The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  As soon as the roasted acorn beverage had been drunk and a cigar smoked, we went out with the gentlemen to finish the evening at the Café Bellevue in the Grand Place. It was a comfort to us after the dark streets, to find the illumination of that luxurious establishment, which—uniquely, in the whole city—produced its own electricity.

  The hall was packed, and I immediately recognized in the customers that feverish haste to enjoy life which had struck me so forcibly in Marseilles two and a half months earlier—but the atmosphere had something even more distraught and funereal about it.

  “They all have the eyes of the Annunciator Dervishes!” Raymonde whispered in my ear.

  The extinction of the lights for the cinema session was greeted with cynical growls of joy from men and women alike, and I had to exchange places rapidly with my young and charming pilot to interpose myself between “him” and his neighbor. The luminous images on the screen catches a sufficient fraction of everyone’s attention, and the scenes of horror, in particular, redouble the avidity not to waste a single second of the supposedly-brief time remaining: the Solfatara seen from Capri, launching its jets and bombs into the sky and pouring smoke from its cone; the towns on the gulf burning amid inundations of lava; the burning of Catania by the fires of Etna; the burning of Milan by the Anarchists; the Revolution in Brussels, the city retaken by the bourgeois party and set alight by the Soviet forces; the Anarchist fires in Glasgow, Rotterdam, Strasbourg, Lille…

  Zzing! A clash of cymbals; the picture is extinguished. A searchlight-beam pierces the smoke-laden atmosphere of the hall to illuminate a real nude dancer on the screen, amid a brutal explosion of improvised drums and the frightful, heart-rending howl—“The torpedo! The Martians!”—of someone leaping on to a table…and the blaster-jets striking heads all around us…the lights come back up—and, further away in the room, another cry springs forth from the panic-stricken throng: “The sky’s on fire! Fire everywhere! Fire!”—and another blaster jet springs forth, frantically mowing people down.

  “Enough, enough!”

  “Get out while you can!”

  “But kill them!”

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!”—from a population instantly bristling with blasters and revolvers, spraying death in every direction.

  It was the scene in the Café Riche all over again, but more brutal and more hideous, with nothing conscious or organized about it, but with an imperious and irresistible magnetism—which, I confess, to my own shame and my beloved’s, brought our blasters dizzily into our hands, and obliged us to fire, and fire again…ffrrr…ffrrr…into the crowd, our nerves twisted by the atrocious delirium of satisfying that animal contagion.

  Our little scientific troop retreated through dark streets, leaving the majority of the guests behind on the way. Some distance from the city, there were confused clamors and detonations; the light of one fire turned the sky purple towards the Boulevard des Ecoles, another towards the Porte d’Isly.

  Walking with the two of us and our host, Doctor Goulliard analyzed the crisis of collective hysteria that we had witnessed in clinical terms: “Reflexive imitation,” he said, “released from the inhibition of rational control. The psychic disintegration seemed to be in suspension during the liberating Respite, but it was incubating, and its latent progress developed today, like a photographic print. In fact, the madness of humankind, which was still embryonic while the torpedoes fell, has found its outlet under the influence of the new catastrophe. The animal instincts, perverted and hallucinated by the destruction and the deaths, dream of completing the work of the volcanoes, repudiating individual and specific conservation to realize its two goals to the fullest possible extent. Arson and massacre, henceforth without pretext—for the sheer love of it—are in the process of exciting a new fanaticism in demented Humankind.”

  We lowered our heads before these frightful truths; self-disgust agitated our hearts, at having participated in these monstrous rites. I felt the last civilized hope flickering within me as I recalled that this cold analyst of the mounting folly had also been in the midst of the mob a little while before, his features contorted and his mouth agape, with a smoking revolver in his fist!

  VI. The Savants’ Failure

  We stayed in Lille throughout the next day. I saw the city in which I had spent my youth turned upside-down by the fury of its own inhabitants, full of crumbling ruins, some of them smoking, watched by mute and somber groups avidly drinking in the spectacle, ready to renew it in their turn a little further away. I witnessed communist distributions, interminable queues outside the doors of Soviet buildings, from which people emerged clutching a smoked herring, a can of preserves or a handful of dry legumes, which had to be defended against the brutal covetousness of passers-by.

