Peace on Earth

ROUND TWO

I awoke rested and immediately went over the events of the day before. You always think better after a good shower, which is why I had insisted on a bathroom with running water instead of those wet towels which are no substitute for a tub. Of course there couldn’t be a tub, with the wash area no bigger than a barrel. Water rushed in on one side and was sucked out by a strong current of air on the other. In order not to drown, because water in zero gravity covers the body and face in a growing layer, I had to put on an oxygen mask before showering, which was a nuisance but better that than no shower. As we all know, even after the engineers could build rockets in their sleep, astronauts were still plagued by toilet accidents, and technology wrestled with that problem for a long time. Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn’t mention it. Urinating (for men, that is) wasn’t too bad, but defecating was solved only with the offices of a special computer, which was fine, but when that broke down you found yourself in extremity and had to improvise. In my lunar module, this computer — about the only one — worked throughout like a Swiss timepiece, thank God. Washed and refreshed, I drank my coffee from a plastic bulb and ate a raisin cake under a funnel with its suction set on high so the crumbs wouldn’t stick to my fingers or choke me. I don’t like to give up my habits. Having breakfasted properly, I took a seat at the selenograph and, gazing at the globe of the simulated moon, smiled, since they wouldn’t be inflicting advice on me for a while. I hadn’t informed Control that I was awake; they thought I was still sleeping.

The mirror phenomenon and the naked blonde had clearly been two tests to determine who or what had landed, and apparently I had passed those tests, being allowed to wander through Flamsteed unenticed and unattacked. But the trap that turned out to be a mine didn’t fit this picture. On one hand they go to great trouble to produce a mirage in the no man’s land, all done at a distance because it is a no man’s land, and on the other they plant mines — as if I was facing an army equipped with both early-warning radar and clubs. But the mine could have been there from earlier days, though neither I nor anyone else had any idea what had taken place on the moon during all those years of hermetic isolation. Not solving this mystery, I began preparing for the next reconnaissance.

LEM 2, in perfect working order, was the product of General Teletronics and a different model from the one I had lost so unexpectedly, poor thing. I crawled into the bay to have a look at it before I became it. It was exceptionally strong judging from the girth of its legs and arms, its broad back, the triple plates of armor that made a dull boom when I tapped with my finger. Apart from the apertures in the helmet it had six additional eyes, on its shoulders, hips, and knees. To outdo their competitor who designed the first LEM, General Teletronics had given their model two personal rocket systems: besides the retros ejected after landing this athlete of steel had jets fastened to its heels, shins, and even one in its behind, which was for balance — as I read in the self-congratulatory instructions — and for the execution of fifty-foot leaps. Its armor moreover gleamed like pure mercury, so that the ray of any laser would be deflected. This LEM may have been marvelous but I can’t say I was thrilled as I inspected it, because the more eyes and dials and jets and auxiliary devices there are, the more the attention they take, and being a standard-model person myself I have no more limbs and senses than anyone else. Returning to the cabin, I hooked into the remote and stood in it, acquainting myself with the complicated controls. The switch that activated the great jumps was a wired wafer you took between your teeth. But how was I to talk to Control with a switch in my mouth? Well, it was elastic and could be molded like clay and tucked inside your cheek, and you could move it between your molars when necessary. In difficult situations, warned the instructions, you should take care not to bite down too hard. There was nothing about teeth chattering from excitement. The switch tasted awful; I immediately spat it out. Possibly they had smeared it with something at the proving ground on Earth, orange or mint toothpaste. I disconnected from the remote, went into a higher orbit, and flew around the moon to target 002 between Mare Spumans and Mare Smythii while conversing with the base as politely as I could.

