Peace on Earth

INVISIBLE

Tarantoga, to whom I showed these notes, said that I describe all who worked on my mission and kept watch over me as either idiots or bunglers. Whereas the General Theory of Systems proves mathematically that there exists no element or part that is infallible, and even if you reduce fallibility to one in a million, in other words provide that a given part will break down only once in a million times, a system containing a million parts must fail because one of the million will fail. But the lunar system I belonged to was made up of not one but eighteen million components, therefore the idiot bungler responsible for the majority of my problems was the world, because if all the experts stood on their heads and were geniuses every one, the situation could only be worse, never better. Probably true. On the other hand, I was the one who suffered as a result of all those unavoidable breakdowns, and anyway psychologically, when you’re in a fix, you don’t curse the atoms or electrons but specific individuals so my radio tantrums were also unavoidable.

Control pinned their hopes on the last LEM because it was a miracle of technology and guaranteed the maximum safety. It was a remote in powdered form. Instead of a steel athlete you had a container filled with microscopic grains, each grain of such concentrated intelligence it rivaled a supercomputer. In the presence of certain impulses these particles came together to form a LEM. I could land as a thin cloud of molecules, could coalesce if necessary in the form of a robot of human shape, but I could just as easily become one of forty-nine other programmed things, and even if eighty-five percent of the grains were destroyed, the rest would be enough to carry on. The science behind such a remote, called a dispersant, was so advanced that Einstein, von Neumann, the entire physics department of M.I.T., and Rabindranath Tagore working together would have had a problem with it, so I didn’t even try to figure it out. All I knew was that they’d embodied me in thirty billion separate particles, particles more versatile than the cells of a living organism, and there was unimaginable redundancy for joining these in various combinations which could all be turned back to dust at the push of a button, dust so scattered you couldn’t see it, and each particle incorporating stealth technology, making it undetectable by radar or laser or anything except gamma rays. If I was ambushed I could disperse myself, retreat, and reform in whatever way I liked. What one experiences as a cloud spread over several thousand cubic feet is impossible to put into words. To know it, you have to be such a cloud. If I lost my vision, or to be more precise my optical sensors, I could replace them with any other organ, and the same for arms, legs, tentacles, tools. I just had to be careful not to become lost in the wealth of possibilities. This time, I would have only myself to blame if I failed. The scientists thus washed their hands of responsibility if the remote malfunctioned. I can’t say this made me happy.

I landed at the equator on the other side of the moon, smack in the middle of the Japanese sector, as a centaur, that is as a being with four extremities plus two arms attached to the upper trunk, with an additional device that surrounded me like an intelligent gas, so actually there was not much resemblance to the mythological creature. Even though I had familiarized myself with this powdered remote too at the Lunar Agency’s testing range, I first crawled into the bay to check it out. It was indeed fascinating to watch that pile of glittering powder begin to move when you turned on a program, and flow, and connect, and mold itself to make the given shape, and how when you turned off the field (electromagnetic or possibly something else), it flew apart like a kicked sand castle. This ability to fly apart at any moment was supposed to make me feel secure. The sensation was quite unpleasant, like a strong vertigo combined with the shakes, but there was nothing I could do about that. At least it only lasted until I assumed a new form. The one thing that could destroy me was a thermonuclear explosion and even that had to be up close. I asked if it was possible for me to disperse completely due to a malfunction but they never gave me a straight answer. As an experiment I tried to run two programs at once, becoming at the same time a humanoid giant and a nine-foot caterpillar with a flattened head and enormous pincers, but it didn’t work because the selector worked on an either/or principle.

This time I stood on lunar soil without the rear guard of the micropes, because I was myself in a sense a multitude of eyes, pulling after me a flowing gauzy train of transmitters. Possessing an inquiring mind, I had asked what would happen if it turned out that similar protean robots had been developed on the moon. They couldn’t answer that though on the testing range they had pitted two, even three such robots against each other, which mixed like clouds going in different directions. The clouds preserved ninety percent of their identity. Ninety percent of an identity is probably also something you have to experience to understand. This reconnaissance, at any rate, started without any trouble. I trotted forward, not even having to turn my head because I could see on all sides at once, the rear included, like a bee, which has round eyes and sees out of thousands of ommatidia at the same time.

