The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  X. The Bunkers of Mont Blanc

  The Mont Blanc colony, where we were resident until the end, comprised two quite distinct parts linked by the funicular railway that had been established, in civilized times, for the benefit of tourists unused to tiring climbs. At Chamonix, the principal aerodrome, the plant manufacting of the Nutriment, the workshops for construction and repair, and the turbines furnishing electrical energy for heating, lighting and so on, accommodated a population of 300 mechanics and artisans, whose unusual intelligence had preserved them from the “animalizing” contagion and who had offered their services spontaneously to the scientific “colonists” from the very beginning. Higher up, at 4800 meters, the buildings of the observatory were occupied by about 30 astronomers and an equal number of university men, whom Leduc had assembled as a complement of the last representatives of civilization. As for us, we were lodged in the vast bunkers hollowed out in the rock, beneath the thick carapace of the eternal snows, whose depths contained stories of every sort—enough for us to sustain a two-year siege.

  The cannon, machine-guns and other weapons in that arsenal of yesteryear—which had escaped the destruction ordered by the Directorate—set up in batteries at strategic points, would permit us to resist the combined barbarian hordes of Europe, in the highly improbable event of their venturing to such an altitude, above the domain of Eternal Night that they held sacrosanct.

  An impregnable fortress of civilization, our summit stood up amid the blue sky. Even Chamonix, at 1034 meters, was free of the reddish veil that we perceived, far below, as a sinister sea of purple clouds, beneath with his hideous humankind of the hordes pursued its regression towards the ancestral Beast. Around us, the grandiose landscape of mountains draped in inviolable snows extended infinitely, and we spent hours, warmly wrapped in furs, walking along the terrace of the observatory. Never tiring of blue sky and sunlight, after our confinement beneath the bloody shroud, whose retrospective horror made us exclaim indignantly against the stupidity of having endured it for so long, we caressed the vault of the firmament, restored to the original purity of the beautiful profound indigo that dresses the sky at high altitudes, with ecstatic gazes. Gratefully, we followed the course of the regal star that bathed us with its dazzling radiation. We savored the play of the light on the grandiose panorama of the Alps, which offered its snow-capped peaks, angular glaciers, ravines and torrents to our binoculars—and sometimes the minuscule silhouette of a chamois, immobile beneath the immense enchantment of the setting Sun.

  In the meantime, the night offered us the inexhaustible marvels of its constellations and its planets, which the persistent covering of red clouds had hidden from us for six months. We had never seen them in an atmosphere so clear, by means of instruments so perfect, with s competent a guide—for the Director of the Observatory himself, the amiable Abbé Romeux, observing our astronomical zeal, was kind enough to authorize us to use the large equatorial, and we gradually became used to spending entire evenings beneath the cupola.

  These sublime contemplations gave Raymonde and me the impression of floating above life, and the year of our sojourn at Mont Blanc was a period of elevation—I might even say spiritual serenity—in which our love, renewed by the anguish of that separation which had proved not to be final, burned more ardently and more purely than ever.

  We did not go so far, however, as to abstract ourselves from the communal life that made our station into a family of sorts. The greater number of Mont Blanc’s guests gathered every evening in the largest of the bunkers, transformed into a library-cum-drawing-room. The scientists and the artists had both learned to forget the slight mutual distrust that had once separated them, and they no longer considered one another as anything but equal representatives of Civilization. In the peaceful atmosphere of that electrically lighted and heated hall, the noise of general or particular conversations was reminiscent of that of a club of olden times.

  In addition to the subject of the material situation of the world—Leduc, an indefatigable explorer, brought us daily accounts of what he saw beneath the dome of the purple Night—there was no lack of news for our commentators. Materially isolated, the TSF station, well equipped this time, put us in communication with other final representatives of civilization, who were scattered around the circumference of the globe in seven other colonies.

