Peace on Earth

DA CAPO

Before he had time to open his mouth, the drone of an engine could be heard above us and a great shadow swept across the garden and windows. Kramer grew bug-eyed. The throbbing faded, then returned. A helicopter hung just above the trees. There were two reports, as if someone had uncorked enormous bottles of champagne. The helicopter was so low, I could see the people in its cabin. One of them opened the door and shot another flare downward. Kramer jumped up. I didn’t dream he could move so fast. He rushed from the room, his head down. From the helicopter something shiny fell and was lost in the grass. With a roar the machine lifted and flew off. On his knees in the high grass, Kramer opened a container no larger than a soccer ball, took out something, an envelope, and tore it open. The message must have been important because the paper shook in his hands. He looked in my direction. He was pale, changed. Again he read the paper, and stood. He crumpled it in his fist, put it in his pocket, and slowly crossed the lawn, not bothering to take the path. He came back in and without a word kicked one of the antibug devices. Something in it crackled and there was a little blue smoke from it. I still sat on the floor, and Kramer stamped on his equipment and tore at the wires as if he’d gone insane in earnest. Finally, out of breath, he took off his jacket and sank into the armchair. Then he looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, and grunted.

“I just lost my temper,” he explained. “They’ll retire me. Your career too is finished. Forget about the moon. You can send a postcard to Shapiro. Care of the Agency. They’ll still be there for a while, out of inertia.”

I said nothing, suspecting some new trick. Kramer took a large plaid handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his brow, and regarded me, I thought, with a mixture of pity and resentment.

“It started two hours ago and is going like a house on fire, everywhere. Incredible. We’re pacified, all right, here and overseas and from pole to pole! The global loss — trillions of dollars. Including space, because the satellites were the first to go. Why are you gaping?” he added, irritated. “Haven’t you figured it out? I got a letter from our Uncle Sam…”

“What does it say?”

“You think we’re still playing? No, my friend, the game is over. Sit down and write about your adventures, the Agency, the Mission, whatever you like. Maybe it will be a bestseller. And no one will touch a hair on your head. But don’t put it off, or the guys at the Agency may scoop you. They may already be starting their memoirs about the old order…”

“What has happened?”

“Everything. Did you ever hear of Sim Wars?”

“No.”

“Core Wars?”

“Aren’t those computer games?”

“Ah, you see, you do know! Yes. Programs that destroy other programs. They were thought up back in the eighties. They were unimportant then. An amusement for programmers. Viruses and counter-viruses. DWARF, CREEPER, RAIDER, DARWIN, and a hundred others. But here I am giving you a lecture on cybertronic pathology.” He grimaced. “This has cost me my health! And now I fill you in instead of looking for a new job!”

“Uncle Sam sends you letters by copter? Isn’t the post office working?” I asked, still sniffing for a trap.

Kramer took out his checkbook, scribbled something across a check, made a paper airplane out of it, and sailed it onto my lap.

“To the Missionary: a souvenir from Adelaide,” I read. “What are you getting at?”

“That’s all it’s good for. Uncle sends his greetings, of course. There is no post office. There is nothing now, nothing.” He swept his arms in a circle. “All gone! It started two hours ago, didn’t I tell you? Doesn’t matter who’s to blame. Your professor too is out of work. Nice old man! At least I bought a house in time. I’ll grow roses, vegetables, for barter. No more banks now either. It’s stuffy in here…”

He fanned himself with his checkbook. Then he looked at it with disgust and threw it into the wastebasket.

"Pax Vobiscum,” he spat. “Et cum spiritu tuo."

I began to understand. He wasn’t pretending.

“Those viruses?” I asked slowly.

“Yes, my brave little Missionary. This is your work. It was you who brought that clever dust to Earth. Now they can either give you the Nobel Peace Prize or have you shot for treason. I wouldn’t pin your hopes on a Nobel, but you’ve definitely made it into the history books. You brought humanity a plague, whether of doom or deliverance is up to the historians to thrash out over the coming years. You’ll be in every encyclopedia.”

