The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  In the sky, the Earth had disappeared. Drowned in the rays of the sun, behind which it was passing, relative to us. Hope has begun to dawn again since, in the early days of May, one sees it lingering, as the evening star, in the dusk. Every day it detaches itself a little further from the dazzling vicinity of the sun, while getting closer to us. Another eight and a half months…eight…and the distance will become small enough for us to attempt the return journey—but that daily glimpse of the Earth, while exciting hope, also aggravates impatience.

  Since I have got to know it better, the lacertian world imposes an increasing horror upon me and a contagion of incurable ennui.

  These beings are stuck in their past science, in their static and immutable wisdom. The errors of industrial civilization have been succeeded by arrested development. Deprived of the support of fecund applications, their science has invented nothing since the Separation…and the contemplation of Science with the possession of Wisdom is not sufficient to fill a life, to give it the sentiment of existence. Aurore has told me often enough that they are happy after their fashion, but I think they must be immeasurably bored on their worldlet. Their sole distraction is possessing the image of the past world, via the cinema, dreaming of the society of effort and strife from which they have excluded themselves voluntary.

  Desire for risk! Confronted by this stagnation, which I am forced to share, I throw myself violently back toward our civilization, our terrestrial world, which I cherish with all its errors—even its vertigo, the prelude to the inevitable catastrophe!

  How beautiful it seems to me, our epoch! The most admirable, the most exciting, the one that has seen the most in the least time, at a limitlessly accelerating rhythm. A marvelous counterpart to the progress that puts into less worthy hands the brutal intoxication of power: all the consciousness that the automobile, the airplane and the wireless procure the possession of the world; all humankind participating in every human unit, which never happened on a plane that, even yesterday, only a few geniuses could attain, by dint of thought. Today, it only requires a little intelligence to enjoy the spiritual joys of Unanimity, once reserved for rare precursors.

  And while we are here, languishing on this ridiculous fragment of planet, life is functioning at full tilt on the Earth....

  What has happened there, during the year since we left? That forms almost the only common concern among us, and every day, when we come together at meal-time, we take up the same hypotheses, the same fears: of war.

  We compare ourselves to the Arctic explorers who spend winter imprisoned in the ice, amid the horror of a six-month night, without seeing anything but the eternal ice-sheet, seals and polar bears. And we envy the resources that they will have henceforth of the radio, in order to remain in touch with the civilized world.

  And to think that every day, in all probability, a message intended for us is launched into the ether! Even if she doubts that we are still alive, Madame Simodzuki, soon cleared of all wrongdoing and free to act, must have started the station on the Levant working again.

  Oh, if only we could receive those messages! But when she came to the rocket herself, Aurore observed that the antenna had suffered irremediable damage in flight; its location was not far enough from the tube and it has been burned by the ejection of gases. It would be necessary to establish another antenna...

  Solicited by my wife, Zilgor has refused the necessary authorization for a long time, but a festival of the Rejuvenation of the Unique—which we were not allowed to attend—has taken place during Eros’ passage through the winter solstice. Zilgor has come out of it buoyed up, more accessible to new ideas, more disposed to listen to Aurore. He has finally given us permission to use a section of the atmospheric network south of the Palace as an antenna.

  There can be no thought of going to the rocket every day to listen to the wireless. It is necessary to dismantle the apparatus, transport the components, and install them in the room in the right wings placed at our disposal, with the necessary electrical equipment. For two months Aurore has labored on that with the engineer of the Metallurgy, a Mortal in a red cape, assisted by Oscar, only too glad thus to escape the ingrate task of educating he bowwows. I did my best to help too.

  On the tenth of July, everything was set up, ready to function.

  Assuming that a transmission would have taken place every day from Uraniville during the hour when Eros remained above the horizon, it would still have been necessary on our part, in order to receive the messages, for Khalifur to have been simultaneously brought by the rotation of the asteroid on to the face directed toward the Earth—which restricted the hours during which we could receive the narrow beam of directed waves. Furthermore, in view of the distance, it is necessary not to count on picking up any other station on Earth, no matter how powerful it might be. The time when our native planet passes the meridian offered the best chance.

  All four of us—even Ida—were assembled around the speaker, along with Styal and the engineer who had helped with the set-up. Aurore manipulated the controls...

  A phantom of jazz emerges momentarily from the static…and plunges back...minutes go by…syllables are sketched, but focusing is difficult, taking time...

  Finally, a voice—a human voice, a terrestrial voice—pronounces a few words…is submerged in the static…resumes, increasingly clear and distinct...

  We listen, throats tight, titillated by a delightful emotion. We listen to that human voice other than ours, the only one heard for fifteen months, absorbed at first in the pure joy of perceiving it, uniquely as music…then captivated by the meaning of the words, when a momentary clearance of the frightful crackle of the static permits us to understand a few words:

  “…a further message for the bold explorers. The spaceship is continuing its regular flight. The space-sickness, which had almost prevented the passengers from eating thus far...”

  We looked at one another, bewildered.

  “Eh? What? It’s not even us that they’re talking about!” muttered Oscar, while the waves were blurred again.

