by Theo Varlet
When I chanced to come round my head felt atrociously heavy, as if my brain were swollen. I understood, fearfully, that the semi-automatic machines for renewing the air were no longer working. The monitor dial revealed a dangerous proportion of carbonic acid. With great difficulty, I succeeded in moving to open the oxygen valve. Another quarter of an hour, and we would all have been asphyxiated...
Aurore’s forebodings were all too accurate. The tanks contained barely enough fuel to show down the spaceship somewhat and prevent our going up in a fatal puff of smoke as we traversed the atmosphere. Luck, however, was in our favor; we had the ocean beneath us. Side by side with Aurore and Oscar at the periscope, sick and anguished, my vision blurred, I watched the deep blue of the Pacific, between the Hawaiian islands and the Polynesian archipelago, rising up to met us. We were too far away to see whether any ship was in the vicinity.
At intervals, I glanced at the chronometer. The braking was supposed to last for nineteen minutes. At the fourteenth, the thunder of the engine began to weaken; its roar decreased, became a rumble, a slight hiss…and expired. Run dry. We were still falling, irremediably, with a velocity of several kilometers per second.
“Those two keys!” my wife ordered Oscar and myself. “Turn them!”
With all our strength, we twisted the handles, which were designed to jettison the motor, now red-hot, and thus avoid the possibility of an explosion on contact with the water...
Then we all laid down; and, turning toward me, Aurore, without a word, gave me one last kiss: a kiss that might perhaps precede our death by a matter of seconds.
The raw light of the electric bulbs was reflected in the eyes of my beloved wife, two centimeters from mine...
Suddenly, at the same time as a sensation of weight invaded us once again, a slight sound was born, initially similar to the susurrus of waves against the sides of a moving ship, which grew rapidly, son enveloping us with a sonorous roar. The layers of the atmosphere, increasingly dense, exercised their retardation by friction on the walls of the spaceship, which was falling like a bolide...
Was its speed still great enough for it to burn up? How many seconds could the metal resist? An increasing heat enveloped us, a fiery breath...
And with an almighty impact, I lost consciousness, with the instantaneous intuition that we had escaped the peril of combustion, that the apparatus had reached the water and was plunging, at a gradually decreasing speed, into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
XXIX. Planetary Colonization
A long regular swell rocked the rocket, a full third of which was above the water. In the joy of salvation, we breathed in drunkenly through the man-hole, the vivifying breath of the briny air, laden with iodine and sunshine. Shrieking gulls, huge seabirds, were circling in the sky. We felt excessively heavy, but that very weight, by imposing a burden on our muscles to which they had been unaccustomed for nineteen months, attested to our return to the maternal planet. It also gave us an appetite, and we ate a meal of biscuits and gruyère cheese, installed in the nose-cone of the rocket, our hair whipped by the breeze, which seemed succulent to us.
An optimism attenuated our recent sorrows, damped down regrets...
With Zilgor, the formula of the Ultra-X reflectors had disappeared forever; we had not even brought the “cinelife” apparatus back from Eros, as we could have done in les abrupt conditions of departure. Of those nineteen months of adventures, nothing remained to us but our memories, books full of notes and a few rolls of film. But we were back on Earth, safe and sound.
Even Oscar reacted against his melancholy. Gripped again by his profession, he drafted at hazard, in telegraphic form, an initial communication for his newspaper.
Deprived of our wireless apparatus, we were reduced to waiting for the hypothetical passing of a ship. According to a fix made at midday, we were close to the shipping route between North America and Australia.
To signal our presence and avoid a collision we installed a mast, on which a flag floated by day and an illuminated electric bulb by night—and we took turns on watch.
At the beginning of the second night, I was asleep with Aurore in the cockpit when a cry from Oscar woke us up.
“On your feet, friends! A ship!”
The uncertainty did not last long. A huge liner appeared on the north-eastern horizon, with all five of its decks lit up, heading straight toward us. When it was five hundred meters away we fired revolver shots. The howl of a siren replied to us; the beam of a searchlight picked us out, a boat put to sea.
