instructions. So I turned the volume knob on my chest and called Earth. The response would come with a three- second delay, I knew, and those seconds seemed like ages. At last I heard the voice of Wivitch. He had a million questions but I told him to be quiet, saying only that I had landed without mishap and was at the target 000 and nothing was attacking me. On the subject of the other remote I was silent.
“Please answer one question, it’s very important,” I said, trying to sound phlegmatic. “The remotes that were sent here before me carried lasers. What kind? Neo-dymium?”
“You found their remains? Are they burned? Where are they?”
“Please don’t answer a question with questions,” I said, interrupting. “Since it’s my first communication from the moon, this is obviously important. What kind of lasers did the two recon pilots have? Were they the same?”
A moment of silence. Standing stockstill, under the heavy black sky and beside the shallow crater filled with sand, I saw the line of my footprints across three sloping dunes to the fourth, where my reflection stood. I kept him in sight while listening to the indistinct voices in my helmet. Wivitch came back with the information.
“The automata had the same lasers as the pilots,” his voice suddenly rang in my ear, making me jump. “Model E-M-9. Nine percent emission in the x-ray and gamma range, the rest in blue.”
“Visible light? Ultraviolet too?”
“Yes. The E-M series all have continuous spectra. Why?”
“Just a minute. Maximum emission in the bands above visible light?”
“Yes.”
“What percent?”
Again silence. I waited patiently, feeling the left side of my suit, where the sun was, slowly warm up.
“Ninety-one percent. Tichy, what’s going on?”
“Wait.”
This information puzzled me at first because I remembered that the emission spectrum of the lasers that destroyed our probes was different. More in the red. Could the device have been a mirror even so? Then I remembered that with nonlinear optics a reflected ray need not have the same frequency as the one incident. Even in the case of ordinary glass. Though this wasn’t glass here, of course. Whatever reflected laser beams could also move them in the spectrum toward the red. I couldn’t ask to talk to physicists now — later maybe — so I racked my brain for what I remembered of optics. To turn high-energy radiation into visible light didn’t require additional energy, it just needed some energy absorption. It was therefore easier. I could stay with the mirror hypothesis without looking for miracles. I felt better. I started to figure out where I was by the stars. The French sector was about five miles to the east, and less than a mile behind me was the American sector.
“Wivitch? Do you read me? Moon here.”
“Yes. Tichy! There have been no flashes. Why did you ask about lasers?”
“Are you recording me?”
“Of course. Every word.”
I could hear the exasperation in his voice.
“Listen. What I’m about to say is important. I am standing in the Flamsteed crater. I am looking east, in the direction of the French sector. There is a mirror in front of me. I repeat: a mirror. Not an ordinary mirror but something that reflects only me and my surroundings. I don’t know what it is. I see myself exactly, that is I see remote Number 1 at a distance of approximately two hundred and forty paces. The image landed with me. I don’t know how high this reflecting area extends, because while landing I was looking downward, at my feet. I first saw the double right above the crater, very close. It was a little higher than me, also larger. But when it stood in front of me, it was exactly my size. The mirror may be able to enlarge the images. I think that’s why the moon robots that destroyed those remotes seemed so incredibly squat. I tried touching my double. My hand went right through, there was no resistance. If I’d had a laser and shot at it, that would have been the end of me, I’d have received the whole reflected charge. I don’t know what happens next. I can’t see where the mirror ends. That’s it for now. I’ve told you all I know. If you’re quiet, I’ll keep the radio on, but if there’s a lot of talking, off it goes, because I don’t want distractions. Which is it to be?”
“Keep it on, keep it on…”
“Then be quiet.”