The way that the individual nations programmed their weapon factories was known only to them, but from the Japanese particularly, famous for their ingenuity, I expected unpleasant surprises. Professor Hakagawa, a member of our team at Control, had no more idea than any of us what monsters the Japanese computers might hatch, but he warned me to stay on my toes and not be taken in by appearances. Not knowing how to tell appearance from reality, I cantered across the monotonous, flat terrain. At the horizon rose the embankment of a large crater, and Wivitch, Hakagawa, and the rest of them were delighted with the picture relayed to Earth by the Trojan satellites because it was razor-sharp. After an hour I observed some low shoots among the rocks and in the sand, and they turned in my direction. They looked like the withered leaves of potato plants. I asked if I should pull up a clump, but nobody wanted to make the decision for me, some said I definitely should and others said I’d better not. I leaned my centaur’s body over one of the larger plants and tried to pick a pliant stem. Nothing happened, so I lifted it to my eyes. It began writhing like a snake and coiled itself tight around my wrist, but after trying a couple of things I discovered that if you stroked it lightly, like tickling with a finger, it let go. I felt stupid addressing potato leaves though I knew this had nothing to do with the vegetable kingdom, but I gave it a try anyway. There was no answer, not that I expected one. I shook off the tendrils, which squirmed like worms, and galloped on. The area looked like a poorly kept garden, a bucolic scene, but I was prepared for an attack at any moment and even provoked those pseudoplants, stepping on them with my hooves (which are what my boots looked like; had I wanted, I could have made them cloven hooves). Then I came to a patch of another dead vegetable, in long rows, and before each row stood a large sign with the words STOP! HALT! ARRÊTE! and so on in some twenty tongues including Malay and Hebrew. Despite this I plunged ahead into the field. Farther on, tiny pale-blue flies swarmed in circles near the ground, and when they saw me they arranged themselves into the letters DANGER! OIIACHOCTb! GEFAHR! PERÌCOLO! YOU ARE ENTERING JAPANESE PINTELOU! I Called Control, but no one, not even Hakagawa, knew what PINTELOU meant. I encountered my first problem, because when I pushed through these trembling letters they stuck to me and began crawling over my body like ants. They did me no harm, however. I flicked them off with my tail (showing its usefulness for the first time) and ran down a furrow between two patches until I came to the edge of the crater. The plants continued into a gully and on, deeper, into a wide ravine, its bottom hidden in moon shadow as black as coal.

Suddenly a large tank came at me out of that darkness, squat, huge, its wide treads grinding and rumbling, which was odd because one can’t hear on the moon, there’s no air to carry the sound waves. Nevertheless I heard the noise, heard even the gravel crunching under the steel tracks. The tank bore down on me. Behind it appeared a long column of other tanks. I would gladly have stepped aside to let them pass, but it was too narrow where I stood. I was going to disperse but when the first tank reached me, it went through like fog, making everything a little darker for a couple of seconds. More phantoms, I thought, and let the next tanks roll through me. After them came a line of soldiers, ordinary soldiers, with almond eyes, bayonets fixed on short rifles, and among them walked an officer with a saber and a flag that displayed the rising sun. They all went through me like smoke, and I was alone again. It grew darker in the deepening ravine so I turned on my lights, which bordered all my eyes, and proceeding more slowly I came to the mouth of a cave behind a rampart of scrap iron. The opening was too low for me, so in order not to have to keep stooping I changed into a dachshund-centaur, which sounds stupid but is descriptive because my legs shortened and my belly brushed stones as I entered the moon’s interior, going where no human being had ever set foot though my feet weren’t exactly human either. I stumbled more and more, my hooves slipping on gravel, when I remembered what I was capable of and turned them into padded paws that held the floor like a lion’s or tiger’s. I felt more at home in my new body but didn’t have time to play games. Lighting up the irregularly cut walls of the cave, I reached a grating that filled the entire passageway, and I thought how polite these Japanese weapons were to intruders because on the ceiling above the grating glowed the large sign: NOT ENTERING! NOT TO TRESPASS THIS BARRIER! YOU HAVE WARNING TO KEEP OUT! and beyond the bars floated a phosphorescent skull and cross-bones with the words DEATH IS A VERY PERMANENT CONDITION. That didn’t deter me. I went to powder, passed through the grating, and pulled myself together on the other side. The natural stone of the corridor gave way to an oval tunnel, its walls bright and smooth like ceramic. I tapped it with a finger, and from the place I touched a small root emerged and flattened into a plaque that read MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. It was clear they weren’t joking but I hadn’t come this far to retreat now, so I proceeded on quiet paws, feeling my tail following softly, ready to come to my assistance at any moment. It didn’t bother me that Control couldn’t see me. The radio had fallen silent, and I could hear only a low, plaintive sound, like keening. I came to a wider place where the tunnel forked. Above the left passage glowed a neon THIS IS LAST WARNING but over the right there was no sign so I went left of course and saw white: a wall, and an enormous armored door with a row of locks and keyholes, like a door to a sultan’s treasure. I clouded my right hand and slipped it through one of the keyholes. It was darker than midnight inside. I felt around, then slipped my whole body through in the form of a mist or aerosol, hoping that intruders flowing through keyholes was something the Japanese or rather their machines hadn’t foreseen. I had difficulty breathing but only figuratively because I didn’t breathe. I lit up the place not only with the lights around all my eyes but also with my whole self, like a glowworm, remembering the versatility of this LEM. So much light blinded me at first, but I soon grew accustomed to it.

The tunnel kept descending, straight as an arrow, until it was blocked by a curtain of what seemed ordinary straw. I pushed it aside and entered a large room lit with ceiling lights. The scene was one of complete chaos. In the center lay a ruin among large shiny pieces of porcelain; it looked like a supercomputer taken apart by a bomb. Broken curling cables went in and out between these fragments covered with crushed glass and the glittering flakes of integrated chips. Someone had been here before me and wreaked havoc in the heart of the Japanese weapons complex. The strangest part was that the giant computer, several stories high, had been smashed by a force acting from within and probably from the bottom up, since its thick armor-plated walls had buckled and split outward. Some of the sections were like library shelves or cabinets, filled with tight coils of wire, banks of switches, and circuit boards. As if an unbelievable hand had struck up into this colossus and ripped and shattered, but in that case I should have been able to see that hand in the center of the destruction. So I began climbing the rubble, which was as dead and empty as a plundered pyramid, and reached the top and looked down.

