The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  The worthy Abbé interrupted himself, though, and we heard him strike himself resoundingly on the head. “Madame Rudeaux!” he cried. “I offer you an honorable apology! You were right: that slender shining thread really is the track of a giant railway girdling the Jovian equator, Yes, it all becomes clear to me now…we do not know the exact nature of this dart of light and heat which is extending into space before our eyes, this fantastic pencil of fulminant energy which will strike the Martians, but I can see therein an application of the principle employed by Archimedes when he set fire to the triremes of Marcellus, which were besieging Syracuse, with the aid of ardent mirrors. Jupiter is using an analogous method to launch the solar energy stored in its Accumulators. But if this Apparatus X, the projector that we have just seen unmasked, were stationary on the planet’s soil, it would be drawn away by the planet’s rotation and would not be able to remain permanently aimed at Mars. But look, its aim remains fixed, while Jupiter had already been turning sensibly upon its axis for twenty minutes. There’s no doubt about it: Apparatus X, the fulminant projector, is mounted on a mobile carriage which is moving along the Jovian equator on those shining rails in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation, and with an exactly equal velocity.”

  A murmur of admiration went up, addressed to the clarity of Abbé Romeux’s explanation as well as to the genius of the Jovian astronomers for that masterpiece of grandiose simplicity: the egg of Columbus!

  But everyone soon feel silent, for the celestial spectacle required all our attention.

  The formidable dart of vibratory energy had continued its elongation. It had gone past all four of the Jovian satellites, and we imagined with awe the sight that the monstrous beam of their Justice must have presented to the astronomers of Ganymede as it extended over their heads, a few 1000 kilometers distant, towards the criminal planet. The latter had finally been accommodated in the field of our telescope, Jupiter having been eliminated therefrom, and it appeared, as large as a plum, facing the rigidly-extended thread of fire, whose dart was coming closer and closer, as if to perforate it.

  We recognized the geography of that familiar globe, drawn with the clarity of a miniature Persian rug: the white caps of polar snow, one—the southern—much larger than he other; the narrow and elongated seas, whose green color varied in darkness according t their depth; the rounded black stain of the Solis Lacus; and the fawn-colored continents, tinted to a greater or lesser extent with orange, striated with a network of canals that was scarcely visible, due to the dryness of the season. We thought about the Martians, who could see the inexorable Sword extending towards them.

  I imagined those millions of beings, powerfully intelligent but devoid of any moral scruple, cowardly and perfidious, akin to fallen angels, awaiting, with despair in their hearts, the unknown and terrible Visitation that would be their End-of-the-World. How they must be repenting, at this moment, their inexpiable crime! Or not, in fact! Those creatures were incapable of repentance; it must be the rage of their powerlessness that was torturing them, the crazed exasperation of perishing without vengeance, the regret of having to submit to that pitiless talion for nothing…solely for the pleasure of having broken the resistance of Earth; the regret of having delayed too long, of having used the last days of the previous opposition to send those vain penetrative shells to terrify a demoralized humankind, which was at their mercy, instead of profiting from the panic created by the torpedoes by gathering the fruits of their first bombardment and expediting their departure from their own world, crammed into interplanetary vehicles, the Martian colony that would have ensured the future of their race on the new planet!

  Now, they did not even have the consolation of telling themselves that other sons of Mars had landed on the Earth and would sooner or later establish their supremacy there. All the sons of Mars, without exception, were about to the slain by the Sword of judicial extermination!

  Jupiter’s Thunderbolt had finally completed its prodigious development; it reached the globe of Mars—but without producing the sudden and catastrophic effect that our imaginations had calculated, more or less complacently. We could not retain a murmur of anxiety, while the crowd on the terrace, less discreet, complained loudly of its disappointment, as if at a firework that had just fizzled out.

  This time, the Abbé used his loudhailer to reassure us. For the guests in the cupola, his voice resonated bizarrely, doubled up, as one might say: natural first, then amplified by the apparatus and echoing from a distance in the icy nocturnal air:

  “The point of impact of the fulminant Dart is hidden from us, my friends. Remember that Jupiter is situated well beyond Mars, almost behind it relative to us, and the rigid jet of its projector cannot bend so as to strike the face turned to us simply to be agreeable to us and give us a better view! Have a little patience. If I am not mistaken, the conflagration that must presently be devouring the continent known as Elysium, which may be its capital, will soon be revealed to us by the distant effects that must result from it in the Martian atmosphere, while we wait for the rotation of the planet to place its devastated face before our eyes—which we shall see tomorrow night, for in an hour, as you know it will have disappeared beyond our horizon.”

  Soon, in fact, a thin fringe of white cloud edged the disk of Mars, coming from the opposite face. It was no more, in appearance, than slowly-extending light cloud, but, in reality, it was the sign of the frightful conflagration caused by the Thunderbolt!

