The Navigators of Space Page 26

  Even so, he remained nervous. All in all, the event was unexplained. Why had Arva been lying at the bottom of the embankment? Had she—she who was so vigilant and agile—suffered a fall? It was possible, but improbable.

  What should he do? Stay here until she had recovered her strength? It would take at least two weeks for her to recover completely. Better to go back to the Equatorial of the Dunes. There was nothing fundamentally urgent. The adventure on which Targ had embarked was not one of those whose outcome depends on a few days.

  He went to the large planetary and transmitted a call. As before, on emerging from the gulf, he received no reply. Immediately, a terrible emotion took hold of him. He repeated the signals, giving them the maximum intensity. It became obvious that, for some enigmatic reason, Erê and the children either could not hear him or were unable to respond. The two alternatives were equally ominous. There was surely a connection between Arva’s accident and the planetary’s silence.

  An intolerable dread was gnawing at the young man’s breast. His legs were trembling, obliging him to lean against the planetary’s supporting structure; he was incapable of making a decision. Finally, he tore himself away, bleakly resolute, and examined all the parts of his glider with anxious attention. He laid Arva down on the largest of its seats, and took off.

  It was a lamentable journey. He only paused once, at dusk, to attempt another call. Having obtained no reply, he wrapped Arva up tightly in a silica-wool blanket and injected her with a dose of cordial larger than the earlier ones. She scarcely shivered in the depths of her torpor.

  All night, the glider cleaved through the starry darkness. The cold being too intense, Targ went around the Skeleton Mountains. Two hours before dawn, the austral constellations appeared. The traveler, his heart beating faster, sometimes looked at the Southern Cross and sometimes the bright star that was the Sun’s closest neighbor, whose light only takes three years to reach the Earth. How beautiful the sky must have been, when young creatures studied it through the foliage of trees, even more so when silvery clouds mingled their fecund promise with the tiny lamps of infinity. And there would never be any more clouds!

  A delicate light pearled the east, and then the enormous disk of the sun rose. The Equatorial of the Dunes was not far away. Through the objective lens of the aerial telescope, Targ sometimes glimpsed, through gaps in the dunes, the wall of bismuth and the arcum dwellings, amber-tinted by the morning light.

  Arva was still asleep, and a further dose of stimulant did not wake her. Even so, her pallor was not as livid; her arteries were throbbing weakly, and her skin did not have the translucent stiffness that was suggestive of death.

  She’s out of danger! Targ assured himself—and that certainty soothed his pain.

  All his vigilance was directed toward the oasis. He strove to catch sight of the family enclave, but it was still hidden by two small hills. Finally, it appeared, and Targ wrenched the glider’s tiller convulsively; it dived abruptly, like an injured bird.

  The entire enclave, with its houses, its hangars and its machines, had disappeared.

  XVI. In the Eternal Night

  The glider was no more than 20 meters from the ground, traveling at top speed. It was about to fall vertically and smash when Targ straightened up reflexively. Then, lightly tracing an elegant parabola, he resumed his flight as far as the edge of the enclave.

  Having landed, the watcher remained motionless, paralyzed by grief, in front of an enormous and chaotic ditch. There, beneath the darkness of the Earth, lay the beings that he loved more than himself.

  For a long time, the thoughts crawled through the poor man’s brain in total disorder. He was not thinking about the cause of the catastrophe; he was simply feeling an obscure ferocity, attaching to it all the misfortunes of that dismal week. Images followed one another at random. He continually saw his nearest and dearest, whom he had left two days before. Then, the tranquil figures were snatched away by an unnamable horror. The ground opened up. He saw them disappear. Their faces were terrified. They called out to the man in whom they had put their trust, and who—perhaps at the very moment of their death—had thought that he had vanquished Fate.

