A female clerk came into my office to give me a typewritten note, which I took in my hand without looking up. It was a Jovian message—the second we had received by sidereal TSF—giving the formula for the synthetic food manufactured on Jupiter, whose intensive production, if it was successful, would allow us to avoid the usual difficulties of replenishing stocks of meat and agricultural produce. The note was so badly typed, however, that its errors made it almost unreadable.
“Who typed this?” I asked the clerk, while deciphering the script. “You?”
“I’m new to the service, Monsieur, and it wasn’t my trade…”
Her voice touched me strangely, but my nerves were all over the place, and I shouted at her, with a brutality that even astonished me: “That’s obvious—in that case, why are you here?”
“I beg your pardon, Monsieur. I’m a refugee from Paris; my fortune was on deposit in the Banque de France and I lost everything in the catastrophe. I’d almost forgotten that I’d learned to type at school… I’m extremely sorry to be good for nothing.”
It was only then that I raised my eyes to look at her. What point is there in describing that face, soft and melancholy but radiant with frankness and honesty, for the indifferent? In any case, I don’t think I saw anything in that first instant but her eyes. They were a peculiarly rich and profound blue, like the flower of the Alpine larkspur—but that, too, I did not know until later. I only knew, with the conclusive certainty of a revelation, that those eyes—alone among the millions of open eyes beneath the foreheads of humankind past, present and future… alone in the infinite universe, in fact—were the only ones that could penetrate the invisible, impalpable but impenetrable partition of extraneous indifference and hostile egotism that separated me, like a choking carapace of glass, from my so-called human brothers.
Henceforth, I was no longer alone; the implacable law of suspicion and antagonism was suspended for the two of us; our fraternal souls, as was predestined, recognized one another. Exhausted by long solitude, avid for expansion and communion, and to realize the marvelous alliance of the human couple, to concentrate on another the treasures of affection that our youthful enthusiasm had formerly dreamed of spreading throughout the world—the treasures of a love repressed by the harshness of life, by the bitter law of competition, hostility and hatred—we recognized one another.
Our idyll blossomed at a single stroke, without any other prelude than the banal incident that I have just described. We were certainly both victims of that singular and disturbing acceleration which, after the debilitation and metal disarray of the early days, had afflicted the thoughts and actions of human beings, as hectic and fast-moving as a clock whose escapement has broken. The waves of the collective psyche, emanating from the millions of people swarming around us, and billions of others more distant, brought their precipitant palpitations to us, even in the directorial palace, with a vehement, undeniable, quasi-material force. “Make the most of the time you have left:” that contagious idea filled space, vibrating in the manner of the Hertzian waves, incarnate in everyone breathing, realizing itself on the plane of brutal desire or that of ideal satisfaction, according to the character of the individual…
It seemed to us that we had known one another forever, that we were only continuing, in this new life, a long intimacy sealed elsewhere—on the Earth or some other planet—during the double avatar of a radiant anterior life. “You shall die!” was trumpeted in our ears every morning by the news of a new torpedo attack. Tomorrow, it might be our turn. We scorched through the days regardless, in order to savor those joys to the full which had been the most beautiful adventure of humankind since the symbolic Adam and Eve. Vertiginous paradox! The world began, for us, in the midst of the disaster that would finally devastate our species. But the monstrous danger, while scourging our souls, retreated into a sort of phantasmal unreality. Stronger the death—the Martian red death suspended above us like the sword of Damocles—our couple scorned it with a smile, for out marvelous exultation rendered us immortal. It came from much further away than our ephemeral existence; it sprang from the profound source of the Spirit that animated the universe; it was already immortality.
During the days that separated us from the weekend holiday, hard-won from the indefatigable Director, I recollect that the typewriter of third-grade clerk Raymonde-Alice Becquart was in my office more frequently that the strict requirements of service demanded!
