“In other words, McIntyre is…”
“Don’t say it.”
I took a notepad from my pocket and wrote on a fresh page: “It understands what it hears better than what it reads. We’ll have to communicate, for a while, in this matter, by writing to each other. My guess is that the things I didn’t put into my report to the LA because I couldn’t remember, It remembers, and that someone knows or at least suspects this. I won’t phone M. or go back to him, because he’s probably the ‘he’ in the letter. He wanted to ask It questions. Perhaps to interrogate It. Please write your reply.”
Tarantoga read my note and frowned. Saying nothing, he bent over the table and wrote: “But if he is from the LA, why this deviousness? The LA can contact you directly, no?”
I wrote back: “Among those to whom I turned in NY there must have been someone from the LA. Through him they learned that I found a way to talk to It. But I left before they could try that themselves. If the anonymous letter is telling the truth, the son of the man who was your father’s friend was supposed to take over. To find out, without arousing my suspicions, what It remembers. Whereas, if they turned to me directly, officially, I could refuse to submit to such an interrogation, and they would be up a tree because legally It is not a separate person and they would need my consent to talk to It. Please use participles, pronouns, verbs, and avoid simple syntax.”
The professor tore out the page I had written on, put it in his pocket, and wrote: “But why is it that you don’t want It to know what is now happening?”
“To be safe. Because of what was written inside that envelope. It can’t be from the LA because the LA obviously wouldn’t warn me about itself. Someone else wrote it.”
Tarantoga’s reply this time was brief:
“Who?”
“About what is taking place where I was and had the accident, many parties would love to know. The LA has plenty of competition. I believe we should avoid the company of kangaroos. Let’s get out of here. It doesn’t understand the imperative mood.”
Tarantoga took all the pieces of paper from his pocket, rolled them into a ball with the letter and envelope, lit it with a match, and tossed it into the fireplace. He watched the paper shrivel into ash.
“I’m on my way to a travel agent,” he said. “And what will you do now?”
“Shave,” I said. “This beard itches like the devil and obviously is no longer needed. The faster the better, professor. Maybe there’s a night flight. And don’t tell me where we’re going.”
As I shaved in the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I made faces. The left eye didn’t even blink. I appeared completely ordinary. When I packed, I looked at my left hand and leg now and then, but they behaved normally. At the last moment, however, as I was putting my ties on top of the folded clothes in the suitcase, the left hand took the green tie with brown dots, a tie I liked though it was quite old, and threw it on the floor. It, apparently, didn’t like it. I picked up the tie with my right hand and tried to make the left hand take part of it so we could lay it neatly in the suitcase. What happened next had happened more than once before: the arm obeyed but the fingers didn’t. They opened, and the tie fell on the bed.
“Hopeless,” I sighed, stuffed the tie into the suitcase with my right hand, and closed the suitcase. Tarantoga appeared in the doorway, showed me two tickets without saying a word, and went to pack.
Did I have reason to fear my right hemisphere? I could think about this without worrying, because It couldn’t know what I thought unless I told It by hand signals. Human beings are so constructed that they don’t know what they know. What a book contains can be learned from the contents page, but there’s no contents page in the head. The head is like a full bag; in order to see what’s in it you have to pull everything out, item by item. Groping for a memory in your head is like groping in a bag with your hand.
