Peace on Earth

CARNAGE

Of the next ten landings I have memories as fragmentary as they are unpleasant. The third reconnaissance lasted the longest, three hours, even though I came down in the middle of a pitched battle between robots that looked like prehistoric lizards. They were so busy fighting, they didn’t notice me when I descended on the battlefield in a halo of fire, white as an angel though without wings. Still aloft, I understood why this region had seemed empty from the ship. The robots were camouflaged; on their backs they had a knobby design that was like scattered stones in sand. They slithered with terrible speed. At first I didn’t know what to do; there were no bullets whizzing past, no explosives, but the laser flashes were blinding. I lumbered quickly to some large white rocks, because this was the only cover in reach. Peering out from behind a boulder, I watched the battle.

I couldn’t tell who was fighting whom. The lizard robots, which resembled caimans, were attacking up a shallow slope in my direction, hopping. But the enemy seemed to be among them, in their ranks, perhaps the enemy had parachuted in, because I saw some lizards struggling with others and they looked exactly the same. At one point three that were pursuing one came quite close. They caught it but couldn’t hold it because it shook off all its legs and escaped, writhing like a snake. I hadn’t expected such primitive combat, with tails and legs being torn off, and I waited for them to get around to me, but somehow in the heat of battle I was ignored. A line of soldiers advanced on the slope, spitting laser fire from mouths funnel-shaped like blunderbusses. But something odd was happening higher up on the slope. The robots in front, covered by the fire of those behind, slowed about halfway up and began to change color. Their sandy backs darkened, then were covered with gray smoke as though from an invisible flame, and then they ignited. But there were no flashes from the other side, so it could hardly have been lasers. The slope was now strewn with charred and melted machines, but new troops came and went rushing to their doom.

It was only when I turned on my telesights that I saw what they were attacking. At the top of the hill was something huge and unmoving like a fortress, but a peculiar fortress because it was all mirrors. Or maybe not mirrors but screens of some kind, which in the top half showed the black sky with stars and in the bottom the sandy slope strewn with debris. Unless they were both mirrors and screens at the same time. The lasers had no effect on the fortress, were deflected, meanwhile lower, where the biggest pile of robot corpses lay, the temperature of the rock was over three and a half thousand degrees according to the bolometer in my helmet. A force field heating by induction or something like that, I thought, pressing tight to the boulder that was my shield. The lizards attacked, and the mirror-screen thing surrounded itself with an invisible wall of heat, fine, meanwhile what was I supposed to do, defenseless as an infant caught in a wave of charging tanks? I didn’t have to report all this to Control because my third remote was followed by a special rocket that looked like an ordinary rock. It impersonated a meteor, except that this meteor didn’t fall but hung two miles above me.

Something touched my thigh. I looked down and froze. It was one of the legs of the robot that a moment ago had turned into a snake. The leg had inched its way to the boulder where I was hiding and had come upon me. In this blindly twitching thing with three sharp claws and sandy camouflage there was something both repulsive and pathetic. It tried to attach itself to my thigh but of course couldn’t, finding no purchase. I picked it up with disgust and threw it as far from me as I could. It came back. So instead of observing the battle I had to fight with that leg, because it was trying to climb up me again, ineffectually, as if it was drunk. And now the others will come, I thought, and the situation will be really ridiculous. I threw it. At least Control was silent, because any conversation might be overheard, which would be bad for me. Crouching in the shadow of my boulder, I gripped my shovel and waited for the leg, and thought darkly that all I needed was for the damned thing to have some radio transmitter too. Contracting and lengthening in turn, it reached my knees because I was kneeling, and I held it down with one hand and with the other started chopping with the shovel. Instead of taking notes on robot warfare Ijon Tichy sits on the moon making lizard-leg hamburger. Wonderful. Finally I must have hit a sensitive spot because it rolled over and stiffened. I got up then and peered around the boulder.