  When he was finally able to think more clearly, the Last Man tried to work out what had happened. Was it another earthquake? No—no seismograph had recorded the slightest tremor. Besides, apart from a few hectares of the oasis and the desert, the enclave alone had been affected. The event was the consequence of anterior circumstances; the undersoil, having been fractured had collapsed. Thus, the misfortune that had ruined the supreme hope had not been a major convulsion of nature but an infinitesimal accident, on the scale of the feeble creatures it had engulfed.

  Targ, however, believed that he could see therein the same cosmic will that had condemned all the oases…

  His pain did not leave him inactive. He studied the ruins. They offered not the slightest vestige of human endeavor to his gaze. Power-generators, machines for digging, boring, crushing and cultivation, gliders, cars and houses had vanished into a formless mass of stones and rubble. Where were Erê and the children buried? Calculation only permitted a rough and perhaps deceptive approximation; he had to act on guesswork.

  On the northern side, Targ assembled the apparatus necessary for clearing and digging; then, having condensed the atomic energy, he attacked the immense ditch. The machines hummed for an hour. Jacks lifted up the blocks of stone and threw them aside automatically. Cobalt paraboloids shoveled out the smaller debris, and the slow and irresistible impacts of the pile-drivers equilibrated the walls as the excavation progressed. When the trench had reached a depth of twenty meters, a glider appeared, then a large planetary with its granite pedestal and accessory structures, and then an arcum house.

  Their placement made Targ’s calculations more exact. Assuming that the catastrophe had surprised the family in or near the house, it was necessary to extend the excavation westwards. If Erê or the children had been able to reach the planetary responsible for communication between the Equatorial of the Dunes and Redlands—as Arva’s accident led him to suppose—then he ought to continue his search in a south-western direction.

  The watchman set up apparatus in both the probable locations, and resumed work. “Humanized” by the incalculable effort of generations, the vast machines had the power of the elements and the delicacy of slender hands. They lifted out boulders, and amassed heaps of earth and small stones without any fits and starts. It only required light pressure to orientate them, accelerate them, slow them down or stop their progress. In the hands of the Last Man, they represented a greater power than had been possessed, in the primitive eras, by an entire tribe, or an entire people.

  An arcum roof appeared. It was twisted and crumpled, and an occasional section had fallen in, but precise indications allowed him to recognize it. Since the landing at the Equatorial of the Dunes, it had sheltered all the affections, dreams and hopes of the last human family.

  Targ stopped the machines that had begun to lift it up, and considered it, with fear and tenderness. What enigma was it hiding? What drama was it about to reveal to an unfortunate worn out by misery and fatigue?

  For several minutes, the watchman hesitated over the resumption of his work. Finally, after enlarging one of the rents, he let himself slide down into the dwelling.

  The room he went into was empty. A few blocks of stone were obstructing it, one of which had torn away a wall-bed and crushed it. A table had been smashed to pieces, and several soft aluminum vases flattered by impacts.

  The spectacle had the indifferent character of material destruction, but it was suggestive of more disturbing scenes. Trembling from head to toe, Targ went into the next room. It was as empty and devastated as the first. He visited every corner of the house in succession—and when he found himself in the last room, a few steps from the entrance door, his anguish was mingled with amazement.

  “It’s quite natural, though,” he whispered, “that they should have fled outs
ide at the first sign of danger.”

  He tried to imagine how the first impact had occurred, and what concept of the peril Erê would have been able to form. Nothing came to him but contradictory ideas and sensations. Only one impression remained fixed: that instinct must have taken his family toward the Redlands planetary. It was, therefore, in that direction that it was logical to direct his attention. But how? Had Erê reached the Great Planetary or had she been killed on the way?

  The words that Arva had stammered came back to the watchman’s memory. The circumstances gave them meaning. Erê or one of the children—perhaps all of them—had almost certainly got that far. It was, therefore, necessary to resume work as quickly as possible—which would not prevent the commencement of a communicating tunnel.

