The Nyctalope on Mars 1: The Mystery of the Fifteen

by Jean de La Hire

  Between these pedestals, in the vivid light of electric lamps, stood enormous machines, to whose enigmatic forms Science, that divinity of modern times, would have devoted careful study. And these machines were alive. Immense circular plates of crystal glass were rotating in dazzling displays of reflected light; levers were moving up and down; cylinders groaned with an interior tumult; whistling propellers hanging from the ceiling fanned the air—and sometimes, long crepitant sparks sprang from inexplicable items of apparatus, which bore some similarity to Oepinus condensers.16

  In the very center of the room there was a group of eight identical machines from which thick cables emerged that extended to wind around the uprights of the pylon—and in front of one of these machines two men were standing silently, with their hands in their pockets and their eyes fixed on a voltmeter of unusual size set in a large mahogany panel.

  Suddenly, one of the two men spoke.

  “What time is the short-circuit?”

  “The appointed time.”

  “Eight o’clock on the morning of October 18?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll be far enough away, won’t we, Breton?”

  “I presume so, Normand, since we’ll be leaving in the monoplane at 7 a.m.”

  There was a pause. Behind them, a cylinder groaned more loudly, deafeningly…

  “It’s just that there’ll be something of a cataclysm,” Normand said, raising his voice. “The entire esplanade will blow up; the shattered pieces of the pylon will be hurled up to two kilometers and the forest will be ravaged by a cyclone for two leagues around. There’ll be such a displacement of air…”

  “Bah!” said Breton, shrugging his shoulders. “We’ll be 200 kilometers away, at an altitude of 2000 meters, if you like. Perhaps we’ll feel a gust of wind…”

  “A squall?”

  “We’ll avoid it all…”

  “I hope so, Breton, but I’d rather leave sooner.”

  “Impossible! Koynos won’t reach Mars until tomorrow morning, when our central chronometer, here, marks 7 a.m.. We mustn’t cut off the current a single minute before then.”

  “And the chemical combination?”

  “Everything’s been calculated. The copper wire will drop there. The short-circuit wont be produced until 8 a.m. We’ll be far away.”

  There was a further silence between the two lonely men. In the midst of these gigantic machines, in the vestibule of the subterranean hall, they looked like pygmies.

  Breton took out his watch. “It’s 10 p.m. Should we go to bed?”

  “Yes, but tell me—what shall we do with the young man?”

  Breton burst out laughing. “A funny story!” he said. “I laughed my socks off when the lad finally confessed that the people in the aeronef had set him as a sentinel. A sentinel! There, immediately in front of the ventilation shaft! Bad luck on him! Did you see how we gathered him in, double-quick, one-two-three! He didn’t make a sound.”

  Normand laughed heartily. “Indeed! The poor boy was petrified when he saw the ground rise up at his feet and a black hole appear. A sentinel! The people in the aeronef were mad to make use of such a young lad!”

  “He’s brave, though,” said Breton. “He didn’t want to talk at first, remember! It took the threat of electrocution to make him admit that he’d been posted as a sentinel, and that Saint-Clair was obeying us, keeping to an altitude of 4000 meters. Yes, obey us!—and tomorrow, at 8 a.m., the aeronef will receive a rude shock. It’s at 4000 meters, that’s true, but directly above the esplanade. The explosion will be so powerful, the displacement of air so violent, that even at 4000 meters, the aeronef will be blown away like a wisp of straw, twisted, flattened… Oh, if Koynos knew that, he’d split his sides, although he never usually laughs at all.”

  The two technicians’ laughter was mingled momentarily.

  “The boy’s called Max, isn’t he?” Breton went on.

  “Yes—but we have to decide. What shall we do with him? We can’t leave him to be blown up with the base.”

  “Of course not! But if we take him with us, he’ll only talk later.”

  “Bah! He knows hardly anything.”

  After a pause, during which the two men carefully considered the fate of their prisoner, Normand exclaimed: “I’ve got it! We’ll take him with us, after making him swear that he’ll never say anything about his adventure, or else he dies. He’s young and honest—he won’t break his word.”

  “Yes, you’re right. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Everything’s in order here?”

