For ten days, we lived the pedestrian and stagnant existence of bureaucrats by day, and modest village folk by night—and every day, the funeral bell tolled for new victims in the region, prey, like the rest of the world, to the Plague, to the red death of the torpedoes, to Anarchism, to the dementia of the panic and to desperate pleasures. It seemed to us that all of that had been going on for years and might continue indefinitely, like the Martian bombardment.
XI. What the Air Force Commander Saw
I never found out the real reason for the long five-day excursion which the head of Air Force operations at La Crau undertook during that dark interval. Officially, he was commissioned to sound out the dispositions of the governments of countries detached from the Union, but we guessed that there was something else behind this pretext.
Isaac Schlemihl, rewarded with his license for the exploitation of Martian radium, had chosen Avignon as his center of operations, and the proximity of the ancient papal city was too tempting for the commander at La Crau, with his insatiable curiosity and his spirit of adventure, not to pay the audacious businessman an immediate visit. I have every reason to suppose that our friend Sylvain undertook his official tour with a few kilos of radium hidden in his cockpit, destined to resupply the constitutional powers in Spain and Algeria, who had run out of the precious metal. What commission did Schlemihl give him on the price of the sale? In what currency were the transactions completed? Was Gideon Botram mixed up in the business? There were so many points that it is impossible for me to elucidate, because our friend Sylvain restricted his account of his voyage to an episodic narration.
The story that he told Gabrielle, Raymonde and myself one evening in our room at he Hôtel de la Plage contained facts so curiously characteristic—not to say tragic—that I made haste, the following morning to write them down. These notes, preserved through the most perilous adventures, have aided me in composing my memoirs.
Sylvain Leduc and his mechanic Champoreau had taken off in their favorite helicopter—the “old crate” that had already over flown a capital city in flames with me as its passenger, and was destined to have a near escape from yet another torpedo.
The shoreline of Languedoc, and that of Catalonia, whose curving line they followed rather than cutting straight across the Gulf of Lyon, offered them a spectacle—normal in that era—of seething disorder: cities, towns and villages establishing their local Soviets, the swelling numbers of the Black Guardsmen, flags displaying the skull-and-crossbones, blasters and mass executions. Mystical processions wound through the countryside, and the pilots of those pirate helicopters of Anarchy that were not flying towards the obliterated cities to pillage the ruins were amusing themselves by sowing death and panic in the ranks of those miserable sheep.
Barcelona, faithful to its traditions, had already rebelled against Soviet power; from one end to the other, the superb Rambla was nothing but a confused battlefield, and several public monuments were on fire. Analogous scenes were occurring in the other towns, and Leduc, habitually blasé, summarized what he saw in Valencia and Seville with this lapidary statement: “People were demolishing them without knowing why, and there were fires everywhere.” In the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada, the forest clearings were swarming with people, as if the entire population of the region had come to camp out on their peaks.
“All that was banal to me, you understand,” Leduc said. “And my brave Champoreau yawned as if to dislocate his jaw. He had just asked me whether we would still find moukères 10 in Algeria as we were arriving at Gibraltar, when I saw a flag fluttering in the wind on top of the famous Rock. I thought I was seeing things, and told Champoreau to take us down to 200 meters—there was no mistake! It was the English flag, the so-called Union Jack—and, even better than that, columns of what looked like red ants winding along the spiraling roads and on the ramparts: the old Redcoats! There was still an English garrison at Gibraltar! Although there were no more national flags, no more governments, hardly any more society, while everyone else was pitching camp where he pleased, these damned Englishmen had found a way to reinstall themselves on their Rock as if nothing had happened! That took me by surprise.
“We had opened the portholes, because of the heat, and we scented the characteristic odor of Albion—that cumulative perfume of Navy Cut tobacco, brandy, whisky, rum, plum pudding, roast beef and tea. On the parade-ground of the fort a company of redcoats was standing motionless. They had rifles, surreptitiously conserved in bunkers along with the uniforms, and they fired a volley as the flag was lowered and hoisted three times, saluted with regimented cries of ‘hip, hip hurray!’ Where had they dug them up, these Englishmen of Gibraltar? They were 30 years behind the times!”