“Maybe together with you?” I suggested. I still didn’t know exactly what had befallen us, but Kramer wasn’t playacting, I’d have bet both halves of my poor head on that.

“There was another program then, WORM,” Kramer went on sadly. “You have to realize that nowadays a person in my profession has to have a higher education. Those days are gone when it was enough to be a beautiful woman, go to bed with someone, photograph a stolen document in the bathroom, and it’s back to Washington. No, first you need a Ph.D. in math, then information theory, then your specialty, and it’s half your life in school before you can even begin.”

“As a spy?”

“Spy.” He turned the word over in his mouth as if it was sour, and snapped his suspenders, which were deep blue with white stars. “I am a civil servant in a special section and privy to the highest matters of state. The word spy is an insult to me. But it doesn’t matter anymore. From WORM and programs like it came the theory of information erosion — you know about it?”

“A little.”

“So. It turned out that information erosion wasn’t the invention of some professors of computer science but had been used by bacteria four billion years before, give or take a few hundred million. They were the oldest cells, the first, each with its own program, and they fed on each other and off each other because there was no one around yet to get herpes or cancer. But our great scientists somehow didn’t see the connection. They were too full of their own knowledge. The theory was tested only a few times, in the context of secret battles between consortiums, each trying to paralyze the others’ computers. Software warfare. You’ve heard of that, I think?”

“But it was a long time ago.”

“Forty, maybe fifty years. That’s precisely why now we are undone… Because except for clubs, kitchen knives, and pistols there are no weapons that have not been computerized! Everything became programs, chips, processors, and it’s for that reason. Have you tried to use the phone?”

“Not today. Why?”

“The telephone system is out, too. The viruses attacked everywhere at once! Did you listen to the radio?”

“No. I don’t have one.”

“They aren’t intelligent. That was clear from the beginning. They have as much intelligence as any other virus. But the erosion capability is phenomenal!” He squinted at a van Gogh on the wall, fiery sunflowers. “But why am I here talking to you? Maybe I’ll take a walk, or hang myself. On these wires.”

He kicked the nearest gizmo.

“What seems a great mystery from the front is as plain as potatoes from behind,” he said. “Did we send the best weapon-creating programs to the moon? We did. Did they improve themselves over x years? And how. Did they go at each other hammer and tongs? Of course, it couldn’t have been otherwise. Who won? As always, the side that packed the most punch in the least space. The parasites won, the molecular midgets. I don’t think they’ve even been named yet. How about Virus lunaris pacemfaciens? All I want to know is what made you land there and bring back that do-good plague? You can tell me now — privately, because it makes no difference to the governments. Not anymore.”

"All programs have been destroyed? Computer memory, everything?” I asked in a daze. I was beginning to see the scope of this.

“Yes, Missionary of pestilence. It puts me in mind of Poe’s Red Death. Not that you spread it intentionally, because how could you have known? We are thrown back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Technologically speaking and in general. Except that there were cannon then. We’ll have to pull them out of museums.”

“Hold on, Adelaide,” I interrupted. “Why the nineteenth century? After all, there were fully equipped armies then…”

“You’re right. Our situation is without precedent. Like after a quiet little atomic war where the whole infrastructure goes up in smoke. The industrial base, communications, banking, commerce. Only simple machines are left, yet no one has been hurt, not even a fly. Although actually that’s not true. There must have been plenty of accidents, but without the media we remain uninformed. After all, newspapers have not been printed on a hand press for a very long time. Forget the editorial offices. Forget our cars too. My Cadillac is no more.”

“It was a company car, wasn’t it?” I observed. “Not your worry…”

“True,” agreed Kramer. “The poor will be on top now, the Fourth World, because they still have the old Remingtons, maybe even muskets from 1870, and of course spears and boomerangs. Those are now the weapons of mass destruction. We could not withstand an invasion of Australian Aborigines. But come, there is no reason now not to tell me: Why did you land on the moon?”

