“Shut up, Kropatchek,” said the commander of the Restoration. “You’re not a diplomat, that I know!”
“You’ll spoil everything, General,” whispered the disguised woman, pleadingly, placing her chubby hand on the warrior’s arm.
“The required military forces,” Ladislas repeated, without seeming to notice the incident, “to impose our power on Europe and to drown any trace of resistance in blood. I admit that to be so. I also admit that we would resign ourselves to that extremity in order to re-establish and re-affirm social order. But it is not social order—it is, on the contrary, the usurpation of Anarchy—that you’re proposing that we sanction. It’s chaos: the negation of all the fundamental principles of family and society that are implicit in the very title that you’re offering us. No, Monsieur Schlemihl, you are free to make alliance with the Revolution, and you are free to dupe the last few men of property, even including the venerable leader of Christendom, but you shall not draw a single member of the Directorate into your net! Even if our refusal provokes your wrath, and that of your satellites; even if your execrable army makes us pay with all our lives for our fidelity to truly liberal principles, completing the work of the Martians by trampling down the last defenders of Civilization, I give you and your Janissary chief, here and now, our response in a single word: never!”
Standing up with his hands upraised to the sky in heroic testimony, quite transfigured, the old savant, ordinarily so cool and composed, vibrated with the faith of a martyr. Galvanized by that contagious enthusiasm, our Master got up in his turn, and pronounced, in a clear and resolute voice: “No, never!”
I almost added my own voice to that sublime oath.
As for the envoys of Darkness, Kropatchek was a deeper shade of crimson than his uniform, and was rolling his furious eyes. The pilot with the nice hips was trying to calm him down. Schlemihl, with an expression of scornful pity, shrugged his shoulders and muttered between his teeth:
“Alter Meschuge…Chalaumes mit Backfish!” 15 Then, in a louder voice, he said: “Words, gentlemen, nothing but words. I admit your hesitation, and I respect the motives for it without sharing them...but you’ll think about it, I’m sure, and you’ll end up realizing that I’m right. Within a month, Monsieur Gideon Botram, I shall have the pleasure and the honor of seeing you crowned leader of the New Society by His Holiness Benedict XXII, to the unanimous acclamations of the bourgeoisie and our valiant Soviet army. Have your response sent to me in Avignon by helicopter; our TSF apparatus has been put out of action, as you know. And with that, gentlemen, I have the honor…come, Rara; let’s go, Kropatchek.”
And, followed by his two companions, flanked by the Senegalese, the Tempter made his retreat. Five minutes later, the sinister helicopters were bearing the odious trio towards the northern horizon.
I was not party to our Master’s subsequent regrets, or the exhortations that Ladislas must have lavished upon him in private to prevent him from going back on his word and sacrificing the sacred cause of Civilization to his thirst for political power. I only know that Monsieur Schlemihl was not seen again in Saintes-Maries. But who knows whether, despite everything, that evil suggestion might not have ended up victorious, and that cynical prediction being realized, if further events had not completed the demoralization of humankind and the absolute obliteration of all constitutional power?
III. Ladislas Wronsky’s Idea
In speaking instead of, and on behalf of, Gideon Botram to answer Isaac Schlemihl, Ladislas Wronsky had done nothing but affirm his true position. In fact, he was the one who held the first place in the new Directorate, which became the recrudescence of the spiritual authority of the old savant’s genius over the scientific minds of every country.
I have no doubt that, if he had wanted to, Ladislas could have seized political power at the moment of the Deliverance, when the crowds hailed him as the “Savior of the World.” The leaders of the Anarchist committees prided themselves on their science, and would probably have recognized him as their nominal president. If such possibilities ever occurred to him, though, the old man’s integrity would have refused to entertain them for a single second. He judged himself entirely unqualified to exercise political power; if anyone had offered him the sovereignty of the world, he would have immediately handed it over to Gideon Botram. His only ambition was to bring all the force of his intelligence to bear on the progress of humankind.
