From that pantheistic point of view, the civilization—“forced,” like a hothouse plant—that pulsed beyond the horizon in great cities seemed infinitely distant to me. The rumble of electric trains passing in the distance in the depths of the valley, coming from London or Paris, the drone of a few antique aircraft in the sky or the quieter flight of ultramodern helicopters, inspired me to a smile of disdainful pity. What good was all that haste, that all that mad, hectic activity? How was the simple and easy life I was leading in that obscure village, in the midst of its coarse and cordial population of fishermen, less desirable than that of the Parisian whirlwind? Did the intensive civilization of the great cities do anything for the great majority of men but exasperate the conflict of the vulgar instincts, and show up in stark relief the deadly effects of our animal descent—the true and ineradicable “original sin”?
And, as I looked at the setting Sun, whose crimson disk striped by horizontal bands of mist reminded me of Jupiter as seen through a telescope, I envied the lot of the Jovian sages who had been able to ally progress with the moderation of desire, to use the discoveries of science discerningly, in order to put them at the service of their noble curiosity, and adopt the search for truth as the goal of their species instead of the illusory and troublesome satisfactions of wealth and well-being….
I scarcely paid any heed to the newspapers, and had become so accustomed to the interplanetary reports that it took me several hours to digest the importance of the enigmatic bulletin of June 22, 1978:
Mars has stopped replying to our transmissions. Is this silence due to an equipment malfunction, or should we see it in correlation with this new signal received from Jupiter: A projectile or bolide has been launched from Mars, headed in the approximate direction of the Sun?
I had just picked a superb Chrysanthemum sagetum when the threat hidden in that ambiguous sentence suddenly emerged into my consciousness. The Sun? But the red planet was almost in opposition, since it was presently passing through the constellation Scorpio and shining in the sky for the greater part of the night. A trajectory traced from its surface towards the Sun had to pass close to the Earth, perhaps intercepting it! It was our planet, rather than the central star, that the Martians had selected as a target!
In a flash, the whole of the English writer’s prophetic novel came back to me. The time had come when the Martians, finding it untenable to remain on their minuscule planet, frozen, dehydrated and partially stripped of its atmosphere, had resolved to “relocate,” and were putting the resources of their industry to work on that basis. And look how many of the secrets of the Jovians and Terrans had been revealed to them, with inconceivable naivety! What a hopeful abode, what a veritable paradise, the Earth must seem to them, less ancient and closer to the Sun, with its rich atmosphere, oceans and seas covering three-fifths of its surface. It offered conditions similar to their own, in terms of a day and night of almost equal duration to those on Mars, with seasons similarly accentuated—distributed, it is true, over a much shorter annual period, but whose more rapid alternation could only have a stimulant and renovating effect on Martian organisms.
Despite all these reflections, which unfolded automatically within me—as they must have done, that day, in the majority of readers endowed with any astronomical knowledge—and having re-read the printed passage, I could not believe it. Was that due to the state of nervous exhaustion from which I was convalescing, or to the empery of nature, which always had the effect of distancing me from human preoccupations? Or was it the rebellion of my survival instinct, which prevented me from believing that the threat was real, rejecting the monstrous possibility?
The last reason was undoubtedly the true one, for the indifference was almost universal. Public attention was then concentrated on the exploits of the famous Patagonian boxer Quiensabe, and his match with the Japanese champion Matsu, which was to take place in a few days time at the Timbuktu Olympic games. The alarmist reflections published by two or three daily newspapers on the subject of the extraterrestrial menace passed almost unnoticed. The hypothesis that it was a scare story, put forward by the majority of the papers, seemed to be confirmed, in the following days, by the absolute silence of interplanetary communications—which had, in fact, been suppressed by government censorship. Personally, lost in the joys of the neophyte botanist, I silenced my rational dread and tried to set aside my obscure presentiments of an impending catastrophe.
