Free Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem

The world breathed a sigh of relief, but not for long, because fear returned—now as the specter of the nonhuman invasion of Earth by the moon. So there was no task more urgent than to pierce the mystery of the moon.
    With these words the chapter ended. There were a few dozen pages left in the book, but they wouldn’t turn. As if they were glued. Stuck together with bookbinder’s glue, I thought. I couldn’t separate them, so finally I took a knife and slid it carefully between the pages. The first page was blank, but where the knife touched it, letters formed. I rubbed the paper with the knife until I obtained the following message: “Are you ready to assume this burden? If not, put the book back in the envelope! If yes, turn the page!”
    The next page was also blank. I ran the blade from top to bottom and eight numbers appeared, in groups of two with hyphens between them like a telephone number. I separated the remaining pages but there was nothing on them. “A curious way to recruit Savers of the World!” I thought. At the same time I began to suspect what lay in store. I closed the book but it opened again by itself at the page with the numbers. Nothing was left for me but to pick up the phone and dial.

In Hiding
    It was a private loony bin for millionaires. Somehow you never hear about insane millionaires. A movie star or a statesman or even a king can go insane but not a millionaire. At least not judging from the newspapers which put revolutions and the fall of governments in small print buried in the middle of the paper but on the front page they tell you absolutely everything about the mental state of a practically naked young woman with big breasts, or a snake that crawled up a circus elephant’s trunk, causing the animal to go on a rampage in a supermarket and crush three hundred cans of Campbell’s tomato soup along with a register and one checkout girl. An insane millionaire would be welcome in a paper like that. But millionaires don’t like publicity whether they’re insane or not. Insanity might help a movie star’s career but not a millionaire’s. A movie star doesn’t even have to have acting ability, or a voice, they can dub in another, and her real face can be totally unlike her posters and films, the main thing is to have “it,” and she’ll have “it” if she’s getting divorced again or buys a convertible upholstered with ermine or poses nude for Playboy or has an affair with a pair of octogenarian Quaker Siamese twins. Today a politician too must have a great voice, a great smile, and a great body to win voters over the television. But millionaires can only be hurt by such things, not to mention the market. A millionaire has to be calm, predictable, and reserved. Any unpredictability better be hidden. And because it has become extraordinarily difficult to hide from the press these days, millionaire asylums serve as invisible fortresses, invisible because inconspicuous: there are no uniformed guards, no slavering dogs on leashes, no barbed wire, for that only whets a reporter’s appetite. Such an asylum should look uninteresting, and above all it will never call itself an insane asylum. The asylum I found myself in was supposedly for people with ulcers and bad hearts. How then, you ask, did I know straight off that it was a loony bin?
    We weren’t allowed inside until Dr. House, a trusted colleague of Tarantoga’s, came to get us. He asked if I wouldn’t like to take a little walk in the park while he talked with Tarantoga. So I felt sure he assumed I was insane. Apparently the professor hadn’t had time to fill him in, because we left Australia in such a hurry. House deposited me among flower beds, fountains, and hedges, and our bags were whisked away by two attractive women in elegant suits who didn’t look at all like nurses, which also set me thinking, but the clincher was when a potbellied old man in pajamas, seeing me, moved over so I could sit beside him on the lawn