And the image of the Apocalypse appeared: Marseilles on fire, kilometer after kilometer along the coast; L’Estaque, the detonation of whose explosives factory we had heard, was a volcano of green, yellow and blue flames; the piers and basins of Joliette, as visible as in broad daylight; warehouses burning here and there; the old harbor still alight, spreading its flood of burning petrol everywhere; and throughout all its breadth, mounted in stages above its amphitheater, the city erupted with the yellow flames of its oil refineries and soap factories, mingled with the red whirlwinds of satanite.
Over the length and breadth of the city, as far as the outlying districts, loomed the giant torch of the Palais de la Garde. In the distant agricultural lands, burning pine woods hemmed the profile of the hills, testifying, like the igneous plumes in the gulf—among which there was one solitary Stromboli in the open sea, near the Planier lighthouse—to the expansive force of the Torpedo. None of the disasters that had struck the terrestrial capitals equaled this one in its extent.
Despite the distance—we were just passing over the Château d’If—we were terrified by a voice that drowned out the vague tumult of the conflagration: the magnified voice of a loudspeaker with which some unfortunate surrounded by the gas was advertising his presence. His distinct and repeated cries of “Help! Help me!” desperately howling into the air, seemed to be the unanimous voice of he murdered city. The rescue helicopters were widely scattered, though; perhaps thirty in all, gliding hither and yon amid the red reflected light and the smoke. The strike of airbus personnel and all other means of transportation had paralyzed the rescue effort. A single disciplined airborne squadron was arriving belatedly from Toulon; its searchlights and sirens were behind us briefly, slanting down upon the burning city, while we moved out over the sea without stopping.
The voice of our host jerked us out of the state of grief-stricken hypnosis that had overtaken us.
“There’s money to be made down there,” he murmured, as if talking to himself—and repeated, as if by habit: “Money!” He raised his voice, at first for his wife and then for us: “And we need it, my girl, because this strike has cleaned me out. The Directorate won’t be in a hurry to indemnify me for my property in Marseilles, my factory in Timbuktu, my bank in Paris or my château in Cassis. Apart from this meager machine that’s transporting you, Monsieur and Madame, I’m as poor as Job right now—but I started with even less, and I defy all the Martians in the world to prevent me remaking my fortune. As true as my name’s Isaac Schlemihl, there’s money to be made from a little scheme I’ve just cooked up. Well, Monsieur…”
“Léon Rudeaux,” I said, astounded to see this businessman setting his desire for money and wealth against the destruction of a capital city and the collapse of civilization.
“Ah—you’re the one who draws up the governmental communiqués? My congratulations…well, Monsieur Rudeaux, I’ve got you out of a tight spot, and Madame too, without any fuss, you must admit, and I’m counting on you not to refuse me a small favor. You have the confidence of our international Gideon; introduce me to him as your temporary pilot and put in a word for me, so that he’ll grant me a license for the exploitation of the ruins…”
“What? What about the looters? The Black Guardsmen?”
“Don’t worry—they’ll help me. In any case, they won’t take everything, and I’ll be operating legally and methodically. I can count on you, can’t I?”
A strangled “yes” was my only response. Disgust and admiration were choking me. Avidity and presumption pushed to such a degree made this Shylock a kind of hero!
Meanwhile, we were leaving the hot zone of the city of Marseilles and the gulf’s gigantic fireflies behind. In the darkness, which seemed more intense by contrast, we no longer had anything to guide us but the lights of the airfield at La Crau—a distant agitation of beacons, searchlights and colored signals beyond the surface of the Berre reservoir to our right, darker than the sea to our left, pricked by a few minuscule navigation lights—and, becoming more distinct as we approached, the Faramam lighthouse and the airstrips of Saintes-Maries, our objective.