I was roused from this semi-somnolence by a visit I received from my old friend Sylvain Leduc, to whom I had just written, thinking that he was still in Le Bourget. My letter had reached him at the experimental airfield at Le Crotoy, where he was the chief test-pilot, and he had made haste to cross the bay of the Somme, in the course of testing a turbine-driven helicopter,5 to shake me by the hand. He told me some grave news, unknown to the public, which he had received from his wife Gabrielle, an interpreter of the Jovian signals at the central Office of Terrestrial and Interplanetary Communications, in Mont-Valérien. Not only had the launch of a Martian projectile towards the Sun—and the Earth!—been confirmed, but subsequent messages had announced that further launches had taken place on a daily basis, in the same direction. With fraternal anxiety, the Jovian astronomers were following the progress of these machines, whose point of impact they were endeavoring to determine in advance. That of the first seemed to be in western Europe.
It transpired, moreover, that the secret was ill-kept by the translators of interplanetary communications, and the rumor had spread—in the big cities, though not, so far as I knew, to Saint-Valéry—that the “Martian missile” would fall on French territory. It was to avoid a panic that, on the day after my conversation with Sylvain Leduc—on July 7—the newspapers were authorized to publish the results of the Jovian observations. The trajectory of the so-called “celestial messenger” (and there was mention of only one) had been conclusively established; it would intercept the Earth’s orbit and strike its surface obliquely 33.8 seconds after 5:58 on the morning of July 8. The point of impact, with a possible margin of error of a kilometer, would be the site of Nancy.
The evacuation of the city and its suburbs, begun the previous day, would be completed that evening. All measures had been taken for the immediate destruction of the projectile and its occupants, if they manifested any bellicose intentions. A cordon of teledetonators was surrounding the threatened area, and batteries of long-range blasters were aimed at the probable point of descent. The inhabitants of other regions of France—and, a fortiori, of Europe—had, therefore, no reason to be anxious. The same government that had repelled the Asian invasion and put an end to the scourge of terrestrial warfare would also be able to avert the Martian peril and deprive the invaders of any chance of renewing their criminal attempt.
These official assurances must have set the minds of the general public—whose opinions doubtless resembled those I heard voiced in the Café des Pilotes in Saint-Valéry’s harbor—completely at rest. While playing cards, the regulars commiserated hypocritically with the poor people of Nancy, obliged to leave their homes—they would doubtless be generously compensated at the taxpayers’ expense, worse luck!—but their faces were smiling jubilantly as they told themselves that they were quite safe here, and that there was not the slightest risk of their being splashed, or having a window smashed by stray shrapnel.
The ferocious egotism of these numbskulls revolted me; I hurried out of the café to parade my muted disquiet and melancholy reflections along the deserted dike—but, contrary to my habit, I found solitude hard to bear. I would gladly have shared my reflections with a friend, felt myself surrounded by the presence of numerous human brothers, or mingled in a crowd, using the sight of a great city to defend myself against the menace from outer space, whose nature my imagination could not specify but which overwhelmed me with ever-more-sinister presentiments. If it had not been so late in the day, I would have gone to Le Crotoy to see my friend Sylvain.
The sunset distracted me somewha
t from my anguish, with the spectacle of its melancholy serenity.
At the very edge of the dike, where I stood thoughtfully among white and pink clover, yellow bird’s-foot trefoils and various graminaceous plants, their stalks swaying in the cool evening breeze and overhanging the bronzed depths of the Somme. The stream glowed red in the fading sunlight, already deformed by refraction, beneath a sky steeped in nacreous pinks and pastel blues. Chirping birds filled the wooded parts of the old cliff, beyond spreading groynes interspersed with grey mud-banks carpeted with saltwort and Artemisia. A red-brown cow lowed periodically in the vast peace of the quiet evening, which extended over the grey and glossy sands of the bay, streaked with sinuous puddles of the rising tide, bordered by the low dunes of Saint-Quentin, the familiar silhouette of Le Crotoy and a long blue-hazed fringe of poplars. A flock of seagulls went by, screeching. At the junction of the two arms of the river, the water splashed against the prow of a punt in which a man was sitting, carelessly fishing with a line—as if there had never been a planet Mars in the Heavens, and no projectiles launched by its treacherous inhabitants were heading towards the Earth, charged with a nameless menace, compared with which the invasions of Attila and Tamerlane were nothing but idyllic and amusing children’s games!