I was flying as peacefully as a fed baby in its cradle when something happened to the selenography. It’s an excellent instrument when it’s working. There’s no reason to travel with an actual globe of the moon; you can use a hologram, which is like having the entire satellite hanging in the air not three feet from you, rotating slowly, and you can see both its sculpted surface and the boundary lines of the sectors, the nations indicated by the kind of letters that appear on cars: US, G, I, F, R, S, N. But something had gone wrong, because the sectors began changing color, all the colors of the rainbow, then the pockmarks of the craters blurred, the image shuddered, and when I frantically turned knobs, it returned as a smooth white sphere. I tried adjusting the focus, size, contrast, but the moon for a second appeared upside down then disappeared altogether and the selenograph couldn’t bring it back. I told Wivitch, and of course he said I had pushed a wrong button. After I assured him ten times that we had “a serious problem here,” because since Armstrong that’s how you put it, the experts finally got to work on the selenograph, and that took half a day. First they told me to go into an orbit above the Zone of Silence in order to rule out any interference from unknown forces or waves directed at me from the moon. When that didn’t help, they checked directly from Earth all the circuits, integrated and not, in the holograph, meanwhile I fixed myself lunch then dinner. Since it’s not easy to make a good omelette in zero gravity, I took off my helmet and earphones so the disagreements between the information scientists and the teletronicists, not to mention an ad hoc team of professors, wouldn’t distract me. After all the debating they came to the conclusion that the selenograph was broken. They also established which micro-component had blown, but it happened to be the only one I didn’t have a spare for. They told me therefore to take my ordinary moon maps, the ones printed on paper, and tape them to the screen and use that to navigate. I found the maps but unfortunately I had four copies of the first quarter of the moon, where I’d been, and that was all. Great consternation. They told me to look again, more carefully. I searched the ship with a fine-tooth comb but found only a small comic book, pornographic, left by one of the technicians during the final preparations before takeoff.

Control now split into two camps. One said that under such conditions I couldn’t continue the mission and should return; the other wanted to leave that decision to me. I agreed with the second camp and decided to land as planned. They could always transmit to me a television picture of the moon. Not a bad idea, except that this couldn’t be synchronized with my trajectory; they’d either show me the surface of the moon whizzing past or hardly moving at all. On top of that I would be landing at the very edge of the face visible to Earth and then proceeding to the far side, which presented another problem. They wouldn’t be able to send me a television picture directly when the ship was parked above the far hemisphere, which should have been child’s play because the picture could be relayed to me by the monitoring satellites but they refused. They refused because somehow no one had foreseen this eventuality and the satellites were programmed according to the doctrine of ignorance and therefore weren’t allowed to transmit anything to Earth or from Earth. Not anything. True, to maintain contact with me and my micropes, so-called Trojan satellites had been put into high equatorial orbit, but these were not for relaying television signals. That is, they were, but only via the micropes. There was an awful lot of discussion about this, then someone suggested they brainstorm the problem, and for the next four hours the scientists talked. They talked so much, I couldn’t stand it, and then they drifted off the subject and were talking not about how to help me but who was to blame for not having provided redundancy in the selenographic system. As usual when people work collectively, shoulder to shoulder, the blame was not individual, but the accusations flew back and forth like tennis, until finally I told them I’d handle it myself. The risk was already so tremendous that a little additional risk, it seemed to me, wouldn’t make any difference. Besides, the question of which sector I landed in, US, R, F, G, I, C, or any other letter of the alphabet, was purely academic.

