The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  In any case, the surprise of seeing the guard of honor aligned in serried ranks around the Technical Director was sufficient was sufficient to cut off my speech. Quite different from the ordinary shaggies with whom we were in daily contact, 1000 monkeys 39 with long gripping tails, little larger than domestic cats and clad in thick fawn or silvery-grey fur, were standing proudly, grimacing and contorting their faces grotesquely beneath Magus-styled helmets.

  “Ah, R’rdô, do you like my new recruits?” Leduc said, fixing me with the disturbing gaze that never failed to make me shiver every time we met—and he added, with a shrug, as if parenthetically: “You’ve changed a great deal, R’rdô, since your attack of epilepsy on the day Egregore died! Honestly, you’re hardly recognizable! Patience, though!” Then, pointing to his monkeys, he said: “Maki-mokokos. All priests of the Sun, if you please. Technical ritual. Never let it be said that I lack religion…or altruism, eh! Here are souls provided with bodies! And it’s only just begun. The forests of Madagascar and the East Indies are full of them. Oh, the lads are more skillful handymen than they look…and anyway, they take up so little room! We’ll cram at least 4000 of them into a cylinder by piling them up a bit…ah, that’ll stir things up on Venus!”

  The maki-mokokos, immobilized in various attitudes, drank in his words. At the mention of Venus, their enthusiasm burst forth in shrill cries and excessive gestures. They extended their arms towards their chief, blowing kisses at him and capering on the spot, finishing up by babbling a sort of cantata: “Ha ha ha! Hurrah, Technical Director! He is the Great Martian, who will reincarnate us! Ha ha ha! Hurrah! Long live the Boss! He will lead us to Venus, the doorway to paradise! Blessed be he, the Great Martian who has saved us! We shall go to the Sun…to the Sun…to the Sun!” And, in a turbulent acrobatic rush, the monkey priests set about executing a series of perilous somersaults, which concluded in a pose of adoration, addressed as much to Leduc as to the Sun.

  While this scene was in progress, the helicopters had begun to arrive. An increasingly dense crowd of Terromartians and shaggies was distributed on the slopes of dunes shaped into terraces, which a superficial vitrification had converted into a giant amphitheater. Its arena was nothing less than the mouth of the Great Central Tunnel.

  The excavator, or, rather, the monstrous rock-drill destined to open this new shaft into the entrails of the globe, presented the appearance of a round platform supported at its periphery by seven feet comparable to those of the Eiffel Tower, pierced with a hole like that belonging to a skimmer—but a skimmer 200 meters in diameter, to which an entire series of transformers and auxiliary machines communicated the energy supplied by clumps of enormous cables: a skimmer as large as a city square, in which our official rostrum almost disappeared in the combined irradiations of the already-setting Sun and the metallic surface on which the maki-mokokos were agitating.

  In a harsh and strident voice, amplified by the louspeakers for the benefit of the crowd, Leduc, proudly positioned in front of me and my general staff, began his discourse:

  “Martians! The presence among us of R’rdô, our Great Leader and future Emperor, is sufficient justification in itself for my conduct and the fullest vindication of the Tunnel, whose excavation he will inaugurate with his own hand.

  “However, as there are souls among us more timorous than truly religious, who still doubt the legitimacy of my designs, I would like to begin by defending myself against the reproaches addressed to me at the time when the late Pontiff Egregore XII—he reigns in the glory of the Sun!—misunderstood my intentions and believed that he detected a heresy therein.

  “Martians! You know that the industrial production of solar is now an accomplished fact. The indispensable geocoronium has been discovered, in abundance, in the upper atmosphere. There is, in consequence, no more need to search for that substance in the depths of the terrestrial globe. That is understood—but that was only a secondary reason for the excavation of our Tunnel. There is another, much more serious and imperious reason, which every true Martian soul….”—Leduc emphasized these words while taking a long look around, which appeared to pause insistently on me—“….which every true Martian soul will understand without difficulty and accept with enthusiasm: Vengeance! Sacred, just and legitimate Vengeance!

  “Martians! A few months more, and your indefatigable labor will have completed the Cylinders that will transfer us to Venus and bring us swiftly closer to the solar paradise. The progress of that Mechanization so loudly decried by its retrograde blasphemers will spare us the uncertainties and trials of one avatar…and probably a second, if the feeble Venusians concede us the resources of their world, or if we win a victory over their feeble weapons.

