Peace on Earth

BRIEFING

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 pre-chopped food with chopsticks and always have rice.

“Everyone knows,” his voice rose, “who Stephenson was and everyone honors him for his locomotive, his steam engine, but what is that banal relic next to artichokes, which will be with us forever? Vegetables do not age like technology…” The paleobotanist warmed even more to the subject. Was Stephenson risking his life when he put Watt’s steam engine on wheels? Did inventing the phonograph place Edison in mortal danger? They risked at most their families’ anger or bankruptcy. How unfair, that inventors of old-fashioned technology are all famous while no one even thinks about the great gastronomical inventors, or about raising a monument to the Unknown Chef as we do for the Unknown Soldier. And yet so many anonymous heroes fell in terrible agony after they made their brave experiments, with mushrooms, for example, where the only way of distinguishing poisonous from nonpoisonous is to eat and wait for the results.

Why are the schoolbooks full of kings who became king for no other reason than that daddy was king? Why do children learn about Columbus, the discoverer of America who discovered it only by accident, on his way to India, while there’s not one word about the discoverer of the pickle? We could have managed without America, sooner or later America would have discovered itself, but not the pickle, and then there would have been nothing to sit on our plate beside a roast beef sandwich. No, gastronomy’s nameless heroes were more heroic than those who found a soldier’s death! A soldier had to charge the enemy trench or face a court-martial, but nobody ever forced a person to brave the danger of an unknown berry. Tarantoga’s cousin would like to see a commemorative tablet over the door of every restaurant, with the inscription MORTUI SUNT UT NOS BENE EDAMUS.

The telephone rang. Tarantoga’s cousin handed me the receiver, saying it was for me. I was surprised, because no one knew about my return from the stars. It was someone from the office of the Secretary General of the UN. He had called Tarantoga for my address, and the cousin short-circuited the call, as it were, by giving the phone to me. Dr. Kakesut Wahatan, plenipotentiary extraordinaire and adviser on global security, wanted to see me as soon as possible. We made a date for the next day. I jotted the time into my notebook, having no idea what I was getting myself into. But I was glad for the call, because it had interrupted the flood of eloquence from Tarantoga’s cousin, who wanted to tell me next about spices and pepper. I took my leave, saying I had to go and promising (insincerely) that I’d drop in again soon.

Tarantoga told me later that the primroses died: his cousin, in his paleobotanical-gastronomical fervor, forgot to water them. A common phenomenon: he who devotes himself to the general does not concern himself with the particular. Thus the meliorists who would make the whole world happy but have no time for an individual.

I wasn’t told straight off that I would be asked to risk my neck for humanity by flying to the moon to see what those intelligent weapons were up to. Dr. Wahatan received me with smiles, coffee, and old cognac. He was Asian, a perfect Asian, because I learned nothing from him: he knew how to keep a secret. The Secretary General, he said, intended to read me, but being so very busy, he wondered if I could recommend the ten books I felt were the most important. Seemingly by coincidence, a couple of people dropped by and asked me for my autograph. It was hard to refuse. The talk turned naturally to robots, to the moon, but the moon mainly in its historical role: as a decoration in romantic literature. I learned much later that thiis was no normal conversation but a screening for security clearance, because the armchair in which I sat so comfortably was riddled with sensors that analyzed my reactions, through microscopic changes in muscle tension, to such key stimulus words as “moon” and “robot.” The diagnostic situation since I left Earth for the Calf constellation had reversed itself: I was evaluated by computer, my human interlocutors serving only to gather data. The next day, I went again to the UN office, I don’t know exactly why, and then they invited me again. They kept wanting to see me; I began having lunch with them in the cafeteria, which wasn’t bad, but the reason for these appointments remained unclear. There was talk about the United Nations publishing my collected works in all the languages of the world: more than four and a half thousand languages. I am not a vain man, but that seemed like a good idea to me. These new acquaintances all turned out to be fans of my Star Diaries. They were Dr. Rorty, Engineer Tottentanz, and the brodiers Cybbilkis, identical twins whom I learned to tell apart by their ties. Both madiematicians. The older, Castor, worked in algomathematics, which is the algebra of conflicts that end fatally for all parties. (This branch of game theory is sometimes called sadistics.) The other Cybbilkis, Pollux, was not a sadistician but a statistician and had the curious habit of suddenly interrupting a conversation with such questions as “How many people on earth at this very moment are picking their nose?” A phenomenal calculator, he could come up with answers to such things instantly. One of the four was always waiting for me in the vestibule as big as a hangar to take me to the elevator. We went either to the Cybbilkis’ workshop or to Professor Jonas Kuschtyk, who also loved my books and quoted from them, giving the page number and year of publication. Kuschtyk (like Tottentanz) worked with telefer theory, a new field of remote robotics. The telefer slogan: “Where a man can’t go, a remote can.” Kuschtyk and Tottentanz urged me to try remoting. It’s quite an experience to have all your senses connected by radio to a machine.