We touched down at 2 a.m.; the field was as animated as an air show, but I was struck by the disarray and insufficiency of the police service: five or six Senegalese, who dared not even prevent an airbus from disembarking some twenty menacing refugees, mostly armed with blasters, before their very eyes. Blasters had become as common as the rifles and pistols of the bellicose era. Bitterly, I recalled the first governmental exodus to Mont-Valérien, and its inviolable cordon of troops. This time, it would only require one or two helicopters loaded with Black Guardsmen to abduct the Director!
The latter was asleep, it seemed, no one knew exactly where. It only remained for us to imitate him. As the moment was hardly propitious for seeking out lodgings, we accepted the hospitality offered by Monsieur Isaac and spent the rest of the night sleeping on the comfortable pneumatic armchairs of the cockpit-drawing-room that had just transported us.
X. The Abdication of the Directorate
Gideon Botram had waited until the last possible moment before yielding to the exhortations of Ladislas Wronsky and fleeing the Palais de la Garde in face of the immediate threat of insurrection. He refused to believe in the danger, and that no preparatory measures had been set in place to evacuate the governmental staff. Only he and the ministers got away aboard the few available helicopters, while ordering the Air Force at La Crau to send an aerial flotilla at the earliest possible moment to transport official documents and the other inhabitants of the Palais to Saintes-Maries. The latter, it was hoped, had nothing to fear from the popular hostility aimed specifically at “the Antichrist and his associates,” not the subaltern employees who were victims of the “tyranny.” What fate the Black Guardsmen had in store for them, however, remains a matter for conjecture, for the first units of the Guard had not yet reached them when the Martian Torpedo projected a satanite generator on to the Palais, and the torrents of red gas flooding the hill devoured all those who escaped the fire.
Our Master seemed to me to be singularly depressed when I was introduced into his modest room at the Hôtel de la Plage, with Raymonde and Isaac the ex-millionaire. He thanked the last-named for having brought back his most devoted colleagues safe and sound; then, having dismissed him with a promise to satisfy his request, he returned his attention to us momentarily to ask us for a few details of our adventure. When we had declared ourselves ready to resume our duties straight away, he shook our hands benevolently, and with unaccustomed emotion.
“Thank you, my friends.” Then, resuming his “official” tone, he added: “Mademoiselle Becquart, would you please present yourself at His Excellency Monsieur Wronsky’s office; you’ll replace his missing secretary. Monsieur Rudeaux, follow me, we have to draw up a communiqué and reinstitute the Terrestrial Information Service.”
He lowered his voiced, though, as he pronounced the last phrase, as if the ex-Master of the World were ashamed of his eventual powerlessness.
There was no underestimating the significance of the series of measures that he had been obliged to take: the transference of the capital to Marseilles; the replacement of Mont-Valérien by the giant station of the Camargue as the central terrestrial and interplanetary TSF station—a chain of fatalities that had inevitably resulted in the flight to Saintes-Maries. Even at the height of its glory, the Directorate of the United States of the World considered the communication service that permitted it to serve as “the world’s brain” essential to its existence. That service measured out the life of its ideal organism and dispatched its sovereign orders to the most remote regions of the globe. At each stage of its political diminution, the relative importance of pure Information had increased. Now, it had become unique and predominant.
The stranded remnant of the Directorate that had finally run aground in the wilderness of the Camargue—a mere dozen individuals lodged in the whitewashed walls of a cheap little hotel in a petty seaside resort, dev
oid of ministers, archives and staff, save for a few clerks at the TSF station, one typist and one supervisor, without any other military support than a single brigadier and four Senegalese—was a mere phantom of government that was no longer anything more than a global Press agency, a theoretical and superfluous organ, like a lucid intelligence surviving within a body struck down by paralysis.
In effect, the Terrestrial Directorate had ceased to exist, since the reawakening of nationality and the political schism of the extra-European countries. The United States of Latinate Western Europe had only survived dismemberment for a few days.
Even if Gideon Botram were only taking temporary refuge in Saintes-Maries, as was his intention, he had not transported anything to his new capital but an authority reduced, at the very most, to France—which is to say, the few large cities that not yet fallen prey to revolutionary panic.