The whole idea of the nationality of the robots inhabiting the moon, who knows in what generation now, was absurd. As you know — or may not — the most difficult task of military automation programming turned out to be the identification of the enemy. On Earth this was not a big problem; that’s what uniforms were for, flags, colorful insignia on the wings of airplanes, helmet styles, and it wasn’t all that hard to tell if a prisoner of war spoke Dutch or Chinese. With machines it was a different story. Therefore two strategies emerged: the Friend strategy and the Foe strategy. The first advocated the use of a multitude of sensors, analytical filters, differential selectors, and other such recognition devices; whereas the second was simplicity itself — the enemy was whoever or whatever didn’t know the password and so had to be destroyed. But nobody knew what course the autoevolution of weapons on the moon had taken, or what kind of tactical programs had developed to distinguish friend from foe. Though of course friend and foe are highly relative terms. You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there’s no way to tell if that grandmother’s Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus. Moreover, the automation of the armies eliminated ideology. An attacking robot follows its program, acting in accordance with focalization and optimization algorithms, differential diagnostics, and game theory — not patriotism. Military mathematics and weapons automation, moreover, if they had their apostles, they also had their apostates. The former maintained there were programs that could ensure perfect loyalty in a war robot so that nothing could turn it to treason; the latter said nonsense, because there is no code that can’t be cracked and no security system that can’t be subverted, just look at the history of computer crime. A hundred and fourteen programmers protected Chase Manhattan Bank’s information centers from entry by unauthorized persons, and a bright young kid armed with nothing but a hand calculator and an ordinary telephone broke into that inner sanctum as a joke and left a calling card: auditors wanting to check a balance, before each CREDIT and DEBIT command had to type PEEKABOO. Of course the experts immediately devised a different, much more complicated, unbreakable program. I don’t remember now who broke that one. But this has no bearing on round two of my mad mission.

I don’t know the name of the crater I landed in. From the north it resembled Helvetius but not from the south. I had examined this second landing site from orbit although not that carefully. It didn’t matter to me whether or not it had been a no man’s land once. I could have determined the coordinates, playing at the astrograph and doing declinations from this star and that, but I decided to save that for later. LEM 2 was a lot better than I thought it would be, but it did have one problem, the temperature control worked in only two positions, so I had to keep turning the switch, jumping back and forth between oven and icebox which made my nose run. But why was I still sitting in the ship, putting off the landing? It wasn’t fear, I suddenly understood, but the fact that I didn’t know the name of the crater where I would be landing. As if a name had special significance. Which no doubt explains the zeal with which astronomers christened every surface feature of the moon and Mars, and why they fell into despair when they discovered on other planets so many mountains and valleys and had no more names left that sounded good.

The area was flat except for the northern horizon where a line of ash-gray vertical rocks stood against the black sky. I slogged with difficulty through abundant sand, checking from time to time to see if the micropes were still with me. They hovered so high above that only occasionally could I see them sparkle, distinguished from the stars by their movement. I was near the terminator, the night side of the moon about two miles ahead of me. The sun, very low, touching the horizon at my back, cut the plain with long parallel shadows. Every depression in the ground, even small ones, was filled with such darkness that it was like stepping into water. Hot and cold by turns, I walked stubbornly on, in the direction of my own giant shadow. I could talk with Control but had nothing to say. Every few minutes Wivitch asked me how I was doing and what I saw, and I answered: all right, and nothing. On a sloping dune lay a stack of large flat stones, and I went toward them, seeing a glint of something metallic there. It was the shell of an old rocket, clearly from the days of the first moon shots. I lifted it, looked at it, dropped it, and walked on.

At the top of a rise where there was hardly any of that fine sand that clings to your boots, was a stone the shape of a badly baked loaf of bread, and I don’t know why but I kicked it. Maybe out of boredom or because it was lying so apart. The stone broke instead of rolling downhill, and a piece the size of a fist flew off, leaving a surface that gleamed like quartz. Of course I knew plenty, from my briefing, about the chemical composition of the moon’s crust but couldn’t remember if it included quartz, so I picked up the fragment. It was surprisingly heavy. I held it and looked at it, and not knowing what more to do with it, tossed it away and moved on, but didn’t move on because at the last moment, as it left my hand, it glittered in the sun very curiously, as if something tiny was trembling in the concave broken place. I didn’t pick it up again, but bent over it and watched for quite a while, blinking because I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me unless something really strange was taking place in that stone piece. The surface of the break was quickly losing its shine, in a few seconds was dull, and then it began to fill out as if drawing substance impossibly from within. The stone seemed to exude a viscous sap like a cut tree. Carefully I touched it with a finger, but it was not sticky; gummy, rather, like plaster before it sets. I looked at the other, larger piece and was even more surprised. It had not only dulled but swelled out a little at the place of the break. I didn’t say anything to Wivitch, just stood there, legs apart, feeling the sun at my back, a hot pressure, it hung not far above the gently curved, white-and-black striped plain, but I didn’t take my eyes from the stone.

