The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  While he was radiotelegraphing, the Stellarium descended into the clearing. We finally landed, and Jean found himself back with us.

  The immense sadness ceased to weigh upon us. Hope sounded its fanfares. For several minutes we exchanged incoherent words of joy.

  Then Antoine asked: “You really think they’re harmless, then?”

  “They’re already naturally inclined to a gentleness greater than human beings…a gentleness that includes a great deal of resignation.”

  “Why resignation?”

  “They know that they and their entire Realm are in a state of decay. They know it in a sort of innate manner, as well as by tradition. Our presence naturally inspires a great curiosity in them, and gives them—if I’ve understood rightly—a vague hope.”

  The Stellarium remained stationary on the edge of the clearing. Gradually, Tripeds had arrived, who were maintaining their distance. One of them came closer and waved its right arm in a rhythmic manner.

  “It wants to welcome you,” said Jean, who replied to the Triped’s gestures.

  “What shall we do?” asked Antoine.

  “Give me a cup of coffee!” said our friend, laughing. “The absence of coffee was a poignant privation.”

  I immediately put the water on to boil, while Jean continued: “If you’ll permit it, I’ll return to them for two or three hours every day, in order to perfect my sign language. During that time, you can continue your explorations… You must have made some exciting discoveries.”

  “We’ve discovered Triped cities—but why do some of them live on the surface and others underground?”

  “There are, I think, two different patterns of evolution. Without fighting one another, or hating one another, the Subterraneans scarcely socialize with the others. They too have veritable cities, or townships.”

  “The cities on the surface are mostly made up of ruins. In cities that could accommodate 300,000 or 400,000 Tripeds, there are 10,000 at the most—sometimes fewer.”

  “Then the subterranean cities, fully inhabited, are more recent. That of my friends doesn’t contain more than 2000 inhabitants. I can go across it in any direction…ah! The coffee!” Jean sniffed the odorant vapor avidly.

  “We’ve surpassed many ancestral things…but we’ve added nothing to them!” he exclaimed, as he finished his coffee. “Of everything we’ve brought with us, nothing else reminds me more tenderly of the Earth.”

  “Do you think that we can definitely prolong our sojourn?” I asked.

  “From the energetic point of view, we can find everything we need…in the same way, as you know, it will be easy for us to renew our oxygen supplies. There remains the matter of nourishment. The Tripeds’ doesn’t suit us…”

  “It’s only a matter of nitrogenous substances. As for hydrocarbons…”

  “We’ll take charge of that…”

  “There are nitrogenous aliments,” Jean went on, “but they contain substances whose elimination might give us an acceptable substitute. In their present state, they’re not poisonous…but they don’t provide nourishment.”

  “An adaptation that might take years!”

  Jean’s return brought the joys of spring. The dreams of previous times rose up once again from the abyss, from the depths of the immeasurable spaces in which our native planet floated.

  “All the same,” Jean muttered, “I’ll be glad to see her again!”

  Every evening, we turned toward her, as she became a resplendent star. We beheld her again, we poor atoms, conquerors of the ether, humble navigators of the imponderable ocean…

  Nonetheless, we had no regrets; nostalgia did not extinguish the passion for knowledge.

  “A time will come when fleets of Stellariums will go from planet to planet! Humans are only tiny creatures—but what tiny creatures they are!”

  V.

  Every day, Jean spent three or four hours among the Tripeds, and then participated in our explorations. Antoine and I were impatient to do as he did, but it was necessary to wait until the sign language was less embryonic.

  We took lessons with Jean, who brought back a new “word” every day. In this work of cerebral adjustment, the Tripeds showed themselves to be superior to humans, being endowed with a greater abstract agility—is it not the case that among us, old peoples in decline are always more abstract than peoples who are still young?

  On returning from one of his absences, Jean remarked: “We already possess two hundred terms of exchange. With 600 or 700 terms, many things can be expressed quite well—after all, some subtle classical authors made use of no more than 1200 or 1500 words!”

  As Jean and his Triped friends perfected their “dictionary” we obtained more precise information regarding the present and past of Mars. It confirmed our conclusions. The memory of a superior power and knowledge persisted among the Subterraneans; once the Tripeds had practiced an ingenious and diverse industry, which involved productive factories, innumerable means of terrestrial and aerial transport; they had been able to use subtle energies, since, even now, they communicated over long distances and made use of radiation weapons for attack and defense.

  We also learned that no war had broken out between Tripeds for millennia. The incompatibility of races had not translated itself into any brutal act, much less homicidal encounters.

  “They destroy certain animals, however,” said Jean. “I think I understand that they have often gone to war with the other Realm. Thus far, the explanation remains a trifle confused.”

  “I doubt that they mean the Ethereals.”

  “Surely not! It might be a question of the Zoomorphs—which, if I understand correctly, gain territory incessantly.”

  “The two Realms can’t co-exist, then?”

  “I suppose not.”