The laser-shooters had fallen, and I could hardly distinguish the individual robots, their gray blending into the surroundings. But now up the slope came, from where I don’t know, a spider as big as a shack and listing like a ship at sea. Flat as a turtle on top, it wavered on its many widespread legs, the knees higher than itself on both sides, but it proceeded methodically, heavily, carefully placing those many-jointed stilts, and approached the wall of heat. I was curious to see what would happen. Under its belly something long and dark, almost black, came into view, probably a weapon of some kind. The spider stopped at the wall of heat and stood awhile, as if thinking. All action stopped. The only thing I could hear was high squeaking in my helmet, a signal in some incomprehensible code. A strange battle, for it was primitive, resembling the struggle of Mesozoic dinosaurs on Earth millions of years ago, but at the same time it was sophisticated, because these lizards had not hatched from reptilian eggs but were robots armed with lasers and packed with electronics. The giant spider now hunkered down, its belly touching the ground, and seemed to close in upon itself. I heard nothing, but of course even if the very moon were to split open you would hear no sound, however the ground shook once, twice, three times. The tremors became continuous, till everything around me, and myself, shook with an increasingly intense vibration. The dunes in the distance strewn with the bodies of gray lizards, the slope facing me, and the black sky above it, I saw everything as through trembling glass. The outlines of objects blurred, even the stars on the horizon winked as on Earth, and I shook feverishly, like a tuning fork, and so did the boulder I clutched. I shook in every bone and finger, more and more violently, as if every part of my being were quivering jelly. The vibration was painful now, like a thousand microscopic drills at once. I tried pushing away from the boulder, to stand separate, because then it would reach me only through the soles of my boots, but I couldn’t move, my hands were paralyzed, I only watched, half-blind, as the giant spider drew itself into a dark bristling ball like a real spider dying under a magnifying glass that focuses the sun. Then everything went black and I was falling into an abyss, until I opened my eyes, covered with sweat, my throat tight, and saw the bright, friendly colors of the control panel. I had returned to the ship. Apparently a safety mechanism disconnected me at a certain level of discomfort. I rested a minute, then decided to go back, although with the hideous feeling that I might be entering a corpse. Carefully I pushed the lever, as if it could burn me, and found myself again on the moon and in the all-consuming vibration. Before the safety mechanism threw me on the ship again I saw, though not that clearly, a great mound of black fragments that were slowly rumbling down. The fortress fell, I thought, and again was back in my own body. But the fact that the remote hadn’t come apart gave me the courage to try it one more time.

Nothing shook now. All was deathly still. Among the charred lizards lay the ruins of the mysterious fortress that had blocked the way to the top of the hill. The spider that had destroyed it using resonance lay in a ball of twitching legs which straightened and bent, straightened and bent, movements that grew slower until they stopped completely. A Pyrrhic victory? I waited for another advance but nothing moved. If I hadn’t seen what I had seen, I might not even have noticed the burnt debris that littered the whole field, it blended in so with the sand. I tried to rise but couldn’t. I was not even able to move a hand. At most I managed to tilt my head in the helmet so I could see myself.

It was not a pretty sight. The boulder that had served me as a shield was split into large pieces and those were covered with a network of hairline cracks. My legs or rather what remained of them were stuck in rubble. The poor remote was an armless, legless torso. I had the eerie sensation that my head was on the moon and my body was on the ship, because even as I saw the battlefield under the black sky, I felt the seat and shoulder belts of my chair. The chair was with me yet not with me because I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t hard to figure out the reason: the remote’s sensors, without incoming data, shut down so I remained in contact only with the head which, protected by the helmet, had survived the murderous moonquake caused by the spider. Nothing more for me to do here, I thought. But I stayed, half in half out of the rubble, and looked over the sunlit field.

In the distance something was flapping in the sand, sluggishly, like a fish on a beach. One of the lizard robots. Sand rolled off its back as it hauled itself into a sitting position like a kangaroo or dinosaur, and it sat there, the last witness of a battle that no one won. The robot turned toward me and suddenly began to spin, and spun so fast, the centrifugal force made its long tail fly off. I watched, amazed, while it whirled now like a top, until pieces flew in all directions and it fell flat, flopped over a few times, and with a final somersault landed on the other bodies and was still. Although I had attended no lecture on the theory of electronic expiring, I knew that this was what I had just seen, it was so like the death spasms of a crushed beetle or caterpillar. We know how their death looks but cannot know if those last spasms signify suffering. I had had enough of this. I felt, in a way difficult to describe, that I was involved in it, even responsible. But because I hadn’t come to the moon to philosophize on moral questions, I bit down hard to disconnect myself from the pitiful remnant of LEM 3 and in the blink of an eye was back on board to tell Control what had happened this time.