The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

  And I examine the network of wires that is interwoven behind the control-panel, trying to trace the connections…

  A slight scrape of a shoe on the doorstep…

  I turn round…

  Leduc!

  He does not say anything. He comes towards me, a diabolical fixed smile on his lips. The barrel of his blaster protrudes from the pocket in which his right hand is buried.

  “Ha ha! Are we taking a little lesson in applied electricity, R’rdô?”

  But I don’t wait for the murderous gesture that will inevitably follow this sarcastic remark. I have already leapt forward, a fraction of a second ahead of him. I have grabbed his throat in both hands, while my left leg squeezes his right side and paralyzes his hand. His recoil movement makes me lose my balance; I drag him down with me—with him underneath, fortunately. And I squeeze that throat, squeeze it frenetically; the larynx cracks in my clenched fingers. The nails of his left hand dig into my wrist. My leg is trapped underneath him, and I feel him spring back like an elastic mattress. He launches kicks in every direction, and drags me little by little…towards the control panel!

  Taking advantage of the fact that I have momentarily turned my head, he bites my ear. His teeth dig in. I struggle; I increase the force of my strangling grip. He lets go with a stifled roar. But I hear—horror!—the click of a switch depressed by his heel! Which one? My strength increases in my fists; in a sudden rage, I close my jaws on his nose, which happens to be within range, and I hold on hard with my teeth and my fists, indefinitely—with a mad desire to know which switch…

  His groans grow feebler; his fingernails relax; the muscles of his body soften; one more twitch, a death-rattle…

  It’s over. His face scarlet, his eyes bulging, his tongue protruding and black, his limbs limp, he is no longer moving. He’s dead. No matter; I take the blaster from his pocket and discharge it at his skull, which explodes with an atrocious odor of burned meat…

  The control-panel! The Bomb switch is untouched! It’s the one operating the sluice-gates that Leduc had activated! They’re not closed. And, trembling with a hope that I am powerless to stem, I drive home the switch operating the hoods with all my strength. 9:45 p.m.! More than an hour and a half too soon! The Sun is a certainty!

  By way of reaction, a nervous weakness overtakes me. I totter, dizzily, and am forced to lie down on the floor for a few minutes, side by side with the corpse, my head hidden in my folded arm, breathless, shaken by brief spasms that resemble sobs.

  Blood runs freely from my torn ear and my lacerated wrist. Little by little, the buzzing of my arteries eases. I get hold of myself again on hearing a sound—the electric ventilator? Some clockwork mechanism?—which is coming from under the opaline floor-tiles. What is it? Oh yes, the delay-mechanism…the hoods…the sluice-gates…

  I get up. I make an effort to disengage the contacts of switch number three. In vain-the current is already flowing. I abandon it. I’m afraid of activating number two. There’s nothing more for me to do but wait.

  Invaded by an icy cold, despite the stuffiness of this hothouse, irradiated by a Sun more than half-way to its zenith, I wait, I wait….

  Distraught, I watch the white army of tents linedup indefinitely beneath the blue sky, in the ochreous frame of the naked desert.

  Suddenly, the powerful throbbing of dynamos fills the Camp, and with a flapping of canvas like the unleashing of a great salvo of gunfire, with a dry clicking of metallic armatures, all together, the 2000 white hoods of the Camp of the Titans open up, falling to the ground—and like some magic trick, the 2000 visible nose-cones, fabulous sugar-loaves each painted “cadmium orange”—the propulsive bed of solar—and each surrounded by its sparkling bed of reflective mirrors…

  I throw myself outside.

  A vibration begins, a sonorous snore, as if an enormous organ were beginning to play a wild and prodigious tune, crescendo and rinforzando—the solar motivated by contact with the light. The Cylinders shudder, shiver, rise up from their holes simultaneously, exposing their entire height—a titanic array of blue-and-yellow skittles—and, suspended, freed from weight, leave the ground, climb, accelerate, on a note that is increasingly powerful and sharp, intolerable—a concert of 100,000 locomotives—and fly away, sparkling bolides amid the azure, in chorus….a tightly-knit swarm of glittering insects…finally to disappear, resorbed into the dazzling sunlight.