  “All in order.”

  “Give the regulator a turn.”

  “It’s done.” So saying, Breton gently lowered a shiny crystal handle within arm’s reach.

  Then the two men left the group of eight twin machines behind, crossed the immense hall, opened a polished steel door and went into a room in which there were four little iron cots, arranged side-by-side along a wall covered with panels of waxed wood. Maximilien Jolivet was asleep on one of these beds. The soft light shed by a green-tinted lamp was shining full on his face. He was sweating profusely. His hands, tied together by a piece of rope, which then extended to wind tightly around his feet, lay limply on his chest. His breathing was painful and jerky.

  The two technicians stood beside the bed and looked down at the sleeper.

  “He’s in pain, Normand,” said one, in a whisper.

  “Poor boy!” said Normand. “If my son had lived, he’d be a fine lad like that, to be sure. Should we untie him, Breton? His arms are scraping his chest and it’s giving the little lad bad dreams. He won’t get away, that’s for sure!”

  “Untie him! Obviously, when one’s arms and legs are tied, one can’t sleep easy. He’s exhausted, anyway. This is the first night he’s been able to sleep. We’ll wake up before him tomorrow. Untie him…”

  Normand took a clasp-knife from his pocket, opened it, leaned over Jolivet and used the razor-sharp blade to cut the rope, first at the wrists and then at the ankles. At first, Max did not move, but then he released an immense sigh; his hands strayed towards the edges of the bed, his feet drew apart and he turned on to his right side. He continued sleeping but his breathing was now placid and regular.

  The two men exchanged a glance of satisfaction and went to their own beds. Three minutes later, they were lying down.

  “What time shall I set the alarm for, Breton?”

  “Half past six.”

  “Good night, then! We need to sleep soundly, for we’ll have an arduous journey tomorrow and the day after.”

  “We certainly shall! Forty-eight hours straight in an airplane!”

  Ten minutes went by, and a duet of rhythmic snoring sounds eventually rose up as Breton and Normand where plunged into the most restful of slumbers.

  Another ten minutes went by.

  The three extended bodies gave no other signs of life than the sounds of respiration—but then one of the three bodies moved quietly; a head was raised; two eyes opened. Max examined his guardians.

  “They’re asleep,” he breathed, between his lips. Slowly, as lightly and smoothly as he could, he slid from his bed to kneel on the floor. Gently, with circumspect fingers, he unlaced his left boot and took it off, then the right…

  He got up, taking great care that not creaking muscle betrayed his movements. He looked at the sleepers, then at the open door to the hall of machines, sparkling in the electric light.

  “Let’s go!” Max breathed. “I kept my eyes open when they were carrying me; I can find the way back…”

  Gliding over the floor, he crossed the room, went through the doorway and disappeared.

  An hour went by, then another, then a third. Breton and Normand were asleep. Their snores accompanied the rumble of the active machinery, as if in pianissimo. The door to the bedroom, in which the green lamp only gave off an attenuated light, was a large white rectangle in which phantom outlines of machines were distantly described. Suddenly, a form loomed up in that
rectangle: a dark form, which slowly glided forward. It was Jolivet. He went straight to his bed, and lay down, taking infinite precautions… but as he stretched himself out, the metallic mattress-base emitted a sharp screech.

  At that same instant, another dark shape had appeared in the luminous rectangle of the doorway, but it stepped back behind the wall as the screech sounded.

  “Eh? What? What’s that?” growled Breton, sitting up with his eyes open.

  Without replying, Max raised an arm and placed it on his breast, releasing a deep sigh. The mattress-base made the noise again.

  Breton shrugged his shoulders, muttering: “That blessed mattress-base hasn’t been oiled for months!” And he let himself fall back. Normand had not woken up. Breton took two minutes to go back to sleep.

  Again, the three extended bodies were motionless and the rhythmic snoring of men mingled with the enormous hum of the active machinery. The dark shape glimpsed in the luminous frame a little while before soon reappeared—and the topmost part of that shape was marked with two phosphorescent points, like nyctalopic eyes…

  At that same moment, Jolivet sat up in his bed again.

  Then it was quite simple.