“You think I know.” It began to sink in, how small I had become, how insignificant my situation. “But I don’t. I’d happily give you five percent of my royalties from that bestseller if you could tell me. After all your studies you should be better than Sherlock Holmes. It’s elementary! You know the clues as well as I do…”

He shook his head in a melancholy way.

“He doesn’t know,” he told van Gogh’s flowers, which the sun had just reached. They cast a yellow light over my unmade bed. My legs hurt from sitting cross-legged, so I got up, took the bottle of bourbon hidden in my closet and some ice cubes from the refrigerator, and poured for myself and for him. I proposed a toast to the memory of the arms disarmed.

“I have high blood pressure and diabetes,” Kramer said, turning the glass in his fingers. “But one drink won’t hurt. So be it. To our dead world!”

“Why dead?” I asked.

We drank. Kramer choked, coughed a bit, put the glass down, and rubbed his face. I noticed he hadn’t shaved well. In a weak voice, as if he’d aged ten years in a moment, he said:

“The higher one has gone with computers, the farther he’ll fall. They ate every single program.” He slapped his pocket where the letter from Uncle Sam was. “The end of an era.”

“Why? There are antivirus programs…”

“Medicine is useless when the patient has died. Anyway there are no more programs of any kind, on land, in the air, at sea, in space. Even to deliver this letter an old Bellem was used, because the new models won’t move. It began a few minutes after eight… and those idiots thought it was an ordinary virus.”

“Everywhere at once?”

I tried to imagine the chaos in banks, airports, offices, hospitals, computer centers, universities, schools, factories… and couldn’t.

“No one knows for sure because there’s no communication, but from what I’ve heard, yes, everywhere at once.”

“How is that possible?”

“What you brought was in a dormant form, like spores. The spores multiplied in chain reaction to achieve a certain level of saturation in the air, water, everywhere, and that specific concentration in turn activated them. The weapons programs on the moon must have been the best shielded, so with ours on Earth it was like taking candy from a baby. Total bytocide. With the exception of living things, which on the moon the spores never had to deal with. Otherwise they would have butchered the lot of us, along with the antelopes, ants, sardines, and grass. But enough! I’m tired of talking…”

“If it is as you say, everything will start again from the beginning — in the old way.”

“Of course. In six months or a year they’ll find an antidote for Virus lunaris bitoclasticus, and the world will proceed to the next mess.”

“Maybe you won’t lose your job.”

“No, I’m through,” he said firmly. “I’m too old. The new era will require new training, new courses. Antilunar information theory and so on. They’ll probably heat the moon by thermonuclear means, sterilize it, and even if the cost goes into the trillions, it’ll be worth it not to have to worry.”

“Worth it for whom?” I asked. This Kramer was an odd character: he kept saying goodbye but didn’t get up to go. Maybe he was just unburdening his heart because I was the only one in the asylum who knew who he was. Maybe, with his broken life, he should see a psychiatrist.

“What do you mean, for whom? The armorers, the industrial-military complex. Everyone. They’ll go to the libraries for old blueprints, rebuild some classic machines, rockets, and then turn to the dead computers. Because the hardware is perfectly preserved, like mummies. Only the software is kaput. Wait a couple of years. You’ll see.”

“History never repeats itself exactly,” I said, and poured him another bourbon without asking. He tossed it down and didn’t choke; his bald head reddened a little, that was all. Little flies played in a ray of sunlight coming in from the window.

“The damn flies survive,” Kramer muttered. He looked at the garden where patients in colored bathrobes and pajamas were shuffling along the paths as if nothing had happened. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the wind made the big chestnut trees sway, and the fountains made little rainbows with their spray. While one world was perishing, departing to an irrevocable past, the new world was not even in diapers yet. I didn’t share this insight with Kramer, it was too banal. I just poured him the rest of the bottle.

“You want to get me drunk?” he asked, but drank. He put down the glass, stood at last, threw his jacket over his shoulder, then hesitated, his hand on the doorknob.

“If you do remember… you know what… write to me. We’ll compare notes.”

