The Martian Epic
Page 43
A great blast of hope, like the sounding of a clarion call, went through me and brought me to my feet. It was over, this time. Nothing more to dread for the Earth. The explosion of the bomb, if it were to happen some day, would only damage the top of the tunnel and its surroundings, a corner of Africa, even—but the rest of the world was safe.
My adventure left me with a considerable feeling of humiliation, though. Had I really seen Satan? Had the spirit of Evil become incarnate once more before me, as the anthropomorphic and theriomorphic gods once had in Classical times? But it was strongly reminiscent of a crisis of madness, especially if it really had been me who triggered the Bomb’s fall!
Without daring to verify the condition of the conductive wires, I clung to the more reassuring hypothesis that the mechanism had been activated automatically, after a long delay, and that I had had a dream.44
At any rate, I was free of the spell by means of which the memory of the Martians had held me captive. My brain had recovered its lucidity and its vigor. With a shrug of the shoulders I rejected the poisoned sophistry that the Evil One had released into me. The idea of the suspended Bomb and the final annihilation of the Earth would have haunted the minds of men and paralyzed their efforts of recivilization? Not at all! They would have got used to it and would soon have given it no further thought. Does the certainty of death, inevitable for everyone, prevent one from living? History is there to show us that civilizations are equally ephemeral, but that each of them exerts itself nevertheless to make progress towards the apogee of perfection that does not long precede decadence and death.
While reasoning thus, I headed for the helicopter, which the nocturnal surge had lifted from the airfield and carried to the top of the dunes—without serious damage, fortunately. Darting a last glance toward the head of the Tunnel, I set a course for Alexandria, where I counted on finding fuel and food in the Martian establishments that the shaggies had not thought of destroying before going back to Mars Central.
To rejoin my beloved, to find the colony of the Last Men—that was, indeed, the idea blossoming within me, since I had overcome the quasi-delirious crisis of nervous exhaustion. Raymonde, my friends from Mont Blanc… I visualized them, hiding in some Andean crevasse, watching the sky in fear of volvites. I imagined their anxious anticipation, and their joy when they saw my liberating helicopter hovering above them. How would they know it was me, though? I had to make a flag.
I made one as soon as I arrived in Alexandria, with strips of blue, white and red cloth, which I stitched together unskillfully: the old flag of France would preside over the new destiny of the Earth.
As I had anticipated, the warehouses were intact, and I was able to replenish my food supplies, not without having to fight a veritable battle with blaster shots against the wild dogs and jackals that had already invaded them.
An hour later, with the food-stores well stocked and the tanks full, I took off again, determined to cross the distance that separated me from Quito in a single stage. Ten thousand kilometers, at a speed of 250 kph an hour, if all went well, would be a matter of 40 hours…
At high altitude, at top speed. The yellow desert, and yet more desert, speckled with rare green oases; to the north the distant crests of the Atlas Mountains. The noise of the machine kept me company; by their regularity, the throb of the turbines and rotor-blades, shearing the layers of air, hold my attention in the breathing-spaces between maneuvers. I forgot he absolute solitude of the world.
The Sun went down, directly in front of me, over the sea, as I passed the breakers of the African coast.
Then came the twilight, and the night; the Moon rose, filling the sky with its serenity, frosting the waves with silver gleams. Favored by an east wind, the helicopter makes progress with admirable regularity. An occasional glance at the compass and the altimeter, a twitch of the thumb on the levers—I had abundant leisure to take a light snack, and to indulge myself, during the hours of that nocturnal flight, in long reveries, lost between the majestic serenity of the ocean and that of the somber azure, its stars rarefied by the moonlight.
The next day’s journey was more taxing. Easy as it was to maneuver the helicopter in the fine weather, it exacted a nervous tension, exhausting at length. The uninterrupted circle of the marine horizon exercised a dolorous fascination upon me. I ended up falling into a sort of somnambulistic daze, punctuated by total “absences,” from which I awoke once or twice a few meters above the waves. I resigned myself, therefore, to landing that evening on the coast of Venezuela, in order to grant myself a little sleep.