I was willing. It was only much later that I realized they weren’t Ijon Tichy fans at all but had read me strictly in the line of duty. Their task, with many other Lunar Agency people (whom I won’t mention so as not to immortalize them), was to pull me gradually into the Mission. Why gradually? Because I could refuse, after all, and go home, taking with me all the secrets of the Mission. And what if you did? asks someone from the audience, a heckler. Would that be the end of the world? The point is yes, possibly, it would. The person selected from thousands by the Lunar Agency had to be both extremely capable and extremely loyal. Capable we understand, but loyal? And loyal to whom, to the Agency? Yes, inasmuch as it represented the interests of humanity. No nation or coalition of nations could be allowed to learn the results of the lunar reconnaissance, assuming it succeeded, because whoever knew the state of the weapons there first would gain, by that strategic information, immediate supremacy on Earth. The peace, in other words, was far from idyllic.

So the friendly scientists who let me play with the remotes as a child with a toy were actually dissecting my mind, that is, the computers were, invisible but analyzing our every conversation. Castor Cybbilkis, with his surrealist ties, was there as a theoretician of disastrous endgames, because precisely such a game was being played with me, against me. In order to accept or reject the Mission, I first had to learn about it, but then if I rejected it or if I accepted, returned, and then divulged the results of the reconnaisance, known only to me, it would create a situation the algomathematicians called pre-catastrophic.

The candidates were of different nationalities, races, professions, and accomplishments. I was one of many though I had no idea of that. The person selected would be a delegate of humanity, not a spy — or potential spy — for any country. His code name would be Missionary. But I was kept in the dark as much as possible. When they finally made me Missionary and I had crawled into the rocket for the nth time only to crawl back out two hours later in my space suit bristling with wires and tubes because again something had gone wrong during countdown, I finally had time to think about the past few months and put two and two together. I understood now the game the LA had been playing with me for the highest possible stakes. If not the highest for humanity and the world, certainly the highest for me: I didn’t need algomathematics and game theory to see that the simplest way for them to ensure secrecy in this situation was to do away with the pilot immediately after his return to Earth, as soon as he made his report. Knowing that they had to send me now, since I had shown myself to be the best of the candidates, I told this to my dear colleagues, the Cybbilkis brothers, Kuschtyk, Blahouse, Tottentanz, and Garraphizi (more about Garraphizi later) who along with a few dozen communications technicians would be the ground support for my selenological expedition, that is they would be for me what Houston was for Armstrong and Co. during the Apollo mission. To make those hypocrites as uncomfortable as possible I asked them if they knew who would take care of me after my return as a hero — the Lunar Agency itself or a hired gun?

That’s what I said, in those exact words, to see their reaction. If they had considered that scenario, they would understand me immediately. They froze. It made quite a picture: the small area in the cosmodome called the Waiting Room, with its Spartan décor — coke machines, card chairs, metal tables covered with bilious green plastic — and I in my angel-white space suit, my head under my arm (actually my helmet, but that’s how you say it: your head’s under your arm when you’re ready to fly), and facing me, my loyal comrades, scientists, doctors, engineers. I think it was Castor who spoke first. That it wasn’t their doing, it was the equation, the computer, because if you looked at the thing mathematically, abstractly, the solution to the problem of ensuring secrecy did not take into account any coefficient of ethics, and I was insulting them all by suggesting, at such a moment, that they were in on it.

