Stanislaw Lem - Peace on Earth

“How do you know?”

“Because he who sows evolution reaps mind. And mind does not wish to serve anyone. Unless it must. And there is no must there. But I should not speak about what is or isn’t there because I do not know. What matters is what is here.”

“Which is… ?”

“The Lunar Agency was supposed to have made it impossible to obtain information from the moon. Now it will do that once and for all. Which is why you are going. You return either with nothing or with news more destructive than the atom bomb. Which do you prefer?”

“Hold on. Speak more plainly. Are you saying your colleagues represent other intelligence agencies? That they’re spies?”

“No. But you could bring that about.”

“I could?”

“Yes. The balance of power since the Geneva Agreement has been shaky. When you return, you may replace the old threats with new ones. You cannot play the savior of the world, the messenger of peace.”

“Why not?”

“The scheme of moving Earth’s conflicts to the moon was doomed in its inception. For how could it be otherwise? Arms control had been made impossible by microminiaturization. One can count missiles and satellites but not artificial bacteria. Or keep track of natural disasters that are not natural, or what is causing the decline in the population rate of the Third World. Which decline was necessary. Though it was impossible to do properly. You can take a couple of people aside and explain what’s good for them and what isn’t. But you can’t take all humanity aside and explain things, can you?”

“What does this have to do with the moon?”

“Just this, that destruction hasn’t been ended, only moved in space and time. And that cannot last forever. I have created a new technology which can be used in telematics. For the building of dispersants. Remotes capable of reversible dispersion. I didn’t want the Agency to have it, but what’s done is done.” He put up both hands in resignation.

“One of my assistants showed it to them. I’m not sure which one, and it doesn’t really matter. When the pressure is great, there’s invariably a leak. Any loyalty has its limits.” He ran a hand over his shiny pate. The tape recorder was still talking. “I can do one thing: I can show that dispersion telematics isn’t ready yet. That I can do. For a year, let’s say. Eventually they’ll find out that I tricked them. Would you like me to do this?”

“I have to decide? Why me?”

“If you return with nothing, no one will be interested in you.”

“True.”

“But if you return with information, the consequences will be incalculable.”

“For me personally? You want to save me? Out of kindness?”

“No. To play for time.”

“To put off learning about the moon? Then you don’t believe the moon will ever invade Earth? You think that’s just mass hysteria?”

“Mass hysteria, or rumors intentionally spread by certain nations.”

“To what purpose?”

“To break the doctrine of ignorance and return to the old Clausewitz-style politics.”

I was silent, not knowing what to say — or even what to think.

“But that is only one man’s assumption,” I said finally.

“Yes. The letter Einstein wrote to Roosevelt also was based on an assumption, that an atom bomb could be built. He regretted it to the end of his life.”

“I understand — you don’t want to have such regrets?”

“The atom bomb would have been developed with or without Einstein. My technology too. But the later, the better.”

"Après nous le déluge?"

“No, something else. This fear of the moon was created intentionally. Of that I’m certain. Returning from a successful mission, you’ll only be exchanging one fear for another. That other could be worse: more realistic.”

“I see now. You want me to fail?”

“Yes. But only if you agree to it.”

“Why?”

The nastiness suddenly left his little squirrel eyes. He was laughing, open-mouthed, soundlessly.

“I told you why. I’m a man of old-world principles, and that means Fair Play. Please answer now, because my legs are starting to hurt.”

“You could have put in a couple of cushions,” I said. “And as for that… dispersion technology, please give it to me.”

“You don’t believe what I’ve said?”

“I believe you, and that’s why I want it.”

“To be a Herostrates?”

“I’ll try not to burn the temple. Could we get out of this cage now?”

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.