The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  But let’s concentrate on Eros. Through the porthole, seen with the naked eye, it’s a fourth magnitude star. In the telescope, it’s a tiny, very bright disk. The measurement gives me less than the number of seconds anticipated by the ready-reckoner.

  I go back down—or, rather, go back through the trap, inconvenienced by my weightlessness, floating as in those dreams in which one “levitates” into the air…those dreams, according to what I’ve read, that might be distant atavistic memories of the time when humankind’s ancestors lived in water, as fish.

  But I’m far from being as fortunate, here, as a fish in the water!

  In the engine room, Aurore is resting peacefully. The sight of her dear face attenuates the painful impression I’m feeling of being the only person on board awake.

  I go back up a hour later and, surprise! This time, the disk of Eros is dark, and I find several seconds of arc too many. I’m obviously a dunce when it comes to making astronomical observations!

  The effort that I’ve had to make in getting around has tired me out. I let myself drift momentarily, no matter where, over the storage-lockers, and I close my eyes. A kind of fever tinged with semi-delirious thoughts…it’s as if I’d taken some drug. It reminds me of the time I experimented with hashish, with the painter Arbel, when I had the illusion of floating in infinite space. I didn’t suspect, then, that one day it would be pure reality! And, aided by the memory, I imagine that I’m dreaming, that I’m continuing an old hashish dream...

  “Gaston! You’re asleep! Wake up!”

  “It’s Aurore who is shaking me. I have, indeed, been asleep—for more than six hours! She doesn’t address any reproach to me, but I sense that I’ve committed a grave sin against on-board discipline. Space-sickness, yes—but I promised to stay awake. It’s as if an officer of the watch were to go to sleep on his bridge, under the pretext of sea-sickness.

  “It’s time to have something to eat,” my wife proposes, although she confesses that she has no appetite.

  It’s eight p.m. on the eighteenth of April. It’s a long time since our lunch in Uraniville, but the mere idea of eating makes me nauseous. To keep my conscience clear I force myself to nibble a banana, but I don’t succeed in getting all the way through it. Aurore gives up too. It’s complete anorexia. Are we going too fast for four whole days, then? Weightlessness causes singular disturbances of the organic functions!

  And while my wife resumes her active watch, I fall back into a soporific state; my attention wanders, flees, escapes into confused dreams, a kind of light delirium, which wouldn’t be unpleasant if it weren’t for the bouts of respiratory malaise and nausea...

  Hours pass, interminable and vague.

  The monotony of that four day voyage! A hundred hours! Four days and four hours!

  The automobile puts us in contact with the landscape, which it rips and cleaves asunder, and renders us sensible to its hectic course. On a steamship, or a railway train, even with eyes closed, there’s the rolling of the wheels, the pulsation of the engines, the trepidation of the propeller—and in the cabin of a aircraft, the song of the motor. One senses that one is moving, approaching a goal.

  Here is inhuman space, in the void…in these lacunae separating the scattered granules of matter that are the planets…here in infinite space, with no reference-points, the displacement of this vehicle, in spite of its unprecedented speed, is as insensible for its passengers as the double movement of its axial rotation and its orbital motion around the Sun is for the inhabitants of Earth.

  Neither day nor night; the raw glare of the electric bulbs in the spaceship, narrower, more uncomfortable and more depressing than the worst of submarines…time has stopped. Only the on-board chronometer affirms its persistence.

  One knows that one is moving, that a trajectory is being followed, that the minutes and the hours are not elapsing in vain…but one does not feel it. It is apparent immobility and the silence of death, save for the faint continuous hum of the gyroscopes.

  The exultation that I expected in advance of the superhuman flight toward a new world—fiction! There is, in reality, for the interplanetary voyager, immeasurable ennui and malaise, the nausea or lethargy of space-sickness.

  Confronted by my apathy and my virtual torpor, Aurore gives up entrusting the agreed turns on watch to me. She stays awake without a break…and without fatigue, she claims.

