The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  Then, a further discovery.

  There are people!

  At the edge of the forest of pylons, four bizarre little beings have appeared. We’re close enough now to make them out with the naked eye. One would swear that they were humans, almost naked, with very white skins. They are gesticulating and even seem to be uttering cries, but we can’t hear anything, any more than we can communicate our reflections since we’re in a vacuum. And we look at one another, immobilized by the same astonishment. In the void! How are they breathing? It’s absurd! It’s crazy!

  Our leader raises her index finger: Pay attention! Then she agitates it negatively above the holster of her revolver, in a gesture that signifies: Above all, don’t shoot!

  And we advance carefully toward these mysterious beings, analogous to ourselves, but who have no need of air in order to live.

  How can we signify pacific intentions to these people of another planet? Wave the ritual white handkerchief? But what if white is a color of ill omen, as Edgar Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym was able to observe, to his detriment, among the savages of the Antarctic seas?

  Seen from ten meters, these inhabitants of Eros are anthropoid pygmies, of a seemingly elevated type that recalls the semitic type, with an albino pallor and off-white hair. On their bodies, well-proportioned but a trifle thickset, the majority have a single garment: a loincloth composed of pieces of tin-plate. Some complete that ornamentation with pieces of red, blue or green fabric; they are females, several of which are almost beautiful beneath their dirt. But their facial expressions are, without exception, stupid, and they move indifferently on all fours or standing up. It is certainly not these savages who constructed the city of metal domes that looms up behind them.

  At present there are a dozen of them, and they are still arriving. But why do they not cross the limit if the last pylons? Is the desert of red sand taboo for them?

  They seem to be animated by welcoming intentions, and yet the remain there under the latticework of metallic wires, dancing and gesticulating.

  Here we are. Under the pylons, parallelograms of mossy verdure alternate with concrete pathways. A broader avenue forms a circular route, bordered on the outside by a thick cable of bare metal bristling with teeth. Damn! What if that’s an electrified barrier? Let’s avoid touching it as we pass over it...

  A bizarre thing! As I cross over, I collide with an elastic resistance, as if there were invisible wall in front of me, between the desert and the park.

  I hesitate momentarily, but with a solid shoulder-charge Oscar plunges into and through the fluid obstacle, pulling Ida after him. I profit from the example and draw Aurore through in a similar fashion.

  But now, having penetrated beneath the network of pylons, we have entered into a brutal racket; savage cries resound in our ears, and at the same time, a breath brushes my cheek.

  “Look!” says Aurore, her arm raised. “Here, under the pylons, between the lianas and the wires of the metal trellis, the sky is blue!”

  There, under the pylons, there is air! Air two paces from the void, without any material wall!

  But we can discuss that astonishing phenomenon later. We have taken off our respiratory masks, and at the appearance of our faces, analogous to theirs, the indigenes of Eros crowd around us, in a redoubtable ovation. Their tin-plate loincloths, which they are agitating by writhing, mingle a rattle of saucepans with baying cheers that deafen us. One might think they were dogs. The impression of hearing an unleashed pack of hounds is so strong that Oscar immediately baptizes them “the bowwows.” My wife, more scientifically minded, names them “hominines.”28

  Our attempts to address speech to them are lost in the tumult. Reinforced continually by new arrivals, the members of the vociferous horde jostle one another to get a better sight of us, and threaten to stifle us beneath their swarm, from which a powerful musky odor emerges. Without any malevolent intention on their part, we’re in danger. It will be necessary to drive them back by violence. Already, the smallest of these beings, stark naked children, are gripping us, hitting us with their minuscule fists, and imprisoning our arms, legs and bodies with their clusters. Oscar and I are having more success in preserving ourselves from their assaults than Ida and Aurore. I reach for my revolver.

  But a strident whistle-blast cuts through the tumult. Above the heads of the white pygmies I see another group of hominines arriving at the gallop along the avenue. These, a little taller than our savages, are dressed in uniforms of green leotards with clinking yellow shorts, which make them resemble fairground wrestlers. Six of them are carrying a litter on their shoulders, from which a shrill and sibilant voice, completely different from the baying of the hominines, is furiously launching what must be orders, vituperations and threats. I glimpse a long, slender form, wrapped in a vermilion red cape, which leaps down from the litter and starts swinging a truncheon around...

