"Stanislaw Lem - Ijon Tichy 05 - Peace on Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

"A Helen and Kurt Wolff book."
I. Title.
PG7158.L39P5713 1992
891.8'537-dc20 91-47970

Designed by Lydia D'moch
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition
 JIHGFEDCB




Contents

Doubled
Briefing
In Hiding
The Lunar Agency
The Mission
Round Two
Carnage
Invisible
Visits
Contact
Da Capo



Doubled

I don't know what to do. If I could say "I'm miserable," it wouldn't be so bad. I can't say "We're
miserable" either because I can only partly speak for myself even though I'm still Ijon Tichy. I used to talk
to myself while I shaved but I had to stop because of my left eye's lewd winking. Coming back in the
LEM, I didn't realize what happened to me just before lift-off. The LEM, by the way, doesn't have
anything to do with the American NASA module manned by Armstrong and Aldrin to collect a couple of
moon rocks. It was given the same name to disguise my secret mission. Damn that mission. When I
returned from the Calf constellation, I intended to stay put for at least a year. But I agreed to go for the
sake of mankind. I knew I might not come back. Doctor Lopez said my chance of survival was one in
twenty point eight. That didn't stop me: I'm a gambler. You only die once. Either I come back or I don't,
I said to myself. It never occurred to me that I might come back but not come back because we would
come back. To explain I'll have to release some highly classified information but I don't care. That is,
partly. I'm writing this too only partly and with great difficulty, typing with the right hand. The left I had to
tie to the arm of the chair because it kept tearing the paper out of the machine. It wouldn't listen to
reason, and while I was immobilizing it, it punched me in the eye. It's because of the doubling. Our brains
all have two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum or great commissure. Two hundred million
white nerve fibers connect the brain so it can put its thoughts together but not in my case. It happened on
that range where the moon robots tested their new weapons. I stumbled in there by mistake. I'd
accomplished my mission, had outsmarted those unliving creatures, and was on my way back to the
LEM when I had to urinate. There are no urinals on the moon. They wouldn't work anyway in a vacuum.