The Xenobiotic Invasion

by Theo Varlet

  “At Hénault-Feltrie’s,” her brother declares, proudly, “We’re perfecting a metallic monoplane with a turbocompressor, which will give it a cruising speed of 350 kph.”

  In order to seek forgiveness for his failed antiquities, Alburtin joins in and stimulates the new conversation: “And when the astronautical rocket enters into everyday use, it will no longer be in hundreds of kilometers an hour that we’ll be counting, but thousands.”

  “The horror of it!” exclaims the modernist dowager. “Fortunately, that’s not for our time. I won’t live to see it—and neither will you. Perhaps in a century or two...”

  “Is that, Mama,” Luce jokes, severely, “what you call being up to date? Don’t you read the newspapers anymore?”

  I was, in fact, about to cite the departure of the American rocket, but Alburtin has got in ahead of me. Facing the blue sea, upright in his wicker armchair, he is pontificating amiably:

  “Interplanetary voyages? But we’re almost there—we are there! Within ten years, Hénault-Feltrie—your boss, Géo, one of the donors of the Rep-Hirsch prize and a great champion of astronautics in France—affirmed in 1929. After the aircraft, the rocket: that’s natural; it’s the curve of inevitable progress. Think of the acceleration of scientific progress and the multiplication of discoveries. The 19th century alone realized more than the 2000 years preceding it. The beginning of the 20th century, up to the war, has made as much ground as the entire 19th century. Ever more rapidly, ever further, ever higher! Rockets to the Moon and the planets? That will be child’s play as soon as we’ve discovered—in atomic disintegration, for example—more powerful sources of energy. With those presently at our disposal, it’s already possible, just about. People have only been devoting themselves to it seriously for two or three years, and it’s making progress—opinion is excited, impassioned; one senses that the moment has come. In 1929, a German launched the first automatic rocket at 200 an hour…which exploded after a few kilometers, along with its passenger, a cat—but that doesn’t master. In 1930, the rocket-plane manned by the aviator Espenlaub7 made a tour of the aerodrome at Lohenhausen, near Dusseldorf. It was recently announced that a professor from Budapest, Doctor Oberth,8 has invented a rocket-shell with which he is planning to make a voyage to the Moon and back; 87 people, 20 of whom are women, have written to ask to company him...”

  “You’re forgetting the film The Girl in the Moon, which shows us the voyage accomplished,” Luce put in, taking a long draft from the cigarette in her long jade holder, “according to the vision of its director, Fritz Lang.”

  “Always joking, Mademoiselle! The film was anticipation—but that’s no longer the case. At present, like me, you’ve been able to read in the dailies of the last few days that the American scientist Professor Oswald Lescure is launching a rocket, with a passenger, into interplanetary space. And you’ve also been able to read in this morning’s Petit Marseillais that the departure was due to take place today...”

  “From Columbus, Missouri,” I completed. “And the passenger is Professor Lescure’s own daughter. He must have confidence in his invention!”

  “And the girl must have a lot of pluck!” the doctor continued. “The newspapers are comparing her to an aviatrix, but her flight is much more dangerous than crossing the Atlantic by plane. Even if she doesn’t get as far as the Moon, which is her intention, who knows whether she’ll fall back to Earth, or whether she’ll ever return here?”

  “Shouldn’t someone be able to follow her apparatus by telescope?” asked Madame de Ricourt, affecting a resigned expression.

  “I doubt it, Madame. And anyway, there’s no means of steering it, or of bringing it safely to harbor.”

  “It’s suicide, then! The government shouldn’t have permitted...”

  Géo intervened. “As you can imagine, Mama, there have been test flights. One doesn’t set off for the bull’s-eye—the Moon—just like that, with a new machine. One must first know how to handle it. The girl has been in training, like the first aviators, the Wright brothers, at Dayton in 1903-04. Now that the doctor has reminded me about it, I’ve seen the name Aurore Lescure in cinema posters.

  “I’ve seen her on the screen,” Alburtin continued. “She’s very pretty.”

  “Pooh!” said Luce, disdainfully. “An American with a PhD—a female scientist in spectacles.”

