“Give them to us, quickly,” Raymonde cried, feverishly. “Are they saved?”
Without saying a word, the functionary took two forms from his desk drawer and held them out to us. We pored over them tremulously.
Directoire Saintes-Maries, October 11, 9:17 a.m.
Besieged in TSF station by Anarchist forces on ground and in air. Helicopter hangar destroyed in explosion. Leduc’s aid arrived too late; could not get through to us. Fire has reached dynamo hall and control room where we have taken refuge. Bomb. Adi…
“We did not receive the end of the message,” murmured the manager, looking away. “The transmission was abruptly cut short. Look at the other one.”
Raymonde was devastated, sobbing on my shoulder. I read through my tears:
La Crau, October 11, 8:02 p.m.
Our blasters useless against Anarchist machine-gunners. Saintes-Maries station destroyed this morning. Gideon Botram, Ladislas Wronsky, Gabrielle Leduc and all personnel died for civilization. Crau airborne squadron returned decimated. Awaiting news of Léon and Raymond Rudeaux.
Sylvain Leduc.
The excellent Amiénois abstained from offering us the banal consolations of awkward pity. He helped us to contain our grief by asking for a few details of our late friends and our mission, then about ourselves. These confidences softened our sentimental regrets slightly; simultaneously and conversely, however, our comprehension of the consequences that this misfortune would have for us only became sharper. Without a home, having no role to play any longer, without any goal in the precarious existence that had been gifted to us, undeservedly, by our absence, it seemed to us that all external support had been suddenly removed, and that we were sliding into a sort of moral abyss, inextricably and desperately bound together by our love, but powerless to resist the blow.
When I had finished telling my story—and I gained confidence to the extent of revealing my companion’s disguise—our interlocutor began to speak.
“Monsieur et Madame…or, rather, gentlemen, for security is so problematic in our sad epoch that I advise you to persevere in that prudent measure…your situation is such that nothing any longer compels you to leave Amiens. I am sure that you will agree with me, once you have seen the exceptionally favorable state of affairs that pertains here. Even if the functions that I continue to exercise—oh, by habit and by inclination, for nothing remains of the PTT22 but the name, save for a few radio stations—even, as I say, if my job did not keep me here, I would spend the few remaining days of my life in Amiens. The vicissitudes of the day have deprived me of my wife and my four children, and I live in a house that is much too large for me alone, which I would be happy to share with guests as distinguished as you. Since you make use of the Jovian nutriment, you will fit in with my regime, and if you have tastes that are in any measure artistic, you will not find society and distraction lacking.”
I thanked the kind functionary warmly, and, after having consulted Raymonde for form’s sake, I accepted his generous hospitality. Then I asked him for an explanation of his last remark.
“Chance, gentlemen, fortunately for us, is a most singular thing. My story will help you to understand that our city is an anomaly of the first order. To cut a long story short, the Jovian nutriment preserved us from the communist revolution. I have no doubt that if that experiment, which demonstrated the perfect innocuousness and nutritive virtue of the product, had taken place sooner, while communications were easy and widespread, the popular prejudice that ‘the nutriment causes the plague’ would have been easily vanquished and that its general employment would at least have attenuated the crisis that has wrecked civilization. It’s too late now, alas! Amiens must be a special case…
“You are familiar with the tyranny of ‘fashion’ and you remember its power before, and even during, the ‘Season of the Torpedoes.’ Well, by virtue of one of those sudden vogues which once made it practically obligatory for the entire artistic population of Paris to visit some place in Brittany, Provence or the Basque country, Amiens became the rendezvous of all the capital’s painters, sculptors, musicians, writers and so on—or, rather, those who escaped the disaster, who were numerous in the quarters least affected, Montmartre and Montparnasse.
“A simple freak of chance was the origin of this movement; during the rescue process, a dozen airbuses loaded with escapees of this sort found it opportune to set them down in Amiens. They became infatuated with the cathedral and declared our city ‘the only one possible,’ telling all their dispersed colleagues—communications still existed at that time, remember—who hastened to join them.
