Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  There, all possible aid stopped. As fifty thousand years of heredity have conditioned them to inflexible laws, the Last Men accepted without revolt the verdict of destiny. Therefore, there was no war; a bare few individuals sought to bend the rule and came in supplication to the Red-Lands. There was nothing to do but turn them away: pity would have been a supreme injustice, and an abuse of authority.

  As provisions began to dwindle, each oasis designated those of its inhabitants who had to die. First the old were sacrificed, then the children, except for a small number who were kept in reserve, on the hypothesis that there might be a possible change in the planet’s evolution, then, there followed all those whose constitutions were depraved or sickly.

  Euthanasia was extremely gentle. Once those condemned had taken the wonderful poisons, all fear vanished. Their waking hours were one long ecstasy, their sleep as deep as death. The idea of nothingness delighted them, their joys grew until they reached the final torpor.

  Many hastened their end. Little by little, it became a contagion. In the equatorial oases, they did not wait until provisions ran out; water still remained in some of their reservoirs, and already the last inhabitants had disappeared.

  Four years were needed to annihilate the inhabitants of High Springs.

  Then, these oases were swallowed up by the immense desert, the ferromagnetics occupied the place of humans.

  After Targ’s discovery, the Red-Lands had prospered. They had rebuilt the oasis to the east, on a site where the paucity of ferromagnetics made their destruction an easy task. The building, the clearing of the land, the harnessing of the waters was done in six months. The first crops were beautiful, the second marvelous.

  Despite the successive death of the other communities, the men of the Red Oasis lived with a sort of hope. Were they not the chosen people, those in favor of whom, for the first time in a hundred centuries, the implacable law had bent? Targ maintained this spirit in their souls. His influence was great. He possessed the appeal of those who triumph, and their symbolic prestige.

  However, his victory had impressed Targ more than anyone else. In it he saw an obscure reward, and even more, a confirmation of his faith. His spirit of adventure blossomed; he had aspirations almost as great as those of his heroic ancestors. And the love that he felt for Érê and the two children he had by her blended with dreams of which he dared speak to no one, except his wife or his sister, for he knew they would be incomprehensible to all other Last Men.

  Mano did not have this fever. His life followed a straight line. He never thought of the past, even less about the future. He tasted the unchanging sweetness of each day; he lived with his wife, Arva, an existence as carefree as that of the silver birds whose flocks, each morning, soared above the oasis. As his first children, because of their sturdy constitutions, had been among the emigrants taken in by the Red-Lands, he barely felt a fleeting pang of melancholy when thinking of the destruction of High Springs.

  In contrast, this destruction continued to torment Targ: many times his glider took him back to his native oasis. Doggedly he searched the area for water, he left the safety of the protective roads, he visited the desolate stretches where the ferromagnetics were living the life of young kingdoms. Along with several men from the oasis, he had explored a hundred chasms. Even though his searches were in vain, Targ never became discouraged: he taught that one must merit discoveries through stubborn effort and long patience.

  IX. The Receding Waters

  One day, as he returned from his solitary explorations, Targ, from the height of his glider, noticed a crowd near the main reservoir. By means of his telescope, he made out the Water Masters and the members of the High Council; several miners were emerging from the wellhead. A flock of birds flew to meet his glider: from them he learned that the spring was causing some concerns. He landed and was immediately surrounded by a jittery crowd, who put their confidence in him. He felt cold to the bone, when he heard Mano say: “ ‘The water level has gone down.”

  All voices confirmed the sad news. He questioned Rem, the head Water Master, who responded:

  “The water level was measured at the wellhead itself. It has fallen six meters.”

  Among all these faces Rem’s was motionless. Joy, sadness, fear, desire never were seen on his cold lips, nor in his eyes, which looked like two pieces of bronze, and whose sclera were barely visible. His professional knowledge was perfect: he knew the entire tradition of the well-masters.

  “The water level can vary,” Targ remarked.

  “That is true! But normal variations are never more than two meters, and such gaps are never sudden . . .”

  “Do you know with certitude that they are sudden now?”

  “Yes, the instruments have been checked. They’re in working order. Still this morning they detected nothing. It was toward midday that the level started to fall. The rate is now more than a meter and a half per hour.”

  His mineral eye remained fixed; his hand made not a gesture; one saw his lips barely move. Targ’s eyes quivered as with the pounding of his heart.

  “According to the divers,” said Rem, “there are no new fissures in the bed of the lake. The trouble, then, comes from the springs themselves. There are three possible hypotheses: the springs are blocked; they have deviated from their paths; or they have dried up. We are keeping up hope.”

  Out of his mouth, the word “hope” fell like a block of ice.

  Targ asked again, “Are the reservoirs full?”

  Rem almost made a gesture: “They are still full. And I’ve given the order to dig new ones. Within the hour all our machines will be in action.”

  Things went exactly as Rem had announced. The powerful machines of the Red-Lands dug into the granite. Until the first star appeared, stupor reigned over the oasis.