A quarter of an hour later, we climbed aboard the Southern Cross, in service between Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco. An officer questioned us, while passengers whispered around us—and I must admit that the rags of our old aviation suits gave us a scarcely commendable appearance—but when Aurore had revealed her identity, and when the spaceship surged forth, hoisted up on a hawser, there was a triumphal ovation...
And the first civilized meal that we had tasted, while recounting our adventures to the officers! That coffee, those cigars, of which we had been deprived for months...
As soon as the news of our return had been sent by radio to the Jour and diffused by the agencies of the entire world, messages began to flood in to us from all points of the globe. The telegraphists, who were working without pause, were insufficient to receive them all. A telegram from the Frémiets, effusions of affection for their son, whom they had given up for dead; congratulations from Madame Simodzuki, opening a line of credit at the banking agency of the Southern Cross and arranging a rendezvous in Paris...
All three of us were harassed with propositions: articles for the press, lecture tours, cinemas, even music-halls; Aurore was offered fabulous jobs as a rocket-pilot.
At the port of call in Honolulu, reporters and managers of every sort were waiting, having come from the United States to meet us, taking a naval vessel, with an army of photographers and cameramen. Our old clothes were bought for their weight in gold. A dozen crystalline fruits brought from Eros for Zilgor’s nourishment during the journey were sold for 200 dollars each to an agent of some zirconium king.
In San Francisco the policemen of the official brigade had to appeal to Pinkerton detectives to clear a path for our automobile to the airport.
But all that is only of passing interest.
We spent an evening in Chicago, to meet the survivor of the American expedition to Venus, Colonel W. S. T. Nares, the pilot whose two companions had been devoured by an enormous beast and who had brought the rocket Spirit of America back alone.
He showed us his entire collection of photographs, evoking terrifying monsters: plesiosaurs, dinotheria, atlantosauruses forty meters long, which humans would have to fight in order to make a place for themselves on the new world; landscapes of tropical forests lost in the steam-bath vapor rising from rivers at the temperature of hot baths; the cloudy mountains he had named the Magnetic Range, a cordillera of native iron. He showed us specimen of petroliferous earth and minerals of various metals mounted in labeled tubes: all the material necessary to set up a fruitful branch of terrestrial civilization.
How pitiful we felt before all that, returning from Eros!
On the transatlantic liner Île-de-France, which brought us back to Europe, we were surrounded once again. Taking advantage of the distaste that Aurore and I had for that excessive publicity, our nephew added to the demands of his profession the care of receiving in our stead a number of those indiscreet individuals, and I saw with pleasure that he did not detest the conversation of amiable female passengers avid for autographs. He even wrote a few dedications in verse! From which I concluded that we need not retain any further anxieties on his account; the memory of Ida was not harassing him unduly.
On the Île-de-France, where the majority of the passengers spoke French, we were able to take account, even better than on the American liner, of the enormous impression created in the world by the discovery of Venus. In the ten weeks since the two rockets had returned,
the fever of enthusiasm and impatience aroused by that news had only increased. It was far from the ill-tempered anxiety that had charged the international atmosphere with menace before our departure. Instead of regarding neighboring countries with a muted temptation to take their place in the sun by force, all eyes were turning toward the new world, Earth’s “twin,” which offered unlimited territories and virgin riches.
It is the old migratory instinct that has awakened again. In an era when the entire Earth had been divided up into lots, at the same times as its dimensions were being reduced by rapid transport, that instinct, no longer finding room to operate, had been transformed into bad temper, a sterile itch. The only possible distraction was a new world to conquer.
The discovery of Venus has reopened all possibilities. The prospect of planetary colonization has come to redirect the bellicose rivalries that confronting one another and enraging one another in the overly narrow cage of the Earth. The immense anxiety has been relieved, deflected, channeled.
Everyone in the world has understood that planetary colonization will be more rewarding than war; that is the fashionable formula of the moment. It is no longer a matter of armament or perfecting the rocket-torpedo; all the nations are only thinking about constructing spaceships that will be ready to depart during the next conjunction of Venus, in eighteen months.
