The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  A few last helicopters and volvites, bringing back Martians on secondment elsewhere—in Khartoum, Aswan, Alexandria, America and at the Tunnel—are landing on the airfields. The return of these aircraft, whose service is no longer required, provides the shaggy avaiators with the opportunity for a new game. Helicopters and volvites, with no one aboard but with their accelerators full depressed, are launched vertically, their rotor blades whirling and their jets blasting until they are exhausted, forced to execute the most baroque acrobatics before disappearing, finally to crash down beyond the horizon.

  They are not alone in the air, however, and other ascensions provoke the loud enthusiasm of the crowd. Like fairground balloons filled with hydrogen, animals—a cow, a hippopotamus, an elephant, several sheep—rise up, stiff-legged, heading straight for the Sun, indefinitely. To our amazement, various other objects begin to take the same route: tables, bottles, an empty pair of trousers, as if yanked from someone’s feet…

  “Ah, the clever lads!” cried Leduc. “What a good trick!” And he draws us, at the double, through an increasingly dense crowd, to the solar factory.

  In front of the factory door, 200 or 300 shaggies are shouting and jostling one another around a vat half-full of the heliophilic substance, which is protected from the Sun’s rays by a tarpaulin. They are using brushes to smear all the items of furniture and tools that come into their hands, and which other shaggies are hurriedly carrying away into the daylight, where they take flight.

  “Boss! Boss!” yelp the improvised removal men. “It’ll arrive on Venus, won’t it? We’ll get it back?”

  But Leduc shrugs his shoulders. It’s a nice idea to send the “whole bloody shop” by the same route, to conserve it along with the Cylinders, but if they have to recover up there everything that has been fabricated here, it’s hardly worth the trouble of changing planets.

  “No, shaggies! A clean slate! And everything starts again, at someone else’s expense. You wouldn’t want…”

  Howls of fright, horror and surprise cut short his speech. A few paces away from us, a maki-mokoko, which has insinuated itself into the shaggy ranks and has been unwittingly spattered with solar by the dripping brushes, loses its footing, drawn by the luminous attraction.

  “Help! Help!” chirps the unfortunate, kicking out, head down, two meters above the ground. Another maki-mokoko bounds forward and clutches its hands, retained in turn by two colleagues clinging to its legs, arms and tail—but the vertical force of the solar carries all four of the little animals, linked in a howling cluster, upwards, upwards…

  An explosion of Homeric laughter greets their grotesquely desperate gestures, until their final disappearance into he dazzling sunlight—for the Martian is heartless; pity is foreign to his psychology, and the frightful fate of their brothers—asphyxiation, then freezing—evokes no such emotion in the audience.

  “Take the Cylinders—it’s safer!” Leduc sniggers. And we press on, without his giving a thought to the possibility of confiscating the shaggies’ dangerous plaything.

  But the squandering of the cracterite—several tons of which remain in the factory— calls for a semblance of caution, at least. A ration of 100 grams, with the means of making use of it, will be distributed to persons of good character, so that they might blow up a building or two.

  And the explosions multiply, with the noise of falling masonry. Provided that the Cylinders, the Red Palace and the Monument are spared, free license to raze Mars Central to the ground is granted by the Technical Director to the Pilgrims of the Sun. He even encourages them, and equips them. Having arrived at the Well of Core-Iron—or, rather, on the edge of the enormous basin into which it falls back like a fountain of water—we see the shaggy steelworkers striving to capture the incandescent spray in order to transform it into an incendiary sprinkler. Leduc does not hold back, detaching two foremen to organize the work. A platinum tube, detachable extensions, isolating holders…after ten minutes, the apparatus functions as desired, projecting the liquid fire over a radius of 200 meters, at any desired angle. On contact with it, pavements and walls of crystal shatter, metals twist and melt, everything combustible ignites, and the rain of fluid iron, raining down on the smoking debris of the factories it has burned, sprinkles them and encrusts them with a carapace of rapidly-solidified smelter.

  On every side, the triumphant clamor of the destructive folly is mingled with explosions and the sounds of collapse. Acrid smoke is billowing, filing the streets through which we beat a retreat to the Red Palace, where we end up taking refuge, while the methodical destruction is completed before our eyes.