  An efficacious police operation. Instantly, we are released. Our savage admirers draw away, gripped by panic, howling in distress. Not one resists; all the hominines in tinplate loincloths allow themselves to be beaten by benevolent blows from the “wrestlers” in green leotards and yellow shorts—exactly like dogs. Beneath the truncheon of the lanky fellow in the red cape, three or four fall, their heads split, and their comrades carry them away into the depths of the forest of pylons.

  We can finally breathe.

  “The gentlemen of the central brigades exercise a strong hand here, as they do back home,” Oscar jokes

  Ida, however, is quivering with horror and indignation. “It’s abominable! Those policemen mistreating poor proletarians like that! If they lay a hand me...” And she puts her hand on the holster of her revolver.

  “No threatening gestures!” orders my wife, authoritatively. “Do you want to get us massacred?”

  Meanwhile, the savages having disappeared, the hominines in green leotards and yellow shorts, who are holding long sticks—their only apparent weapons—for a line some distance away. The individual from the litter, who has had his back to us thus far, looks us in the face, and his appearance draws an “Oh!” of amazement from me.

  “Quès aco?” said Oscar, astounded.

  “Oh—the frightful beast!” cries the Russian.

  “A theromorphic saurian—some kind of iguanodon!” observes Aurore, keenly interested.

  Unlike the others, it is impossible to mistake him for a quasi-human. The tall individual—who is a head taller than me, and I measure a meter sixty-five—dressed in the vast vermilion cape, beneath which some kind of furry waistcoat envelops his torso tightly, like a breastplate, is a lizard.

  It is not a matter of a metaphor, an animal resemblance such as we sometimes see among our fellows. No, he is, literally, a lizard: a tall lizard standing on his hind feet, with his tail forming a tripod. His triangular reptilian head, devoid of ears or fur, which I mistook for a helmet for a fraction of a second, really is a living head of natural skin, green, granular and dry, whose musculature flexes. His feet are hidden in boots, but his arms and lizard’s hands are visible.

  He’s a lizard—but not an animal: a lizard endowed with an intelligence that is reflected in his mobile features and his round eyes, each with a golden iris and a black sclerotic, are shining. He takes stock of us.

  There was a clownish incongruity about it, as if a wise old man clad in a comical carnival costume were looking through the holes in an animal mask. I was torn between a crazy desire to laugh and the fear of annoying that intelligent being.

  Suddenly, he lowered his head; the crown appeared in its entirety and I saw with horror that he possessed a third eye at the top of his skull. That third eye, devoid of iris or sclerotic, offered an enormous black pupil streaked by vague iridescences—signals, perhaps, of thoughts in movement?

  Aurora seemed fascinated by scientific curiosity. She murmured: “The third pineal eye! As in the saurians of the Secondary Epoch. It’s no longer present in any species save for the Hatteria punctata of New Zealand
,29 which still possesses one capable of functioning.”

  There was a minute of terrible suspense.

  The saurian’s acolytes surrounded us, awaiting the pleasure of their master.

  Was he about to set them upon us? If so, how should we react? Non-violence, or a fight to the death?

  The Russian had taken her revolver from its holster.

  Oscar had just taken a few discreet snapshots of the scene. From the corner of his mouth, he said: “What do we do? Run away? They have no firearms—nothing but clubs. A brief gallop, since we’ve become more agile than kangaroos, and we’ll leave them behind. What do you say, Rette?”

  My wife did not have time to reply, nor the Russian to aim her revolver, as she had intended. The Lizard had made a decision. He uttered a modulated stridulation of whistles, and without any violence, but in unison, his bodyguard rapidly touched our elbows and knees with their staffs.

  The effect was surprising.