  “You’re exaggerating Luce. She doesn’t have spectacles, but she has a rather surly manner—a real tomboy…a horror. I remember now; I’ve seen her too—with you, Luce, and Madame Delval, at the Paramount...”

  At each of these reflections, I was on the point of exclaiming: “I’ve seen her at the cinema too! Not once, like you, but eight or ten times, as often as I could...” But what outbursts of laughter from Géo, what jovial jest from Alburtin, what scandalized old lady’s pout, and what mocking laughter from Luce I would have attracted, in making the confession it would have been impossible for me to suppress: “I’ve seen her…and I think she’s adorable.”

  Wisely, I kept quiet, understanding the ridiculousness of my romantic and imaginative sentiment. To be smitten with a professional beauty of the cinema—a Rudolph Valentino if one is female, a Pola Negri if one is male—is still acceptable; there is a contagion in that, a spirit of imitation, of snobbery. One is submissive to the prestige of a face loved by thousands—but in my personal case, that explanation did not hold up. These people with cinematographic passions are predisposed to it; they are smitten in their turn by all the great film-stars. For me, on the other hand, if was sufficient for an idol of the public to appear on the screen for my individualistic instinct to raise my hackles against her; that multiplicity of homages, far from seducing me, held my sentiments below melting-point. Not once in my life had I felt the attraction of a famous face. The emotion experienced with respect to Aurore Lescure was unique in my experience.

  The first time I had seen that face surge forth, after a title read with indifference, I scarcely knew who she was, and yet my gaze was caught, my attention held fast. The black-and-white image was, to me, a supernatural apparition, a revelatory upheaval. I recognized that slim young woman costumed as an aviatrix, her face made into an oval by the coarse fabric helmet, reduced to its essential features. That slightly melancholy and dolorous style, the neatly-divided mouth with the firm lips, the magnificent teeth and those limpid eyes, child-like and yet so profound, were the very synthesis of my ideal type of beauty. I had already seen it in my dreams—or in an anterior life. Who knows?

  I had lashed myself with irony—in what anterior life, idiot? That young foreigner, separated from you by five or six thousand kilometers, that pioneer of a futuristic sport standing behind her rocket-ship, that shiny steel shell, with her hand on the bolt of the porthole-door that is about to close upon her when she had finished addressing her conventionally-forced smile to the camera-operator...

  When her image disappeared from the screen, I felt a strange emptiness, an intimate discouragement, an immeasurable isolation…and I left the theater, refusing to watch another film, carrying the marvelous image away with me.

  And, while mocking myself for that haunting, that possession, stronger and more tenacious every time, I had returned to see her, always more intimately convinced that I was recovering the image of an individual known in some anterior life, of an individual to whom I was bound by mysterious ties—but also an individual whom, in all probability, I would never meet...

  Could I really allow such crazy sentiments to be suspected by my companions, even by virtue of an imprudent word of allusion, on that October afternoon, beside the ink-blue Mediterranean, in the rays of the setting Sun?

  II. Aurore Lescure

  Why did I get into Dr. Alburtin’s little roadster in order to return to Cassis? Why did I arrange things, cleverly, so that Madame de Ricourt would take her place with Luce in the turbo, on the strength of Géo’ promise that he would not exceed 30 kilometers an hour? My latent rancor in regard to the disdainful judgmen
t passed by Luce on the American astronaut must have provoked my determination, and also the subconscious sentiment of being more in sympathy with Alburtin and the secret hope of continuing the conversation about the Rocket.

  I jokingly evoked as a reason, however, that I did not want to give any offense to the doctor by seeming to scorn his modest C6.

  At any rate, the decision that I made on the threshold of the Hôtel de la Plage near the ruins of Tauorëntum had, I repeat, a supremely important influence on my future, and also significantly influenced the fate of the civilized world.