  “I have no need to tell you why it is necessary for us to make haste. The ruins of our dear planet, the scorched earth of our ancient fatherland, which the televisors show us every evening, are there to testify to the fate that is reserved for us if we delay long enough for vile Jupiter to recover its proximity to our present abode. We must, at all costs, decamp before the Jovian opposition.

  “The so-called administrators of justice might use any means possible, even if we have gone, to renew their exploits—but they would evidently limit themselves to the destruction of Mars Central…a matter of ten minutes. The rest of the Earth would remain, offering, in the short term, a shelter for humans who have escaped our sweeps—and, in the longer term, a field of incarnation for the souls of the cruelest of our enemies. For it must be said: although the criminal folly of the Jovians has already been punished by the incineration of Mars itself, which has closed off access to the solar paradise to them and to the inhabitants of the outer planets, that prohibition is merely temporary. Sterilization is not annihilation, and life will flourish again on Mars sooner or later, offering our oppressors organisms that will reopen the sequence of avatars and open the way to the Earth for them.

  “There it is, Martians—that which we cannot permit! Jupiter has shown us the way; we must follow it! We must create an irremediable breach in the planetary chain, conclusively blockading the outer souls on obese Jupiter—where they belong! We must not only leave but destroy the Earth!

  “Destroy the Earth. Does that seem to you not to be easy?

  “Well, it is—there’s nothing simpler: by means of the Great Central Tunnel!

  “Let us first set aside the objection that we have been anathematized by the late Pontiff, by reason of the waste of time. He feared—as you, perhaps, also do—that the supplementary labor would use up too much precious energy, which would be better employed at the Camp of the Cylinders.

  “O ye Martians of little faith! You doubt Mechanization! The Mechanization that has furnished you so many irrefutable proofs of its limitless power! The Mechanization that has transported you as far as the Earth, in spite of your enemies, and will soon place Venus at your mercy!

  “Be tranquil! Mechanization, the expansion of Intelligence, creates the instruments of its noble designs as and when they are needed. It draws them from inexhaustible Matter, multiplies them by formularistic application, at the pleasure of its desires. A few shaggies will suffice for the Tunnel drilling-operation. But we have too few, they say, to divert even a single shaggy from the factories of Mars Central? That is false! Those who say so are liars—or, like our late holy Pontiff, mistaken…and our ancient Pontiff who is still alive is stuck in fossilized prejudices in the face of Mechanization.

  “I, the Technical Director of all the works in progress and to come—the Boss, as you call me—give you my word: there will be enough Cylinders! They may be a little cramped, but there will be enough for everyone, including our faithful maki-mokokos. And the Cylinders will leave in time! And if the molding and pouring slows down for two or three days because of the initiation of the excavation, you shall see it renewed with increased ardor as soon as the volvites return with their American recruits.

  “I am multiplying projects, to be sure—but I am also multiplying the personnel. I am
multiplying the volunteers and I am multiplying the machines. And the one that the honorable R’rdô will switch on in a moment, which is powered by atomic energy, finally put to industrial use, will excavate a Tunnel…to the center of the Earth! Look at this platform on which we are standing: you have the measure of its caliber before your eyes. Calculation has demonstrated that it is sufficient for a mine appropriate to the mass of the planet—a mine, I say, but a mine into which we will not have to introduce any explosive. That necessity is supplied in advance. The explosive is quite ready. It is Our Father the Sun who has providentially included it at the beginning of time, when He formed the planets from His sacred Substance! The explosive is there, beneath our feet. The central layers of the globe—like others whose depths are unconsolidated—encloses a mass of gas compressed to 1000 atmospheres, and reduced by that pressure to a quasi-solid state. Now, this magma of endothermic composites only requires, in order to dissociate itself with an abrupt release of heat, thus creating an explosion of incomparable violence, the introduction of a sufficient quantity of water. Well, we shall send that water down by means of the Tunnel. A profusion of water: a canal and an improvised sluice-gate will pour half the Atlantic Ocean into it, if necessary.