The end of Marseilles had struck the final blow to his political authority. The last countries faithful to the former Union founded by France’s scientific dictatorship—Spain, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy—gave notification of their withdrawal on July 21 and 22. By virtue of a curious phenomenon of habit, however, a vestige of his former prestige continued to surround the person of the Master in the eyes of neighboring governments. Almost without exception, the latter punctually remitted the news previously destined for the central power and asked for “assistance” in resisting Plague and Anarchy.
Both these scourges gained ground. As if primed by the fall of the torpedoes, both extended their contagion around sources that grew more numerous by the day. While the former mowed down individuals and dissolved their corpses, the second struck down supportive institutions, and, incapable of replacing them with a viable and coherent social order, broke up into local soviets independent of and hostile to one another.
Gangrene disintegrated the formerly united and vigorous body of humankind, converting it, by a retrograde evolution, into an aggregation of countless municipal “cells,” debilitated and corroded by dissent.
Oh, the work of the torpedoes had been swiftly accomplished, and all resistance broken! The Martians could have disembarked from the next “celestial messenger;” we were ready to submit to their enslavement! Presumably, though, we still seemed to be too strong; their cowardice recoiled before the least possibility of danger, or virtue…
The torpedoes were still falling; the flow of disasters continued. Meanwhile, we stayed at Saintes-Maries. The dispossessed Master seemed to have been struck by a paralysis of the will. There was no more question of reorganizing a Directorate, in France or elsewhere, Bordeaux, Lille, Brussels, Geneva and Le Havre having been mentioned at first. The ex-Leader of the World, Gideon Botram, with his keen sense of reality, understood that the time of political power had passed. He was resigned to the spiritual authority of a sort of Pope-in-exile.
Our global communications center became humankind’s last line of communication, its intellectual consciousness—and the “rulers” of each country, inflicted to various degrees by the same political decay, in the midst of the contagious madness of he masses, held on with all the might of their subsistent reason to this unique wellspring of civilization. The powers of darkness were gaining ground, though, and the cells of its cerebral subdivisions atrophied one by one in the progressive paralysis; some stations ceased to respond, each deliberately and arbitrarily disconnected by the sedition of a populace refusing to have anything further to do with “The Antichrist.”
We were astonished, at first, that these protestations were as platonic as they were, and that no general crusade was preached and dispatched against us, but the extravagant popularity of Gideon Botram, born no one knew where or how, persisted in thwarting such ambitions. I have referred to him, explicitly, as a Pope—an anti-Pope, perhaps, but the analogy holds. Every day, he was solemnly excommunicated and accursed as he Antichrist in every temple of Christianity, and abused as a “foreigner” in 498 dialects by a good two billion souls of every other religion, but his apocalyptic prestige was his safeguard. An aureole of superstitious terror surrounded him, even in the eyes of non-Christians. To attack him would have been a sacrilege, an impiety against the designs of divine Wisdom. The fire of Heaven had spared him twice, and that must be because he was reserved by Providence for some more frightful and spectacular punishment, destined to serve as an example to every nation…
Our existence organized its routines on the model that the hazards of the first day had assigned to us. I left the hotel with Raymonde at 8 a.m. to go to our duties at the TSF station a few 100 meters away. Gideon Botram, formerly so active and early-rising, sometimes accompanied us. All arrogance, as well as all initiative, seemed to have deserted him; he chatted with us casually about the mosquito-bites he had suffered during the night, about the radiant morning light, about the cicadas that maintained their deafening concert. Walking in the shade of the plane-trees, we had the appearance of a trio of petty clerks going to their office as late as possible. The members of the government, overtaken by the same torpor of abdication, ambled around, waiting for their Master beneath the old nettle-trees on the terrace.
