It was supposed at first in official circles that each gas-generator contained, in some sealed compartment, a Martian who controlled the manufacturing process, but that absurd idea was quickly abandoned. The Martians had no intention of coming to Earth before having, if not exterminated the human race to its last representative, at least destroyed the great cities, pulverized the social organism and annihilated all attempts at resistance. These positivist beings were consummate cowards, and refused to run the risk of a battle—so, in order to colonize without danger, they proceeded in the manner of hunters who gas a foxes’ lair in advance; it was a war of extermination that they had declared upon our species.
The Director refrained from publishing these atrocious conclusions, but the masses were not deceived, and the demoralization of knowing that it was condemned to death overwhelmed humankind. Rather than combining all its forces to oppose the peril with a unanimous will, it seemed instead that the universal obsession with carnage and destruction had awakened atavistic instincts, which had been repressed by normal life and which had been thought conclusively defeated by the triumph of civilization and peace. Monstrous though it was, instead of turning these wild instincts of hatred and destruction against the common enemy, humankind turned them against itself and began to tear itself apart, beneath the satisfied eyes of the Martians!
I shall, in due course, describe the abominable scenes of disorder of which, alas, I was to be the witness. The break-up began, here and there, in the early days, even in the numb bewilderment of an as-yet-imperfect comprehension of the eventual fate that was reserved for us, but its manifestations were suppressed by the local police and we only heard muted rumor of them at the Directorate. We were too absorbed in the task—literally superhuman and without precedent—of reorganizing all the services with whatever staff we chanced to have, and putting the great cities on a defensive footing.
The requisitioning of aircraft, especially, gave the authorities a great deal of trouble. The panic that was later to empty the great centers of population had scarcely begun. People restricted themselves to sleeping under their roofs; attachment to one’s domicile, resigned passivity and the optimistic belief that the threat was to others limited the exodus to the countryside to a few isolated instances. But the owners of aircraft, believing that they were certain to be able to escape in the case misfortune, selfishly refused to surrender their machines.
The rich, under the pretext of taking vacations and avoiding the heat, flew off to mountain villages, or even to sanatoriums in Greenland, Spitzbergen and other regions neighboring the North Pole, which the Earth’s axial tilt would shelter from the Martian bombardment for a few weeks more—and it seemed improbable that the bombardment could be sustained for more than a month after the warrior planet’s opposition. Gideon Botram had considered using this means of efficacious salvation on a large scale, but how could the whole human race be transported to these superior latitudes? How could it be housed, fed and provided with the means of subsistence there? The problem was insoluble, and censorship forced the newspapers to maintain silence regarding the immunity reserved for the north pole and its surrounding regions.
The first symptoms of the disintegration of civilization were manifest in the form of a revival of nationalism. The United States of the World had united all the people of the Earth in the same apparent fraternity 30 years before—the highest achievement of scientific civilization, and also the most artificial. The Martian attack, and the explosion of atavistic instincts that was its immediate result, struck it a mortal blow. The Terrestrial Directorate—established, in the event, by force—had continued its reign by virtue of acquired habit and the worldwide prestige of Paris, the political and intellectual center of the globe. That prestige was, however, not unmingled with a certain rancor in the formerly-autonomous nations towards imperialist France, which had reduced them to the status of administrative districts.
Paris, the capital and brain of the world, the universal object of envy and covetousness, still attracted criticism from preachers, even of the official religions, who vituperated against its dissolute splendor and debauchery, and covertly wished the wrath of the Lord upon the “modern Babylon.” The tireless propagandists of Anarchism joined in the chorus, seeing the liberation from the “Directorial yoke” as the first step towards communist enlightenment of humankind. The catastrophic destruction of Paris seemed to both parties to be the realization of their most cherished desires: the hand of God, or Immanent Justice—using the Martians as intermediaries—had struck the guilty city, and a new era had opened beneath the feet of a regenerated human race!
In addition to these monstrous sectarian abuses, which considered the death of millions of innocent people to be a negligible detail or a holocaust necessary to the realization of their ideas—coincident, they believed, with the designs of Providence—many regions of United States of the World profited from the occasion by reasserting their autonomy. The radio messages broadcast from Mont-Valérien declaring that the Terrestrial Directorate, in the person of Gideon Botram, was secure, and that the common government of France and the world would be reformulated in the province—in brief, that French dictatorship would continue—were generally delayed or intercepted, and the delegate powers in the capital of each state in the Union simultaneously announced the catastrophic destruction of the central Directorate and the re-establishment of the former nations they represented and governed.
England, Japan, China, Germany and the Argentine Republic were the first to apprise us of their firm determination to resume political independence. Then, the Washington newspapers that reached us after July 11 via the Transatlantic Tube contained insulting and aggressive tirades against the Europe that had obliged the true United States—those of America—to set aside its glorious flag, the stars and stripes, for more than a quarter of a century, in favor of the monogram PAX and the azure globe making up the symbol of the tyrannical Directorate. The Chicago Tribune, in particular, commented ironically, with deplorable humor, on the fact that Europe had been selected as a target—quite justly, it affirmed—for the Martian “messengers.” America itself was allegedly sheltered from a similar misadventure and, if the worst came to the worst, would be able to defend itself against the “stinking bullets,” as it wittily rechristened the infernal torpedoes.
