His forehead covered in sweat, Nibot stirs himself with a convulsive effort. He releases a cry of anguish, awakes with a start, sits up, and I see his eyes fix themselves upon me fearfully. For an instant, the dream is prolonged in reality, the mysterious lucidity of the hypnotic state allowing him to glimpse our astral form, whose dissolution is completed by a fuller awakening…
He rubs his eyes, turns a commutator, lighting up the room, and leaps out of bed, murmuring: “The Abbé…provided that he’s still up...and that he doesn’t think I’m rambling! That was a premonitory dream of the first order! My God! I’m still trembling.” While pulling on his shoes he speaks at hazard into the room: “Thanks, Rudeaux!”
Perfect! There’s no need for us to stay here, for the moment. The imminent arrival of young Moreau and his squadron will force the Abbé to make his decision. For the moment, our duty calls us to the last of our civilized brothers who might be saved—in Edinburgh!
Edinburgh. At dawn, beside the Firth of Forth—whose green waters, devoid of any ships, extend to the sea—the old black city extends the ranks of its tall houses beneath the illusory safeguard of Castle Hill. Except for the new quarters in the west, which have been ravaged by fire, the ancient capital is still standing; this desert of houses, looted but apparently intact, and these streets and squares, from which not a flagstone is missing, give an impression of disaster more overwhelming that all the heaps of ruins we have already seen. It is as if human life has retreated from the planet…
But we have better things to do than glean picturesque impressions or philosophize as to the destiny of civilization. One of the last refuges exists within the city’s perimeter. The University…
We eventually locate it, after some searching. Surrounded by parks and tennis-courts, its vast Gothic buildings ought to enclose the elite of the United Kingdom: a few 100 professors and scientists. But no! No one! It’s entirely deserted and abandoned. We have arrived too late! They have already set out, on the road to perdition.
The general staff of the airborne squadron reckoned on “collecting” them, though. They cannot be far away; they have no helicopters—but as we explore the city’s bounds, we see the daylight broadening, which is reducing our chances of intervention by the minute…
Above the docks, a brand new British flag is fluttering in the westerly breeze. A man comes out of the offices of Norddeutscher Lloyd, stretching his arms, then another. They are dressed in frock-coats and top hats, evidently academics. The fatter of the two gesticulates and points to the south, prompting his companion to scan the marine horizon of the Forth with the aid of a telescope. What are they waiting for?
As the other members of the colony emerge on to the quay, the sinister truth is revealed. The feverish gazes in those emaciated faces, the quivering hatred that agitates those bodies, the harsh and jerky accents of those voices…all-too-familiar symptoms, alas! There is no longer anyone here but Terromartians hoping for the arrival of their fellows. Hunger has sealed their fate. In order to distance them from the university, where they were offering too much resistance to the souls’ assaults, a perfidious radio message told them that succulent foodstuffs were on the way—roast beef, pickles, sponge pudding, rhubarb tart—and the unfortunates came down to take delivery of them on the quay, where one night of somnolence in the atmosphere of the Perfume, attenuated though it is, has got the better of them.
Pity overwhelms us at this sight—pity mingled with horror; a complex sentiment strongly analogous to that awakened by the physical or moral decline of a relative. But the mix also contains a strong dose of hatred towards the Martians and the frustration of not having been able to deprive them of this prey…
Come on! It’s done! The colony of Last Men that we are attempting to bring together will have to do without the academics of the United Kingdom; it will have to do without those specimens of human wisdom that comprise dialecticians and theological hair-splitters!
Considering the Edinburgh episode closed, having cost us half a day, let us leave the banks of the Forth to return the summit of Mont Blanc.
VIII. The Flight to the Antipodes
The entire colony is assembled on the terrace of the Observatory, in broad daylight. Everyone is arguing animatedly, and fists are being brandished at the North-Western horizon, over which the Martian squadron has just vanished.
