hooked into the remote and stood in it, acquainting myself with the complicated controls. The switch that activated the great jumps was a wired wafer you took between your teeth. But how was I to talk to Control with a switch in my mouth? Well, it was elastic and could be molded like clay and tucked inside your cheek, and you could move it between your molars when necessary. In difficult situations, warned the instructions, you should take care not to bite down too hard. There was nothing about teeth chattering from excitement. The switch tasted awful; I immediately spat it out. Possibly they had smeared it with something at the proving ground on Earth, orange or mint toothpaste. I disconnected from the remote, went into a higher orbit, and flew around the moon to target 002 between Mare Spumans and Mare Smythii while conversing with the base as politely as I could.
I was flying as peacefully as a fed baby in its cradle when something happened to the selenography. It’s an excellent instrument when it’s working. There’s no reason to travel with an actual globe of the moon; you can use a hologram, which is like having the entire satellite hanging in the air not three feet from you, rotating slowly, and you can see both its sculpted surface and the boundary lines of the sectors, the nations indicated by the kind of letters that appear on cars: US, G, I, F, R, S, N. But something had gone wrong, because the sectors began changing color, all the colors of the rainbow, then the pockmarks of the craters blurred, the image shuddered, and when I frantically turned knobs, it returned as a smooth white sphere. I tried adjusting the focus, size, contrast, but the moon for a second appeared upside down then disappeared altogether and the selenograph couldn’t bring it back. I told Wivitch, and of course he said I had pushed a wrong button. After I assured him ten times that we had “a serious problem here,” because since Armstrong that’s how you put it, the experts finally got to work on the selenograph, and that took half a day. First they told me to go into an orbit above the Zone of Silence in order to rule out any interference from unknown forces or waves directed at me from the moon. When that didn’t help, they checked directly from Earth all the circuits, integrated and not, in the holograph, meanwhile I fixed myself lunch then dinner. Since it’s not easy to make a good omelette in zero gravity, I took off my helmet and earphones so the disagreements between the information scientists and the teletronicists, not to mention an ad hoc team of professors, wouldn’t distract me. After all the debating they came to the conclusion that the selenograph
Control now split into two camps. One said that under such conditions I couldn’t continue the mission and should return; the other wanted to leave that decision to me. I agreed with the second camp and decided to land as planned. They could always transmit to me a television picture of the moon. Not a bad idea, except that this couldn’t be synchronized with my trajectory; they’d either show me the surface of the moon whizzing past or hardly moving at all. On top of that I would be landing at the very edge of the face visible to Earth and then proceeding to the far side, which presented another problem. They wouldn’t be able to send me a television picture directly when the ship was parked above the far hemisphere, which should have been child’s play because the picture could be relayed to me by the monitoring satellites but they refused. They refused because somehow no one had foreseen this eventuality and the satellites were programmed according to the doctrine of ignorance and therefore weren’t allowed to transmit anything to Earth or from Earth. Not anything. True, to maintain contact with me and my micropes, so-called Trojan satellites had been put into high equatorial orbit, but these were not for relaying television signals. That is, they were, but only via the micropes. There was an awful lot of discussion about this, then someone suggested they brainstorm the problem, and for the next four hours the scientists talked. They talked so much, I couldn’t stand it, and then they drifted off the subject and were talking not about how to help me but who was to blame for not having provided redundancy in the selenographic system. As usual when people work collectively, shoulder to shoulder, the blame was not individual, but the accusations flew back and forth like tennis, until finally I told them I’d handle it myself. The risk was already so tremendous that a little additional risk, it seemed to me, wouldn’t make any difference. Besides, the question of which sector I landed in, US, R, F, G, I, C, or any other letter of the alphabet, was purely academic.
