The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  Night fell. We established a fan-shaped barrage of rays, admittedly weak but sufficient to keep the invaders at a distance.

  “It will be impossible,” Jean remarked, “to maintain a barrage when we’ve cleared a territory five or six times as extensive—we won’t have enough machines.”

  “Then let’s think about fabricating smaller accumulators.”

  That was relatively easy, now that we had developed our machine-tools, all the more so because the barrage devices, in addition to their smaller dimensions, did not require the same precision as the others.

  We communicated our project to the Implicit Chief, who understood its importance.

  A luminous multitude crowded around the large fires dispersed on the plain; the Triped camp reminded us of the entries when combatants bivouacked on the eve of battles, before the epoch of radiation warfare, from the era of hand-to-hand combat of primitive humans armed with pikes, clubs and spears to the battles of giant canon and airplanes. A mystical hope returned to the crowd a little of the racial ardor that had disappeared such a long time before.

  “It seems that our world has been rejuvenated!” Grace told me. “The dream of the Future is reborn! Many of our people hope that Earth will reanimate Mars…”

  “What about you, Grace?”

  “I don’t know. I’m happy…I feel that I’ve grown.”

  A poet of olden times wrote: “You looked at me in my night/With your beautiful starry gaze/Which dazzles me!”50 A hyperbolic image of Earth, but far inferior to reality here! Grace’s eyes, more varied and also more variable than our dull terrestrial eyes, were truly comparable to a constellation of great multicolored stars.

  We had gone out of the camp, and in the cold darkness the Ethereals were multiplying their mysterious movements. With a mystical exaltation, rendered more mystical still by Grace’s presence, my imagination went out to them.

  “We’ll never understand them!” I said, in a melancholy tone.

  “It’s better thus,” she replied. “It’s better not to understand too many things.”

  What tenderness emanated from her! I quivered in the utmost depths of my being. “Oh, Grace, it’s you that I’d like to understand!”

  “I’m simple—how much simpler than you! My inclinations guide me, and I don’t seek to know what they hide…”

  “Why come to me?”

  “Because I’m happy beside you!”

  She stroked me; I felt a mysterious fluid passing through me, more ineffable than a perfume, more evocative than a melody. I was born into a singular and charming life, which prolonged the image of Grace in the past and the future.

  The chill increased. I brought her back to the fires. We stopped near the Implicit Chief, whose daughter she was. He looked at us with a serene curiosity, astonished, I think, by the intimacy that had grown up between his daughter and me—and which, all things considered, pleased him. It would have seemed absurd to suspect a sexual attraction; the incompatibility of Tripeds and humans was too great! Even if such an attraction had revealed itself to be possible, the father would not have conceived any anxiety.

  As I have said, the extraordinary fluidity of Martian love, stripped of all gross apparatus and any brutal or baroque gesture, excludes all repugnance, hatred and jealousy. No father or mother intervenes in the predilections of their children. Two lovers can be faithful by virtue of an exclusive affection without being linked by social rites or individual promises. As for children, for many millennia they have been the responsibility of the community, which finds it politic to take an interest in their fate.

  In sum, the family does not exist in the terrestrial sense, although children are as beloved as ours. There are none of the painful doubts that still trouble so many humans regarding the authenticity of filiation; the Tripeds have been granted the privilege of an infallible instinct, which allows them to know immediately whether a new-born is theirs or not.

  If my preference for Grace pleased the Implicit Chief, it was because he felt a keen inclination for Terrans himself. His imagination, more than that of other Tripeds, was comparable to that of the Ancestors. Our coming—he told me subsequently—had awakened atavistic dreams in him and rendered to the Future and its Possibilities a seduction previously extinct. That evening, he asked me: “Is our sky as beautiful as yours?”

  “It is incomparably more beautiful by night,” I replied. “We have nothing similar to these luminous life-forms that agitate beneath stars brighter than ours. Your nights would be superior in everything if they were warmer, as ours are in summer, even in the lands where winters are harsh.”

  “Those warm nights must be very pleasant!”

  “They have a great deal of charm.”

  “And what of your days?”

  “I find them preferable to yours, but you might not like them at all. Our plants are more colorful and more numerous; they produce flowers from which other plants are born, and which are almost as striking as your womenfolk. Three quarters of the Earth’s surface are covered by waters that run or palpitate; the hour that precedes daylight and the one that follows it are much brighter than on Mars.”

  “We are nothing,” he said—and a melancholy expression passed over his magical eyes. “How much shorter life on our planet will be than on yours! Already the radiant age is past—and it never permitted our Ancestors to cross the abysms of space. Too small and too far away from the sun, our world could not accommodate an evolution comparable to that of your world!”

  “I find that quite astonishing. We only have one sort of life—you have three!”

  “There was only one in the time of the Great Power! As, in spite of everything, life has begun on your world in much the same manner as it did here, I think that it will multiply in its turn, when the decline of humans has begun. It’s logical to suppose that the multiplication in question will be much more surprising than it is here!”