  Targ had gone below ground. By means of galleries outfitted by the miners, there was now rapid access without danger. In the glow of the searchlights, the watchman examined the subterranean site that he, first among all men, had come upon. He studied it feverishly. Two springs fed into the lake. The first came out twenty-six meters deep, the second at a depth of twenty-four meters.

  Divers had been able to enter one outlet, but barely. The other one was too narrow.

  In order to get additional information, they had attempted to work into the rock; a landslide gave rise to fears. Might not any such rearrangements generate fissures, through which water would be lost?

  Agre, the eldest member of the Grand Council, had said: “This water was given to us by the Disaster; without this, it would have remained inaccessible. Perhaps this event also traced its present path. Let us not begin new, uncertain works. It is enough that we have carried to term those that were absolutely necessary.”

  As these words seemed wise, the men resigned themselves to the mystery.

  Toward the end of dusk, the level fell more slowly; a wave of hope passed over the oasis. But neither the Water Masters nor Targ shared their confidence; if the rate of fall was decreasing, it was because the water had receded below the largest fissures into which it was leaking. The water now contained in the lake could fall to a level of four meters, and if the springs remained inaccessible, then this, along with what remained in the reservoir, would be all the water possessed by the Last Men.

  All night long the machines of the Red-Lands dug new reservoirs; all night as well, water, the mother of life, continued to be lost in the abysmal depths of the planet. By morning the level had fallen to eight meters, but two reservoirs were ready that rapidly took in their provision; they absorbed three thousand cubic meters of liquid.

  Filling these lowered the level once again; the mouth of the first spring could be seen to reappear. Targ went inside it ahead of everyone else and saw that the ground had undergone recent changes. Several crevices had formed, masses of porphyry obstructed the passage; it was necessary, provisionally, to give up trying to explain how the disaster occurred.

  A second day passed, which was
mournful. By five o’clock the underground flow and the filling of another reservoir lowered the water to the level of the second spring, whose mouth had completely disappeared.

  From this moment on, the loss stopped; it was no longer necessary to hasten the construction of new reservoirs. Rem nonetheless persisted in finishing his job, and, during six days, the men and machines of the oasis toiled on.

  At the end of the sixth day, Targ, harried, his heart in a fever, sat meditating in front of his dwelling. A silvery darkness enveloped the oasis. Jupiter could be seen in the sky; a sharp half moon cleaved the ether: without doubt, this great planet also created kingdoms that, after having known the freshness of youth and the force of adulthood, perished from loss and anguish.

  Érê had come. In a beam of moonlight her long hair seemed a soft and warm light. Targ drew her to him; he murmured:

  “At your side I had found once again the life of ancient times. You were the dream of a new genesis . . . by simply feeling your presence, I believed in days without number. And now, Érê, if we do not recover the springs, or if we do not find any new water, within ten years the Last Men will have disappeared from the planet.”

  X. The Earthquake

  Six seasons came and went. The masters of the Waters caused great galleries to be dug in order to recover the springs. All failed. Illusory fissures or impenetrable chasms foiled their efforts. From month to month, hope dwindled in their souls. The ancient atavism of resignation weighed on them once more; their passivity seemed even to grow, in the way a chronic illness, after a moment of respite, takes a turn for the worse. All faith, however feeble, abandoned them. Already death gripped these dismal lives.

  When the time came for the High Council to order the first deaths by euthanasia, it happened that there were more volunteers ready to die than the law demanded.

  Targ, Arva, and Érê alone refused to accept fatality; but Mano became discouraged. Not that he had become provident. No more than before did he think of tomorrow; but for him fatality had become an ever-present reality. Once the euthanasia began, he had acquired such a keen sense of the fading away of things that all energy abandoned him. Light and darkness became, equally, his enemies. He lived on in a lifeless and mournful waiting; his love for Arva had disappeared along with his love for his own person; he lost all interest in his children, knowing that euthanasia would soon take them as well. And the act of speech became unbearable for him, he no longer listened, he remained silent and torpid for days on end. Almost all the inhabitants of the Red-Lands led an existence similar to his.

  No effort was capable of stimulating the pitiful amount of energy they had, because there was almost no work to be done. Except for a few clumps of plants, maintained in order to have fresh seeds, all agriculture had disappeared. The water in the reservoirs needed no care: it was kept from evaporating and purified by machines that functioned almost perfectly. As for the reservoirs themselves, they needed, each day, only one inspection, which was made easy by automatic gauges. Thus, nothing occurred to disturb the listlessness of these Last Men. Those best able to escape from these doldrums were the least emotive individuals, who had never loved anyone, and had hardly loved their own persons. These, perfectly adapted to the millennial laws, displayed a plodding perseverance, strangers to all joys as to all sorrows. Inertia dominated them; it bolstered them in the face of excessive depression and against any sudden resolutions; they were the perfect products of a doomed species.

  On the other hand, Targ and Arva sustained themselves through a superior capacity for emotion. In revolt against the evidence, they stood against the formidable planet as two small, ardent lives, full of love and hope, pulsing with those vast desires that had kept animal nature alive through a hundred thousand centuries.