“You were at Saint-Valery, you say, on the morning when the first torpedo fell? Two days later, you would have found numerous ‘artistic refugees’ there, for Saint-Valery shared the fashionability of Amiens during the summer. Everyone gathered hereabouts at the beginning of September, and, because the normal population had diminished by three-quarters during the Great Exodus and in consequence of the ‘Martian bronchitis,’ the artists easily found lodgings.
“As for nourishment, Monsieur Leduc could tell you that ever since the industrial manufacture of the Jovian nutriment first began, he has dispatched considerable stocks of it to Amiens in response to its inhabitants’ demands. It is a unique case, I believe, but all those who have artistic inclinations and tastes are enormously appreciative of the particular spiritual stimulation provided by that form of nourishment, with involves no digestive effort or waste. Others followed suit, and everyone here has lived exclusively on that admirable product for some considerable time.
“Thanks to that circumstance, there was no soviet in Amiens. I should add, though, that the most dangerous elements of the population set off for Paris, with the aim of pillaging the ruins, and that few returned. Besides, from the very beginning, a few hearty fellows among the artists and sculptors constituted a ‘Phalanx des 4-z’arts’ 23 and the idea occurred to them of adopting the old firearms from the museum as their munitions. They did not have any trouble putting down attempts at popular insurrection, in view of the limited range of radium blasters.”
“I saw that in Avignon,” I put in.
“The idea has run its course,” Monsieur Zambeaux continued. “It’s a fatal regression, progress in reverse. I have no doubt that we shall see the return of bows and arrows, and then stone axes. In sum, we are living here under the dictatorship of Art, as the Earth was formerly under the dictatorship of Science. Our domain is more restricted, though, for—except for a little colony at Saint-Valery—it reaches its limit in the suburbs. The peasants are mistrustful and remain distant, quite peaceful but refusing all commerce with us. The Soviet towns are hostile to us, and since the dawn of anarchy bands of Eternal-Nightists have been roaming around the surrounding country.”
“I think I saw some of them in London—but I don’t know what they are.”
“The Eternal-Nightists were born of an enormous flood of propaganda that reached us from America when the Transatlantic Tube was temporarily restored to use. You might well have read their tracts, without attaching any more importance to them than to the manifestoes of 20 other new sects—but this one succeeded. Its hour had come, and it undertook a formidable development, which was uninterrupted by the failure of communications, because its members were wanderers. There has been a snowball effect since the penetrative shells and the revelation of the volcanoes. In brief, since you don’t know, Eternal-Nightism is a cause—or, rather, a kind of mysticism—which proposes to save humankind by establishing a veil of opaque smoke all around the Earth, intended to impede the Martian shots.
“The ‘zones of fine weather’ in which the first telemechanically-directed torpedoes had to fall provided the principle from which the promoters of this ostrich-like scheme departed. And the general obscuring of thought, the decline of the intellectual level, reached such a point that the penetrative shells, designed by the Martians to strike without deviation, did not cause them to abandon their idea. On the contrary, th
e example of volcanic plumes—which they could see in actuality or in the cinema—was an encouragement to them.
“The American tracts included a very simple formula for a compound that produces prodigious volumes of purple smoke, opaque and persistent, of which the adepts of the new cult make considerable use. You must have noticed fires of this sort in the course of your expedition. In addition to that, though, they set light to anything prone to produce smoke as it burns: wood-piles, haystacks, tanks of petrol or kerosene, even houses—for Eternal-Nightism is nothing but a destructive version of nihilism; it’s rumored that its secret rites include human sacrifice and cannibalism.
“Thus far, we’ve been sheltered from their attacks, but their bands are growing larger every day. Winter is approaching, and they’ll need to find new food supplies—for the Nutriment inspires them with extreme horror. After the pillage of the countryside, it will be the turn of the cities. Will our ‘Phalanx des 4-z’arts’ be able to hold them off? I doubt it; the air force at Le Crotoy seems to be leaning towards their doctrine, and only ten helicopters remain in Amiens since the exodus from the cities. Your friend Leduc might be the defender our ‘artistic station’ requires.”
