“Ah, no,” said the director with a sad smile. “That is not possible. The course of evolution cannot be foreseen. We learned this the hard way.”
“How?”
“As you said. We used identical computers in our research lab and identical programs and let them go. Plenty of evolution, but divergent. It’s as if you wanted to predict the outcome of a chess tournament in Moscow between a hundred grand-master computers by simulating the games on a hundred identical computers in New York. What would you learn about the Moscow games? Absolutely nothing. Because no player, man or computer, always makes the same moves. Of course the politicians wanted us to provide them with such simulators, but it didn’t give them anything.”
“But if nothing so far has helped and all your probes disappeared like stones in water, how can I hope to succeed?”
“You will have devices no one has had before. My assistants will give you the details. Good luck…”
For three months I wore myself out on the training instruments at the Lunar Agency and I can tell you that at the end of it I knew telematics like the palm of my hand. It’s the art of operating by remote. You have to strip completely and pull on an elastic suit a little like a wet suit but thinner and shining like mercury because it’s made of wires lighter than a spider’s web. They’re the electrodes. They cling to the body, transmitting the electrical changes in your muscles to the remote which uses them to repeat exactly your every movement. That’s not odd, the odd part is that you not only see with the eyes of the remote but you feel what you would feel if you were in its place. If it picks up a stone, you feel the shape and weight as if you had it in your own hand. You feel every step, every stumble, and when the remote bumps into something too hard, you feel pain. I thought that was a malfunction, but the chief of my training program, Dr. Lopez, told me it has to be that way. Otherwise the remote will be constantly damaged. If the pain is great, you can disconnect the channel, but it’s better to lower the intensity with the modulator instead so you don’t lose contact with the remote. A person in an artificial skin loses all sense of himself and identifies entirely with the remote. I trained on different models. A remote doesn’t need to be man-sized or -shaped; it can be smaller than an elf or larger than a Goliath but that causes certain problems. If instead of legs it has, say, a tractor tread, you lose the feeling of direct contact with the ground, a little like driving a car or a tank. When the remote is enormous, you have to move very slowly because its limbs might weigh several tons each and possess no less inertia on the moon than on Earth. I experienced this with a two-hundred-ton remote and it was like walking underwater. But such a remote presents a target the size of a tower. I also used tiny remotes resembling insects. It was quite amusing, but from that vantagepoint every pebble is a mountain and it’s hard to get your bearings. The heavier moon remotes were grotesque. Squat, with short legs to keep the center of gravity as low as possible. My LEM maintained its balance better than a man in a spacesuit because it didn’t totter, and the arms were long like an orangutan’s. Those arms turned out to be useful in twenty-meter leaps. I particularly wanted to hear which models had been used in the previous reconnaissance attempts and how they had functioned. To brief me on those unsuccessful expeditions my tutors had to get special permission from the director because all this was top-secret. The whole Mission was top-secret and so was the fact that the earlier ones had failed. The point was not to fan the flames of panic which was spread by the press with its speculations. Central Control gave me the cover of adviser to the Lunar Agency and I had to avoid journalists like the plague. I was finally able to interview the two reconnaissance pilots who had returned in one piece but I never laid eyes on them, talking with them by telephone. Each had changed not only his name but also his face so that his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.
The first pilot reached the zone of Radio Silence with no difficulty and went into stationary orbit some two thousand miles above the Mare Nubium, sending down an armored remote that landed in a completely deserted region. It was attacked before it took a hundred steps. I tried to get some details out of him, but he just repeated the same thing. The remote was walking alone on the flat plain of the Mare Nubium, having first checked the area in a radius of several hundred kilometers and detecting nothing suspicious, when an enormous robot, at least twice the size of the LEM, appeared to one side, very close, and opened fire. There was a blinding, silent flash and that was all. The pilot photographed the place from orbit afterwards, and there beside a small crater lay the remains of the remote, melted into a lump of metallic slag.
Around it was nothing but the empty plain.
The second pilot had two remotes but one began somersaulting after it left the ship and broke up on the rocks. The other one was a double, called twins. Twins are a pair of telemates operated by one person. They do everything in tandem, one staying a hundred meters behind the other to see what attacks it. Both were protected moreover by micropes, which are microscopic cyclops, a sort of television camera made of a swarm of sensors no bigger than flies and each equipped with a minuscule lens. The whole cloud of micropes accompanied the twin remotes at an altitude of a mile above the surface of the moon in order to keep them and their surroundings too in sight. The pilot operates the remote but the micropes send their pictures directly to Central Control on Earth. The result of all this careful planning was miserable. Both remotes were destroyed in the same moment, with hardly time for them to stand straight in the lunar dust. The pilot told me they were attacked by two robots of singular build, low to the ground, humpbacked, and extremely pudgy. These appeared out of thin air and took immediate aim. He lifted his gun but didn’t have time to pull the trigger. He saw a blue-white flash, laser for sure, and found himself back on the ship. He photographed the remains of the remotes, and Control confirmed his report. The remotes had become incandescent as they were hit by a laser of great power, but the source of the beam could not be determined. I watched the film of what the micropes recorded and also examined pictures of the last moment, magnified to the maximum. The computer analyzed the image of every stone in a radius of two kilometers which is the lunar horizon because you can only go in a straight line with a laser. It was mystifying. The two remotes landed well, not even staggering, and began marching one after the other in slow motion, when suddenly they lifted their guns as one man, though the camera showed nothing, and opened fire, and were hit, one in the chest, the other a little lower. The bolts of light blew them apart in a cloud of dust and burning metal. Although the pictures were analyzed from every angle, it was impossible to find the place from which the lasers were fired. The desolation in the pictures was greater than the Sahara, and both the attackers and their weapons remained invisible. But the pilot insisted that at the moment of the attack he saw two grotesquely humpbacked robots where a second earlier there was nothing. They came out of nowhere, took aim, fired, and vanished. He didn’t see them vanish, of course, because the eyes of his remotes were vaporized, but from the ship he observed the settling cloud of dust and glowing cinders in the place of his defeat.
I had learned little, yet something of significance: that one could return from the Mission in one piece. Regarding these mysterious attacks, there were a number of hypotheses, including one that said that on the moon
It’s impossible to simulate the weaker gravity of the moon on Earth, so after a few exercises at the lab I flew a couple of times a week to the Agency’s orbital station where a special platform had been set up with a gravity six times weaker than Earth’s. When I was able to move comfortably in the skin of the remote, the next stage of my training followed, highly realistic though not at all dangerous. But it wasn’t pleasant. I had to walk on an imitation moon among large and small craters and have things jump out at me.
Since my predecessors had not benefited from their weapons, the Mission staff decided it would be better if I went unarmed. I was to keep with the remote as long as possible because every second meant a mass of data recorded by the micropes following me like a swarm of bees. There was no point trying to defend myself, Tottentanz persuaded me, because I would be entering a waste bristling with death and inevitably fall and the whole hope was that we would learn something from my death. The first reconnaissance pilots insisted on guns for psychological reasons not hard to understand. In a tight spot it always feels better to have your finger on a trigger. Among my mentors (tormentors) there were also psychologists. Their task was to prepare me for every kind of unpleasant surprise. Although I knew I was not in any real danger, I walked on that imitation moon as on a hot plate, looking in all directions. It’s one thing to seek an enemy whose face you know, quite another to have no idea because a nearby boulder, as lifeless as a corpse, might suddenly split open and belch flame at you. It was a simulation, but the moment of every such shock was a nasty thing. Automatic circuit breakers would disconnect me from the remote when there was a hit, but they weren’t instantaneous and many times I experienced an