  IV. The Night of Satan

  The only movement I made in the course of the following two hours was to withdraw into the shadow of the control-booth. I waited, running my gaze over the empty mirror-sided ditches, and searching the sky instinctively for the Cylinders, as if they might return. Around me, an infinite silence. In the control-booth, flies were buzzing around the corpse. And I waited, my stomach churning with an animal anguish, waited for he explosion of the Bomb and the Tunnel—the annihilation of the Earth…

  But the mechanisms had been stopped, their role accomplished: hoods removed, sluice-gates opened. That was all. The Bomb remained suspended above the flooded Tunnel, intact. A frightful threat for the future…

  The future was a matter of indifference to me, though. While the understanding grew, little by little, that I was safe, the agonizing construction in my gut eased, and I was able to reflect.

  The Martians gone, en route to the Sun; Venus saved; the Earth saved—I had yet to understand it fully; I did not feel any joy in the unexpected success, surpassing all my hopes. An enormous lassitude and an incomprehensible discouragement were weighing me down, at the idea that I was the only living human being on this side of the globe. To rejoin my beloved, out there, almost at the Antipodes, seemed to me to be a task beyond my compass…and the future of humankind to reorganize!

  That crisis of mortal fatigue and fearful solitude revealed a part of my personality of which I had succeeded in remaining ignorant until then. I plunged into the secret abysses of my consciousness with horrified curiosity…

  The Martians! Their collective atmosphere, coarse and odious, to which I had grown accustomed, was lacking! Something in me almost regretted not having gone with them. A sort of occult martianization, acquired by osmosis, had bound me to them! I regretted being, by definition, their enemy, instead of participating frankly in their power. Ah! Why was it that duty had force me to oppose their projects, to send them directly to the Sun, to obliterate the entire future of their civilization? It differed from terrestrial civilization? Even so, they too incarnated the universal Spirit! The esoteric ideal of their Magi was worth as much as the most noble thoughts of humankind! And as for the aspirations of the masses, the “well-being” pursued by us was clearly inferior to Martian “salvation”—and even to the frenzy for Mechanization, mad but disinterested!

  With a burst of contrived laughter, I brought the examination of my conscience to an abrupt halt. Come on! I must be going mad, indulging myself in tranquil philosophizing when the situation required all my mental and physical energy—all that remained to me, after the exhausting emotions of recent days. A fit of nervous fatigue: nothing astonishing in being a little delirious.

  Let’s see—what is to be done? Depart for America? Yes, that’s understood. But the Bomb? Is it solidly set in place above its hole? Shouldn’t it be checked first? With due precautions, I ought to be able to cut the wires of the detonator, to take out the cartridge that threatens the security of the site. There would be nothing more to dread for the future of the Earth and humankind than the slow and gradual corrosion of rust…and by then, perhaps the cracterite will have been subject to the molecular disintegration common to all the unstable explosive derivatives of nitrogen. Or, better still, if all goes well, if the Last Men can reorganize themselves, the Bomb will have been disarmed and its charge rendered harmless.

  The general staff’s helicopter is here, on the Cylinders’ airfield, 100 paces from the control-booth. The tanks are full. I know how to fly it. En route!

  The familiar journey over the melancholy desert
sparsely strewn with thorny bushes—cacti, aloes, nopals, Indian figs—seems inordinately long this time, for I have always undertaken it in a volvite. The Sun is brushing the horizon in front of me; this formidable day is about to end when I catch sight of the Tunnel. The immense reservoirs to the north, at the limit of vision, are empty; a miry crust of salt covers their bed. In the middle of the amphitheater of vitrified dunes, the Bomb, suspended from its double scaffold of steel, hangs over a circular lake 250 meters in diameter, whose waters are rippling placidly in a southern breeze, the wavelets tinted blood-red by the sunset.

  Hovering, I hesitate to set down. An obscure fear holds me back, as if the danger were worse here, close to the center of the explosion—which would, however, destroy the whole Earth, if Leduc’s calculations are correct.

  I overcome this instinctive weakness. I get down on to the airfield, beside the observation-post.

