Despite the horripilatory vibrations of the Perfume, which escape from the lair to propagate the Martian summons over the entire continent to the last remaining humans, overcoming the odiously familiar nausea, we go into and enormous hall full of methodical and terrifying activity. There’s no doubt about it, it’s the Hall of Reincarnation!
But we have come a long way since the timid trials of the early days; the procedure has been industrialized, for it is a matter of putting the Martian stamp on the entire remaining population of the Earth. And we have considerably underestimated that remaining population, which the approximate calculations made in our final days at Mont Blanc set at a few tens of thousands! A battery of 15 solenoids, operated under the surveillance of the Magi by a numerous staff, is entirely engaged in the conclusive “Martianization” of the heterogeneous crowds accumulating on the lower floor of the hall, contained by barriers like those of the Parisian metro in the days of affluence.
There are pilgrims of every kind there. Some have been swept up by aerial missions, still in possession of their humanity, rolling their fearful eyes. Others, having already been invaded by Martian souls for some time, are quivering with impatience, for they have come spontaneously, some on foot, from the depths of Europe, Asia or Africa, attracted by the magnetism of the Perfume: people from the Hordes, ex-Eternal-Nightists, ragged, dirty and verminous; muzhiks in lambskin coats and fur hats; Hindus in loincloths and large yellow turbans; Chinamen in blue silk robes with slanting eyelids; tattooed Africans, showing all their white teeth when they laugh…and among the last contingents of the Old World, I shudder to see a Boer in a broad-brimmed khaki hat beside a Zulu. The civilized stations have not been spared! What has befallen our friends at Mont Blanc? Those on whom I was counting above all others! Are they still resisting? Or have they already gone over to the enemy?
The features of one of the overseers in the cap of a sub-Magus seem familiar—yes, it’s Doctor Landru, the hypnotist from Dury, who is devoting himself gladly to his new “patients.” Singular patients, these totally naked dark-skinned creatures, to whom five solenoids are dedicated. Those bestial, prognathous and hairy faces, those long arms, those feet with opposable thumbs! Apes! They’re apes, whose repressed souls have been recruited from the equatorial forests, brought by helicopter from as far away as Java and Borneo—entire menageries of apes, awaiting their turn to be elevated to the dignity of Martians! Doubtless it was in error, at first, deceived by the resemblance, that their souls took possession of simian bodies—but now, the robust orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees are hunted methodically, as equals of the last humans.
And, indeed, for beings as deprived of aesthetic and signified sensibilities, for beings as basely utilitarian as these Martians—cornered, moreover, in a frightful impasse, for want of human bodies—are not these “anthropoids” an admirable substitute? Will not that sturdy gibbon make a worker replete with strength and dexterity? Will not its brain, delivered to an exclusively practical spirit, careless of the heights of speculative thought, know exactly how to send to its vigorous muscles and agile fingers the orders of a Martian will? Yes, of course! It will not take long for us to see, when we visit the city, that this subterfuge, dictated by urgent necessity, has given very satisfactory results to our invaders, whose number has thus been doubled, enabling the Terromartians of human origin to be reserved for the more delicate tasks.
Before leaving the Hall, we see the strange excess to which a mad desire for reincarnation can press certain souls. In addition to the apes there are numerous postulants who have adopted the bodies of cattle, dogs and hyenas. But the Magi refuse to sanction these monstrous borrowings—which cannot be useful to society, for want of hands—and these wretched animals only pass into Landru’s solenoids in order to be electrocuted and then delivered to the butcher: a fine example of the ferociously utilitarian organization imposed on the Colony!
Outside, we find that night has fallen. The Monument, illuminated from inside, is a monstrous mountain of light, at the top of which floats the fateful Magus and the gleaming Shell, in the crossed beams of searchlights installed on the ancient Pyramids. On every side, cold floodlights replace the daylight with a white clarity and establish a phosphorescent halo above—the City!