  My muscles already tensed for a riposte, I had expected an attack, but not to feel, on contact with those long canes, my elbows and ankles immediately paralyzed, as if by a subtle and icy fluid. My arms hung down, inert, my legs stiffened. It was the same for my companions, and the revolver dropped from Ida’s hand. We were well and truly captured. The paralysis held us as effectively as material bonds.

  A cry of rage escaped the Russian’s throat, but a simple flick of the mysterious wand on her neck robbed her of her voice.

  “Trapped!” murmured Oscar, without budging.

  That was my opinion too. There was nothing to do but resign ourselves passively, and await events.

  Once again, the Lizard directed his triangle of eyes at us, but then lost interest, and, after having whistled an order, climbed back into his litter, which the hominine porters lifted up, moving off at a trot along the avenue beneath the pylons. In two minutes, they were out of sight.

  In our turn, framed by the eight remaining wrestlers, we were made to march, slowly and with difficulty, on our stiff-kneed legs, like old men.

  What were they going to do with us?

  In spite of the distressing situation, my wife maintained her serenity. Her example acted upon us. Instead of moaning, we observed as we went along. Oscar hazarded the opinion that the forest of pylons and metal latticework was a gigantic wireless antenna.

  “I think it’s more likely,” said Aurore, “that this apparatus serves to prevent the escape of the local atmosphere. These wires are under tension, and their network forms a screen. We pierced the resistance as we arrived from the desert.”

  The squares of moss were cultivation, as were the lianas interlaced between the poles, producing clusters of unfamiliar fruits geometrical in form, like colored glass. Perched on ladders of climbing pylons, the hominines in tinplate loincloths—or savages of a short while before—were busy harvesting those strange vegetables. It was evidently from their work that curiosity had drawn them to come and look at us. The absolute authority of the saurian master and the blows of the cudgel had sent them back to work. As we passed by, they now limited themselves to turning their head furtively in our direction, at a distance.

  “A frightful slavery reigns on this world!” noted the young journalist aloud, preparing an article about our arrival. And he added a curse addressed to “those dirty wrestlers” who had paralyzed our arms and made it impossible for him to write a single line…for how long?

  We were drawing nearer to the city, and could make out armored facades of nickel-plated steel between the last pylons. To the right, a decapitated skyscraper sliced in two by the explosion of a torpedo displayed through the gaping breach a hideous mass of twisted and oxidized debris. The rubble gave the impression of having been there for centuries.

  Four wrestlers armed with sticks were guarding the entrance to the city. Overhung by a metallic trellis continuing that of the pylons, the street presented a long perspective of intact armored facades, clad in an untarnishable skin, alternating with blasted ruins, caved in and reduced to scrap iron. The whole gave an impression of dilapidation, decrepitude and antiquity. In the distance stood the cyclopean mass of the monument with steel cupolas that we had perceived from the top of the red dune, and behind which the sun was now hidden.

  The solitude in that metal city was almost complete. Over the 1,500 meters of the main street, we encountered fewer than twenty inhabitants, mostly hominines and two or three saurians in red capes, on foot. They seemed to be in a hurry, and scarcely honored us with a glance. To the right and the left, others streets branched off, no less deserted.

  Night fell suddenly, with no twilight, as brutally as if a switch had been flicked. In the sky, between the wires of the metallic network, the stars were shining, vaguely reflected in the facades and the roadway. No artificial lighting came on in the city, but our guards seemed to be able to see as well as by day.

  In front of the palace with the cupolas—“the Mosque,” according to Oscar—we crossed an immense empty plaza diagonally. A sliding door opened to let us in, and after having climbed a stairway, with difficulty, and followed a corridor, the four of us were shoved into a dark room. The door closed and bolts clicked.

  We were definitively prisoners of Eros.

  XIV. Lacertians and Hominines

  The vague light of the stars, which comes in through a window with stout bars, does not permit us to see well enough to find our way around in the cell, but we have not been searched or stripped, and we have retained all our equipment—except for Ida, who has lost her revolver. The paralysis provoked by the wrestlers’ sticks dissipates somewhat, which allows us to bend our arms. We take out our pocket torches and, only lighting one at a time, in order to conserve the batteries, we explore the room.