  Two instances of murderous rage further revealed the abominable crisis before our eyes: the preliminary howl of “A torpedo! The Martians! Fire!” followed by indiscriminate blaster fire, and the convulsions of the wretch writhing in the road, finished off by the stamping heels of the audience. The “Martian bronchitis” was also laying low the healthiest of constitutions debilitated by insufficient nourishment. The majority of women had the same gleam in their eyes as the two in the dean’s home. Dresses were rare, and those on display—gaudy, extravagant, low-cut to the basses of the sternum in spite of the cold—were completed by an SSF armband. Children were playing at “Martians” and I saw a group of them on the Boulevard de la Liberté sprinkle petrol on a luxurious house abandoned by its owners and set fire to it, without anyone trying to stop them.

  After we had spent a second night under the roof of the amiable Dean, the latter took us back to the aerodrome, where our aircraft was returned to us, not without difficulty. A few liters of fuel were sold to us at a high price. Two hours later, after a journey favored by good weather, hardly troubled by cloud, we disembarked in Brussels at the University’s private airfield in the very heart of the city.

  There, too, ruins were numerous. The entire quarter situated between the Parc and the Hotel de Ville, where civil guards and Black Guards had been fighting doggedly eight hours before, was nothing but a heap of debris. There too, the noise of rioting and distant explosions had replaced the placid rumor of the capital. There were no trams and no taxis, only a few cars with blacked-out windows and a few furtive pedestrians.

  “A great many Italian refugees have arrived here,” said our host, biology professor Jan Vlaminck. “They contributed to the spread of the panic. They affirmed that the Martian shells were continuing to fall every day, and exasperated criticism of the government—Soviet now—which was accused of hiding the fact. It was an unpopularity in which we scientists shared. Since yesterday, I dare not show myself in the city. We’ve been accused of complicity with the Martians, by virtue of not having advertised the arrival of the projectiles this time. We’re accused of not having been able to prevent their fall or ameliorate their ravages. We’re accused of having cut off the electricity.”

  “These idiots,” continued Monsieur van Himmeln, director of the Observatory at Uccle, “have forgotten—if they ever knew—that there are such things as falling stars. Yesterday evening, there was a riot in Schaerbeek because people mistook the luminous track of a meteorite for the arrival of a torpedo. Two or three of them even committed suicide on the spot, for fear of Martians! That is the consequence of a crass ignorance of astronomy, about whose dangers I advised the public authorities—when there were public authorities!”

  I had hoped to communicate with Saintes from Brussels, but the TSF was still not working and it would be days, in the present disorder, before local dynamos were rigged up and ready to substitute for the current of the Equatorial Alternators.

  It was on my own authority that I decided not to visit Holland, for Monsieur Vlaminck assured me that I had no hope of finding any recruits there for the Conservatory of Montpellier. The choice of a French city as the site of the institute would be no more acceptable in Leyden than in Brussels, and would excit
e the same repugnance. “I’m astonished,” he added, “that our savant colleague Monsieur Wronsky did not think of Brussels! Brussels is the only capital in Europe worthy of the name that is still standing; it is entirely appropriate to shelter the hearth of human thought and hope for a future recovery!”

  Only one university member, Doctor de Witte, gave me his support and promised to make his way to Saintes-Maries, by a means which presently remained hazardous, all regular transport services by rail and air having ceased. Doctor de Witte was, however resolved to make the journey on foot if necessary. Despite the mild joy his enthusiasm caused me, I was unable thereafter to dissimulate the hopelessness of my mission, and the full extent of the moral collapse. The Sign of the Beast had not even spared the elite. The savants had participated in the narrow nationalism that was compartmentalizing the Earth; they had, in sum, refused to leave their countries, their “familiar surroundings,” in order to constitute the sacred Phalanx of civilized Redemption. They refused to understand that their ideal union, formerly ensured by the facility of communication, would become impossible, and that, in isolation, they risked succumbing to the contagion.