Any attempt at repression would have been illusory, or would have led to conflicts of an incalculable seriousness between the forces of the Directorial police and the black gendarmerie stationed in every state, blindly submissive to the local authorities, whose loyalty to their adoptive fatherland had not been put in doubt for 10 years. It only remained to recognize the fait accompli: the Directorate of Gideon Botram no longer held sway outside France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. Our TSF messages no longer broadcast unchallengeable orders to the world, merely daily news of the cumulative disasters inflicted by the Martian torpedoes and defensive Platonic exhortations—for the fratricidal wars that would soon bloody the continents and add their blind horrors to those of the Martian bombardment did not take place between nations.
The gravity of the situation did not escape the local governments; they gave way to national vanity in proclaiming their separation from the French Directorate, but did not go so far as to make war against it, and resisted the pressure of atavistic instincts. Those instincts initially wrought their havoc between classes, and then at random between various human groups. There were only a few instances of sporadic precursors of Revolution seeing fit to destroy the TSF antennae, thus isolating a city or capital from the daily flow of information that was still centralized by the former Terrestrial Directorate. Such places, cut off from the calamitous news, quickly took on a precarious and spasmodic existence, like decapitated ducks still running around and reflexively beating their wings.
In any case, the political disintegration of humankind, revelatory of the profound foolishness of human intelligence, occurred with stupefying universal spontaneity. It was a palp
able example of the kind of psychic wave which, then more than ever, seemed to impinge upon everyone’s mind at the same time, causing all the representatives of humankind to think and act as one. The various phases of the terrestrial panic, the epidemics of sentiment or resolution that affected every nation in that accursed era, became manifest everywhere simultaneously, like TSF receivers under the influence of Hertzian waves. I had every opportunity to convince myself of that in the course of my official duties—and later, when I was swept away with the government by the vertiginous cyclone of revolutionary panic, I had no doubt that the scenes to which I was a witness were unfolding in the same way, analogously if not identically, over the entire face of the condemned planet.
VI. An Idyll Under the Martian Terror
The sixth torpedo put an end to the relative quietness of America by destroying Chicago and setting the waters of Lake Michigan alight from a distance. The seventh was aimed at Boston, the eighth at Yokohama. The ninth fell far away from any big city, covering the fertile plain of Limagne in Central France with a red tide of satanite and obliterating all human life from its surface. Had the Martians aimed at Clermont-Ferrand and, for the first time, missed their target by a wide margin? No—the example of Paris, attained by the projectile whose trajectory threatened Nancy, was there to demonstrate that the torpedoes were not subject, once and for all, to a single ballistic impulse at the point of their launch towards the Earth, but that the Martians retained command of their “messengers” up to the last, perhaps by means of telemechanical waves. The devastation of Limagne was certainly intentional, and it had the result of greatly increasing terrestrial panic.
People in the cities, who had imagined that they would find a secure haven in the countryside whenever they wished, sensed the vanity of that refuge; people in rural areas, who had selfishly thought themselves safe, came to share the apprehensions of city-dwellers. In addition to the polar region, accessible only to the privileged few, the high altitudes of mountain peaks offered the fearful minds of men the only seeming immunity from gaseous red death and incineration. The inhabitants of every plain and valley, and everyone living in proximity to a watercourse, trembled in the same manner as city folk—but the hour of the great exodus had not come. We still had a further cycle of preliminaries to undergo in our gradual descend into the utmost depths of the inferno of fear in which civilization eventually foundered.
The news of social movements that reached us at the Palais de la Garde from every part of the world became more worrying every day. Cosmopolitan Anarchism loudly proclaimed its schemes of annexation; its secret committees, with new stocks of Martian radium at their disposal, were manufacturing blasters, and their disciplined groups were repeatedly meeting official forces of Senegalese head on. Scenes of vile looting were ravaging entire cities, in which sacrilegious malefactors had spread false rumors beforehand, saying that a message from Jupiter had announcing the fall of the next torpedo thereon—and the horrible confusion of panic inevitably followed.
The disruption of aerial and railway transport increased. The replenishment of provisions went badly; country people no longer went into the cities, and hoarded their produce. The devaluation of platinum dragged down the value of international coinage struck in that metal; bills drawn on the Banque de France were refused; gold and silver disappeared. Storehouses of foodstuffs were ransacked, even those earmarked for refugee camps. Mortality rates among the refugees rose dramatically.
At the same time, the first outbreaks of an epidemic became manifest on the outskirts of torpedoed cities, where millions of corpses were rotting. The physicians designated this virulent contagion by various names, and the popular euphemism of “Martian bronchitis” was calculated to reassure the most timorous, but its ravages were no less incalculable for that. If I recall the descriptions I had occasion to read at that time correctly, its symptoms corresponded point for point with those of the infamous Black Death, which had become the scourge of Europe in the darkest hours of the Middle Ages—to which our own era was becoming increasingly analogous.
