Only four continued, heading for Mars—and they disappeared into the distant ether, like four falling stars…
Second Interlude
The French Minister of War, at that time, was General Darmant. It was to that valiant soldier, very active in his intelligence and very modern in his thinking, that the French army owed its battalions of aviators and the active deployment of aero-machine-guns: special aircraft whose engines, by means of a simple clutch-system, at an appropriate moment, could activate a continuously-firing machine-gun mounted on a rotating pivot, placed underneath the body of the machine. The pilot had only to press his foot on a pedal and a hundred and twenty bullets per minutes would immediately sweep the horizontal plans of the aero-machine-gun within a radius of two thousand meters, either in a complete circle or within the limits of a desired angle.
At 10 a.m. on October 23, General Darmant, who was in his office in the Rue Saint-Dominique, received an unexpected visit from Monsieur Sanglier, the head of the Sûreté. The interview lasted three minutes.
After showing Monsieur Sanglier out, General Darmant called the duty officer and said: “Send Ensign Damprich in.”
As soon as the Ensign was in his presence, all the doors being closed, the Minister invited him to sit down and said: “Go ahead—I’m listening.”
The Ensign spoke. He told the story, from the beginning, of the extraordinary adventure in which he had taken part. He told it in its entirety, saying nothing superfluous, but omitting no material detail. When he reached the point of talking about himself, he said: “Before leaving by radioplane with 14 companions for the planet Mars, Saint-Clair, who had initially intended to take me with him, preferred to charge me with a mission to come to you, Monsieur le Ministre. He gave me his very clear instructions, a confidential letter addressed to you, and a duplicate of the plans necessary for the execution of his projects. Accompanied by a technician from the Condor, I’ve come here from the Congo by airplane, without a pause. I shall only go back when I can carry your reply, in order to make it known to the Nyctalope via interstellar radiotelegraphy.”
Opening a briefcase that he had been balancing until then on his knees, he first took out a large sealed envelope, then a wad of papers, which he put on the ministerial desk.
Without interrupting his silence, General Darmant broke the seal on the envelope, unfolded the letter that it contained, and read it. This is the text of that letter, copied from the original contained in the dossier of the XV:
Congo Radiomotive Station,
October 22,
To General Darmant, Minister of War, Paris.
Monsieur le Ministre,
In a few hours, I shall depart for the planet Mars by ways and means that have already been explained to you by Ensign Damprich, bearer of this letter.
On Mars, where I shall arrive on October 29, I shall merely consider myself as the scout of a French expeditionary force. It is up to you, Monsieur le Ministre, to obtain that force from the government of our country and to direct it, in the first instance, to the Congo radiomotive station. This force should, in my opinion, consist of only 3000 men, selected as soon as possible from the aviation battalions and infantry machine-gunners. It should be accompanied by a crew of 100 experienced technicians.
Under the directions of Messrs. Breton and Normand, chief technicians of the station, this crew should be able to construct in one month the 250 12-seater radioplanes necessary to transport the aforementioned 3000 men to Mars. The armaments of this troop will be constituted by a stock of electric rifles, of a model as yet unknown to us, which I have found in the store-rooms of the radiomotive station.
It is important that the governmental decision is taken within 24 hours and that the expeditionary force is sent to the station within a week, by means of military aircraft currently in service. During the month that is necessary for the construction of the radioplanes, the men should initiate themselves, at the station itself, in the handling of the electric weapons and the guidance of the radioplanes, as well as take an elementary course regarding the astronomical conditions and habitability of Mars. It would be wise if an astronomer—Camille Flammarion, for example—were to be attached to the commander of the expeditionary force, and that a representative of the government were to be delegated to it in the capacity of historian, in order to keep the official journal of the expedition. For my part, on Mars, I shall take advantage of the 30 days to prepare a landing-ground for the expeditionary force appropriate to the glory of the French army.
Please accept, Monsieur le Ministre, assurances of my respectful sentiments and profound devotion.