  On the nineteenth and the twentieth, I’m still in the same state, and the situation is the same up above for the two invalids. Only Aurore has succeeded in eating two bananas and drinking a cup of tea.

  On the twenty-first, at one o’clock—another thirteen hours!—great news, which jerks me out of my apathy. Eros isn’t round! And it rotates obliquely on its axis. That’s why my attempts to measure it the other day—and Aurore has had no better luck since—were worthless. Sometimes I had a large diameter between the wires of the micrometer, sometimes a small one.

  I make the effort to go into the cabin to look through the porthole, but we’re still too far away. All that I can distinguish of Eros, through the telescope, is its general form. One might think it a pomegranate seed, the tapered part of which is dark, rugged and jagged, while the end with the rounded cap is ruddy and marked by a bright dot.

  A glance, in passing, at the invalids. The Russian woman does not seem to be suffering as much. Our visit has woken Oscar up; he goes down with us into the engine room. He says that he feels better; fortunately for him, weightlessness dispenses him from maintaining an equilibrium that is equally stable in all directions; otherwise, he would be unsteady on his feet. Space-sickness has reduced that proud journalist to the timidity of a schoolboy. When we arrived down below he begs me to excuse his fiancée for the other day’s scene.

  “You can understand, Uncle, that when the poor thing heard that a one-hour test flight had been transformed into a long-distance interplanetary flight, she was frightened...”

  I cut him off. “Yes, we noticed that—but I’m up to date. It’s over. Let’s not go on about it.”

  “You and Rette won’t hold it against her, I hope, when she’s on her feet. She’s a little edgy...”

  “We’ve told you; peace is made!”

  And Aurore adds: “What I expect from her is that she’ll collaborate loyally with is in the exploration of Eros.”

  To demonstrate his personal good will, Oscar remained down below for most of the time during those final hours, taking an interest in the progress of the rocket, asking for explanations—which he noted down—about the control of the various apparatus, including the engine.

  The approach of deliverance also shook me out of my torpor. Even the Russian became animated again up above, but refused to quit her couchette. She replied in a civil enough tone, however, when I asked about her health as I passed through the cockpit in order to observe Eros.

  Another hour, another 150,000 kilometers.

  Seen by the naked eye through the porthole in the cone, the worldlet toward which we were heading already presented a polygonal surface almost a third as large as the full moon. In the telescope, one could make out the rotation of the body, which was bringing the hemispherical part toward us. At the center of that red-tinted expanse, Aurore pointed out a sparkling lozenge.

  “One might think that it were metal or glass…perhaps a city. It’s in the vicinity of that point that I’m going to land.”

  As we can see much better through the portholes of the cone than through the periscope, our captain has let the spaceship run on its own momentum for as long as possible with its tip directed toward the target, but it’s necessary now to present the base, in order to brake. The rotation is effected in five minutes, with the aid of the servo-motor. It’s very curious; one sees the inclination of the walls change, as in a swerving train or aircraft, but one doesn’t feel it, since one remains, weightlessly, in whatever place one happens to be. Only habit attributes an up and a down to this little world apart that is the rocket’s interior.

&nb
sp; Twenty minutes of acceleration at 3G—that makes a rude contrast for people who have been weightless for four days! Astronautical transportation inflicts barbaric shocks on its passengers; but that’s inevitable so long as it’s in an embryonic phase and doesn’t have sufficient energy to spare to maintain even a minimal a continuous acceleration, which would give the traveler the illusion of retaining at least a fraction of his weight.

  Oscar had gone back to the cabin to lie down next to Ida on the storage-lockers. I remained with Aurore, who was operating the controls, with her hands on the levers and her eye at the periscope.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  A double response: “Ready.... Ready.”

  And the thunder of the engine bursts forth, the titanic howl of the liberated energies...

  The infernal minutes commence, in which one remains, thoughts scattered, lost in that sensation of enormous weight that flattens you to the mattress, embeds you in it…subject to the counter-acceleration of braking, of retardation, which is now opposing the course of the rocket, resorbing with every passing second the kilogram-meters of acquired momentum, finally to reduce them to zero and land without any shock on Eros...