Tarantoga paid the hotel bill, and as we drove to the airport at dusk and then waited in the terminal, I went over everything that had happened after my return from the Calf, to see how much I could remember. Earth had changed completely. There was total disarmament. Even the superpowers no longer had the money to continue the arms race. The more intelligent the weapons, the more they cost. That was the real reason for the Geneva Agreement. In Europe and in the United States no one wanted to enlist in the army. Men were replaced by machines, but one machine cost as much as a jet plane. Live soldiers surrendered the field to nonliving soldiers, who weren’t robots, either, but simply small computers inserted into rockets, self-firing firearms, and tanks like giant bedbugs, flat, because no space was needed for a crew, and if its computer was knocked out, a spare took over. Since command communications were vulnerable to disruption, the machines were made more and more autonomous, and therefore became more and more expensive. I couldn’t recall who came up with the idea of moving the arms race to the moon. Not in the form of weapon factories but through the so-called planet machines. These machines had been in use a couple of years for exploring the solar system. Remembering this, I noticed that a number of details were missing. Had I known them before or not? One usually knows, when one can’t remember something, whether or not one knew it in the first place, but I didn’t. I must have read about the new Geneva Agreement before my mission, but I wasn’t sure. The planet machines were built by several companies, mostly American. They were unlike anything industry had produced before. Not factories and not robots but something in between. Some resembled giant spiders. Of course there was a lot of debate, a lot of protests that they shouldn’t be armed but used only for mining and that sort of thing, but when it came to transporting the weapons to the moon, it turned out that the countries who could afford it already had self-programming mobile rocket launchers, cannon able to travel underwater, fire-throwers able to travel underground like moles, and laser artillery that could move like tanks and trigger, with salvos of intense radiation, nuclear fusion reactions that would vaporize everything, themselves included. Each country could program on Earth its own planet machines, which were then transported to the moon and placed in their respective sectors by the Lunar Agency, especially created for that purpose. The principle of parity was adhered to, how much of this and that could be put up there, and various international commissions watched over this whole military exodus. Scientists and generals from each country were allowed to verify that their devices were unloaded on the moon and in working order, then they all had to return to Earth together. In the twentieth century such a solution would have been senseless because the arms race wasn’t so much a matter of production as of research, innovation, which in those days depended entirely on people. But these new machines worked on a different principle, one borrowed from the natural evolution of plants and animals. These were systems capable of auto-optimization, speciation, and ramification, which means they could change themselves and multiply. I was pleased with myself that I had been able to remember that. Was the right hemisphere of my brain, interested mainly in women’s behinds and cake and hating green ties with brown dots, able to grasp such concepts? How could Its memory, then, be of value militarily? But if it wasn’t, I reflected, all the worse for me, because I could swear up and down that It knew nothing but no one would believe me. They’d grill It, that is grill me, and if they didn’t obtain what they wanted with the signs I taught It they’d use better teaching, better signs, and not let go for anything. The less It knew, the more trouble I was in. My life, even, might be at stake. This was not paranoia. I continued to dig into my memory.
On the moon, the electronic evolution of new weapons was to begin. In this way, despite disarmament, no nation would be defenseless, because it would own a self-perfecting arsenal. And any surprise attack by an enemy, war without declaration, was impossible now, because to commence hostilities a government first had to ask the Lunar Agency for permission to use its sector on the moon. There was no way to hide this, and the side threatened would also apply for permission, and that would begin the return of the means of annihilation to Earth. The whole point was that the moon be inaccessible.
Neither people nor probes could be sent to learn what military capability a given nation had at its disposal. A clever plan, but at first the project met with strong resistance from the generals and politicians. The moon was to be a testing ground and laboratory for military evolution within the sectors allotted to the various nations. The first order of business was to make sure there was no conflict between the sectors. If a weapon developed in one sector attacked and destroyed a neighbor’s weapon, that would upset the balance of power. The day such news came from the moon, there would be an immediate return to the previous situation and very likely war, a war conducted with modest means at first but in short order the nations would all rebuild their arms industries. The programs of the moon systems, written by the Lunar Agency in conjunction with multinational commissions, contained locks to keep the sectors from attacking each other, but that protection was considered insufficient. As before, nobody trusted anybody. The Geneva Agreement had not turned men into saints or international diplomacy into a convocation of angels. For that reason, after the transporting was completed, the moon was declared off-limits to everyone. The Lunar Agency itself could not enter there. If a defense program in any of the testing ranges was destroyed or breached, all Earth would know about it in an instant, for each sector bristled with sensors that
