Peace on Earth

THE MISSION

Take-off was aborted eight times. Something went wrong at every countdown. It was the air conditioning, or a backup computer reporting a short circuit that wasn’t real, or a short circuit that was real but not reported by the main computer, and on the ninth countdown, when it looked like I’d be on my way at last, the Number 7 LEM balked. There I lay, swaddled and wrapped in tape that held a thousand sensors, like a mummy in a sarcophagus, my helmet shut, the laryngophone at my throat, and the tube of the orange juice container in my mouth. With one hand on the emergency ejector switch and the other on the steering wheel, I was trying to think of things pleasant and far away, so my heart wouldn’t pound, because it was being watched on screens by eight people along with my blood pressure, muscle tension, sweat level, eye movements, and galvanic skin response, all revealing the fear felt by the intrepid astronaut as he waits for the ritual zero and the thunder that will thrust him upward. But each time what I heard was profanity, in chief coordinator Wivitch’s voice, and the words “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I don’t know whether it was my ears or the microphones but his voice echoed as in an empty barrel; I said nothing, however, knowing that if I mentioned this, they’d examine the helmet and call in resonance experts and there would be no end to it.

This last problem, called LEM’s Mutiny by the technicians, was really quite peculiar: from the diagnostic signals intended only to check out its systems the unit began moving, and when it was turned off, instead of stopping it shuddered and tried to get up. Like a mindless idol it struggled against its straps and nearly tore apart the harness, though they disconnected all the lines to it one by one and couldn’t figure out where the power was coming from. It must have been a leak of some sort in the current. Impedance, capacitance, resistance, susceptibility. When engineers don’t know what’s happening, their vocabulary takes on the richness of physicians discussing a hopeless case. As is well known, whatever can go wrong eventually will and in a unit of 298,000 circuits and chips no amount of redundancy can provide a hundred-percent certainty. A hundred-percent certainty, says Halevala, the oldest repairman, is provided only by a dead body, in that it won’t rise up. Halevala liked to say that God, creating the world, didn’t take statistics into account, and when problems started in Paradise He resorted to miracles but by then it was too late. Wivitch said that Halevala brought bad luck and asked the director to dismiss him. The director believed in bad luck but the Council didn’t, so the Finn, appealing the dismissal, kept his job. Such was the atmosphere in which I prepared myself for the Mission.

I had no doubt that in lunar orbit too something would go wrong, though the simulations and inspections had been repeated ad nauseam. But of course I didn’t know when that would happen or into what sort of mess it would put me. At the next countdown everything went fine, but this time I pulled the plug, because my left leg fell asleep, too tightly wrapped, and I argued on the phone with Wivitch who said the pins and needles would pass and the tape shouldn’t be any looser. But I insisted, and they had to spend an hour and a half unwinding me from my cocoon. It turned out that someone — but of course no one confessed — had used a pipe-cleaning utensil to help pull the tape and it had been forgotten under the wrapping around my shin. I asked them to let the matter drop even though I could guess who had done it, since only one of them smoked a pipe. In heroic tales of space such things never happen. An astronaut does not get the runs, nor do the amenities malfunction so that his spacesuit fills with piss. Which actually happened to the first American astronaut in his suborbital flight but out of natural historical-patriotic delicacy NASA didn’t mention it to the press.

The more care they take for your comfort, the more likely it is that some tangled bit of wire will dig under your arm or a buckle pinch in the worst possible place, driving you up the wall. When I once suggested they put remote scratchers inside the suit, they all thought it was a joke and laughed, except the seasoned astronauts who knew what I was talking about. It was I who discovered Tichy’s Law which says that the first itch occurs in a place on the body you can’t possibly reach. The itching stops only when something serious happens, because then your hair stands on end, your flesh crawls, and breaking into a cold sweat does the rest. True as this is, the authorities don’t want to hear it because it doesn’t rhyme well with One Giant Leap for Mankind. Can you imagine Armstrong climbing down the rungs of that first LEM and saying instead that his underwear was riding up? I’ve always thought that the people at Central Control who sit back in their chairs with a can of beer and give advice to the astronaut-turned-mummy, with their words of encouragement and support, should first put themselves in his shoes.