  It was in Brussels that I first heard mention of the “Eternal-Nightists” whose baneful doctrine—if one might call it that—was destined to achieve worldwide extension, and gradually to draw into its hallucinated intoxication the sectarians of every religion. My guide could not give me any precise information about them, though. He included them, under the general label of “anarchists,” within a sort of vague “fifth estate” formed by all the appetites and animal rages, whose irresistible tide was engulfing the communist “fourth estate” in its turn.

  On leaving Brussels after a sojourn of 20 hours, we would have been easily able to visit the ruins of Antwerp and reach Oxford in the same day, but the spectacle of London attracted us more, and we headed straight across the North Sea. On the outskirts of Ghent, the traces of the tide of satanite that had destroyed “the glory of the Scheldt” were visible in the sterilized landscape, the dead trees and burned-out farms of the coastal region, contrasting with the green Flemish countryside. We were flying high and fast, and the only indications of social disorganization that struck us were the abandoned railways and canals, where the barges were randomly grouped in confused masses. Bruges had been burned out, and the Casino at Ostend was still on fire; its smoke served us as a reference-point when we flew out over the waves, struggling against a rather violent north wind, which drew thick clouds across our course, enveloping us before we reached the English coast.

  I headed for the Thames Estuary, so that I could follow the river’s course without any risk of getting lost. Moving slowly at a low altitude—for the sirens of helicopters, invisible in the fog, came close on several occasions—we flew along the broad river, once animated by intense traffic but now deserted save for a few electric launches and a white ferry-boat broken down in the middle of the estuary. Boats of every shape and size were laid up along the interminable quays, and in the basins fringed with warehouses, which bordered both banks all the way to the Pool of London. Beyond Gravesend, they had all been within the reach of the fires and the red gas.

  Upstream of Woolwich, the effects of the torpedoes became more and more complete. Blurred by the fog, fragments of charred wall loomed over the debris of riverboats; empty shells like pontoon bridges filled the burned-out docks, whose quays had collapsed. I tried in vain to make out the location of Greenwich. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing still standing. The once-majestic Tower Bridge had blocked the river with an inextricable mass of rubble and twisted metal. London’s other bridges had all suffered the same fate, their heaped-up debris making barrages from which the current tumbled in cascades between banks whose ruins extended beyond the horizon.

  Everything, from the docks and residential districts of the East End to the fine buildings along the Embankment, had been devoured by the egalitarian satanite. Beyond Westminster Bridge, the tower of the Houses of Parliament remained intact, by virtue of one of those freaks of chance that the vulgar qualify as miracles, as if it were turning a monstrous eye upon the nightmarish devastation…and upon a gathering of human beings more sinister still.

  In a vast square, around what seemed at first to be a fire, a procession of thousand ragged individuals, men and women, was moving in a circle. The memory of the fusillade in Avignon prevented me from descending low enough to read the inscriptions on their banners or make out the words of the hymn they were singing, but I could see that the pseudo-fire was only a sort of brazier. Each in his or her turn, as they passed by, threw upon it a handful of some substance that produced a thick red smoke, whose eddies gradually spread an opaque pall above the square. The sharp tones of three harmoniums, like those previously used by the Salvation Army, accompanied the joyous hymn voiced by all the demented wretches.

  The incantation of that funereal music and the pillar of purple smoke rising into the sky like a monstrous prayer—rites of some ignominious mystery celebrated in the midst of that necropolis, displaying the abominable obsession of its ruins for mile after mile—brought our horror to its peak. It became so poignant that I did not wait for Raymonde’s plea, and, blessing the clouds that my unhealthy curiosity had initially cursed, we gained altitude. Their pitiful shroud closed again over the corpse of the murdered city.

  We descended again in the vicinity of Windsor. The intact castle dominated the pleasant town and the woods decked out in their autumnal shades. A quarter of an hour later, we were in Oxford, at the airport of the ancient University, where I was surprised to see the British Union Jack flying, as in days gone by. The mere sight of that flag could have told me the response that Wronsky’s propositions would receive.