  “All this, of course, will not function until the last cylinder is already en route for Venus, at a safe distance.

  “And then, my friends—and THEN, Martians!—you shall see something out of the ordinary, I assure you: the accursed planet Earth exploding like a grenade, breaking into 1000 million fragments, pulverized, volatilized in the sidereal abyss! Finished, erased, cleared away. Nothing left in the orbit of the former Earth but a little meteoric dust, good for making falling stars. And who will be caught on the hop? The Jovians! Those holy fools, the Jovian ‘administrators of justice.’ Ah, if they’re already biting their fingernails waiting for life to flourish again on Mars, they’ll have to wait, then…for the Earth to reform—for its scattered particles to reaggregate, to offer a new abode for organisms and accommodation for the souls of the ‘administrators of justice’!”

  A cyclone of triumphant howls greeted these words. Drunk with hatred and vengeance, delirious, the Martians stamped their feet, and the maki-mokokos surrendered themselves to a riot of somersaults and joyful yelping. Ten minutes passed before the Technical Director was able to obtain silence and add: “Do you understand the reason for my Terran-hunts now? I don’t want to blow them up along with the Earth without utilizing them!”

  This time there was a hurricane of laughter—and no one asked what would become of the un-reincarnated Martian souls at the moment of the explosion.

  As for me, I felt that I no longer had a drop of blood in my veins. Throughout Leduc’s speech, I had made superhuman efforts to hide my distress from the orator, who appeared to examine the expression on my face curiously on several occasions. But when I had to follow the Technical Director on my own, and climb up with him into the observation-post where all the pit-head’s controls were…when he placed my fingers on a lever saying, “The honor is yours, R’rdô—go ahead!”…I felt that I was about to faint, and darted a desperate glance around the terraces crammed with attentive Martians and at the enormous skimmer, free of occupants and ready to begin its sinister work.

  “What is it? What’s the matter with you, R’rdô?” growled Leduc’s suspicious voice.

  Three seconds of further hesitation and my career as Great Leader would have been irremediably compromised, along with all the possibilities that it reserved for me. For the sake of the Last Men, I had to commit that planetary murder!

  I moved the lever in an arc over the marks of a graduated dial where blue sparks were scintillating; some lights came on and others were extinguished; the indicators of manometers moved, the needles beginning to turn vertiginously; transformers hummed; servomotors juddered—and with an enormous metallic brouhaha, punctuated by strident screeches, the entire drilling-machine was set in motion. It bit into the sand, which the holes of the “skimmer” threw out as it went towards an evacuation canal, where a deluge of water bore it away across the desert, as a river of mud.

  The shaggy that was standing behind Leduc and me in the observation-post came forward to the control panel, and took possession of the levers. The regulated machines attained their maximum efficiency, and everything whirled, hummed, crashed, splashed and rushed in unison, with a formidable regularity.

  In five minutes, the skimmer had disappeared beneath the seething sand, which visibly sank into a vast crater, whose walls, solidified by liquid hydrogen, hewed out the orifice of the Tunnel—of the Mine that would make a monster grenade out of the Earth, whose future annihilation the Martians in the amphitheater were cheering…

  Open-mouthed and bewildered, I stared in turn at the abominable work that I had just set in motion, at the simian face of the shaggy monitoring his gauges, at the ironic and ferocious face of Leduc, and at the red and dismal Sun setting behind the horizon of the Sahara….

  IV. Under the Orders of Mechanization

  “Egregore XIII is dead!”

  Such were the first words with which Raymonde greeted me, on the terrace of the Palace where the volvite deposited me on my return from that expedition.

  Beneath our feet, the Martian inferno displayed its luminous panorama of floodlights and noisy factories, from the Camp of the Cylinders in the distance, dominated by the red geyser of “core iron,” to the illuminated Monument where the Magus of the Shell was whitely silhouetted against the open sky.

  “Egregore XIII is dead!” bellowed the city’s loudspeakers, in their turn. “Tomorrow at midday: his funeral! And hallowed be his designated successor, R’rdô, Emperor of the Martians!”

  It was necessary for us to endure the congratulations of the chiefs, even those of Leduc—yes, the Technical Director came in person to favor me with a vigorous handshake and these ambiguous words: “There’ll be no more trouble now, R’rdô! You won’t try to get in my way, like that old dodderer. We’re old friends, aren’t we?”

