Peace on Earth: A Novel (From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy Book 4) by Stanislaw Lem

Author:Stanislaw Lem [Lem, Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2002-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Round Two

I awoke rested and immediately went over the events of the day before. You always think better after a good shower, which is why I had insisted on a bathroom with running water instead of those wet towels which are no substitute for a tub. Of course there couldn’t be a tub, with the wash area no bigger than a barrel. Water rushed in on one side and was sucked out by a strong current of air on the other. In order not to drown, because water in zero gravity covers the body and face in a growing layer, I had to put on an oxygen mask before showering, which was a nuisance but better that than no shower. As we all know, even after the engineers could build rockets in their sleep, astronauts were still plagued by toilet accidents, and technology wrestled with that problem for a long time. Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn’t mention it. Urinating (for men, that is) wasn’t too bad, but defecating was solved only with the offices of a special computer, which was fine, but when that broke down you found yourself in extremity and had to improvise. In my lunar module, this computer—about the only one—worked throughout like a Swiss timepiece, thank God. Washed and refreshed, I drank my coffee from a plastic bulb and ate a raisin cake under a funnel with its suction set on high so the crumbs wouldn’t stick to my fingers or choke me. I don’t like to give up my habits. Having breakfasted properly, I took a seat at the selenograph and, gazing at the globe of the simulated moon, smiled, since they wouldn’t be inflicting advice on me for a while. I hadn’t informed Control that I was awake; they thought I was still sleeping.

The mirror phenomenon and the naked blonde had clearly been two tests to determine who or what had landed, and apparently I had passed those tests, being allowed to wander through Flamsteed unenticed and unattacked. But the trap that turned out to be a mine didn’t fit this picture. On one hand they go to great trouble to produce a mirage in the no man’s land, all done at a distance because it is a no man’s land, and on the other they plant mines—as if I was facing an army equipped with both early-warning radar and clubs. But the mine could have been there from earlier days, though neither I nor anyone else had any idea what had taken place on the moon during all those years of hermetic isolation. Not solving this mystery, I began preparing for the next reconnaissance.

LEM 2, in perfect working order, was the product of General Teletronics and a different model from the one I had lost so unexpectedly, poor thing. I crawled into the bay to have a look at it before I became it.

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