The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  I listened in amazement. I sensed a bitter irony in the words that was not addressed to me, and which contrasted with the gentle pressure of her hand on mine. I replied with contained vehemence: “What are you trying to say, Aurette? You’re not insinuating that I might take advantage of my liberty to flee with the others?”

  In a more serious tone, she said: “That might, perhaps, be the wisest thing to do, for just between the two of us, I’m not ready to be liberated—but I’m not insinuating what you think. I wanted to make you understand that not everyone has your scruples. You’d do well to watch our passenger.”

  I remembered Ida’s gaze, and her fiancé’s weakness of character.

  “Don’t worry, my love. I won’t let them out of my sight tomorrow. We’ll all leave together, or not at all.”

  When morning came, the experiment produced the desired result. After breakfast, when we were served, as Oscar had told us, a very edible guinea-pig stew, Styal came in and took Aurora to “the Master.” Then the Russian, her fiancé and I put on respiratory apparatus and opened the door. Ida went out first. The three wrestlers posted in the corridor seemed slightly surprised, but they let her pass, although one separated from the group, stick in hand, in order to follow her. Oscar followed them and was similarly escorted. I had no more difficulty.

  All three of us were, therefore, free, with the sole proviso that our guardians followed us. Once we were outside the Palace, however, I realized that their surveillance was not so much intended to hinder our liberty as to ensure it, by driving away the curious hominines. I do not mean the lacertians, who did not even turn their heads to look at us.

  Lacertians and hominines…our rudimentary classification of the inhabitants of Eros needed to be completed. The “red capes” came to the Palace, but we only had rare opportunities to see the lizards in green togas—the “academicians”—whose physiognomies irresistibly imposed an tenacious and insistent impression of old age…or rather, for they seemed to be in good health and in full possession of their faculties, of centuries-old antiquity, and who all appeared to be the same sex.

  Here in the city, nothing but red capes, visibly young, some of whom enveloped their faces in the characteristic feminine veil. What surprised us, however, was the small proportion of lacertians relative to their hominine slaves—one in ten at most.

  The roles of the hominines that I have described thus far as “wrestlers,” because of their green leotards and yellow shorts, began to appear to us to be more various that their uniform costume had led us to suspect. In reality, they are servants who do everything, including roles that we consign to machines. Their various functions are distinguished by insignia of yellow metal attached to their leotards on the breast and proudly displayed.

  There are very few true policemen with sticks, responsible for keeping order; order is maintained almost automatically, by virtue of the perfect submission of the slaves, who obey their masters as naturally as dogs obey us. A few examples of revolting brutality, which we witnessed as we moved around, showed us that, whatever Ida might think or say, no idea of revolt could be generated behind those foreheads, resigned to everything in spite of their magnificently open facial angle.

  “And that’s why they have no fear of letting us circulate freely,” I opined. “They doubtless assimilate us, more or less, to the hominines; they postulate by definition that we venerate the intellectual superiority of Messieurs the lizards.”

  “Even if we’re not forced to remain among them very long,” sniggered Ida, “we’ll show them that they’re mistaken! Their social situation is a permanent outrage to humanity.”

  After an incarceration of nine times twenty-four hours, one experiences a desire to stroll for a while in the open air, even air that is itself imprisoned by a network of metal wires. With three hours days, however, if we wanted to cover up the rocket properly, we had no time to waste.

  Once we had crossed the grand plaza, we went into the main street opposite the Palace. The spectacle of blasted dwellings scattered among the armored buildings with nickel-steel facades suggest strongly that the inhabitants of Eros were once familiar with “the art of war.”

  I pose the question: “Might they have grown wiser? Might they have voluntarily renounced armed struggle, as they appear to have abandoned the employment of technology?”

  Already, in the Palace, we have noticed that a number of applications of science have fallen into disuse: the lacertians warm their apartments with electric radiators, but alongside that are the elevator-shafts devoid of cars, telephonic apparatus that no longer works, torn-out electrical wires, etc. Here in the city, the few surviving street-lights lack bulbs. There is no means of rapid transport—not one automobile, merely a few delivery vehicles with wheels now devoid of tires. One travels on foot; at the very most, a few noble saurians have themselves carried in litters.

  It seems that a decision has been made in favor of anti-technological simplicity, for it is certainly not impotence of scientists who have been able to realize the integral cinema and effect the imprisonment of an atmosphere beneath the network of pylons and streets. This civilization, although undoubtedly scientific, has no inclination to suppress distances or spare muscular effort.

  Oscar and I recognize, however, that there is little need to suppress distance in a city 1,500 meters in diameter, all of whose territory, including the two-kilometer-wide suburb, cannot exceed fifteen square kilometers. As for sparing muscular effort, why bother, when one practices slavery?

  Deferring an investigation of the city until later, we go into the pylon forest. There too, our curiosity would find abundant exercise. One edifice, situated some fifty meters from the avenue we follow, sends a torrent of fresh air toward us by way of a kind of enormous ventilator. That must be one of the oxygen-producing stations renewing the atmosphere—but we don’t have time to turn aside, or to visit the hominine encampment to which Oscar went yesterday. We content ourselves with gazing in passing at the harvest of the climbing lianas and crystalline fruits. Ida speaks to some of the bowwows, which seem fascinated, seduced by the inflections of her voice—which earns them a brutal call to order by their overseer.