Leo Saint-Clair.
P.S. Ensign Damprich is equipped with the plans and estimates necessary to support this letter and will place himself at the disposal of the government for 48 hours to make any supplementary explanations. L. S.-C.
General Darmant was a difficult man to astonish. On this occasion, however, he was rather astounded. In the 10 years that he had been a Minister, however, he had never had a better opportunity to be astounded than he had at that moment.
With his elbows on the table and his chin in his joined hands, he silently considered the Nyctalope’s letter, spread out in front of him, and he reflected. His stupefaction lessened by the minute, to the extent that, finally raising his head, he said in the calmest possible voice—a clear voice accustomed to impassive command: “Where are you staying, Ensign?”
“The Grand Hotel, Monsieur le Ministre.”
“Thank you. Please remain at my disposal; I shall see Monsieur Thoubert in a quarter of an hour, and the President of the Council will decide whether we need to submit the question to the Council of Ministers, which meets tomorrow.”
Damprich had risen to his feet. General Darmant accompanied him to the door, shook his hand, and, returning to his desk, gathered together the letter and the dossier sent by Saint-Clair.
A quarter of an hour later, a ministerial car deposited General Darmant at the steps of the Ministry of the Interior.
Monsieur Thoubert being absent for a few minutes, the Minister of War was received by Maurice Reclus, the President of the Council’s Chief of Staff.19
The General had known the young man for two years; his intelligence was very lively, his tact perfect, his ardent activity and political sense were highly esteemed in official milieux. The President of the Council had such faith in his Chief of Staff that even Ministers, before talking to Monsieur Thoubert, were not at all displeased to present themselves initially to Maurice Reclus, and they often regulated their attitude to the President of the Council according to the respectful indications that the Chief of Staff—without appearing to attach any importance to them, of course—had skillfully suggested to them.
This way why, while waiting for Monsieur Thoubert, General Darmant—in a familiar and friendly fashion that safeguarded his ministerial dignity—acquainted Monsieur Reclus with Saint-Clair’s astonishing proposal.
“I’m an old friend of the Nyctalope,” Monsieur Reclus said, gravely. “If he says that he’s about to go to Mars, it’s because the extraordinary journey is possible. The President of the Council, to whom I once had the honor of introducing Saint-Clair, considers that the Nyctalope is the perfect archetype of France the Conquering Nation. With respect to the present situation, Monsieur Thoubert will certainly share your opinion, Monsieur le Ministre, and I do not think it too forward of me to tell you that, if the President of the Republic does not oppose it, the Martian expedition will be decided tomorrow. There is, it is true, Parliament…” The Chief of Staff broke off and made a significant grimace. The Minister of War smiled and shrugged his shoulders almost imperceptibly—at which sight, Monsieur Reclus laughed silently.
At that moment, though, Monsieur Thoubert, the President of the Council, came into the office, and Monsieur Reclus withdrew, after shaking General Darmant’s hand.
The following morning, on the clearly-formulated instructions of Monsieur Bourgeois, President of the Rep
ublic, with whom Monsieur Thoubert had had an interview the previous night, the Council of Ministers met in full, including the Undersecretary of State for the Fine Arts himself! An extraordinary thing: contrary to the regulations, Monsieur Brand, President of the Senate, and Monsieur Painlevé, President of the Chamber, also attended the session!
Ensign Damprich had been summoned and, during the first part of the session, found himself in a neighboring room with Maurice Reclus and the Secretary-General of the Presidency.
In the Council, the current business was quickly expedited. Then Damprich was called. For reasons that remain secret, the official record of the Council’s deliberation has not been included among the innumerable documents comprising the dossier of the XV, but the consequences of that deliberation are well-known. They are summarized in a deceptive manner in this note, which the Agence Havas communicated to the newspapers that evening, and which is to be found in the appropriate folio of the dossier:
The Council of Ministers has decided to attempt a trial mobilization of military aviators. Three thousand men and 1000 airplanes, departing from various garrisons of France and Algeria, will congregate on a fixed date in the vicinity of Brazzaville, in the Congo.
