Peace on Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 bed-bugs, 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