“I’ve heard that before,” I answered. “Blame it on the computer! Sure, sure. But forget ethics for the moment. I know, you’re all saints and I’m one too. But didn’t any of you, the computer included, think of this?”

“Of what?” asked a hangdog Cybbilkis.

“That I might suspect, and might confirm my suspicion, as I’ve done just now. Surely that will affect the equation of my loyalty…”

“Oh of course that was taken into account,” said the other Cybbilkis. “It’s the ABC of algomathematical statistics: I know that you know that I know that you know that I know. The infinite series of conflict theory.”

“Very well,” I said, getting interested in the scientific aspect of the thing. “Then how did it work out for you in the end? Does or doesn’t the confirmed suspicion affect my loyalty?”

“It does,” admitted Castor Cybbilkis reluctantly. “But the second derivative of the curve of your loyalty after a scene like this one (taking place as we speak) shows a leveling off to zero.”

“Aha.” I scratched my nose, shifting the helmet from my right arm to my left. “So that what is now happening decreases the mathematical expectation of reduction of my loyalty?”

“It decreases it,” he said. And his brother added, looking at me both kindly and searchingly: “You yourself probably feel…”

“Exactly,” I muttered, realizing, not without surprise, that they were right, they or the computer, in this psychological calculation: my indignation had noticeably diminished.

The green light went on over the exit to the launch pad and all the buzzers sounded, indicating that the problem had been corrected and I was to get in the rocket again. I turned without a word and walked, they in attendance, and as I walked I thought. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I have to finish. After I left stationary earth orbit and they couldn’t touch me, when they asked me how I felt, I answered fine, and that I was considering whether I shouldn’t make friends with the “nation” of the moon in order to give a few people I knew on Earth a good kick in the pants. How hollow was their laughter in my earphones…

But that came later, after my trips to the simulated lunar testing range and the visit to Gynandroics. That corporation has greater earnings than IBM, even though it began as a small subsidiary of the company. I should explain here that Gynandroics, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t manufacture robots or androids, if by those terms we mean humanlike machines endowed with human intelligence. It’s practically impossible to put a human mind in a machine. The computers of the eightieth generation and beyond are more intelligent than we, but their minds bear no resemblance to a human being’s. Man is a highly illogical creature and therein lies his humanity. He has reason, yes, but it is heavily polluted with prejudices, emotions, and attitudes carried from childhood or the genes of the mother and father. That’s why a robot passing for a person (over the telephone, for instance) is fairly easily unmasked. Nevertheless the porn industry put a limited line of S-dolls on the market, S for sex. These didn’t catch on; they were too logical, too intelligent; a man going out with one would end up with an inferiority complex. And they were expensive. Why pay $90,000, not counting local taxes, when you could have a natural partner for much, much less? The real revolution in the sex market was caused by remotes, or “empties,” dolls also fashioned in the image of humans but brainless, brainless not in a pejorative sense but literally: the remote woman and the remote man were empty shells operated at a distance by humans.