  In a flash of intuition, I imagined the Martian crowds assembled in the streets and the squares of the capital of Elysium, seeing the dazzling tip of the Jovian Projector growing at their zenith, into which their gazes were plunging, so to speak, like that of a condemned man into the muzzle of the musket that will shoot him. Here, though, the fatal shot had taken 30 minutes to reach them, and their dazzled pupils must be opening wider and wider upon the final nullity—an immeasurable, monstrous Sun invading their sky with phantasmagoric acceleration; a cataclysmic deluge of 1000 infernos falling at the same time on ten square kilometers; the volatilization of a city and its population in the fiery hurricane of the captive solar radiation, stored and projected in an annihilating beam.

  No refuge could withstand the Jovian Thunderbolt: the ceilings of caves and subterranean tunnels would melt into liquid lava under an elevation of temperature which the Abbé Romeux’s spectroscope measured at 3000 degrees Centigrade. The seas themselves could not have provided an adequate shelter, for they were reduced to whirlwinds of dense vapor, which mingled with the other products of the combustion.

  And Mars, turning slowly on its hypothetical axis like a chicken on a spit, successively offered all the points of its surface to the avenging Thunderbolt—which, for eight long days, swept all the meridians one after another, charring the soil, volatilizing the seas, all the way to the two poles, where the ice-caps melted, spreading out their whiteness in liquid cataracts, as in times of flood, filling the canals, which were attained and dried up in their turn. Eight days, during which a formidable warfare between water and fire, until the definitive victory of the latter, must have been pursued beneath an increasingly dense swathe of vapor, whose eddies and momentary gaps permitted us to glimpse the progress of the devastation—the accomplishment of the great work of Jupiter’s Justice.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. That first night, when the telescope only showed us the traces of the fire lit on the invisible face of Mars, reserved an event designed to disturb the joy of the conclusive deliverance that the cremation of the enemy planet signified for us.

  It was 3 a.m. Mars and Jupiter, linked by the incandescent thread of the Thunderbolt, had vanished over the horizon. Dawn was about to break. On the terrace, the majority of the occasional observers, equipped with instruments that were too weak and disappointed by the insignificance of a spectacle that they had anticipated very differently—Mars bursting into flames, I suppose, like a wad of cotton wool soaked in kerosene—had left the party. Those who remained we
re discussing without any enthusiasm the future that the final defeat of their enemies in the sky had secured for humankind.

  Beneath the cupola, around the big 220-centimeter telescope, we were just directing one final glance at the pitiless Dart digging into the heart of the red planet, our satisfied hatred and still-timid joy of deliverance mingled with a sort of pity. Raymonde had just expressed everyone’s private sentiment by murmuring “Poor Martians! Were they really all guilty?” when a disturbance began in the crowd outside, composed of confused exclamations of indignation, anger and discouragement.

  A single rough voice rose above the tumult momentarily, saying: “Filthy swine! It’ll be a good thing if they fry to the very last one!”

  There was a noise of hurried footsteps; the clamor drew nearer, and an electrician from the TSF appeared on the threshold, brandishing a paper breathlessly.

  “Monsieur l’Abbé!” he stammered. “Monsieur l’Abbé. They’ve… they’ve fired again!”

  II. The Survivors’ Shell

  “If the beast is dead, its venom is dead”—the proverb was contradicted by the facts. That lair of sidereal bandits, Mars, was crackling in the flames of a monstrous inferno; its last survivors were subjected to the torments of asphyxia while they awaited final extermination—and yet, the Jovian cosmogram informed us that a new projectile was on its way toward us. On the day, perhaps at the very hour, of the punishment, perhaps at the exact moment when the fulminant Battery had been unmasked on Jupiter and the destructive Fire had been launched towards them, the ungovernable Martians had “fired” one last time. And because, at the moment of opposition, the face of Mars turned towards the Earth had escaped the investigations of the Ganymedean televisors, the projectile had not been perceived by them and signaled to us until a few hours after its departure.

  The broadside of cries of hatred unleashed by our fellow citizens on the terrace betrayed such a veritable demonic fury that Abbé Romeux—the uncontested but untitled head of the “political establishment” of Mont Blanc—hesitated to transmit the news to the other civilized stations of the world, which were not equipped with interplanetary TSF. All of them had already manifested their impatience to be delivered from the Martian threat once and for all; at that time, three of them—Edinburgh, Cairo and Cape Town—had just witnessed the execution of the Jovian sentence. Mount Wilson was at the telescope. Nagasaki, Simla, Gaurisankar had been informed. Should we spoil their joy, or dash their hopes, by plunging them once again into anguish and discouragement, risking demoralizing the weakest, who were at the end of their resistance?

  However, the contrary thesis, supported by Leduc, quickly rallied the majority of the scientific votes and decided the Abbé: better to make the announcement before the idea of deliverance had sunk in; the disappointment would be less precipitate, and serious measures could be taken in all the centers of civilization to oppose the Martians’ final shot, which would conclude with their disembarkation.

