What would become of these refugees? How could their disordered multitude be fed and lodged? Would they find the help they needed in the peripheral agglomerations, as they passed through?
We saw, in the Director’s frown, that he too was taking account of the difficulties of the situation. The charitable assistance of individual initiatives might do some good, but what else was there? What about all the public services whose exceedingly complex and delicate organization extended throughout Paris, France, Europe and the entire world, whose networks all depended, in the final analysis, on the central administration of Paris? How could the world get by, thus decapitated, until these services had had time to be reconstituted and returned almost to normal?
Gideon Botram cast a pensive glance over the little company of officials—telegraph-operators, civil servants, scientists and so on—that the rescue planes were continuing to disembark in the Mont’s internal courtyard. He communicated his resolution to them by loudspeaker.
“Messieurs, the fate of the United States of the World is in our hands. As soon as the fire in the ex-capital is under control, we shall reconstitute the Government in the provinces.”
The war against the gas had just begun. Two large canary yellow airbuses, loaded with explosives, were visible in the fuliginous fog—but the task, which would have been relatively easy at the beginning of the catastrophe, had become very difficult. The gas-generators embedded in their dozens in the ground of the unfortunate capital were each hidden beneath an enormous red stain, impenetrable to the gaze but at least ten meters thick, which prevented accurate aiming. It was unthinkable that the flying machines should be instructed to descend into the waves of infernal vapor. It was necessary to stick to dropping the explosive charges as judgment dictated, and continuing until each generator was destroyed.
The first success was fatal to those who achieved it. Their machine descended far enough into the fog and the smoke as almost to touch the effervescent carpet of red gas filling the Place de la Concorde. The sixth attempt must have struck home, for the Martian generator sent up a column of crimson fire, accompanied by an irresistible explosion, to a height that seemed to us to be equal to that of the Eiffel Tower. The airbus, caught in the explosion and doubtless blasted into little pieces, had vanished by the time the spray settled.
The others, rendered prudent by this example, only released their explosives upon the fire-vomiting shells thereafter from a considerable altitude, while moving at speed; this delayed the operations markedly.
At 10:30 p.m., the special defensive apparatus erroneously organized around Nancy came to join the conflict, but their efficacy was mediocre. It required no less than six hours for the aerial fleet to obliterate all 45 of the gas-generators; the long-range deflagrators, which were, in any case, too heavy for transportation by helicopter, would not have helped. This destruction only served, at first, to augment the disaster, for the water from the sewers, which had been breached in many places, caught fire on contact with the infernal substance, and the flames engulfed the islets of houses that had been spared thus far. Save for a few culminating points, the entirety of Paris, from La Chapelle to Vanves and from the Bois de Boulogne to Vincennes, presented nothing to our eyes but an immense furnace, whose light emerged here and there from the layer of smoke that the breeze carried vaguely westwards.
We wept silently, sent back to our tasks by the orders of the Director, who had recovered his impassivity. Sentiments that we had set aside until that moment, of the kind formerly known as patriotic, rent our hearts and drowned us in the regret of civilized men confronted with the most poignant and immediate sorrow of seeing the treasures of art and history—museums, libraries, monuments—thus obliterated: ten centuries of genius and assiduous effort, the glorious patrimony of a France that had ceased to be a geographical expression and an administrative subdivision, and had become again our country, native or adoptive; the corner of the planet dearer than any other to our hearts, where generations had lived and died in times past, in happy ignorance of future scientific progress, interplanetary communications and Martian gas torpedoes!
V. Humankind Condemned
A little after 11 p.m. on the evening of the day when the Earth first learned about the frightful efficacy of the Martian torpedoes, exhausted by emotion and insomnia, I disembarked at Marseilles from helicopter No. 4 of the Directorate squadron. As soon as the last source of rutilant gas had been destroyed before our eyes and orders had been given for the fight against the Parisian fire, Gideon Botram had embarked the 50 or so more-or-less official staff—among which the Leducs and I were henceforth numbered—with whose aid he proposed to reconstitute the body of government on the Mediterranean coast.
