The Navigators of Space Page 20

  Targ, Arva and Mano shuddered; they remained momentarily taciturn, and then the quadragenarian spoke again: “The zones vary with an extreme slowness. For two hundred years the strongest shocks have occurred deep in the desert; their repercussions haven’t altered the springs. Redlands, Devastation and Occidental are the only ones close to the dangerous regions…”

  He studied Arva with a gentle admiration, in which the flower of love was growing. Widowed three years before, he was suffering pangs of loneliness. In spite of the rebellion of his strength and affection; he had resigned himself to it—marriages and births were regulated by rigid laws—but several weeks before, the Council of Fifteen had inscribed Mano’s name among those who might remake a family, and the image of Arva had undergone a metamorphosis in Mano’s soul, the obscure legend being illuminated once again.

  “Let’s mingle hope with our anxieties!” he exclaimed. “Even in the marvelous Epochs of Water, wasn’t every man’s death the end of the world for him? Those who now live on the Earth run fewer risks, individually, than our forefathers of the Radioactive Era!”

  He spoke fervently, for he had always rejected the lugubrious resignation that devastated his peers. An excessive atavism had doubtless only permitted him to escape it intermittently; nevertheless, he had known the joy of living in the sparkling present moment more often than most.

  Arva listened to him gladly, but Targ could not imagine being neglectful of the future of the species. If, like Mano, he happened to be abruptly gripped by a fugitive sensuality, he always mingled it with that great dream of Time that had guided his ancestors. “I can’t be disinterested in our descendants,” he replied. Pointing toward the immense wilderness, he added: “How beautiful existence would be if our reign extended over these frightful deserts! Don’t you ever think that there used to be seas, lakes and rivers there…countless plants and—before the Radioactive Era—virgin forests. Oh, Mano!—virgin forests! And now, an obscure life is devouring our antique fatherland!”

  Mano shrugged his shoulders meekly. “It’s a terrible thought that, outside the oases, the Earth is so uninhabitable for us—perhaps more so than Jupiter or Saturn.”

  A rumor interrupted them; heads were being raised attentively; a new flock of birds had just arrived. They announced that some distance away, in the shadow of the mountains, an unconscious young woman had fallen prey to the ferromagnetals.

  While two gliders set off over the desert, the crowd thought about the strange magnetic creatures that were multiplying on the planet’s surface as humankind declined.

  Long minutes went by; the gliders reappeared. One of them was bringing back an inert body, whom everyone recognized as Elma the Nomad. She was a strange orphan girl, not much liked, for she had the instincts of a wanderer, whose savagery disconcerted her peers. Nothing could prevent her occasionally fleeing into the wilderness.

  She was deposited on the balcony of the Planetary; her face, half-hidden by the long black hair, seemed to be livid, and strewn with scarlet dots.

  “She’s dead!” declared Mano. “The Others have drunk her life.”

  “Poor little Elma!” cried Targ. He gazed at her with pity—and, passive as it was, the crowd growled hatefully against the ferromagnetals.

  The loud clamor of the resonators, however, deflected their attention.

  “The seismographs have detected an abrupt shock in the vicinity of Redlands…”

  “Oh! Oh!” cried the plaintive voice of the thickset man. No echo replied to him. Faces turned toward the Great Planetary. The multitude waited, shivering with impatience.

  “Nothing!” exclaimed Mano, after two minutes of waiting. “If Redlands had been affected, we’d already have heard…”

  A strident voice cut his speech short, and the Dish of the Great Planetary proclaimed: “Immense quake…the entire oasis is shaking…Catas…” Then, confused sounds, a muffled collision…and silence…

  Everyone waited for a further minute, as if hypnotized. Then the crowd breathed in hoarsely; even the least emotional were excited.

  “It’s a great disaster!” announced old Dane.

  No one doubted it. Redlands possessed ten broad communication planetaries, which could be orientated in any direction. For all ten to fall silent, either they must all have been uprooted or the consternation of the inhabitants must be extraordinary.

