by Theo Varlet
All the evidence suggested, however, that she was taking the improvised vocation of evangelist seriously, and every morning she took us to the camps in order to devote herself to it zealously until nightfall. Not only was it visible that she was devoting herself to the task wholeheartedly, but she abstained from addressing her customary reproaches to my wife, whom she accused of “not knowing how to handle” Zilgor to persuade him to liberate us all.
I ended up yielding to the evidence; the Russian had given up on escaping from Eros and reaching the Earth before the next conjunction.
Nevertheless, I wanted to make absolutely sure, and it was not until the tenth of July that I abandoned my fastidious surveillance.
XXI. The Film of Ektrol
Meanwhile, the beginnings of confidence had been established between the Master of Eros and Aurore. Instead of seeing her as a mere documentary repository worthy of methodical consultation but whom it was necessary to keep in servitude in order to maintain her permanently at his disposal, he ended up considering her, if not as an equal, at least as a “natural person.” As she explained the condition of terrestrial civilization to him, he seemed to conceive a pitying sympathy for her. Instead of opposing a haughty silence to her questions, as he had to begin with, he sometimes consented to reply to them.
In the evenings, when all four of us were together, she told us things he had said, thanks to which certain enigmas of Erotian society received a semblance of a solution.
Thus, we now know that the batteries of concave mirrors situated outside the pylons capture, day and night, not the calorific and luminous rays of the sun but the ultra-X radiations of nebulae, subsequently transformed into electricity. It is the only source of energy subsisting on Eros; there is no more hydroelectric or tidal power, since there are no more watercourses, nor lakes, nor seas; there is no more black oil, no gasoline, all the deposits having been exhausted before the “Separation.”
We know that this Separation is a crucial event in Erotian history. It was then that the natural atmosphere suddenly disappeared. An anticipated catastrophe, it seems: Khalifur—the Khalifur of the armored houses—had provisions of oxygen that permitted the survivors to “hold on” and to constitute the network of pylons. All animal and vegetable life disappeared, however, outside the city.
We have deduced that the “separation” in question excised the asteroid from a much more considerable planet named Ektrol. We also suspect that Zilgor witnessed that catastrophe, that when he talks about it, he does so as an eye-witness. He says: “I have seen.” Was it, then relatively recent?
All that my wife extracted from Zilgor in fragments, without too much difficulty. He has also contented to tell her that her captivity will come to an end one day, and that she will be free to return to Earth with her three companions—but what she has not yet found the means to discover is how long it will be before he intends to liberate her. When she broached the subject before the thirtieth of June, and told him that, once that date was passed, our exile would necessarily have a duration that would be very distressing for her and her companions, the lizard with the golden skull simply relied, with a thin smile: “Why did you come?”
As impassive and cold as the superhuman science he incarnates, sentimental arguments have no purchase with him. He will liberate Aurore when he judges that his research is complete within his brain, when he has extracted all the scientific content from hers, and not one day sooner, even if we have to remain on Eros forever and perish here of sorrow and tedium...
The surveillance that I exercised for two months over Ida and Oscar had given me something to do. Its abandonment, after the tenth of July, left me idle. Fleeing the confined atmosphere of our prison, I spent three hours a day roaming the hideous streets of Khalifur, waiting for nightfall, when Aurore would be restored to me, and when I would contain a taste of affection and consolation in her company.
Debilitated by an unhealthy diet and by the interrogations that “vampirized” her, she soon went to sleep. Sleep escaped me, and I remained in distress, stifling between the walls of that armored Palace, thinking despairingly of the long months that remained for us to pass in that frightful sojourn. I cursed Zilgor and the pitiless science that retained us here; I cursed the adventure that had brought Aurore and me here, by virtue of the ambition to raise my life to a superhuman utility.
It was my fault that we were stranded, perhaps with no hope of returning, on this ridiculous asteroid! What need had I to encourage my wife in her astronautical inclinations? Could she not have served science more usefully on Earth—while I continued to paint? We would then be enjoying our modest share of happiness; we would be living in peace; we would be traveling among human cities and the beautiful landscapes of the Earth...
The Earth! During the last third of the night, getting up earlier and earlier, I looked at it through the window, floating above the steel domes. That large blue-tinted planet, incomparably bright, was our maternal Earth, with its two million human beings…with its seas, its continents and its cities...with its capitals, and our dear Paris...
The first symptoms of an imminent change in our situation became manifest on the third Erotian day of the twenty-second of July. Aurore told Oscar, Ida and me that the Master of Eden wanted to initiate her in the history of Ektrol and show her a film that might serve as a lesson to humans. We were authorized to see it.
“Well, well,” said Oscar, “so he’s deigning to take notice of the scientific ‘dunces’ and see them as delegates of Earth!”
But the reporter for the Jour, like me, accepted enthusiastically. Ida refused point-blank; her work of evangelization required her.
The session, reserved for Zilgor, the Twenty and the four Terrans, took place the next day in the apartment of the Master of Eros.
Everyone knows what a multitude of facts the Pathé News, for example, can present in a quarter of an hour. It would require a book for me to recount everything that unfurled before our eyes in the course of those three hours of uninterrupted projection. I shall limit myself to a rapid synopsis, in which shall pinpoint a few striking details at intervals.