Geometrically laid out and paved with glass, the streets of that fantastic Chicago are swarming with crowds of Terromartians: humans and simian forms, males and females, naked or dressed any old how—save for the uniform headgear, a cap with two distinctive horns, of the Magi and overseers—devoid of all elegance, hypnotized according to their social function, identified by a registration number, usually attached to the collar. Streets? Tunnels, rather, with the iron-and-glass walls of phalanstery 32 habitats, shops, busy workshops, and ceilings made up of a dense network of various and innumerable cables, conductive wires and conduits, loaded on to pylons distributed without any aesthetic care—all of it temporary, formless, improvised.
There is an incessant movement along elevated monorails—vertical, horizontal and oblique—of luminous bolide-wagons, filing in every direction to the groaning, grinding, humming, quivering factories, shaken by blows from giant pile-drivers, with chimneys pouring out plumes of chemical vapors into the luminous mist of the floodlights. They are the only chimneys, for combustion has been banished from the city; it is the Equatorial Alternators of Khartoum and the Solar Accumulators of Aswan that activate all the machinery. Unfamiliar motors rotate madly beneath sheet-metal hangars or complex superstructures. In steel foundries several kilometers square, serpentine channels of molten metal diverge from an infernal well which vomits liquid iron extracted directly from the plant’s igneous core! Thunderous rivers of fire cataract into the circular molds from which the future cylinders of sidereal escape will doubtless emerge.
Other works are manifold and incomprehensible: pulleys, giant cranes, automatic loading-machines pouring out hills of material into railway stations, using the old network of Tantah and Alexandria; airports, vertical floodlights, transport helicopters, airbuses full of conscripts or volunteers, immediately steered towards the Hall of Reincarnation…it is to lodge them that the city expands incessantly, its glassworks transforming the sands of the desert into crystal and molding the paving-stones for the streets, slabs stood on end, shaped into walls, partitions, floors, welded by solar heat—houses built in a quarter of an hour, fitted out and furnished, ready to receive their new inhabitants within an hour!
Despite the awareness of duty that oppresses us, the interest of this tremendous spectacle holds us spellbound for some time. The midnight shift has taken over while we are still wandering through that atmosphere of hectic activity, of which the busiest cities of America can only give the faintest idea.
I had always experienced a sort of vague unease in seeing and hearing industrial machinery in action—grinding mills, shredders, elevators, trolleys, collieries, furnaces, steelworks, metallurgical workshops—firstly because of their noise, which made my nerves jangle, but above all because of the deleterious social ferment that I was by no means alone in attributing to the blind and excessive application of Mechanization. Naivety? How may “human cogs” of the most ferocious industry kept their individuality, followed their personal interests, through the stampede of our machines to goals that were, in the final analysis, various…and innocent?
Here, the character of these prodigious forces, assembled everywhere and converging upon a unique finality, seems to have developed a clearly satanic paroxysm. One senses, here, that the city at work is participating, in its entirety, in a dogged and mysteriously hectic haste, whose pace seems to be dictated by the action of the luminous Magus, which is replicated in the forced trepidation of the atmosphere, and in the features of these dehumanized Terromartians, by their new expressions, hard and blinking at the same time, distorted by a grimacing contraction of willful avidity, common to all, from leaders and overseers to simple workers of every race—white, yellow, black—and hairy laborers of various si
mian species.
Back to the airport, beneath the white, cold light of the floodlights. Twenty airbuses are being filled up with fuel, ready to take off: a methodical tumult in which white overseers and black pilots intermingle with the ape-mechanics that I cannot quite get my head around. And yet, they are all Martians; they evidently consider themselves natural to the same degree, in spite of their disparate and heterogeneous envelopes. Those ape-mechanics are no more peculiar and out of place among them than African stokers and Malay lascars used to be among us.
An irritating shock of surprise: in one of the two leaders wearing purple capes and the caps of sub-Magi who are overseeing the preparations—the one smoking his pipe—I recognize Sylvain Leduc. Oh, he was entirely ripe for rendering himself to the Martians, already converted to the furious folly of Mechanization and all its consequences; he threw himself into the wolf-trap, so to speak—and I wonder whether his new soul differs greatly from the old one!