  Orientating the transmitter, Targ sent forth a long appeal. No response. A dull horror weighed up their minds. It was not the ardent disturbance of the people of yesteryear, but a slow, idle, all-consuming distress. Narrow ties bound together High Springs and Redlands. For 5000 years, the two oases had maintained a constant relationship, by means of the resonators and frequent visits by glider and electric car. Thirty relay-stations furnished with planetaries marked out the 1700 kilometer highway between them, which linked their two populations.

  “We have to wait!” Targ shouted, leaning over the balcony. “If panic is preventing our friends from replying, they won’t take long to recover their composure.”

  No one believed, however, that the people of Redlands were capable of such panic; their race was even less emotional than that of High Springs; although capable of sadness, it was scarcely amenable to fear.

  Targ, reading incredulity on all the faces, said: “If their apparatus has been destroyed, messengers can reach the first relay-station within a quarter of an hour…”

  “Unless the gliders have been damaged,” objected Hélé. “As for electric cars, it’s improbable that they’d be able to get through ruined outskirts in a short time.”

  Meanwhile, the entire population was moving toward the southern zone. Within a few minutes, gliders and electric cars were pouring out thousands of people in the vicinity of the Great Planetary. Rumors increased, like long sighs punctuated by silences—and the members of the Council of Fifteen, the interpreters of the laws and determinants of unanimous actions, assembled on a balcony. Everyone recognized old Bamar by her triangular face and long salt-white hair, and the bulging head of her husband, Omal, whose 70 years of life had not been able to pale his tawny beard. They were ugly but venerable, and their authority was great, for their children were unblemished.

  Bamar, ensuring that the Planetary was correctly orientated, sent forth a few waves in her turn. Before the receiver’s silence, her face darkened further.

  “Thus far, Devastation is safe,” Omal murmured, “and the seismographs haven’t indicated any quakes in the other human zones.”

  Suddenly, a strident appeal sounded, and while the multitude straightened up, hypnotically, the Great Planetary was heard to growl: “From the first Redlands relay-station. Two powerful quakes have shaken the oasis. The number of dead and wounded is considerable. The crops have been annihilated. The waters seemed to be under threat. Gliders are departing for High Springs.”

  There was a stampede. People, gliders and electric cars surged forth in torrents. An excitement unknown for centuries elevated resigned minds; pity, dread and anxiety rejuvenated that Last Age multitude.

  The Council of Fifteen deliberated, while Targ, trembling from head to toe, replied to the message from Redlands and announced the imminent departure of a delegation. In tragic times, the three sister oases—Redlands, High Springs and Devastation—were obliged to come to one another’s rescue. Omal, who had a perfect knowledge of the tradition, declared: “We have provisions for five years. A quarter might perhaps be claimed by Redlands. We are also ready to receive two thousand refugees, if that is inevitable—but they would be on reduced rations and they would be forbidden to reproduce. We too would have to limit our families, for it would be necessary to restore the population to its traditional figure within five years.”

  The Council approved this citation of the laws; then Bamar shouted to the crowd: “The Council will appoint those who will leave for Redlands. There will be no more than nine. Others will be sent when we know what our brothers need.”

  “I want to go,” begged the watchma
n.

  “And me!” Arva added, excitedly.

  Mano’s eyes sparkled. “If the Council will permit, I will also go with the envoys.”

  Omal looked at them favorably—for he, like them, had once known those spontaneous impulses, so rare among the Last Men.

  Except for Amat, a frail adolescent, the crowd waited passively for the Council’s decision. Submissive to millennia-old rules, accustomed to a monotonous existence, troubled only by the weather, the people had lost its taste for initiative. Resigned, patient and endowed with great passive courage, nothing about adventures excited them. The enormous deserts that surrounded them, devoid of all human resources, weighed upon their actions as well as their thoughts.

