The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  “Possible, doubtless,” Antoine retorted, “but so improbable that, for us, it might as well be impossible.”

  “If, by chance, they were much more intelligent than us,” I remarked, “there would be a chance of success. You’ve already admitted that they’re essentially superior.”

  “Essentially, yes. But suppose they’re still in the earliest phase of their reign—by analogy, something like the first terrestrial creatures of the Primary Era.”

  “For what it would cost us,” said Jean, his eyes fixed on a column in which the Ethereals were manifesting a vertiginous activity, “it would be absurd not to make the attempt.”

  We did not go any further that evening. On the far horizon the Earth rose, a coppery jade star that we contemplated affectionately; it would take so little to prevent us from ever returning to it. Jean’s words, however, rendered more concrete an idea to which we often returned. Another incident gave him a singular impulsion. It was during a visit that we made with the Implicit Chief to the ruins of a temple that had been abandoned while the Tripeds still retained their creative genius. The ruins in question, which were not very ancient—perhaps 5000 or 6000 years old—were composed for the most part of carved blocks, sometimes bearing a number of symbols, which we judged to be inscriptions.

  “They are, indeed, inscriptions,” the Implicit Chief affirmed, “but we can no longer decipher them. One of them, however, according to my great-great grandfather, reports an attempt at communication between our ancestors and the luminous life-forms.”

  “Eureka!” Jean exclaimed, enthusiastically.

  Antoine nodded his head, excited in his abstract fashion, his eyes suddenly vague, devoid of gaze, and his eyebrows furrowed. I was no less excited than they were.

  “But you haven’t retained any trace of that communication?” I asked the Implicit Chief.

  “No, none—nor had my great-great grandfather. If the attempt succeeded, all communication between the luminous life-forms and us ceased hundreds of thousands of years ago.” In a melancholy fashion, he added: “It’s lost, like so many admirable things. I don’t even know the purpose of most of the tools you see there. As I’ve often told you, we’re poor decadent creatures, who don’t even know a thousandth of what they knew, and our power has diminished more than we know.”

  Thus spoke the Implicit Chief, and—I don’t know why—his speech, although similar to so many others in which he testified to the Tripeds’ decline, struck us more keenly than all the rest. With a placid sadness, he added: “I am alone in regretting it, and only on certain days. Decadence is not a disease; often I reckon it is a good thing.” After a pause, he went on: “If only we were conclusively protected from the arid creatures, life would be happy for me and the others.”

  My distracted companions paid hardly any attention to these words. Jean’s expression was revealing an increasing agitation; Antoine’s, contracted, testified to an intense preoccupation.

  When we went back to the Stellarium, Jean said: “Why shouldn’t we try to do what the ancient Tripeds might perhaps have done?”

  “It’s a matter of knowing whether we’re as intelligent as they were,” said Antoine. “I doubt it.”

  “Eh? We may doubt it, if we please, provided that it’s a provisional doubt that doesn’t prevent action.”

  “My doubts are stimulants!” Antoine retorted, phlegmatically.

  That evening, we began experiments—or, as Jean put it, opened hostilities. As had been agreed during the day, we traced luminous signs on a board. Naturally, we adopted the method that was, in a sense, classical—one that our ancestors had tried in the nineteenth century and our contemporaries had improved. We had encountered only failure; neither Mars nor Venus, nor any other planet, had ever replied. With the aid of a phosphorescent substance we traced simple geometrical figures on the board: triangles, squares, circles and ellipses. The figures thus assembled seemed to us to have more chance of attracting attention than a single figure, even if it were repeated.

  A few hours passed. Nothing, naturally.

  “It would have been prodigious to obtain an immediate reaction from the Ethereals,” Antoine remarked.

  “Is it certain that no reaction was produced?” I said.

  Jean, who was observing the columns and luminous groups attentively, said in his turn: “I haven’t observed anything irregular, at any rate.”

  “Of course not!” muttered Antoine, who had started laughing softly. “It will take time for us to be able to distinguish the normal and the abnormal in these creatures.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” Jean retorted, with a hint of bitterness. “I agree that I’d have done better to say that I didn’t notice anything at all.”

  “Conclusion?”

  “No conclusion. We remain in the dark, not knowing whether our appeal has failed, or even knowing whether it has been noticed. We don’t know anything. Nevertheless, we have to repeat the experiment for several days, in order to attract the Ethereals’ attention.”

  “That’s what we shall do.”

  “Amen,” said Jean. “I have a feeling, Antoine, that it will be necessary to have recourse to something other than the visual. Everything inclines us to suppose that a mode of perception analogous to our sight is foreign to them. In the meantime, let’s repeat the first experiment carefully.”

  We repeated it carefully for six days running, for the sake of conscientiousness.

  “Nothing prevents us from repeating it endlessly,” said Jean, on the sixth day, “but we ought to undertake other simultaneous exercises.”

  He had no need to say so. His intention corresponded to ours. We thought it quite improbable, in fact, that the Ethereals had means of perception corresponding to our senses. Given the lack of those senses, we had a better chance of achieving our goal with the aid of rhythmic signals, commencing with the most rudimentary.