In addition to the evenings of plenary liberty, our inexhaustible conversations also required the nights, until 3 or 4 a.m., when daybreak made it impossible to ignore our fatigue and the threats of the present. With religious attention and boundless curiosity, we told one another the stories of our lives, effecting, so to speak, and exchange of our individual egotisms, which ended up being fused together—and above this charming and childish babble, our souls experienced transcendental unity, communing in the permanent and silent grip of ecstasy.
VII. The Revolutionary Panic
The delightful Saturday finally arrived. Feverishly, I opened the envelope containing the news sent from the Saintes-Maries station, to the text of which Gaby Leduc had added an amicable personal greeting from Sylvain and herself. Then I read the official communiqué—the 13th torpedo falling on New York; the first attempts to manufacture the Jovian synthetic nutriment on an industrial scale; the repression of the Islamic revolt in the region of Timbuktu; the work urgently begun to repair the Equatorial Alternators destroyed a few days earlier; the discovery by Ladislas Wronsky of a serum effective against “Martian bronchitis”—whose worst aspects I carefully abridged, according to the Director’s orders.
At 11 a.m., I left the gubernatorial palace with Raymonde, who was dressed entirely in white. In spite of the summer Sun, we had decided not to make use of the helicopter that had been put at my disposition, along with its pilot, for two days. We needed complete intimacy and absolute liberty, so we undertook our escapade intending to use any means of transport that we chanced upon, or which caught our fancy. The air outside, although hot, was exquisite to breathe after the close confinement of our offices. Arm in arm, as joyful as children, we went down to the center of town at a lively pace, through streets that ere increasingly animated.
“What festival is taking place today?” asked my companion, huddling close to me. “Is it possible for these people to enjoy themselves while humankind is undergoing this frightful crisis?”
“It’s more that they’re forcing themselves to forget.” I dared not call attention to the profound analogy that I saw between their situation and ours.
The world had moved on while days of overwork and nights of exhaustion—during which I was careless of everything except the presence of my beloved—had kept me within the walls of the Palais de la Garde and the artificial atmosphere of the mandarins. In the external world, in people’s ongoing lives, consternation had given way to a fever of merriment, and to desperate transports of brutal pleasure. Life had become exaggerated, better to deny death.
Beneath the ardent Sun, in the intense heat of the July noon, faces were already sweating wine, eyes were burning with cynical desires, and voices cracked as they issued falsely jovial appeals to others to join the self-indulgent carousal. While I drew Raymonde along, confused and slightly fearful, I almost regretted not having taken the helicopter.
Old crones with shrill voices, sitting beside heaps of comestibles, launched envious gibes at our excessive elegance. An acrid odor of food fried in the open, with which a crowd of nervous youths, both male and female, were stuffing themselves, nauseated us as we passed by. The furious chords of pianos and electric organs blew over us, emerging from gaping music halls lit up as if by night; weary frenzy carried couples from one dance to another in the sunlit street, gyrating as if death alone could put an end to their vertiginous sabbatical. The bars were overflowing with men and women embracing one another, clamoring drunkenly and dazedly in the tobacco fumes and the odors of aperitifs and spilled wine, some o
f whom addressed obscene invitations to us.
The brutality and susceptibility of crowds, their irresistible force and blind wrath, as immune to pity or logical argument as a runaway horse or a mad bull, had always inspired the same insuppressible horror in me as a visit to a madhouse. This time, we were in the very midst of the dementia, which some impulse or fortuitous pretext might turn against us at any moment, and we lived through a quarter-hour of painful nightmare—I had no weapon and we dared not run—until we reached streets that were less menacing.
The atmosphere, meanwhile, remained oppressive. There was a sense of the inauguration of a new era, the dawn of a social delirium, of which the term “Martian terror” is as good a description as any.
On a near-deserted boulevard that we went along with some relief, bordered by smart houses and emporia, a racket was suddenly raised as a tumultuous procession emerged from a side-street. A banner of black velvet with silver trim, displayed above a sheaf of funereal plumes, bore a skull-and-crossbones device against a backcloth of emblematic tears, and an inscription in large letters: THE BROTHERHOOD OF MISERY. Behind the flag-bearer came the fanfare: some 20 people armed with various brass instruments and improvised noise-makers. As they crossed the boulevard they suddenly erupted, simultaneously, into a quasi-musical charivari.