Separated from my friends—for it was Ladislas Wronsky, the head of the scientific civil service, who occupied the fourth seat in the Director’s helicopter, in which Leduc had obtained a place for Gabrielle—and lodged with seven or eight people unknown to me in a cockpit designed for six, I was too weary to take part in the conversation. I had become drowsy even before the terrifying furnace of the capital disappeared over the horizon, and upon arrival, I allowed myself to be led passively to the room assigned to me at the Prado Airport Hotel.
When I woke up under the warm caress of the morning sunlight, I kept my eyelids closed to begin with, to savor the beatitude, vague as yet, of that return to life. The memories that haunted me, of the Martian missile, desperate flights, crumbling roofs, towns on fire—it was a nightmare, was it not?... A bad dream, which would dissipate at the familiar sight of my bedroom in Saint-Valéry and the bay of the Somme….
I opened my eyes: an unfamiliar room, furnished with the banal and gaudy luxury of accommodation for travelers—and, through the window, the blue waves of the Mediterranean, sparkling brightly in the sunlight. I really was in Marseilles; I had not been dreaming, but had actually experienced that tragic day.
Nevertheless, the horror of my memories was attenuated by the spectacle that I beheld, leaning contemplatively on my elbows at the casement. Beneath the ardent light of the Provençal summer, the white villas and the palm-trees by the road-side extended in a harmonious curve to the chain of hills whose limestone stood out in sharp relief against the azure sky. Yachts with immaculate sails and fishing-boats with long slanted lateen-yards speckled the gulf indolently. Sea-mews as white as snowflakes were skimming the waves, while larger gulls glided slowly overhead at a great height. A marvelous setting, in which everyone breathed the joy of life! Optimism was reborn in me while I shaved. My improvised flying-suit made me smile, and I imagined myself under the orders of Gideon Botram, Wing-Commander, combating the Martian torpedoes. Evidently, we would “get them,” as I had read in my history book.
A light drumming at my door recalled me to reality. I opened it. Sylvain came in, his brow furrowed, and shook me by the hand.
“The Master’s asking for you, old chap. Your information service won’t be idle today: Martian torpedo No. 2 fell on Lyon two hours ago… The same thing as Paris yesterday—the Rhone’s on fire, it seems, as far as Valence!”
Without giving me time to digest this calamitous news, he drew me along the corridor to the elevator. For some reason that escapes me—for Gideon Botram was as unostentatious as could be—it was in a dozen automobiles that the staff brought from Mont-Valérien were transported to the Grand Palace of Notre-Dame de la Garde, selected as the provisional seat of government.
That journey through Marseilles in the bright July morning! Marseilles, alive and exuberant, astir with the news—carefully adulterated—of the burning of Paris, but still ignorant of the catastrophe in Lyon and, above all, of the series of torpedoes whose threat was suspended over the entire world. Its citizens did know, on the other hand, that the ancient Phocian city was to replace the Sequanian ex-capital as the implicit center of France and the world, and Massilia’s secret envy of Lutèce took satisfaction in this belated triumph.6 Along the Old Harbor—a forest of masts and rigging majestica
lly overlooked by the svelte gossamer silhouette of the transporter-bridge—along the quays animated by a cosmopolitan population, along the Cannebière with its white buildings, under the shady plane-trees of the side-streets of Meilhan, and other boulevards whose names I have forgotten, the dense crowd massed to watch us pass by greeted the Director’s arrival with loud ovations; fervent pride was displayed on almost every face. The fate of Paris was forgotten in the jubilation of seeing Marseilles promoted to the rank of capital of the United States of Earth.
It was the last glimpse I was to have of normal and civilized city life.
