by Theo Varlet
The plaza lacked lighting, and we had no light-source at our disposal. Only our pocket torches served us by night, in case of necessity. Oscar sometimes switched his on for a few minutes in order to consign some observation to his notebook that he fared not being able to recall in the morning. Outside of those moments, there was complete darkness in our prison, scarcely tempered by “the obscure light that falls from the stars.”
That night, therefore, our coterie and theirs were in our separate corners, talking in low voices in order to hold back the assault of thieving sleep. The narrow divans, unearthed from among the old furniture, served us as beds with neither sheets nor blankets, but it was not cold, and our aviation suits, which we took off during the day for fear of stifling in the Senegalese temperature of the room where the Berlitz lessons were held, kept us sufficiently warm when night fell. Aurore and I were sitting chatting on the edge of the divan. I could scarcely make out the pale oval of her face in the gloom. Suddenly, I saw her features illuminated by an orange light, at the same time as Oscar’s voice exclaimed: “Hey! There’s a fire!”
A bright light was being projected into our prison from outside. All four of us ran to the window.
Ws it a collective hallucination? The expression “rubbing one’s eyes to convince oneself that one isn’t dreaming” must be a merely rhetorical figure of speech, not corresponding to anything real, for that would have been an occasion, if ever there was one, for it to become manifest—but no one budged. With our heads fraternally pressed together, in spite of hostilities, we stared through the bars, all eyes, at the stupefying metamorphosis to which the grand plaza of the Palace had just been subjected.
Dark, deserted and lugubrious at the last glance I had cast over it before retiring to my corner ten minutes earlier, it had now become a paradisal garden beneath the tropical glare of a blue sky, and on the silver-speckled ground, lacertians in red or green capes were strolling.
Radiating from the star-shaped intersection, profound perspectives plunged into exuberant thickets of vegetation: arborescent ferns, palm-trees and coconut-palm. And around lianas with bright flowers flew hummingbirds, sparkling like precious stones, and multicolored butterflies as big as pigeons, Cascades and jets of water, iridescent with rainbows, alternated with the hanging greenery of the palms. Through the soundproof glass of the window, feeble echoes of music reached us confusedly.
The prodigious spectacle was real; there was no doubt about it! All four of us checked our perceptions in a crossfire of questions and answers. Surprise and uncertainty were succeeded by affirmation and conviction. Oscar, enthused, exclaimed with joy. Even the sulky Ida confessed her admiration.
“It’s an artificial projection,” Aurore declared, finally. “Look.”
Colored rays played over our faces and our clothes, modifying and displacing our heads and limbs. Green palms were outlined on the walls of our prison, slashed with black stripes by the bars of the window.
A cinematographic projection!
But in what studio has this film been made? Or is it a “documentary” enabling us to witness some festival in a privileged region of Eros? Impossible! I’ve seen through the telescope that Eros is nothing but an arid and charred block. Even admitting that another city akin to this one exists, somewhere on the surface, it cannot contain the vast perspectives of these landscapes, especially not that blue sky, that “natural” sky in which feathery cirrus clouds are floating, drifting on the wind...
But what a film! What a product of the cinema! Instead of being displayed flat on a screen, the colored and animated apparition fills three-dimensional space. Not only are the palms swaying in the breeze, but the walkers are crossing one another’s paths in different planes. It’s cinema in relief—complete, integral cinema.
We stand there in open-mouthed amazement, fascinated by that prodigy of a science that the people of Earth have not yet attained. The lacertians who are walking there before our eyes seem to be conversing and give the absolute illusion of reality. Some of them are in couples, and a subtle grace reveals the partners of the female sex as much as the veils framing their faces. The zephyr running in gusts over the foliage sometimes causes the light fabrics to flutter.
“It seems to me,” Oscar murmurs, in a dazed and almost frightened tone, “that some of them are…real.”
“What do you mean?” I ask him.