It was growing or, more precisely, healing. After a few minutes the two parts, the stone and the fragment I had held in my hand, no longer fit, they had both swelled until each was a lump that had no flat side from the fracture. I waited to see what would happen next but nothing more happened, as if the wound had been sealed in both places by a scar. Absurd yet true. Remembering how easily the stone had broken, because I hadn’t kicked it very hard, I looked around for more. A few, smaller, lay on the sunny slope, so I took out my folding shovel, went over and hit them, one by one, with its sharp blade. They split like overripe chestnuts and shimmered inside, until I came to an ordinary rock, because the shovel bounced off it leaving only a white line on its surface. I returned to those that had fallen in two. They were healing, there was no doubt about it. I had a little Geiger counter in a pocket on my right thigh. It registered nothing when held near the stones. This was an important find because stones don’t heal, therefore these were probably the product of some local technology and I should collect them. I was reaching for one when I remembered that I couldn’t return to the ship because that wasn’t in the Mission. Nor could I do an in-the-field chemical analysis, having no reagents. If I told Wivitch about this phenomenon, a lengthy conference would ensue, full of expert opinions, and excited scientists would forbid me to leave the spot and ask me to break as many of the stones as I could, like eggs, and observe what happened while they theorized more and more boldly, but I felt in my bones that nothing would come of it, because you have to have some idea in your head before you start experimenting. Then I heard from Wivitch, who had seen me hitting something with the shovel but apparently the picture transmitted by the micropes was not sharp enough for him to see what. I answered that it was nothing and quickly continued on my way, full of thoughts.

The ability of those injured in battle to repair themselves might be useful to warrior robots but hardly to stones. Could this mean that the computers in this locality were building weapons from the ground up, as it were? But even so, why would stone projectiles need to heal? Then the thought occurred to me that I was here, after all, not as a living being but as a nonliving remote. Could it be that the evolution of the moon weapons had proceeded along two independent lines: as the production of weapons that would attack what was nonliving, and separately, what was living? Let us assume that. Let us assume — I thought — that a device designed to destroy a nonliving weapon could not with the same efficaciousness destroy a living enemy, and that I had encountered the second type of device, one set for the landing of a man. Since I was not a man, these mines — if they were mines — failing to detect a living body inside my suit, did nothing to harm me, and only sealed themselves up. A robot scout from Earth, happening upon them, would pay no attention to healing rocks, not programmed to notice so bizarre and unforeseen a phenomenon. But I, neither man nor robot, had noticed. What then? I did not know, but if there was any truth at all in my theory, I could expect other mines, mines not for humans but for automata. I walked more slowly, placing my feet with great care, passing dune after dune, the unmoving sun behind me. The stones I came to, some larger, some smaller, I didn’t hit with the shovel or kick in case there were indeed two kinds of mines. I went on like this for a good three miles or maybe more but didn’t take out my pedometer, which was in a shin pocket so deep and narrow it was murder getting my glove in. Then, looking to the south, I saw ruins.