The Englishmen in question had maintained all their fine traditions, however, and out two aviators had to pay the price for their curiosity, for a shell, bursting 10 meters from the helicopter, reminded them that “no one flies over Gibraltar.”
In Algeria, Leduc found a situation less advanced than in Europe but just as serious. The Islamic uprising in Timbuktu had already spread, even to the peaceful tribes of our old colony; the Atlas mountain region was beset by fire and bloodshed and the large coastal cities, especially Algiers, were resisting with difficulty. I don’t doubt that Schlemihl’s radium was gladly received there. Poor Champoreau did not have the leisure to make the acquaintance with the anticipated moukères, though, for, after a brief halt at Bône—Constantine had fallen into the hands of the Khroumirs and there was no longer a single living European in Tunisia—Leduc set a new course for northern Italy. The southern half of the country had been provided with radium by the Rome torpedo; Sicily and Calabria, overrun in every direction by troops of anarchist marauders, offered scant temptation to our explorers, who were so inadequately armed that they carefully avoided getting close even to a lone helicopter.
It was in the open sea south-west of Sardinia that they encountered the American millionaire’s yacht.
“Some kind of eccentric, who did not even have a radio aboard—deliberately, too, for he wanted to take a complete vacation, ignoring all business matters, just fishing and drinking cocktails on his boat…leading the life of a natural man, no less! Left America two months before. Last landfall at Monaco three days before the first torpedo. Always on the move thereafter, around Corsica and Sardinia, in absolute ignorance of events. The Jovian cosmogram announcing the projectile? A rumor! He had seen Cagliari burning from the sea, but that was insufficient to inform him, wasn’t it? So his yacht, which I perceived as it was hauling up its fishing-nets like some vulgar lugger, was carrying the colors of the United States of the World, with an America ensign in the corner, according to maritime custom before the cataclysm. That was the detail that gave me the idea of going down for a bit to talk to him…not without being hailed to come aboard, because I didn’t want to be shot at, as in Gibraltar. On the contrary, though; he welcomed us as old friends.
“His English threw me—Yes, damn it is all I know—and he didn’t speak French, or even Italian. Fortunately, Champoreau, who’s done a stint in Australia and has a gift for languages, played interpreter. Our old crate was moored to the bridge by the lascars and we had a chat with the boss, W. J. K. Dervanbilt—yes, the Cannery King in person—in the fancy stateroom, around a collection of glasses and bottles: whisky, Benedictine, kummel, chartreuse, and cigars with gold bands, like in the old days. But that wasn’t all, brother, and as soon as I had twigged the situation, I amused myself by letting him go on…
“He had his bully beef factories in Chicago, and—a quirk of which he seemed proud—all his title-deeds, bonds and banknotes in the Esmeralda’s strong-box. The crew? Oh, that strapping fellow would have broken one of them over his knee and clobbered the rest with the pieces; anyway, he had a real bulldog as second-in-command and loaded blasters in his pockets. Would they form a sea-borne Soviet when they had taken in what Champoreau translated on my behalf? At any rate, W. J. K. Dervanbilt’s eyes widened lik
e soup-plates when he understood that his home town had copped a Martian torpedo. Chicago razed! Factories gone, banks gone, government gone—everything gone! A smash worse than all the Grand-Soirs 11… and I showed him cuttings from the American papers, proclamations, communiqués, my official papers and Isaac Schle…well, in brief, enough to convince Saint Thomas.
“ ‘Well,’ he said, finally, putting his fat cigar down on the edge of the ash-tray. ‘Well, it’s finished!’ Then, taking a key from his waistcoat pocket, he went to open a big strong-box that took up a whole corner of the stateroom. ‘Please help me,’ he added, taking an armful of title-deeds and banknotes.
“ ‘He’s asking us to help him,’ Champoreau translated, flabbergasted by these heaps of papers that represented thousands and millions of dollars.
“ ‘Overboard,’ the millionaire directed us, heading for an open porthole.
“ ‘He wants us to throw it all in the sea!’ protested my Champoreau.
“ ‘What do you expect?’ I said. ‘It’s no good for anything else!’
“In five minutes, the clearance was finished. As if nothing abnormal had happened, our man offered us one last cigar, gave us one last handshake, and, while two crewmen were untying our helicopter, phlegmatically instructed the others to cast the nests again. Bah—that Cannery King wasn’t about to die of hunger; there are plenty of fish in the sea.”