  Saint-Clair took three silent steps, which took him to Normand’s bedside. Max slipped out of bed and stationed himself beside Breton’s bed. In his right hand, each of them held the butt of an automatic pistol, which could fire 20 rounds in 30 seconds.

  With a single movement, Saint-Clair and Max lifted their left hands and brought them down again, the former on Normand’s shoulder and the latter on Breton’s. The two sleepers both woke with a start, and each heard a voice that said: “Surrender, or die!” Each of them was looking into the little black hole of a familiar weapon.

  “Oh!” said Breton.

  “Bah!” coughed Normand.

  There was a minute’s silence, of dismay for the vanquished, expectation for the victors.

  “You surrender?” said Saint-Clair.

  “First, who are you?” cried Normand, without moving a muscle.

  “The Nyctalope.”

  “The Nycta…!” And his eyes widened. He turned his head slightly, looked at Breton, who was also looking at him, and said: “Do you understand?”

  Breton shrugged his shoulders, then said, resignedly: “That’s all right; we’ll understand later.”

  “It’s Monsieur Saint-Clair, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, my friend, in person.”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” Breton put in. “The little one’s fooled us. All the same it’s a bit strong…” After a brief pause, he added: “I surrender.”

  “Me too,” said his comrade.

  Max laughed silently. “We won’t do you any harm,” he said. “You were gentle with me—you untied me so that I could sleep more easily. Thanks.”

  Saint-Clair nodded his head and, putting his pistol back in his belt, said: “Hands in the air!”

  “Are you going to tie us up?” asked Breton.

  “Obviously! We’ll talk more calmly that way—because we need to talk.”

  “All right—everyone gets his turn,” said Breton.

  As Saint-Clair, having spotted a coil of rope suspended from a hook, went to fetch it, Breton leaned towards Normand and whispered in his ear: “The short-circuit is set automatically; at 8 a.m. the copper wire will drop into the solution. Silence! Everything will go up, including them—and us!”

  “I suppose so,” replied Normand, with a strange sadness—and he looked long and hard at Maximilien’s face, which was radiant with joy.

  Saint-Clair and Jolivet did not suspect that, at the very moment when their victory seemed complete, their lives had never been in such frightful danger—but isn’t the instinct that often warns animals of peril one of the natural, if nearly always unconscious, faculties of human beings? It’s necessary to believe so, for the first questions that Saint-Clair, seated on an empty bed, asked the two technicians were these:

  “Why did Bastien say to me as he died: before October 18, or all is lost? Why did the luminous messages on the esplanade say: before October 18? It’s now 4 a.m. on that fateful day—so what’s supposed to happen here later? Answer me.”

  Breton and Normand shook their heads and, after looking at one another gravely, growled in unison: “No.”

  “What?” said Saint-Clair.

  “We won’t answer that question,” Breton affirmed, resolutely.

  Normand raised his eyes desolately to look at Jolivet, and murmured, through blanched lips: “That’s right. We mustn’t answer that question.”

  II. Oxus’ Astonishment and Koynos’ Infatuation

  At exactly the same moment when Saint-Clair was posing the question that Breton would not and Normand “mustn’t” answer, exactly 55,100,000 kilometers from the XV’ s terrestrial base, Koynos was asleep on the seat of his moving radioplane. The mechanic Alpha was holding the steering-wheel. They had left Earth seven days, four hours and 14 minutes before.

  With his eyes on the chronometer, which had 24 divisions, Alpha let 53 minutes pass; then, tapping Koynos’ shoulder with his left hand to wake him up, he said: “We’ll be arriving in three hours, Commander.”

  The radioplane was, indeed, only a little less than 900,000 kilometers from Argyre Island, which had been captured from the Martians by the astonishing Oxus.

  “I slept for a long time!” Koynos said.

  “And soundly too, Commander,” added the stern Alpha, employing the respectful familiarity that Koynos allowed him.

  The Commander stretched himself, yawned, and said: “In three hours, Alpha, all communication between Earth and Mars will be cut off. That’s the will of the Master, in order that we can complete the conquest of Mars without being troubled by terrestrial worries. Our affiliates will hear no further mention of us until it pleases the Master to send one of the Fifteen back to Earth.”