It didn’t make much of an impression on me because there are so many piles of rock on the moon that from a distance look like the ruins of buildings. Still, I changed direction and waded through deeper sand, expecting that grouping of rocks to reveal its true, random nature, but it didn’t. On the contrary, the closer I got, the more definitely it looked like the half-broken façade of a low building, and the black places weren’t shadows but holes, maybe not as regular as windows but on the moon no one had ever come across such large holes in rock and certainly not in a row. The sand stopped giving way beneath me, and my boots hit something rough, pitted, and glassy, like lava except it wasn’t lava but perhaps sand that had been raised to an extremely high temperature then cooled. I wasn’t mistaken because this surface was dazzling in the sun and covered the entire slope that led to the ruins. A high dune lay in front of them, and when I reached the top of it I had a perfect view and understood why I hadn’t seen them from orbit. The ruins were deep in rubble. If these were truly houses, then the rubble came up to the windows. From a distance of about three hundred yards they resembled something familiar from photographs: stone foundations after an earthquake, for example in Iran. From orbit you would see them only near the terminator, the low sun shining through the window openings, which were misshapen as if from an explosion. But I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that this was merely a peculiar rock formation. I went closer. Feeling very uneasy, I took out my Geiger counter and plugged it into my suit so I could hear if the ground was radioactive. It was plenty radioactive but not until halfway down the dune. When I stepped onto the rubble that surrounded the squat houses with jagged walls and no roofs (now quite positive this was not the product of natural forces), I heard the counter’s rapid clatter. The rubble didn’t move under my feet as normal rubble would, it was as if all fused by the intense heat of an explosion. I was at the first house now but couldn’t inspect it properly because I had to watch every step, placing my heavy boots carefully among the pointy ledges of that great heap so I wouldn’t slip and become stuck between two boulders, which wouldn’t have been difficult. Higher up, on a level with a nearby ruin, the rubble changed to a glaze covered with black streaks like soot. It was easier to walk, and I went to a window, an irregular opening with hanging stones at the top. I looked inside and saw — though not at once, because it was so dark — long objects lying haphazardly. Reluctant to crawl through the broken window because my remote, a massive thing, might get wedged, I looked for a door. If there were windows here, why not a door. But I didn’t find one. Walking around the house, which was grotesquely squashed as if by some tremendous force, I discovered a crack in a side wall, wide enough to let me in if I hunkered down. On the moon, where sun and shadow coexist without intermediaries, the contrast is too much for the human eye even when relayed by a remote. I crawled groping into a corner of the room, pressed my back against the wall, and closed my eyes until they grew accustomed to the dark. I counted to a hundred, then looked around.

The interior was like a cave without a ceiling, which didn’t mean light from above because the lunar sky is as black as night. And the sunlight through the window was not visible as a shaft because there was no air or dust to diffuse it. The sun remained outside, present only as a blazing white patch on the wall opposite the corner where I stood. In its reflection, at my feet, lay three corpses. That’s what I thought in the first moment, because although blackened and distorted they had legs, arms, and one even had a head. Blinking and shielding my eyes from the patch of sun, I knelt over the nearest one. It was not a human body, nor any kind of mortal remains, for what has never been alive cannot die. The form sprawled before me was a manikin but probably not a robot, because its torn-open trunk was completely empty. There were only a few bits of rubble and sand inside. Cautiously I pulled at the thing’s shoulder. It was surprisingly light, as if made of styrofoam, and black as coal, and headless, but then I saw the head by the wall — it was upright on its severed neck and regarded me with its three empty eyesockets. Naturally I wondered: why three and not two? The third eye was a round cavity positioned where on a man you would have the bridge of the nose, but this curious manikin surely never had a nose because on the moon there would have been no point. The other manikins were also only roughly humanoid. Although the destruction of the house had greatly deformed them, you could see that even to begin with they had been only approximations to the human shape. Their legs were too long, about one and a half times the length of the torso, and their arms were too thin and attached not to the shoulders but oddly, one to the chest, the other to the back. Which must have been by design because the explosion, shock wave, and cave-in could have contorted the limbs of one like that but not all of them in the same way. Having an arm in front and an arm in back might be, who knows, advantageous in certain situations.