Our installation was laborious. The vast buildings, on a hill overlooked by the Basilica and its gigantic gilded Virgin, were scarcely able to accommodate the Directorate’s central services. The ministries and administrative offices—all of whose staff and documentation would have to be reconstituted—were distributed across the city. For a week, my duties monopolized me completely, and I was no more sparing of my eighteen secretaries and typists. We were a long way from the three hours of official labor! From 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.—the moment at which I handed over the night shift to an intelligent assistant—I handled incoming messages from the TSF receiver at Saintes-Maries-de-Camargue, of which Gabrielle Leduc had been appointed director; I censored, summarized, corrected; I drew up reports and official bulletins; I transmitted the Director’s orders. All the news of the world passed before me eyes: calamitous, frightful, of a nature to demoralize the most hardened soul….
The fall of the second Martian torpedo on Lyon had been better observed than in Paris. Observers were able to see the bolide, superficially inflamed by its traversal of the atmosphere, slow down at an altitude of several kilometers, before bursting into some 50 fragments—the generators of the red gas, which scattered over the Lyonnaise region to strew death and devastation. The battle was better organized this time, thanks to the initiative of a knowledgeable chemist, Arnold Ginestal, who suggested neutralizing the gases, even before the destruction of their generators by explosives, by means of powerful jets of liquid carbon dioxide. Thanks to this procedure, whose employment was to be generalized, the burning of the Rhone did not even extend as far as Valence, and it was possible to save about a third of the city of Lyon, in addition to the hills of Fourvières and La Croix-Rousse—whereas only a tenth of Paris, at the most, remained standing when the fire was put out.
The shards of the gas-generators, blasted apart by explosives, permitted the conjecture that the shock of impact triggered the automatic production of an indefinite volume of the rutilant vapor, which greatly intrigued our chemists. They baptized the new element that its analysis revealed Ruberium, after its color—but it was soon overtaken by the name Satanite, coined by a journalist from Bordeaux in view of the infernal properties of the Martian substance—which left the acids and most energetic combustibles of terrestrial nomenclature far behind. Decomposing water with the accompaniment of flame, it devoured animal flesh and vegetable tissue, cement, building-stone and marble, causing all calcareous compounds to effervesce on contact with it, and it worked through a meter’s thickness in a few minutes. Steel resisted it quite well, as proved by the metallic bridges, which were twisted by fire but remained in place. The collapse of the Eiffel Tower was solely due to the corrosion of its concrete foundations. Various metals—gold, iridium and platinum—were proof against the action of Satanite, and attempts were made to utilize them in the manufacture of costumes resembling diving-suits, which would permit rescuers to risk going into the heart of the rutilant gas-clouds.
There was certainly no lack of platinum thereafter, nor of radium. The former of these two elements, whose numerous applications had previously increased their market value to unprecedented proportions and threatened to exhaust their terrestrial ores, made up the body-work of the Martian machines, while the latter provided the energy-reserves feeding the production of the rutilant gas! Each of the 30 or 40 generators launched by a Martian torpedo contained, in addition to substances as yet unanalyzed, ten tons of platinum and seven or eight kilograms of radium! Shortly before, that would have represented fabulous riches, a treasure to make the princes of the Arabian Nights, with their sacks of rubies, turquoises, sapphires, emeralds, topazes and diamonds, pale with envy! It was a rain of Danae, amounting to hundreds of millions—more than enough to pay for the material damage inflicted by the gas and the fire!
Despite the relative depreciation in price brought about by the first news of this profusion, a horde of looters swooped on the smoking ruins of Paris as soon as the firemen were finished, and then on Lyon, to carry off the shards of platinum while they were still warm, and to gather up the smallest pieces of radium, at the risk of atrocious burns. Organized gangs equipped with helicopters, in defiance of the armed forces, even attacked the debris of the satanite generators, bearing away considerable blocks of the precious element.