  That question fascinated us. Jean promised to do everything possible to obtain details. He brought them three days later.

  “I understood this time. The Realms can’t live on the same ground, at least after some time. In addition to conflicts with the superior Zoomorphs—murderous conflicts for the two Realms—the soil gradually becomes incapable of producing vegetation. It’s poisoned; the animals perish and life becomes untenable for the Tripeds. It is, in consequence, essential to repel the slightest incursions. Having taken refuge in their subterranean tunnels, our friends are sheltered from their adversaries. Even if there are fissures, the Zoomorphs’ emanations are neutralized and absorbed. The Tripeds can plan attacks, which don’t kill but merely render the Zoomorphs’ sojourns difficult. Unfortunately, the numerical weakness of the Tripeds, which gets continually worse, restricts their field of action; some territories are inevitably abandoned or ill-defended.

  “At this moment, the battle is fierce in one southern region—I don’t know exactly how far away it is from here. The Zoomorphs, being very numerous, are gradually gaining ground. I sense that the Tripeds are hoping that we might intervene…”

  “There’s almost nothing we can do,” said Antoine.

  “What if Mars furnishes us with the necessary raw energy? I think it will do so without any great difficulty.”

  “We could see—and, in any case, study possible means.”

  VI.

  The first meeting was gripping.

  It took place a short distance from the Stellarium, under the umbrella of an enormous plant. There were five Tripeds, whose multiple eyes looked at Antoine and me strangely.

  Everything about them was unusual; no terrestrial image was exactly adaptable to their structure, and yet a thousand subtle analogies arose at the sight of them, giving rise to an indescribable sympathy from the very beginning.

  Gazes dominated all other expressions of their harmonious faces by a considerable margin. None of the six eyes had the same shade as another, and every shade varied indefinably. That diversity and those variations suggested an agile life whose charms far surpassed all human charms. Oh, how dull the most beautiful eyes of terrestrial women and children would have seemed by
comparison! The impression, so sharp at first, increased further by the second; soon, even Jean’s keen gaze seemed grievously insignificant.

  In our indescribable solitude, the signs that Jean had taught us were forcefully engraved in our cerebral, nervous and muscular memory. We made use of them almost familiarly. Besides, our interlocutors’ comprehension was rapid and precise; their intuition easily filled in lacunae.

  “I know already,” said the one who appeared to be the dominant individual, “that you come from the neighboring world. You are superior to us…and superior to our ancestors.”

  I thought I discerned a melancholy in the multicolored gleams of his eyes.

  “Why superior?” said Antoine. “We’re merely different.”

  “No, no…superior. Our world is smaller…we have not lasted long enough. It is a long time now since our strength departed. We are also vanquished. We know already that you are conquerors. You must be the masters of your world.”

  “Yes, we dominate the other living things…”

  “We are always retreating! We occupy no more than a tenth of the planet. The creatures that are displacing us are not our equals…but they can live without liquids.”

  I hesitated before saying: “Do you love life?” It was necessary for me to repeat the question in three ways.

  “We do not love it greatly. We would not be unhappy without the Others. For a long time, our forefathers knew that our race was bound to disappear. That no longer saddens us; we only wish to disappear without violence.” After several attempts, he succeeded in making himself understood. “All living things have their end of the world. It does not come more quickly for each of us than for those who preceded us; we may even live longer—and since our number diminishes from century to century, all that we can wish for is that the Others will give us time. Perhaps you will help us?”

  The bizarrerie of adaptation! I got used to those flat faces, which lacked the fragment of flesh, fundamentally so ugly, by means of which we breathe and smell; I got used to that skin, which had so little in common with ours, and to those strange branches that replaced our hands. Already I felt that, by degrees, everything would seem normal.

  More than their physical structure, I was fascinated by the idea of their eternal silence. Not only was their language visual, but they averred that they were incapable of emitting any sound comparable to articulated sound, or even to the cry of the most obscure terrestrial animal.

  “Is it because they can’t hear anything?” Antoine asked.

  “I’ve asked the question without any result,” Jean replied.

  Antoine tried to pose it in his turn; he could not make himself understood. The notion of articulate speech—and, undoubtedly, any notion of audition—was absolutely foreign to them.

  “On the other hand,” said Jean, “they perceive by touch vibrations of the ground that we don’t perceive at all—with the result that the approach of a creature is signaled in darkness with a precision that humans cannot attain.”

  “Could their sense of touch detect aerial waves, up to a point?”

  “Yes and no. If the waves are very powerful they perceive them by the vibration of the ground or objects.”

  While we were exchanging these items of speech other Tripeds had arrived.