  Two of these were associated with the sister observatories of Mont Blanc, lodged on the summits of Gaurisankar and Mount Wilson. The former, which remained purely astronomical, was in the town of Simla, the former summer residence of English officials in India. It brought together on the slopes of the Himalayas the largest number of men resolved to defend the conquests of intelligence again the empire of Darkness. Mount Wilson was more closely analogous to Mont Blanc in the composition of its personnel, though perhaps more exclusively scientific. It was the only center of civilization that remained in the entire extent of the two Americas, at least so far as we knew—for it was possible that a colony worthy of the name, although deprived of TSF, had gathered together the survivors of a superior humankind in South America.

  This hypothetical colony had, however, escaped the researches of the Japanese aviators of the Nagasaki station, whose long-range explorations made our friend Sylvain pale with envy. On the other hand, they had discovered an unexpected terrestrial paradise flourishing in Tahiti, Samoa and several Pacific atolls, whose natives, liberated from the vile domination of the Whites (who had been killing one another since the beginning of the crisis) had recovered their natural folkways and their happy and innocent barbarity.

  At the southern tip of Africa, Cape Town had passed into the hands of Boers, who were taking revenge for the Transvaal and valiantly defending an agricultural colony a few dozen kilometers square against the incursions of the Zulus—but towards mid-January, they ceased sending us their news.

  Cairo held out until the end: an island of Western civilization grafted on to Arab fatalism, which astonished us by its vitality.

  Finally, much closer to us, Edinburgh, where the arrogant dons of Oxford had been very happy to find a refuge—under the British flag, it is true—was the least interesting; their messages only concerned theological disputes with no connection to actual circumstances.

  Thus, so to speak, the selection had been made. The human species had divided into two distinct sub-species: on the one hand, the regressive elements, the Hordes delivered to atavistic instincts and dying in millions every day; on the other, the 12,000 or 15,000 civilized individuals of the “stations.” But what did our small numbers matter? It was the sacred fire of intelligence of which we were the guardians, and the slightest preservable spark might suffice to reanimate the flame that we had seen burning so brightly when Civilization was incarnate in three billion representatives. Had not all the innumerable oaks of the future forest first been contained in a single acorn? It is sufficient that a seed finds fertile ground; it was sufficient for us that the future would open up again.

  And it seemed that it did open up again.

  First of all, the Eternal Night dissipated, in the course of the winter in which I devoted my leisure time to drafting the greater part of these memoirs.

  It seemed certain that the combined efforts of the Eternal-Nightists would have been powerless to create the funereal shroud if the volcanoes opened or reanimated by the penetrative shells had not lent them their effective support. Indeed, the great plutonian manifestations, which were attenuated towards the end of spring, died down almost completely in the course of the summer—and the veil of purple clouds dissipated in the winter. It is true that the ranks of the Hordes were thinned out, mown down by the redoubled force of the epidemics that found these degenerate and verminous creatures an admirably fertile terrain. As they ran short of combustible material, the harvest of smoke failed, and their rites were reduced, among the survivors, to mere symbolic gestures.

  All that winter, from November to March, snowstorms kept us confined to the warm bunkers—it is
possible that, without that prolonged confinement, I would not have written these pages—and deluges of rain, at lower altitudes, succeeded in sweeping he atmosphere clean. The distant landscapes reappeared, illuminated by the Sun to the depths of the valleys, and the earth, liberated from its sterilizing shroud, covered itself once again with green vegetation. There was no shortage of habitually-cultivated regions to recover their fecundity. Leduc was already talking about reconquering agricultural land, and we discussed the opportunity thus presented for the war of extermination that he recommended: a general massacre of the remaining hordes, which some of us simply wanted to herd into “reservations” analogous to those in which the Americans had accommodated their Redskins. We imagined the city of the future hopefully.