“Well, yes…I’m not mistaken. Look at that lady arriving over there from the right. Her veil isn’t moving, but the wind is agitating the cap of her cavalier and those of their immediate neighbors. So she’s real—and the others aren’t.”
Nevertheless the individuals, real or not, are crossing paths, avoiding one another as if they were reciprocally visible to one another. So far as external appearances are concerned—form, color and relief—does this cinema, pushing illusion into the domain of touch still conserve some material solidity in its evocations?
We refuse to believe it; the tricks of cinema cannot go that far. Even Aurore doubts it.
Meanwhile, under the palms, the strollers are thinning out. As if at a given signal, they disappear one after another into pathways to the left. Only a handful of laggards remain when, with an almost painful brutality, the light goes out, without a flicker, the marvelous décor is abolished, and nothing any longer remains but the grand plaza, dark and deserted beneath the starlight filtered through the aerial network and vaguely reflected on the facades of the armored buildings.
But no! The plaza isn’t deserted…not entirely. Three or four confused silhouettes of belated strollers hasten toward the entrance of the main street, to the left...
The mysteries of Erotian science…a staggering glimpse opening on the beauty and joie de vivre of a world foreign to our habitude.
My companions are as silent as I am. Oscar is the first to recover the power of speech.
“That cinema beats everything, for sure!” he jokes, stiffening himself against his own emotion. “Say, Rette, you have to get that trick explained to you. If we could take a specimen of that apparatus with us when we get out of here it would cause a sensation on Earth. You can see it from here: cinelife! What a patent to have! It would make millions! That little performance alone was worth the voyage. I no longer regret my four days of space-sickness...and my captivity in this damned slum…provided that it doesn’t go on to long.”
On the following nights we hoped to see the spectacle repeated, and even got up several times to watch from the window—but the wait was too long, and we wearied of it. Festivals of that sort were rare, or, at least, representations only took place rarely in the grand plaza. Between that first vision and the day when we Terrans were specially favored with a memorable projection session about which I shall talk in due course, we only had one other opportunity, on the twenty-fifth of June—two months after our arrival—to witness through our prison window the nocturnal metamorphosis of the plaza into a luminously beautiful landscape.
That time, it was no longer a tropical park but a maritime beach. The ocean sparkled in the sunlight, and the waves unfurled; we could almost feel the spray and the saline odor of their breaking. The music faintly perceived through the soundproof glass evoked the song of the wind and the waves. Lacertians were voluptuously sunning their bodies on the tawny slope of the sand or swimming with the agility of tritons, while others watched them from the shade of tall pines. But that was happening in the background of the scene, too far away from us, and it was impossible to determine whether people of flesh and blood were mingling with those depicted in the film, as we had briefly thought the first time. The only new detail, by comparison with the scene in the tropical park, in which no hominines could be seen, was the appearance on the beach of a handful of our pseudo-kindred, in the role of slaves carrying umbrellas.
Apart from that, the enigma of that “spatial” cinema remained complete. In fact, it never was resolved for us. The questions put by my wife, first to Styal and then to Zilgor, were met with a disdainful silenc
e or an order, brutally issued, to talk about something else. Even when she had gained the confidence of the Master of Eros, at a later date, he refused to give her the slightest technical explanation of the functioning of the apparatus.
XVIII. A Visit to the Rocket
Throughout that first period of our captivity, from the twenty-third of April to the third of May, we only went out of the Palace once. We had still only glimpsed confusedly the problems posed by the world of Eros, in terms of the present decadence and the scientific grandeur that it had attained in the past—problems that our recovered liberty would permit us to discern more clearly in the spectacle of the city and its surroundings.
We did, however, familiarize ourselves with the lacertians—Styal, Zilgor and the others, in red or green capes, that we met in the corridors or saw circulating in the plaza: lizards adapted to a vertical stance.