It was impossible for me to sleep, though; in spite of the searchlights and navigation-lights, a horde of wild beasts besieged me with a concert of howls. At midnight, I judged that I was sufficiently rested to go on, by moonlight.
In truth, I don’t know what prodigy effected my crossing of the South American continent; the 12 hours that went by before I arrived in sight of he Cordillera were, for me, more like the memory of a dream than an actual journey. I recall, to begin with, the somber procession of the equatorial jungle, cut here and there by pale and gleaming rivers, but after that, nothing but the sensation of trying to stay awake at the controls…then the snows of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, shining against the sky…a detour northwards…and I started as if in response to an electric shock, and released a delirious cry of joy, when I discovered—overlooking the flat roofs, monuments and gardens of deserted Quito—a flag fluttering on the cupola of the observatory: the same French colors that I had deployed at the rear of he helicopter.
I sounded the siren as I descended. Some twenty people were moving on the ground, raising their arms; the sound of their voices reached me…
Eyes obscured by emotion, I set down. The cockpit door opened…and I found myself being hugged to Raymonde’s bosom, covered in kisses, assailed by the anxious questions of the Last Men, who were pressing around us, with Abbé Romeux and Nibot at their head.
I had to tell the story of the Martians’ departure—the reasons I had for believing that the Cylinders were on their way to the Sun and that the Earth was permanently liberated. I abstained, however, from making any mention of the Tunnel and the Bomb. There would be time, later, to open up to the Abbé and make my confession regarding my disturbing Satanic encounter.
The news of the Martian exodus was welcomed with all the joy imaginable. It was, however, not unexpected; if I found my friends in Quito, it was thanks to the suspicion of it that they had for a week. After their escape from the crater, in fact, they had hidden in a ravine on the north flank of Cotopaxi, whose eruption was limited to a placid lava-flow. Their supplies of the Nutriment had permitted them to spend several months there without venturing out and running the risk of being spotted by the daily volvites and helicopters. One day, they had stopped seeing them. The proximity of the Jovian opposition, and what they knew of the Martians’ projects, led them suppose that the latter had quit the Earth, and they had been sufficiently emboldened to go to Quito, there to install themselves in the buildings of the Observatory, to the great satisfaction of the Abbé.
That evening, while the Last Men were celebrating, now without constraint, in the open air on the illuminated terrace, their certain and conclusive deliverance, I wandered through the gardens embalmed with tropical perfumes with my sweet Raymonde leaning tenderly on my shoulder. I took the Andean flower from my portfolio, and presented it to her without saying anything. She released a cry of astonishment, for she had picked it after the flight from the crater, before falling asleep, exhausted but thinking about me. And it was marvelously heart-warming for both of us, when I told her about my vision, to understand the extent to which our union was perfect and intimate, since it had somehow transcended the distance! But the anguish and sadness of the separation had made us pay too dear for that proof, of which our true love had no need. Whatever happened now, we hoped with all our hearts never to be separated again and to confront the future that awaited us with the Last Men together.
Where shall we establish our colony, the future center of human expansion? Here or in Europe? The youngest and most adventurous among us are allowing themselves to be seduced by the beauty of the tropical sky, but the majority—which includes me, Raymonde and the Abbé—tend towards the second hypothesis. The charms of the gardens of Quito cannot make us forget the country of our birth. There is fine weather there too…
The Martians? We have just had news of them…for the last time. This morning—the 28th day after their departure—the Abbé, as is his habit, was making an observation of the Sun with the large telescope when he suddenly saw an exceedingly brilliant “flare” light up, in the very center of a sunspot: a phenomenon contrary to all the laws of astrophysics, and of which the only possible explanation is the arrival of an enormous bolide, or a group of bolides, in the inferior layers of the photosphere. The flare only lasted for a few seconds, but the Abbé remains convinced, as we all do, that he has just witnessed the sudden and simultaneous volatilization of 2000 Cylinders, with their cargo of Terromartians, shaggies and maki-mokokos, who have finally reached the destination of their pilgrimage: the solar paradise!