  Interplanetary communications had been re-established, after many attempts, at the beginning of March, and the cosmograms from Jupiter inspired us with a new confidence in the future. “Earth shall live,” our wise protectors affirmed; we need no longer fear attack from Mars. No torpedo, no penetrative shell would come to ravage our globe. The punishment of the criminal planet would be an accomplished fact within a few months, at the outset of the new opposition. Since making its solemn promise to their brothers in space, the Jovians had devoted all the resources of their immense planet, all the genius of their intellectuals and al the efforts of their population—which was numbered in hundreds of billions—aided by a gigantic technology, to preparing the means of carrying out the sentence handed down by the high court of the Solar System. The general mobilization of Jovian society against Mars was an accomplished fact, and when the time came…

  The masters of Jupiter did not, in fact, reveal the exact means to be employed—in order, they said, to avoid the abuses that might be made of them by the humankind of our world, which was certainly worthy of their pity, but was still so far from their perfection and too little advanced to share in the redoubtable secret of “Solar Accumulators.” Our large equatorial at Mont Blanc, however, permitted us to distinguish modifications of the surface of the planet of wisdom that revealed prodigious building-works, which the guilty Martians, thanks to their televisors, had to be following tremulously. The bands of cloud that we had always seen, dense and continuous, reigning over almost all of the Jovian disk, now appeared to have retreated to the higher latitudes, and to be divided along the equator by a black zone, in which our most advanced optical instruments clearly discerned a large number of “cells” designed to capture solar radiation in the same way that a soot-blacked box absorbs them—with the difference that the Jovian “accumulators” had been storing billions and trillions of calories of radiant energy for months, which the would when the time came, re-emit them all at once, for the tragic execution…

  Nevertheless, no one quite understood the role played by a slender line of light, formed from the combination multiple points extended over the entire circumference of Jupiter, in the exact center of the black zone of Solar Accumulators traced around the equator. Even Abbé Romeux was perplexed and shook his head with a pitying smile when Raymonde hazarded the hypothesis that it might be a railway line extending all the way around the planet’s girth.

  As the date fixed by the high court for the accomplishment of their irrevocable sentence and the conclusive liberation of Earth drew nearer, we became increasingly impatient to see the denouement of he drama of which we were passive audience, and which was taking place millions of kilometers away, as inaccessible to our intervention as ancient Fate.

  “The planet Mars, which has sinned by fire against sidereal Fraternity will be punished by the fire of immanent Justice, of which Jupiter has instituted itself as the champion. This fire, borrowed from the radiance of Our Father the Sun, will be unleashed upon the aforesaid planet Mars on June 22, by the terrestrial calendar, and the Execution will commence at midnight, Mont Blanc time.”

  Such was the wording of the avenging cosmogram that we discussed every evening, as the opposition approached, while tracking the two planets as they drew inexorably closer to one another, following the inevitable laws of universal gravitation. By a disturbling coincidence, however, the Earth was also moving forward in its orbit, in such a manner that the criminal planet would not only come into opposition with its judge and executioner but with its victim, the Earth—so that, on June 22, the three planets would be very nearly in a straight line extended from the Sun, and that, at the moment when the Jovian Accumulators could finally take effective action against the vile Martians, thee latter would similarly arrived at their minimum distance from the Earth.

  To what desperate gesture might the certainty of punishment impel them?

  Part Three: The Martian Paradise

  I. Jupiter’s Thunderbolt

  Wrapped in furs, all the inhabitants of the upper station and those from Chamonix, brought by a special train, were walking around the terrace of the observatory, waiting for the fateful moment when we would witness the formidable and unprecedented spectacle of an interplanetary punishment, as the mysterious dispositions of whose true nature and effect we were still ignorant were activated. The ice-cold and clear night shone overhead and all around us, deploying the familiar splendors of the constellations. To the south, close to Antares in Scorpio, dazzling Jupiter and ruddy Mars were separated by a distance equal to twice the diameter of the full Moon, which was shining with a steady and placid light.

  The warm and sonorous voice of Abbé Romeux drew us from our anxious reveries: “Five minutes gentlemen!”

  Everyone took up his observation post.

  All the portable instruments at Mont Blanc had been distributed among the notable members to the colony. In addition, the observatory’s optician had constructed several hundred rudimentary telescopes by inserting photographic lenses into lead tubes, and everyone had been provided with one. Abbé Romeux’s benevolence towards Raymonde and me had, however, extended to making us part of the privileged circle using the eight rotatory ocular prisms connected to the large 220 telescope.