An international conference will be held at The Hague in order to divide up zones of influence on Venus equitably. Every country intends to take effective possession of its own zone: so many square degrees, between such-and-such meridians and parallels. Anti-astronautical laws have been repealed everywhere. Poor governments are negotiating loans, using the returns of their future colonies as collateral. Along with nations like the United States, France and Italy, which have already made their trials, the others are hastening to make up for lost time. There is not one that does not have one or several rockets under construction in its shipyards. This time, a hundred or more departures for Venus are anticipated—not to mention the exploratory flights that will take off three months hence with Mars as their destination.
And that activity has given business a new boost. Under that sprinkling of hopes, confidence has been regenerated. People laugh at us when we mention “the crisis,” which, for us seems like only yesterday, although the Terrans—we have maintained the habit between ourselves of saying “Terrans”—regard it as disappearing into a prehistoric past.
There is the fecund fever of prosperous epochs. New entrepreneurs are swarming around astronautics. The official inauguration has been announced for the fourteenth of July of a daily Paris-New York transatlantic rocket service, taking 23 minutes. Companies have been founded for regular transportation between Earth and Venus. Others, more numerous, are ready to “rationalize” the carving up of the new world: the International Society for Astral Colonization (ISCA); the Company for the Exploitation of Venus and Other Planets (CEVOP), etc.
In truth, Madame Simodzuki’s fears have been realized. Astronautics has fallen into the public and democratic domain; it is not only the produce of thought that will be transported to Venus, but our civilization as it is, with all its errors and human passions, good and bad.
We were impatient to know how she had reacted to the forced abandonment or her original dream. As soon as we arrived in Paris, we dined with her that evening, in a small company, with the engineer Northwell and Miss Lat, at the Majestic.
The Comtesse’s ideas had evolved considerably. Since she had seen the impossibility of acting in secret, she had had no need to learn that her dream of a planetary conservatory had been realized on Eros by the Lacertians, and with what less-than-brilliant results, in order to renounce that utopia. Moreover, had not the danger of imminent war, which had justified her concept, disappeared?
She has understood that astronautics and planetary colonization are, like everything else, carried along by the fatal movement of industrial civilization, which spans all human activity without distinction. It is impossible to limit or localize progress.
Madame Simodzuki is content to entrust astronautical enterprises to a holding company, in the countries where they are not monopolized by the State, and she is buying interplanetary emigration companies in order to control, so far as is possible, the quality of the departures. The sole black spot is that the U.S.S.R., with its Dnieprostroi factories, where giant rockets capable of transporting 150 passengers are under construction.
“We haven’t yet reached the stage of numbers of that sort,” the Comtesse said to Aurore, “but we’ve made progress in two years even so. Tomorrow, Northwell will show you the plans on the Ad Astra X. It has a crew of ten, who will be under your orders if you decide to take command of the flight to Mars in three months’ time. No, shh! Don’t give me an answer today; you need to discuss it with your husband first...”
Our second evening was spent with the Frémiets. My excellent Aunt surpassed herself in culinary matters. She wanted to feed us up, as if we had only been out of the rocket for an hour.
“You need to get our strength back, after those twelve days without eating. My poor children! Is it possible! Oscar has already told us...”
Once again, it was necessary to tell the story of our sojourn on Eros, but by preliminary agreement with our “nephew,” who preferred to protect his mother’s sentiments, the Ida chapter was largely expurgated. The Russian became, in Aurore’s narrative, a simple stowaway, and her propaganda among the bowwows had not had an involuntary accomplice.
I must say that my wife told it very well from that particular viewpoint. I didn’t know she had such a talent for lying. But Oscar must, in confidence, have let his father divine more of the truth. The latter smiled with a knowing expression, his white beard clutched in his fist, and darted amused glances at his son. After dinner, when we went into the drawing room for coffee, he caught me between two doors.