  The overseers watch sympathetically; Leduc and his foremen, overflowing with enthusiasm, applaud the spectacle…

  The pyre of Sardanapalus! The burning of Persepolis by Alexander! The sack of Syracuse or Corinth, of Rome, of 1000 cities! The petrolization of Paris by the Commune! The bombardment and burning of anything at all by anyone at all! The destruction of Mars Central by the Martians! There is the ultimate result of the efforts of intelligence and industry, and of the civilization that hey have engendered!

  At 5 p.m., even the Boss admits that it cannot continue and that it is time to pause for consideration. If we stick to the original plan, which was to embark everyone in the Cylinders two hours before departure, a good half of the Martians will remain on Earth, for they will be exhausted by their orgy long before morning and in no state to get out of bed. Where will they sleep, anyway? The phalansteries are no more than smoking ruins or cracterite-blasted debris. The majority of the streets are already impassable.

  It is decided that all Terromartians, shaggies and maki-mokokos, without exception, will sleep aboard the Cylinders and not emerge again before the time of departure. As a further safety precaution, the nitrous oxide will be administered immediately.

  For the last time, the Monument’s sirens raise their familiar voice; the loudspeakers proclaim the final order to gather at the Camp of the Cylinders, where an immediate embarkation will commence…and I declare that latecomers will no longer be accepted after 9 p.m.

  In one of the helicopters retained at the Red Palace, the general staff in its entirety is transported to its posts in order to supervise the operations.

  Here are the Cylinders—or, rather, the hoods of white canvas protecting their solar cladding from the daylight. Ranged twenty abreast, these enormous tent-like entities are lined up in groups of five for kilometers. There are 2000 of them, and I know their capacity well enough to know that the entirety of the crowd that is beginning to arrive in innumerable processions will be accommodated here without difficulty.

  Leduc and his shaggy chiefs get busy, regulating the assembly of the crews around the cylinders with the aid of loudspeakers. Everyone has been given an order number in advance, and a general rehearsal two days ago ensured the exactitude and precision of the maneuvers. In the glare of the floodlights, which light up in the dusk, Terromartians, shaggies and maki-mokokos—plus the last-minute reincarnates: rats, guinea-pigs and swarms of buzzing insects and scuttling spiders—gradually resolve their confusion and take their designated places…

  Then comes the roll-call of identification-numbers by the crew-commanders and the rallying of stragglers by the sirens—and, as they disappear into the tents, the hurrying footsteps of the Pilgrims of the Sun begin to resound on the metal staircases of Cylinders.

  For a full half-hour that dull rumble resonates incessantly, like subterranean thunder. It is succeeded by the clicking of steel—that’s the covers of the “man-holes” closing and being solidly bolted into their impermeable mountings…

  In the interior of each cylinder, the nitrous oxide gas is released and plunges to Martian into a blissful sleep, from which they will not wake up until they each Venus—they believe…

  Only one cylinder is still open and free of occupants: that of the general staff. Indeed, Leduc and his three habitual acolytes, my overseers and I, are spending the night of Earth. Tomorrow morning, th
e rest will embark in their turn, except for me; I shall remain until the last moment to trigger the fatal mechanisms.

  And, from the helicopter that takes us to the Red Palace, I direct a long look at the control-booth in which, tomorrow, the fate of two planets will be settled.

  III. Go!

  Leaning on the balcony of my apartment, I look out, alone before the starry night that is no longer veiled by the odious glare of Martian floodlights. Vast silence. Down there, behind Mars Central in ruins, the 2000 Cylinders are asleep under their hoods. No other sound than the distant call of a hyena or a jackal and, from time to time, the coarse snoring of Leduc or someone else, audible through an open window on the next floor down.

  Bathed by the mildness of the Egyptian air, I contemplate the night—the Last Night! Tomorrow, the Tunnel and the Bomb, which are awaiting the spark of ignition, will have done their work, and it will all be over! In the roll-call of the worlds, which is deploying the jewels of its constellations before my eyes, the Earth will be absent.

