The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  The last-named emitted a sinister laugh. “That’s all, good…Abbé Romeux, hey! Maybe the soul of an astronomer can jump aboard, in the solenoid! That doesn’t depend on us though, but on chance, on some whim of a wandering soul! Our means are very imperfect—our spiritual methods aren’t as highly developed as our mechanical ones, by a long chalk. It’s the fault of the Magi, R’rdô! The Magi have always been laggards, behind the times. It doesn’t matter, though. Romeux’s brain will make a fine instrument for anyone other than a complete idiot. And the rest of the gang…adequate Terromartians. It’s high time to readjust the proportions somewhat—we’re overflowing with shaggies!

  “But it’s not settled yet; there’s the matter of catching them. A spectacular hunt, the like of which hasn’t been seen for a long time—an imperial hunt. Hee hee! If you weren’t attached to Mars Central by definition, in tour capacity as Magus, R’rdô, I’d ask you to organize it. But for want of you, Her Excellency—Her Majesty the Empress, I mean—is made for the job, with her crew of Amazons…”

  A refusal, or even a hesitation, on Raymonde’s part was unthinkable. All eyes were fixed upon her, and it was with anguish in my heart that I heard her reply, in a voice in which only my vigilant affection was capable of discerning a disturbance: “Naturally, Leduc—I was about to suggest it.”

  VI. Aboard the Nautilus

  You will recall that we left Abbé Romeux and his companions to continue their exodus to America aboard the submersible liner Nautilus, after two days of sailing.

  No troublesome incident had occurred since the departure from Bordeaux. No suspect helicopter had been spotted by the lookout, and they had made steady progress in a west-south-westerly direction in a flat calm. Under the impulsion of her three propellers, powered by alcohol-fuelled turbines, the powerful steel hull clove the green crystalline waters of the Atlantic at twenty-five knots—46 kilometers an hour—and left behind a majestically straight wake in which seagulls played, excited by the sportive pursuit.

  The Abbé had revealed himself at the outset to be as fine a mariner as he was an astronomer. The painter Nibot, who had sailed in his youth, served as his second officer; the former supervisors of the hydroelectric turbines on the Arve at Chamonix took charge of the engines. Everyone was a crewman of some sort, and the women donned stewardesses’ aprons—so successfully that everything went as smoothly aboard the Nautilus as it had in the days when she transported rich passengers from Bordeaux to New York and vice versa. Everyone took turns to enjoy the best cabins and the luxurious drawing-rooms, and the bracing pleasures of idling on the deck.

  Strange as it may seem, among people who had just escaped the most frightful dangers, good humor reigned and confidence increased with each passing day. The precipitate flight from Mont Blanc, the journey across deserted and ravaged France and the threat of Martian souls were all lost in the distance—the far distance, beyond the blue horizon, behind the immense expanse of ocean they had already crossed. The illusion of security returned to the exiles, and the future smiled at them again.

  Even though they had found the ship’s stores almost empty—the coal-bunkers, on the other hand, were full, as were the cisterns of fresh water—there was no fear of starvation because they had brought a sufficient supply of the Nutriment from Chamonix to support the seventy-one passengers for six months. In five days, at the most, they would be in Panama, and in Tahiti within a month, on the far side of the world, where there was a good chance that the Martians would not come to hunt them down.

  Only the victims of sea-sickness—who were quite numerous, at first—saw the situation in tones of black, and had premonitions of catastrophe.

  On the sixth day, a first warning lent support to the pessimists.

  They were in view of the Bahamas, and the idlers on the deck, stretched out in deck-chairs, were examining the benevolent tropical landscapes through binoculars, when the lookout shouted: “A helicopter, to the North, heading straight for us!”

  Fortunately for the exiles, who hurried inside as fast as they could, the volvites had not yet come into service, and the helicopter in question was scarcely capable of 150 kph. The Nautilus had time to fill her ballast-tanks and submerge without being seen.