In truth, young Moreau had conducted himself marvelously. I could not have wished for better. He and his colleagues of the general, staff have behaved with perfect arrogance. Helmets on their heads and blaster in their fists, they have disembarked from the flagship-helicopter as if they were entering a conquered country, while the other seventeen helicopters hovered above the Observatory, ready to open fire on it. They have summoned the Abbé to take passage for their shore with his companions, to collaborate in works of public utility. They might just as well have made allusion to the true objective of that voyage and its terminus at the solenoid!
But the Abbé had had time to reflect on the painter’s dream. He met the threat and imprecations of the Martians with the calm and dignified request for a delay of twenty-four hours to make his preparations—and the young admiral, who had expected overt resistance, had had to grant it to them. He had departed after announcing that the colony would be embarked on the following day, at the same time, of its own accord or by force.
Almost everyone can see the situation in its true light. Only a tiny minority of dyed-in-the-wool positivists are shrugging their shoulders and arguing against the evidence. Moreau has been recognized by several of his former comrades. The symptomatic appearance of the Terromartians has added the clearest possible confirmation to Nibot’s story. The shaggies, in particular, excited horror, and these abject creatures appear to the Terrans to be a living example of the fate that the Martian souls had in store for them.
The Abbé’s harangue concludes in favor of immediate flight. Unanimously, save for five votes, the abandonment of the station is agreed. No one is to carry any more than is strictly necessary. It is a heart-breaking business for everyone, but a matter of sacred duty to themselves and Humankind.
The Abbé goes back into his cupola one last time, embracing with a long glance the telescopes, spectroscopes and all the other instruments that have brought him the noblest joy of all. He wipes away a tear after caressing the ocular of the equatorial, faithful companion of his night-watches; then, resolutely, he chooses a few of the most precious papers from the heap of his manuscripts, slips them into his portfolio and goes out on to the terrace.
The 69 inhabitants of the Bunkers are there, ready to consummate the sacrifice. The women are in masculine clothing; everyone is wearing an overcoat and carrying an overnight bag, the only authorized item of luggage. For the last time, they take their places in the carriages of the funicular railway; for the last time they glance at the summit where they have lived for such a long time. Sobs mingle with the tinkle of bells as the convoy moves off, following the steep route that descends amid the snows and the glaciers to the inferior station of Chamonix.
An unforeseen hitch! The mechanics, the people who tend to the turbines and the manufacture of the Nutriment—20 people in all—immediately refuse to take part in the exodus. They have only seen Moreau’s squadron from afar, and they are treating the Martian danger as a pure phantasmagoria. They are talking about resisting to the death and hiding in the depths of the Bunkers. The Abbé’s authority and the fugitives’ pleas have not convinced them all. A dozen are holding out; as time is pressing, the rest have to resign themselves to leaving them behind.
The defection of the aviators, two months ago, deprived the colony of its air-fleet: a cruel absence, in the present circumstances, in which speed is more important than anything else. How long will it take for these three ancient Alpine cars, into which everyone has piled, to make a journey from here to Bordeaux? It’s a matter of life and death, for the magnetic effluvia of the Perfume will become manifest on the other side of Sallanches, and every
one has to understand that there must be no question of going to sleep before leaving the dangerous zone.
Everything goes well at first. The roads, left to their own devices for two years, are only slightly pitted here and here, but no one is worrying about a few bumps. The countryside goes by, in a solitude and absolute silence that gives it a prodigious majesty of history equal to that of the cities. Better than in their familiar refuge, floating above the clouds, the fugitives perceive that the reign of humankind has suffered a tragic and perhaps permanent eclipse, and that they are, in any case, its last survivors. Rain begins to fall after Valence, marking a further contribution to their dark mood, but at least it has the fortunate effect of hiding them from the gaze of Martian aviators and erasing the wheel-marks on the road.
A difficult crossing of the Cévennes; several broken bridges force long detours. The delays become worrying. It is dark when they reach the forests of the Cantal. They take the risk of lighting torches; the glare attracts animals, whose eyes gleam by the side of the road: foxes, wild boar and wolves, which bark, growl and howl in the darkness. The women release cries of fright, but the Abbé chides them gently; they ought to be thankful that they are thus protected against drowsiness!
