozen steps away, large enough for me to hide behind. Gazing passionately at the woman and as if not knowing where I was going, I went toward the boulder, and when I was behind it, I moved quickly. I picked up a sizable stone, one that on Earth would have weighed ten pounds, and hefted it. It was hard and light, like a petrified sponge. To throw or not to throw, that is the question, I thought as I watched the seated siren. Half recumbent on her boulder, she seemed to be sunbathing. I could see her rosy nipples and that her breasts were whiter than her belly, as with women who wear two-piece suits to the beach. I threw. The stone sailed slowly, endlessly, hit her shoulder, passed through her, and embedded itself in the sand at her bare feet. I expected an explosion but there was none. I blinked, and in that blink she vanished. One second she was sitting with her elbow on her knee and twisting a lock of golden hair around a finger, and the next second she was gone without a trace. The stone I had thrown wobbled a little before it stopped, and a small cloud of kicked-up sand settled on the gray rock. I was alone again. I rose from my crouch, and Wivitch spoke. Apparently he couldn’t take my silence any longer.

“Tichy! We have no picture! What happened?”

“No
picture
…?” I asked.

But of course—they must have observed this whole episode on the video. I had forgotten there was a cloud of micropes somewhere above me.

“We had static for forty seconds. The engineers thought it was our equipment but that’s been checked and everything here is working. Look hard, you should see them.”

He meant the micropes. They’re as small as flies but in the sun you can see them at a considerable distance, like sparks. I looked up at the black sky but saw not one spark. What I did see was different and quite strange. It was raining. Here and there little dark droplets fell into the sand. One of them hit my helmet, and I was able to catch it before it rolled off. It was a micrope, but blackened, melted into a tiny lump of metal. The drizzle grew lighter as I told this to Wivitch. After three seconds I heard him curse.

“Melted?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Which was logical. If the naked woman ploy was to succeed in undermining my credibility, Earth should see nothing.

“What about the backups?” I asked.

The micropes were operated by the teletronics people and not under my control. Four additional batches of them were on the ship.

“The second cloud was sent. Wait!”

Wivitch turned to speak to someone. I could hear another voice.

“It was sent two minutes ago,” Wivitch said. He was breathing heavily.

“Have you reestablished video?”

“Yes. Hey, Jack—how much on the telemeters? We can see Flamsteed now, Tichy, they’re descending. We’ll have you too in a second … what’s that?”

The question was not addressed to me, but I could have answered it, because again it began to rain melted micropes.

“Radar!” cried Wivitch, not to me but I could hear him, he was so loud. “What? Not enough resolution? Ah… Listen, Tichy. We saw you for about eleven seconds. Again there’s no picture. You say they’re melted?”

“Yes. And black as if fried to a cinder.”

“We’ll tty once more, this time with a tail.”

Which meant that the third cloud of micropes would be followed and observed by the fourth. I didn’t expect anything from this.
They
knew the micropes from previous reconnaissance attempts and knew how to deal with them. Heating by induction, a zone in which any piece of metal would melt from eddying Foucault currents. At least as far as I could remember from high-school physics. But the particular device was not important. The micropes were worthless no matter how radar-proof and state-of-the-art they were. Built on the model of an insect’s eye, where in flight each ommatidium-prism could take in more than 2,400 square feet. The resultant picture was holographic, three-dimensional, in full color, and sharp even if three quarters of the cloud was blinded. The moon obviously knew all about the micropes. Not encouraging, though to have been expected. The main thing that puzzled me was why I was still standing in one piece. If they could dispose of the micropes so easily, why wasn’t I disposed of when the mirror trick didn’t work? Why hadn’t they disconnected me from my remote? The teletronicists said that that was virtually impossible because the control channel was in the band of the hardest cosmic rays, an invisible needle that reached from ship to remote and was so high-energy that it could be significantly affected probably only by the gravitational pull of a black hole. Only a million-tesla magnetic field would be able to bend that needle, and to generate such a field would require on the order of trillions of megajoules. In other words they’d have to pump gigatons of energy into space between the remote and the ship, and maintain something like an open umbrella over the moon, a shield of thermonuclear plasma. Either they couldn’t, or they chose not to do so at this moment.

Such restraint, perhaps, came not from insufficient power but from a strategy. So far nothing on the moon had really attacked the reconnoiterers, whether robots or people. They had destroyed themselves, being the first to shoot. As if the nonliving inhabitants of the moon, had decided to remain on the defensive. And true, an adversary on the attack is in less clear a position than the adversary who knows an attack is coming. And so the doctrine of ignorance as a guarantee of peace, devised with so much trouble, had been turned with mockery and menace against its inventors.

Wivitch was speaking: the third group of micropes had arrived safely and I was on their screens again. So maybe
they
had only wanted to blind Control during the nude-woman mirage. I was plunged into thought. The moon, listening to the radio, had to know about the growing anxiety on Earth. The fear stirred by the press had infected not only the people but the governments. Though everyone realized that a nuclear strike against the moon would spell the end of peace on Earth. Therefore either a preemptive attack against the human race was imminent, or something very strange was taking place on the moon. Wivitch called me again to tell me that
all
the micropes would be deployed. They would come in successive clouds, wave after wave, not only from my ship but from all four comers of the world, as it were, because it had been decided to activate the reserves stockpiled under the zone of silence. I hadn’t even known they were there. I sat down in that lifeless desert and leaned back a little to take in the black sky. I couldn’t see the ship but saw the micropes, sparkling clouds descending and also approaching from all horizons. Some hung over me, swelling and billowing and glittering like a swarm of golden gnats playing in the sun. Others, the reinforcements, I could make out only now and then, when one of the stars winked out for a moment, obscured by a cloud of my microscopic guardians. They had me in their screens now at all angles. I should have got up and continued on but I was suddenly reluctant. Slow and ungainly in my heavy spacesuit, quite the opposite of the micropes, I made a good target even for someone with bad cataracts. Why did I have to be at the front of this mission anyway? Why couldn’t the swift micropes go instead, scouting ahead for me? Control agreed. A change of tactics. Swarms of golden mosquitoes sailed above me in a wide swath toward the lunar Urals.