  The alert was thus without consequence—but it marked the beginning of tribulations that fate had thus far spared the fugitives—with the sole aim, one might have thought, of crushing them more completely. A sequence of misfortunes had begun.

  First came the helicopters. Since leaving the Gulf Stream—for it had been necessary to go around the northern rim of the Sargasso Sea, whose tangled prairies of floating algae would have slowed them down too much—the Nautilus found herself, unknown to her commander, on one of the most frequently-followed routes used by Martian aircraft heading for Central America. The helicopters multiplied in a fashion that was terrifying and inexplicable to our friends. At certain times, the periscope could hardly be extended above the surface without a new flying machine forcing the vessel to dive precipitately. On one occasion, the hull was seen through the transparent water and a bomb was dropped, which obliged her to descend to a great depth and remain there until nightfall.

  After that came the wind. One of the main advantages of submersible liners—the one that had caused them to be adopted by millionaire tourists and permitted companies to withstand the competition of the Transatlantic Tube—was sparing their passengers from the worst effects of sea-sickness by sailing for long periods at depths of 50 to 60 meters, at which the agitation of the superficial waves was virtually imperceptible, but the captain of the Nautilus could not risk traveling blind in these regions, where the charts warned of sandbanks and coral reefs. It was necessary to remain immobile for 48 hours, until the squall blew out, at a depth of thirty fathoms. The marvels of the abyssal world that they were then able to contemplate—luminous forests of polyps populated by cephalopods equipped with veritable searchlights and fishes whose flanks were equipped with rows of phosphorescent dots—were insufficient to calm the anxiety of the passengers, especially the female ones.

  One might have thought that everyone had a presentiment of what was to follow: the damage, perhaps due to the inexperience of the engineers or a defect of the greasing, which caused the turbines to jam immediately after the coast of Haiti had been lost to sight and the eastern point of Jamaica doubled.

  A heart-breaking disappointment! All the way to Panama, their course across the Gulf of Mexico was free of nautical dangers thereafter; they had hoped to pass through the canal, and escape the helicopters once and for all, in a day at the most—but there could be no question of going on solely powered by the accumulators, which would eventually have to be recharged. They had to make repairs, a soon as possible, and, given the nature of the damage—a “blade salad” in the main turbine—it would be best to head for the nearest port: Kingston.

  The repairs took much longer than they had initially imagined. A month and a half was lost in numerous failed attempts on the part of the engineers, who could not find the necessary spares in the shops in the port, most of which had been destroyed by fire, and had in the end to resort to forging them themselves, at high risk of being detected.

  Martian helicopters, in fact, passed by on a daily basis—not, fortunately, directly over Kingston, but a few kilometers out to sea. Nevertheless, it was necessary, after the first night to render the Nautilus invisible from above: to camouflage the dock where it rested with the aid of tarpaulins on which a vague representation of ruins was daubed—work that Nibot carried out in a few hours, aided by five or six other painters evacuated from Amiens and Saint-Valery.

  It was not only danger from the air that the unfortunate exiles had to face, however. Scarcely were they installed under their tarpaulins, where the tropical Sun maintained the atmosphere of a Turkish bath all day long, when the Martian souls began to assail them. Those in Europe, which had tormented them from Sallanches to Bordeaux, were all too well aware of their powerlessness beyond the limit
s of the Perfume’s reign, and they had left off after the embarkation aboard the Nautilus. The sea, empty then of all human activity, was hardly frequented by the wandering souls; they had scarcely been manifest since Bordeaux save for a few isolated nightmares, individual persecutions that were not difficult to repel. The souls of Jamaica were much more enterprising, because simian bodies, at that time, were only admitted to the honors of the solenoid after a rigorous selection process. The American monkeys, in particular, were mostly rejected—so they attempted the conquest of the refugees from Mont Blanc.

  The engineers, fortified by their work against baneful suggestions, resisted well, but the forced idleness to which the other “castaways” were consigned might have been fatal, had it not been for the intervention of the Abbé. On the second night, three men and two women were invaded as they slept and woke up possessed, rolling their eyes wildly and clamoring raucously for the assistance of “their Martian brothers” and for “repatriation.”