The last two weeks I spent at the base were not pleasant. There were new attempts to remove Ijon Tichy. Even after the incident with the false Marilyn Monroe they didn’t tell me that my mail was being scanned by a special machine. The technology of epistolary terrorism is so developed that a charge able to blow the addressee to pieces can be placed inside a Christmas or birthday card wishing him health and happiness. It was only after a deadly letter from Professor Tarantoga almost put me out of the picture and I raised holy hell that they showed me the machine, an armored container with slanted steel slabs to absorb explosions. Each letter is opened by pincers and examined by x ray and ultrasound to trigger the detonator if there is one. The letter in question didn’t explode and Tarantoga had actually written it, so they brought it to me and I was saved thanks to my sense of smell. The envelope reeked of mignonette or lavender, which seemed strange to me, suspicious, because Tarantoga is the last person to use perfumed stationery. No sooner did I read the words “Dear Ijon” than I began to laugh and instantly realized that although I was laughing I was not amused, and since one does not laugh for no reason, I concluded, putting two and two together, that this laughter was not natural. I did a very prudent thing then, slipping the letter under the glass that covered my desk, to read it that way. And thank God I also had a runny nose, which I blew. The Council afterward debated whether I blew my nose automatically or from an instant insight, and I myself wasn’t sure. In any case this was why I inhaled only a very small amount of the drug with which the letter had been impregnated. It was a completely new drug. The laughter it produced was the overture to hiccups so persistent that they could be stopped only by a strong narcotic. I immediately phoned Lohengrin, who at first thought I was playing some joke because while I spoke, I roared with laughter. From the neurological standpoint laughter is the first stage of a hiccup. Finally the matter became clear, the letter was taken to the laboratory by two men in masks, and Dr. Lopez and his colleagues came and gave me oxygen. When I had subsided to a chuckle, they made me read all the lead articles in the newspapers of that day and the day before.

I didn’t realize that during my absence the press as well as television had split in two. There are papers and programs that give all the news and those that give only the good news. Until now they had been feeding me the second kind, which is why at the base I had the impression that the world had truly improved after the signing of the Geneva Agreement. You would have thought that at least the pacifists were happy, but no. A book Dr. Lopez loaned me tells the story of our new society. The author shows that Jesus was a subversive sent to undermine Jewish unity with that love thy neighbor business, on the principle of divide and conquer, which worked, and which a little later brought down the Roman Empire. Jesus himself had no idea he was a subversive, and the apostles too were in the dark, having only the best intentions although everyone knows what is paved with good intentions. The author, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, says that anyone who proclaims brotherly love and peace on earth should be immediately arrested and interrogated to see what his agenda really is. So it’s not surprising that the pacifists have changed their tactics. Some have taken up the cause of delicious animals. There has nevertheless been no decline in the consumption of pork chops. Others urge solidarity with all living things, and in the German Bundestag eighteen seats were won by the Probacteria Party which says that microbes have as much right to live as we so instead of killing them with medicine we should alter them genetically to live not on humans but on something else. There is a real groundswell of good will, with disagreement only about who is standing in its way. But there is no disagreement that the enemies of brotherly love should be exterminated root and branch.

At Tarantoga’s I saw an interesting new encyclopedia entitled The Lexicon of Fear. It used to be, says the book, that fear had its roots in the supernatural: in spells, witches, demons, heretics, atheists, black magic, ghosts, Bohemians, and abstract art, but in the industrial age fear shifted to things more concrete. There was fear of tomatoes (carcinogenic), aspirin (stomach bleeding), coffee (birth defects), butter (saturated fat), sugar, cars, television, discotheques, pornography, birth control pills, science, cigarettes, nuclear power plants, and higher education. I wasn’t surprised by the popularity of this encyclopedia. Professor Tarantoga is of the opinion that people need two things. First, an answer to the question “Who is responsible?” and second, to the question “What is the secret?” The first answer should be brief, obvious, and unambiguous. As for the second, scientists have been annoying everyone for two hundred years with their superior knowledge. How nice to see them baffled by the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, and the emotions of plants, and how satisfying it is when a simple middle-aged woman of Paris can see the whole future of the world while on that subject the professors are as ignorant as spoons.

