An International Mission to the Moon

by Jean Petithuguenin

  When they perceived the antitechnologist aircraft, they thought that the helicopter had been completely destroyed. They were heartbroken not to have been able to intervene in the battle sooner; they swore at least to avenge the members of the crew who had just fallen victim to their duty.

  Chartrain gave his mechanics the order to place the flying machine in its departure position. Electric winches immediately hoisted the apparatus to ground level. The reaction engines spat. The telemechanical aircraft took off, bounding into the air like a veritable rocket.

  The engineer watched the approach of the enemy planes through the periscope. They were flying low because of the clouds. He shivered at the thought that the antitechnologists were doubtless about to drop bombs in an attempt to destroy the Great Current base from top to bottom.

  “Increase the tension…five thousand volts!” he ordered Claire Nolleau, leaning over the control panel beside him.

  He followed the rapid ascent of the flying automaton on the screen. But the units of the enemy squadron must have perceived their new enemy, and were taking aim at the place from which it had departed. Doubtless they also realized that they were dealing with a telemechanical apparatus commanded from the ground, because, while maneuvering to avoid it they began launching torpedoes at the point from which it had taken off, where the control system ought to be.

  Chartrain had activated the flying automaton’s television and teleaudition apparatus and now had the impression of seeing and hearing as if he were aboard the machine.

  A screen placed directly in front of him offered the appearance of a window through which he sometimes saw the sky and sometimes a bird’s eye view of the ground, in accordance with the evolutions of the automaton, launched in pursuit of the enemy. By virtue of a well-known phenomenon of illusion, although he was motionless in his seat and the images perceived through the window were moving. He had the impression of sometimes leaning to one side and sometimes the other, exactly as the automaton was doing up in the air, whose apparatus was transmitting its indications to him.

  The torpedoes launched by the enemy made the ground tremble and imparted commotions so violent that the functioning of the equipment in the control room was disturbed. At times, the television image became less clear and, more seriously, the controls suffered faults.

  The periscope and the television screen spread a half-light around the bunker, which added to the reflection of the disposed lamps of the lighting apparatus.

  Chartrain observed his companion covertly while giving her brief orders. He was able to remark that she was pale and that her hands were trembling. He felt sorry for her, and regretted having accepted her aid in such circumstances.

  While bombarding the ground with their torpedoes the antitechnologist planes tried to destroy the automaton itself with cannon fire. Being relatively small, however, the rocket-apparatus was a difficult target. It was also extremely mobile, making aiming even more awkward, while it circulated amid its adversaries. Finally, its essential organs were enclosed in armored containers, while its wings and fuselage were made of very light materials, which projectiles could go clean through without causing serious damage.

  Chartrain had brought his artillery into action and his fulgurant tubes claimed three victims, one after another. But if the terrorists were criminals, they were no cowards. In spite of the losses they had suffered in their battle against the helicopter, they held firm against the new, almost ungraspable, enemy that threatened to exterminate every one of them.

  In order to evade their fire, the telemechanical plane had to be swerving, rising or diving incessantly, but it returned constantly to the attack, maneuvering with a vertiginous rapidity.

  “Nolleau,” said the engineer. “Take over the cannon and the tube; I have enough to do piloting the machine.”

  No more than a minute had passed since the fantastic battle had begun, and five enemy aircraft had already been shot down.

  The entire base was abuzz. In spite of the normal orders that had been given, people were risking themselves outside their shelters momentarily in order to catch glimpses of the combat.

  Obedient to Chartrain’s orders, Claire Nolleau set about aiming the tube and the cannon by means of the visors commanding the weapons by telemechanical correspondence.

  Aiding and advising one another, the young couple were doing good work. The sky was being swept clean; the aggressors’ aircraft were falling, one by one.

  Claire suddenly had the impression of being projected backwards, while a formidable howl deafened her and a fulgurant light dazzled her. She was enveloped by dust and smoke, submerged by a rain of debris.

  She experienced violent blows to the head, shoulders and back….

  She reopened her eyes, and immediately took account of the fact that she had been unconscious for a time. She was lying against the wall at the back of the bunker, where the half-light furnished by the screens of the control panel and the lamps still reigned, augmented by sunlight that was penetrating through a gaping hole in the middle of the ceiling.

  She sat up abruptly. She felt bruised all over, but the sentiment of danger caused her to overcome her discomfort. The dust that was still flying around the room convinced her that very little time had elapsed since the explosion—a torpedo launched by the enemy had doubtless hit the bunker.

  Was Chartrain dead?

  Still sitting in the pilot’s seat, he had slumped forward on the control panel and was no longer moving.

  Claire staggered across the room, tripping over debris. She looked at the television screen. The images were whirling and swaying. Earth and sky succeeded one another with vertiginous alternation.

  Well, yes! The flying automaton, deprived of direction, was performing acrobatics that were the prelude to its fall and destruction.

  A glance into the periscope told the young woman, on the other hand, that two aircraft—was that all that remained of the enemy?—rid of their adversary, were now circling over the buildings of the Franz-Josef base, about to rain down bombs.