  We perceive more, in brief bursts:

  “…anticipations... goal of their voyage the day after tomorrow. If their apparatus is still... will send their first impressions...”

  Then nothing more that is intelligible, and we soon cease to receive anything at all. I exclaim: “Has Madame Simodzuki, by chance, sent a rescue expedition?”

  “Impossible,” said my wife. “The distance of Eros is presently too great. It’s doubtless the anticipated flight to Venus.”

  After four Erotian days, and every twenty-four hours thereafter, we renew the experiment, and the operator succeeds in picking up the beam of waves from Uraniville, but we begin to perceive that we must have been very lucky the first time to obtain a few intelligible phrases without a hitch. In general, the rendition of the speaker is utterly capricious and the waves are subject to continual vanishments. The messages, full of gaps, resemble those documents that are found in bottles that have been floating at sea for a long time, in which only distantly isolated words refer to an enigmatic meaning.

  In such conditions, the work of deciphering and interpretation spoiled the pleasure of the sessions. It was a veritable torture of Tantalus, and we often exerted a great deal of effort for no result. But as the Uraniville station had commenced with an identical message, summarizing events since our departure, before giving the daily news, every time it directed its Hertzian beam at Eros, it gradually became possible for us to piece together the text of that fundamental message like a puzzle.

  This was it, in broad terms.

  The day after her arrest, after a rapid investigation, the Comtesse had been released, with apologies, by the agents of French law, along with all the staff of Uraniville and the crew of the Fusi-Yama—but, the necessities of her defense having obliged Madame Simodzuki to reveal part of her enterprise, she completely renounced secrecy and gave full details to the press.

  You will remember the extent to whic
h, before our departure, public opinion had been overexcited by rumors of the military utilization of rockets, but the news that a spaceship carrying three passengers—the message made no mention of Ida—had taken off for another planet brought about a considerable shift, and a wave of enthusiasm followed the anxiety and unease. In Toulon, Madame Simodzuki was carried in triumph, and the French government had not taken long to award her the legion d’honneur and confirm officially the tacit authorization she had already received to utilize her property on the Île du Levant as a base for astronautical flights.

  Taking advantage of her popularity, the Comtesse exposed her ideas in a series of lectures that impassioned the world. Interplanetary emigration was to have the principal objective of saving the essence of thought in case of catastrophe. Passionate debates arose around that idea. When the billionairess published her intention of launching a second rocket the following year, this time toward Venus, the news excited the emulation of governments. The study of rockets as engines of war passed into a second phase and all interest was redirected toward extraterrestrial flights. A detectable relaxation followed in international relations. The great nations made it a point of honor each to prepare its flight to Venus, concurrently with that of the Japanese woman patronized by France.

  In addition to the United States, which possessed the Moon Gold patents and factories, and had already undertaken the construction of one rocket, Italy and Germany had hoped to have machines ready. During the conjunction of Venus, flights would take place in the following order, staged according to the duration of the journey calculated in each instance, fifteen, twelve and eight days: firstly, the Romalto, from the island of Ustica; secondly, the Spirit of America from Columbus, Missouri; thirdly, the Ad Astra II from the Île du Levant. The Verem’s Vorvaerts would not be ready in time, its engine not being sufficiently perfected.

  Of the three ships, all equipped with wireless, the first two had ceased almost immediately to be able to send their news. Only the Ad Astra II had remained in contact with the Earth, thanks to an antenna that constituted a considerable progress on that of her sister ship.

  Already during the third session, in two hours of listening and laborious manipulation, we had succeeded in capturing a scrap of a message in retransmission, in which the passengers of the Ad Astra II had announced their arrival on Venus themselves:

  “…forty-two million kilograms…our brothers of Earth…torrid heat: forty eight degrees Centigrade…but one can breathe easily…guard the rocket with the machine-gun…monstrous animals in the forest...”

  It was very meager as regards details, but the voice of the speaker, heavy with static, metallic and deformed by the superimposed retransmission, proclaimed the triumph, and a few bars of the Marseillaise subsequently perceived completed the grandiose evocation sufficiently.

  Mute with emotion, I participated in the enthusiasm of millions of wireless enthusiasts listening on Earth, everyone at his apparatus.

  Oscar uttered a resentful curse: “The lucky devils! They’ve hit the bull’s-eye with their Venus. At least that’s a planet! While we…”

  And thus, in dribs and drabs intercut with long lacunae, one fragment every twenty-four hours, we divined the odyssey of the rocket pioneers during the ten days they spent on Venus: the exploration of a virgin world, unexpected riches, reminiscent of Earth at the end of the Secondary Epoch, populated by enormous brutes with no intelligent beings...

  Then the return journey, the eight days of the trajectory, the landing at Uraniville in the midst of ten thousand spectators come from all points of the globe, the formidable ovation to which an echo reached us...

  And then the return of the American apparatus, with the sole pilot on board, his two companions having died on Venus, in the stomach of an ichthyosaur.

  As for the Italian rocket, no news.

  Every four Erotian days, Aurore, Oscar and I—the Russian had soon stopped coming—spent two hours in the radio room, rather poorly recompensed for our assiduity, most often by a thin fragment of news, but buoyed up even so by the illusion of getting closer to the Earth by that means.

