A “prodigy” then occurred which influenced opinion in the direction of peace: the Magus of the Shell, whose internal mechanism had not been properly oiled, ceased to direct its mobile arm in accordance with the Sun’s apparent course; it stopped one morning, pointed towards the zenith, and all efforts to start it up again were in vain.
Even Leduc pretended to see this incident as an omen predicting catastrophe. He threw in the sponge and, on the morning of the seventh day, sent me a plenipotentiary charged with negotiating the terms of a definitive agreement between the two parties.
At the time, there was no one with me but a deputation of maki-mokokos, which had come to bring me their daily tribute of symbolic pumpkins, and I was hardly reassured when the envoy came in. It was the largest orangutan I had ever seen, at least two meters twenty in height, with jutting canines as long as a finger, and the physiognomy of a perfect brute. Clad only in his russet hide, he swelled up with pride within his aluminum collar—on which I read the serial number W2743—and stopped in front of me, supported by both hands on an enormous cudgel capable of decapitating all my trembling little maki-mokokos with a single circular sweep.
The sight of the horns and magical wings of my ceremonial dress, however, intimidated that Martian soul, and the formidable beast bowed and mumbled when I offered him a cigar. Then, in response to my invitation, he set down his club and took his place in an armchair—where he remained throughout the conference, sniffling with embarrassment and twiddling the thumbs of his feet.
I had prepared my speech. I began with a eulogy to Mechanists, whose constant efforts for the well-being of the colony merited general gratitude. Putting a brake on the solar impatience of my faithful followers and religious friends, I conceded to Leduc a halt on Venus, where his technical talents would have the leisure to exercise themselves in the conquest of that world. That conquest duly completed, everyone would then return to the cylinders, setting a course for Mercury or straight for the Sun, according to the circumstances.
W2743 declared my offer acceptable. There remained the delicate point of establishing whether everyone would be accommodated. Seven days of work lost signified at least 100 cylinders fewer than the anticipations of the plans. I replied, however, tit for tat, with a plan that avoided the difficulty in a manner as simple as it was elegant. A hundred cylinders fewer? No matter; we would make room in the others by leaving out the stocks of food judged necessary. No one would eat during the journey; everyone would sleep. A small proportion of “laughing gas”—nitrous oxide—released into the interior atmosphere of each cylinder by an improvised regulatory device would plunge all its occupants, Terromartians, shaggies and maki-mokokos alike, into a delightful sleep full of paradisal dreams…
This proposition seduced my plenipotentiary right away. He threw away his cigar, clapped his hands, pulled my arm from my sleeve with an ultra-vigorous handshake, and cried: “Agreed!”
And he added, as if it were Leduc himself speaking: “Ah, that’ll stir things up a bit!”
The news of these preliminaries spread in a matter of minutes throughout Mars Central. The senior staff came to congratulate me on my moral victory, while the shaggies did the same for Leduc. A general amnesty for all abandonments of posts, depredations and acts of violence committed since the banquet was broadcast by the official loudspeakers, in the midst of unanimous joy. The shaggies de-fortified the Camp of the Cylinders and the helicopter airports; the “pumpkins” ceased mounting guard around the explosive dumps and the cracterite factory. The entire population came together and mingled on the Esplanade to watch the reconciliation of the two enemy leaders—the Boss and the Emperor—which took place on the second terrace of the Monument.
Leduc and I exchange a solemn handshake, while the solar hymn and the shaggy hymn are united in a charivaric cacophony. I meet the hateful stare that the other drills into me during the comedy.
Peace is fixed, to be sure, but warfare continues on the sly between the two of us! You know, Leduc, that I’m a Terran, you told me so, and you’re more convinced of it than ever. Nevertheless, as you have no means of proving me guilty, you must keep your mouth shut. I have too many supporters, haven’t I? Even the shaggies, now! It’s just the two of us, hey? And, as you say: “that’ll stir things up a bit.”
“And now,” Leduc said, over the loudspeaker, as if echoing my thought “everyone back to work!”
The sirens howled. Helicopters and volvites, cars, lorries and pedestrians sped towards the factories and steelyards. At 9 a.m., all the machines of Mars Central were humming at full tilt.
It was the Reincarnation service that had suffered most from the shut-down. A thousand recruits brought by the aerial transports were waiting, packed in special holding-cells, for the solenoids to be reactivated.
Pretending—for the benefit of the senior staff surrounding us—to bow very humbly before My Majesty, Leduc proposed that we start our official tour in the Hall. I consented.
What a sad surprise awaited me there, alas! Five-sixths of the postulants for Martianization were maki-mokokos, plus a few baboons, spider-monkeys and tamarins. This simian swarm filled the atmosphere beneath the glass ceiling with the reek of a badly-maintained menagerie, and I hastened past their ranks in a hurry to be done—but at the very back of the room, in front of the solenoids reserved for Terromartians, I saw some bound prisoners. With a painful presentiment, I headed toward them.
“And these,” I asked, faking a detached manner. “Where have they come from?”
The individual in charge—a black gibbon with very long arms—grimaced amiably. “Tahiti, Majesty. Arrived yesterday.”