By putting on a suit that pressed hundreds of electrodes to the skin, anyone could link with a male or female remote. Little did people dream how this technology would change their lives, especially their sex lives. From marriage to the oldest profession in the world. The courts were faced with unprecedented problems, legal dilemmas. The law didn’t recognize intimate relations with a doll as grounds for divorce. Whether stuffed or inflated by a bicycle pump, whether with automatic transmission or without, it didn’t matter; that was no more adultery than if a person was cohabiting with a chest of drawers. But teleferic products forced judges to determine whether or not a married individual entering into a liaison with a male remote or a female remote was thereby committing adultery. The concept of “remote adultery” was the subject of heated debate not only in the legal journals but also in the daily press. And adultery was just the tip of the iceberg. Can you deceive your wife, for example, with her own self but younger? A certain Adlai Groutzer ordered from the Boston branch of Gynandroics a remote of his wife at age twenty-one, not fifty-nine, her actual age. A further complication was that when Mrs. Groutzer was twenty-one, she wasn’t Mrs. Groutzer at all but the wife of James Brown, whom she divorced twenty years later to marry Adlai Groutzer. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. A ruling also had to be made as to whether a wife who wouldn’t operate the remote bought by her husband, for sex, was refusing him his conjugal rights. And whether remote incest was possible, and remote sadism and masochism. And remote sodomy. One company put out a line of dolls with modular private parts, so that you could quickly switch from male to female or even have it both ways. Among the customers of Gynandroics were quite a number of elderly prostitutes, no longer able to ply their trade; their years of experience made them masters, by remote, of the art of love. But the technology wasn’t limited to the erotic in its application. Take for example the twelve-year-old schoolboy who, receiving a poor grade for spelling errors in composition, used his father’s muscular remote to beat the English teacher to a pulp and break all his furniture. This remote, called Body Guard, sold like hotcakes. It was kept in the garden shed to protect the family from burglars. The boy’s father wore electrode pajamas to bed, and when the alarm went off, signaling the presence of an intruder, he could deal with the culprit or even culprits without having to get out of bed, because the remote would hold them until the police arrived. The son borrowed his father’s pajamas while his father was out. I had also seen picketing and street demonstrations against Gynandroics and comparable Japanese companies. The protesters were mostly women. In the few states where homosexuality was still against the law, legislators were trying to decide whether a homosexual, in love with a man who was not, was breaking the law if he sent him a female remote which he, the homosexual, was operating. When the Supreme Court finally ruled that relations per procura (with the aid of a remote) lay within the lawful bounds of matrimony provided both parties consented, the Kuckerman case came up. Mr. Kuckerman was a traveling salesman; Mrs. Kuckerman ran a beauty salon. They spent little time together: she couldn’t leave the salon, and he was on the road a lot. They agreed to intermediate their union, but couldn’t agree whether it should be by remote-husband or remote-wife. The Kuckermans’ neighbor brought down upon himself the wrath of both when he suggested, trying to be helpful, that they compromise and use a teleferic pair: a remote husband with a remote wife seemed to him a Solomonic solution to the problem. The Kuckermans considered it idiotic and insulting. They had no idea that their argument, after it appeared in the papers, would lead to a phenomenon called teleferic piggybacking — because a remote, too, can put on an electrode suit and operate another remote, and so on ad infinitum. The idea was received with enthusiasm by the underworld, because it is as easy to find the operator of a remote as it is to locate a radio transmitter. The police had no problem solving teleferic burglaries and murders. But if the perpetrator remote was operated by another remote, by the time you got to the second remote the criminal, the human, had broken radio contact with his “middleman” and left no clues.

The catalogs of Telemate and Sony offered remotes from Lillputians to King Kongs, as well as famous people-in-history remotes, uncanny re-creations of Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and Queen Navarra, not to mention movie stars. In order to avoid lawsuits for “resemblance to persons living or dead,” anyone wanting a copy of the First Lady in his closet, or his neighbor’s wife, availed himself of a mailorder unassembled model. The customer, in the privacy of his own home, could put together the Playmate of his choice, following the instructions. Narcissists ordered their own likeness. The legal system could not handle the flood of new cases, moreover it became clear that one could not outlaw remotes as one outlawed the manufacture of drugs or atomic bombs by private individuals, because the remotes were already big business and indispensable, besides, in agriculture, technology, and science, including astronautics. It was only by remote, after all, that a man could land on such planets as Saturn or Jupiter. Remotes were also used, of course, for mining and for rescuing people in the mountains and during earthquakes and other natural disasters. The Lunar Agency had a special contract with Gynandroics for moon remotes. I would soon learn that they had indeed used them in project LEM, but with results as mystifying as they were catastrophic.