That seemed obvious to us, and we composed a long radiogram to Sylvain in which an explanation of the situation of Amiens was appended to news concerning us and our condolences on the sad loss of Gaby. An aerodrome is not easy to move, however; the white birds of La Crau were acclimatized to the skies of Provence, and it required repeated messages to persuade Sylvain that, following the obliteration of Saintes-Maries, the asylum of Science, our duty was to defend Amiens, the asylum of Art.
Introduced by Monsieur Zambeaux into a literary salon in the Rue Delambre, our scientific affiliations initially obtained us a reserved, almost suspicious, welcome, but the story of our adventures and Raymonde-Ramond’s “original” costume soon made us a successful curiosity in the Amiens-wide artistic community, which ceased to consider us as outsiders and eventually admitted us.
How friendly and sympathetic that little society seemed to us, despite its petty faults and imperfections, and the inevitable friction between its members, during the long months that we were fortunate enough to live within it! We were, to be sure, surrounded by egotism, but—in sharp contrast to what had happened in other human aggregations— it had not submitted to the crazed contagion of atavistic instincts. Reduced by their “artistic temperament” to the role of slaves to the instinct of Beauty, these people had channeled the manifestations of atavism into works of art, resulting in nothing other than a crop of masterpieces. Beneath the thumbs of sculptors and the brushes of painters, clay was modeled and colors were juxtaposed in radiant forms. Printing-presses manned by the authors themselves ground out immortal poems; sublimely-imagined plays awoke echoes of classical drama in theatres habituated to the dismal drone of “repertory;” and the crowds filling the vast naves of the cathedral were ecstatically infused, to the accompaniment of mighty organs, with the souls of composers of genius.
We lived in an atmosphere of sublimely unreal art, in the divine world of Beauty, which seemed to me then to be the most noble goal of human activity, the supreme justification of the existence of humankind upon the Earth, even higher than the pursuit of Virtue or that of Truth. We forgot the calamities that had dissolved upon the globe and had delivered the remaining millions of our contemporaries to the madness of despair.
Leaning against the balustrade of the flat roof on one of the towers of the cathedral, with 100 other fervent admirers of sunsets, we learned to see nothing but a supplementary magnificence in the fantastic coloration that the Sun’s fires took on, thanks to the increasingly dense dust and vapor spread into the atmosphere by the distant eruption of the fire-vomiting mouths expelling the flaming entrails of the globe. The columns of purple and black smoke rising here and there from the countryside, like the pillars awaiting the future dome of the Eternal Night, brought joy to painters and provoked admiration among mere amateurs of beauty.
Beauty! She, uniquely, in all her forms, preoccupied the population of Amiens. It would require a whole book to enumerate the manifestations that she revealed in that hothouse of Art! Even costume, liberated from vulgar prejudices, participated in everyone’s fantasy. In the streets, silken doublets, brocade mantles, pointed shoes, Henri IV ruffs, Greek chlamyses, Egyptian calasiris, delighted our aesthetic sensibilities at every step. In the well-heated drawing-rooms, Olympian forms had no fear of exposing themselves without veils to gazes purified by the exclusive and permanent worship of beautiful forms.
The former Musée de Picardie, with its frescoes by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and its renowned treasures, was no more than a minor appendage to the new galleries that monopolized, one by one, the Prefecture, the Palais de Justice and the Gare du Nord, similarly adapted to lodge masterpieces of the past acquired in sovietized towns in exchange for foodstuffs drawn from Amiénois storehouses, rendered redundant by our stocks of the Nutriment.