It is necessary that I open an intimate and personal parenthesis at this point—not to indulge myself, like some, by laying bare the secret impulses of my heart, but because this confession appears to me to be indispensable to the comprehension of my attitude and my role in the events to follow. Furthermore, I have every reason to think that my case was far from being isolated, and that it will serve as an example to demonstrate the force with which the will to live is manifest, even in the most desperate circumstances, and the force that the illusory power that the essential and ineradicable sentiment which one 19th century philosopher named “the genius of the species” 7 is capable of exerting on a man plunged in the situation in which I then found myself, making him forget the most immediate and frightful dangers and launching him into the future as if he were assured of the greatest and most fortunate opportunities.
An orphan since the age of 20, the bitter competitions of a literary career—which I had eventually adopted after a rather prolonged digression into scientific studies—had taught me soon enough to consider the world as an arena, in which it is only possible to remain standing at the cost of an incessant struggle. Even with the firmest of friends, one must take account of the fundamental egotism inherent in every human being and the too-frequent opposition of their interests to ours. Intimacy, between men, can rarely be more than intellectual—and my experiences with the representatives of the other sex had not had the success I expected, based on the faith of poets and my own illusions. I had run up against futile anxieties, total indifference or incomprehension of any slight elevated subject-matter, which established an obstacle in our commerce and quickly dissipated any initial intimacy. These brief adventures had left me the melancholy memory of an irremediable dissatisfaction.
At first, I thought myself a sentimental monster, with aspirations incompatible with those of my peers, destined to bear the burden of my isolation forever. Then, I reckoned myself the victim of my exceptional moral elevation. Finally, I gradually came to understand that people were all in the same situation, with the rare exceptions of a few fortunately-matched couples. I ceased to hunger for their fate and eventually resigned myself, not without a certain bitter aftertaste, to being alone in the world, in the midst of a desert of human hostility, imprisoned within the strict limits of my individual organism with my incommunicable soul, which no other soul would ever illuminate with fraternal effluvia, in that supreme psychic communion once celebrated by the divine Plato.
Life having been thus denuded, so far as I was concerned, of all sentimental interest, my ambitions turned increasingly to intellectual and philosophical curiosity; I lived, so to speak, by habit, and any incidental successes that accrued from my quotidian existence seemed equally vain with respect to my most intimate consciousness—that internal tribunal, one step removed, which watches over all our actions and thoughts as if from the serene altitude of an essential world, weighing us and judging us, volens nolens, from the viewpoint of the Eternal.
In consequence, I only attached a superficial importance to the singular freak of chance that struck me like a ricochet from the Parisian catastrophe, which made me—an obscure publicist 36 years of age—the head of the Directorate’s information services, an official personage of worldwide notoriety. Only my external vanity was flattered. When the exhausting demands of my duties left me the leisure to look out of my window at Marseilles’s beautiful warm and starry summer nights, my solitude within the universe seemed more bitterly intense than ever. I felt that I was alone among the human race, prey to the panic of its condemnation and the wild surge of animal passions; I felt that I was lost, an infinitesimal globule of consciousness on the surface of the Earth, spinning beneath the Martian threat, beneath the tragic fist of a superhuman Destiny that crushed humankinds, planets, suns at the whim of blind chance…or a supreme Will: the unfathomable ways of Providence, as the ministers of he official religions put it…
I felt useless, empty, broken, with no longer even a semblance of amity; Sylvain Leduc had been promoted to Commander of the aerodrome at La Crau; his wife was directing the new worldwide TSF station at Saintes-Maries-de-Camargue. I had nothing about me but the slyly obsequious faces of my subordinates or the expressionless and preoccupied visages of Gideon Botram and his senior collaborators.
I sometimes congratulated myself on being alone in the world in this fashion, without any charge on my soul, having never given life to an innocent creature to be hurled into the gulf in which humankind was sinking—but I did not succeed in deceiving myself, and quickly came to wish, according to the whim of stoical egotism, that I had a companion heart and mind possessed of a fraternal intelligence. I too wanted to experience sentimental joy, even at the expense of a distressing responsibility—for it would surely multiply tenfold my consciousness of the struggle, of life, whose every form appears precious from our new-found viewpoint of men condemned to death.
But I’m rambling…
News items of the direst sort reached us, that morning, at the governmental Palais de la Garde, and preoccupation with them added to the normal burdens of my work in setting my nerves jangling: the tenth torpedo fallen on Timbuktu; the principal station of Equatorial Alternators annihilated; the general massacre of Europeans in the Saharan oases and the destruction of the apparatus of interplanetary optical projection; insurrectionist movements throughout Muslim Africa; India afflicted by fire and bloodshed; Martian bronchitis, diffused by air transport, multiplying its hecatombs at unexpected distances from the sources of infection—1000 victims in New York, as many in Cuba, twice that number in Montevideo... And the list was growing longer every minute.
The Martian Epic Page 7