  General consternation! What was to be done with these unfortunate fanatics, whose piercing cries might attract the next helicopter? Nibot and four veterans of the Phalanx des 4-z’arts tied them up and gagged them one after another. Doctor Goulliard was already talking about “communal safety” and insinuating that “before Pasteur’s discovery people bitten by rabid dogs were stifled with pillows.” The scientists nodded their heads approvingly…but Abbé Romeux stepped in.

  “My friends,” he said, “I have always respected your private opinions, and have never attempted to convert you to the true faith from which some among you have lapsed. I hope that they will do me the politeness today of letting me apply the remedy that the Catholic religion—to which I have the privilege of belonging—puts at our disposition in similar cases.”

  “Are you talking about exorcism, Monsieur l’Abbé?” asked Doctor Goulliard, during a pause interrupted by the stifled grunts of the possessed individuals. “My God, I wouldn’t blame you in the least. I’m ready for anything, since I’ve been forced to admit the existence of the soul! However, exorcism is applicable to ‘demons.’ ”

  “When it was instituted, doctor, the Church could not foresee the Martian invasion!” said the Abbé.

  He dressed in his ecclesiastical robes and, in the middle of a respectful and attentive circle, had the first possessed individual brought to him. It was Félix Delarue, a poet.

  When the stole made contact with his hair, the possessed man, grinding his teeth, twisted his arms furiously. As he had lost his waistcoat and one of his short sleeves in the course of the fight, his biceps could be seen writhing beneath his skin “like a captive bat,” as the painter Nibot told me later. His eyes avoided those of the priest and betrayed the anguish of the Martian soul, disconcerted by the ritual preparations, especially by the sort of magnetic chain formed by the audience.

  “Vade retro, Satanas!” pronounced the Abbé, forcefully—and, under the inspiration of the moment, he added to the liturgical formula: “Depart, Martian spirit! Leave the body that you have stolen; restore it to its legitimate proprietor. Félix Delarue, I order you, in the name of the Lord and the living persons who surround me, to return to yourself!”

  And the combination of human wills, united in an occult fashion by the Abbé and projected against the Martian, worked! The foreign soul weakened under the assault, and, with a despairing scream, the man fell back on to the ground. A few moments later, it was the real Félix Delarue who got up again, unsteadily, and threw himself effusively into the arms of his liberator, to the acclamation of the entire audience.

  But the Abbé imposed silence on all manifestations of joy and gratitude. “You may thank God, my friends when we have vanquished the other demons…”

  Half an hour later, not a single individual was any longer possessed; the five Terrans were victorious over their aggressors, and Doctor Goulliard himself came to render homage to the striking achievement of the Abbé, who wore his triumph with his habitual modesty and limited himself to replying to the congratulations: “You see, my friends, what a catastrophe the world might have avoided if there had only been more confidence at the outset in the aid of the Church! It is irreligion that has doomed the Earth!”

  But the scientists, unconvinced, attributed the success of the exorcism to anything other than the words of the Latin liturgy. Whatever the reason, the Martian souls considered it efficacious, admitted defeat, and did not renew their attempts upon the Mont Blanc exiles during the six weeks they remained in Kingston. They redirected their attention to the monkeys of the region and the rare humans who were still dragging out a miserable existence in the mountains of the interior—and their victory over the latter, in one case, subjected the passengers of the Nautilus to a frightful necessity.

  This is how it came about.

  On the evening of a day even more oppressive than usual, when helicopter alerts were so frequent that they hardly dared to light their muted lanterns in the shelter of the camouflaged tarpaulins—for the boat’s interior was uninhabitable—the barking of dogs became audible in the distance, in the deserted ruins of the town, approaching rapidly. It was not the first attack of this sort, and the sentries were getting their blasters ready when the heard human calls for help, mingled with the voices of the dogs. In a fatal moment of thoughtlessness, pity over-rode prudence, and the Abbé himself ran outside shouting: “Over here!”