Given that the Martians—as succeeding events were to prove to us—were spying on all the actions of humankind, by means of the television apparatus whose secret had been generously donated to them by the Jovians, how they must have laughed! And how thankful they must have been for the unexpected consequences of their involuntary gift of Artaxerxes! For the possession of all this radium by fomenters of disorder was to hasten the collapse of humankind. International Anarchism still existed, in fact, but had been reduced to the impuissance of vain declarations, strictly contained by the government dictatorship that controlled the secret of the blasters, monopolizing the radium that fuelled them. Now, it appears that this secret had already been in the hands of various occult committees for some time, and that they only lacked the active product needed to manufacture weapons and distribute them to their affiliates, whose ranks swelled in a matter of days into a desperate mob…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Nice, Rome and London received the third, fourth and fifth satanite torpedoes, and shared the fate of Paris and Lyon. It became impossible to hide from the public the fact that the Martian bombardment was continuing, and the Directorate authorized me to admit it in the communiqué of July 13. We added this advice to the inhabitants of cities: go up to the upper floors of houses at 5 a.m., or even the roofs, to which the rescue helicopters—which the civic authorities had requisitioned in large numbers—would come. Meanwhile, the means of defense were organized: fleets of aircraft, furnished with explosives and cylinders of liquid carbon dioxide, were training in the use of their equipment. The great cities would be preserved, to the extent that was possible, and would not, at any rate, be subject to disasters comparable of those of the earliest days.
These exhortations and official assurances, however, were a feeble counterbalance to the news of successive catastrophes. In particular, refugees from the destroyed cities, some of whom were beginning to arrive everywhere in Western and Central Europe, and in North Africa, seemed to carry a contagion of unbridled terror that diffused around them, adding its influence to the atmosphere of horrified anxiety in which humankind was presently living.
It was on the evening of the destruction of Rome that I saw these unfortunates with my own eyes for the first time. After a day of oppressive heat and excessive mental strain, I was wandering along the Cannebière, alone and melancholy, breathing in the breeze drifting up from the harbor, amid a crowd with drawn features and furrowed brows, whose muteness seemed sinister.
On the terrace of the Café Riche, lit up in its usual sumptuous fashion, people were slumped in front of their glasses, immobile and prostrate, their backs bowed in anticipation of the blow that would strike them down, perhaps in a few hours time, in the frightful agony of rutilant vapor or fire. Others, their jaws clenched, were holding women’s hands, staring at them in a near-demented fashion. On the edge of the pavement, 100 curious idlers were gathered around a lamentable group, exchanging opinions.
The group comprised a husband, wife and daughter: Italians with dark brown hair and eyes and dull complexions, with their burned and corroded clothes in ta
tters, sprawled on packages wrapped in garishly-colored handkerchiefs. An electrically-powered trawler had just disembarked them, after taking them aboard the previous day from the end of the pier at Nice. The daughter, her voice punctuated by sobs, was telling the story of the thunderclap of the explosion: the precipitate flight from their homes at Ponchettes, along the waterfront, amid the fearful tumult of the murdered city—the tocsin, the howls of distress, the helicopters’ sirens, the first detonations of the explosive attacking the satanite generators—the flames springing forth from the palace to their right, and the stream of red gas that was emerging on to the street, which they would have to get past to reach the jetty and salvation. She unwrapped the rag enveloping her legs to display the purple scars inflicted by the diabolical substance.
Coins rained down; pity and indignation stirred the crowd; hostile cries were raised, less against the Martians than against the Directorate, powerless to combat them and assuage the miseries of “poor sinners.” It was then that I heard, for the first time, our Master called “the Antichrist”—which would soon become the rallying cry of mystical Anarchism…but a squad of Senegalese arrived, who dispersed the idlers and led the lamentable refugees away.
Nice had been struck by a torpedo at 2 a.m., Rome at 3 a.m.; London perished at 11 p.m. One could not even expect the daily catastrophe at a fixed hour, as had been thought at first. That disillusionment was not the least serious; so many people, petrified by habit, clung to the least appearance of regularity, like drowning men to planks, for the salvation of their reason—and the Martians, more knowledgeable about our psychology than we thought, deregulated their fire in consequence.
The Martian Epic Page 6