Among the enigmas of the human heart that remain indecipherable to me, I place the singular and quasi-paternal affection that this churlish and misogynistic old man of 69 saw fit to bestow on Raymonde and myself. I cannot see what interest he—a fanatical devotee of science, scornful of what he called “literary gossip”—could possibly find in me. The only one of my novels he had riffled through, at Raymonde’s instigation, drew the severe verdict: “What does it prove? There’s no conclusion!” And yet, he loved me like a son.
As for his secretary, he did not spare her his reprimands; when he invited us to his residence “for a chat” he shut her mouth with a comment like, “You’re very sweet, of course, my child, but, as a woman, you can only have general ideas,” if she happened to express a serious opinion. Nevertheless he cherished her like a daughter.
Did he sense, beneath the feminine airiness that he affected to attribute to her, the rare qualities of that beautiful soul: the proud independence, the rectitude, the loyalty, the horror of lying that had to bring forth fervor for the truth? Or was it just the whim of an old savant, lovelessly celibate, skeptical with regard to habitual flatteries, touched by the sight of our spontaneous sympathy towards him? I never figured it out.
Whatever the reason was, I thought that I ought to mention that affection, because it had a powerful influence on our destiny and launched us into subsequent adventures whose narration might be useful for the edification of Humankind—if the reign of Humankind on Earth ever resumes!
I shall not overemphasize the sudden change of opinion that overtook the governmental “court” when our favored situation was no longer in doubt. The venomous smiles of the Ministers’ wives, and their backhanded sneers regarding that irregular couple, the “petty Chief of Information” and “Monsieur Wronsky’s little typist” were a thing of the past, as was their malicious pleasure in lingering in the drawing-room for the sole purpose of keeping us from the piano. Now it was all graceful bows and the vilest groveling to obtain the presence of one or the other of us at “afternoon tea”—and when our clear resolution to decline any invitation of that sort had been politely but firmly signified, their toadying became even more flagrant, to the extent of leaving the drawing-room and piano to us “out of respect for the inspiration of the exquisite musicienne…”
Ladislas’ infatuation for our company resulted in daily conversations with him, either in his office, under the pretext of service, by day, or on the terrace of the station in the shadow of the nettle-trees in the late afternoon, or even in Gideon’s lodgings in the evening—but never in his hotel room, which he had arranged with stoical simplicity, and where, he said, we would have had nowhere to sit.
The news of events and the threats of the future, terrestrial and Martian, formed the habitual subjects of these conversations, but not one terminated without the old savant holding forth on the project dearest to his heart: the foundation of a Conservatory in which the world’s savants might be kept safe until better times: the very spirit of Civilization.
The theory on which the notion was based—although much too absolute, in my humble opinion—was original and seductive. It had, in any case, the advantage of sustaining our morale even after the second catastrophe. Here, succinctly summarized, is his reasoning.
The present lapse was only a superficial accident, whose consequences could be easily arrested by the good will of the intellectual elite. Indeed, he said, civilization, as it is ordinarily understood, is an illusion. It is necessary to distinguish, within its bosom, the Gifted Minds—men endowed with active intelligence, who
are the truly civilized—from the remainder, whose passive intelligence merely reflects the thought of the former: the “human material,” as the old savant expressed it.
Active intelligence is a rare phenomenon. The Gifted Minds form, so to speak, a variety of the human species—a spiritual variety whose representatives are born in various places, according to as-yet-unfathomable laws, independent of the general carnality. In them, intelligence, with its disinterested love of Truth and scientific curiosity—the civilized man’s notion of the sacred and the sole justification for the existence of humankind within the plan of creation—predominates over animal existence. It is only given to a small number of individuals, however, to attain this goal, or, at least, to pursue it consciously. They alone are efficacious; they alone exist, in the absolute sense. The remainder, whose number appears to constitute Civilization, are only “human material:” souls as deprived of real thought as the will of a hypnotized “subject,” reflecting the ideas of the Gifted and passively following their progress. The habitual fabric of their lives and the quotidian object of their preoccupations are the instincts and appetites of the “ancestral Beast,” and civilization can only manifest itself in them if those instincts and appetites are sufficiently bridled and dulled.