  It is vast, at least twenty meters on each side, and more reminiscent of a lumber-room than a prison, containing an assortment of divans and tables heaped up in the corners. The walls and floor are bare plaster; they once had a coating that has disappeared. Insulated metal wires might once have terminated at telephones or lamps; a kind of electric radiator must have served as heating, but it is deprived of its conductive wires. Nothing remains of the interior fittings that is still functional, except for a water-tap and a sink.

  The door is made of thick metal, solid and securely locked. Several hominines can be heard on the other side—our jailers—laughing and chattering in their guttural barking language.

  The window, glazed, allows a sight of the nocturnal sky, checkered by the mesh of the metallic network that maintains the city’s atmosphere and, seven or eight meters below, the grand plaza, which extends away, dark, deserted and lugubrious. Unbreakable and tightly-packed metal bars defend the opening; it is impossible to think of escaping that way.

  During the exploration of the place, our commentaries remain sober and banal, for fear of reciprocally robbing one another of the little courage we had left—but the Russian does not have that scruple. Her angry interjections increase as her larynx recovers its flexibility. When she feels able, she takes off her equipment, which she throws on to one of the sofas, and stands in front of Aurore, her arms folded, and grates aggressively:

  “If this is all you have to show me on your famous Eros, it really wasn’t worth the trouble of obliging me to endure four days of incarceration in an aluminum box! Isn’t that so, Oscar?”

  She pronounces Oscar by putting a vigorous tonic stress on the first syllable, authoritarian and possessive.

  While also freeing himself from his kit, Oscar acquiesces with a vague “Um.” His infatuation with the Russian does not prevent him from perceiving that she is becoming unbearable. He is visibly annoyed at being summoned by her as a witness against us.

  That lack of enthusiasm has the effect of exasperating the petulant young woman. Increasingly carried away, she unleashes pell-mell all the resentment that she has been storing up.

  “Oh, you! You don’t want to compromise yourself. You admire your dear Aunt Rette, our valiant Captain, who has got us i
nto this mess by preventing us from defending ourselves just now against that lizard’s henchmen. You always think she’s right, even against me! You’re a fine fiancé! I’ve already seen how you support my interests when you let Madame Aurore decree a departure for Eros without opposing it! But you knew that I was in the rocket, too ill at first to understand what you were saying. You knew that I had a mission, that I couldn’t absent myself for days on end without exposing myself to the disgrace of my superiors.

  “Yes, my superiors! For I’m a Bolshevist, if you want to know, filthy bourgeois that you are…a true, pure Bolshevist! And if I hadn’t refrained from taking action, out of affection for this young ingrate, who’s now denying me, you wouldn’t be here, you two Delvarts! Instead of simply making notes on your rocket and the secrets of its functioning to deliver them to those more worthy, I would have sabotaged the apparatus before your departure, as would have been my duty, and it would have exploded by now, along with you, or would be adrift in interplanetary space, out of control.

  “It’s not the representatives of capitalist society—much less an infamous exploiter like your Comtesse—that are destined to colonize a new world, into which they would import their vices and their social absurdities; that liberating role is reserved for Communism, which represents the true future of civilization!”

  The ferocious little sectarian was taking her revenge for her four days of passivity in the rocket! Certain of her impunity, she was insulting us all to our faces, in the rapid surge of a new fit of hysteria.

  Awkwardly, Oscar tried to appease her. “Come on, Ida, my little Ida, calm down…calm down!”

  Her features convulsed and her eyes haggard, she shoved him away furiously, and went on in a strangled voice: “You disgust me! You’re nothing but a filthy bourgeois, like those two! Leave me in peace! You’ve kidnapped me by force—well, you’ll be sorry! I represent the future of the world! I have the irresistible force of a hundred and fifty million proletarians behind me, who have triumphed over their oppressors and are in the process of conquering the Earth! If we escape massacre and recover our liberty on this planet, I shall do my duty…complete my mission…and you’ll see, Captain Aurore, that I’ll make trouble for you, for you and your capitalism... You’ll see! Oh, you’ll see...”