  Only Aurore could see, through the periscope, the ground of the unknown world rising to meet us. Impossible to exchange a word. I abandoned myself, within the deafening thunder, to the anguish of being crushed, indifferent to the perhaps-imminent catastrophe...

  With small jerks of the handle, Aurore reduced the gas-flow. We had started braking too soon. The thunder decreased, reduced to the roar of an aircraft engine…

  One last reassertion, punctuated by crescendos and silences...

  Our pilot, hands gripping the levers, her gaze glued to the periscope, guided the rocket toward its landing-point.

  A slight shock…the spaceship quivered on its shock-absorbers, like an airplane that has landed a trifle abruptly…that was all. We were down.

  All the controls at rest, my companion gets to her feet and announces: “We’re now on Eros. We need to get used to the weak gravity of the little world. We only weight two or three kilos each.”

  Two or three kilos—that’s not very much, but it’s a great relief, even so, after the weightlessness of “free fall,” when one still feels nauseous from having weighed nothing for more than a hundred hours.

  I’m reanimated, alive again. My heart is beating with more assurance and regularity. My lungs dilate, breathing in and filling up. After claustration in that artificial atmosphere, will I finally be able to breathe free air?

  With a marvelous lightness and ease of movement I climb up into the cockpit behind my wife. We rejoin Oscar, who is already at the porthole, but there isn’t much to see. The apparatus is almost vertical on its supports in a hollow. We’ve been lucky, in fact; a few meters further on and we’d have collided with the side of one of the hillocks of red sand that are blocking the view. But there’s one bad sign: lit by a torrid sun the dunes of red and are outlined by a black and starry sky—as black as the void of interplanetary space.

  “So, no air,” Aurore warns us, stopping Oscar’s movement as he prepares to unfasten the screws of the man-hole. “If we can see stars it’s because the atmospheric screen that hides them on Earth during the day by scattering the sunlight doesn’t exist here. I’ll make sure, though.”

  She presses a valve designed for that purpose, which links a manometer to the external environment. The needle falls to zero.

  “It’s a total vacuum outside. We’ll be obliged to put on respiratory masks to go outside.”

  That was anticipated, but the disappointment is harsh. Ida, who is observing us from her frame, scowls in a sarcastic and bitter manner, as if she were holding Aurore responsible for that lack of atmosphere.

  “You see…Captain! It was hardly worth the trouble of bringing me here by force. Within a week, you’ll have to leave for Earth.”

  The reflection completes the ruination of the joy of arrival. To be subject once again, and so quickly, to the pangs of space-sickness! But Oscar, in the resurrection of recovered gravity, is overflowing with optimism.

  “Bah! Even so, a week will give us plenty of time to see lots of things.”

  An excursion with masks becomes a veritable expedition. Before organizing it, Aurore considers our disappointed expressions and makes a suggestion. “We’ve been fasting for four days. Before going outside, we ought to eat something.”

  I perceive then that I’m hungry. Oscar also observes that the recovery of gravity has given him an appetite. Ida admits, sulkily, that she could gladly eat something.

  A lunch is improvised. While water is being heated for the tea, I distribute bananas, chocolate and ship’s biscuit.

  “It’s a pity that we don’t have a bottle of champagne to drink to Eros!” says the young reporter, regretfully, chewing furiously.

  The snack has reinvigorated us. Even the Russian, whose mournful face is tinted pink, has quit her couchette and is standing up without difficulty.

  While taking the respiratory masks from a locker, my wife asks her solicitously: “Do you feel well enough to go with us, Ida?”

  The other, however, looks at her sullenly. “Don’t worry about me. Now I’m here, thanks to you, I’ll look after myself.” And with her jaws clenched, she takes the breathing apparatus I hand her, which her fiancé helps her to fasten on her back.