  Having made his resolution, Targ raised the entrance door and attempted a rapid exploration—but blocks of stone and rubble confronted him with an insurmountable obstacle. He went out again through the roof and started the machines working again to the south-west. Then he rearranged the northern apparatus and started them on digging out the tunnel. He also attended to Arva, whose lethargy was gradually taking on the appearance of normal sleep.

  Then he waited, vigilantly, his eyes fixed on the docile machines. Sometimes, he rectified their endeavor with a furtive gesture; sometimes, he stopped a pick, a blade, a screw or a turbine in order to examine the terrain. Finally, twisted and distorted, he perceived the tall stalk of the planetary and the sparkling dish. From then on, he never ceased to direct the effort, only using the subtler equipment that, when the occasion demanded, lifted up the large stones or heaped up the smaller debris.

  And he released a lugubrious lament, like a cry of agony. A light had just appeared: that flexible and living gleam that he had perceived on the day of the disaster amid the ruins of Redlands. His heart froze; his teeth chattered. With his eyes full of tears, he slowed down all the machinery, only allowing the metal hands to act, gentler and more skillful than human hands.

  Then he stopped everything, and lifted up against his chest, with raucous sobs, the body that he had loved so passionately…

  At first, a thrill of hope cut through his convulsion. It seemed to him that Erê was still not cold. Feverishly, he put the hygroscope to the pale lips.

  She had disappeared into the eternal night.

  For a long time, he looked at her. She had revealed to him the poetry of former ages, dreams of an extraordinary youth transfiguring the dismal planet; Erê was love, in which there was something vast, pure and almost eternal. And while he held her in his arms, he seemed to see a new and innumerable race live again.

  “Erê! Erê!” he murmured. “Erê, youth of the world! Erê, last hope of humankind!”

  Then his soul hardened. He placed a grim and bitter kiss on his companion’s hair, and set to work again.

  He brought them all out, one by one. The mineral realm had been less ferocious toward them than the young woman; it had spared them a slow death, the slow dispersal of vital energy. Stone blocks had smashed their skulls, opened their hearts, crushed their torsos.

  Then, Targ sank down on to the ground and wept endlessly. Grief had overwhelmed him, as vast as the world. And the words of the dying woman in Redlands resounded through his pain like the knell of the immensity…

  A hand touched his shoulder. He sat up with a start. He saw Arva leaning over him, livid and unsteady on her feet. She was so exhausted that no tears came to the corners of her eyes—but all the despair possible to feeble creatures was dilating her pupils. In a colorless voice, she murmured: “We must die! We must die!”

  Their gazes met. They had loved one another profoundly, every day of their lives, through all their dreams and all reality. They had held the same hopes in common, passionately—and in their infinite misery, their suffering was still fraternal.

  “We must die!” he repeated, like an echo. Then they hugged one another—and, for the last time, two human breasts beat against one another.

  Then, in silence, she raised to her lips the iridium tube that never left her. As the dose was massive, and Arva’s weakness extreme, the euthanasia only took a few minutes.

  “Death…death…” the dying woman stammered. “Oh, how were we able to fear you?”

  Her eyes darkened, a pleasant lassitude extended her limbs, and her thoughts were completely annihilated, while her breast exhaled its final breath.

  And there was only one human being on Earth.

  Seated on a block of porphyry, he remained shrouded in his sadness and his dream. Once more, he made the long voyage up the stream of time, which had so ardently exalted his soul.

  First, he saw yet again the primitive sea, still warm, where life was abundant, unconscious and insensible. Then came the blind and deaf creatures, extraordinary in their energy in boundless fecundity. The vision born, the divine light created its minuscule temples; the creatures born of the Sun became aware of their existence—and firm ground appeared. The populations of the water expanded on to it, vague, confused and taciturn. For three hundred thousand years they created subtle forms. The insects, the amphibians and the reptiles inhabited the forests of giant ferns, the profusion of calamites and arrowheads. When the trees put forth their magnificent torsos, immense reptiles also appeared. The dinosaurs were as tall as cedars, pterodactyls soared over the vast marshes…