  Two fires were enveloping us with their benevolent radiance, and I observed once again that the Tripeds’ abstract faculties surpassed ours.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, “why, given your subtle intelligence, you have renounced creativity.”

  “We didn’t renounce it spontaneously. It required an immense lapse of time, and countless ordeals, to abolish the creative faculties.”

  “But since you understand so easily things that are foreign to your civilization…”

  “Yes, we understand…I even think that we might learn everything that is done on Earth—but we no longer know how to draw new notions from our ancient notions…we don’t know how, and we’ve lost the taste for it. It seems so futile to us! Perhaps it would only be a cause of unhappiness—for the return of that sharp anticipation, inestimable for young races, would be despairing for old ones. A thousand times better not to think about the future, to narcotize ourselves in the present in which we only suffer while inferior life-forms threaten us. And yet, since your arrival, something stirs within me—a strange desire for renewal…the aspiration for a vaster and more intense life!”

  He threw a few blocks of fuel on the fire, and remained there, meditatively.

  IX. The Catastrophe

  In the four days that followed, we slowly extended the cleared zone and occupied, by joining it up with the terrain we had initially conquered, about 1800 hectares. Then it was necessary to rest, not because our energy supplies had been significantly deleted—we were renewing them without any great difficulty—but because it had become difficult to maintain an effective barrage.

  We then put all our efforts into the fabrication of defensive accumulators. Four of these little devices, put in working order, were emitting radiations in a fan along a line a kilometer long, but five kilometers remained to be covered, which was a considerable hindrance to us in the attack.

  It was therefore decided that we would work to complete our means of making war, and for ten days the entire camp set to work constructing them. On Earth, it would have been difficult to recruit novices
capable of understanding a complicated task as rapidly as the Tripeds, and carrying it out efficiently. On the other hand, one would have found much more initiative among the terrestrials. Our friends, even those of the elite, scarcely passed the level of assimilation; they did the work marvelously, but they were strangely short of initiative. Every gesture, rapidly learned, became automatic, but whenever something unexpected occurred, we had to intervene.

  Even so, the fabrication progressed much more rapidly than it would have advanced on Earth in similar circumstances, and the Tripeds delivered machines to us in quantity, all exactly similar to the models.

  Nearly two weeks passed, and almost all of the line to be covered was already defended; thanks to their feeble output, the accumulators recharged themselves easily by means of solar radiation.

  Once the work was organized, the very automatism of the Tripeds gave us the leisure to examine the Zoomorph Realm more closely. In the invaded zone as in the zones occupied for a long time by these organisms, it did not take us long to remark that there was nothing comparable to the vegetable/animal division characteristic of terrestrial life, and also of Martian life in the Realm to which the Tripeds belonged. All the Zoomorphs took aliments from the ground, but the superior Zoomorphs were “carnivores” as well.

  The absorption of aliments took place over the surface of the body; the Zoomorphs did not possess any orifice adapted for swallowing substances. It was all done by a sort of osmosis.51 Whether the nourishment was taken from the ground or from living beings, it entered into the organisms as infinitesimal corpuscles. Victims only perished exceptionally; after a period of torpor in which all vital action was suspended, they usually ended up by being reanimated.

  It was easy for us to capture Zoomorphs of small or medium size and to study their anatomy; thus far it has been impossible to understand exactly how their organs function, or even to determine their presence.

  As I have already noted, the constitution of higher Zoomorphs is trilateral; the inferior species have a structure as confused as the thallus of a mushroom or an alga. Inferior or superior, they all exhibit numerous vacuoles, often disposed in chains or triangles. We suppose that these vacuoles serve particularly for circulation and nutrition.

  For want of liquids, circulation is doubtless achieved by projections of microscopic particles; in several “vivisected” Zoomorphs we have been able, with the aid of a high-powered magnifying-glass, to follow currents and whirlpools of elements that seem homogenous to the circulation of blood and sap.

  At the outset we believed that certain Zoomorphs remained attached to the ground; we were not mistaken; all Zoomorphs can move, but the individuals of rudimentary species can only do so after long intervals of immobility, probably when they have impoverished the location to which they are fixed.

  The flattened form of Zoomorphs indicates, I think, that they require a large surface successfully to attack the inert or living solids from which they obtain their subsistence. This is all the more probable because they seem to absorb few substances from the atmosphere; the rigid ground must, given this principle, play the greater role in their formation—and because they do not put down roots, it is not surprising that they embrace and extend themselves superficially.

  It is also noticeable that the flattening of the structure is slightly less marked among the predatory Zoomorphs—but as they continue to demand the principal fraction of their nutrition from the planet, that development is of scant importance.

  There is no indication of an instinct of association among the Zoomorphs—and I am not talking about a refined instinct, like that of ants, termites and bees, or even wasps or beavers, but an instinct as like that which assembles flocks of migratory birds, bison herds or wolf packs. The actions of Zoomorphs are strictly individual. There is not even any trace of family ties.

  Fecundation is external; the new-borns seem to spring from the ground, so tiny is the seed, and while still almost invisible they seem already to possess the integral features of their species.