  We did not have a single instant of doubt about that, and our brothers’ responses all expressed the same opinion: the projectile destined to reach terrestrial soil on July 6—in seven days time, at the moment of writing!—encloses at least some of those Martian colonists for whom the torpedoes and the penetrative shells had prepared the way. The hypothesis that they might have launched another dirigible torpedo was flagrantly absurd, since there were no longer any Martian engineers to transmit the directive waves. A penetrative shell or some other merely destructive device? Equally inadmissible. The ravages caused on the Earth by the bombardments of the opposition of 1978 had let nothing for the most ferocious and cowardly of skyborne enemies to desire. The way was open—they knew that—and their intention was certainly to profit from it this time. The Jovian Thunderbolt had surprised them in all-out preparation for a methodical invasion of the Earth; its operation had simply coincided with the first departure of Martian colonists. Without that opportune intervention, more projectiles would have followed, stuffed with invaders finally resolve to set foot on the coveted planet.

  Yes, this time we will have to deal with the Martians in person—but that idea ought to reassure us, if our anxiety is accessible to reason. This interplanetary vehicle is unique. According to the model of its predecessors loaded with satanite or penetrative explosives, it cannot contain more than a few dozen combatants at the most, with weapons and baggage. Even supposing that they are equipped with new and powerful means of destruction, any one of our civilized groups ought at least to be able to hold them in check, which will give time for help to arrive. And such help will be near at hand, given that the helpers will already be on their way to the threatened point, which the Jovian astronomers will determine for us a day or two in advance.

  Provided, therefore, that the Martians do not have the privilege of increasing their number with a rapidity that is, on Earth, reserved to inferior animals, we shall soon get to the end of their small number. The worst that can happen, in the highly improbable case that their vehicle’s point of descent escapes Jovian observation and the attention of men, is that they might be able to install themselves in a deserted region—or one inhabited by the savage hordes, which comes down to the same thing—and found their colony there. We would then have two heterogeneous races resuming their development…until the moment of the fatal collision, “when the better would triumph,” as Leduc put it.

  Let us put that last hypothesis aside, though. In reality, we shall do everything possible to engage in battle at the earliest possible opportunity, to settle the fate of humankind once and for all. Leduc has just told us that he has put his aerial squadron on a war footing.

  The present date of June 29 has seen the extinction of the Thunderbolt, the punishment of Mars being complete and all life abolished on the surface of that planet. It is also notable, from my point of view, for another reason: it is the day when I have finished writing the previous pages, begun last winter and interrupted several times, recapitulating I the form of memoirs all that I was able to see and learn in these last two years that is worthy of interest. They are finally up to date, and I propose to continue them henceforth on a daily basis, as events transpire.

  July 1. The muted demoralization that I have omitted to mention until now, because of its vague and ungraspable character, and because it has not been expressed in words, is making troubling progress. Something serious is going on at Chamonix, if I read Leduc’s concerned attitude correctly. He mutters to himself about the insubordination that is rife down there, especially among the aviators. Since the spring, he avows, one might think that they have been subject to the contagion of the de-civilized atmosphere in which they undertake their exploratory expeditions. Stocks of wine, canned food and biscuits, recovered from the ruins of Lyon, and which their leader ordered to be stored in Chamonix, have been retained by them and consumed in secret orgies in which the inhabitants of the lower station participated. Since then, their appetite for meat has revived and the Jovian Nutriment is no longer sufficient for them. The announcement of an expedition in which they have been instructed to take part has been greeted by general protests, and it required all Leduc’s authority to force them to consent to make the necessary preparations.

  At Mont Blanc itself, a singular nervousness is increasing. The population of artists, in particular, is manifesting disturbing symptoms. Nibot and the majority of the painters have abandoned their brushes; the writers openly repeat an opinion that drew a contemptuous exclamation from me shortly after my arrival in Amiens, at a salon in the Rue des Trois-Cailloux: “Why bother, since there’s no longer an audience?” The women, especially have changed; they organize dances on a daily basis, not only in the Bunkers but at Chamonix—and they are careful not to invite Raymonde and me, for they sense our disapproval of these new mores. It has even reached the scientists; the insufficiency of their laboratories and libraries, and the installation’s discomforts, provoke fits of bad temper that degenerate into bitter disputes—and the Abbé Romeux has great dif
ficulty calming these outbreaks and re-establishing an ephemeral harmony.

  As for Raymonde and myself, love preserves us from the contagion; we are closer than ever, and we derive our scorn for death and the new calamities with which the future seems replete from the notion that we shall suffer them together. Nevertheless, we too feel a kind of bizarre enervation, and sudden fits of apprehension without any definite cause—a secret anguish that translates into a sharp desire to be somewhere else. It seems to us that we have been stuck in the cold of high altitudes for a year, and that we are reawakening from that lethargy, weary of the monotony of spending our lives shuttling between Mont Blanc and Chamonix, weary of the ever-present faces of our fellow detainees, avid to see other people, avid to rediscover new horizons, even on the devastated Earth.

  It seems to us both that occult and evil influences are lurking all around us, in the atmosphere of the Bunkers. We have decided today to join Leduc’s expedition, if he will allow it.

  July 3. The mutiny of the aviators has reached its denouement, which almost turned to tragedy. It has, at any rate, deprived our station of effective means of cooperating in the defense of Civilization against the supreme assault that the sons of Mars will mount against it.