  The Earth subtracted…astronomers, revising the map of the Heavens, will notice that a star, formerly of the first magnitude, has totally disappeared, borne away by some mysterious catastrophe. Ah! If all the worlds in the Universe were moved to pity by the fate of the Earth! If infinity were to mourn the loss of the annihilated planet! But how many of our celestial brothers will do it the honor of wondering what has become of it?

  The Earth…one of the smallest planets in the Solar System. It shines, blue and resplendent, in the sky of Mercury and Venus; it is visible from Mars; it is seen from Jupiter as a morning and evening star; but it is scarcely distinguishable from Saturn, lost in the Sun’s glare as Mercury is for us, not a man in 1000 ever having seen it in his life. And beyond Saturn, from Uranus, Neptune and the Transneptunian planet—the Earth is invisible! Non-existent! Non-existent for the rest of the infinite Universe! Already, for the millions of planets gravitating around the innumerable suns of the Galaxy, and all the other galaxies in space, the Earth might as well not exist, and its disappearance will pass unperceived….

  So what?

  For the last time in my terrestrial life, I contemplate the starry night; I expand my mind: I embrace sidereal space—and a sublime pride brings me upright, thinking: “Man is naught but a reed, but he is a thinking reed…” And I substitute Pascal’s text with this paraphrase: The entire Universe may unite to destroy me, but I know it, and I contain the Universe!

  A sovereign peace, as vast as the Heavens with which I am communing, into which I am already plunged by my eternal thought, no more and no less than I shall be tomorrow—only my ephemeral existence, my avatar in this temporary body, with its joys and its sorrows, will vanish without return…

  And almost unconsciously, my hand slowly takes out the Andean flower, the flower with scarlet petals…and I think of my beloved, over there, on the otherEarth, which separates us…and, on a sublime impulse, I give thanks to the death that will reunite us. Stronger than death, love will fuse our souls together, for ever this time, amid the ruins of the world!

  I contemplate the night. Fortified against petty individual cares, my soul allows itself to be invaded by vast dreams, by grandiose scenes that resuscitate for me the destiny of the Earth. In the same way that a drowning man sees all his life flash before him in a few seconds, the Earth’s past unfolds panoramically before me: I incarnate the supreme consciousness of the planet that is to die.

  I see the Earth’s entire past again…

  First awakening to existence, an isolated vortex of cosmic matter drawn from the originating Sun—and gyrating in its orbit, in the estate of the minuscule Sun, for myriads of centuries. Then, in contact with the cold of Space, the surface gradually losing its heat, condensing the vaporized metals in formidable igneous floods which sketch out a pasty pellicle—a crust on which the waters rain down in their turn, in boiling oceans. In the bosom of primary seas, battered by storms, the rudimentary life of amorphous cells is born—aggregating little by little into complex creatures, rough-hewing flora and fauna: polyps, trilobites, ganoid fish. On the emerging continents, still hot, in the opaque steam-room vapor that the wan eye of an enormous Sun can scarcely penetrate, giant lycopods, calamites, Sigillaria, cycads and arborescent ferns emerge. In the marshy deltas of rivers their trunks pile up, preparing future coal-seams, in which spiders, myriapods and fantastic crustaceans are fossilized, and dragonflies with the wingspan of a crow…

  And the centuries fly by; and on the beds of the seas, the future continents accumulate, a few millimeters per year, their layers of microscopic shellfish and madrepores…and here’s the Secondary period: ammonites as large as chariot wheels, giant reptiles—brontosaurs, iguanodons, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and the monstrous diplodocus, and the pterodactyls inaugurating the conquest of the air for the future birds. And the flora matures, flowers bloom, and the mammals of the Tertiary dethrone the reptiles: here is the paleotherium, the dinotherium, the machairodont, and the mastodons and mammoths—the mammals, extending their sequence as far as its coronation: Man, animal and naked at his emergence, but, Prometheus having stolen the sacred fire of Intelligence and universal Spirit distributed through Nature….