  And after the excitement of each session, there was a more profound and more heart-rending relapse into the nightmarish reality of Khalifur and the odious lacertian world...

  XXVI. “It’s war...”

  A slap, vigorously applied, resounded in the darkness of our lodgings. An hour before the first outbursts of their dispute had awoken Aurore and me, the row having arisen between the two fiancés. They had quarreled with increasing bitterness, in contained voices, through clenched teeth, in their compartment of the common room with partitions of tapestry. The Russian pressed out nephew to give in...and his determination must have been extraordinary, for he opposed a stubborn and indignant refusal. Was he finally about to shake off the yoke of the femme fatale? Or was it only a temporary discord, as had occurred several time between them on trivial matters? But it had never come to blows before.

  After the explosion of the slap, evidently received by Oscar, the latter had uttered an “Oh!” of amazement. Then silence fell, completely. Outside, the stars were shining in the black void above the ruins of the blasted metropolis.

  As soon as the sun appeared, without waiting for the morning meal, Ida, dressed to go out, with a ferociously resolute expression, marched toward the door. Just as she was about to open it, Oscar, who had followed her in great distress, put his hand on her arm.

  “No, I beg you! You’re not going to do it?”

  She shook him off, shoved him away brutally, and disappeared without a word, while the two hominines on duty came in, carrying the daily meat waffles and guinea-pig stew.

  Our nephew had remained where he stood, unsteadily, as if dazed. He watched the wrestlers set down their tray on the table and leave, according to the ritual. Suddenly, he collapsed on to his chair, his head between his hands, and in a voice punctuated by sobs he cried: “She’s mad! Mad and criminal! And me—what an idiot I was not to have understood sooner! No, I don’t want to serve as her accomplice in such a coup. Rette, Gaston, you’re nice people, I don’t want anyone to do you any harm—you have to help me prevent it!”

  I abstained from reminding him that he had almost abandoned us here, nice people as we were, my wife and I, and make off with his fiancée in the rocket—but I was curious to hear the revelations that range and resentment of his feeble past would extract from him. I also had a certain amount of pity for the big baby, who was now weeping in the consoling arms of Aurore.

  When the sobs eased, she stood him up and said to him, affectionately: “Spill it, my little Scar. Unburden your heart. What’s wrong?”

  The poor boy wrung his hands in despair.

  “What’s wrong is that I’ve allowed myself to be jollied along like a mere bowwow. It’s abominable! She wants to start a revolution, the great upheaval. All her talk of regeneration…and to think that I’ve believed it for eighteen months. It was to get to this. She’s just revealed her real plan to me.”

  I felt a shiver run down my back. We were fools! I tried to doubt it, but I saw once again the ecstatic savages before the Russian, obeying her like a divinity. It had then been a matter of do-re-mi, but in that time since I had last gone back to the pylons, what might she not have been able to teach them…yes, to the tune of the Internationale!

  Aurore was only ever irritated by stupidity. This time, she could not contain herself.

  “But that woman can’t understand, then, that the ‘people’ here are the lacertians! That these other creatures that resemble us physically are only inferior animals, unworthy of domination!”

  Then she got a grip on herself, looked the young reporter in the eye and interrogated him. “The revolution—the great upheaval? Aren’t you exaggerating the gravity of the situation, Scar? How would she be able to bring an entire population of slaves to that point, without their masters suspecting anything? When there’s not only the police, but the overseers of the harvest...”
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  Oscar was still distressed, but he recovered the faculty of thinking and expressing himself clearly.

  “You know very well, Rette, that the Lizards believe as firmly in the absolute and definitive submission of the hominines as in the theorems of geometry—and for many centuries, appearances have proved them right. The police limit themselves to distributing their blows without dreaming that any idea of revolt could ever enter the heads of their inferior fellows, the savages. They have such scorn for them, anyway, that they would think themselves dishonored if they listened to what they are saying. Then, there’s the entire ‘reservation’ zone into which they only go at rare intervals, when they’re in search of recruits for the factories. Oh, Ida’s taken all her precautions! She remembers the time when she was an OGPU spy and political agitator! She’s been careful not to try any propaganda on the police and has maintained the external obedience of the slaves until the last moment. Oh, she’s been skillful, the witch! Even the agent’s of the Sûreté wouldn’t have seen through the smokescreen before yesterday.”

  I interrupted, and said, without reflection: “Never mind the police, Scar—what about you? You, who saw everything—do you dare to maintain that you were ignorant of her true plans? For eighteen months you’ve collaborated with her criminal propaganda without knowing anything about the goal at which she was aiming? That seems hard to believe.”

  Oscar was too demoralized to object. “It’s the simple truth, though, Uncle. I saw everything—or almost everything, for recently there’s been the wireless one day in four…but I only understood this morning, when she no longer had any alternative but to initiate me into her plan, because the hour is about to sound. The first eight or nine months, in any case, it was only a matter of focusing the bowwows’ attention and capturing their obedience. It was indirectly that she suggested to them that their slavery wasn’t part of the immutable order of things, that it might be changed.