stopped. The only thing I could hear was high squeaking in my helmet, a signal in some incomprehensible code. A strange battle, for it was primitive, resembling the struggle of Mesozoic dinosaurs on Earth millions of years ago, but at the same time it was sophisticated, because these lizards had not hatched from reptilian eggs but were robots armed with lasers and packed with electronics. The giant spider now hunkered down, its belly touching the ground, and seemed to close in upon itself. I heard nothing, but of course even if the very moon were to split open you would hear no sound, however the ground shook once, twice, three times. The tremors became continuous, till everything around me, and myself, shook with an increasingly intense vibration. The dunes in the distance strewn with the bodies of gray lizards, the slope facing me, and the black sky above it, I saw everything as through trembling glass. The outlines of objects blurred, even the stars on the horizon winked as on Earth, and I shook feverishly, like a tuning fork, and so did the boulder I clutched. I shook in every bone and finger, more and more violently, as if every part of my being were quivering jelly. The vibration was painful now, like a thousand microscopic drills at once. I tried pushing away from the boulder, to stand separate, because then it would reach me only through the soles of my boots, but I couldn’t move, my hands were paralyzed, I only watched, half-blind, as the giant spider drew itself into a dark bristling ball like a real spider dying under a magnifying glass that focuses the sun. Then everything went black and I was falling into an abyss, until I opened my eyes, covered with sweat, my throat tight, and saw the bright, friendly colors of the control panel. I had returned to the ship. Apparently a safety mechanism disconnected me at a certain level of discomfort. I rested a minute, then decided to go back, although with the hideous feeling that I might be entering a corpse. Carefully I pushed the lever, as if it could burn me, and found myself again on the moon and in the all-consuming vibration. Before the safety mechanism threw me on the ship again I saw, though not that clearly, a great mound of black fragments that were slowly rumbling down. The fortress fell, I thought, and again was back in my own body. But the fact that the remote hadn’t come apart gave me the courage to try it one more time.
Nothing shook now. All was deathly still. Among the charred lizards lay the ruins of the mysterious fortress that had blocked the way to the top of the hill. The spider that had destroyed it using resonance lay in a ball of twitching legs which straightened and bent, straightened and bent, movements that grew slower until they stopped completely. A Pyrrhic victory? I waited for another advance but nothing moved. If I hadn’t seen what I had seen, I might not even have noticed the burnt debris that littered the whole field, it blended in so with the sand. I tried to rise but couldn’t. I was not even able to move a hand. At most I managed to tilt my head in the helmet so I could see myself.
It was not a pretty sight. The boulder that had served me as a shield was split into large pieces and those were covered with a network of hairline cracks. My legs or rather what remained of them were stuck in rubble. The poor remote was an armless, legless torso. I had the eerie sensation that my head was on the moon and my body was on the ship, because even as I saw the battlefield under the black sky, I felt the seat and shoulder belts of my chair. The chair was with me yet not with me because I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t hard to figure out the reason: the remote’s sensors, without incoming data, shut down so I remained in contact only with the head which, protected by the helmet, had survived the murderous moonquake caused by the spider. Nothing more for me to do here, I thought. But I stayed, half in half out of the rubble, and looked over the sunlit field.
In the distance something was flapping in the sand, sluggishly, like a fish on a beach. One of the lizard robots. Sand rolled off its back as it hauled itself into a sitting position like a kangaroo or dinosaur, and it sat there, the last witness of a battle that no one won. The robot turned toward me and suddenly began to spin, and spun so fast, the centrifugal force made its long tail fly off. I watched, amazed, while it whirled now like a top, until pieces flew in all directions and it fell flat, flopped over a few times, and with a final somersault landed on the other bodies and was still. Although I had attended no lecture on the theory of electronic expiring, I knew that this was what I had just seen, it was so like the death spasms of a crushed beetle or caterpillar. We know how their death looks but cannot know if those last spasms signify suffering. I had had enough of this. I felt, in a way difficult to describe, that I was involved in it, even responsible. But because I hadn’t come to the moon to philosophize on moral questions, I bit down hard to disconnect myself from the pitiful remnant of LEM 3 and in the blink of an eye was back on board to tell Control what had happened this time.
INVISIBLE
Tarantoga, to whom I showed these notes, said that I describe all who worked on my mission and kept watch over me as either idiots or bunglers. Whereas the General Theory of Systems proves mathematically that there exists no element or part that is infallible, and even if you reduce fallibility to one in a million, in other words provide that a given part will break down only once in a million times, a system containing a million parts
Control pinned their hopes on the last LEM because it was a miracle of technology and guaranteed the maximum safety. It was a remote in powdered form. Instead of a steel athlete you had a container filled with microscopic grains, each grain of such concentrated intelligence it rivaled a supercomputer. In the presence of certain impulses these particles came together to form a LEM. I could land as a thin cloud of molecules, could coalesce if necessary in the form of a robot of human shape, but I could just as easily become one of forty-nine other programmed things, and even if eighty-five percent of the grains were destroyed, the rest would be enough to carry on. The science behind such a remote, called a dispersant, was so advanced that Einstein, von Neumann, the entire physics department of M.I.T., and Rabindranath Tagore working together would have had a problem with it, so I didn’t even try to figure it out. All I knew was that they’d embodied me in thirty billion separate particles, particles more versatile than the cells of a living organism, and there was unimaginable redundancy for joining these in various combinations which could all be turned back to dust at the push of a button, dust so scattered you couldn’t see it, and each particle incorporating stealth technology, making it undetectable by radar or laser or anything except gamma rays. If I was ambushed I could disperse myself, retreat, and reform in whatever way I liked. What one experiences as a cloud spread over several thousand cubic feet is impossible to put into words. To know it, you have to be such a cloud. If I lost my vision, or to be more precise my optical sensors, I could replace them with any other organ, and the same for arms, legs, tentacles, tools. I just had to be careful not to become lost in the wealth of possibilities. This time, I would have only myself to blame if I failed. The scientists thus washed their hands of responsibility if the remote malfunctioned. I can’t say this made me happy.
I landed at the equator on the other side of the moon, smack in the middle of the Japanese sector, as a centaur, that is as a being with four extremities plus two arms attached to the upper trunk, with an additional device that surrounded me like an intelligent gas, so actually there was not much resemblance to the mythological creature. Even though I had familiarized myself with this powdered remote too at the Lunar Agency’s testing range, I first crawled into the bay to check it out. It was indeed fascinating to watch that pile of glittering powder begin to move when you turned on a program, and flow, and connect, and mold itself to make the given shape, and how when you turned off the field (electromagnetic or possibly something else), it flew apart like a kicked sand castle. This ability to fly apart at any moment was supposed to make me feel secure. The sensation was quite unpleasant, like a strong vertigo combined with the shakes, but there was nothing I could do about that. At least it only lasted until I assumed a new form. The one thing that could destroy me was a thermonuclear explosion and even that had to be up close. I asked if it was possible for me to disperse completely due to a malfunction but they never gave me a straight answer. As an experiment I tried to run two programs at once, becoming at the same time a humanoid giant and a nine-foot caterpillar with a flattened head and enormous pincers, but it didn’t work because the selector worked on an either/or principle.
This time I stood on lunar soil without the rear guard of the micropes, because I was myself in a sense a multitude of eyes, pulling after me a flowing gauzy train of transmitters. Possessing an inquiring mind, I had asked what would happen if it turned out that similar protean robots had been developed on the moon. They couldn’t answer that though on the testing range they had pitted two, even three such robots against each other, which