I forced myself to remain impassive under Leduc’s intent state. Guided by that name, however, I recognized among the wretched human wrecks heaped up between the barriers the deserters of Mont Blanc, the ex-aviators, Champoreau and Zanzi in particular. The latter was clutching his pet cat, Cognac, in his bound arms; the cat was mewling desperately.
“There you are, riff-raff!” sniggered Leduc. “I told you that I’d get my hands on you again, some day. You’ve had a lark, have you? Now it’s time to stir things up a bit for your roll-call.” As I made as if to draw away, he added: “Don’t you want to wait a while, R’rdô, to watch these rogues pass through the solenoid?”
All the Martians of whatever sort, from the largest to the smallest, were very fond of such spectacles; my indifference would have attracted awkward comments, if not used against me by Leduc. So I stayed—and, cursing my weakness and evoking new execrations against the Marrtians, I saw each of the twenty-two Terrans buckled into an oblong basket with iron thread—a sort of creel—and submitted to the psychostatic currents. Their martyrdom was brief, though; the operation as quickly completed. Debilitated by long suffering, they put up hardly any resistance. Their human consciousness having faded away, they awoke again as Martians without further ado.
XII. Watch Out For the Bomb!
The telepathic vision of Raymonde, saved from the volcano, was not repeated, but I still had the precious “apport” that she had left me: the beautiful Andean flower with the scarlet petals.
When evening brought me solitude, after the agitation of my official life, and aggravated my crushing sensation of loneliness into the most frightful distress, I took that desiccated relic from my portfolio and extracted from the thought of my beloved the courage to go on living and to carry my superhuman duty through to the end.
I rejoiced in the stroke of luck that had prevented the Last Men from going to Tahiti, in pursuit of their original intention. She and they had thus escaped the frightful finale of the great hunt. I imagined her, in company with Abbé Romeux and the others, hiding on the slopes of the Cordillera, in some secure shelter from which she would not budge until the deliverance. The thought that she might be discovered there by the volvites sometimes threw me into fits of atrocious despair, during which the sight of a Martian face became intolerable to me. I shut myself up in my room, then and closed
my door to all visitors, from the innocent and child-like maki-mokokos with their naïve presents of pumpkins to my devoted Nazir Bey—whom I could not forgive for having brought me, by way of consolation, a young and pretty Nubian girl.
In these hours of plenary distress, memories of our shared past reawakened with a tortuous vividness. Our days in Marseilles, in Amiens, at Mont Blanc, then our journey to Cairo, our disincarnation, our reign appeared to me as a paradise, uniformly haloed with the blissful glory of our cloudless union through the worst external catastrophes.
The desire to find my beloved again increased immeasurable, sweeping aside all other considerations, and I conceived the craziest plans to rejoin her, which seemed to me to be as simple and easy as things are in the exaltation of delirium or in opium dreams….to steal a volvite, corrupting its crew, who would follow me blindly, then go to join her and wait with her and the Last Men for the Martians to leave…
Immediately, though, I blushed at my cowardice. I remembered my promises: to save the Earth, to prevent the invasion of Venus. I stiffened my resolve. I climbed back from the depths of the abyss towards lucidity. I instructed myself to be grateful for the knowledge that Raymonde was safe, and rejoiced stoically in her absence, which would permit me to play the great game without any supplementary risk to her.
My first serious attempt to intervene dated from the Banquet. It had turned out that I could not succeed in convincing the mystic folly of all the Martians and sending them straight to the Sun; Leduc had blocked my plan. Very well—bbut he was not invincible. My next strike, better planned, would see to him. What difference did it make that he more than suspected my secret Terran identity? It was sufficient that my moral authority over the great majority of the people tied his hands with respect to me. That was a result, and a valuable one.
They days went by, though, and I did not come up with any viable plan. The Cylinders were increasing in number, threatening Venus with invasion; the tunnel was getting deeper, threatening the Earth with destruction!
Destruction! And yet…I had absolute confidence, all too clearly justified by results, in Martian science and industry, but I could not quite persuade myself that the Tunnel-mine would have that frightful efficacy. I summoned my feeble knowledge of algebra and mechanics to my assistance to compare the mass of the Earth with the magnitude of the forces brought into play. Unless one supposed that the cracterite and the endothermic substances of the planetary depths had an inconceivable fracturing force…I doubted it. And when I saw Leduc wild-eyed, trepidant and incoherent, infected by the uncouth soul of Mechanization, I wondered whether that madman might not have overestimated the power of his formulas—I remembered the Tower of Babel—and prayed to God to confound the Titan’s sacrilege.
A new manufacturing process had started: that of the penetrative shell designed to puncture the crust left intact at the bottom of the tunnel, thus letting out the central fire. At the same time, the wide-open sluice-gates would release the water from the reservoirs so as to fill the entire volume of the enormous well, transformed into a mine by the mixture and the instantly explosive combination of the two elements of liquid and fire. A spherical shell—a bomb, rather—200 meters in diameter, slightly less than that of the tunnel, to permit the air compressed by its free fall to escape around its perimeter: a bomb filled with the cracterite that was accumulating in silos, constructed in segments, transported one by one to the head of the Tunnel, where their assembly would take place as soon as the desired depth had been reached and the orifice disencumbered.