Their basic form, according to Aurore, was reminiscent of that of an iguanodon—a saurian that had already learned to stand upright on Earth. The biocosmic plan is analogous on all the planets of the solar system, but, because of their intelligence, we learned to consider them as “people.” The occasional rebellions of our human atavism—which showed them to us as buffoonish and sacrilegious parodies, an affront to humankind, the sole beings endowed with reason, created in the image of God, according to tradition—became rarer.
“The image of the geocentric God of old,” Aurore observed, when I confessed that sentiment to her. “But God has grown; he’s become cosmic; there’s enough variety in him to incarnate reason in various organic types, according to the planets…to populate the worlds with multiple forms, all striving, by different means but through one unique matter, toward Knowledge, which is One...”
Ida, careless of philosophical considerations, was primarily preoccupied with the slavery and decadence to which our human brothers on Eros were condemned, and never lost an opportunity to reproach us for our insensitivity to seeing them tyrannized by their masters. She seemed very proud to have obtained from her jailer the hilarious daily greeting of “Comrade…tovarich”—the only words that the poor animal had proved capable, after more than thirty lessons, of retaining durably, by virtue of parroting them.
I have given an account of the tedious period of our “Berlitz lessons” and our interrogations by Zilgor. During the eight Erotian days corresponding to the terrestrial first and second of May, the situation became even more difficult. Only my wife was now summoned by the Master of Eros; Ida, Oscar and I no longer left our prison.
How many sad hours I spent in that lugubrious and unhealthy room, where the air was only renewed through a narrow ventilator above the door. To distract myself from my not-very-cheerful thoughts, I gazed out of the window at the comings and goings of the wrestlers and lacertians in red or green capes, while Oscar and his fiancée exchanged whispered confidences and made plans for the future, or quarreled loudly about the responsibility for our present situation.
Aurore, although she came back exhausted from her two and a half hours spent with Zilgor, the indefatigable interrogator, strove to galvanize our courage by predicting an imminent end to our captivity.
“My science isn’t inexhaustible. When Zilgor has emptied me out, he’ll get weary of questioning me, and won’t have any reason to keep us here...”
She admitted that, thus far, he had not once deigned to listen when she broached that subject, but we had another two months ahead of us…two months in which the distance from Eros to Earth would not have increased to the point of prohibiting the rocket from making the return journey.
“And what if they don’t let us leave before the end of those two months?” Ida retorted, sullenly.
“In that case, Eros having passed the orbit of Mars on the first of July, it’ll be necessary for us to wait nineteen months more for the proximity of Earth to become sufficient again.”
The deprivation of bread was, as I’ve said, difficult for us, but in addition to the monotony of our daily diet—synthetic meat and fragments of sliced liana—it became perfectly odious. Outside of their cannibal nourishment, we suspected that the savages of the pylon forest procured edible animals by hunting, which would have varied our menu agreeably.
On the third of May, before leaving for the daily session with Zilgor, my wife decided to ask Styal for permission for one of us to go there and see.
To our surprise and joy, the lacertian called one of the wrestlers, who was waiting by the door, gave him a sibilant order, and with the crackly loud-hailer voice he took on when he spoke French, said to Oscar: “You…go with this one.” And he disappeared, taking Aurore, escorted by her jailer, with him.
Oscar did not need telling twice. Seized by inspiration, he put on his aviation suit, grabbed a respiratory apparatus and an oxygen cylinder from the corner to which they had been relegated, and strapped them on in a matter of seconds, while saying to Ida and me: “If I get the chance, I’ll risk it. If they stop me, too bad—I’ll try again. Don’t get too bored.”
Aurora had already returned that evening when he came back, with a triumphant expression and his chin rid of the three hairs that he pompously referred to as his beard.
“Victory, my friends! I’ve found a guinea-pig, or something resembling it. From what I understand, it must be considered unclean nourishment, and only the savages eat it—but they’ll cook one for us nevertheless tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I’ve brought a nice surprise.” And he threw his well-stuffed bag on to the divan, from which packets of biscuits, tins of jam and various toiletries escaped.
Everyone exclaimed.