  My eye was glued to the cold copper circle. The Jovian globe suddenly appeared, against a round velvet-black background speckled with tiny stars, giving me that indefinable, and yet quite clear, impression which invariably “grabs” the experienced observer as well as the simple amateur: the impression of astronomical Space.

  That globe, isolated from all the rest, with the apparent size of a little pumpkin, was visibly floating in the void, escorted at an oblique angle by its four large satellites, like blanched cherries. Visibly—one might almost say palpably—the system was an enormous distance away, in a remote abyss, which further increased the imperceptible trepidation of the image caused by the electric motor responsible for keeping he telescope pointed at the celestial sphere in an invariable direction, from which the rotation of the Earth would otherwise displace it in a matter of seconds.

  Before that sojourn at Mont Blanc, photographs, maps, descriptions and figures concerning Jupiter, drawn from books, had spoken only to my intelligence, but here I had incorporated those abstract notions into my sensibility. When I put my eye to the eyepiece, my imagination was immediately engaged, perceiving the reality of distances and volumes directly.

  That globe I was seeing, less luminous than our Moon, was certainly a world. Fawn-colored in general, it was cut in two by the black zone, which was itself divined by the mysterious shining line traced along the equator. It was the giant of the Solar System, 11 times greater in diameter than the Earth, whose surface, 120 times larger, sheltered that population of noble and disinterested beings who had just spent two terrestrial years in the realization of the grandiose project inspired in their wise leaders by the vile conduct of the Martians.

  We felt the presence of those 300 billion Jovians, scattered beneath the clouds they had carefully withdrawn to the superior latitudes, or grouped in the equatorial zone, around the apparatus receiving the avenging energy, every workman at his post, the fingers of every engineer upon his controls, his eyes on the gauges, all religiousl
y awaiting the signal they would be sent in a few minutes time by the great leader of Jovian society. The latter was based on Ganymede, the third largest satellite, so modest in its dimensions by comparison with its planet but more voluminous nevertheless than Mercury and not much inferior to Mars.

  On Ganymede, the great leader was sitting in the midst of his Constituency of astronomers and sages, an impassive tribunal of judges, poised to erase a planet from the map of the Heavens, because its inhabitants had misused the gift of intelligence and contravened the law of sidereal Love and Fraternity!

  At that level of magnification, the telescope’s field of view could not contain Jupiter and Mars at the same time, and the condemned planet was still hidden from us, but we would soon steer our instrument towards it. Beneath the cupola where the privileged spectators waited, eyes glued to the ocular lenses, the twelve strokes of midnight fell one by one into a profound silence.

  Then, on the brilliant thread of the Jovian equator, a luminous point was born, intensified, became as dazzling as a solar fleck, and extruded a sort of white-hot needle sideways from the vast globe, which moved slowly along.27 It attained the side turned towards Mars, extended therefrom, and pursued its development into the night-black darkness…

  Through the open door, as well as the oblong bay in the cupola itself, we heard cries of surprise exclamations of admiration, and even jokes from every part of the terrace—but it was for the benefit of the privileged few at the large telescope that Abbé Romeux gave his commentary on the spectacle.

  “That luminous thread you see developing with such apparent timidity is, in fact, propagating towards Mars at the speed of light: 300,000 kilometers per second! But think of the distance separating the two planets, diminished for us by their immense remoteness and perspective, just as electric express-trains traveling at 200 kph appear to us, when seen on the horizon, to be toiling like snails—but don’t forget that the distance between Jupiter and Mars is actually more than three times that between Earth and the Sun. Three and a half times 150,000,000 kilometers is 525,000,000! I will, therefore, take 30 minutes for the tip of that luminous-calorific jet to reach the surface of Mars. A marvelous and unprecedented projection, to be sure, since it is due to the genius of the creatures inhabiting Jupiter, but comets, those enigmatic entities dispatched from the hands of God, have achieved almost as much. The tail of the comet of 1811 measured 175,000,000 kilometers; that of 1843 extended 300,000,000 kilometers; that of…”