  Lord Higgins welcomed us with perfect politeness, but refused categorically to allow me to complete my mission with respect to his colleagues. While he lived, he declared, not a single member of the University would leave Oxford to establish himself in a continental city. A global Institute? That was all very well—but what point would there be in looking for a new seat? That seat was entirely ready; it already existed, populated by an elite which, if they so desired, the savants of merit living abroad were welcome to join. Oxford would willingly open its doors to them. Outside of that rational solution, however, no project could be viable or worthy of consideration. No Englishman would lend his hand to it. The University of Cambridge,18 although it was Oxford’s rival, would undoubtedly give me an identical refusal. In short, I could dispense with further travels and return as quickly as possible to France.

  To tell the truth, Lord Higgins did not express himself in such brutal terms, but his discourse tended to that conclusion, without the slightest ambiguity. I would have persisted nevertheless and continued to Edinburgh, where at least two recruits awaited us, their support having been guaranteed in advance, had it not been for the news that reached us in the evening.

  Lord Higgins did us the extreme kindness of putting us up “until tomorrow morning, when I believe you’ll have good weather for traveling.”

  After dinner—I admit that we took considerable sensual pleasure in consuming two slices of an admirable and most unexpected joint of roast beef, bloody and juicy—we all went into the drawing-room, here our host regaled us with a reading from the Bible: a chapter from the Apocalypse, as I recall, quite appropriate to the situation. Then the two Lady Higginses, mother and daughter, retired while we men stayed to drink “a glass of wine” while chatting.

  The advertised glass of wine was succeeded by whiskies and cognacs. While our host was in the middle of a dogged apology for the Anglo-Saxon race, and therefore oblivious, I was able continually to exchange my empty glass for Raymonde’s full one, my poor love being unable to cope with these libations. A liveried servant then came in, bearing a silver tray. “The TSF correspondence, my lord,” he said. “The central station in France resumed transmission half an hour ago.”

  One of the radio messages was addressed to:
“Léon and Raymond Rudeaux, in the course of a Directorial mission to Brussels, Leyden or Oxford.”

  “Oh, what luck, my darling!” cried my pilot, forgetting “his” role in the heat of emotion “They’ve got a dynamo going again!”

  Lord Higgins started and looked at us oddly. “Yes, gentlemen, the station at Saintes-Maries has been able to re-establish one dynamo—but ours isn’t turning as yet, so our antennae can receive but can’t transmit…”

  I was no longer listening. My anxious gaze was following Raymonde’s finger as it ran beneath the text signed by Wronsky: Anarchist riots throughout Provence. Helicopter squadron dispatched to relieve Kropatchek has not returned. Are blockaded, with insufficient forces, by nihilist bands. Send help if possible. Hope mission successful. Good wishes from everyone.

  “My God! How terrible!” cried Raymonde—and her tears ate into the virile make-up on her upper lips. We must send them help. My lord, I implore you, in the name of science and humanity, don’t refuse…”

  “Impossible, Madame,” replied our host, bowing. “I regret it, but we only have a few policemen in Oxford. They’re indispensable to the safety of our colony. All our good wishes go with you—but that’s the most I can do.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” I said bitterly, supporting my poor companion, who was about to faint. “Your kindness is overwhelming. We’ll leave alone, then, at dawn tomorrow, to rejoin our friends and fight alongside them, to the death, for the sacred cause of Civilization!”

  VII. The Breakdown at Dury

  We were flying at top speed above grey rain-clouds, which hid the ground. I had not even had time to fill up with fuel, and Lord Higgins did not offer me any as he bid us farewell with a glacial attitude. It would, therefore, be necessary for us to land in the course of the day, for our half-empty tanks would scarcely take us any further than Clermont-Ferrand. In order to be ready for any Soviet eventuality, Raymonde had become my pilot Raymond again. Her eyes gleaming with urgency and anxiety, she looked back and forth between the compass, the anemometer and the infinite sea of cloud.