The other leader—superior to Leduc, as indicated by the larger horns on his Valkyrie’s helmet—has his back to me, but I recognize him unhesitatingly even before seeing his face and the thick beard that formerly framed it. It’s me; it’s my stolen body, which I will have to win back from its present possessor one day, perhaps soon. The fight will be hard, for the Martian seems to be endowed with a rigid and imperious will, but the spirit of my beloved—where is her body now?—reminds me of the Master Initiate’s secret. My victory is sure…and what might I not accomplish on behalf of humankind—the Last Men—once I am introduced into the Supreme Council of the Martians, in the guise of that highly-placed leader, whose authority must be considerable, to judge by the crawling deference of his subordinates, including the prideful, brusque and gruff Leduc.
A sharp curiosity draws us closer to the two leaders. They are speaking French. That surprises me at first, but, on reflection, it is entirely natural, since that is the language in which both their brains are accustomed to think and express themselves: the memory of the language is inscribed in the cerebral circumvolutions, and their Martian souls are obliged to adapt themselves to that quasi-material habitude.33 I catch the names of cities—Rome, Nice, Lyon, Paris, London—but all that is already agreed between them.
“Moreau!” Leduc calls out—and a Terromartian advances, simultaneously respectful and swollen with a childish pride. It’s our friend Sylvain’s young mechanic: the one who accompanied us to Cairo, and has now been promoted to admiral of the expedition that is ready to take off—with a purpose that is unknown, but of which I sense the importance.
Leduc gives him his final instructions: “Everything’s understood, isn’t it, lad? Make straight for Italy, and go up as far as Rome—first stage—tomorrow evening. Leave one helicopter and enough people—a gang of shaggies and a white man, Schlemihl perhaps—to scrape the solar from the base-unit. Pay attention, now—no mistakes! Work by night and seal the cases! Then to the rendezvous, double quick. Detach one or two helicopters to clear out the last hordes, if there are any, from the nearest ports of embarkation. There are torpedo-boats at Brindisi and Genoa ready to repatriate the volunteers. You’ll continue with the main body of the fleet. At Nice, there’s another torpedo base-unit. You repeat the business with the solar. One helicopter and one crew. Ditto at Lyon, Paris, Antwerp, London. Ah! Mont Blanc…do as you like with that lot, but don’t rush things; go gently to begin with, leave the heavy stuff for later. Tempt them as you pass by, but leave taking them—aboard your own machine, in their case—until you’ve cleared out France, Belgium and England—the ones in Edinburgh too, although I think they’re already on their way…”
Our friends at Mont Blanc are alive! They’re still holding out! What luck! We shall attempt to save them!
V. Calling for Volunteers
Fly straight to Mont Blanc—that’s our first thought. But what good will it do? We need a plan of action first. And how can we keep them safe if we don’t know exactly what danger our friends are facing? Our disincarnate condition, though conferring on us the levitational ability to displace ourselves at will, is not combined with lucid clairvoyance: the thoughts of the Martians remain closed to us unless they express them, and in order to be informed in a useful fashion of the young leader’s intentions, we shall have to follow him.
As invisible guests—supernumeraries that will scarcely tire the engines—we take our place with Moreau and his general staff in cabin A of the flagship-helicopter, a powerful airbus with three sets of supportive rotor-blades and two twin hulls. At a word from the Great Leader—my Martianized body—Leduc blows on his whistle; the signal lights turn green, and all the engines of the air-fleet begin to purr. A second blast of the whistle—red light—and the twenty machines take off in a mathematically-precise formation.
At and altitude of 500 meters the immense Martian city seems to us to be fully illuminated by its millions of floodlights. With the flagship-helicopter at its head, the squadron, formed into a triangle like a flock of wild birds, veers around the illuminated Monument bearing the Shell—and we discover on the head of the artificial Magus, looking down from this height, a minuscule Magus of flesh and blood, lit up by a searchlight, who gives us his blessing, while a formidable acclamation rises up from the crowd assembled in the Grand Plaza of the Pyramids.