These maneuvers, whose purpose is to demonstrate the value and practical utility of a projected regiment of aviators, are due to the initiative of Monsieur Thoubert and General Darmant, who have both displayed great interest on many occasions in the question of airborne troops.
The 3000 men will remain in the Congo for a month. They will be placed under the command of Colonel Boulaux, Director of the airfield of Chalais-Meudon.
In addition, in order not to limit the flight of the aircraft involved in the maneuvers to the south and east of Brazzaville too narrowly, the government has obtained from Belgium entire liberty of passage throughout the extent of the Independent State of the Congo.
The necessary funding for this original trial mobilization and long-distance expedition will be met from the current exercise budget, which is broadly sufficient, due to recent economies made in the munitions of war.
Attempting to outdo one another, all the ministerial newspapers praised this idea, which they described as “in conformity with the progress of science” and “eminently patriotic.” No journalist or reader suspected that the government was assuming the terrible responsibility of sending 3000 men to Mars, without even informing the Chamber and the Senate.
It is true that the Chamber and the Senate were then on vacation. It is also true that Messrs. Brand and Painlevé, who were present at the Council meeting that had taken this clearly unconstitutional decision, shouldered part of the responsibility, in the name of the Chamber and the Senate, and, in case of subsequent difficulties, the gross responsibility for the perils that the Ministers and the President of the Republic himself were assuming. It is also true, finally, that the Ministers, skilled psychologists, were giving themselves a month to prepare public opinion by means of an adroit press campaign, to make it accept with enthusiastic admiration on November 23 what it would have considered, on October 24, to be folly and aberration.
TO BE CONTINUED IN
PART TWO: THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE
Notes
1 A metric league is four kilometers, so the distance Koynos is quoting is 56 million kilometers. Earth and Mars do, in fact, come that close to one another during some oppositions, although Earth’s mean distance from the Sun is approximately 150 million km and Mars’ mean distance from the Sun is approximately 228 million km. The duration of a 56 million km journey at 300,000 km per hour is actually 186.67 hours, or 7 days 18 hours and 40 minutes, but that arithmetical quibble pales into insignificance when one remembers—as La Hire apparently does not—that the Earth and Mars are moving objects whose distance is constantly changing, extending to more than 350 million km when they are on opposite sides of the Sun. There could not, therefore, be any standard journey time for the trip, and it would vary much more greatly than La Hire eventually concedes that it might, if the journey were possible at all (the hypothetical method he employs is absurd).
2 The region of Argyrus still features on modern maps of Mars, where the Latin form of the name is conventionally used, but it is no longer reckoned to be a sea, so it cannot accommodate an island. I have translated La Hire’s île d’Argyre into English, and have done the same with all his other terms—which are borrowed, with due acknowledgement, from Camille Flammarion’s maps—because they refer to an essentially imaginary Mars rather than the real one whose map still duplicates some, but not all, of Flammarion’s labels.
3 Hertzian waves—i.e., radio waves—could not possibly flow “uninterruptedly” from a station on Earth to a spaceship in flight because the Earth is rotating on its axis; for approximately half of each day, the mass of the Earth would interrupt the signal. Mars also rotates at much the same axial velocity, so the transmissions from a Martian station propelling radioplanes in the opposition direction would be similarly interrupted. As with other inconvenient facts, La Hire ignores this, presumably in order that his story should not become inconveniently complicated.
4 The “Hictaner” was a man adapted to breathe under water, who provided the central motif of the novel to which Le mystère des XV is a sequel, L’homme qui peut vivre dans l’eau [The Man Who Could Live Underwater], serialized in Le Matin in 1908. The significance of the term is dubious; the same spelling is also used in the Ferenczi paperback edition of the earlier novel but Jess Nevins renders the term “Ichtaner” in an essay on the Nyctalope contained in his web guide to superheroes and “Icthaner” might make more sense, as a contraction of Icthyander (“fish-man” in Greek). The statement that the present story is taking place 25 years after its predecessor is subsequently contradicted, in several different ways, causing a confusion that is discussed in some detail in the afterword.