That is, indeed, the real danger—and about 3 a.m., when the mountains are finally conquered and the convoy descends into the valley of the Dordogne, on an unexpectedly well-preserved road, the fugitives are anxious that somnolence is overtaking them—will they succumb to the assaults of the souls so close to home? Once again, though, the Abbé saves the situation; he intones one of those new ballads, which once helped weary soldiers keep in step; everyone takes it up in chorus, and this simple stratagem is enough to reawaken the most torpid….
The songs succeed one another indefatigably, in the black night, then in the dawn, then in broad daylight: the Montagnards, the Petit Navire, the Madelon—and the brightly colored autocars—marked “Route des Alpes” and “Grande-Chartreuse”—seem once more to be carrying a cargo of joyful tourists. What tourists! The Last Men, dispossessed of their planet, in flight through the infinite solitude, under the threat of the Martian souls and the helicopters that might fall upon them at any moment!
Libourne. The rain has stopped. Beautiful summer sunlight revives hope in their hearts, in spite of the desolation it illuminates. They will soon escape aboard a fishing-boat; they will reach America, then the South Seas, Tahiti or Samoa, and it will require the Devil’s own luck for the Martians…
Bordeaux. The half-destroyed city is no more than an ossuary in which the crows are busy. Along the Garonne, packs of ferocious dogs are completing the pillage of the storehouses and the crates, sacks and bales that lie here and there, eviscerated. There are precious few ships on the river, all in a piteous condition, but downstream of the Quai de Bacalan there is a basin with its floodgates closed and intact, where two lovely submersible liners—the Argonaut and the Nautilus—are floating placidly, the latter ready to set sail!
In 50 minutes, the crew is constituted; the mechanics have got the surface engines going and are charging the accumulators for an eventual dive. Abbé Romeux, at his captain’s post, gives the order: “Half-speed forward!” The hull vibrates in sympathy with the propellers, and the vessel passes through the lock-gates.
“Slow the port engine…more rapidly…full speed ahead!”
And the Last Men, leaning their elbows on the slender guard-rails on the back of the monstrous metallic cetacean, watch the gentle slopes of the hills on the two coasts of the Gironde, with their deserted vineyards whose harvests will never be used, fade into the distance beneath the radiant Sun.
At noon—exactly 24 hours after the departure from Mont Blanc—the Nautilus passes the Tour de Cordouan. The waves of harmful Perfume have ceased to be perceptible, and everyone is intoxicating themselves breathing the healthy and revivifying sea-breeze. Those most cruelly tormented by insomnia can grant themselves a reparative nap without fear, between the fine sheets of the luxury cabins.
For two days, we accompany the submersible, whose sharp nose-cone cleaves the green Atlantic swell indefatigably. Not a single alert has forced her to dive. There is not a Martian helicopter in view. The escape plan that I have suggested to Nibot is adopted; they are going to head for Panama, go through the canal and continue into the Pacific, with Tahiti as their destination—where the Martians might perhaps allow the colony of Last Men to live in peace.
But time exists for the disincarnate soul—or, rather, its elongation, at the whim of desire and impatience, which are submissive to even more fluctuations than those of vulgar mortals, whose organism tempers such impulses like a sort of unconscious regulator. The disincarnate soul seizes things by intuition, immediately—schematically, so to speak—while vulgar perception, before arriving at intimate consciousness, filters them through the inordinately complex network of nerves and cerebral connections making up the mundane sensorium, whose secondary vibrations are subject to a halo of harmonious resonances. For us, as pure spectators, the Nautilus’s crossing does not have the attraction of the thousand petty incidents of quotidian life, and its slowness and monotony exasperate us, haunted as we are with the obsessive idea that we have other duties to accomplish.
The works are making giant strides in the distant Martian city, where the Great Leader and his female companion are directing operations, incarnate in our bodies. Without fully admitting the full extent of the egotistical interest that the hope of soon being reintegrated into those bodies offers us, we delude ourselves with the generous illusion that, once we are disguised as these important individuals, it will be easy for us to intervene in the sidereal drama that has pitted the Titans of Mars against the children of the Earth. So, carried away by this secret desire, we let the last custodians of human civilization continue their exodus, and we return to Mars Central.