It was the hymn of the new society that the members of the column were singing in chorus, at the top of their voices, but it was impossible for us to distinguish the words because of the deafening noise made by the thunderclaps of an over-zealous noise-maker. It was easy to grasp their meaning, however, by reading the inscriptions traced in white letters on the black taffeta bands elevated on poles above the ranks of the enthusiastically-howling crowd:
NO MORE SLAVERY!
LIBERTY UNTIL DEATH!
DOWN WITH THE RICH!
WE WANT TO GO TO SPITZBERGEN TOO!
DOWN WITH THE ANTICHRIST AND ALL HIS HENCHMEN!
BY FREE WILL OR BY FORCE, BUT WITH US ALL THE SAME!
THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH, BUT THERE IS TIME TO REPENT!
ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL!
And others, even more direct.
The procession filed across the boulevard 20 meters in front of us. I recognized all the sorts and conditions of society: seamen, aviators, mechanics, civil servants, dock laborers, factory workers, businessmen in suits—no less ardent than the rest—and even two or three Senegalese gendarmes, without their helmets, showing their teeth as they laughed and rolling the whites of eyes in their black faces… all intermingled with women, bare-headed or bonneted, linking arms in ranks of 10 or 12, all wearing similarly covetous expressions on their hateful faces, all with the same sinister fire in their eyes, avid for a leveling engulfment in convulsions of hideous joy.
“How are such things allowed?” murmured Raymonde, disgustedly. “Aren’t there any police any more?”
“No more police, I fear, my darling, than airbuses in flight or trams on the rails. All the public services are on strike, and our excursion…”
“Oh, my love, we might have to go on foot, but we can’t say in Marseilles; all this madness sickens my heart and frightens me.”
“Let’s go to the harbor, then; we’ll get aboard a ship, one way or another, and spend our Sunday further along the coast.”
As we came nearer to the city center, the partying crowds gave way to these more conscious and organized manifestations of the same state of mind. It was a society prey to the release of animal instincts. They walked at liberty in every human shape and form, prominently parading their communist, materialistic or mystical imperatives. The ordinary routines of life had fallen apart, disintegrating under the influence of the panic, and its elements were re-grouping in the form of processions, each symbolizing an aspiration, a desire or a threat.
We saw a long procession of refugees filing around the Prefecture, perhaps 10,000 strong, a collection of the most tattered rags and the most disparate costumes that I had ever seen, from women with bare legs and bare feet, clad in mere slips, to men in underpants, crossing their muscular arms over their hairy chests. They were all sweating in the midday Sun, as lean and hungry as a migrating wolf-pack, all howling wildly, while brandishing their fists at the sky, or raising insanely vengeful placards:
GIVE US BACK OUR HOUSES AND OUR WEALTH!
WE ARE THE VICTIMS OF THE DIRECTORATE!
DEATH TO THE ANTICHRIST!
WE DEMAND PEACE WITH THE MARTIANS!
SURRENDER GIDEON THE ANTICHRIST TO US!
GIVE US BREAD OR WE’LL TAKE IT!
Other processions, much less dense and tumultuous, but more disquieting, each consisted of about 100 men—only men, no women—with fiercely resolute expressions beneath the masks of sweat that covered their faces like a uniform. They bore no placards, wore no insignia. These first organized bands of revolutionary Anarchism marched in tight formation, keeping in step like military patrols, each under the orders of a leader. They were apparently armed with blasters, whose black shafts and strangely-formed reflectors testified to their clandestine fabrication.