I could hear Wivitch breathing heavily, each huff with a three-second delay, two hundred and forty thousand miles above me, because Earth stood high in the black sky, almost at the zenith, a gentle blue among the stars. The sun, on the other hand, was low, and as I watched my double in the white spacesuit I could see the long shadow from me stretching across the dunes. A little crackling in the earphones, but there was silence. I could hear my own breathing, realizing it was me on the ship, yet I heard it as if I were standing in my own body here in Flamsteed. We had expected surprises but not in the no man’s land. Apparently they used this mirror trick to make every intruder, living or nonliving, self-destruct upon landing, before he could start sniffing around. Clever. More, intelligent. But inauspicious for me. No doubt much more was in store. I wouldn’t have minded returning to the ship to think over the situation and discuss it with Control — it was easy to leave the remote, just break the safety glass on my chest and turn a knob — but I wasn’t about to do that. Besides, I was in no greater danger here than on the ship. What then, look for the source of the mirror? And if I found it? The image would disappear, that was all.
They say you get your best ideas when you’re taking a walk. I started moving, not exactly the way one strolls but with that slightly drunken moon stride, first one foot forward as on Earth but then both feet together, hopping like a sparrow. Or rather like an oversized ball that bounces and between bounces sails for a while above the sandy ground. Having covered some distance in this manner from where I had landed, I stopped to look back at myself. I saw a small figure on the horizon and was dumbfounded for the second time. Even far away I could see that it was no longer myself in white but someone else. Someone slender, graceful, the head shining brightly in the sun. A human figure on the moon without a spacesuit! And completely naked. Robinson Crusoe seeing Friday couldn’t have been more astounded than I. I quickly raised both arms but the creature did not follow suit. It was not my reflection. It had golden hair that fell over its shoulders, a white body, long legs, and it came toward me without haste and as if without any particular purpose, and not waddling and halting either but smoothly, as one walks on the beach. Thinking “beach,” I realized it was a woman. A young woman, and with not a stitch on her. In her hands she held something large and multicolored, and it covered her breasts. She approached not directly but at an angle, as if to pass me at a modest distance. I almost called Wivitch but bit my tongue. He wouldn’t believe me. He’d think I was hallucinating. I didn’t move, searching her face, wishing desperately I knew what to do but I didn’t. The only thing I was sure of was that my eyes weren’t deceiving me, nor my brain. I don’t know why but it seemed to me that everything depended on her face. If it was Marilyn Monroe again, as at that Italian restaurant, then I would have to doubt the evidence of my senses, because how could any wave or force get into my memory and obtain precisely that image? I wasn’t even standing here on this lifeless ground in my own person, I was sitting in the ship, strapped to the armchair at the controls, but even if I were here myself, what could enter my head with such perfect accuracy? Apparently, I thought, there were different kinds of impossibility, some greater and some lesser.
She was the siren of the islands that Odysseus passed. Luring men to their death. I don’t know what made me think of that. I stood, and she kept coming, now and then lowering her face framed by flowing hair to sniff the flowers she held, though on the moon one can’t smell anything. She paid no attention to me. But no matter what her appearance or actions, the mechanism inside her had to function logically, following logical programs. That had to be my point of departure. The invisible mirror was to put every armed intruder out of action. Seeing an opponent, the intruder would pull its gun to defend itself, though not to attack, its purpose being only reconnaissance. But when the other also drew its gun, the intruder would shoot, because if it allowed itself to be destroyed, it would not be carrying out its information-gathering program. But I did not produce a weapon. Instead I called Earth and told Wivitch what I saw. Were my words overheard? Almost certainly. An enormous, truly criminal oversight on the part of the whole project was that no one had thought to shield Tichy’s communication with the base, which wouldn’t have been that hard to do. A device built into my radio could have converted what was said into an unintelligible code. The underground military computers knew human speech, and even if they weren’t given it to begin with, it was child’s play for them to learn it, all they had to do was listen to Earth’s tens of thousands of radio stations. Not to mention television programs, which is no doubt where the naked woman came from like Venus riding the sea foam.
All very logical. If it’s not a robot because it doesn’t shoot and doesn’t even inspect its double, which surely