  Can one speak of the intelligence of Zoomorphs? We would rather say that they are entirely at the mercy of “tropisms,” which become more various as the individual is more highly evolved. We have searched for races of directive organs or organs of transmission; we assume that these functions emerge from the disposition of vacuoles. Where one would expect to find a head, as in a terrestrial or Martian animal, one finds no particular material structure, but several systems of vacuoles inside which multitudes of corpuscles move with a remarkable regularity.

  As for the vacuoles disposed in chains or linked by fine canaliculae, everything leads to the supposition that they replace our nervous and muscular systems.

  Nothing is more bizarre than the trajectories of these flat and formless individuals, which seem to move at hazard, tracing innumerable zigzags until they are solicited by some lure or some danger.

  When a prey-Zoomorph discerns the approach of a Zoomorph predator, it flees instantly; it has a good chance of saving itself for, at a distance varying according to species—but never very great—it ceases to be perceptible. Besides which, hunting is not continual, as in our forests and savannahs; even the predatory Zoomorphs live primarily on the soil and the atmosphere, it is only occasionally that they go in search of prey.

  By comparison with the life of Zoomorphs, the life of Martian animals and vegetables almost ceases to seem strange to us. The plants are reminiscent—more or less confusedly but still reminiscent—of our plants. The superior animals are homologues of our vertebrates; the running of some and the flight of others—the five feet or five wings—have ended up seeming natural to us. As for aquatic species, their five fins make them more comparable to our batrachians than our fish.

  Among all of them, circulation is liquid; it is a kind of blood that nourishes their bodies, even though the blood may be violet, blue or green. The vessels that contain it recall our veins and arteries, although a single heart is replaced by two, three, four or five convulsive pockets, according to the species.

  They have mouths; their multiple eyes are true eyes; the digestive organs do not differ overmuch from those of many terrestrial animals. If we had never seen birds, or fish, or insects, they would doubtless appear as singular to us as Martian animals—but we would recognize, eventually, a kinship between mammals and the birds, the fish or the insects. Thus we find homologies between Martian organisms and ours, although it is necessary to recognize a fundamental difference from the Zoomorphs, and even more so from the Ethereals.

  As for the Tripeds, we ended up considering them actually as people, although their evolution has separated them more obviously, in a few respects, from our superior animals than from the majority of the higher Martian creatures. Every day, however, their vertical stance, and their mentality especially—astonishingly close to ours—their emotionality, their charm, and the charm of their womenfolk above all, increased a familiarity and intimacy that made them our otherworldly family.

  During the night, we maintained the habit of taking refuge in the Stellarium, established behind the camp. In the early days, one of us would stand watch; then a profound sense of security caused us to abandon that precaution; all three of us slept as tranquilly as if we had been living in an earthly house.

  Generally, the Tripeds woke up before us. A few hundred of them, tempted by the caverns, had established themselves beneath the reconquered ground; others came and went as they pleased.

  One morning, we were woken up by a knocking on the hull of the Stellarium, and perceived numerous Tripeds, who were evidently upset—which, for want of being able to express their emotion by means of voices, they were making manifest in violent gestures.

  As soon as they saw that we were up, they multiplied signals; we knew immediately that the Zoomorphs had breached the barriers.

  “All the barriers?” asked Antoine, extremely surprised.

  “No!” replied several Tripeds at the same time—the signs were not confused as words wo
uld have been. “Only on the right...a host of enemies. A large number of our people have perished.”

  “We’re on our way!”

  The Stellarium was already lifting off, and we were soon hovering above the multitude. Seven enormous Zoomorphs—the largest was almost a hundred meters long—were moving among the bodies of Tripeds that had been struck down. Other Tripeds were lying in the dry bed of the ancestral river, and beyond that, a large number of our friends were gesticulating desperately.

  On the extreme right of the formerly-reconquered territory, there was no longer a single Triped alive—which permitted us to take the offensive immediately. Since it was impossible to attack all the monsters head-on, we adapted a divisive tactic. Each Zoomorph was maneuvered in turn, and as we proceeded more intensively than usual, we obtained rapid retreats. At a rate of five seconds of irradiation per individual, we were able to return to each Zoomorph twice a minute—and as the rays always fell in the same direction, the flight was orientated as we desired. In any case, out of inertia, the Zoomorphs did not attempt to turn back; even in the intervals of respite they followed the line that we wanted them to follow.

  It only took us a quarter of an hour to clear the area, after which Jean went out to examine the radiator on the far right.

  “The axis of the apparatus was tilted upwards a few degrees,” he declared on his return. “In consequence, the rays were no longer level with the ground. The Zoomorphs simply passed under the beams.”

  “Is it repaired?”

  “Naturally.”

  “That will teach us to stabilize the inclination more firmly!” said Antoine. “Such a small thing! Now let’s make inquiries of our friends.”

  While we were exchanging these brief words, the Implicit Chief had hurried forward. He seemed profoundly emotional. His body was trembling like a birch tree in the wind, and he thanked us vehemently. “We didn’t dare turn another apparatus against the invaders,” he said, “for that would have opened up a new access to those outside.”