The lights of the Martian city decrease; we fly at full speed over the Nile Delta, where the evil activity of the invaders is revealed by the numerous lights of electric convoys filing along the railway and transport helicopters bringing their cargoes of recruits. We fly over the resuscitated port of Alexandria and out over the Mediterranean, whose vague phosphorescence seems to reflect the starry night.
In cabin A, having given his orders, young Moreau sits down at his table and pours champagne for his general staff. Isaac Schlemihl is there, having escaped the massacres by some prodigy, with his wife Rachel, who is similarly wearing the brick red flying suit of the Martian pilots. Nazir Bey is there, still wearing his fez. But they and the three others—there are seven in all, counting Moreau—are no longer human, save in appearance. Their savage Martian souls are hypnotically fixed on their abominable duty; the hope to “convert” the remainder of true humankind, to make them willing or unwilling recruits to “Mars & Co.” as they say. For they all speak French, the international language after the catastrophe, as before, although they speak it with an atrocious new accent, hoarse and jerky, which elides vowels and seems to multiply the consonsants, cutting through them like blades through bucklers.
It is August 15, apparently. Five weeks have gone by: a mere five weeks, since the Cairo Shell and the arrival of the Magi! What sinister progress they have made in that brief interval! And the Martians of the general staff, as they all empty their champagne glasses, rejoice in the work accomplished. The entire population of Africa, Asia and Europe, with only a few exceptions, has gone to Cairo: 123,000 Terrans and 210,000 apes, or “shaggies,” have fallen into the power of Martian souls and have passed through the Solenoids of Reincarnation!
But here are a few frustrations. Nazir Bey regrets that the Perfume’s zone of influence could not be further extended. It has reached its maximum development and its limits are approximately those of the Old World: a circle, henceforth unextendable, traced around the Magi. And the Magi, for occult reasons, refuse to displace themselves on Earth. Moreau criticizes them bitterly, and the entire general staff joins in the chorus, except for Nazir Bey, who comes to their defense.
Poor Magi! They are sufficiently preoccupied in directing the mysterious and religious aspects of the enterprise! If only they were all still alive, the only Martians to have reached Earth integrated in body and soul—but death has already cruelly thinned out their sacred phalanx; of the 21 occupants of the Shell, nine have been carried off by microbial maladies unknown on Mars. Have the survivors acclimatized, or will they face further perils in their turn? Will the dignity of Magi, the origin of which is lost in the night of time, and which has been perpetuated through innumera
ble generations in the Martian caste privileged—miraculously, they claim—by the provision of wings and cephalic antennas, pass into profane hands. Will it be so far reduced that the successor to the Sovereign Pontiff Egregore XII,34 the mystical instigator of the Expedition will be a vulgar Terromartian?
And these “vulgar Terromartians” who surround us agonize over that thorny question with all the passion of their true Martian souls. There are some who scarcely dare discuss it, waiting until Nazir Bey, a fervent and exclusive partisan of the Magi, has gone to make a round of the engine-room and the crew stations. Even then, voices are lowered, as if in dread that spies might hear. The young admiral, Schlemihl, Rachel and their associates are all partisans of Leduc, whose popularity is growing among the aviators and the shaggies.
The majority of their allusions escape us, to tell the truth, but one thing is clear: that Leduc, the chief technician of the Martian endeavor, disapproves of the Magi, who want to limit the Great Work to a pure and simple exodus to Venus. Probably for reasons of personal ambition, and perhaps also by virtue of forceful mechanist convictions, he supports a project that is bringing together all the dissidents, extremists more Martian than the Magi.
What is this project? A mystery. Moreau contents himself with making a discreet allusion to it, but that is enough to electrify the entire table, which rises in tumult. Glasses are clinked, and everyone drinks enthusiastically: “To the Grand Central Tunnel! To the Atlantic Ocean!”
An absurd, crazy toast! But the hideous and hateful laughter that greets it tells us that it embodies a frightful menace for the Last Men.
The Martian Epic Page 27