  If I believed in metempsychosis, I would doubtless see an occult premonition in the conversation we had just had and the image of Aurore Lescure that was haunting my mind—but I don’t believe in it, and, on cool analysis, the coincidence was perfectly natural. The newspapers had announced that the flight of the interplanetary rocket would take place that day; at the same time, throughout Europe, France and America—the entire world—hundreds of thousands of men and women must have been thinking about the heroine and talking about her exploit.

  The only difference there was between me and the others is that I saw her land.

  The Rocket, according to the mathematicians, had an equal probability of falling at the North Pole or the middle of the Gobi desert: a simple matter of theory. If it had fallen elsewhere, it would not have had any further effect on the facts of our lives. I prefer to believe in destiny. In the real universe, of which my destiny in a part, Aurore Lecure had to land, inevitably, at a determined point, and I also had to be passing by that point at the same moment. In truth, it was all simple and natural, rather than marvelous.

  It happened so rapidly that Alburtin and I scarcely had time to understand what was happening.

  It was 5 p.m.; the Sun had disappeared behind the calcareous crests of the picturesque gorge that we were passing through, unhurriedly, but it was still broad daylight. Ten minutes before, at the exit from La Ciotat and the beginning of the coast, my friend Géo had afforded himself the facile pleasure of outstripping us by giving his turbo free rein, and the Ricourts ought, at that moment to have been arriving in Cassis at the Hôtel Cendrillon, where I would meet up with them again at dinner. We were within sight of the Belle-Fille pass, where two roads—the one to Aubagne and the one to Casasis—separated, when I glimpsed a light in the sky from the corner of my eye, which caused me to raise my head.

  A trail of red fire, like the track of a bolide, but which was slowing as it fell vertically from the zenith…a strident fizz...

  The light went out; the sound ceased—and, in the clear blue sky, a flaccid and indeterminate shape was visible, in a rapid perpendicular fall.

  “An aircraft!” I exclaimed. “A plane that has caught fire and is falling!”

  Keeping his hands on the steering-wheel, Alburtin took his eyes off the road for two seconds.

  “A funny aircraft!” he opined. “More like a dirigible?”

  In consequence of the large size of the object, it was not possible as yet to estimate its distance. In the oblique sunlight, the flaccid form of the preceding moment had taken on the clear aspect of an elongated oval and the yellowish profile of a “semi-rigid” airship. Beneath it, however, suspended by invisible wires, something metallic was sparkling.

  It descended, no longer in free fall but with a regular slowness, directly toward us, on to the spur of a wooded hill that separated the two roads.

  I realized what was happening and exclaimed: “A parachute descent! The plane has caught fire and the pilot has ejected.”

  Having arrived at the bifurcation, the automobile was close enough to the aerial object for us to be able to make out its dimensions and nature. It was not a distant large dirigible but a fairly close yellow fabric parachute supporting a canister that shone as if made of aluminum.

  “What’s that?” said Alburtin, perplexed, stopping at the foot of a boundary marker.

  A singular anxiety invaded me; my heart was beating violently—but I dared not jump to a conclusion as yet; the parachute distracted me.

  A hundred and fifty meters from us, at an equal distance between the two roads, the metallic object plunged into the pines and brushwood with a rustle of branches and foliage. The shock of impact was perceptible, and a noise of breaking glass, while the parachute settled limply on the crowns of the trees.

  “Are you coming?” I said, impatiently.

  “Just a minute.” My companion set the car moving again, came to a stop on the edge of the road 50 meters further on, then switched off the motor and the headlights.

  I had leapt to the ground, listening carefully.

  The evening breeze was freshening in the great silence of those bird-free valleys, but there was no human sound—no cry for help. A profound anguish, far surpassing the anxiety that one might feel for an unknown person in danger, gripped my heart.

  Through the bushes of russet rock-rose, flowering gorse and kermes oak, I drove straight toward the spot marked by the yellow festoons of the parachute’s canopy, paying no heed to the gorse and goatsthorn, whose sharp needles clawed at me hands and my legs, through my trousers. The plump Alburtin was panting behind me.

  Finally, I made out a glint of metal in the undergrowth; a few strides further on, there was a kind of enormous shell, lying almost flat on its side, on an outcrop of rock.