For my own part, though, I felt horribly certain that I was contemplating Nature, within the ancient and traditional security of humankind’s reign on Earth, for the last time!
III. The Death of Paris
It was impossible for me to sleep that night. Haunted by the most somber presentiments regarding the Martian attack, I only closed my eyes to see a series of images of disaster, as clear and sharp as illustrations printed in histories of the most calamitous wars and the prophetic visions of the English novelist. The cylinder fallen from the sky in the London suburb, the Heat Ray, the “tripod” war-machines devastating several English counties, the hideous invaders succumbing after a matter of days to the microbes of their new domicile… Would we escape so lightly? I dared not believe it.
I lost myself in wondering what motives had impelled the Martians to that abrupt attack, instead of requesting permission to establish themselves peacefully in some region of our world. Humankind would not have refused a refuge to those sidereal brothers forced to leave their native planet by cold and the rarefaction of its atmosphere and water—in brief, by the destiny that was reserved for us, in a more-or-less distant future! With a bitter laugh, though, I divined that the utopian ideal of Charity had no currency on Mars, which must be populated by beings of a uniquely positivist intelligence, ferociously utilitarian, who would gladly have massacred all the inhabitants of the Solar System in order to lodge their race in a more comfortable abode. And I thought about the noble and sympathetic Jovians, who would have preferred to die, to the very last member of their race, rather than perpetrate a deliberate injustice…
I abandoned all thought of sleep. My eyes wandered, via the open widow, over the liquid expanse of the moonlit bay, where the tide as beginning to ebb. In the North, the luminous beams of the lighthouses at Berck and Le Touquet swung back and forth on the horizon, and the searchlights of Le Crotoy illuminated the passage of the moving silhouettes of helicopters. As dawn broke, solitude became suddenly unbearable; I got up, dressed myself, and set off across the sands towards the airfield.
It was 5:45 a.m. when I arrived. My friend Sylvain, already up and about, was not in the least surprised to see me. He was almost expecting me, sure that I must be feeling the same anxiety and need for reassuring company that he felt himself. In his flying-suit, accompanied by three mechanics, he was working on his new machine, powered by a reactive turbine. It was, he affirmed, much superior to the helicopters currently occupying the hangars aligned as far as the eye could see on both sides of the aerodrome.
The camp’s main clock chimed six.
“There it is! Nancy’s fate must be sealed!” joked the youngest of the grease-monkeys.
“Do you think it’s clever to joke at a time like this, idiot!” Leduc spat at him. “You’d be laughing on the other side of your face if you were there!”
“Unless, by chance, Ganymede was mistaken, and…” I did not finish. Releasing an inarticulate cry, the young jester extended an index finger, whose direction our gazes followed, immediately magnetized. A long streak of red flame slanted across the sky to the south, and sank, like a falling star, but visible in broad daylight, slowly beyond the horizon.
Dumbfounded, we had not moved a muscle when a prolonged whistling sound, descending in frequency, reached us in its turn. Only then did our exclamations of horror escape.
Leduc took his forehead in both hands. “Headed for Paris!” he murmured. “Who knows… My poor Gaby, at Mont-Valérien… Oh, the filthy brutes!” He suddenly shoved his aides. “Get a move on, you lot! Get ready for take-off... No, good God, not the new kite—my old crate, the number two. At the double! If I’m not in the air in three minutes from now, watch in hand, I’ll report you for disobeying an order!”
The three men ran to the hangar towards which he was pointing.
A sudden inspiration overwhelmed me: a furious desire to see for myself the unknown spectacle, suspicion of whose awfulness was twisting my guts. Oh, if Leduc left without me, I would go mad on the spot! But he must have read my thought in my eyes, for I had no need to speak. He dragged me by the elbow to his wardrobe.