The drilling work was nearly finished. Thanks to the molecular disintegration process, a continuous progress of 1100 or 1200 meters per hour had been achieved during the last six months.
“Like cutting through butter!” cried Leduc, enthusiastically, as he followed the movement of the needle registering the regular descent of the drill-bit into the interior of the terrestrial mass.
About two cubic kilometers of volatilized slag fell back every day as impalpable dust over the whole of North Africa and the Mediterranean basin. In the immediate vicinity of the well, the fuliginous layer was several meters deep, transforming that part of the Sahara into a land of soot. Special machines were ceaselessly occupied in sweeping the observation-post and the hangars, and keeping the road clear. On several occasions the power-lines broke, as telegraph cables used to do beneath the weight of frost.
Out of all the work-sites, this was the one that exercised the greatest attraction on me. As a human, I anticipated apprehensively the day when the roaring whirlwind of microscopic material would cease to spring forth from the well, but the disinterested curiosity of the savant that I had once dreamed of being was stimulated by the idea that it would become possible on that day to descend into and explore the fantastic excavation. I thought about the geological discoveries that might be made there, and it irritated me to see the perfect indifference of the Martians in that regard.
Terrestrial science had, until the end, progressed in constant liaison with industrial applications—hand in hand, so to speak. Roadside ditches, quarries, wells and the galleries of mines had furnished their documents to geological science, whose lofty theories had then been applied to the tracking the course of subterranean seams. On Mars, this stage had been skipped. Mechanization had overtaken science and progressed with giant strides along the path of uniquely practical applications, multiplying creations as enormous and powerful as the “dinosaurs” of the primary epoch, but similarly monstrous and lacking a future. The tunnel’s engineers, like everyone else in Mars Central, had never had the slightest desire to study the transected strata by taking samples therefrom. And if they talked about visiting its depths when the perforation was terminated, it was for routine technical reasons, to assure themselves of its verticality, and to see whether the vast hollow pocket encountered five kilometers down—when a serious incident had forced the work to be suspended for three days—presented any risk to the success of the enterprise.
Human explorations of the terrestrial crust had never exceeded a maximum depth of 3000 meters. When the drilling of the Tunnel was halted, it had attained 4000 kilometers, and that simple fact was sufficient to overturn all the notions of classical geology. It had been possible, thanks to preliminary soundings, to drill between two “igneous pockets”—the one that supplied steel to the Camp of the Cylinders and another to the west—and to descend almost as far as to make contact with the true nucleus of “central fire.” Situated at a depth of 4000 kilometers, this occupied about a third of the terrestrial diameter—which is to say, much less than had been estimated by Terran geologists, who were almost all supporters of a uniform and very extended distribution of high-temperature matter. In addition to that cardinal fact, however—foreseen by a tiny minority of 19th and 20th century savants—what paleontological revelations might the tunnel offer me! The origin of life, perhaps: the hypothetical original beings, of which the poor preservation of “Archean” rocks—gneiss and mica-schists—no longer permitted the identification.
For two days after the conclusive arrest of the tornado, energetic ventilation had partly purified the Tunnel’s atmosphere. The buttressed framework designed to suspend the monstrous penetrative shell above the orifice had already been put in place, and I imagined at first that Leduc and I would go down in a skip—but no cable could even sustain its own weight over such a extent, and the exploration had to be undertaken in a helicopter provided with a refrigeration chamber—for the pyrometers measured a temperature of 160 degrees at the bottom of the well.
There were three of us aboard the machine: a single shaggy pilot, myself and my enemy. Throughout the duration of the journey I did not take my finger off the trigger of my blaster, hidden under my cape and pointed at Leduc. One suspicious move, and that would have been the end of him—but he scarcely spared me a thought. The Mechanist ecstasy had gripped him, and he raptly contemplated the absolute verticality of the walls, striped by the illumination of our navigation lights, be
tween which we were descending at a hectic speed, braked from time to time by a few turns of the rotor-blades.
I was bitterly disappointed, for, during these periods of deceleration, I saw that the rim of the formidable tube had been absolutely vitrified by the disintegration process, and that it presented a similar surface everywhere, save for changes of color revealing the layers of slate, basalt, porphyry and granite.
We paused for the first time at five kilometers to inspect the cavern that the Tunnel had encountered on its way. Spared by the vitrification, this lacuna, 100 meters high and not very deep towards the north and east, extended a gulf of darkness southwards and westwards, in which the beams of our searchlights were swallowed up. It was necessary to use the helicopter to explore it.
Suddenly, I had to bite my tongue until it bled in order not to cry out. On the floor of he grotto, harshly lit by the beam of cold light, was a fantastic landscape: an entire forest, complete with leaves; an immobile, petrified forest carried down as a whole into the entrails of the Earth with a “compartment” of former crust, after some cataclysm or other. And between the colorless, quasi-spectral branches, the forms of animals—three males and a female—were grouped around the remains of a fire. Animals? No—humans! Humans of the Tertiary period: the First Men!
“Look at that!” I could not help stammering, gripping Leduc’s arm.
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