  “There is no reason why Targ, Arva and Mano should not go,” old Bamar remarked, “but it’s a long journey for Amat. Let the Council decide.”

  While the Council was deliberating, Targ studied the sinister expanse. A bitter dolor accumulated within him. The Redlands disaster weighed on him more heavily than his brothers, for their hopes only extended to the slowness of the final decay, while he persisted in imagining fortunate metamorphoses—and the circumstances offered a bitter confirmation of Tradition.

  II. Toward Redlands

  The nine gliders flew toward Redlands. They did not stray far from the two roads that electric cars had followed for centuries. The ancestors had constructed huge refuges of stainless steel with planetary resonators and numerous less important relays. The two roads were well-maintained. As the electric cars used them sparsely and their wheels were fitted with highly elastic mineral fibers, and as the people of the two oases also knew how to make partial use of the enormous forces their forebears had mastered, the maintenance was more a matter of supervision than work. The ferromagnetals rarely appeared there and only inflicted insignificant damage; a pedestrian could have walked for an entire day without sensing any harmful influence, but it would not have been prudent to pause for too long, and especially to fall asleep. Many victims had, like Elma, lost all their red blood corpuscles there and died of anemia.

  The Nine were not in any danger; each of them was flying a light glider that could have accommodated four people. Even if an accident overtook two thirds of the machines, the expedition would not be compromised. Endowed with a near-perfect elasticity, the gliders were built to resist the rudest impacts and to withstand storms.

  Mano had taken the lead, Targ and Arva were flying almost in convoy. The young man’s agitation was increasing incessantly, and stories of great catastrophes faithfully handed down through the generations haunted his memory.

  For 500 centuries, humans had only occupied derisory islets on the planet’s surface. The shadow of decay had long preceded the catastrophes. In a very ancient epoch, in the early centuries of the radioactive era, the decrease of the waters had already been observed; many scientists predicted that humankind would perish as a result of the desiccation—but what effect could those predictions have on people who saw glaciers covering their mountains and countless rivers irrigating their settlements?

  The waters did, however, diminish, slowly but surely, absorbed by the Earth or volatilized in the firmament.40 Then came the awful catastrophes. Extraordinary rearrangements of the crust occurred; sometimes, earthquakes destroyed ten or twenty cities and hundreds of villages in a single day; new chains of mountains were formed, twice as high as the ancient ranges of the Alps, the Andes and the Himalayas; the water was gradually exhausted with the passing centuries. Metamorphoses became visible on the surface of the Sun whose effects, according to uncomprehended laws, were echoed on our poor globe. There was a lamentable sequence of catastrophes; on the one hand, mountains were raised up to heights of 25,000 to 30,000 meters; on the other, immense quantities of water disappeared.

  It is on record that, at the beginning of these sidereal upheavals, the human population had attained the figure of twenty-three billon individuals. Those masses had enormous forces at their disposal. They could split atoms—as we still do ourselves, albeit imperfectly—and did not worry overmuch about the flight of the waters, so advanced were their artificial methods of cultivation and nutrition. They even imagined that they would soon be able to live on organic produce manufactured by chemists. Several times, this ancient dream appeared to have been realized, but every time, strange maladies or rapid degenerations decimated the groups subjected to experiments. It was necessary to stick to the aliments that had nourished humans since their remotest ancestors. In truth, these aliments had undergone subtle metamorphoses, as much by virtue of techniques of animal husbandry and agriculture as by virtue of scientific manipulations; reduced rations sufficed to maintain an individual human, and the digestive organs underwent a significant diminution, in less than 100 centuries, while the respiratory apparatus increased in size as a direct consequence of the rarefaction of the atmosphere.

  The last wild animals disappeared; edible animals, by comparison with their ancestors, were veritable zoophytes, hideous ovoid masses with limbs transformed into vestigial stumps and jaws atrophied by force-feeding. Only a few species of birds escaped the degradation and acquired a marvelous intellectual development. Their gentleness, beauty and charm increased through the ages. They rendered unexpected services, by virtue of their instincts, more delicate than those of their masters, and those services were particularly appreciated in laboratories.