  “This time there are two ‘women,’ ” Jean remarked. “I can’t quite bring myself to call them simply ‘females.’ ”

  He had no need to point them out: slightly taller than the males, they were more different from them than our counterparts are from us. There is no point in attempting to depict their grace and seductiveness; when I had exhausted all the metaphors of the poets—having summoned up flowers, stars, forests, summer evenings, spring mornings and the metamorphoses of water—I would still have said nothing! There was no relationship to human beauty or animal beauty. My imagination searched in vain for benchmarks of evocation and illusions of memory. How certain their charm was, though! Every passing minute confirmed it. Was it necessary to admit that beauty is more than a simple adaptation of a fraction of the universal reality to our human reality?

  I had always considered that the human face, with the soft protuberance of the mucus-producing nose, the ridiculous appendages of ears and that mouth in the shape of an oven—repugnant, in sum, by virtue of its brutal function—was not in itself superior to the snout of a wild boar, the head of a boa constrictor or the maw of a pike, and that it acquired all its seductiveness from an instinct similar to that which guides a hippopotamus, a vulture or a toad. The contribution of esthetic reality thus seemed to me to be subordinate to our physical structure, and would be entirely different if we were constituted differently. The young female Martians gave the lie to this theory; the most gracious of them, especially, demonstrated to me, with forceful evidence, the possibility of beauties perceptible to us and yet completely foreign to our environment and our evolution.

  The conversation continued, and took a positive turn. The Tripeds asked whether we might be able to help them combat the invasion of a part of their territory. They did not find it easy to fight against the small or large Zoomorphs. For the colossi, it was necessary for them to combine the emanations of a great many ray-guns; they also had to maintain themselves at a distance, lest they sacrifice a considerable number of combatants. In sum, the energies that the Tripeds had at their disposal were too weak.

  “Were your ancestors better armed?” I asked.

  “Our distant ancestors, yes. But in those days, the enemies of our Realm were small in size and only occupied sterile regions. No one guessed the future role that the creatures would play. When the peril became evident, it was too late. We no longer possessed means powerful enough to destroy the large enemies. All our efforts have been limited to opposing their advance.”

  I am summarizing the Tripeds’ replies, which were only obtained after numerous questions, and elucidated with difficulty.

  “Are your enemies organized?” asked Antoine.

  “Not exactly. There is no direct understanding—nothing that resembles a language—and we do not know whether it is appropriate to speak of intelligence. They act according to an instinct incomprehensible to us. When the invasion of a territory has begun, the enemies accumulate, and then the inferior organisms begin to increase…and when they have been in the area for a while, the ground is poisoned. Our plants can no longer live there.”

  “Are the invasions rapid?”

  “Quite rapid once they have begun…and more frequent as time goes by. Once, hundreds of centuries ago, the invasion was so slow that it was almost imperceptible; it was limited to desert regions. Our own decrease had already begun. Now, we often lose fertile regions. The invasion that has begun in the south is very threatening, and will cost us dear if it succeeds.”

  “We shall discuss the matter!”

  For some time, my friends and I stood there looking at one another.

  “We already know that we can intervene,” said Antoine, “but at the price of a considerable expenditure of energy. Our means, as they are at present, do not permit it. It’s necessary to know whether Mars is able to furnish us with new resources. Solar radiation is too weak here for our transformers to derive a radioactive surge directly. A supplementary derivation is required from Martian materials.

  “I think the planet can provide it,” Jean affirmed.

  “Let’s get to work!”

  The Tripeds watched our mysterious conversation avidly. They knew already that signals emanated from our mouths; they were trying to take account of lip-movements.

  Jean turned toward them and signed: “We will attack your enemies if we find the necessary energies.” After several repetitions he succeeded in making them understand. Because the Tripeds employed a form of energy hitherto unknown to us for loading their weapons, they ended up catching on to what he meant.

  “We will help you!” said the influential Triped. “But how do you know that our intervention will be useful?”

  “Becaus
e we have already encountered your enemies, and have discovered how to put them to flight.”

  At these words, there was a lively agitation among the Tripeds; their multiple eyes literally lit up their faces.

  More impatient than the males, one of the “women”—the more graceful—asked: “Have you seen the largest among them?”

  “Yes—several as long as the distance between me and that rock.”

  How we were able to decipher the joy of the Tripeds, so different in its manifestations from our human joys, remains inexplicable. The eyes, above all, revealed it to us, with their continual variations—and the emotion of the curious young female was singularly seductive.

  VII.

  Habituation—the preliminary form of adaptation among humans and animals—tightened our relationship with the Tripeds. We became so used to their presence, their forms, their movements and their customs that it soon seemed as if we had been among them for a very long time.

  As I have said, their dwellings were underground, although they spent a substantial part of the day in the open air. I now knew the reason for that, which was simply the need to escape the excessive nocturnal cooling—a reason all the more peremptory because a mild temperature reigned at a certain depth, accompanied by light emanated by the planetary subsoil.

  It had not even been necessary to excavate refuges; the planet had a great number of caverns linked by tunnels; they could often be accessed by slopes of varying steepness, all the way down to two or three thousand meters underground. Triped industry had made these natural habitats more comfortable in places.