5 The paperback text misquotes this date as 1900, probably because of a typographical error; I have substituted the year in which Monsieur Gabet actually demonstrated his “torpille radio-automatique.”
6 William Henry Pickering (1858-1938) played a crucial part in the evolution of the myth of the Martian canals; his observations of Mars during the opposition of 1892 included allegations regarding “lakes” and “clouds” that greatly encouraged the hypothesis that the planet was habitable and were extensively cited by Percival Lowell in support of the thesis that the planet was home to an advanced civilization. Pickering’s suggestion that interplanetary signals might be exchanged by means of an optical telegraph did not give rise to any actual project in our history, but such an endeavor had been featured in Gustave Le Rouge’s Le prisonnier de la planète Mars (1908; tr. in the Black Coat Press edition of The Vampires of Mars), which La Hire had probably read.
7 The “old Blériot” mentioned here is Louis; his son Marcel also became an aviator of some note.
8 Chrysale is a character in Molière’s Femmes savantes, who protests against the pedantic pretensions of his wife, brother and daughter by means of stubborn prosaicism and calculated understatement.
9 Like La Hire, I have already run out of conventional terms synonymous with “airship” and “airplane,” further variations of which would be useful to describe the different types of vessel he invents. Here, La Hire borrows the term “aéronef” from Jules Verne’s Robur le conquérant (tr. as The Clipper of the Clouds), and I have followed the example of Verne’s English translator, who transcribed it directly for want of any ready-made English equivalent.
10 This must be a misprint, and should probably read “70th year.” I have tried to clarify the matter, to the extent that it is possible, in the afterword.
11 Les terres du ciel [The Worlds in the Heavens] was published in 1877. La planète Mars et ses conditions d’habitabilité [The planet Mars and its conditions of habitability] was first published in 1892, with an updated edition in 1909; it is the maps contained in the latter version that La Hire uses in his accounts of Martian geography.
12 The actual elephant, hippopotamus and rhinoceros are not forest animals, and the panther and leopard are the same species. The parallel species of popular fiction are, however, quite different.
13 Henry Morton Stanley, who became famous for tracking down the missionary David Livingstone, subsequently entered the service of Leopold II of Belgium, and played a significant role in the establishment of the Independent State of the Congo. His book In Darkest Africa (1890) gave a mildly sensationalized account of his 1887-89 expedition into the Ituri forest; the text only mentions the tribes that he groups together as the Wambutti briefly, remarking almost en passant that they are “dwarfs or pigmies,” and certainly does not describe them as “violent and bloodthirsty cannibals,” but they caught the public imagination more than any other inclusion in the text; they played an increasingly significant role in the supplementary lectures Stanly gave and were adopted into popular fiction with considerable zest. La Hire calls the tribesmen “nains,” which I have chosen to translate as “dwarfs” partly because La Hire uses the French word “pygmées” elsewhere, in a different context, and partly to emphasize that La Hire’s “Vouatoua”—a word that he seems to have invented—bear no resemblance at all to Stanley’s Wambutti (who are nowadays known as the Bambuti, and are no more dwarfs than they are cannibals).
14 The French government had long maintained a notional monopoly on the sale of tobacco, which could only be bought legally from official outlets, but it had always been a law that excited a great deal of disobedience and derision.
15 Actual lemurs inhabit Madagascar, but literary lemurs are more versatile.
16 Franz Ulrich Theodore Oepinus, or Aepinus (1724-1802) was one of the pioneers of electrical science, who lent his name to a type of condenser in use throughout the 19th century.
The Nyctalope on Mars 1: The Mystery of the Fifteen Page 20