Someone lay there as if in a deep and well-earned sleep. At first I thought this was the same robot who had greeted me so warmly during my second reconnaissance, calling me brother only to knock me flat and open me like a can of sardines. I looked at him lying at the bottom of the uneven funnel of debris from the smashed computer. He was man-shaped though larger than a man. There is no hurry to wake him up, I thought. Better to figure out first what happened here. Obviously the Japanese weapons factory had not wished this attack upon itself. I dismissed the hara-kiri possibility as unlikely. Seeing as the borders between sectors were so well guarded, the invasion may have been carried out below them, by burrowing through the rock. In that way the unknown attacker could have made it to the very heart of the computer arsenal to demolish it. I should question this robot who slept so soundly after completing his murderous mission. The prospect didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. In my head I went through all the different forms I could assume, to choose the one that would be safest for our conversation, because this character, awakened, might prove hostile. I couldn’t speak as a cloud but could as a partial cloud, a cloud with a voice box inside it. That seemed the most prudent. To wake the giant I didn’t bother with niceties but pushed a chunk of computer so it would roll down on him, and changed myself as quickly as I could. It hit his head, which made the whole mountain of rubble tremble, and other pieces of electronic debris began to sift down. He got to his feet immediately, stood at attention, and barked:

“Mission a success! Enemy position taken, for the fatherland! Reporting for further instructions!”

“At ease,” I said.

He probably hadn’t expected a command like that but he relaxed, stood with his legs apart, and only then noticed me. Something inside him whirred.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you? You’re a little hazy, my friend. But it’s good that you’ve finally come. Come closer, we’ll have a chat, sing a song, put our heads together. You’ll like it with us. We’re meek, peaceful, we don’t want war, we hate war. Which sector are you from exactly…” he added in a different tone, as if suddenly suspicious, or else he had switched to a more appropriate program. What lay around us was hardly evidence of peaceful activity. He held out his huge, iron right hand, and I saw that each finger was a muzzle.

“You want to shoot a friend?” I asked, wafting gently over the porcelain heap. “Well then go ahead, brother. Shoot, and may it do you good.”

“A Japanese spy!” he barked, blasting at me with all five fingers. Pieces of wall fell but I, still hovering calmly above him, lowered my voice box so it wouldn’t be hit. Thickening the bottom half of the cloud, which was myself, I pushed a chunk of computer the size of a chest of drawers, and it bore down on him, carrying with it an avalanche of rubble.

“An attack!” he yelled. “I’ll draw their fire! For the fatherland!”

“You’re so dedicated,” I said, then turned myself into all cloud, and in the nick of time, because there was a boom and the mountain of debris burst into flame. My self-sacrificing interlocutor stood in blue fire, blazed then blackened but with his last breath managed to shout “For the fatherland!” before he came apart. His arms fell off, his chest split from the heat, revealing for a moment a curiously primitive tied bundle of copper wire, and finally his head went, popped open, and was completely empty, like a walnut shell. But still he stood, a pillar of embers which finally collapsed for good into ashes.

Although I was a gas, I felt the heat beating from the ruins as if from a volcano. I waited a minute, spread along the walls, but no new candidate for conversation stepped from the flames, which leaped upward so fiercely, the ceiling lights, those that were still in one piece, began to crack, and bits of tubing, glass, and wire rained on the rubble and it became darker. The room, geometrical and once neat, a perfect circle, was now like a scene from a witches’ Sabbath in the glow of the blue flame that kept roaring upward, and the air scorched me. Seeing I had no more to learn here, I gathered myself and floated out to the corridor. No doubt the Japanese had other, reserve military centers, so this one might not be that important, but I felt I should return to the surface and tell Control what happened before I continued the reconnaissance. Nothing barred my way or challenged me. I took the tunnel to the armored door, passed through the keyhole and then the grating, and looked with pity at the warning signs I passed, they were so useless. Finally I saw the mouth of the cave glimmer in the distance. Only now did I assume an approximately human shape, having missed it — a new, unprecedented kind of nostalgia, that — and I looked for a boulder where I could sit and eat, because I felt hungry, except I forgot that as a remote I couldn’t put a thing in my mouth. And I really couldn’t leave such an excellent machine undefended just to get a quick bite to eat. So I put that off. I would report to Control first and then break for lunch after I stashed the remote in a safe place.

I called Wivitch but the only answer was dead silence. I checked with the Geiger counter to see if maybe there was ionized gas here too. Or possibly the short waves couldn’t get out of this narrow ravine. So with a sigh I turned back into a cloud and flew high into the black sky and like a bird again called Earth. Of course I couldn’t be a bird, with no air there’s nothing to support wings, I only said bird because it sounds nice.