“Your accursed civilization, which is not concerned with souls but only with bodies,” he added, “and which makes humans the slaves of machines, will be swept from the face of the world. You believe yourselves to be redoubtable with your fulgurant rays, your automata, your pocket-planes, your hydrogliders and all your diabolical inventions, and you are certainly capable of sowing death, of reducing cities to ashes, of ruining the peoples who resist you, but you will not triumph over the will of free men, whose countless multitudes will fall upon you like locusts on a field of wheat and exterminate you, along with your wives and children, in order that the servants of matter will disappear from the nations forever.”
From that moment on, events succeeded one another rapidly, throwing the whole world into perturbation.
The radiograms that Paul Chartrain and Claire Nolleau gathered together, which completed the transmission of images animated by the reporters of the major news outlets, permitted the personnel of the Great Current to follow what was happening very precisely.
All the workers of North Africa were on strike, from Cairo and Alexandria to Tangiers and Casablanca. They had stopped work, claiming that they were “making common cause with their Asian brothers.”
In Calcutta, the largest city in India, which had grown prodigiously in the last two centuries, multiplying buildings and skyscrapers, anxiety was at its peak. That great center sent the most alarming news.
The Associated Republics of Asia had mustered all their armies unexpectedly and were marching on the frontiers of Europe and Asia Minor. Large forces were signaled descending from Tibet toward India through the passes of the Himalayas.
All of Hindustan was in effervescence. Its government, affiliated to the Euro-African Federation, was hastening to organize resistance, but the authorities had been caught unawares. There was no plan of action. The considerable means at its disposal were, unfortunately, disseminated, difficult to assemble and to utilize.
Men were mobilized, automata requisitioned, along with machines of every sort, factories and railways. Aerial and maritime navigation were taken under the direct control of the Ministry of Defense—the name “Ministry of War” had long since disappeared from the official vocabulary. Even those women were enrolled who volunteered for services at the rear and as mechanics or pilots.
Wang-Ti-Pou’s partisans unleashed their offensive with lightning rapidity.
The adherents of civilization, who, by contrast with their enemies, were called technologists, had not had time to organize their defenses before squadrons of aircraft, going around the Himalayas through Indochina, came to fly over the great cities of Burma and India and drop tons of explosives there.
It was believed that the machines at the disposal of Wang-Ti-Pou’s armies were archaic in type and relatively slow, traveling at no more than four hundred kilometers an hour. They certainly did not have the improved engines of destruction that the technologists had invented long ago. Given that they did not encounter any serious aerial force before them, however, they were capable of carrying out frightful devastations.
At ten o’clock in the morning. Scoresby time, the radiophonic emissions that brought news from all parts of the world on different wavelengths became unintelligible. Disorderly emissions of great power on various wavelengths caused such perturbations that all communications became confused. It was assumed that the confusion was the work of antitechnologists who were sending out the disruptive waves deliberately.
At the Franz-Josef base, the engineers, and the official representatives, journalists and tourists who had not yet departed, were gripped by fear. Faces paled and gazes vacillated beneath contracted brows.
What did it mean? Were they about to lose contact with the civilized world?
To be deprived of communications with the great centers was a new and disconcerting sensation for people who were used to never losing contact with worldwide thought. The world had become an immense thinking organism in which all individuals, cells of the social body, required their ration of neural input.
The perturbations of the wireless did not prevent, to be sure, transmissions by wire; the telephone and telegraph lines continued to function; but, obliged to fill in for the immense traffic of the failing radio, they could not be sufficient. News only spread with a considerable delay, and its items were often contradictory.
Thanks to the privileged situation of the Great Current Company, an enterprise of public utility, Paul Chartrain, whom Claire Nolleau came to assist whenever she was not retained by Hurlaut, still received sufficient information to form a reasonably accurate idea of events.
It was known that the Great Current was threatened by the general strike in North Africa, which had turned into an insurrection and had cut communications between Timbuktu and Europe. It was felt to be necessary to maintain contact between the two bases at Timbuktu and Franz-Josef, and equally necessary to expedite, as a matter of priority, telegrams coming from the Orient destined for the Parisian centre, which were immediately retransmitted to Timbuktu, Scoresby and Franz-Josef.
At three o’clock in the afternoon at the latter base, which corresponds to about ten fifteen p.m. at the longitude of Calcutta, Chartrain received a retransmitted telegram from Hanoi announcing that large antitechnologist forces had just crossed the frontier north of Tonkin, flying at an approximate sped of four hundred kilometers an hour. They were expected to reach Hanoi in half an hour. Urgent measures were being taken for the protection of the inhabitants and all the aircraft that it had been possible to mobilize were being sent to intercept the enemy.
From that moment on, the dispatches succeeded one another without interruption, sometimes confirming and sometimes contradicting one another.
The authorities in Calcutta seemed to have lost their heads. It was necessary to ward off so many dangers at once that the administration was swamped.