It is in the domain of morality that the passive man, the “human material” finds his opportunity to raise himself up and render individual and social life harmonious and beautiful—offering to the truly civilized, the Gifted, a milieu favorable to the maximum development of intelligence, which then projects on everyone, indiscriminately, the aureole of Civilization.16
Now, before our eyes, the work accomplished over centuries by the efforts of the Gifted had perished in a few days. The mass of those “civilized by contagion” had escaped the “polarization” of the Elite, and, by a sort of inverse Visitation of the Spirit of Darkness, had returned to the atavistic instincts and repudiated Civilization.
The only means of conserving the gifts of progress was, therefore, to abstract them, in the person of their true depositaries, from a milieu that had become worse than unfavorable—actively hostile, in fact—and to bring the Savants and the last men of good will together in a single central Institute, where their reciprocal company would shelter them from animal instincts and evil suggestions.
Gideon Botram had stopped openly opposing this project, but I suspected him of taking pleasure in increasing the difficulties of realization with which he obstructed Wronsky’s impatience. The latter was, in effect, the President Designate of the “Conservatory of Civilization,” and its advent would reduce the phantom authority still attributed to the former Director to naught.
IV. Three Penetrative Shells
The days went by. The evenings extended and became cooler. The song of the cicadas became more discreet. The grapes were ripe; the harvests began. Storm-clouds sometimes appeared in the everlasting azure of the Provençal sky, breaking in benevolent downpours over the Sun-baked ground.
We were finally getting close to the fateful date of October 1, which the most pessimistic had fixed as a limit to the possibility of a new bombardment of the Earth by Mars during this opposition. The disquiet of the provisional state in which we were living would then disappear, we thought, along with the desolate feeling that a “mainspring” had been broken—the mainspring of Humankind’s hope and confidence in the future.
After mid-September, it seemed to us, the Martian menace would be thwarted, for the date of October 1 concerned the arrival on Earth of a projectile, and it was necessary to allow a fortnight for its trajectory from the red planet. We would therefore be safe if no shot was detected by September 15 or 16—and the astronomers of Ganymede were on watch; day by day, the Jovan cosmograms told us “Nothing new on Mars” and added a laconic: “Courage! The punishment will take place”—at the next opposition, in two years’ time.
The disappointment was all the more irritating for being so long delayed. The fatal blow renewed the anguish that we alone, of all humankind, had to support until the projectiles’ arrival! On the morning of September 12, Jupiter sent us the message: “Shell departed from Mars towards Earth.” There was identical news on September 14, and again 15—then nothing more; the “season” was closed, conclusively.
We repeated to one another endlessly that the waves from the oscillators would deflect these three shells, like their predecessors, but we were no longer able to believe in the efficacy of that protection, for the Martians would not have wasted their efforts gladly. If they had decided, after a month-long interruption, to send us these projectiles at the last minute, they must have employed a novel means to ensure that they would strike their target!
While the three new “messengers” were making their way through the interplanetary void—tiny twinkling flecks, followed by the televisors of the Jovian astronomers intent on calculating their trajectories and the points on the terrestrial surface from which the unknown flails hidden within their metal flanks would reach out—hope and apprehension succeeded one another in those of us in the know, like light and darkness on a stormy day.
Would three shells, if they escaped the deflective network of the telemechanical waves, be enough to make Humankind renounce its will to raise itself up again? Gideon Botram enumerated the favorable symptoms that had multiplied considerably in recent days, modest as yet, but clear enough to demonstrate that a recovery was taking place all over the world. The folly of pleasure was dying down. Certain groups—electricians, mechanics, transport workers and public servants—were returning to work. Factories were reopening their doors. TSF stations that had been deliberately put out of action were being repaired. Newspapers were multiplying; their tone was becoming less pessimistic, beyond the Atlantic as well as in Europe.