  “To what extent, and in what form—if one can speak of form in this context—are they conscious of our presence?” Antoine asked. “They presumably confuse us with the objects that they go around.”

  “That’s plausible,” Jean agreed. “They’re probably unaware of the living existence of Zoomorphs, Tripeds and everything else living on Mars alongside them.”

  “Which wouldn’t bode well for our enterprise,” I added. “I refuse to believe it, for it would be necessary to write off an intelligence having a least some analogy with our own.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t animate obstacles, by virtue of their perpetual displacement, and various actions and reactions, have a general and particular rhythm quite different from inanimate objects? If they’re intelligent, the Ethereals can’t have failed to perceive that.”

  “But without necessarily concluding that the obstacles are alive,” Antoine contended.

  “Agreed—but the difference must give beings whose thoughts have any relationship with ours, however distant, cause to reflect.”

  “Let’s pass on to the Deluge. What signals should we adopt?”

  “I can’t think of anything simpler than Morse code in a radiant form,” Jean suggested.

  “That’s very rudimentary,” said Antoine, pulling a face.

  We tried radiant Morse code for several days, within the limits of visual radiation, and in the infra-red and ultra-violet, all the way to X-rays. It had no more success than the geometric designs.

  On the seventh day, Antoine complained: “It definitely is a wild goose chase.”

  “A noble pursuit,” said Violaine.

  It should be noted that these attempts did not waste much time; once the apparatus was set up, it functioned automatically. Afterwards, it was sufficient for one or other of us to keep an eye on events during the two or three nocturnal hours devoted to the experiments.

  “A noble pursuit if you wish,” I said, “but another failure. I’ve got an idea!”

  “I’ll stand aside to let it pass!” Antoine joked.

  “Well, it’s
that our radiant Morse signals are too slow in frequency to be perceived by the Ethereals. Let’s accelerate them.”

  “Not a bad idea. Let’s accelerate them.”

  Quite rapidly, we set up an acceleration device, of which we had all the necessary components, complemented by an apparatus for successive deceleration. The frequency of the signals was multiplied by a thousand.

  Still nothing.

  After two days, we multiplied them by a hundred thousand, then a million, and a billion.

  For two hours, we repeated the word homo endlessly.59

  The operation required little attention, so we engaged in rambling conversations or trivial tasks.

  One evening, Jean’s voice awoke me from a meditation. “The miracle is accomplished!” His bright eyes were shining with enthusiasm, his cheeks quivering.

  “What?” said Antoine, straightening up with a start.

  “They’ve replied!”

  “No? No?” I said, simultaneously credulous and incredulous.

  He had no need to insist; the decelerators were connected to an evidential plaque imbued with a fluorescent material, and the plaque was repeating, at regular intervals:

  . . . __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

  We looked at it, astounding. Then Violaine murmured, gratefully: “A new era is beginning.”

  We were saturated with enthusiasm. If we had had any doubt, it would have been dissipated when Jean sent a new signal: “I am,” which was immediately repeated.

  “Ah!” said Jean, putting his hands together. “If I had any faith, I would pray.”

  “But we are praying!” Violaine retorted. “Our attempt has been one long prayer. I was sure that they’re alive, but I never really hoped that a link could be established between material creatures and creatures of radiation.”

  “Personally,” said Jean, softly, “I already entertained a timid hope during our first voyage.”

  “Mystics are often right!” Antoine concluded. “Besides, the radio-wave technology permitted us to hope.”

  VII.

  Prodigious as our first success was, it did not give us any certainty with respect to the future of our relations with the Ethereals. After all, communication had only been achieved in its most embryonic form; they knew that we existed, that we were living beings like them and that we were attempting to know them and make ourselves known to them. It was a clean slate, with a simple mutual notion of existence. It was now necessary to cross abysses of discrimination to go beyond that.

  Our first victory dissuaded us from despair. Jean, following the norms of his nature, was full of faith and hope. We first set out to suggest the notion of identity and the verb “to be,” which implies existence. To succeed in that we made use of the terms “you” and “me,” applied alternatively to one or other of us, and then simply the verb “to be.”

  It required much probing to arrive at that result, and intuition played such a considerable role, especially on the part of the Ethereals, that I feel incapable of explaining it—all the more so because my memory only registered the major phases, without any perceptible relationship between them. It was, in a sense, the cerebral development of a little child. Every day brought a new element of discrimination; soon, it was evident that the Ethereals could distinguish us individually and understood the verb that commanded all the others.

  For our part, we now had a fairly clear perception of the group with which we were corresponding. It was composed of nine quite distinct individuals. They had not precise forms, but each of them comprised a dozen small luminous centers of various shades and intensities, linked by multicolored lines and helices. The distance between the centers, like the movement of the lines and helices, varied continually. A priori, these movements made any precise distinction between individuals, but we eventually finished up by recognizing them, at first with difficulty then quite easily, thanks to repetitions, the creators of habit and automatism; besides, variable as the forms of our correspondents were, they gravitated around a median form.