  The people of that powerful epoch lived an anxious existence. Magnificent and mysterious poetry was extinct. There was no more savage life; no more immense near-empty spaces: the woods, the heaths, the marshes, the steppes and the fallow ground of the radioactive era. Suicide ended up as the most redoubtable malady of the species.

  In 15 millennia, the terrestrial population declined from 23 billion individuals to four billion; the seas, departed into abysses, no longer occupied a quarter of the surface; the great rivers and great lakes had disappeared; the immense and funereal mountains were swarming with people. Thus the primitive planet reappeared—but bare!

  Humans were, however, struggling desperately. Although they could not live without water, they imagined that they could manufacture what they needed for domestic and agricultural usage—but the useful materials were becoming rare, save at depths that rendered their exploitation derisory. It was necessary to fall back on methods of conservation, on ingenious methods of managing the flow and extracting the maximum effect from the nourishing fluid.

  Domestic animals perished, incapable of adapting to the new vital conditions. The people tried in vain to reconstitute more primitive species; 200,000 years of devolution had exhausted their evolutionary energy. Only the birds and the plants resisted. The former recovered a few ancestral forms, which adapted to the new environment. Many, becoming wild again, constructed their eyries at heights where humans could no longer pursue them because of the rarefaction of the air that accompanied, albeit on a lesser scale, that of the waters. They lived by depredation, and employed such refined cunning that they could not be prevented from maintaining themselves.

  As for those birds that lived among our ancestors, their fate was initially dire; attempts were made to reduce them to the status of edible creatures—but their consciousness had become too lucid; they fought desperately to avoid that fate. There were scenes as hideous as those episodes of prehistoric times when humans ate humans, when entire peoples were reduced to servitude. The horror struck home; gradually, people ceased to brutalize their planetary companions and made peace with them again.

  Meanwhile, the seismic phenomena contained to remold the Earth and destroy cities. After 30,000 years of conflict, our ancestors understood that the mineral realm, vanquished for millions of years by plants and animals, was taking a conclusive revenge. There was a period of despair that brought the human population down to 300 million, while the seas were reduced to a tenth of the terrestrial surface. Three or four thousand years of respite brought about a certain renaissance of optimism. Humankind embarked on prodigious labors of cons
ervation; the war against the birds ended; people restricted themselves to putting them in conditions that did not permit them to multiply, and extracted precious services from them.

  Then the catastrophes resumed. The habitable territories shrank again—and, about 30,000 years ago, the supreme rearrangements took place. Humankind found itself reduced to a few territories scattered across the Earth, which had become as vast and formidable as in the primal epochs; outside the oases, it became impossible to procure the water necessary to sustain life.

  Since then, a relative calm has been produced. Although the water supplied to us by the well hollowed out in the abyss has further decreased, reducing the population by a third, and two oases have been abandoned, humankind has persisted; undoubtedly, it might survive for another 50,000 or a 100,000 years.

  Industry has declined enormously; of the forces that our species used in its heyday, the humans of the oases only employ a small fraction. Communication apparatus and mechanical labor have become less complex; many millennia ago it was necessary to renounce the spiraloids that transported our ancestors through the air at a speed ten times greater than our gliders.

  Human live in a state of signation, sadly and quite passively. The spirit of creation is extinct; it only reawakens, atavistically, in a few individuals. By continual selection, the race has acquired a spirit of automatic obedience, and by the same token, its laws have become immutable. Passion is rare, crime non-existent.

  A sort of religion has arisen, devoid of worship or ritual: a respectful dread for the mineral. The Last Men attribute a slow and irresistible will to the planet; initially favorable to the realms to which it gave birth. The Earth let them acquire great power; the mysterious moment when it condemned them was also that when it began to favor new realms.