Stanislaw Lem - Peace on Earth

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

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

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

It was a private loony bin for millionaires. Somehow you never hear about insane millionaires. A movie star or a statesman or even a king can go insane but not a millionaire. At least not judging from the newspapers which put revolutions and the fall of governments in small print buried in the middle of the paper but on the front page they tell you absolutely everything about the mental state of a practically naked young woman with big breasts, or a snake that crawled up a circus elephant’s trunk, causing the animal to go on a rampage in a supermarket and crush three hundred cans of Campbell’s tomato soup along with a register and one checkout girl. An insane millionaire would be welcome in a paper like that. But millionaires don’t like publicity whether they’re insane or not. Insanity might help a movie star’s career but not a millionaire’s. A movie star doesn’t even have to have acting ability, or a voice, they can dub in another, and her real face can be totally unlike her posters and films, the main thing is to have “it,” and she’ll have “it” if she’s getting divorced again or buys a convertible upholstered with ermine or poses nude for Playboy or has an affair with a pair of octogenarian Quaker Siamese twins. Today a politician too must have a great voice, a great smile, and a great body to win voters over the television. But millionaires can only be hurt by such things, not to mention the market. A millionaire has to be calm, predictable, and reserved. Any unpredictability better be hidden. And because it has become extraordinarily difficult to hide from the press these days, millionaire asylums serve as invisible fortresses, invisible because inconspicuous: there are no uniformed guards, no slavering dogs on leashes, no barbed wire, for that only whets a reporter’s appetite. Such an asylum should look uninteresting, and above all it will never call itself an insane asylum. The asylum I found myself in was supposedly for people with ulcers and bad hearts. How then, you ask, did I know straight off that it was a loony bin?

We weren’t allowed inside until Dr. House, a trusted colleague of Tarantoga’s, came to get us. He asked if I wouldn’t like to take a little walk in the park while he talked with Tarantoga. So I felt sure he assumed I was insane. Apparently the professor hadn’t had time to fill him in, because we left Australia in such a hurry. House deposited me among flower beds, fountains, and hedges, and our bags were whisked away by two attractive women in elegant suits who didn’t look at all like nurses, which also set me thinking, but the clincher was when a potbellied old man in pajamas, seeing me, moved over so I could sit beside him on the lawn swing, which I did, to be polite. We swung back and forth in silence for a while, then he asked if I wouldn’t mind urinating on him, though he put it more crudely. I was so taken aback that instead of refusing I asked him why. This agitated him. He got up and walked away, limping on his left foot and muttering to himself, probably about me. I looked around the park, glancing now and then at my left hand and foot, as you might at a purebred dog that you’ve recently been given and that has already bitten a few people. The fact that they were behaving themselves now, swinging quietly with me, was not at all reassuring. I remembered the events of the last few days and thought that in my head another mind lurked side by side with mine, a mind also mine yet inaccessible, which was worse than schizophrenia because you can be cured of that, and worse than the disease of St. Vitus because there all that can happen is that you dance, while I was condemned to a life of mad antics within. Patients were walking along the paths, some followed at a distance by an electric golf cart, probably in case the patient got tired. Finally I hopped off the swing to see if Dr. House had finished talking with Tarantoga and that’s how I met Kramer. He was riding piggyback on an elderly servant dripping with sweat and blue in the face because Kramer must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. I felt sorry for the servant but said nothing and stepped aside to let them pass, figuring that in my present situation I shouldn’t involve myself. Kramer, however, slid off the old man and introduced himself. Evidently interested in a new face. I couldn’t remember what my last name was supposed to be at the asylum though Tarantoga and I had agreed on one. All I could remember was the first name, Jonathan. Kramer liked my informality and asked me to call him Adelaide.

He grew talkative. He’d been terribly bored since his depression lifted. The anguish had kept him from being bored. His depression, he explained to me, resulted from his inability to fall asleep if he first didn’t lie in bed and fantasize a while. In the beginning he pictured the stocks he bought going up and the ones he sold plummeting. Then he pictured having a million dollars. When he got a million, he pictured two, then three, but after five it lost its charm. He had to find new ground for his imagination. It was not easy, he said with a sigh. You can’t fantasize about what you already have or can obtain right away. For a while he pictured getting rid of his third wife without paying a cent in alimony, but then he managed to do just that. House still didn’t appear, and Kramer had got his hooks into me. For a while he used people he was mad at to fall asleep. But that was a mistake because such fantasizing fired up the hate inside him and then he had to take sleeping pills to fall asleep, but the doctors said he shouldn’t on account of his enlarged liver, so the only way then to get rid of the hate was to get rid of the objects of it. No, of course he didn’t hire some Mafia hit man, that kind of thing is strictly for the movies. He hired a real professional, and a hundred thousand dollars a throw was nothing. No, not killing, when you kill someone, you can’t really do anything to him. Nor did he derive any particular satisfaction from physical torture. An enemy or a competitor should be ruined, shown pity, and that’s the end of it. It’s like a corporate raid on the personal level. Kramer had an intellectual side, too, which he concealed from his fellow millionaires, he read books, even de Sade. A sad case, that! Fantasizing about impalement, flaying, and disembowlment while he sat in a hovel with nothing to pick on but flies. The poor have it easy! Everything lures the poor man, everything appeals to him. Every beautiful woman is beyond his reach. Which is why the porn industry does so well. Pneumatic women with pouting fat-lipped mouths, detailed descriptions of orgies plus special oils and paraphernalia, it’s all surrogate and silly. Orgies are so tiresome anyway, there’s nodiing to talk about, nothing left to fantasize about. Oh to have an unfulfillable longing! Adelaide shook his head and said that he had foolishly cut off the branch he sat on by settling those old scores. Now, having nothing to dream about, he suffered from chronic insomnia. He hired a professional fantasist, probably a writer or poet. The man did come up with a few passable ideas for him, but a good fantasy compels its realization and after that it’s gone, so they had to be all but impossible. I interrupted to say that that shouldn’t be so hard. Move a continent. Saw the moon into four equal parts. Eat the leg of the President of the United States in Chinese duck sauce (I pulled out all the stops, after all I was talking to a madman). Have intercourse with a firefly at the moment of its brightest light. Walk on water, become a national holiday, change places with God. Pay the terrorists to leave ministers, ambassadors, and company executives alone and go after the people who really deserve it.