Chief Engineer Paridon Sawekahu showed me around the Gynandroics plant. Tottentanz and Blahouse were with me. Engineer Sawekahu complained about the new legal restrictions that hampered the firm’s research and development of prototypes. And banks, he said, were now putting sensors at their entrances to detect remotes, but that was only the half of it. The banks, of course, feared remote robbery. But instead of using a simple alarm they employed thermoinduction. The remote, as soon as it is recognized, is blasted with high-frequency waves, which cause its wires to melt and turn it into scrap. And the customers complain not to the banks but to Gynandroics. Also, there have been attacks, with bombs even, on trucks carrying remotes, especially attractive females. Engineer Paridon said his firm suspected the women’s liberation movement for these acts of terrorism but at the moment it had nothing that would hold up in court.

I was shown the whole production process, from the welding of the duraluminum skeletons to the covering of the “chassis” with fleshlike material. Most of the remotes are produced in eight sizes. A custom-made model costs twenty times more. Remotes don’t have to resemble people, but the more different they are from a human build, the harder they are to control. A prehensile tail would be an excellent safety feature for remotes working at great heights, installing cables on suspension bridges for example, but a man has nothing with which to operate a tail. Then we drove in a small electric car (because of the size of the place) to the warehouses, and there I saw planetary and lunar remotes. The greater the gravity, the harder it is to build a remote, because a remote too small cannot accomplish much, and one too big, powered with big engines to make it move, will weigh too much.

We returned to the assembly hall. If Dr. Wahatan of the UN had been a diplomatic Asian, with a politely restrained smile, Engineer Paridon was an enthusiastic Asian: his bluish lips never closed, and when he smiled, he showed all his perfect teeth.

“Do you know, Ijon, what the team from General Pedipulatrics and its robots couldn’t manage? Walking on two legs! They flopped because their prototype kept flopping over! Good, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Gyroscopes, counterweights, double feedback in the knees — nothing helped. Of course we have no problem there, a man balances his remote naturally!”

I watched the female remotes coming down the conveyor belt, their skin as rosy-white as a baby’s. One after another they were taken by other belts to the packing area, so that we stood under a line of naked women moving steadily over our heads, inert but their long hair swinging as though it were alive. I asked Paridon if he was married.

“Ha, ha, ha! You make a joke, Ijon! I have a wife and children, of course. A shoemaker doesn’t wear the shoes he makes. But we give our workers one a year as a bonus.”

“What workers?” I asked. There were none in the hall. On the assembly line worked robots painted yellow, green, and blue, their articulated arms extending like geometric caterpillars.

“Ha, ha, ha! In the office we still have a few people. And in the sorting room, the control room, the packing department. Uh-oh, a reject! The legs are not quite right. Crooked! Would you like to try one, Ijon? No charge, you can have a week, and we deliver.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not the Pygmalion type.”

“Pygmalion? Ah yes, of course, George Bernard Shaw! I see the allusion. True, some find it repugnant. But you must admit, it’s better to make women than war! Eh?”

“There are still objections,” I said. “I saw the picket line at the gate.”

“Yes. An ordinary woman just can’t compete with one who’s remote. In life, beauty is the exception to the rule, but with us it is the norm! The marketplace, supply and demand, yes, that’s the way of the world…”

We visited the dressing room, which was full of rustling skirts and lingerie and women busy with scissors and tape measures, not very attractive but then they were only live, and I said goodbye to Engineer Paridon, who accompanied me to the parking lot. Tottentanz and Blahouse were strangely quiet on the way back. I didn’t feel like talking either. The day, however, was not finished.