Blasters had multiplied in unexpected profusion in the last fortnight, almost under the very eyes of the Directorate, which was occupied with other matters. It was easily believable that stocks of these weapons had been laid down for a long time in the factories of Anarchism, only awaiting the ammunition—the radium—that the pillage of he Martian torpedoes now furnished in abundance. Every revolutionary soldier had evidently been issued with his blaster; some allowed their butts or reflectors to protrude coquettishly from their special holsters. One of the contingents we saw, at the top of the Rue de Rome, even exposed all of its black shafts to the sunlight, advancing with arms shouldered, like the troopers of yesteryear.
The few Senegalese who remained faithfully at their posts at the street-corners, their dutiful habits and official hypnotization having not yet been abolished by the contagion of the ambient madness, let them pass. Some looked at them enviously. Two or three, who attempted to re-establish order, were blasted apart in front of our eyes.
Then came the pillage of the Café Riche. The café had opened in the morning, with a staff reduced by the strike, but as noon chimed, all the waiters and waitresses took off their aprons. The managerial staff were attempting to evacuate the dining-room and close the establishment just as we arrived in the Cours Saint-Louis. But a contingent of the Black Guard, turning the corner of the Cannebière, prevented them from doing so. Half of the troop, despite the objurgations of their leader, installed themselves on the terrace, and the other half, carrying bottles, glasses and plates, transformed themselves into a confused torrent of benevolent and derisory waiters, serving their colleagues and the customers. The latter, bewildered at first, began to cheer them amid the popping of champagne corks, whose contents were drunk directly from the bottles, sending foam all over their faces and making the drinkers choke with laughter.
I wanted to buy a bunch of roses for Raymonde, and the crowd was pushing us up against the florist’s stall. Suddenly, the crush was intensified as the crowd shifted. Terrified cries went up:
“The Dervishes!”
“A police helicopter!”
“Watch out—it’s landing in the Cours!”
But it did not land; it came to a halt hovering two meters above the ground, and a Senegalese gendarme leaned out of the port-hole
The roadway of the Rue Noailles emptied, the crowd squeezing on to the pavement, and an improbable procession of dancing men advanced into the vast empty space between the tramway lines, as naked as worms, each one brandishing an enormous blaster reddened with ox-blood in one hand, like a club, and a long skewer in the other, like a dagger. They were using the latter to score their breasts, their thighs and their cheeks. Every sunburned body was smeared with blood; their bellies undulated to the rhythm of darboukas and fifes punctuated by a shrill chant of “Allah! Allah! Allah!” howling forth from frenzied heads shaking their shocks of hair, with their eyes turned ba
ck.
“The Annunciator Dervishes!” whispered my neighbor, whose fat gelatinous belly I felt trembling against my elbow. “They disembarked yesterday evening, from India or Tripoli or God know where. There are already plenty of white men with them…”
I did not hear the rest of the sentence. The Senegalese in the helicopter issued the customary formal demands. His hoarse and guttural voice was instructing the mute and petrified crowd to “Disperse, in the name of the law!” for the third time when the leader of the Dervishes leapt forward, his blaster pointed.
The gendarme’s head crackled in the jet of flame; then the craft’s white cockpit was cut through as if by a punch, and the machine collapsed in flames on to the flagstones, its rotor-blades expiring.
On the terrace of the Café Riche, the Black Guardsmen got up tumultuously, blasters in hand, to repel the stampede of Annunciators, who had recognized their enemies and were falling upon them, clubs upraised. Cries of “Allah! Allah! Allah!” mingled with those of “Anarchism for ever! Death to the Senegalese!”
The customers, mad with fear, plunged under the tables or threw champagne-bottles with all their might at the assailants. A black skull was split like a coconut. Blaster-beams sprang forth in every direction like jets of soda-water, volatilizing everything that interrupted their trajectories. The roof of our stall had a corner removed by a stray shot. Groups of men burned by the beams were falling on every side, writhing like crabs plunged into boiling water—and explosions came from the brawl, now being fought at close quarters, as blasters fired at one another, mutually detonating their radium ammunition.
With moans of fright, the crowd pressed forward, attempting to flee. Raymonde and I could not move, crushed against the flower-stall. My fat neighbor, who had fainted in my arms, served us as a rampart.
The Martian Epic Page 8