“He’s been stupid, eh, the boy? It doesn’t matter—we owe you a great debt for having brought him back. And all things considered, now that the woman is staying up there for good, I don’t regret that he’s had that little adventure. It will be character-building. He doesn’t seem to be thinking about it too much any longer. He was already talking to me this morning about a young Rumanian aviatrix he met on the boat, whom he’s going to meet in Paris...”
Will Oscar be joining us? It’s possible, but for the moment, he doesn’t seem very enthusiastic. He’ll see how things go, he says, and his first priority is to foster his reputation as the new ace of journalism.
But my wife and I have made our decision: we’ll depart in three months on the Ad Astra X. I’ve lost a few illusions, and no longer attribute so naively an exclusive value to science, and the success that has welcomed the exhibition of my sketches, studies and paintings of Khalifur have given me new confidence in my artistic talent.
I’ve recovered my mental equilibrium since I’ve acquired a better appreciation of the part I can play in things and I shall limit my fate to shining modestly as an interplanetary painter, in the shadow of my dear and glorious Aurore...
Notes
1 Available from Black Coat Press under the title The Xenobiotic Invasion, ISBN 978-1-61227-054-8.
2 Translated as The Mysterious Force, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-37-8.
3 Translated as “Adventure the Wild” and included in the Black Coat Press collection The Givreuse Enigma, ISBN 978-1-935558-39-2.
4 The first pulp sf story to develop that hypothesis was Norman L. Knight’s “Saurian Valedictory” (1939).
5 Translated as “The German on Venus” in the eponymous collection, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-934543-56-6.
6 Translated as The Frenetic People, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-118-7.
7 Translated as The Napus: The Great Plague of the Year 2227.
8 Translated as The Martian Epic, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-934543-41-2.
9 Translated as Timeslip Troopers, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-078-4.
10 Translated as The Golden Rock, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-134-7.
11 Translated as The Xenobiotic Invasion, q.v.
12 Presumably Camille Belliard, the proprietor of L’Amitié par le livre, which also published a biography of Varlet by Félix Lagalaure.
13 Robert Esnault-Pelterie (1881-1957) was one of France’s most successful aviation pioneers, making his first powered flight in 1907 and founding the aircraft manufacturing concern that eventually became Vickers Ltd. He published a paper in 1913 that calculated the energies necessary for rockets to achieve escape velocity and travel to the Moon and other planets. In 1927 he hosted a symposium in Paris on the uses of rockets for atmospheric exploration and the possibilities of interplanetary travel, which Varlet might have attended. He also proposed the development of military rockets of the kind Varlet calls “rocket-torpedoes,” in 1929, and persuaded the French Ministry of War to finance a study of their practicality. An expanded edition of L’Astronautique [Astronautics] was issued in 1934.
14 Gaston and André Durville established Europe’s first naturist village, Héliopolis, on the Île du Levant in 1931. Varlet, an enthusiastic nudist resident on the mainland not very far away, was undoubtedly familiar with it. Nudism is still de rigeur on the island today, and compulsory in some areas. Science fiction fans will be familiar with the location by virtue of the enthusiastic account of it in Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road.
15 “Géo London” was the pseudonym of Georges Samuel (1885-1951), who was the star reporter of the daily newspaper Le Journal from 1920-50. Arthur Dupin played a similar role for Le Petit Journal.
16 Jules Dumont-d’Urville’s entire family perished in France’s first railway disaster on 8 May 1942.
17 Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) published the pamphlet Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen [By Rocket into Interplanetary Space] in 1923, and expanded it into the book Wege aur Raumschiffart [Ways to Spaceflight] in 1929. He was the senior figure in the Verein für Raumschiffart [Spaceflight Society] whose attempts to popularize the possibility of spaceflight obtained Oberth the privilege of designing the rocket featured in Fritz Lang’s film Frau im Mond (1929; subtitled in English as By Rocket to the Moon and Woman in the Moon), from which Varlet took the inspiration for the character of Aurore Lescure. Varlet could not know in 1936 that Oberth would indeed work on military rocket projects at Peenemünde during World War II, helping to develop the V-2 rocket bomb.