“You’re coming, of course, Léon? Quickly, put on this suit…n Now the helmet… Good, that’ll do!”
The helicopter’s motor was already purring. Leduc helped me into the cockpit, which was entirely composed of a material of glass-like transparency, took his place beside me in the pilot’s seat, closed the hermetically-sealed door, connected the telephone wires to our helmets and put the machine into gear. The supportive rotor-blades accelerated their rotation, becoming no more than a circulatory phantom… then the propulsive engines… I felt myself plastered to the padded seat by the rapid ascent.
Through the transparent floor—with a singular sensation of insecurity—I saw the farms, the cattle, the trees, the verdant countryside, the sands of the bay, the houses of Saint-Valéry and the bright ribbon of the Somme diminishing vertiginously within my field of view. Despite the noise of the engine, the tumult of the rotor-blades and the rush of the air cut through at top speed, the voice of Leduc—hunched over his controls and his indicative gauges—resonated in my microphones as a clear whisper: “I’m switching on the oxygen; we’ll go up to 8000 meters, so that we can go faster. We’ll be over Paris in 35 minutes. There’s Abbeville, slightly to port…”
Anguish was eating me up. Despite the evident rapidity of our flight, the journey seemed to last for hours. Amiens, miniaturized by distance, allowed me to see through binoculars a crowd of carelessly swarming humans, dotting the streets and squares around the cathedral; the trams, visible by virtue of their white roofs, seemed motionless.
There was a zone of cloud beyond; the Sun only appeared at intervals…
Smoking factories: Creil…
Suddenly, a cry vibrated in my helmet: “Paris is on fire! It’s fallen on Paris!”
Directly in front of us, on the emergent horizon, a pall of bizarrely reddened smoke was ascending into the azure sky. From moment to moment, it grew larger, assuming an increasing importance in the panorama. I could soon make out with the naked eye the suburban towns and part of the capital: the Right Bank, strewn with secondary fires. The great curtain of smoke, shot through with red flames, visible in spite of the bright sunlight, seemed to be following the sinuous course of the Seine as it extended into the distance towards the west.
The Eiffel Tower was invisible, but our altitude permitted us to make out the giant antennae of Mont-Valérien beyond the disaster zone.
“Your wife is safe, in any case,” I said to my friend, dazedly.
“Don’t be stupid! She doesn’t live up there on the Mont. She lives at No. 7, Rue Dupleix, on the far side of the river, near the Champ de Mars.”<
br />
I made no effort to find words to reassure him. The curtain of red smoke, or fire, that was blocking our view, following the exact course of the Seine, might have engulfed the entire Left Bank! In any case, the Right Bank, whose provincial houses were arrayed beneath our feet, seemed to have been peppered by incendiary shells. Twenty or 30 plumes of that uncanny red smoke were scattered between the monuments—which were now easily recognizable, because we were arriving, at reduced speed, over La Chapelle. The Ourcq canal and the Bassin de la Villette were also giving off that tumultuous red effervescence. On might have thought it a firework display in broad daylight… yes, fireworks were alight everywhere: at the Gare du Nord, at the Arts et Métiers, in Les Halles, beside the Opéra, around the Arc and the Etoile—everywhere, as far as the scarlet barrier of the Seine. Yes, the Seine itself was transformed into a river of fire!
A sublime and horrible spectacle: the capital of France and the United States of the Worlds, Paris, the brain of the world, had been condemned to destruction by our brothers from Outer Space! But how had the Martian torpedo been able to produce this gigantic conflagration?
I felt my reason vacillate in the face of the unexpected disaster. I could not tear my eyes away from it. A few hundred meters beneath our feet, the scintillating gold of the cupola of the Basilica of Montmartre was visible, still intact, a vain aegis—but beyond it, below the square form of the Butte, a crater seemed to be agape, vomiting a veritable eruption of viscous red-tinted vapor, which ran in the manner of a liquid, overflowing into the Boulevard Rochechouart, where we could see people desperately fleeing the all-devouring tide in every direction.
The Martian Epic Page 4