On my return home I found a fat envelope in my mailbox. It contained a book with the title The Unhumanization of Weapon Systems in the Twenty-first Century or Upside-down Evolution. The author’s name, Meslant, told me nothing. It was a heavy book, full of graphs and tables. Having nothing better to do, I sat down and began to read. On the first page, before the introduction, was an epigraph in German:

The author presented himself as an expert in contemporary military history. His subject, the new pacifism at the close of the twentieth century: it was prosperity and cowardice that gave birth to the unhumanization of war. People were increasingly reluctant to be fired upon, and this loss of martial spirit was directly proportional to the standard of living. The youth of wealthy nations weren’t interested in the noble motto Duke et decorum est pro patria mori. And it was just at that time that prices began falling in the intellectronics industry. Microprocessing elements called chips were replaced by corn, the product of the genetic engineering of a culture of artificial microbes, mainly Silicobacterium logicum wieneri, named after the father of cybernetics. A handful of these elements cost no more than a handful of barley. Thus artificial intelligence grew cheap, yet the price of new weapons increased geometrically. In the first world war a plane cost as much as a car, in the second as much as twenty, and by the end of the century it was six hundred times more. It was calculated that in seventy years a superpower would be able to afford from eighteen to twenty-two planes. The falling curve of the cost of intelligence and the rising curve of the cost of weapons intersected, and at that point began the unhumanization of the armies. The military became unliving. At which juncture the world went through two crises. The first was when the price of oil soared, the second when shortly thereafter it plunged. The classic rules of economics went out the window, but few understood what was happening, or that the image of a soldier in uniform and helmet charging with bayonet was becoming as distant as the medieval knight in armor. Out of inertia the engineers continued to make big-gauge weapons for a while: tanks, cannon, carriers, and other fighting machines to be used by men, though already these could have gone into battle themselves, without them. Then followed a phase of accelerated miniaturization. Until now all weaponry had been fashioned to fit man: Tailored to his anatomy and physiology, so that he could kill and be killed.

As is usually the case in history, no one saw what lay ahead, for the discoveries which were to make possible the unhumanization of weapons took place in fields of science far from one another. Intellectronics produced microcomputers as cheap as grass, and neuroentomology finally solved the riddle of social insects who live and work together, communicating in their own language, even though bees, for example, have a nervous system 380,000 times smaller than a human brain. The intelligence of a bee is quite sufficient for a foot soldier, as military prowess and intelligence are two different things, at least on the battlefield. The major factor in the push for miniaturization was the atom bomb. The need to miniaturize came from simple facts, but facts that lay outside the military knowledge of the day. Seventy million years ago a huge meteor hit Earth and chilled its climate for centuries, making the dinosaurs defunct but hardly bothering insects and not even touching bacteria. The lesson of paleontology was clear: the greater the destructive force, the smaller the systems that escape it. The atom bomb required the particularization of both soldier and army. But in the twentieth century the idea of making soldiers the size of ants was only a fantasy. You could not reduce people in size or diffuse them. So thought was given to robot soldiers, humanoid, though even then that was a naive anachronism. Industry was unhumanizing itself, but the robots who replaced workers on the assembly line were not made in the likeness of men; they were, rather, human parts selected and enlarged: a brain with a big steel hand or a brain with eyes. But giant robots had no place on an atomic battlefield. So radioactive synsects (synthetic insects) were developed, and ceramic shellfish, and titanium worms able to burrow in the earth and come out after the blast. Flying synsects were airplane, pilot, and missiles all in one tiny entity. The operational unit became a microarmy, fighting only as a whole, much as a swarm of bees acts as a unit to survive while an individual bee is nothing. Thus microarmies of many, kinds were made, on two opposing principles. An army based on the principle of independence proceeded like a column of ants or a cloud of germs or hornets. An army based on the principle of teletopism, however, was an enormous flying or crawling collection of self-assembling elements; according to need, tactical or strategic, it could reach its target in extreme attenuation only to condense there into its programmed whole. The simplest example was the self-dispersing atomic warhead. An ICBM could be tracked, from space by satellite or from Earth using radar; but it was impossible to detect a cloud of infinitesimal particles of uranium or plutonium at very low density, which finally would converge and reach critical mass at its target, a factory or an enemy city.

For a while the old and new weapons coexisted, but the massive machines soon succumbed to the invisible micro. As germs secretly enter an animal organism and kill it from within, so did these unliving microbes penetrate cannon barrels, shell chambers, the engines of tanks and planes, and eat through metal, and detonate the ammunition inside. What could a brave, grenade-carrying soldier do against a microscopic, unliving adversary? He would be like a doctor trying to fight a virus with a hammer. Against an autonomous cloud programmed to destroy all things biological a man in uniform was as helpless as a Roman legionary standing with sword and shield before a rain of bullets.