People, says Tarantoga, believe what they want to believe. Take astrology for instance. Astronomers, who after all should know more than anyone about the stars, tell us that they are giant balls of incandescent gas spinning since the world began and that their influence on our fate is considerably less than the influence of a banana peel, on which you can slip and break your leg. But there is no interest in banana peels, whereas serious periodicals include horoscopes and there are even pocket computers you can consult before you invest in the stock market to find out if the stars are favorable. Anyone who says that the skin of a fruit can have more effect on a person’s future than all the planets and stars combined won’t be listened to. An individual comes into the world because his father, say, didn’t withdraw in time, thereby becoming a father. The mother-to-be, seeing what happened, took quinine and jumped from the top of the dresser to the floor but that didn’t help. So the individual is born and he finishes school and works in a store selling suspenders, or in a post office. Then suddenly he learns that that’s not the way it was at all. The planets came into conjunction, the signs of the zodiac arranged themselves carefully into a special pattern, half the sky cooperated with the other half so that he could come into being and stand behind this counter or sit behind this desk. It lifts his spirits. The whole universe revolves around him, and even if things aren’t going well, even if the stars are lined up in such a way that the suspenders manufacturer loses his shirt and the individual consequently loses his job, it’s still more comforting than to know that the stars don’t really give a damn. Knock astrology out of his head, and the belief too that the cactus on his windowsill cares about him, and what is left? Barefoot, naked despair. So says Professor Tarantoga, but I see I am digressing.

They shot me into orbit on the 27th of October, wrapped in sensor tape like an infant in swaddling clothes. From a height of four hundred miles I observed Mother Earth and could hear the engineers at the base cheering that this time it worked. My first stage, the main booster, separated as it was supposed to, above the Atlantic, on the dot, but the second got stuck and I had to help it. I think it fell in the Andes. After the traditional good lucks and safe trips I took over the controls myself and proceeded through the most hazardous zone on the way to the moon. You have no idea how many old satellites, civilian and military, are circling Earth. Something like eighteen thousand not counting the ones that have come apart, particularly dangerous because the pieces are almost too small for radar. And then there’s a lot of ordinary garbage in space, all kinds of waste products, especially radioactive, deposited here by jet. So I flew with extreme caution until space was properly empty. Only then did I unbuckle all the belts and start checking my LEMs.

I turned on one after the other, seeing how each felt, seeing the interior of the bay through its crystal eyes. I had nineteen remotes, but the last one was by itself in a crate marked fruit juice to fool unauthorized persons. Inside the crate was a hermetically sealed cylinder, light blue, which housed a powdered remote, Professor Lax-Gugliborc’s top-secret creation, and I was to use it only as a last resort. I knew the principle of its operation but still don’t know whether I should reveal that yet. Nor do I want to turn this account into a Gynandroics catalog or a product list of the Lunar Agency’s teleferic division. LEM 5 started shivering when I turned it on. Since it was feedback-connected to me, I shivered too, as in a fever, teeth chattering. I was supposed to inform the base at once about such defects, but I didn’t because I knew from experience what would happen. They would immediately call in a whole army of mechanics, designers, engineers, and specialists in electronic pathology, who would be angry with me for making such a big deal out of light convulsions that might go away by themselves, and they would give me contradictory instructions, connect this, disconnect that, and how many amps to zap the poor thing with because electroshock can help machines as well as people. And that would produce some new, unpredicted response, and they would tell me to wait patiently while they ran simulations of the LEM, analog and digital, and of me too, as they argued with each other constantly and now and then told me to stay calm. The team would split into two or three camps like distinguished doctors in consultation. Perhaps they would have me climb into the bay with tools and open the LEM’s belly and train the hand camera on it since all the circuitry is there and not in the head which hasn’t room. So I’d be following the baton of the experts, and if it worked, they’d take the credit, and if it didn’t, I’d get the blame.

But I was 100,000 miles from Earth now and increasingly glad I had kept quiet about the problem, because soon there would be more than a second’s delay in communicating with the base and I’d be sure to bust something, precise movements are difficult when you’re weightless, a spark would tell them I’d caused a short, and then there would be a chorus of sour remarks. Tichy’s screwed it up, they’d say, there’s nothing we can do. So I had spared both them and myself that aggravation.