  An hour after our departure from the Palace, the sun was almost at the height of its course when we arrived at the external limit of the forest of pylons. Our three wrestlers did not object when, with our masks adjusted and the oxygen taps open, we passed through the invisible resistance of the radiation wall to set out over the red sand of the desert in the ferocious sunlight.

  Our footprints guided us. In its hollow in the dunes, the Ad Astra appeared to us, pointing its gleaming mass at the black and starry sky, as if desirous of taking flight. I experienced a shock, a surge throughout my being, a regret at not being able to embark and leave immediately…but with Aurore.

  I realized that my two companions must be experiencing a similar sentiment, unrestricted by the qualification that I had added. They did not say a word when we had penetrated into the apparatus, closed the man-hole and taken off our masks.

  An accomplished wireless operator, who had taken note of Aurore’s explanations, my nephew imagined that it would be child’s play for him to deploy the antenna and get the radio working, in order to try to receive a hypothetical transmission from Uraniville—but his attempts were vain. Whether because the landing in the sand had damaged the mechanism or because of his own incapacity, nothing consented to function.

  The Russian, waiting for him to finish, was tapping her foot impatiently in front of the control levers. When he gave up and rejoined her, after three-quarters of an hour, she addressed his with an eloquent gaze, both interrogative and imperious. Regretfully, one might have thought, he bent over the inscriptions on the dials with a reflective and anxious expression.

  Pretending to busy myself in my turn with the wireless, I followed the mute scene anxiously. It was obvious—all too obvious. Oscar believed that he was able to undertake a flight himself. In the course of last night’s lon
g whispered conversation, he fiancée has extracted a confession of that presumptuous confidence from him. Now, she was following the results of his meditations on his face. She was waiting for a response. He gave her one, with a slight wink, which signified: “Yes, I can do it, don’t worry.”

  The mystical pale blue eyes hardened behind the gold-rimmed glasses. An oblique glance discreetly designated me. In her impetuous impatience, she was asking her fiancé to act immediately, without taking me into account. Might the two of them not be able to overcome my resistance?

  Seeing a hesitant hand advance momentarily toward the levers, I almost leapt upon him—but he did not complete the gesture, and replied to the other, with a glance: No, not now, later. And he added aloud, intended for me: “It’s a pity that Rette’s not with us. We would have been able to take off. But patience—the time will come. We still have two months.”

  “Yes, yes, it will come, and quickly,” said the Russian, in a tone that combined irritation and the certainty of victory.

  When we left the rocket I took care to make my two companions go first, carrying a cover of asbestos cloth.

  When, hanging on to the external ladder, Oscar and I combined our efforts to deploy the heat-resistant tarpaulin over the metal cone—fortunately, there is no wind in the void, so there was no need to weigh the fabric down—I suddenly realized the abominable situation that I was in.

  The Russian had not been able to persuade my nephew, this time, to use force and engage in a hand-to-hand struggle with me to eliminate my opposition and carry out their plan. Oscar, an honest man, had held firm—but how long could he resist the perfidious influence of the femme fatale? What ruses might she not inspire in him?

  I could no longer lose sight of the two accomplices for a single instant without having to dread that they would take advantage of it to run to the rocket and take off, leaving my wife and me on Eros! Whether they went out together or separately, it was henceforth forbidden for me not to give them an inch, no matter which of them it was, or both together!

  XIX. The City of Khalifur

  That dire prognosis was realized. The situation, in regard to Aurore’s captivity, remained immutable—and was only to be modified, in fact, after three months. During the first two, while Eros, drawing away in its orbit, still remained sufficiently close to the Earth—during the seventy days until the tenth of July, to be on the safe side—I kept track of every step of the couple with an exhausting assiduity. The only thing in my favor was that our relative liberty, for some impenetrable reason, ceased at nightfall. From sunset to sunrise, I had three hours of daily rest.

  As they were taking a malign pleasure in keeping my anxieties alert, Oscar and Ida only went out, most of the time, equipped with their respirators—slightly cumbersome, to be sure, but the weak gravity on Eros rendered the vanadium-steel bottle containing oxygen less heavy, when strapped to the back, than a Tyrolean bag containing soap and a comb.

  Even on the few occasions when they left their apparatus in the prison when they went out in the morning, however, I could not relax my surveillance, in case it was a trick and they might take advantage of my inattention to come back to fetch them surreptitiously.

  They were two abominable months of continuous anxiety, very keen to begin with, and which, although subsequently attenuated, subsisted until the very end of the period. Oscar resistance weakened as the work of corruption progressed. During visits to the Ad Astra—we went back a dozen times—I remained ready to resist an attack.

  If Ida had still had her revolver, I’m convinced that I would not have got out of it alive. She had made that suggestion to her fiancé, but the wretch conserved, in spite of everything, a residual depth of honor and loyalty; she was never able to get him to hand over his pistol, or even lend her material assistance in reducing me to impotence.