The whole idea of the nationality of the robots inhabiting the moon, who knows in what generation now, was absurd. As you know — or may not — the most difficult task of military automation programming turned out to be the identification of the enemy. On Earth this was not a big problem; that’s what uniforms were for, flags, colorful insignia on the wings of airplanes, helmet styles, and it wasn’t all that hard to tell if a prisoner of war spoke Dutch or Chinese. With machines it was a different story. Therefore two strategies emerged: the Friend strategy and the Foe strategy. The first advocated the use of a multitude of sensors, analytical filters, differential selectors, and other such recognition devices; whereas the second was simplicity itself — the enemy was whoever or whatever didn’t know the password and so had to be destroyed. But nobody knew what course the autoevolution of weapons on the moon had taken, or what kind of tactical programs had developed to distinguish friend from foe. Though of course friend and foe are highly relative terms. You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there’s no way to tell if that grandmother’s Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus. Moreover, the automation of the armies eliminated ideology. An attacking robot follows its program, acting in accordance with focalization and optimization algorithms, differential diagnostics, and game theory — not patriotism. Military mathematics and weapons automation, moreover, if they had their apostles, they also had their apostates. The former maintained there were programs that could ensure perfect loyalty in a war robot so that nothing could turn it to treason; the latter said nonsense, because there is no code that can’t be cracked and no security system that can’t be subverted, just look at the history of computer crime. A hundred and fourteen programmers protected Chase Manhattan Bank’s information centers from entry by unauthorized persons, and a bright young kid armed with nothing but a hand calculator and an ordinary telephone broke into that inner sanctum as a joke and left a calling card: auditors wanting to check a balance, before each CREDIT and DEBIT command had to type PEEKABOO. Of course the experts immediately devised a different, much more complicated, unbreakable program. I don’t remember now who broke that one. But this has no bearing on round two of my mad mission.
I don’t know the name of the crater I landed in. From the north it resembled Helvetius but not from the south. I had examined this second landing site from orbit although not that carefully. It didn’t matter to me whether or not it had been a no man’s land once. I could have determined the coordinates, playing at the astrograph and doing declinations from this star and that, but I decided to save that for later. LEM 2 was a lot better than I thought it would be, but it did have one problem, the temperature control worked in only two positions, so I had to keep turning the switch, jumping back and forth between oven and icebox which made my nose run. But why was I still sitting in the ship, putting off the landing? It wasn’t fear, I suddenly understood, but the fact that I didn’t know the name of the crater where I would be landing. As if a name had special significance. Which no doubt explains the zeal with which astronomers christened every surface feature of the moon and Mars, and why they fell into despair when they discovered on other planets so many mountains and valleys and had no more names left that sounded good.
The area was flat except for the northern horizon where a line of ash-gray vertical rocks stood against the black sky. I slogged with difficulty through abundant sand, checking from time to time to see if the micropes were still with me. They hovered so high above that only occasionally could I see them sparkle, distinguished from the stars by their movement. I was near the terminator, the night side of the moon about two miles ahead of me. The sun, very low, touching the horizon at my back, cut the plain with long parallel shadows. Every depression in the ground, even small ones, was filled with such darkness that it was like stepping into water. Hot and cold by turns, I walked stubbornly on, in the direction of my own giant shadow. I could talk with Control but had nothing to say. Every few minutes Wivitch asked me how I was doing and what I saw, and I answered: all right, and nothing. On a sloping dune lay a stack of large flat stones, and I went toward them, seeing a glint of something metallic there. It was the shell of an old rocket, clearly from the days of the first moon shots. I lifted it, looked at it, dropped it, and walked on.
At the top of a rise where there was hardly any of that fine sand that clings to your boots, was a stone the shape of a badly baked loaf of bread, and I don’t know why but I kicked it. Maybe out of boredom or because it was lying so apart. The stone broke instead of rolling downhill, and a piece the size of a fist flew off, leaving a surface that gleamed like quartz. Of course I knew plenty, from my briefing, about the chemical composition of the moon’s crust but couldn’t remember if it included quartz, so I picked up the fragment. It was surprisingly heavy. I held it