On two occasions, my beloved pilot and I set off in our helicopter, in convoy with an airbus on an expedition of this sort. The first, to Lille—which brought us, among others, the delightful “wax head” attributed to Raphael—gave me the opportunity to see the unfortunate city again. The Soviets were succumbing to the daily incursions of Eternal-Nightists, who had already reduced Roubaix, Croix-Wasquehal and Tourcoing to ashes, sparing only the factory chimneys, which they employed to pour torrents of purple smoke—whose pall covered the entire region—into the atmosphere. In Lille itself, the mid-day Sun had the appearance of a sinister carmine Moon. Doctor Goulliard, whom I saw again on that occasion, attributed the recrudescence of frenzies of murder and arson to the “dynamogenic” influence of that light.
It was soon necessary to give up that sort of expedition, for the cities were falling, one after the other, into the grip of anarchy, and we were almost captured in the course of our journey to Rouen, which we believed to be still sovietized.
It goes without saying that, at the outset of our sojourn in Amiens, I had voluntarily enrolled, along with “Raymond” in the “Phalanx des 4-z’arts.” Once a fortnight we undertook tours of sentry-duty—or, rather, our helicopter did—designed to protect the city against a surprise attack by the increasingly bold and threatening Eternal-Nightists. By day, their columns of smoke wove their fateful veil indefatigably, while it was the bright red fires of their vile “altars” that we observed on the fine nights of that unexpectedly mild winter…mild to the point that the Venetian festivals they organized in the water-meadows often offered us the spectacle of their moving fires reflected in the placid waters, while snatches of song and languorous music drifted up to us—making a poignant contrast with the sullen hymns of the hordes and their monstrous rites dedicated to darkness.
It was the beginning of spring when Sylvain Leduc finally yielded to our solicitations and brought the entire airfleet of La Crau to the North. Half of it was accommodated at Hotoie, the other half at Le Crotoy, where it assumed an authority over a staff whose fidelity was more than dubious—which reassured our colony at Saint-Valery and encouraged a large number of Amiénois to search out the coolness of the bay of the Somme at the end of June.
I doubt, though, that Leduc would have chosen our artistic “outpost” if we had known sooner of the existence of another civilized outpost—this one scientific—which was revealed to us by TSF soon after his arrival.
Our apparatus had limited range, as no doubt did the other stations disseminated over the surface of the globe, equipped with whatever dynamos they happened to have following the loss of the Equatorial Alternators. Our unskilled electricians had been unable to reconstruct the detectors specifically developed for interplanetary communications, and messages from Jupiter no longer reached us. Signals too weak to be deciphered informed us of the existence of enigmatic stations outside Europe.
From time to time, a Soviet town, having been silent for a long interval, would abruptly announce an attack by
errant hordes, a desperate battle, and issue an appeal for help: SOS, SOS, emitted spasmodically…and we would hear no more news of that town.
One the other hand, Mont Blanc—whose astronomers we had believed to be dead and buried—emerged, as it were, out of the blue one morning, to begin transmitting its daily message once again. An entire scientific colony was living up there at present, occupying part of the vast system of bunkers hollowed out in the flanks of the Giant of the Alps following the first announcement of the Asian invasion, and subsequently used as storehouses by the observatory. Thirty scientists had taken refuge there, from Switzerland, Alsace and northern Italy, with a few men of good will, and they were all working actively for the amelioration of their sojourn. They said that they were still capable of tripling the number of their inhabitants.
We were so comfortable in the delightful snare of our artistic Capua that the news only generated a feeble and quasi-theoretical emotional response in Amiens—but Leduc hastened to mount an expedition to Mont Blanc and returned full of enthusiasm. I believe that only the difficulty of accommodating his air fleet at the observatory, or at Chamonix, prevented him from leaving us.
The pure atmosphere that surrounded our brothers in civilization was, in his opinion, a particularly decisive argument. At that height, the most tenuous dust projected by the volcanoes occasionally formed a sort of haze veiling the Sun, but, even so, it was still the Sun, rather than the kind of brick-colored Moon that extended an increasingly dismal and sinister light over us. There was blue sky, instead of the ceiling of reddish smoke that had long been spread out over our heads, and which obliged us to live in the stifling atmosphere of a greenhouse whose windows were smeared with ox-blood.
The Martian Epic Page 19