THE END
Notes
1 Varlet’s own first name was Léon and the pun linking “Varlet” to “Rudeaux” is obvious in both French and English.
2 TSF stands for “télégraphie sans fil” [wireless telegraphy]. As the equivalent English acronym is not used, it seemed sensible to leave the French formula in place.
3 This thesis regarding the necessary similarity of life-forms on the various planets of the solar system was proposed by Christian Huygens in Kosmotheoros (1698); Joncquel and Varlet probably had read the summary of that text in Camille Flammarion’s Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1864; revised ed. 1905).
4 Varlet inserts a footnote here: “The optical exchange of signals did, in fact, become precarious during Jupiter’s conjunctions, which is to say, when the orbits of Jupiter and Earth placed them on opposite sides of the Sun, as much by virtue of the distance involved—six times greater than that at opposition, when the Sun, the Earth and Jupiter were aligned—as by virtue of the radiance of the central star. TSF apparatus had therefore been established by Jupiter, according to designs transmitted to it by Earth, but the apparatus did not function in the correct manner before the second week of the Martian torpedoes.
5 As will become apparent, Varlet’s hypothetical rotatifs [helicopters] have two propulsion systems, the principal rotor blades supplying vertical lift while other “propulsive engines” provide horizontal momentum. At least some of these other engines have propellers, like the aircraft with which Joncquel and Varlet were familiar, but these more advanced types might be more akin to jet engines.
6 Marseilles was founded as a colony by migrants from the Greek state of Phocis, when it was then known as Massilia, and later as Lacydon. Lutèce was an ancient alternative name for Paris, which is a “Sequanian city” by virtue of being situated on the Seine, once also known as the Sequanie.
7 This phrase, or its French equivalent, “le génie de l’espèce,” was actually employed by several 19th century philosophers to means slightly different things. Varlet is probably referring to Henri Bergson, but Bergson had adopted the phrase from its German equivalent, popularized by Arthur Schopenhauer and also used extensively by Friedrich Nietzsche.
8 The expression the mariner actually uses here is coïonnés, one of several argot terms peppering this passage, which could be literally translated as “fucked;” as the use of such terms seems to be intended to contrive a compromise between vulgarity and euphemism, I have exercised a certain restraint in translation.
9 Varlet inserts a footnote on behalf of the narrator: “I reproduce this document from a duplicated sheet that was posted and distributed to the public; its text differs slightly from the one pronounced on the promenade on that memorable afternoon.”
10 There is no English equivalent of this French adaptation from Arabic, which refers to women of easy virtue.
11 A Grand-Soir [Great Eve] is a day of revolutionary upheaval, when an old order comes crashing down and anything seems possible; the phrase was beloved by the French Marxists and Anarchists of Varlet’s day, who had the revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 to look back on—even though none of them had really lived up to that billing—but it has no English equivalent because the English never went in for that sort of thing.
12 This kind of steering-mechanism would be impractical, because the distance between Mars and Earth, even at opposition, requires several minutes for information to be transmitted back and forth at the speed of light, making reactive adjustments difficult. As the reader will see, Varlet consistently has difficulty in accommodating the limiting velocity of light within his extrapolations, although he is aware of some of its implications.
13 This is one of several phrases in the quoted passage for which Varlet offers his own tentative English translations, most of which I have modified slightly into more likely forms.
14 This title refers to an ancient term for Avignon; the Comtat in question was a feature of the days when the papacy was divided, one of the two rivals being established in that city.
15 I have reproduced these phrases exactly as Varlet renders them; he includes a footnote explaining that the Yiddish words translate as “Old fool! What a load of rubbish!”