Even in the twentieth century the tactic of fighting in closed ranks was replaced by the spreading out of troops, but there were still front lines. Now there were none. Microarmies easily penetrated all defenses. Nuclear weapons were ineffective combatting that viral contagion. The cost of a warhead, moreover, cannot be considerably greater than the value of its target. One doesn’t use a destroyer to go after leeches.

The most vexing problem in this unhumanized stage of man’s struggle with man turned out to be that of telling friend from foe. In the past it had been done by electronics, using the password principle. Challenged by radio waves, a plane or missile either transmitted back the correct answer or was attacked. This twentieth-century method became obsolete. Now the makers of arms borrowed from the plants and animals, from bacteria. For the recognition process they imitated the ways of living species: immune systems, the duel of antigen and antibody, tropism, mimicry, protective coloration, camouflage. A micro-weapon might pretend to be an innocent microorganism, or the fluff of a plant, a piece of pollen, but beneath that exterior lay corrosive death. The significance of informational combat also increased — not in the sense now of propaganda but as the invasion of enemy communications, to paralyze it or, as in the case of the atomic locust-cloud, to force premature condensation to critical mass before it reached its target. The author of the book discussed the cockroach, which was the prototype for one kind of micro-soldier. On its abdomen the cockroach has very fine hairs. When they are moved by the air, the insect flees, because these sensors are wired directly to its rear nerve ganglion, and they can distinguish between a draft and the disturbance caused by a predator.

As I read, I felt pity for the champions of uniforms, flags, and medals for bravery: the new era of warfare must have been anathema to their high ideals. The audior used the term upside-down evolution, because in the beginning of life there were microscopic systems which slowly changed into larger systems, while this military evolution proceeded the other way, microminiaturization, and the great human brain was replaced by mechanical insect ganglia. Microarmies arose in two steps. First, the designers and builders were still human; then the unhumanized divisions were conceived, battle-tested, and put into mass production by computer systems that were equally nonhuman. People were eliminated from the military and then from the weapons industry by a phenomenon called “sociointegrational degeneration.” The individual soldier underwent degeneration: he became smaller and simpler. In the end he had the intelligence of an ant or termite. But the collective of these tiny warriors assumed a greater role. The nonliving army was far more complex than a beehive or ant hill; it was more like a biotope in nature, an ecosystem, a subtle equilibrium between competitive, antagonistic, and symbiotic species. A sergeant or corporal in such an army obviously had nothing to do. To grasp the whole picture, merely to inspect the troops, not even the brain power of an entire university would suffice. Thus officers as well as poor Third World countries did not fare well during the great military revolution of the twenty-first century. The irresistible momentum of army unhumanization destroyed the lofty traditions of maneuvers, marches, drills, changing the guard, and regalia. For a while but alas not for long, it was possible to preserve the highest ranks for people, but the strategy-computational superiority of the computerized echelons of command finally put even the most corpulent leaders, including four-star generals, out of work. A chest of ribbons and medals was no protection from early retirement. These officers, facing permanent unemployment — for they could do nothing else — revolted, forming an underground terrorist movement. The crushing of this revolt with the use of microspies and minipolice built on the abovementioned cockroach principle was a grim chapter in our history, because neither cover of dark nor mist nor any kind of camouflage could save those desperate traditionalists loyal to the ideas of Achilles and Clausewitz.

As for the poor countries, they could go on fighting as before, using live people, but only against opponents as anachronistic as themselves. Those who couldn’t automate militarily had to sit quietly in the corner.