  One thought imposed itself upon her: My duty is to take Chartrain’s place, save the automaton, if there’s still time, and continue the battle. I alone can prevent the total destruction of the base.

  She had seized Chartrain by the shoulders and was trying to pull him away from the controls.

  She could not repress a sob. Now that she had raised her comrade’s head, she saw blood on his face, and was devastated to find him inert in her arms.

  Among the members of the mission, the young engineer was the person for whom she experienced by far the most sympathy, and the idea that he might be dead caused her a sharp anguish.

  She succeeded in straightening him up and tilting him backwards in his seat, but she renounced trying to deposit him on the floor in order to take his place. He was too heavy and there was no time to lose. She slid between the engineer and the control panel and, in an uncomfortable position, began to operate the keyboard and the switches, in order to reestablish the automaton’s equilibrium.

  A loud bang announced that the enemy had just launched a torpedo, and through the periscope Claire saw a cloud of dust and smoke rising above the buildings.

  The automaton was no more than a hundred meters from the ground when it ceased cavorting and, obedient once again to the direction of a pilot, resumed climbing with a precise trajectory.

  The infernal racket was renewed. The enemy had launched another torpedo. The projectiles’ effect was terrible. The houses, although solidly built in reinforced concrete with iron frameworks, were being blown away like houses of cards.

  If, as was to be feared, the enemy still had a dozen bombs of that kind to launch, the whole base would be reduced to dust.

  The hope that had momentarily been born among the personnel of the Great Current, at the sight of the automaton precipitating its enemies out of the sky, had vanished at the spectacle of its fall,

  In her caved-in bunker, Claire Nolleau, pale and clenching her teeth,
hindered in her movements by Chartrain’s inert body, stiffened her determination and guided the automaton straight at its two adversaries.

  Fortunately, the controls were intact. The apparatus responded perfectly to the young woman’s impulsions.

  She aimed the fulgurant tube once again and succeeded in blowing up the nearer aircraft.

  Then the pilot of the final enemy craft, understanding that it was about to succumb in its turn, began swerving and pirouetting in a disorderly fashion, in order to evade the attacks of its minuscule and ungraspable antagonist.

  Claire renounced making use of the flying automaton’s artillery. She assigned it the role of a projectile, which she attempted to hurl at its adversary.

  While she was maneuvering it, she heard a grating sound above her head. Concrete debris fell in front of her on to the keyboard.

  She swept it away with the back of her hand and, looking up, saw that a section of the vault, beside the breach, was buckling, threatening to collapse on top of her and crush her.

  She made a movement as if to get out of the way, but changed her mind; if she abandoned her post she would leave the base defenseless, and the enemy craft would finish its work of destruction.

  She brought her gaze back to the instruments and resumed piloting the automaton. She did not want to look at the vault again, because she was not sure that she would not give in to fear.

  The enemy had just launched another torpedo. The bombardment was taking on cataclysmic proportions.

  Those who still had the courage to look up at the sky saw the automaton rise up like an arrow, heading straight for its final adversary.

  The latter avoided the impact by means of an abrupt swerve, and, renouncing the battle, beat a retreat toward the sea, descending in order to gain speed.

  The automaton dived in its turn, and slipped into the wake of the enemy, swiftly gaining on it.

  That final phase was so rapid that the crew of the aircraft did not even have time to open fire again, nor was the pilot able to repeat the maneuver that had permitted him to escape the mortal blow the first time. He tried to swerve, but only succeeded in offering his flank to the automaton, which crashed into it, ripping away the right wing completely and pulverizing the pilot’s post as well as all the other forward compartments.

  The two machines fell together, spinning, and sank in the fjord.

  When she had seen the success of her maneuver, Claire had uttered a cry of triumph, which was also an exclamation of relief, even though there was no one to hear it.

  At the moment that the automation had crashed into the airplane, the television apparatus had been destroyed, and the special screen to which it transmitted its impressions had ceased to reflect the images. It no longer offered anything but a dull and lifeless surface.

  But Claire had seen the enemy’s fall through the periscope.

  Now that the victory was won, the sentiment of the danger to which she and the injured Paul Chartrain were exposed caused her to forget everything else.

  She looked up at the vault and saw, to her horror, that the part that had already loosened was on the point of coming away.

  She threw herself on Chartrain, seized him under the arms, and made a desperate effort to lift him from his seat and drag him away—but she lost her balance and fell to the ground with him, at the very moment that the roof collapsed.

  X

  When Chartrain and Claire Nolleau were pulled out of the rubble under which they were buried, bruised, broken and dying, their rescuers initially despaired of saving them.

  In the hospital at Scoresby, however, to which they were immediately transported, life was successfully maintained in their mutilated bodies by injecting a special serum into their veins, charged with oxyhemoglobin, and the circulation of their blood was maintained by the impulsions of an artificial heart.

  Their ribs broken, limbs crushed and skulls fractured, the young couple seemed condemned regardless, if they escaped the catastrophe, to be no longer anything but poor diminished creatures, infirm and incapable, to whom, in truth, it was not rendering a service to preserve their lives. Such, at least, would have been the opinion of a man of the twentieth century who had seen the two wounded individuals.