  Despite the falling dusk, the gusts of the sirocco render the atmosphere stifling. My muscles are tense, as if stretched to breaking-point, and my brain is seething. I sit down on the spot where I disembarked, on sand as warm as a beast’s belly.

  Beneath the darkening sky, etched in black upon the last glimmers of daylight, the enormous metal balloon attracts my gaze obsessively. What have I come to do here? I no longer know. A sticky torpor—which is not sleep—paralyzes my thoughts, grips me in a sort of lucid somnambulism. A world of ideas and memories stirs within me, but below the threshold of my consciousness; I only perceive them mentally as if, so to speak, from the corner of my eye. What monopolizes my attention is the prodigious convexity of that shiny globe, as stout as a telescopic planet—over which the Moon, which is rising behind me, imposes a hypnotic touch of light…

  Suddenly, my hair stands on end. Leduc! Back there, in the Control-Booth of the Cylinders! What if he were not dead? What if he recovered consciousness? What if the supreme convulsion of his limbs were to strike the switch?

  With a weary effort, I dispel the crazy imagination. He is definitely dead: his tongue is hanging out upon his beard, black and dribbling, and bluebottles are buzzing in his mouth.

  But what about wild animals? If a jackal, for example, or a hyena got into the control-booth, and put its paw…

  An icy chill, like the other, grips my guts. My throat is contracted, my respiration stertorous, my skull empty—and a sharp pain radiates around the back of my neck, as if someone has driven a nail into it.

  A tragic atmosphere of imminent catastrophe. Ah! Who is that in front of me? The Magus? Egregore XIII? Those are certainly his pupils, vertical, like a cat’s, but his phosphorescent horns are curved backwards, he is naked and hairy, and he is slowly stroking his thighs with his long monkey-tail…and his feet—goat’s hooves! It’s Satan! The classical Satan of witches and the Sabbat! But the longer I look at him, the more his features are modified, like “melting views,” and I recognize, successively, Leduc, Schlemihl, Landru, Nazir Bey, all the Terromartians, one after the other, and the shaggies, and the maki-mokokos…

  And while I attempt, distractedly, to seize these fugitive resemblances, to stop them in their flight, as if my life depended on it—they multiply and change. It is an accelerated exfoliation of 1000 superimposed masks. The voice of Satan-Fregoli 42 ridicules me, shriller than the cry of a seagull.

  “Ha ha! You want to save humankind, little man, to contrive a philanthropy? Just a minute! I let you act with regard to the Cylinders, which will procure me a nice collection of souls, roasted to a turn—but that’s enough. Parenthetically, I admire your ingenuity. Let’s see—you seriously believe that your planet will profit greatly from having been delivered form the Martians, as you put it, in order that it can continue to waltz around its orbit, still carting around the animated mildew that you call civilized humanity? But you wretched little fellows have no need of Martians to devour one another—you carry that in yourselves. You’re worse than Martians in the way you treat one another. Homo homini Martianus! 43 One knows one’s classics! And it’s unnecessary to add that the Martian in everyone is me. I pull the strings, and you dance, little chaps. There’s not one of your inventions that I don’t know how to use for he good cause of your fraternity, my charming Cains! Not one! The most moral, the most sacred, those which you judge the most appropriate to safeguard peace and order on your mud-pill. Religion, damn it, the cult of the Other, of my successful colleague—God, to let the name slip—I’ve been able to make the prettiest pretext for squabbling…think of all the little chaps that other little chaps have killed, in the name of their God! From the gentle Hebrews running their sword-blades through all the enemies of Jehovah to the most modern battles, in which each side claims the All-Highest for itself, by way of the persecutions, crusades, inquisitions, terrors and religious wars of cults of every sort…God’s will! Ha ha ha! Do you think so? It’s ME who wills it! And you all march, all together, with such joy, dear little insects, Cains!”

  As he spoke, my sinister interlocutor seemed to inflate, to grow. He looked down on me, his threatening form looming over me, and I was obliged to tilt my head back to see his face, with its inexhaustibly renewed features, standing out, lit by the Moon, against the convexity of the Bomb. My eyes were riveted to his, and in the bewilderment of my empty brain, his words awoke mighty echoes.