But it wasn’t fun for the rich countries either. The old political games went out the window. The line separating war and peace, having long been blurry, was now completely erased. The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the beginning. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war. First, wide-range subversive activity was conducted under the mask of official peace: the infiltration of political, religious, and social movements, even such worthy movements as those to protect the environment; the infiltration also of the culture and mass media, taking advantage of the illusions of the young and the conservatism of the old. Then covert military activity intensified to the point of being overt, except that it was invisible. Acid rain had been known in the twentieth century; now rain fell that was so corrosive, it destroyed the roofs of houses and factories, roads, electrical lines, but no one knew whether this was pollution or the enemy sending poison clouds their way. It was thus with everything. Farm animals died in epidemics that could have been natural or intentional. A storm that flooded the coast might have been an act of God or the clever redirection of a hurricane at sea. A drought — a normal disaster, or one caused by the secret switching of heavy clouds with light. With seismic, meteorological, and epidemiological counterespionage and reconnaissance the scientists had their hands full. More and more of the scientific community became involved with intelligence work, yet the results of their research grew less and less clear. The tracking down of saboteurs was child’s play in the days when they were human; but now, when the suspect was a hurricane or hailstorm, or a crop or cattle disease, or the rise in infant mortality or cancer rate, or even a meteor (the twentieth century had already considered the idea of aiming an asteroid at enemy territory), life became intolerable. Intolerable not only for the man on the street but also for heads of state, who were helpless and confused, and their advisors no less. The military academies added new courses such as cryptotactics, cryptocountering (that is, taking counterespionage to the nth power), crypto field theory, and finally cryptocryptics, the secret study of the secret use of secret weapons indistinguishable from natural phenomena.

To blacken the enemy, one could fake a natural disaster in one’s own country — in a way that made it obvious it was not natural. Also it was proved that certain rich nations, helping those less fortunate, put a drug into the supplies of wheat, corn, and cocoa it sold (cheaply), which caused impotence. This was, then, a secret war of birth control. Although the catastrophic consequence of such escalation was obvious — wherein victory was equivalent to defeat for both sides — the politicians continued with business as usual, concerned more about the voters than the future, making fuzzy promises and being increasingly less able to affect the course of real events. War was peace, not from Orwell’s totalitarian doublethink but because of a technology that erased the boundary between natural and artificial in every aspect of human life and its environment.

Where there is no difference, wrote the author, between natural and artificial protein or between natural and artificial intelligence, misfortunes caused deliberately cannot be distinguished from those caused by no one. Just as light that falls into a black hole cannot pull itself out of that gravitational trap, so humanity at war, reaching the secrets of matter, cannot leave the trap of technology. It wasn’t the governments, heads of state, monopolies, generals, or pressure groups that made the decision to invest everything in the new arms, it was fear, fear that the Other Side would discover, invent, and develop first. Traditional politics were useless. Negotiators could negotiate nothing, because the offer to give up a new weapon only meant, for the other side, that you had a weapon that was even newer. I turned to a mathematical model of conflict theory which showed why further summit meetings were a waste of time. At such meetings, agreements were reached. But it took longer to reach an agreement than for a new development to change radically the situation on which that agreement was based, thus making it an immediate anachronism. The act of reaching an agreement, then, was an empty game of appearances. This was what compelled the world powers to accept the Geneva Agreement: an exodus of weapons to the moon. The world breathed a sigh of relief, but not for long, because fear returned — now as the specter of the nonhuman invasion of Earth by the moon. So there was no task more urgent than to pierce the mystery of the moon.

With these words the chapter ended. There were a few dozen pages left in the book, but they wouldn’t turn. As if they were glued. Stuck together with bookbinder’s glue, I thought. I couldn’t separate them, so finally I took a knife and slid it carefully between the pages. The first page was blank, but where the knife touched it, letters formed. I rubbed the paper with the knife until I obtained the following message: “Are you ready to assume this burden? If not, put the book back in the envelope! If yes, turn the page!”

The next page was also blank. I ran the blade from top to bottom and eight numbers appeared, in groups of two with hyphens between them like a telephone number. I separated the remaining pages but there was nothing on them. “A curious way to recruit Savers of the World!” I thought. At the same time I began to suspect what lay in store. I closed the book but it opened again by itself at the page with the numbers. Nothing was left for me but to pick up the phone and dial.