That devil Leduc had a rather simplistic manner of putting things!
He also had the cruelty to hold us breathless with a prolonged description of Florence, which he flew over during the burning of the Pitti Palace and the neighborhood of the cathedral, while the historic Dome swam in the smoke ‘like a golden pumpkin;’ it extended as far as the lagoons of Venice—but the jocular manner was unsustainable, and he cut it short.
“Well, yes,” he resumed, after a pause, “I saw that torpedo close up. Gaby must have told you. When I think about it…brrr! What you don’t know, though, is that, in falling, it saved our Gideon. We were coming back from Venice, heading straight for La Crau. We were between Brescia and Verona, within sight of Lake Garda, when we came across a dense column of people on the march, which must have taken up a good six kilometers of road…talk about dust! Fifty thousand strong, at least. Men, women, children, a mixture of all the national costumes of the region—Venetian, Tyrolese, all the way to the depths of Dalmatia and Herzegovina. All as ragged as could be, dragging their feet, loaded down with bundles, sweating under the hot Italian Sun, bawling hymns with one voice, led by priests of every sort, sweating more and howling louder than all the rest.
“I’ve seen my fair share of processions, pilgrimages, migrations and the like, but that one, which I saw close up by going down and running along its course from east to west, astonished me. With a mystical fury in their eyes and voices, they shook their ridiculous weapons at us—knives, sticks, broken scythes—aggressively. For them, our helicopter was obviously a diabolical messenger. They threw stones at us…which fell back on their heads, causing them to abandon the sport in short order.
“ ‘Can’t you hear what they’re shouting, Boss?’ Champoreau said. ‘Antecristo, Antecristo! Abassa, Antecristo! Death to the Antichrist!’ I certainly could hear it! And I saw, too, that all of them had large crosses made of white cloth sewn on their left shoulders. Non doubt about it, it was a crusade—the last crusade—marching against the Antichrist. That, undoubtedly, was our Gideon!
“What they might have been able to achieve, I have no idea—and they’re incapable of doing it now, for a very good reason—but you can imagine how interested we were. The head of the column had just come to a halt, on the orders of a singular upstart mounted on a donkey, escorted by a dozen burly fellows who hailed from Brescia. What the Devil did he want of them? And why were these Crusaders obedient to his least gesture? What mysterious authority did the individual on the donkey exercise? His bare feet were brushing the ground, protruding from his white tunic. His long red hair, parted in the middle, together with his beard, created a solar radiance around his face. I couldn’t see his eyes—from above you understand—but they held the crowd in absolute thrall. Christ’s double! He had an electrifying impact on that crowd of fanatics, who were only attentive to him.
“The rearguard of the column was still advancing, overflowing the road on both sides, gradually spreading further and further into the fields, on to the terraces of vines, climbing the fig-trees and olive-trees, surrounding our Christ and his 12 apostles, over whom our helicopter was hovering, like the Holy Spirit! You know me—this mystical nonsense leaves me cold, doesn’t it? Well, if I hadn’t had shuddering and vibrating controls beneath my hands and feet, I think I might have yielded to the contagion of that crowd. That incorrigible street-arab Champoreau had stopped talking; he was very pale as he listened to that Christ, who had dismounted from his donkey to harangue the crowd from the crest of a mound.
“He spoke to them about the iniquities of men, who had drawn the wrath of the Eternal Father down upon them and had merited that deluge of torpedoes. ‘The fire of Heaven will consume the entire Earth, and the End of Time is at hand,’ he went on, in a clear and vibrant voice that filled the countryside. ‘One means alone remains by which to suspend the judgment of my Father, and that is to renew the sacrifice of Golgotha here; to offer me on the cross as an expiatory victim for the salvation of humankind!’
“He was undoubtedly ready to do it, and the delirious multitude assembled around him, believing his words to be as hard as iron…but they were all horrorstruck at the thought of raising a sacrilegious hand against their Saviour. ‘Sure!’ Champoreau was finally able to say. ‘He knows full well that no one would dare…’
“But someone did dare. A little man, bent and broken, in a dirty overcoat, with a long white beard and a hooked nose, detached himself from the crowd and came forward to prostrate himself before the Christ. ‘Here I am!’ he said. He lifted up his head. I thought I was looking at Isaac Schlemihl…who was also the Wandering Jew…who was also Judas! An enormous clamor went up, of horror, relief, triumph. Freed from its anxious delay, the crowd followed the example and precipitated itself forward to accomplish the immutable ritual.