Ladislas Wronsky, the chief scientist, who rose at dawn, was the only one already at work. When Raymonde went into his office, rosy-cheeked, freshly-washed and scented by the sprig of Spanish broom that she had tucked into her waistband, the old scientist looked up from his papers with a severe expression, stroked his long white beard and said: “Half an hour late, Mademoiselle! Let’s get a move on—and throw away those flowers, which are poisoning me.” I would have cursed the indefatigable ardor for work that he alone conserved in the midst of everything, and which he attempted to share with his new secretary, had it not been for the numerous visits the latter paid to my office every day, to bring me some new communication to broadcast, or to ask for the text of a response that was late in coming.
Wronsky sometimes came in person to the operations center and, taking the place of a clerk, sent long dispatches with delicate finger-work; following his departure, I tried hard to decipher his messages from the reel of the telegraph machine, but their meaning remained enigmatic. Among many other vain questions, he was determined to discover at any price what mechanism a Martian torpedo might contain—or, rather, the basal unit that projected the satanite generators. And he implored every country, collectively, to open one up intact for him, rather than destroying it with explosives! It was a fine time to satisfy the puerile curiosity of an out-of-work scientist!
My working days caused a long sequence of news-items to unfold before my eyes. Torpedoes fell on Berlin on July 22, Moscow on July 23, then on Calcutta, Peking, Antwerp and half of Flanders—whose dikes were not high enough to hold back the tide of infernal red gas. There were the ravages of the plague, the emigrations of city-dwellers, submerging the country-dwellers, who resisted them with weapons in hand, forcing a retreat to higher altitudes, where they thought they might find safety, and where they perished in thousands of hunger, cold and exposure. There was the general refusal to consume the Jovian nutriment, although we were hoping, by that means, to spare the world the scourge of famine; it was falsely accused of causing “Martian bronchitis,” and people joyfully set fire to the stocks that helicopters from La Crau distributed to the cities. The workers at the factory making it at Saint-Louis-du-Rhône fell prey to this dread, so we gave up….and every morning, regularly, this laconic and sibylline cosmogram arrived from Jupiter: “Have courage! Examine the torpedoes!” Were they, too, like our Ladislas? It was definitely a mania.
The passive languor holding sway in the atmosphere of the offices overwhelmed me. I fulfilled my duties to salve my conscience. All this information, and the reports in which I summarized it, seemed to me to be utterly tedious and vain. What good did it do to keep humankind up to date with the new misfortunes that struck the race? What was the point in thus poisoning its final days?
At 6 p.m. I handed over to one of my two auxiliaries and lit a cigarette in the doorway. T
hen Raymonde joined me and we went for a stroll together on the narrow strand of fine sand isolated between the low dunes and the blue, tideless sea. The coast extended indefinitely beneath the implacable azure, flat and monotonous; the only two “features” of the countryside were the wrought iron obelisks supporting the network of TSF antennae and, lower down, the ruddy roofs of the village grouped around the ancient church, built in yellow stone gilded by the perennial sunlight and crenellated at the top like a Medieval fortress.
The luminous melancholy of this world’s-end penetrated our souls, causing us to forget external anxieties. We said very little, content to enjoy one another’s presence—or, rather, allowing nature to be a third party to our intimacy. Raymonde had a passion for botany, her mastery of which had long surpassed mine, so we studied the flora of the sands and the salty plain: plants covered with silky hairs or prickling thorns, or with swollen and glaucous tissues, blue thistles, yellow poppies, bouquets of thrift of an exquisite lilac color, sweet-scented sea-lilies…
We went back there in the evenings, sometimes alone, sometimes with Gaby Leduc, whom I had already seen during the day, in the course of business. Her husband occasionally accompanied us—my old friend Sylvain, whose dutiful steadfastness sustained the Air Force at La Crau and whose vigilance ensure the provisioning of the Directorial staff, the TSF station and the greater part of the village of Saintes-Maries. Not once did we go back to the hotel after dinner, with the distinguished refugees and minister’s wives, because those haughty hypocrites with their lorgnettes sickened us with their vainglorious and slanderous gossip. Not once was Raymonde able to play the piano, thanks to those Tartuffes in skirts.
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