  As it accelerated, the progress became so rapid that no one, I think, was able to define its phases. The fact is that the Ethereals had taken command, and we were soon no longer able to doubt that their intelligence was far in advance of ours. They not only knew how to create methods, but also to make us understand them with an extraordinary clarity.

  To begin with, they learned our language; after some time, the slightest indication was sufficient for them. The slightest analogy suggested fecund generalizations to them. Thanks to them, our procedures were subject to prodigious improvements; the acceleration and deceleration devices required fewer and fewer intermediate materials. That was only a preliminary phase, however; it did not take the Ethereals long to want to understand us better and to reply to us in our own fashion. Everything became relatively easy when, following their instructions, we had installed a radio-transmitter of sufficient frequency. The radiations derived from our voices were communicated to them directly.

  The day eventually arrived when we heard them—a moment as fabulous as the one when we received their initial response. To hear voices that did not exist, emitted by beings which cannot emit or perceive sound, and to reply to them with our voices transformed into universal radiations, infinitely surpassed anything we had hoped for in our wildest dreams. When we heard the first words emanated by the Ethereals, Jean, always more inclined than the rest of us to exteriorize his enthusiasm, exclaimed: “You’re right, Violaine! It’s a new era of life, not only for this world but perhaps for all the sister planets of Earth and Mars.”

  A bad line of 19th century verse came back to memory: “Men will become as gods!”60

  “They are the gods!” muttered Antoine, pointing at the Ethereals.

  “Who knows?”

  “Do you doubt that their intelligence infinitely surpasses ours?”

  “No! I don’t doubt that, but perhaps we have potential for development that they do not. We’ve succeeded in leaving our planet. Will they ever succeed in leaving the environment of Mars? We guessed that they were alive, but it seems that they ignored us totally at first.”

  “That’s because we were negligible to them.”

  “Just as they were to us. Nevertheless, I admit their superiority, with the reservation that it does not extend to all our faculties or all our possibilities.”

  “For myself,” said Jean, “I believe they’re capable of overtaking us in every respect.”

  “I don’t deny it—but I doubt it.”

  “We’ll try to find out,” said Antoine. “First, it will be very interesting to know whether they have organizations superior to human organizations.”

  “Surely they do,” affirmed Violaine, with a violence shot through with indignation. “It’s obvious that their communication between individuals is much more perfect than ours, and it must be the same for their collectives and multitudes—as proven by the movement of their columns, which often comprise vast numbers of individuals and collective agitations that we sometimes witness.”

  “On those points,” Antoine agreed, “I’m entirely inclined to share your views, but not with respect to stable institutions and our ‘social memory.’ Have they anything analogous to our libraries, which conserve the past and summarize all our knowledge externally to ourselves? Have they in their activity a manner of existence intermediate between mineral and colloidal life, as between humans and the terrestrial surface? It’s hardly probable.”

  “They must have something better.”

  “We shall see.”

  Our intercourse with the Ethereals became veritable conversations, which would have been almost intimate but for a serious physiological obstacle; what we took a minute to say unfolded, after successive accelerations, in a tiny fraction of that time, on the order of one trillionth. They replied at the same speed, but their words, after being slowed down, arrived at the speed of our own voices. They had, in consequence, to await our responses for an immense interval, relative to the rhythm of
their existence. By contrast, their responses reached us instantaneously, but were reeled off with an unaccustomed rapidity. For example, in a trillionth of a second they could make such progress that it took us a trillion times as long—ten minutes, for example—eventually to follow it.

  Instantaneity on one side, almost infinite slowness on the other; one can easily imagine the great awkwardness in our communications.

  Let us summarize this schematically. Antoine addresses an Ethereal. He speaks for five minutes. The response is instantaneous. An Ethereal speaks for a trillionth of a second. The reply, after successive decelerations, takes ten minutes to unfold. It is therefore necessary for it to await Antoine’s reply for those ten minutes—an extremely long time so far as it is concerned. Obviously, during the interval, it is going to occupy itself with something else.

  Fortunately their lifetimes are not proportional to their vibratory speed—as they made known to us—or conversation would have been practically impossible. Organisms make adjustments—otherwise, would we be able to perceive frequencies as practically distinct as those of light and sound?

  VIII.

  The group that conversed with us—since, as I said above, our communications were becoming veritable conversations—was not absolutely stable. To begin with it had comprised nine individuals; now it was larger, sometimes a dozen, fifteen or even twenty. However, five of the original Ethereals were always present. We had given them the names of stars: Antares, Aldebaran, Arcturus, Vega and Sirius.

  Although the colors of the centers, lines and helices were variable, red and orange appeared more distinctly in Antares, Aldebaran and Arcturus than in Vega or Sirius—which, for that reason, seemed to us to be predominantly blue or violet. Slight as the difference was, it was perceptible, and we learned that it was not without significance; the polarity of the first three was opposed to the polarity of the other two, although that opposition did not have the same significance as the one between positive and negative electrical elements.