“Compare notes?” I said like an echo.

“You see, I have my own theory.”

“About why I landed?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be right. Oath of office, duty, and all that. We sat on opposite sides of the table.”

“The table’s gone. Don’t be such a stickler. I give you my word I’ll keep it to myself.”

“Sure! You’ll put it in your book, then swear that your memory returned.”

“All right, a deal. Six percent of my royalties.”

“You’ll put this in writing?”

“Of course.”

“Twenty!”

“You’re crazy.”

"I’m crazy?”

“I’ve begun to figure out anyway what you’ll tell me.”

“Hm.”

He frowned. You could see that with all the high-level courses he had taken, he hadn’t learned enough. I decided he wasn’t really cut out for his profession but I didn’t tell him. He was retiring anyway.

Kramer let go of the door and went to the window, then sat on the edge of the desk and scratched behind his ear.

“So you tell me,” he said.

“If I tell you, you don’t get a cent…”

Behind him the garden was green. Old Padderhorn came down a path in his wheelchair, an enormous shoehorn in his hand. He held it like a flag. The orderly pushing the chair was smoking one of his cigars. Several steps behind them walked Padderhorn’s bodyguard, in shorts, muscular, with a bronze tan. He wore a wide-brimmed panama and his face was hidden behind a comic book. The holster on his loose belt slapped against his thigh.

“Speak or go, old friend,” I said. “You know that whatever I write, the Agency will deny it…”

“But if you name me as your informant, it could mean unpleasantness for me.”

“The money will make the unpleasantness less unpleasant. I’ll name you if you don’t tell me. Anyway, I think you should get professional help. Your nerves are shot. It’s quite obvious. You can’t hide it.”

He was silent, a broken man. The corners of his mouth twitched. I felt sorry for him.

“You won’t quote me?”

“I’ll change the name and your appearance.”

“They’ll know me even so.”

“Not necessarily. Do you think it was only you they sent to stick to me? But this whole thing was your side’s work, wasn’t it?”

He was indignant.

“We have nothing to do with the Lunar Agency. They were the ones!”

“How and why?”

“I’m not sure how but I know why. It was so you wouldn’t make it back. If you died there, things would remain the same.”

“Not forever. Sooner or later…”

“That was the point, it would be later. They were afraid of the report.”

“Let’s suppose. And the dust? How did it get into my suit? How could they have known about the dust?”

“They didn’t know, but Lax-Gugliborc had his fear. That’s why he fiddled with the dispersant.”

“You learned this?” I was surprised.

“His assistant belongs to us. Lauher.”

I remembered my first meeting with the professor. He had indeed said that one of his colleagues was a spy. It put everything in a different light.

“The callotomy, that was them too?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, added, “And you will never know. No one will ever know. When the stakes are that high, the truth no longer exists. All that remain are theories. Different versions. As it was with Kennedy.”

“President Kennedy?”

“The stakes here were higher. The whole world! There’s nothing higher. Now write what you promised…”

From the drawer I took a sheet of paper and a pen. Kramer stood at the window, his back to me. I signed the document and handed it to him. He looked and was surprised.

“You made a mistake.”

“No.”

“Ten?”

“Ten.”

“All right. It’s my turn. I’ll tell you. The dispersant was supposed to draw you to the moon.”

“You’re telling me it was Lax-Gugliborc? I don’t believe it!”

“Not the professor. He didn’t know anything. Lauher knew. To the fifty-odd programs he added one. Not hard to do for a programmer.”

“So it was your side after all.”

“No. He was also working for a third party.”

“Lauher was?”

“Yes, but we needed him.”

“All right. The dispersant called me. I landed. But what about the sand?”

“An unplanned factor. Unforeseen by everyone. If you can’t remember that moment, no one will ever know. Ever.”

He folded the paper in two, put it in his pocket, and at the door turned and said:

“So long.”

I watched him walk toward the main pavilion. As he disappeared behind the hedge, my left hand took my right hand and shook it. I can’t say I was thrilled by this gesture of support. But life must go on.