To begin with, it had to be expected that the aerial attack launched by the antitechnologists would not stop at Indochina. It would fly over the peninsula, causing damage here and there on a more or less large scale, and try to reach Calcutta in order to destroy that great center, which was like the brain of India.
Now, by virtue of its extent, the city offered an excellent target, and its numerous skyscrapers were very vulnerable. In spite of the solidity of their construction, many of them would collapse under torpedoes,25 burying the streets with their rubble.
The assailants would doubtless also have bombs loaded with asphyxiating gases, and, as war had not been anticipated, the authorities in Calcutta did not possess either reserves of antidotes or masks in sufficient number to protect a population of several million.
It was necessary to take account of the danger of false news, which had to be promptly denied in order to prevent panic, but in the end, in spite of all efforts, that panic could not be prevented from growing.
The terrible events only became known precisely in Europe, Africa and Greenland much later.
The government, meeting in Calcutta, had decided to evacuate the city. In order to escape two risks—the collapse of houses and asphyxiation in the cellars—there was no better mans than dispersing the population in the countryside, where the enemy could not drop enough bombs and torpedoes to ender a practically unlimited territory untenable.
The problem was, however, insoluble, the technologists’ aerial army would be over Calcutta in less than five hours, and they could not possibly evacuate four million people, prey to panic, in such a short time.
The evacuation had commenced of its own accord, but the crowds pressing to get out of the city in vehicles of every sort, overloaded with baggage, were moving with desperate slowness. The quays of the Hooghly, the great arm of the Ganges that irrigates Calcutta, were besieged. The police were unable to prevent the crowd from becoming dangerously turbulent, even though there already hardly any boats left to collect the fugitives. Many people fell into the water, where some drowned.
The last boats, laden with twice or th
ree times as many passengers as they could normally take aboard, withdrew their gangplanks and cut their moorings, allowing clusters of desperate people who were clinging to the ropes in order to try to get aboard to fall; but people continued to pile up on the quays, which could no longer lead to anything but a soaking.
Half an hour after the first dispatch that announced the incursion of the antitechnologist aerial army, Hanoi telegraphed that a hundred helicopters assembled in haste to oppose the invasion had been destroyed to the very last, after a heroic but brief battle, not without having shot down, as far as could be judged, between two and three hundred antitechnologist planes. Many machines had fallen on Hanoi with their bombs, exploding as they fell, and causing frightful damage. Now the victorious antitechnologists were sprinkling the city with torpedoes.
The dispatch was interrupted. The telegraph and the telephone had been interrupted themselves by the rain of bombs. Perhaps, by now, all the inhabitants of Hanoi were dead, asphyxiated.
The President of the Republic of India, the mayor of Calcutta, the ministers, the commanders of the land, sea and air forces, had met in the governmental palace and were trying to imagine the efficacious defense and the stroke of genius thanks to which the capital of India might be preserved. In a short time-span of four or five hours it was necessary to complete a defensive organization that had barely been sketched, and to do it while the terror of the population was paralyzing all services.
They had twenty fulgurant cannons at their disposal, which were hastily set up at the edges of the city. There were two on the Hooghly, carried by hydroplanes. Those machines were capable of working marvels in blasting the enemy on whom their rays succeeded in focusing. A contact of five or six seconds was sufficient to kill men and cause bombs to explode. The sole defect of the weapon was the enormous quantity of energy it absorbed, which it had to obtain, directly or indirectly, from power plants.
The helicopters that had been summoned from all parts of the country, initially by radio and then by telegraph and telephone, were arriving by the minute. They were gathering at the aerodrome of Serampour, between Calcutta and Chandernagor. It was hoped to assemble between two hundred and fifty and three hundred, which would remain a rather feeble force in confrontation with the three or four thousand aircraft that the antitechnologists had launched against the Indian metropolis, especially given that the majority of the machines had only been equipped with improvised armaments. Their number could not include more than fifty truly redoubtable cruisers. It was therefore necessary to expect that the air fleet in question, if it opposed the invasion, would suffer the same fate as Hanoi’s.
As for telemechanical aircraft, which had no crew on board and were piloted from the ground by means of Hertzian waves, they would have rendered immense services if the government had had sufficient numbers at its disposal, but there were no more than a hundred distributed throughout India, in accordance with policing requirements, and there could be to question of assembling them rapidly enough to employ them collectively against the invaders.
There were three submersible cruisers in the Hooghly estuary, equipped with artillery sufficiently powerful to reach aircraft flying at five thousand meters, and which could, on the other hand, avoid bombs and serial torpedoes by diving. A fourth, which was at sea in the gulf of Bengal, was awaited. Unable to receive information via wireless, since the enemy was confusing messages, they had sent a helicopter to search for it and signal it to join the squadron as soon as possible.
Armored vehicles were also insufficient in numbers. The land, sea and air forces had not been designed for the large scale operations of war that now had to be envisaged, but simply to exercise policing functions, to maintain order within the country and stop bands of brigands at the frontier who attempted to penetrate Indian territory.