It is necessary not to forget, however, that we were not witnessing a sequence of images in black and white, but the evocation of the very reality, in color and in three dimensions. Astonishing special effects must have intervened, among others the exhibition of the interior of a building in cross-section; certain episodes were presumably recreated after the fact; there were superimpositions, like that of the Genius of Evil…but nine-tenths of the film was authentically documentary, including the terrifying sight of the aerial bombardment of Khalifur and that of the cataclysm, taken from the cupolas of the Palace.
Only the composition of the sequence and the order of the scenes had been arranged for our benefit. It had certainly been several weeks before that Zilgor had decided to offer the spectacle to the delegates of Earth.
A recapitulative overview: seas shining in the sunlight, lands covered with forests, where an intense animal life agitates. Nature has retained a harmonious equilibrium on Ektrol—for it is evidently Ektrol, this world of noble horizons whose distant curvature attests a large planets, a sister of the Earth and Venus.
And this time we perceive the music, the harmonies of which evoke the unfurling of the waves of the sea, the hymn of the wind over the rocks of the coast, the infinite racket of inviolate jungles, and the torrential din of rivers.
But the supreme civilization has begun to conquer the planet and develop, simultaneously, its industrial grandeur and its plunder of nature.
Here are cities, centers of technology, still scattered, from which extend the accelerating construction of railways, clearing the ground in the prairies of the Far West and virgin forests. Branching from the main lines, whose network tightens, mining exploitations plant their derricks and their chimneys, hollow out their shafts, digging into the entrails of the globe, extracting its reserves of coal, iron, lead, zinc, silver, gold, mercury—the entire ser
ies of metals and minerals, causing oil-wells to spring up in hundreds, engendered in the geological strata by slow maturation since time immemorial. All of it is dispersed, pumped, aspired by the growling tentacular cities, which grow, swell and spread out, overflowing in all directions.
In cross-section: a residential skyscraper, twenty-five floors populated by saurian individuals, superimposed in hundreds of similarly-disposed boxes, couples with their children, accomplishing in series the same actions: eating, sleeping, going to work...
One sees ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand similar skyscrapers multiplying vertiginously, as an image is reduplicated in opposed mirrors: ten thousand transparent skyscrapers; an entire metropolis squandering in that futile proliferation of standardized individuals the wealth of the globe and the products of technology...
At times, in the course of the film, when a close-up shows us the only-too-recognizable head of one of the world’s saurian inhabitants in the foreground, a recurrent surge of our terrestrial habits and prejudices makes us consider the whole thing as a masquerade, a farce in the style of Breughel, a gargantuan allegory, vengeful and prejudicial to human nature.
And yet, the undeniable verity of the scenes imposes itself upon us, and that impression is swiftly effaced; we realize that it comes from an inveterate anthropomorphism; philosophical reflection contributes to its erasure. And one is gripped by the living turbulence of masses, in which the inhuman character of the individuals melts away in the cumulative effect, the unanimous atmosphere of a grandiose civilization analogous to ours. One identifies with that manifestation of cosmic intelligence, sister to the one in which the humans of Earth are the actors...
The dammed rivers of hydroelectric plants, the estuaries capturing the force of tides, the mountain torrents plunging into the forced conduits of turbines. Cut to factories. Pylons replace trees, cables transporting energy stripe the sky of the countryside. Exploitations, clearances…and everywhere debris heaps up, and the residues ejected by factories and cities.
Singularly, in all of that, one has not yet glimpsed the hominines, at least not in their present role as omnifunctional slaves. There are some among the fauna of the forests before their disappearance. And a few tribes are maintained in parks, but the proletarians are lacertians, like the rest of the population.
Collected in close-up for a second, and isolated in the frame of laboratories, among the swarming millions of individuals recapitulated in a whirlwind, the few Scientists emerge, who are the only ones who count.
In superimposition, an enormous Saurian with the silhouette of a diplodocus, with bloodshot eyes, deprived of a psychic eye, dreams of the carnage of an enemy of similar size. He symbolizes the Genius of Evil, the issue of the ancestral brute—the Devil, in sum—who has grown alongside higher planetary thought, and who aspires to capture and bring into play, for its destruction, the energies conquered thereon. Leaning over the Scientist, he watches, claws extended, the invention that is about to be born, the power of new action. The explosive will hollow out mountains, to establish communications between peoples.
The Devil laughs, for the peoples fly different flags, and Diplodocus will be able to utilize the explosive in its own fashion. Nor will he miss out on the yellow or green gases that emerge from retorts, pell-mell with multicolored dyes and disinfectant phenol.
Under the red rays darted by the gaze of the lacertian Satan, the machines are activated, and, by means of entire trains and convoys of trucks laminating the roads, emerge from the factories: rifles, cannons, machine-guns, which accumulate in the arsenals of all nations. More! More! Never enough! It is a matter of surpassing the dimensions of the neighboring people’s stock.