Squatting opposite the sharp patch of sun and in the darkness with three manikin corpses, I realized that aside from the rapid clicking of the Geiger counter I was hearing nothing — that for at least a few minutes the voice of Wivitch had not reached me. The last time I spoke to him was from the top of the dune that overlooked the ruins, and I had said nothing about my discovery, wanting to make sure first that it wasn’t an illusion. I called Control, but heard only the alarm-rattle of my counter. The radiation level was high, but I didn’t bother to take a reading because as a remote I didn’t have to worry, then suddenly it occurred to me that it was some ionized gas given off by these irradiated broken stones which had cut off my radio communication, and that at any moment resonant absorption could cut my contact with my ship. A stab of fear that I would be stranded here forever, which was stupid because if I lost contact with my ship, only the remote would remain in this rubble and ruins while I found myself back on board. But so far I felt no lessening whatever of control over the remote. My ship must have been hovering right over the house, maintaining the orbit that kept it near the zenith above me. No one of course had foreseen such a discovery or such a situation, but the zenith position is optimal for maneuvering a remote, since the distance between it and its operator is smallest and thus so is the response time. Without an atmosphere the concentration of ionized gas (perhaps from vaporization after the explosion) could not be great. Was it also interfering with communication between the base and the micropes? I didn’t know and wasn’t concerned about that at the moment; what intrigued me was what had happened here and why.

I dragged the biggest corpse, the one with the head, backward through the crack in the wall. Outside, the radio still didn’t work, but I was more interested in this poor thing that had never lived, true, but for all its ghastliness made a most pathetic impression. He must have been nine feet tall, or maybe a little less, was thin, and the head was elongated, it had three eyes, no nose or mouth, a narrow neck, and the hands were prehensile, but I couldn’t count the fingers because the material from which he was made had melted the most there. He was covered with tarry cinders. It must have been hot, I thought, and only then did it occur to me that this could have been a group of buildings like those they once set up on Earth to study the effects of nuclear explosions, it was in Nevada and someplace else too, with houses, courtyards, stores, and streets, but animals were used for people, sheep and goats I think, and especially pigs because like us they don’t have fur and therefore suffer the same kind of burns we do. Had this been such a test site? If I knew the force of the blast that turned these buildings into rubble, I could determine from the present level of radioactivity how long ago that happened, but the physicists could also probably calculate it from the mix of isotopes here, so I put a little gravel into the thigh pocket of my suit, then remembered angrily, again, that I wouldn’t be returning to the ship. But it was necessary to date the explosion, even if only approximately. I decided to leave the contaminated area, reestablish contact with Control, and tell them about this, letting the physicists solve the problem of how to analyze the specimen I’d taken.

I don’t know exactly why, but I picked up the corpse and threw it over my shoulder, it didn’t weigh more than ten or fifteen pounds here, and beat a rather awkward tactical retreat, its long legs dragging on the ground and catching on stones. I had to go very slowly to keep from falling. The slope was not that steep but I wasn’t sure whether it would be better to walk on the slippery glass-rock or over the rubble which rolled and shifted at every step. Because of this difficulty I went in the wrong direction and found myself not on the dune again but about a quarter of a mile to the west of it, between large round rocks that looked like monoliths. I put the corpse down on a flat place and sat to catch my breath before I tried raising Wivitch. I looked for the micropes but the glittering cloud of them was nowhere to be seen. And still I heard no voices though I should have by now. The clatter of the Geiger counter in my helmet slowed until it was like individual grains of sand falling on a drum. Then I heard a muffled voice and went numb, because it wasn’t the base. Incoherent and hoarse, yet I caught two words: “My brother… my brother…” A moment of silence, and again: “My brother…”

“Who is that?” I wanted to shout but didn’t dare. I sat hunched, feeling the sweat break out on my forehead, and the voice again was in my helmet. “Come, my brother. Come to me. Without fear. I do not wish you harm, my brother. Come. We will not fight. Do not fear. I do not wish to fight. Come. Let us be brothers. Let us help each other, my brother.” A snapping sound, and the same voice but in a completely different tone, sharp, barking: “Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon! Or I’ll fire! Don’t try to run! Turn around! Hands up! Both hands! And don’t move! Don’t move!”