16 Varlet inserts a footnote on behalf of his narrator: “Ladislas Wronsky thus subordinated moral perfection to the search for Truth—the Saint to the Savant. With regard to the Artist, he had nothing to say. I had some trouble getting him to admit that the Artist also plays a preponderant role and that he is as Gifted with Intuition as the Savant is with Intelligence.”
17 The title of this chapter, “A la recherche des hommes,” is a deliberate echo of Proust’s carefully multilayered “A la recherche du temps perdu,” which is notoriously difficult to render into English; I have adopted the simplest and most literal translation.
18 Varlet actually refers to “the University of Eton” but I have corrected the egregious error.
19 An otary (otarie in French) is an eared seal, or sea-lion. The names in this passage have a familiar ring to them nowadays, but Georges Simenon had yet to invent his Maigret in 1920 and the alleged serial-killer Henri Landru, who used “lonely hearts” ads to attract his female victims, had not yet been brought to trial for murder when Varlet wrote this passage. Landru had, however, been arrested in 1919, and the name might well have rung a bell with some of Varlet’s readers even before the cause célèbre generated by the murder trial—which began on November 7, 1921—made the name notorious.
20 Some of the names Varlet uses harbor insulting double meanings, usually lightly veiled; these two are brutal in their simplicity. A potard is a dispensing chemist; a bahut is an item of kitchen furniture, the Breton equivalent of a Welsh dresser.
21 Varlet inserts a footnote on behalf of his narrator: “We were told a few hours later that we had escaped from the famous hypnotist Landru, who had been imprisoned six months earlier in the departmental Asylum at Dury. After the directors had fled, during the revolutionary panic, he had hypnotized the warders, then the patients and since then had maintained control of the Asylum, along with his accomplices, two former interns and an English nurse, thanks to the protection afforded him by the peasants of the neighbourhood, who were gratefully amazed the Pantagruelian feasts that he committed to their memories every time they brought him
their modest tributes of rabbits, chickens, butter, and so on. A fine example of the general moral laxity in that era!” Splitting the skulls of innocent dupes with spades and mowing them down with helicopter blades—not to mention making no attempt whatsoever to liberate them from their slavery—evidently does not count, in the narrator’s opinion, as further evidence of “moral laxity,” although the reader might take a different view.
22 Like TSF, this is a formula commonly used in France, but not in England, even though the English equivalent (Post, Telephone and Telegraph) would be identical.
23 The “Bal des Quat’z’arts,” usually further abbreviated as “4-z’arts,” was a carnivalesque festival held annually by the students of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, so-called because it brought together students of Architecture, Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. It was first held in 1893 (at the Moulin- Rouge) and continued until 1966.
24 The effect nowadays known as the Greenhouse Effect, to which reference is made here, had first been identified by Fourier in the early 18th century and had been further popularized in the 1890s by Svante Arrhenius; it is not surprising that Varlet concludes (wrongly) that the effect of expelling vast quantities dust and smoke into the atmosphere would be to produce a mild winter, by virtue of retaining more solar heat.
25 Like several of Varlet’s casually-dropped names, these are minimally adapted from those of real individuals: Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, and the famous medium Eusapia Palladino.
26 Ripolin was a 19th century brand of paint, which became sufficiently famous for its name to be preserved as a trivial noun.
27 Had Varlet showed this passage to the real Abbé Moreux rather than delegating its explanation to the fictitious Abbé Romeux, the astronomer would have been able to explain to him why this image is doubly ridiculous. It reproduces what was to become a classic erroneous cliché of science fiction in assuming that a radiation beam would be visible in a vacuum from an angle. Searchlight beams show up in the atmosphere when seen side-on because of light deflected by air molecules; in space such beams could not be seen at an angle. Moreux would also have pointed out that observers on Earth could not see the weapon fire until photons conveying that information reached Earth, which would have to travel at the same pace as the beam itself; the arrival of that information on Earth would be followed almost immediately by evidence of the impact, so observers on Earth would not be able to watch the beam’s “wave-front” making the kind of slow progress here described.