In the end, the heaps collapse and the weapons are animated with a diabolical life, leaping into hands that grip them. Warriors swarm in multiple battalions from every direction charging and firing, and killing, and falling in ranks, in regiments, in armies, in millions of combatants...
After which, the two great continents of Ektrol have no more than one flag each: the White and the Red.
And the accelerated progress resumes, and on each continent, exchanges multiply, and machines engender others by quasi-spontaneous generation, obliging the worker-slaves to labor ever more frenetically. The cities overflow increasingly over the fields, or along causeways, docks and stone blocks, extending tentacles over the ocean.
Triumphs of the supreme civilization! The reign of the lacertians reaches its culminating point. The planet is conquered. And Science can do anything. What does it matter that deposits of coal and oil are almost exhausted? Something else will be found. What does it matter if the life and beauty of nature have been destroyed? The cinema conserves its image, and the last representatives of flora and fauna have been parked in reservations.
It’s then that we see hominines appear in the cities. The fashion begins of domesticating them, and they fight in stadia; it is perceived that their dispositions makes them excellent servants, and their breeding is undertaken in order to sell them to lovers of luxury...
And I experience a relief, in knowing thus that they are not humans from Earth and that they belong to the fauna of Ektrol. No astronautical apparatus has yet featured among the inventions that render the life of the lacertians of the time more comfortable than that of an American of the year of grace 1940.
For the first time we hear the national hymn of Red Ektrol. A kind of ecstasy spreads through Zilgor and the Twenty. We are evidently among the descendants of that nation, whose flag is quartered with a golden sun on a red background. Choirs emit gales of sound rising toward the fictive aircraft that takes us through the air, above festivals celebrating the grandeur of the lacertian fatherland: 100,000 performers, all equipped with little flags, wave them at the end in a triple acclamation, which covers the entire crowd with a moving and innumerable red flag constellated with golden dots.
But the Devil-Diplodocus is still growing, with the Genius of the planet.
The economic struggle between the Red and the Whites is aggravated. Automobiles, clothing and all kinds of superfluous products are seen emerging from factories, piling up more rapidly than they can be used. Each continent persists in sending full-laden cargo-ships to the other. The machines turn perpetually, in an ever-more furious rhythm. Continuous flocks of transoceanic aircraft pass along aerial routes from which birds have been expelled.
The Devil wants them to carry bombs, and presides over the inevitable Ultimate of Ultimates: the launching by aircraft of torpedoes that fall like white darts into the aerial abyss toward the distant sparkling waves thousands of meters below, reducing to imperceptible dots and suddenly reappearing, cleaving the water in groups if white splashes.
Preparations are made on both sides. The stocks are already complete, but the conflict will be too terrible. There is fear; there is hesitation. Airtight blockhouses are built to protect the population against gas, with reserves of air. Khalifur possesses a district of that sort. I recognize the armored cupolas of the Palace and the Observatory.
As the film progresses, I feel queasy: a horrible apprehension, which Aurore and Oscar share, in confrontation with such parallelism between the results of thought on the Ektrol of old and the Earth of today. Is the fate of the lacertians in store here for humans? In anguish, we wait for what happens next.
Two enormous inventions, in rapid succession, emerge from two laboratories among the White and among the Reds.
One is the secret of longevity, by means of grafts of nervous tissue. The skull is trepanned, the cortical regions removed from the brain of the “donor”—who is sacrificed—and adapted into the gray matter of the recipient, who is rejuvenated. And I recognize in the lacertian to the forehead of whom, after the operation, the surgeons fit the golden sheets closing the operculum, as Zilgor, the present Master of Eros, who is here beside us in the room, smiling at his image captured on Ektrol many centuries ago!
The other discovery relates to radiations unknown until then
because they pierce all known bodies without exception, but can be captured by concave mirrors made of a new substance. These radiations are depicted symbolically, in the forms of fulminating tears, rain through space, springing from distant spiral nebulae where the elements of nascent universes are formed from the ether. Mirrors aimed at the Andromeda nebula are seen receiving the fulminating rain, and simple, compact transformers making electricity therefrom, which activate machine with millions of horse-power.
It is the magnificent success of science, which will replace the almost-exhausted energy sources and will soon permit the facile dispatch of interplanetary vehicles.
But Satan-Diplodocus has adopted the idea for his own purpose. He assembles the fulminating tears that fall from all the sectors of space in a ball as big as a fist. That ultra-X accumulator constitutes a device a thousand times more redoubtable than any explosive, for it does not act by means of the simple expansive force of gases chemically disengaged by a reaction, but by immediately communicating, to everything that it touches by deflagration, a formidable radioactivity that results in the atomic disintegration of the matter, its volatilization in the ether.
The first tentative attempts to apply this discovery occasion frequent laboratory accidents; the power and effects of these ultra-X accumulators have not yet been domesticated. What a pity not to be able to use them immediately in the coming war!
The pretext for that war: the quarrel of the Lines of Force.
Alert: the astronomers poring over their micrometric measurements have observed that the rotation of the planet is decreasing month by month. An image shows us that the rotation will eventually cease to rotate and will present the same face perpetually toward the sun. Death by torrefaction for one continent, by congelation for the other.