  A shell? No! The interplanetary Rocket! For the evocation that I had rejected a little while before as demented and absurd imposed itself upon me; I recognized the vehicle, tapered at one end, that I had seen so many times on the screen, with Aurore Lescure smiling at me, one hand on the bolt of the porthole-door.

  That door, or manhole, was in front of me, but hermetically sealed by the wing-nuts and joints of an airtight shutter outlined on the wall, almost at the top of the stout recumbent cylinder.

  As there were not yet two astronautical rockets in service in the world, it was undoubtedly Professor Oswald Lescure’s, which had departed from Columbus, Missouri that very day. Inside it was Aurore Lescure—or her corpse.

  A rapid examination of the shell showed me that the outcrop of rock on which it rested had punctured a small round hole. I bent down, to try to look inside, but there was not enough space between the limestone spur and the shards of broken glass. The disquieting odor of some chemical product was escaping from the hole.

  I stood up and shouted: “Quickly, Alburtin! She’s asphyxiating! Help me to open the door.”

  In order to unscrew it, I grabbed one of the two handles encased in cavities in the shutter of the manhole. An inscription in two languages—English and French—surmounted by the American flag and the words MG-17 First Voyage to the Moon, instructed: To open, turn handle clockwise.

  “The possibility of a crash-landing was anticipated,” said Alburtin, arriving completely out of breath—and he turned the other handle.

  A click...

  The round plate, released, fell back on its hinges to reveal a gaping opening about 50 centimeters in diameter. Avidly, I leaned into it, and glimpsed a human form, collapsed against a control panel. The figure was turned so that only the back of the helmet could be seen.

  “I’m thinner than you, doctor,” I declared, “and there isn’t room for two.”

  Changing my position, I introduced myself into the hole, not without difficulty. The exceedingly small control-room was cluttered with an accumulation of levers and apparatus, on which I dared not suspend myself, and I had to set my foot on the young woman’s hand, which was still clutching a handle. In spite of the two openings—the manhole and the breach in the hull—the air inside was charged with an acrid, choking odor.

  I clenched my jaws in vertiginous rage. What if she were dead?

  “Get ready, Doctor! I’ll pass her to you.”

  Disengaging the fingers clenched around the ebonite handle, I lifted the inert body up by the waist. I felt its reassuring warmth through the leather costume with a surge of joy, and I raised it as best I could toward the opening
.

  With his professional dexterity, Alburtin first extracted the limp arms, then took hold of the young woman under her armpits and hauled her through the hole, while I followed the movement, supporting her hips. By the time I had disengaged myself, he had laid her down on the ground in a place almost devoid of pebbles, carpeted by pine-needles, and was kneeling beside her.

  “No apparent wounds—a simple loss of consciousness,” was his diagnosis.

  “Shouldn’t we take her to the car right away?” I asked, a little less anxious than before.

  “Better to re-establish respiration first. A few rhythmic movements—if that doesn’t work, you can help me by applying traction to the tongue.”

  Removing the unconscious young woman’s helmet and unbuttoning the top of her fur-lined flying-suit, he began alternately raising and lowering her arms.

  The face, in the curly shock of dark mahogany hair, cut to shoulder-length, took on the delicacy of a ball of wax, in which a residue of red in the lips might have denoted feminine coquetry as well as the warmth of life whose return I was avidly awaiting. I thought about a romance by Wells, The Wonderful Visit, in which an angel materializes, having emerged from “the fourth dimension.” A similar marvel was realized here: the angelic astronaut had quite the fallacious domain of the screen for real existence…and I experienced a tremulous joy in recognizing, in that three-dimensional face, point for point, my black-and-white Aurore Lescure completed and made flesh.

  “Oof! She’s breathing,” said Alburtin, with satisfaction, ceasing to manipulate the arms. “She’s coming round now.”

  The eyelids fluttered, then opened wide, and her clear blue-green eyes wandered, vaguely at first, over the doctor’s face, mine, and the branches of the pines. She did not see the shell, which was behind her.

  With a glimmer of comprehension in her gaze, she asked: “Where am I? Did my apparatus crash?”