Something snapped again and the first voice returned, weak and hesitant: “My brother, come. Let us be brothers. Help me. We will not fight.” It was the corpse talking, that was clear. It lay where I had dropped it, and looked like a stepped-on spider with its abdomen split and its legs tangled and its empty eyesockets staring at the sun. It didn’t move but something inside it was addressing me in a loop. A song in two keys, first come my brother and then the barking. That’s its program, I thought. Whether manikin or robot, it was designed first to lure a man, a soldier, then take him prisoner or kill him. It couldn’t do anything now, all that was left in it was an unburned scrap of the program playing in a loop. But why by radio? If it was built to fight on Earth, surely it would speak in a regular voice. I didn’t understand the radio. There were no live soldiers on the moon, and a robot wouldn’t be taken in by this. Or would it? It just didn’t make sense. I looked at the blackened skull, the twisted hands and melted fingers, the torso ripped open, but now without the instinctive pity of a moment ago. With disgust, rather, with ill will, even though the thing was not to blame, it had been programmed this way. How can one be indignant with a bunch of circuits?

When it began its my-brother routine again, I spoke to it, but it didn’t hear me. Or gave no sign of hearing me. I stood, my shadow fell on its head, and it stopped in the middle of a word. I stepped back, and it continued. So it was activated by the sun. I wondered what to do next. This manikin-trap was of little interest, too primitive to be much of a “war machine.” And even the lunar armorers must consider these long-legged figures obsolete and worthless, seeing as they used them to test the effects of a nuclear hit. Because its lifeless refrain made it hard for me to concentrate, but to tell the truth it may have been for another reason, I picked up some larger pieces of rubble and threw them at the thing’s head and then its torso, as if to bury it. It fell silent, and all I heard was a thin squeaking. At first I thought the squeaking was from the corpse, and looked around for more rocks, but then I realized it was Morse code. — t-i-c-h-y — 1-i-s-t-e-n — t-h-i-s — i-s — c-o-n-t-r-o-l — s-a-t-e-1-l-i-t-e — m-a-l-f-u-n-c-t-i-o-n — s-o-u-n-d — w-i-1-1 — r-e-t-u-r-n — s-o-o-n — w-a-i-t — t-i-c-h-y.

So one of the Trojan satellites between us had gone on the fritz. They would fix it soon, sure, I thought sarcastically. I couldn’t reply, there was no way. For the last time I looked at the charred remains, and at the ruins white in the sun on the other side of the dune, and I ran my eyes over the black sky trying in vain to find the micropes. I walked toward a large convex wall of rock that rose from the sand like the gray hulk of a whale. I made for a break in the rock, which was black as tar in shadow, like the mouth of a cave. I blinked. Someone was standing there. A human figure, almost. Short, broad-shouldered, in a gray-green spacesuit. I raised an arm, thinking it was again my reflection and that the color of the suit was only from a shadow, but the figure did not move an inch. I hesitated, perhaps from fear or some premonition. But I hadn’t come here to run, besides where would I run to? I stepped forward. He looked just like a squat man.

“Hello,” came his voice. “Hello… Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said without much enthusiasm.

“Come over here… I have a radio too!” That sounded pretty idiotic, but I went to him. There was something military in the style of his suit. Shining metal bands across his chest. His hands held nothing. Well, that was something, I thought, approaching but more slowly. He came toward me and lifted his arms in a simple gesture of greeting an old friend.

“Welcome! Welcome! How good of you to come at last! We can talk… you and I together… about bringing peace to the world…”

He spoke in an effusive, vibrant, strangely penetrating voice as he came toward me through the deep sand, arms held out, and his whole bearing expressed such cordiality that I didn’t know what to think. He was now only a few steps from me, the dark glass of his helmet blazing with the sun. He embraced me, hugged me, and we stood that way on the gray slope. I tried to see his face but saw nothing, even as close as a hand’s breadth, because the glass was opaque. It wasn’t even glass, more a mask covered with glass. How could he see me then?