  And civilizations are born, and evolve, from the humble nomad tribes of the Stone Age; fire is discovered, bronze, iron…and here is History: battles, heroism, ignominy, sainthood, science, ignorance, folly, wisdom; empire rise, crumble, replace one another: Chaldea, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Greece…and Rome, opening to a conquered world the hope of a peaceful evolution; and Christianity, undermining the gods of Olympus; and the inundation of Barbarism—the Middle Ages, the Eastern empire, the Arabs, and the West recovering the lost Tradition: Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany…and the Reformation; the 18th century, the new spirit of Revolution…the 19th and the 20th: Science triumphant, Industry progressing with giant strides, at an ever-accelerating, vertiginous pace—every advance of Intelligence monopolized by the Instincts and put in the service of Darkness—until the advent of interplanetary communication and the Catastrophe…

  What would have happened, though, if Man had remained master of his planet? If he had followed the course of his evolution, free of Martian invaders? Would he have ended up by casting off atavistic retentions, to elevate himself to a state of superhumanity, more intelligent than instinctive? Or was he, having reached the terminus of his destiny, condemned to perish in one fashion or another, like any over-specialized species?

  Old Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” is, however, parting the veils of the night. The stars are dissolving in the expanding radiance of the Egyptian azure. In the east, Venus, a celestial diamond twinkling in the gathering light, is drowned by the fires of the Sun, rising—for the last time—on the Earth.

  “Out of bed in there—get a move on!” Leduc shouts, jovially, knocking on the doors of the chiefs.

  And the Red Palace fills with the sounds of brutal laughter; overseers and shaggies move from one room to another and, carried through the open windows, their voices echo in the distance on the Esplanade.

  “A nice day for a trip!” jokes one.

  “What about him—is he staying behind? Why aren’t we taking him with us?” inquires Nazir Bey, pointing to the Magus of the Shell on top of the Monument, who is still broken down, his finger pointing to the zenith.

  “The shell might come in handy, at any rate!”

  “Forget these old things,” Leduc puts in. “We’ll do better on Venus!”

  But this good humor is not sustained. The copious breakfast that they extract from cans of preserves and wash down with a flood of champagne weighs the Martians down. From 9 p.m. on, they talk about going to the Cylinders to cool down, for the heat is increasing here, and the distribution of refrigerant liquid has stopped since the destruction of the factory.

  For his part, Leduc is afraid of missing the hour of departure; he consults his chronometer every few minutes.

  I am on tenterhooks; what if they
linger until the last minute, wanting to watch the manipulation of the switches? But I hide my impatience.

  At 9:20 p.m., they decide.

  “I could gladly go to sleep,” declares Nazir Bey.

  “With nitrous oxide,” stresses another.

  “That would be great!” hazards a third.

  “Since there’s nothing more to do here…” The Technical Director concludes.

  During the entire flight aboard the helicopter, though, I feel his gaze weighing, intolerably upon the back of my neck.

  I accompany them as far as the gangway that leads to the cylinder’s “man-hole.” One after the other, they bow to me and disappear into the gaping orifice.

  “Pat attention, eh, R’rdô!” says Leduc, the last to remain. “No slip-up in the operation! See you later!”

  He disappears in his turn, but without my hearing his footsteps on the iron staircase. He’s probably watching me from a distance….

  With an affected insouciance, I emerge from under the hood—which is reminiscent of a fairground circus—and head for the control-booth without looking back.

  It is a small glass shelter, as big as an eel-fisher’s hut, to the north-east of the plain of the Cylinders, overlooking the immense camp and the multitude of hoods shading the solarized domes. But I don’t linger over that all-too-familiar spectacle. Here, inside, is the control-panel, which will only be used once: a thick crystal plate in which the switches are embedded. There are three of them. The one on the left—number three—delivers current to the dynamos activating the sluice-gates. The middle one—number two—lights the fuse that will precipitate the Bomb. The one on the right—number one—simultaneously snatches away the tarpaulins and sets the Cylinders in flight.

  My resolution is unbreakable. In five minutes—not in two hours, as would be required to send the cylinders to Venus—I shall close switch number one. If, however, I can avoid that activation bringing the two others into play….