Peace on Earth

finally made me Missionary and I had crawled into the rocket for the nth time only to crawl back out two hours later in my space suit bristling with wires and tubes because again something had gone wrong during countdown, I finally had time to think about the past few months and put two and two together. I understood now the game the LA had been playing with me for the highest possible stakes. If not the highest for humanity and the world, certainly the highest for me: I didn’t need algomathematics and game theory to see that the simplest way for them to ensure secrecy in this situation was to do away with the pilot immediately after his return to Earth, as soon as he made his report. Knowing that they had to send me now, since I had shown myself to be the best of the candidates, I told this to my dear colleagues, the Cybbilkis brothers, Kuschtyk, Blahouse, Tottentanz, and Garraphizi (more about Garraphizi later) who along with a few dozen communications technicians would be the ground support for my selenological expedition, that is they would be for me what Houston was for Armstrong and Co. during the Apollo mission. To make those hypocrites as uncomfortable as possible I asked them if they knew who would take care of me after my return as a hero — the Lunar Agency itself or a hired gun?

That’s what I said, in those exact words, to see their reaction. If they had considered that scenario, they would understand me immediately. They froze. It made quite a picture: the small area in the cosmodome called the Waiting Room, with its Spartan decor — coke machines, card chairs, metal tables covered with bilious green plastic — and I in my angel-white space suit, my head under my arm (actually my helmet, but that’s how you say it: your head’s under your arm when you’re ready to fly), and facing me, my loyal comrades, scientists, doctors, engineers. I think it was Castor who spoke first. That it wasn’t their doing, it was the equation, the computer, because if you looked at the thing mathematically, abstractly, the solution to the problem of ensuring secrecy did not take into account any coefficient of ethics, and I was insulting them all by suggesting, at such a moment, that they were in on it.

“I’ve heard that before,” I answered. “Blame it on the computer! Sure, sure. But forget ethics for the moment. I know, you’re all saints and I’m one too. But didn’t any of you, the computer included, think of this?”

“Of what?” asked a hangdog Cybbilkis.

“That I might suspect, and might confirm my suspicion, as I’ve done just now. Surely that will affect the equation of my loyalty…”

“Oh of course that was taken into account,” said the other Cybbilkis. “It’s the ABC of algomathematical statistics: I know that you know that I know that you know that I know. The infinite series of conflict theory.”

“Very well,” I said, getting interested in the scientific aspect of the thing. “Then how did it work out for you in the end? Does or doesn’t the confirmed suspicion affect my loyalty?”

“It does,” admitted Castor Cybbilkis reluctantly. “But the second derivative of the curve of your loyalty after a scene like this one (taking place as we speak) shows a leveling off to zero.”

“Aha.” I scratched my nose, shifting the helmet from my right arm to my left. “So that what is now happening decreases the mathematical expectation of reduction of my loyalty?”

“It decreases it,” he said. And his brother added, looking at me both kindly and searchingly: “You yourself probably feel…”

“Exactly,” I muttered, realizing, not without surprise, that they were right, they or the computer, in this psychological calculation: my indignation had noticeably diminished.

The green light went on over the exit to the launch pad and all the buzzers sounded, indicating that the problem had been corrected and I was to get in the rocket again. I turned without a word and walked, they in attendance, and as I walked I thought. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I have to finish. After I left stationary earth orbit and they couldn’t touch me, when they asked me how I felt, I answered fine, and that I was considering whether I shouldn’t make friends with the “nation” of the moon in order to give a few people I knew on Earth a good kick in the pants. How hollow was their laughter in my earphones…