  In five minutes, all four of us are harnessed to our exploration gear: a steel bottle containing the oxygen reservoir, the rubber bag of the valve and the mask hanging down over the chest, plus a Tyrolean bag with water and food for a day. Ida, an unexpected passenger, is the only one in a simple sporting costume, cap and yellow woolen jersey with violet stripes. Oscar is dressed, like Aurore and me, in an aviation suit with a leather helmet. He is also carrying a Kodak slung over his shoulder.

  Aurore checks our equipment.

  “Everyone has a revolver?” Good. Let’s take pocket torches too, in case nightfall takes us by surprise.”

  The sun is, in fact, going down rapidly. Since the landing, scarcely twenty minutes ago, it has declined by several degrees toward the horizon. The shadow of the spaceship on the red sand is visibly elongating.

  Before adjusting the airtight masks that will deprive us of speech, our captain gives us her final instructions.

  “We’re not far from what appeared to me to be a city composed of metallic buildings and surrounded by some sort of park. If the city is inhabited, of course, it’s not by organisms such as we know them on Earth, since we’re in a vacuum. We’ll carry out a reconnaissance in that direction. Then we’ll act in accordance with circumstances. We have eight hours of air in our reservoirs.”

  “What about the rocket?” I asked. “Aren’t we leaving anyone to guard it?”

  “Against whom?”

  “Besides which,” said Oscar, “we have seven-league boots on this worldlet. We can be back in three seconds, at a gallop, if anything happens.”

  “And now,” said Aurore, “it’s necessary to go out rapidly, in order. Oscar first, then Ida, then Gaston, and me. It’s a matter of losing as little air as possible.”

  They were the last words pronounced. Everyone adjusted their masks, opened the oxygen supply—and the cover of the manhole swung back.

  XII. Making Contact

  Without bothering to go down the steps of the exterior ladder one by one, young Frémiet launched himself with a thrust of his leg, and by means of a long parabola, which took several seconds to describe, he landed on the slope of a dune twenty-five meters away. He was still in the air when, one after another, Ida and I catapulted after him.

  During the duration of my leap, I had time to reflect: “A new record for a standing jump” and to add the juvenile joke: “We no longer have any gravity, but we’ll need some, in order to introduce ourselves to the local inhabitants in a dignified manner, if there are any.”

  Two bounds more, and here we are at the summit of the dune, where the panorama is
revealed. In my surprise I automatically hail Aurore, who has stayed behind to close the hatchway—but my voice doesn’t go through the mask.

  Gesticulation is all very well, but it’s no match for speech as a means of communicating one’s impressions to others. The constructor of our respiratory masks didn’t even think of equipping them with a suitable device—a telephone or an acoustic tube. And our eyes, behind the large mica goggles, only express imperfectly the reflections suggested to us by the spectacle perceived from the top of the dune.

  An undulating desert of red sand surrounds us. On one side—opposite the sun, toward the east—there is an indefinite extent in which there are a few scattered ruins of collapsed buildings. I think I can also make out the rectilinear trace of a wide road followed by an aerial rail on pylons. Toward the west, the desert is a mere strip two kilometers wide. Beyond that, my eyes, dazzled by the sun that is low in the black and starry sky, glimpses a forest from which emerges a cyclopean mass of steel cupolas, which are fulgurant with reflected light.

  Aurore has joined us. She points to the “city” exhorts us with gesture to stay together, not to run and to be prudent.

  Everyone obeys, but the facility of the weak gravity incites us to gallop in ten meter bounds. To march steadily requires an effort. Even the soft sand is reminiscent of an elastic trampoline.

  While we advance in a line abreast, the binoculars are passed from hand to hand, with nods of the head commenting on successive discoveries. The forest isn’t a true forest; its trunks are pylons of various kinds: metal beams, concrete masts and other substances, interlaced with seeming vegetable lianas, laden with crystalline fruits that sparkle in the sunlight. Instead of a vault of foliage, however, it’s a network of overlapping metal wires....