  But the physicians of the twenty-third century knew their capability. They did not judge it impossible to heal those cruelly tested human beings and reconstitute them in their integrity.

  The crushed limbs were placed in serum baths and carefully irrigated to maintain vital activity in the cells to which the vessels no longer furnished the necessary blood-flow. Improved apparatus substituted for the damaged central organs and maintained the conditions indispensable to life in the different parts of the body.

  Meanwhile, a great surgeon was summoned from London and disembarked in Scoresby Sound by rocket-plane two hours after the catastrophe. He had given instructions telephonically before departing, and arrived with his aides, and the animals and preparations that he required to carry out grafts everywhere that it was necessary to repair destroyed organs.

  Replacing a bone fragment here and a section of artery or vein there, elsewhere a tendon, muscle or nerve fibers, reconstituting the two injured individuals piece by piece, so to speak, he rendered them the form and figure that they had had before the battle with the antitechnologist squadron.

  After that, there was nothing more to do than maintain their circulation and respiration artificially for a few days, in order to give their reconstructed organism time to readjust itself.

  Meanwhile, the engineers of the Great Current, reunited at the Franz-Josef base, saw a new catastrophe approaching, which the sacrifice of their young colleagues had not been sufficient to prevent.

  The great transformer of current at Franz-Josef, from which the machines occupied in clearing the ice from the frontal gallery received their motive power, had been destroyed by the bombardment. It was impossible to organize help promptly enough to put the machines back into action, or even to bring them back to a safe place. The Scoresby factory, which had been subjected for two days to exceptional demands on its hydrogen reserves, and had not yet received the new supplies requested from Liverpool, could not make available the quantities of fuel that would have been necessary to utilize the reaction engines that the Franz-Josef base possessed. It would have been necessary to make a huge effort to save the base, and they no longer had the means.

  Liverpool, to which distress calls were sent, was short of materials itself, having been obliged to respond to too many demands since the beginning of the crisis.

  The constructors of the Great Current were about to witness, despairingly, the ruination of their endeavor. The pressure of the ice began to increase again under the incessant descent from Mount Petermann, and ended up carrying away the entire framework of dividers installed at the price of so much hardship.

  The engineers and their auxiliaries were overwhelmed by that fatal blow. They had thought themselves victorious, and fatality had reduced the magnificent result of their efforts to nothing. The blind violence of nature had found an ally: the stupid brutality of ignorance.

  But Dr. Bormann, his features set hard, opposing his will to contrary destiny, simply declared:

  “We’ll start again.”

  XI

  In Europe, the antitechnologists’ war had exploded like a thunderbolt. Civilization had never been in such peril.

  Measuring the power that the harnessing of the electrical power of the globe between the poles and the equator was about to give those he regarded as the vile servants of matter, Wang-Ti-Pou had wanted to prevent its accomplishment; he had gone to war before the realization of the Great Current was complete.

  The African insurrection had been the first act of the drama. In spite of the principles they advocated, the antitechnologists hastened to get their hands on all the industrial installations of the tropical regions and the Mediterranean.

  They knew full well that they could not fight with bare breasts against the formida
ble equipment and enormous resources of mechanical energy that Europe had at its disposal. By ensuring themselves of the possession of the thermoelectric factories of North Africa, however—which were, in that epoch, by far the largest in the world—they had procured a very considerable advantage.

  Scarcely had they obtained that success than Asia went into action. The great onslaught, in the possibility of which people had refused to believe, was launched. Muscovy, the Ukraine and Finland were submerged by hordes that moved on foot or on horseback, only possessing rudimentary armaments scarcely superior those of the wars of the twentieth century.

  The invaders were opposed with helicopters, rocket-planes, automata, asphyxiating gases and discharges of artificial lightning. The machines contrived a huge massacre, but the more people that were killed, the more arrived. They were fanaticized.

  The new Attila, who was able to gather together their scattered forces and launch them forth to attack civilization, had materialized. Wang-Ti-Pou had imposed himself upon them and was guiding them as he wished.

  The oriental barriers of Europe were broken down, one by one. Africa and Asia, in coalition, held it in a vice, which seemed to be on the point of crushing it.

  The Asiatic antitechnologists were, however, stopped, thanks to improved weaponry that was brought to bear against them. The war might them have been concluded to the advantage of Europe if Africa, possessed of enormous mechanical means, had not made those advantages available to its allies.

  As had happened in all great conflicts since the twentieth century, the antitechnologists’ war quickly became a material struggle between two powerfully equipped groups, and it was obvious that the defeated party would be the one whose financial and industrial resources ran out first.

  Europe’s resources, certainly, were colossal. There were, throughout the territory of the United States of Europe, countless hydroelectric or thermoelectric power plants, which were immediately requisitioned. But they had the disadvantage of being scattered and thus escaping a general direction that would have been the only means of obtaining the maximum yield from them. The States did not agree with one another as to the best methods to employ in order to win the war, not the best manufactures. The unity of action of European armies not being assured, their enemies took advantage of that and obtained partial successes, the worst effect of which was to demoralize the population.