The military governor, who had the commanders of the three elements under his orders, proposed beating a retreat in order to allow time for help to arrive, which he had requested from all directions. The mayor of Calcutta protested, however, that they could not allow the inhabitants that had not had time to evacuate to be massacred without at least putting on a semblance of defense. If lives had to be sacrificed, at least they would be those of men who made a profession of fighting. His argument prevailed.
The President and Ministers of the Republic of India also considered that, even if the antitechnologists were victorious, they would pay so dearly that their momentum would be broken, and India would thus be the advance-guard of civilization. Thanks to their resistance, Europe and its satellites would gain sufficient respite to raise an insurmountable barrier before the barbarians.
Their point of view had been adopted when a rocket-plane coming from the east landed on the Hooghly. Its captain, having requested an audience, was immediately introduced into the council of war. He brought terrifying news. Hanoi had been destroyed and almost all of its population had perished. It was feared that other large cities had already suffered the same fate. The number of aircraft unfurled over Indochina and heading westwards was estimated at between four and five thousand.
At one o’clock in the morning, in the middle of the night, Calcutta was more animated and noisier than on major holidays of during great popular demonstrations. In streets bordered by skyscrapers, from which a sinister hubbub rose as if from the depths of a precipice, the crowds were jostling without making any progress. The police were impotent to maintain the flow of that excessive flood, and no longer dared try to forbid an exodus that appeared to be the sole means of salvation for a population condemned to extermination if it remained accumulated in the city.
Rocket-planes descending from a vertiginous altitude came to alight on the Hooghly in order to collect fugitives and departed again immediately, climbing toward the firmament. The electric lights shining through the windows of their cabins caused them to resemble fiery meteors. But a rocket-plane loaded to the extreme limit could not carry more than four hundred people, and that would only permit a tiny fraction of the population to be evacuated.
Helicopters were also seen, recognizable by their positional lights, landing at the aerodrome.
Soon, the watchmen at the military posts heard a hum coming from the air, scarcely distinguishable at first from the great rumor of the city. It announced the approach of the antitechnologists’ aerial army. A nearer rumble drowned out the first, however; the three hundred helicopters that had been assembled with difficulty took to the air, in order to meet the enemy and make a desperate effort to bar their passage.
They rose up over Calcutta, and formed a double line in order to oppose a barrier to the invaders. They were flying slowly.
The council of war had decided that the air fleet would not go any further east than four or five hundred kilometers from the suburbs of the great city, in order to remain in liaison with the other defense forces—for without their support, it would be doomed to certain destruction, whereas by coordinating its action with that of the fulgurant artillery, telemechanical apparatus and all the other engines of war, it retained a chance of intimidating the enemy and inciting a retreat.
Showing their lights, without which they would be exposed to the danger of fire from the technologist artillery, the helicopters sowed the sky with hundreds of stars, which seemed to be performing an artistically regulated ballet.
The din composed of all the noises of the city, some near and others distant, some rising and others falling, became formidable.
The Hooghly was glittering with countless gleams.
A swarm of constellations rose above the horizon in the east, announcing the advance guard of the antitechnologist fleet. They surged over the horizon and soon gave the impression of a firework display, rising up like rockets, new ones appearing incessantly.
The aerial horde invaded the sky. The thunder of engines, all roaring simultaneously, now drowned out the sounds of the city.
Searchlights disseminated in the countryside extended their great luminous beams into spac
e. Mounted on automobile trucks, they kept moving in order not to offer too easy a target to the gunners of the aerial cruisers.
The ordinary artillery and the fulgurant rays went into action; and the army of helicopters, which tried to climb above the antitechnologists, were still gaining altitude as the battle was joined.
Perhaps the invaders had not expected any serious resistance, because they seemed to hesitate. Some dived in order to pick up speed and thus avoid the helicopters that were confronting them. Others moved away laterally, and others turned round in order to avoid the rays and shells that were pursuing them. But a large number returned fire, and the battle immediately became terrifying.
The first victims were antitechnologist aircraft, which exploded under the effects of the fulgurant rays or were shot down by shells. Disabled machines exploded as they hit the ground. But the riposte also caused ravages in the technologist ranks. Helicopters were precipitated in their turn.
There as a gigantic and fantastic contest, but it was brief.
For a few minutes, the airborne machines whirled around one another. The fulgurant rays and the luminous beams of the searchlights striped the atmosphere. The noise of the cannonade was mingled with the throb of engines and helices. Airplanes tumbled in zigzags. Helicopters fell like stones.
Many more aircraft were shot down among the antitechnologists than among their adversaries, but as the latter were far less numerous, they were rapidly reduced to negligibility.
A few telemechanical aircraft, devoid of pilots, intervened as dawn broke, revealing the innumerable fleet of the antitechnologists. A certain disorder sown among the assailants had broken the neat order of their triangular formations. The telemechanical aircraft, plunging obliquely, blasting them with their shells and fulgurant rays, and the great birds of prey, mortally wounded, tilted, spun and crashed in splashes of flame with a thunderous din.
An International Mission to the Moon Page 18