“You’ll feel at home here with us, old friend…” He bumped my helmet with his as if trying to kiss me on both cheeks. “At home… we don’t want war, we are peace-loving, meek, you’ll see…” And with that he kicked me so hard that I fell on my back, and jumped on me, both knees in my stomach. I saw stars, literally, the stars of the black lunar sky, while my “friend” held my head down with his left hand and with his right pulled off his metal bands which themselves twisted into horseshoe hoops. I said nothing, dazed, as he fastened my arms to the ground one at a time with the hoops, driving them in with powerful, unhurried blows of his fist, and continued:

“At home, old friend… We’re simple folk, kind, I like you and you like me, old friend…”

“And not ‘my brother’?” I asked, now unable to move either arms or legs.

“Brother?” he said thoughtfully, as if trying out the word. “So be it, brother! I’m good, you’re good, brother for brother!”

He stood, quickly and expertly tapped my sides, legs, found my pockets, took out everything I had, the flat box of tools, the Geiger counter, the folding shovel, and frisked me again, harder this time, especially under the arms, and tried to work his fingers into the top of my boots, and during this careful search of my person not for a moment did he stop talking.

“My brother, you said. Maybe yes, maybe no. Did one mother give birth to us? Ah, mother. Motherhood. Mother is a saint, and you’re a saint too, brother, no weapon on you, none. A clever brother… just taking a little stroll, to pick mushrooms. Lots of boletus here, but the forest is hard to see. Yes, old friend… I’ll make it better for you soon, all better. We’re simple folk, meek, and we will inherit the earth.”

He took a kind of flat knapsack off his back and opened it. Sharp instruments gleamed. He hefted one in his hand, put it back, selected another, powerful shears like the cutters used by soldiers in battle to get through barbed wire, and turned to me, the blades sparkling in the sun. He sat on my stomach, lifted the tool, and with the words “To your health” thrust it into my chest. It hurt but not much. Evidently my remote had pain dampers. I knew that this lunar friend of mine would open me like a fish and that I should return to the ship and leave him the body to cut up, but I was so fascinated by the contrast between his words and his actions that I lay as if mesmerized.

“Why don’t you speak?” he said, slicing through my suit with a crackling sound. Excellent shears, made of incredibly hard steel.

“I can say something?” I asked.

“Go ahead!”

“Hyena.”

“What?”

“Jackal.”

“You insult me, my friend? Not nice. Not friend but enemy. Treacherous. You came here unarmed to confuse me. I wished you well, but an enemy must be searched. My duty. That’s the rule. I was attacked. With no declaration of war you stepped upon this sacred ground. Your own fault. My brother, hah. Brother of a dog! Worse than a dog, and you’ll regret calling me hyena and jackal, but not for long, because memory ends with life.”

The last of my chest welds gave way, and he began to break and pry apart things. He looked inside and hmmed.

“Interesting little gadgets,” he said, getting up. “Fancy stuff. Our experts will figure it out. You wait here. But where can you go? Nowhere. You’re ours now, my friend!”

The ground shook. Turning my head to the side as far as I could, I saw others like him. They marched in formation, goose-stepping the dust up. My executioner stood at attention, preparing to make his report, I supposed.

“Tichy, answer, where are you?” roared in my ears. “The sound is back. Wivitch here. Control. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said.

Some of this must have been overheard by the soldiers, because they broke into a run.

“Do you know what sector you’re in?” Wivitch asked.

“Yes. I’ve just realized. They’ve taken me prisoner! I’m cut open!”

“Which country?” Wivitch began, but my executioner drowned him out.

“Emergency!” he shouted. “Seize him!”

“Tichy!” cried Wivitch from far away. “Don’t let them take you!”

I understood. Letting Earth’s latest technology fall into robot hands was to be avoided at all cost. I couldn’t move even a finger, but there was still a way. I bit down as hard as I could, heard a snap like an overwound spring, and was plunged into total darkness. Instead of sand under my back was the soft upholstery of my chair. I was on the ship. A little dizzy, I couldn’t find the right button immediately, but then saw it. I broke the plastic cover and hit the red button with my fist so the remote would not be examined by them. Below, a pound of ecrasite blew it to smithereens. I felt sorry for the LEM but I had to do it. And so ended the second reconnaissance.