Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem

man and the mailman, now handcuffed, were pushed into this car. I stood staring as the man who had opened the rear door of the Lincoln got out slowly with his hands up and walked obediently to the truck where the white-haired black man put handcuffs on him. No one even spoke to me. The car drove away. The truck holding the driver who’d been shot and his accomplice also pulled away, and the woman picked up the black shawl, brushed it off, put the machine gun back into the carriage, raised its hood, and walked on as if nothing had happened. The street was again quiet and empty. Only the large limousine with flat tires and broken headlights plus the dead dog were proof that I hadn’t dreamed this.
    Next to the department store was a low wooden house with a porch and a garden full of sunflowers. A sunburned gentleman, his hair so blond it was almost white, stood in the open window with his elbows comfortably on the windowsill and a pipe in his hand. He gave me a quiet but eloquent look that seemed to say: “You see?” Only then did I become aware of something that was even stranger than the kidnapping attempt: though my ears still rang with the shots, the screams, and the explosions, not a single window had opened and no one was looking out into the street—as if I was on an empty movie set. I stood there for a good while, not sure what to do. Buying a typewriter no longer seemed important.

The Lunar Agency
    “Mr. Tichy,” said the director, “our people will fill you in on the details of the Mission. I would just like to give you the general picture—so you don’t miss the forest for the trees. The Geneva Agreement made four impossibilities possible. A continuing arms race at the same time as universal disarmament—that’s one. Arming at maximum speed and at no cost—that’s two. Full protection of each nation against surprise attack while each reserves the right to wage war—that’s three. And finally the liquidation of all armies despite their continued existence. No troops, but the staffs stay on and can think up anything they like. In a nutshell, we’ve instituted pacem in terris.”
    “True,” I remarked. “But I read the papers. They say we’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire. That the moon is silent and swallowing all probes because Someone has been able to enter into a secret understanding with the robots there. That an unnamed nation is behind everything that’s now happening on the moon. And that the Agency knows this.”
    “Pure drivel,” said the director. We were sitting in his enormous office. On a platform at one end stood a huge globe of the moon covered with its smallpox of craters. The sectors of the different nations, colored green, rose, yellow, and red like a political map, went from pole to pole, making the sphere look like a child’s toy or illuminated glass orange without its peel. On the wall behind the director hung the flag of the United Nations.
    “There’s a lot of that now,” he said with a pitying smile on his swarthy face. “The press prints it all, and it’s all nonsense.”
    “But that movement, those neopacifists, the lunarians, don’t they exist?”
    “Oh yes. Have you read their statement? Their program?”
    “I have. They call for negotiation with the moon…”
    “‘Negotiation!’” the director snorted with contempt. “Not negotiation, capitulation! And nobody knows to whom! Those muddled heads think the moon has become a party, that it can enter into agreements and pacts, that it’s intelligent and powerful. That up there now is some giant computer that has devoured all the sectors. Fear not only has big eyes, Mr, Tichy, it has a small brain.”
    “Yes, but can we really rule out the possibility of some sort of unification of all those weapons up there—of those armies, if they are armies? How can we be sure this hasn’t happened, if we are in the dark…?”
    “Because even in the dark we know that certain things are impossible. The