But that came later, after my trips to the simulated lunar testing range and the visit to Gynandroics. That corporation has greater earnings than IBM, even though it began as a small subsidiary of the company. I should explain here that Gynandroics, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t manufacture robots or androids, if by those terms we mean humanlike machines endowed with human intelligence. It’s practically impossible to put a human mind in a machine. The computers of the eightieth generation and beyond are more intelligent than we, but their minds bear no resemblance to a human being’s. Man is a highly illogical creature and therein lies his humanity. He has reason, yes, but it is heavily polluted with prejudices, emotions, and attitudes carried from childhood or the genes of the mother and father. That’s why a robot passing for a person (over the telephone, for instance) is fairly easily unmasked. Nevertheless the porn industry put a limited line of S-dolls on the market, S for sex. These didn’t catch on; they were too logical, too intelligent; a man going out with one would end up with an inferiority complex. And they were expensive. Why pay $90,000, not counting local taxes, when you could have a natural partner for much, much less? The real revolution in the sex market was caused by remotes, or “empties,” dolls also fashioned in the image of humans but brainless, brainless not in a pejorative sense but literally: the remote woman and the remote man were empty shells operated at a distance by humans.

By putting on a suit that pressed hundreds of electrodes to the skin, anyone could link with a male or female remote. Little did people dream how this technology would change their lives, especially their sex lives. From marriage to the oldest profession in the world. The courts were faced with unprecedented problems, legal dilemmas. The law didn’t recognize intimate relations with a doll as grounds for divorce. Whether stuffed or inflated by a bicycle pump, whether with automatic transmission or without, it didn’t matter; that was no more adultery than if a person was cohabiting with a chest of drawers. But teleferic products forced judges to determine whether or not a married individual entering into a liaison with a male remote or a female remote was thereby committing adultery. The concept of “remote adultery” was the subject of heated debate not only in the legal journals but also in the daily press. And adultery was just the tip of the iceberg. Can you deceive your wife, for example, with her own self but younger? A certain Adlai Groutzer ordered from the Boston branch of Gynandroics a remote of his wife at age twenty-one, not fifty-nine, her actual age. A further complication was that when Mrs. Groutzer was twenty- one, she wasn’t Mrs. Groutzer at all but the wife of James Brown, whom she divorced twenty years later to marry Adlai Groutzer. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. A ruling also had to be made as to whether a wife who wouldn’t operate the remote bought by her husband, for sex, was refusing him his conjugal rights. And whether remote incest was possible, and remote sadism and masochism. And remote sodomy. One company put out a line of dolls with modular private parts, so that you could quickly switch from male to female or even have it both ways. Among the customers of Gynandroics were quite a number of elderly prostitutes, no longer able to ply their trade; their years of experience made them masters, by remote, of the art of love. But the technology wasn’t limited to the erotic in its application. Take for example the twelve-year-old schoolboy who, receiving a poor grade for spelling errors in composition, used his father’s muscular remote to beat the English teacher to a pulp and break all his furniture. This remote, called Body Guard, sold like hotcakes. It was kept in the garden shed to protect the family from burglars. The boy’s father wore electrode pajamas to bed, and when the alarm went off, signaling the presence of an intruder, he could deal with the culprit or even culprits without having to get out of bed, because the remote would hold them until the police arrived. The son borrowed his father’s pajamas while his father was out. I had also seen picketing and street demonstrations against Gynandroics and comparable Japanese companies. The protesters were mostly women. In the few states where homosexuality was still against the law, legislators were trying to decide whether a homosexual, in love with a man who was not, was breaking the law if he sent him a female remote which he, the homosexual, was operating. When the Supreme Court finally ruled that relations per procura (with the aid of a remote) lay within the lawful bounds of matrimony provided both parties consented, the Kuckerman case came up. Mr. Kuckerman was a traveling salesman; Mrs. Kuckerman ran a beauty salon. They spent little time together: she couldn’t leave the salon, and he was on the road a lot. They agreed to intermediate their union, but couldn’t agree whether it should be by remote-husband or remote-wife. The Kuckermans’ neighbor brought down upon himself the wrath of both when he suggested, trying to be helpful, that they compromise and use a teleferic pair: a remote husband with a remote wife seemed to him a Solomonic solution to the problem. The Kuckermans considered it idiotic and insulting. They had no idea that their argument, after it appeared in the papers, would lead to a phenomenon called teleferic piggybacking — because a remote, too, can put on an electrode suit and operate another remote, and so on ad infinitum. The idea was received with enthusiasm by the underworld, because it is as easy to find the operator of a remote as it is to