“Yes, I was able to go as far as the rocket, with my mask. The wrestler escorting me didn’t try to stop me. The fellow had taken me to a camp of the bowwows outside the walls to let me see the guinea-pigs that they capture in order to cook them. It was at the very edge of the pylon forest, in the direction from which we arrived. It occurred to me to take advantage of that to get out of their air enclosure. I expected to catch a couple of taps from the paralyzing wand, but no! He let me go without flinching, and I found him at the same place, ready to lock me up again placidly, after the hour that my absence lasted—for I took the opportunity to shave. Here’s your razor as well, Tonton—you’re becoming too hirsute. There’s soap and whatever too.”
Avidly, Aurore asked about the condition in which he had found the rocket. We did not know whether or not the Erotians were provided with respiratory masks, permitting them to go out of the atmospheric enclosure occasionally, and whether, if so, they might have paid the Ad Astra a visit.
When Oscar had assured her that no footprints but ours had imprinted the red sand of the desert, and that the spaceship was intact, my wife admitted the worry that she had already confided to me—the risk of deterioration that the apparatus was running in remaining exposed to the heat of the day and the cold of the night, in the void, without the slightest protection.
“Fortunately, the days here are only three hours long. The rocket doesn’t have too much time to warm up in the sunlight or cool down by radiation during nights that aren’t tempered by any veil of atmosphere. If I’d been warned about your excursion, Oscar, I’d have asked you to take a tarpaulin from one of the storage-lockers in order to cover her…while waiting for us to have the liberty to leave with her, or at least to shelter her more effectively.”
Ida’s dry voice resounded. “But since Oscar is allowed to go out, why shouldn’t I—an ignorant and useless person, like him—be equally free…and you too, Delvart. It’s no longer anyone but our knowledgeable Captain of whom the autocrat Zilgor makes use.”
“Polycarpe would have told us if we were free,” I objected.
“Never! What do you expect? Did he even tell Oscar? Do these animals ever deign to explain anything to us, whom they scorn like their slaves, our degenerate brethren?”
“You’re right, Ida,” Oscar opined. “It’s evident. Except for you, my poor Rette, we’re virtually free…at least to come and go und
er the surveillance of our jailers.”
“In fact,” I conceded, “it’s quite possible…and it’s an experiment worth trying.”
While talking, we were delightedly nibbling the squares of ship’s biscuit. Oscar had opened a tin of salmon, and Ida was about to do likewise—but Aurora intervened.
“One will suffice, for this evening. We don’t know what the future has in store for us. There are forty-five days’ supplies in the rocket’s lockers for a crew of four. We ought to keep the food as a last resort.”
Coldly, the Russian continued to unwind the key around the lid, which she removed. She replied, with a tight-lipped expression that presaged one of her storms: “Bah, we can have one extra—and if we’re free, as it appears, I have no intention of rotting here for forty-five days.”
What thoughtlessness! Or what cynicism? Was she forgetting that Aurore wasn’t free? Did she imagine that she had the means to depart under her own steam?
For fear of poisoning the atmosphere and spoiling the evening, no one replied…but I saw the hate-filled expression again, and the resolve with which Oscar’s fiancée had accompanied her proclamation of independence.
During the impromptu meal, my wife gave us instructions for covering the rocket and for working the radio apparatus—for it was possible that the station on the Levant had resumed transmitting, and we ought to try to pick up a message.
Then each couple retired to their corner for the night, as usual.
After a few preliminaries, my wife took my hand affectionately and said to me in a low voice, in a singular tone:
“My dear Gaston, I’ve initiated you sufficiently into the operation of the rocket for you to know how to take off from this planet, where weight is so slight—but you aren’t the only one among us. Oscar was very attentive to the lessons I gave you during the final day of our interplanetary voyage. I even explained that the most practical means, for a novice pilot, of effecting a landing would be to brake, in order not to cook the apparatus during the journey through the atmosphere and come down in deep water, taking care to jettison the burning motor at the last moment, to avoid the danger of an explosion...”