  Moreover, I now believe that the young phenomenon’s presumption and infatuation for the Russian had not blinded him to the extent of obliterating all critical thought; he had doubts about his ability to pilot the Ad Astra. Aurore had given us, as if by chance, a little speech on the difficulties that a novice astronaut would have in guiding a rocket, particularly in landing’ even assuming that he was able to steer it to a sea whose water would deaden the impact, there were 999 chances in a thousand of not braking in time and the apparatus burning up as it traversed the atmosphere. That delicate warning must have recalled our nephew to a saner appreciation of his insufficiency, and contributed strongly to the virtue that prevented him, until the end, from yielding to Ida’s urging.

  Than enraged her. In her nocturnal discussions with Oscar, she was sometimes seized by fits of rage, whose outbursts Aurore and I perceived. Once recovered from her hysterical transports, however, she must have had to yield to the evidence and admit that the desired departure was becoming less practicable with every passing day as our distance from the Earth increased.

  In any case she eventually developed another interest on Eros, and gradually resigned herself to the prospect of spending more than a year and a half there—but I only realized that later, and in spite of it, one always has to fear a reversion in that kind of paranoiac.

  It must not be thought that the surveillance to which I devoted myself absorbed me utterly in its obsession and made me into a kind of prison warder for my companions. The atmosphere only became really tense during visits to the rocket. At other times, although always on the alert and without abandoning my prudence, I got along reasonably well with Oscar—and as the latter wanted to get a big story out of his forced sojourn, those two months of mental torment were far from being wasted, so far as I was concerned, from the documentary point of view.

  The routine was the same every day. Ten minutes after sunrise, we had scarcely completed our toilet when two jailers came in carrying our daily meal: waffles of synthetic meat, “angelica” salad and guinea-pig stew. For the sake of bravado, and in spite of the economy advised by my wife, the Russian added two or three biscuits taken from the rocket’s reserves. Then Styal came to summon Aurore and take her to “the Master.” Immediately, Ida, Oscar and I put on our respirators and went out, an inseparable trio, followed closely by our acolytes, sticks shouldered. Until sunset, when we were obliged to return, we had two and a half hours of daylight at our disposal.

  Oh, those walks à trois! Ten terrestrial weeks of seven days: seventy times four—which is to say 280—Erotian days. One walk per day...

  Apart from visits to the Ad Astra, for which my companions always found a pretext, we first set out to familiarize ourselves with the city.

  The city of Khalifur—Aurore told us its name—or, at least, the part of it still alive, extended eastwards of the Palace, cut at right angles by the large east-west artery departing from the plaza, intersected by four roads parallel to that one and six north-south roads offering, to an even greater degree, the spectacle of dilapidation and abandonment that had struck us as soon as we arrived. Of every ten buildings with armored facades, two were in ruins and seven deserted; the tenth served as a dwelling for red-caped lacertians. Their total population could not have exceeded two hundred individuals of both sexes, not counting children. Every inhabited house possessed five or six hominine servants.

  Even with the animation added by the other slaves, policemen and public functionaries of the city or the Palace, the streets were generally almost deserted. Imagine a city 1,500 meters in diameter, comprising in total some ten streets, each of that length—making fifteen kilometers of public highway—for a population of two hundred lacertians and two thousand hominines. If they were all outside, equally distributed, that would give a density of one individual per ten meters of roadway. The least of our sub-prefectures is more animated. Furthermore, the slaves were not all out at the same time—far from it—and the “red” lacertians rarely showed themselves. The “Academicians” almost never left the Palace.

  At certain times, however—just before sunset, for example—hominines of a species still unknown to us
spread out in compact masses in the streets. They were the true proletarians, emerging from work to go back from the barracks where they spent the night. On the sad pale flesh of their albino pygmy bodies, males and females alike wore nothing but loincloths, like the bowwows outside—but the loincloths were made of blue-tinted metallic cloth, not sheets of tinplate.

  They also differed from the wrestlers in green leotards and yellow shorts—who seemed well-nourished and content with their lot—by virtue of an air of incurable misery. Maintained at the limit of sufficient nutrition, the bleak resignation of collective destiny that was crushing them was legible in their large pink and blinking eyes. The reduction of these beings to animality seemed total. Unlike their fellows, who, but for our guardians, would have harassed us with indiscreet curiosity, they scarcely spared us a glance when we went past their sad troupes, returning to their barracks under the guard of special police. Even Ida admitted that they would be difficult to regenerate.

  There were, in fact, factories in Khalifur, and we were permitted to take a look at them. As I have already said, however, the scientific knowledge the three of us possessed was weak. Ida, an OGPU spy and political agitator, only saw science as a word of great effect, full of promises of material wellbeing. Oscar, apart from six months studying mechanics and a six-week stint in a garage, only had the wide-ranging but superficial notions of a journalist new to his profession. As for me, although I saw science in much the same way as Madame Simodzuki, in its superhuman grandeur, I was far richer in good intentions than precise knowledge, and specific technical questions exposed my almost complete incompetence.