  “What did he mean, beloved?” cried Raymonde, as soon as the door had closed behind our visitors. “Does he suspect…?”

  “That the Emperor of the Martians is a human, willing to do anything to save the Earth and its last legitimate inhabitants? No, I don’t think he’s got that far. I have to make a confession to you: I’ve hidden it from you, thinking that my relationship with Leduc would always be vague and distant—but it turns out that this Martian Leduc has been R’rdô’s political adversary for many years. I found proof of it in my papers, although the details were lacking, and I’ll be taken unawares by any direct question relating to memories that he thinks we have in common. The way he looks at me is enough to tell me that my manner already seems suspicious to him.”

  “The fact of inhabiting a human body must excuse a good many anomalies, though.”

  “Wouldn’t you recognize me, no matter how I were disguised, my dear? My personality must be one of those most familiar to the Martian Leduc—and that individual is threatening us with another danger even graver.” And I told my companion the story of what I had seen and heard—and done—at the site of the Tunnel.

  “The Earth?” she repeated, incredulously. “Blow up the Earth? But that’s insane! Their insensate pride is blinding them. They’ll never be able to do it.”

  “I fear that they will,” I replied.

  She lowered her head without asking me the reasons for my sad conviction, which was all too justified by the unlimited power of the machines whose dull rumbling and shaking was perceptible even in our apartment.

  Once again, the duty to which we had sworn to dedicate our lives appeared to be a vast steep cliff, in which no hopeful ledge offered the slightest support to a climber. The cliff of our duty was becoming increasingly sheer and high—as was the impossibility of our task!

  It was no longer a simple matter of saving one planet, but two: Venus, from invasion; Earth, from destruction! The problem of turning the Cylinders away
from their goal—how?—was doubled by a new one: to prevent our world from being blasted apart along with the Last Men!

  How could the mine be prevented from going off, even if it was of the “delayed action” type, set to explode after the Cylinders’ departure? Once its mechanism was triggered, would I be able to stop it? In any case, as leader of the expedition, would I not be forced to depart aboard the imperial cylinder? If that particular cylinder was being steered automatically, I might, in theory, be able to deflect it away from Venus and send it plunging into the Sun with all its occupants—and myself. That cylinder alone! A futile gesture. Then again, might Raymonde, by some means or other, remain on Earth to take care of the mine? Impracticable, frightful…

  Might it be possible, at least, to warn our friends? But how? And what could that handful of Last Men do against the Titans and their Machines? They had to remain hidden, for their own safety…

  “Venus! Concern yourself with Venus first! Leave the Last Men until afterwards!” insinuated the voice of the Master-Initiate, that wordless voice, which obsessed my dreams every night. I had learned, even in a waking state, to distinguish vague and fragmentary intuitions within my own thoughts, in which I thought I recognized the appeals of our friends or the solicitations of Terran souls. While finding some comfort in the certainty that the Venusian Master had not abandoned me, however, I came close to rebellion on feeling myself subject, by way of his mediation, to the psychic pressure of an entire planet anguished by the threat of invasion. I considered it unnatural to be obliged to save these distant brothers, but not to be able to play the same role as the initiate with respect to terrestrial aspirations. Ah! The problem might be soluble, if all the scattered intelligence of my human brothers were to coalesce in a convergent beam focused on my soul, like that imposed on me by the occult power of Venus!

  The Ascension of Egregore XIII, which took place the following day, partially reproduced that of his predecessor. As before, the Nile artillery thundered, the sirens howled, the Monument’s orchestra unleashed all its brass and percussion, and 400,000 Terromartians and shaggies—augmented by the yelping battalion of maki-mokokos—shouted themselves hoarse singing the praises of the saintly Pontiff…but there was no naked orgy. When the golden statue was launched into sunlit splendor, to the accompaniment of the triumphal march—Bonjour, Monsieur Dumollet!—that brought the sacred occasion to an abrupt close. The helicopter that was carrying my general staff, Raymonde and me, which was made up to resemble a bat, descended majestically to deposit us on the second terrace, where the overseers, the maki-mokokos and the Technical Director were waiting for us.