The nearer I got to the moon, the more unnecessary the advice and cautions I was receiving over the radio, until finally I said that if they didn’t stop bothering me, I’d turn the damned thing off. I knew the moon like the palm of my hand from the days when they were considering turning it into a Disneyland. I circled it three times in high orbit and over the Oceanus Procellarum began a slow descent. On one side I could see the Mare Imbrium and on the other the crater Eratosthenes, then Murchison and the Sinus Medi all the way to the Mare Nubium. I was now so low that the continuation of the moon’s pock-marked surface was hidden from me. I was at the lower boundary of the Zone of Silence. So far nothing unexpected had happened if you don’t count the two empty beer cans that came to life during my maneuvers. When I braked, the cans — as usual discarded in haste by our technicians — manifested themselves and began flying around the cabin, hitting the walls and my head. A greenhorn would have tried to catch them. I changed orbit and flew above the Taurus mountains. When the great Sea of Serenity stretched out before me, I was hit in the back of my helmet so sharply that I jumped. It was a tin of salted crackers that probably had gone with the beer. The base heard the noise and immediately there were questions, but I lied, explaining that I had tried to scratch my head and forgot both helmet and bulky glove. No point in getting the technicians in trouble. They always leave stuff in rockets. It’s like a law of nature.

I flew through the zone of internal control without difficulty, because its satellites had been told by Earth to let me pass. It wasn’t in the program, but I braked hard a few times to dislodge any other mementos from the assembly-and-inspection crews. A comic book stuffed in the reserve selenography drawer fluttered out like an enormous moth. Taking a quick inventory — two beer cans, a cracker tin, a comic book — I concluded that there would be more surprises in store and I would have to stay alert.

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 Tranquillitatis, 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? Neo-dymium?”

“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.

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 try 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 corners 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.

I walked, looking carefully in all directions, until I came to a gently rolling plain pitted with small craters filled with sand. In the sand of one crater was something that looked like a thick dead branch. I grabbed it and tugged, as if pulling a deep root from the ground. Then I used a small folding shovel that I carried strapped to my side. From the sand and dust emerged a piece of iron, burnt, perhaps a fragment of one of the countless primitive rockets that crashed here in the early days of lunar exploration. I didn’t call Control, who through the micropes could see my discovery for themselves. I pulled at the strangely bent bars until a thicker part appeared, and under that was a shinier metal. It didn’t look particularly promising, but having begun this scavenging, I pulled harder, not afraid that one of the sharp pieces might puncture my suit, because I had no need of air. But something changed. At first I didn’t understand why it was hard for me to keep my balance, then realized that my left boot was caught, gripped by flattened, curved prongs. I tried to free it, thinking I’d walked right into this one, but the foot was held fast and even the blade of my shovel didn’t help, unable to pry the prongs apart.

“Is Wivitch there?” I asked, and waited three seconds for him to respond.

“They have me in some kind of bear trap,” I said.

How incredibly stupid, getting taken by something like this! I couldn’t get loose. The micropes surrounded me like excited flies as I struggled with the clamps that had closed on my boot like a vise.

“Return to the ship,” Wivitch suggested. Or it might have been one of his assistants, because the voice sounded different.

“I don’t want to lose the remote,” I said. “I need to cut this!”

“You have a Carborundum saw.”

I unhooked the flat holster at my thigh, and in fact it contained a nice little saw. I plugged its cord into the generator in my suit and bent over. Sparks flew from the spinning edge. The pincers holding my boot at the ankle began to give, practically cut all the way through, when I felt a growing heat in the boot. With all my strength I wrenched my leg away, then saw that the metal bulb from which the bars protruded like roots from a great potato was glowing red-hot. The white plastic of the boot had blackened and was cracking from the heat. I made one last effort and, suddenly released, fell backward. Blinded by forked lightning, I felt a violent blow in my chest, heard the sound of the suit torn open, and was plunged into impenetrable darkness. I didn’t lose consciousness, I was simply in darkness. After a moment I heard Wivitch:

“Tichy, you’re on the ship. Say something! The first remote was taken out.”

I blinked. I was sitting in the chair, my head on the headrest, my legs curiously bent, and holding my chest where a moment ago I had taken the blow. A painful blow, I realized only now.

“Was it a mine… ?” I asked. “A mine connected to a bear trap? Was that the best they could think up?”

I heard voices, but they weren’t talking to me. Someone asked about the micropes.

“There’s no video,” said someone else.

“What? They were all destroyed by that one explosion?”

“Impossible.”

“Impossible or not, we have no video.”

I was still breathing as if after a long run, regarding the face of the moon. With the tip of my finger I could cover the entire crater of Flamsteed and the plain on which I had so stupidly lost the remote.

“What’s wrong with the micropes?” I asked at last.

“We don’t know.”

I looked at my watch and was surprised: I had spent almost four hours on the moon. It was after midnight, by ship time.

“I don’t know about you,” I said with a yawn, “but I’ve had enough for today. I’m going to sleep.”