  He continued: “But I’m straying from the point. I’m rambling. Every day, I become a little bit more aware of growing old. Let’s get back to your plan to prevent this cracterite bonbon from going off. I’ll tell you quite frankly that you can’t, that you shouldn’t, that you won’t do anything at all…on the contrary!

  “Does that astonish you? I’ll explain.

  “You must know that the totality of existing things is formed by the combinations of a number of atoms, which is very large, but limited—if not, everything would be full, wouldn’t it? Now time, intrinsically, is not limited. It is infinite in both directions, past as well as future. Thus, the combinations of atoms that result in the present state of the universe have already had the time to repeat themselves and reproduce themselves, in exactly the same fashion. Everything has already existed in its present form; the same events have already taken place, in the same order.

  “This series of identical repetitions is what one little chap, 24 centuries ago, called, in Greek, the Eternal Return…

  “If I remind you of these notions of elementary philosophy, it’s not to make a show of erudition; it’s to come to this: that you, little chap, have already been in a situation identical to the present one, and that you have already carried out the actions that you will inevitably carry out again.

  “You are sometimes astonished that certain little chaps are capable of predicting the future? Nothing more simple, every future also being the past: a past that, in return for a few formalities of red ink and parchment—a fountain-pen and vulgar paper, not even watermarked, is adequate nowadays—I shall be pleased to reveal to you…

  “This is what you did…the other time—it was a few billion centuries ago. Listen carefully:

  “When you found yourself, as now, in the presence of the Bomb, you understood how vain it would be to rejoin your colleagues on the other side of the world, to reorganize with them a civilization that would be perfectly derisory, since it would be beset by the continual apprehension that the suspended Bomb, after a few years, would annihilate it by virtue of its fall and subsequent explosion. You judged these efforts superfluous, for you as for the others, and you preferred to finish it immediately.

  “How? That’s child’s play.

  “See those two wires coming out of the observation-post and leading to the detonator on the scaffold. It’s enough to scrape the insulation from each wire and bring the denuded portions into contact with one another. The current from the accumulators will flow immediately, causing a spark in the detonator, which will ignite the explosive, which will break the scaffold, which will release the Bomb—which will explode, and so on…

  “Yes, that’s what
you did, what you must do, what you will do, little chap…

  “Give me your hands; I’ll guide them.”

  Then, fascinated by the eyes of the Satan-Fregoli, which were sparkling in a face as broad as the Bomb, towards which my eyes were raised, with my head tilted back, as if I were floating in an ocean of infernal ecstasy, agonized by horror, I submitted to the inevitable necessity. My will no longer existed. Drawn by an external and all-powerful force, my hands accomplished the actions indicated.

  A spark sprang from the wires. I saw a luminous puff of smoke on the left arm of the scaffold, which broke off with a dry explosion…

  In the place of the vanished Satan, I saw the Bomb detach itself and plunge into the water with a cataclysmic splash, which momentarily gave the Tunnel, in the moonlight, the appearance of a fantastic crystalline lace collar…abruptly overflowing as the monstrous balloon immediately sank. In a flash, I imagined its mad descent and the shock of the annihilating impact at the bottom.

  A circular jet leapt up from the well: a foamy surge that reached me, bowled me over and carried me away, suffocating and blinded, in its tumultuous turbulence, all the way to the top of the vitrified dunes—where I lost consciousness.

  V. The Hope of Humankind

  When I came to, it was broad daylight. I was lying on my left side, and the Sun was roasting my wounded ear painfully. Two words were dancing in my clouded head like a chorus: “Little chaps…Little chaps…” And I suddenly remembered: the night, the sirocco, the fantastic apparition of Satan-Fregoli, his speech, my fatal action…

  I opened my eyes with a start of alarm.

  In the middle of the artificial lake, a metal convexity, the summit of a submerged dome, was bobbing on the glistening surface: the Bomb! It had not exploded, nor even reached the bottom of the shaft. Placidly buoyed up, it was floating, sustained by its charge of cracterite, less dense than water!