The Nouveau-Paris, the great daily whose premises had escaped the fire—along with enough others for Paris in ruins to retain nearly 60,000 inhabitants—was looking forward to the reconstruction of the capital, considerably bigger and better than before. Towns were no longer subsisting entirely on the reserves of food in their warehouses; country folk were beginning to provide fresh foodstuffs again. Local currencies were being issued everywhere; the Banque de France had re-opened its counters—under Communist control, admittedly—and was printing bills in Bordeaux that were accepted even by the Soviets. The latter were letting their most outrageous regulations fall into disuse. They were losing territory, expelled by newly-organized White Guards, Blue Guards and Pink Guards. Provence was getting ready to shake off the yoke of Kropatchek and to rescue the Holy Father, who was, in fact, Isaac Schlemihl’s prisoner in the Palais d’Avignon. Southern California, Texas, Florida, Guatemala, the island of Chiloe, Bengal, Egypt, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium and Switzerland declared themselves autonomous bourgeois states. Moreover, the ravages of “Martian bronchitis” diminished in the northern hemisphere with the end of summer, and the disease only manifested itself in the southern hemisphere, at the beginning of spring, in an attenuated form.
In brief, without the threat of the shells, still unknown to everyone on Earth save for 15 or 20 individuals at Saintes-Maries, the situation would have seemed quite encouraging…
But no, alas! In a few days time, the whole world would know—and the only-too-probable ravages of the deadly machines would cause the temporary success of the Deliverance to be forgotten. The 20 months that would then elapse before the next opposition would seem to be a negligible surcease, useful, at the most, for those condemned to death to “enjoy the time they had left.” The sketchy reorganization would be carried away by the explosion of a new panic, this time irremediable.
For Raymonde and me, that fortnight’s delay was far from being the period of sterile anguish that I initially feared. After September 15, Gideon Botram finally committed himself to Lasdislas Wronsky’s projects. I accepted, as a signal honor, the responsibility of conveying the good news to all the savants of Western Europe who would form the nucleus of the “Conservatory of Civilization,” whose seat w
ould be in Montpellier, in the buildings of the Faculty of Medicine; the preparations for the journey took up all my time.
It was not just a matter of gathering a cargo of savants but of sounding out the most notable—in France, Belgium and England on this occasion—and convincing them to go to Saintes-Maries, where Wronsky awaited them. In principle, I should have traveled alone; I only needed a pilot. It was despite my resistance and the amicable representations of Ladislas that Raymonde obtained permission to accompany me.
“It’s a sacred mission that has been entrusted to you,” she said to me, “and I’d be the last person to get in your way, but it’s a dangerous mission too, and I don’t want to be separated from you at any cost. I want to be by your side, until death…and I’ll make myself useful, be sure of that. You can’t travel alone. However perfect your helicopter might be, you’ll need a devoted pilot…and I’ll be that pilot. As we’re going into Soviet lands, I’ll follow Madame Schlemihl’s example, and I certainly hope that I’ll make a better aviator than she did!”
She took some trouble to disguise herself. Her short-cut hair, her upper lip darkened by artificial down, her contralto voice and her slim, lithe figure gave her the appearance of a handsome adolescent. She had a mischievous impulse to try out her new personality on our old friend. Wronsky addressed her gallantly as “young man”—it was the last time I saw him laugh. After that day, she never forsook masculine dress, in order to assimilate the congruent attitudes and gestures.
It still remained for her—and for me—to familiarize ourselves with the operation of our helicopter, a machine lovingly prepared by Leduc in person: a marvel of precision and flexibility, which a child could maneuver.
In normal conditions, our preparations would have taken a few hours. At present, an adventure into the prevailing social disarray was an expedition requiring every possible precaution: on-board sleeping accommodation; changes of clothing; some food supplies—especially of the Jovian nutriment, which we were beginning to employ as a staple; two blasters apiece, with ammunition; an abundance of bills drawn on the principal European banks; not to mention aeronautical charts and my precious letters of introduction for the different countries we were to visit.
The Martian Epic Page 15