“Coins rained down at the feet of the Wandering Jew, who gathered them up one by one, avidly. ‘Enough!’ said the Christ, taking hold of his arm. ‘You have your settlement—30 pieces of silver, AS BEFORE!’
“Two young poplars by the roadside fell beneath the axe, were stripped of their branches by 100 mad woodcutters, who got in one another’s way, and were tied together with a few loops of rope to make a crude cross, which was dragged up to the impassive Christ. The Judas-cum-Wandering Jew set it on his shoulder. ‘Walk!’ he stammered, tremulous with rage and holy terror…and amid the horrified rumor of those 50,000 spectators, the scene followed its inevitable course.
“Beneath the whips of Catholic and Orthodox priests, playing the parts of Roman soldiers with demonic frenzy, the Christ, bowed down by the burden of infamous wood, fell and got up again three times while climbing the Golgotha of a small hill overlooking the calm water of Lake Garda.
“The Christ was stripped of his white tunic, for which the priests played dice; he lay down on the cross…but there were no nails. ‘Here they are!’ laughed Judas mockingly, taking from his pocket three long iron skewers, ringed with rust, one by one. ‘They’re the ones FROM BEFORE, Master; I gathered them up and saved them carefully. ONE NEVER KNOWS.’
“And the rite was completed! He was a contraband Christ, to be sure, but that’s not important; he was a son of man, flesh and blood like you and me; they were real nails of rusted iron that were driven into his hands and feet, clenched in atrocious agony; it was real blood that spurted forth and trickled down, once the cross was stood up and wedged into its hole with three heavy stones. It was a real human cry that the agonized Christ released amid of the frightful silence of the apocalyptic multitude accumulated on the gradient of that improvised theater.
“We
were still hovering at 20 meters, gorgonized, when…oh, my friends! There was a VRRR directly overhead, a crescendo, and…KABOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM! The bolide! A Martian torpedo was falling into the crowd, the principal section 100 meters away from us, sprinkling the human swarm with its generators, which began to belch red smoke amid the deafening howls of people devoured alive by satanite…and nailed above it all was our Crucified Christ, expiring on his Golgotha, an intact islet within the rutilant flood!
“Don’t think for a minute that while I saw all that I was as tranquil in my helicopter seat as I am in this armchair now. Oh, my friends, what a thunderbolt from the God of wrath! ‘Damnation!’ I said to myself as I saw the blow coming. The bolide explodes; we catch a serious gust of wind and are sent spinning towards a generator, which rips off one of our rotor blades and comes down 100 meters away. The helicopter pirouettes, I’m thrown into the air and almost through a porthole—but the engine keeps going. Champoreau hasn’t let go of the controls; he’s gripping them like a monkey, with his head down. He brings the craft up again, minus at least one rotor blade, and we climb again, using our propulsive engines instead of the rotor blades, above the tide of satanite in which our thousands of Crusaders are howling like the damned souls they are…and the Christ, on his cross…he had asked for it, but if Champoreau had let me, I would have taken him down, the poor devil…not that it matters, in the end…
“And then, we ended up arriving, not much the worse, at Brescia, where I was able to get my hands on a new rotor blade in exchange for a few grams of radium, which I just happened to have…”
XII. The Invisible Aegis
The sudden, unexpected and imminent hope of deliverance for humankind visited the TSF station first. For seven hours we alone, along with a few engineers in the tropical regions, bore the burden of anxious expectation. In fact, Wronsky, the instigator of that hope, saw fit to reveal it to us—which is to say, the official staff, including the ex-ministers, Gideon alone having already been informed—on the evening of July 31, and swore us to secrecy. If the experiment failed, we, the last civilized men whom he deemed worthy of subjection to such a rude proof, would be alone in suffering the disappointment. The rest of the world would only be informed in the case of the success of the means of salvation on which, for several days, all over the terrestrial sphere, thousands of workmen had been laboring feverishly, without being aware of the end they were pursuing, maintained at their posts by a few 100 discreet and devoted engineers.
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