  In that era, the first mammals were born, paltry, clumsy and stupid. They prowled around, wretched and so small that it required a thousand of them to equal the weight of an iguanodon. For interminable millennia, their existence remained imperceptible and almost derisory. They flourished, however. The time came when it was their turn, when their species rose up in force in all the corners of the savannah and all the shadows of the forests. They were now the ones that took on colossal form. The dinotherium, the ancient elephant, the rhinoceros armored like an old oak, the hippopotamus with the insatiable belly, the urus and the aurochs, the macherodus, the giant lion and the yellow lion, the tiger, the cave-bear and the blue whale, as massive as several diplodocus, and the sperm whale with the cavernous mouth, aspired the scattered energies.

  Then the planet allowed humankind to prosper; its reign was the most ferocious, the most powerful—and the last. It was the prodigious destroyer of life. The forests died, and their countless guests; every animal was exterminated or debased—and there was a time in which even subtle forces and obscure minerals seemed enslaved; the conqueror went so far as to capture the mysterious force that had assembled atoms.

  “That very frenzy announced the death of the Earth…the death of the Earth for our reign!” Targ murmured, softly.

  A frisson agitated his grief. He realized that what still existed of his flesh had been transmitted, without pause, since the very beginning. Something that had lived in the primitive sea, in the nascent slime, in the marshes, in the forests, in the bosom of the savannahs, and among the innumerable cities of humankind, had never been interrupted, until it reached him. And here he was! He was the last human being whose heart was beating on the face of the Earth—a face that had become immense once again!

  Night fell. The firmament displayed those charming fires that eyes of trillions of human beings had known. Only two eyes remained to contemplate them!

  Targ listed those he had preferred to the others, and then he saw, rising yet again, the ruinous star, the pitted star, silvery and legendary—to which he raised his sorry hands…

  He uttered one last sob; death entered into his heart—and, refusing euthanasia, he emerged from the ruins and went to lie down in the oasis, among the ferromagnetals.

  Then, a few particles of the last human life entered humbly into the New Life.

  THE NAVIGATORS OF SPACE

  To Binet-Valmer,42

  his admirer and friend,

  J.-H. Rosny Aîné.

  Preface

  Everything is ready. The perfectly transparent sublimated argine walls of the Stellarium possess a resistance and an elasticity t
hat render them practically indestructible. A pseudo-gravitic field inside the apparatus will ensure a stable equilibrium to both people and objects.

  We have a space at our disposal whose total volume is three hundred cubic meters; our supplies of hydralium are sufficient to provide oxygen for three hundred days; our hermetically-sealed argine suits will permit us to move about on Mars under terrestrial pressure, our respiration being ensured by direct or pneumatic transformers. In addition, the Siverol devices will allow us to dispense with respiration for several hours by virtue of their globular action and their anesthetization of the lungs. Finally, our supplies of concentrated food, which we can return to their primitive state at will, are assured for nine months.

  The laboratory is equipped for all physical, chemical and biological analyses; we are abundantly provided with destructive apparatus.

  In sum, the propulsion, pseudo-gravitic equilibration, normal respiration and artificial combustion are adequate for three seasons. Allowing three months to reach Mars and three months to return, we shall have three full months to explore the planet, in the event—the least favorable—that we do not find any resources of nutriment and respiration there.

  I.

  8 April. Our vessel is sailing through eternal darkness; the Sun’s rays would strike us forcefully through the argine if we had not disposed devices that attenuate, diffuse or suppress the light at our discretion.

  Our life is as arid as that of captives; in the dead expanse the stars are merely monotonous points of light; our work is limited to meager matters of conversation and surveillance; all that the apparatus needs to do until the landing is rigorously determined. No obstacle has arisen that demands a change of course. Our interior life is subordinate to machinery. We have books, musical instruments and games. The spirit of adventure sustains us, an immeasurable hope, somewhat deadened by waiting.