  The watchman had abandoned none of his explorations; he kept a series of gliders and motocruisers in perfect working order; he even kept the principal planetary reflectors from falling into ruin, and watched over the seismographs.

  Thus, one evening, after a voyage in the direction of Devastation, Targ held a solitary vigil in the night. Through the sheet of transparent metal of his windowpane, a constellation appeared that in the time of Legends they called Canis Major. It contained the brightest among the stars, a sun far more vast than our Sun.29 Targ raised up his inextinguishable yearning toward it. And he thought of what he had seen, toward the middle of the day, as he was gliding close to the earth.

  It was on an exceedingly desolate plain, where a few solitary blocks of stone reared their forms. Everywhere the ferromagnetics were tracing out their violet agglomerations. He was barely paying attention to them, when, toward the south, on a clear yellow surface, he perceived a race that he had never before encountered. It produced individuals of large size, each one composed of eighteen groups. Some of these reached a total length of three meters. Targ calculated that the mass of the most powerful could not be less than forty kilograms. They moved about more easily than the most rapid ferromagnetics known up to now; in fact, their speed reached half a kilometer per hour.

  “This is terrifying,” the watchman murmured. “Were they to get into the oasis, would we not be defeated? The least breach in the wall would put us in mortal danger.”

  He shuddered; an anxious moment of tenderness took him into the adjoining rooms. In the orange glow of a Radiant, he contemplated Érê’s astonishingly luminous hair and the fresh faces of the children. His heart melted. To simply see them living, he could not understand the end of mankind. How could this be! Youth, the mysterious power of generations are in them, so full of sap, and is all of this going to vanish? For some doddering old race, slowly broken down by decadence, to be in this state, that would be logical; but why these, this flesh as lovely and new as that of men from before the Radioactive Era!

  As he was returning to himself, still in a dream, a slight jolt shook the ground. He barely had time to perceive it, and already, the immense calm had returned to the oasis. But Targ was full of suspicion. He waited for a while, his ear cocked, listening. All remained peaceful; the gray masses of the landscape, silhouetted in the powdery light of the stars, appeared immutable, and in the sky, implacably pure, Aquila, Pegasus, Perseus, Sagittarius inscribed the minutes as they fleeted upon the dial of the infinite.30

  “Was I wrong?” the watchman mused, “or could the tremor really have been insignificant?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, with a slight shiver. How could he even dare to think that any trembling of the earth could be insignificant? The most infinitely small of such tremors is full of the most menacing mystery!

  Worried, he went to look at the seismographs. Device Number 1 registered the small tremor, a slight trace, and barely longer than a millimeter. Device Number 2 showed that the phenomenon had no consequence.

  Targ went to the house of the birds; no more than twenty of them had been preserved. When he arrived, all were sleeping; they barely raised their heads when the watchman switched on the light. The quake then must have barely aroused them, for a very brief moment, and they did not anticipate a second one.

  Nonetheless, Targ felt he had to alert the chief sentinel. This man, an inert individual with atrophied nerves, had noticed nothing.

  “I’m going to make my rounds,” he declared. . . . “We will verify the water levels every hour on the hour.”

  These words reassured Targ.

  XI. The Fugitives

  Targ was still asleep when someone touched him on the shoulder. When he opened his eyes, he saw his sister, Arva, extremely pale, looking at him. It was a sure sign a disaster had happened. He arose with a start.

  “What is happening?”

  “Fearsome things,” the young woman replied. “You know that, this evening, there was an earthquake, because you yourself were the one who reported it.”

  “A very slight quake.”

  “So light that nobody noticed it but you. Yet its consequences are terrible. The water in the main reservoir has disappeared! And there a
re three huge cracks in the South Reservoir.”

  Targ turned as pale as Arva. He said, hoarsely:

  “But didn’t anyone check the water levels?”

  “Yes. Until this morning, the levels had not changed. It was only this morning that the large reservoir suddenly collapsed. Within ten minutes the water was gone. In the South Reservoir cracks appeared a half an hour ago. At most a third of the water can be saved.”

  Targ’s head was bent, his shoulders sagged; he was like a man ready to collapse. And he murmured, full of horror:

  “Is this, at long last, the death of mankind?”

  The catastrophe was complete. As all the granite reservoirs had already been used up for the needs of the oasis, except for those that had just been struck by the accident, the only remaining water was that which was contained in the arcum basins. This would be just enough to slake the thirst of five or six hundred human creatures for a year.

  The High Council convened.

  It was an icy and nearly silent gathering. The men who comprised it, with the exception of Targ, had attained a perfect state of resignation. There was barely any deliberation: nothing but the reading of the Laws, and a calculation based on unvarying data. Thus, the resolutions were simple, clear, pitiless.

  Rem, the grand chief of the Waters, summarized them: “The population of the Red-Lands is still seven thousand people. Six thousand must, this very day, submit to euthanasia. Five hundred will die before the end of the month. The remaining ones will diminish from week to week, in such a way that fifty remaining humans will be able to sustain themselves until the end of the fifth year . . . if by then no new sources of water are discovered, it will be the end of mankind.”