IX. The Titans
The Titans are celebrating this evening. The thousands of floodlights and searchlights that provide the city’s customary illumination are augmented by the fantastic light of a giant torch, a worthy appendage to the Monument of the Shell. It is a rigid jet of white fire that rises into the night: an incandescent jet, which gushes forth with a formidable roar and falls back as an artificial rain into a basin, in which a sea of molten metal ripples before subsiding to smoothness. And all the people of Mars gathered around—all those well-nourished people, sure of their strength—acclaim the magnificent result of the new drilling operation, sent at Leduc’s instigation more deeply than the first into the “igneous pocket” of the planet’s ferruginous core. It is extracting more cubic meters per hour than any oil-well of yesteryear. Up above, in a helicopter illuminated by the fiery jet, which is slowly circling the dazzling stream, a Magus—supported by two assistants, for he seems ready to expire—is bestowing his tremulous blessing on the inexhaustible fountain of iron, which springs forth and falls back amid unanimous exultation.
“Countless cylinders!” trumpets the loudspeaker that is amplifying the weak and quavering voice of the Magus.
“Cylinders! All the cylinders!” bellows the enthusiastic crowd.
“Which will enable the sacred people of Mars to take a new step in the cycle of existences, and bring them nearer the supreme and endless Glory that awaits them in the resplendent bosom of Our Father the Sun. So must it be!”
“So must it be! To Venus! The Sun! The Sun!” howl various factions of the crowd, delirious with mysticism.
The Benediction of the Fire is concluded. The blare of sirens instructs the crowd to disperse and return to work. Ah, tonight will be full of joy and fervor! The glorious ceremony has caused recent setbacks to be forgotten—for three more Magi have succumbed to terrestrial diseases in the last few days, and it is the less afflicted of the two survivors of the sacred caste who has just allowed himself to be seen; the other, the Sovereign Pontiff Egregore XII, whose grandeur retains him in the Palace of Reincarnation, is on his deathbed, already discussing his impending funeral rit
es.
But what does it matter, now, if the passing of the Magi cuts short the emission of the Perfume and makes the recruitment of “volunteers” more difficult? So much the worse for those errant souls which have not yet had the chance or the skill to equip themselves with a body. Ferocious opportunists, the privileged individuals of Mars Central content themselves with regretting, hypocritically, the fate of the Faithful Dead who will not be taken forward. The success of the enterprise is already assured for the currently-alive. The exodus will have taken place before the Earth’s orbit brings it close enough to Jupiter again for the Thunderbolt to reiterate its effects.
The exodus will have taken place, for there are sufficient numbers to do the work, and an abundance of metal.
Metal! That was a crucial shortage, until the moment when the new jet of “central fire” spurted into the air. The first well, whose yield was feeble and exploitation precarious, merely demonstrated that rendering the native metal usable for casting cylinders only required a refinement operation. The shortage was important, for the most perfect techniques of Martian steel-making and the most powerful furnaces would have been incapable of producing the thousands of tons of steel that the molds of future interplanetary vehicles would absorb from mineral ores.
Some already full and cooling down in clouds of acrid vapor, several 100 already hollowed out and provided with their feeding-grooves, and others at every intermediate stage of completion from the simple tracing of the rounded outlines of their mighty girth, the molds occupy a sandy plain 30 kilometers square, on the edge of the desert. Beneath the white glare of cold light projectors, it is the most active workplace in the entire city. Not that large numbers of workmen are occupied there! Manpower is scarce, and cannot be wasted, even for the task that constitutes the end-product and final goal of all the efforts of “Mars & Co.” One Terromartian overseer and five or six shaggies are sufficient to work the tapping process—or, rather, to maintain surveillance over it, for the machines, powered by cables as thick as an arm, seem to be endowed with their own intelligence, such is the precision and regularity with which their seemingly-awkward and malformed mammoth limbs are functioning.
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