  “What about the Congo station?”

  “Annihilated!”

  “What! All the machines, the pylon, the mobile esplanade, which cost so much work and so much money?”

  “Everything will be destroyed, Alpha. At 8 a.m., exactly. Breton and Normand will be flying to Paris in a monoplane, while the station goes up with a bang. The machines will be pulverized, the esplanade shattered, the pylon shredded into a thousand pieces and thrown to the four corners of Heaven!”

  “Fortunately, we’ll have arrived!”

  “Yes—had the cataclysm occurred before we landed on Argyre, the lack of Hertzian waves would no longer have allowed us to sustain us and propel us at an ever-diminishing speed, and we would fall like a mere bolide somewhere on the Martian surface.”

  “And as the fall would be from a height of thousands of kilometers…”

  “Hundreds would be sufficient for us to die without honor or glory, Alpha, broken, crushed, and reduced to a pulp.” And Koynos burst out laughing, so little did he fear that eventuality, so sure was he of the faithful punctuality of Breton and Normand.

  Indeed, the hours went by without any noteworthy incident; the kilometers were devoured by the radioplane speeding towards Mars, which was growing ever larger, and at 7:30:45 a.m.—which was exactly 7:30 a.m. on Earth—the radioplane’s runners touched down gently on the terrace of Koynos’ house on Argyre Island and skidded to a halt within three times their length.

  “To the Master first,” murmured Koynos. “I’ll go see Xavière immediately afterwards.”

  He helped Alpha back into the radioplane, though; then he went into his dressing-room, where he remained until the wall-clock chimed 8 a.m.—for Oxus was expecting Koynos at that precise minute, neither sooner nor later.

  The Commander found the Master in his vast study, standing behind the desk set between the celestial globe and the Martian globe. Koynos bowed, kissed the hand that was held out to him, and said, simply: “Master, your orders have been carried out.”

  “Without incident?”

  “Without incident. Saint-Clair is dead
.”

  Oxus shivered. “The Nyctalope, dead?”

  “Yes, Master, by my own hand. It was necessary. The same for Bastien, who did not want to follow me to Mars. As for the Congo station, it is being annihilated at this very hour.”

  Oxus smiled in satisfaction. Then, mechanically, he turned his eyes towards an instrument with a dial suspended, alongside others, from the wall of his office. By courtesy of a special receiver installed outside, the instrument recorded the intensity of the Hertzian waves emitted from the radiomotive station in the Congo.

  “This instrument won’t function again for a long time, then,” said Oxus, turning his head towards the dial, “and we...” He stopped, open-mouthed.

  Koynos, whose eyes were also fixed on the dial went pale. “What’s that?” he said.

  The needle on the dial was pointing to the number 150.

  “It ought to be at zero now!” stammered Koynos.

  But the needle, quivering slightly, as usual, remained at 150.

  Oxus marched up to the instrument, put his finger on a black button, and murmured, gravely: “It’s working perfectly, Koynos. What does it mean?”

  The Commander was overwhelmed by an irrational anxiety, though, as he said: “The chronometer at the terrestrial station must be slow.”

  “That’s possible,” aid Oxus. “Yet it’s a mathematically precise chronometer... Let’s wait!”

  They waited. Ten minutes went by. The needle remained at 150.

  “When the cataclysm occurs,” said Koynos, mechanically, “there will be no more Hertzian waves, and the needle will suddenly return to zero...”

  “Wait!” said Oxus again, in a dry tone.

  Another ten minutes were lost, one by one, in the past. The quivering needle maintained its position.

  Koynos was white. Oxus, his eyebrows furrowed, clenched his fists. And they remained silent, facing the dial which told them that, on the distant Earth, 14 million leagues away, their final orders had not been carried out.

  When an entire hour of waiting had expired without the needle being displaced by a quarter of a millimeter, Oxus looked at Koynos, but the Master’s eyes expressed nothing but a prodigious astonishment. In a blank voice, summarizing all his tumultuous thoughts, he said: “Are you sure, Koynos, that the Nyctalope is dead?”