Peace on Earth

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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.

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