  Twenty seconds later, two breathless individuals threw themselves under the tarpaulin, and the furious pack that was pursuing them was struck down, howling, by a salvo of blaster-fire.

  The execution completed, everyone gathered round the escapees, who had been rendered into a pitiful state by the thorns of the tropic forest and the fangs of the dogs. What adventures had these dark-skinned “gauchos” with red shirts and leather trousers undergone before arriving here? To all questions however, they only replied with incoherent fragments of bad Spanish.

  Professor Bianchini finally contrived to catch the word Hermanos. “Brothers,” he repeated, darting a troubled glance around the assembly, whose faces were going pale. Then, in response to the gauchos, “Si, siamos hermanos, todos hermanos…y hijos de la madre Tierra!” he said: “Sons of Mother Earth? Oh no, they are not...not any more at least!”

  The Martian souls inhabiting the bodies, having believed that they would encounter brothers from their planet here, recoiled at this revelation. The gauchos’ eyes burned with infernal rage. “Traidores!” howled their raucous voices—and two unsheathed daggers were planted, one in Bianchini’s breast and the other in the throat of his neighbor, a female painter named Bilitzka. Without the quick reaction of Doctor Goulliard, whose blaster decapitated the vile Martians with a double shot, Abbé Romeux would have been their third victim. Even so, he attempted to deflect the weapon.

  “Don’t kill them!” he cried, in the midst of the confused panic the drama had generated in its audience.

  “Right, Abbé, you can look after them!” sniggered his savior, leaning over the wounded Terrans.

  This adventure, which cost the lives of the two unfortunates, increased the impatience and general nervousness and caused the permanent abandonment of plans for settlement on Jamaica or nearby Haiti that the slowness of the repairs and the vicissitudes of the crossing had persuaded a few people to make. The mere possibility that other neo-Martians might discover the Nautilus before her departure and denounce her to the helicopters precluded any thought of staying longer than was strictly necessary.

  It was with an inexpressible relief, therefore, that they finally re-embarked, at dusk, and felt the submersible vibrate once again under the impulsion of its turbines as it slid over the blue waves, quite ready to disappear beneath their blue veil. No helicopter searchlight came to add its threatening star to the marvelous constellations of the tropical night, however, and the Gulf of Mexico was crossed by night, at full speed, without incident.

  When day dawned, the American coast was in sight, and at eight a.m. the Nautilus reduced her spe
ed as she entered the Colon passage and proceeded along the inter-oceanic canal.

  VII. The Massacre of the Amazons

  The traces of the battles and the anarchist devastation that had bloodied America a year earlier appeared along with the city of Colon, a desert of ruins in which a few wary animals could be glimpsed. On the banks of the canal, along which the liner advanced more rapidly than the nautical regulations would have authorized, there was not a single building standing.

  “Will we be able to get through the Culebra lock?” the pessimists wondered. “Provided that the opening mechanism is working—and that there’s water in the upper reach!”

  Alas, yes—there was, and plenty of it! But the lookout, on spotting the lock through his binoculars, could not retain a cry of despair. The lock-gates had been blown up and their debris, along with the quays that had collapsed into the lock, was blocking the canal with a formless barrage, over which the waters of the upper reach were pouring from a height of ten meters!

  It was the end! They could go no further!

  The Nautilus stopped.

  Everyone, including the engineers, had come up on deck. They were looking back and forth, in bleak silence, from the fatal obstacle to the formidable walls of rock that encased them within the Culebra strait. From the top of one, on the right, a little monkey—a marmoset—was punctuating its capers with bizarre gestures. Nibot pointed it out to his companions, and forced himself to cheer them up with a remark that he thought witty: “There’s one who won’t denounce us to the Martians.”

  The ill-timed joke fell flat. At the mention of the word “Martians,” the exiles shivered. The time when the helicopters usually arrived was drawing near.