The Nyctalope on Mars 2: The Triumph of Love

by Jean de La Hire

  It was 18:30 p.m., or 6:30 a.m., when the adventurers were ready to make a start. “Arm yourselves with revolvers and cartridges,” ordered the Nyctalope, “and take hatchets. Go and cut leafy branches in the forest over there and cover up the radioplanes in such a manner that the sunlight can’t make the crystal carapaces sparkle like mirrors We must take every possible precaution to hide our arrival for as long as possible.”

  Within ten minutes, this was done. The four radioplanes disappeared under heaps of branches and foliage. Afterwards, the troop climbed a hillock raised on a large open meadow and Saint-Clair got his bearings. To the south, a pale pink sea as calm as a lake extended as far as the eye could see, extending to the horizon in the east and the west, bordered to the north by the flat straight shores of the island on which the men had landed; this was Lake Niliacus.

  To the east and west, the ground was flat and bare, sandy by the shore and covered with red grass towards the interior. Clumps of trees broke the monotony in places. To the north, however, the horizon was delimited by low hills, some of which were planted with moderately high forests, and which seemed dense.

  “Let’s go northwards,” said Saint-Clair. “It’s obvious that these shores are absolutely deserted. There’s not so much as an animal to be seen; the place seems dead. If any life-form other than vegetable persists here, it can only be in the island’s interior. Let’s head north!” And the little troop marched off.

  Pary O’Brien was sent 500 meters in advance as a scout. In case of any danger or important discovery, he was to run back at top speed. The adventurers were, in any case, making rapid progress. The low density of the Martian air tripled the effects of their strength and the elasticity of their muscles. They moved at a speed of 15 to 17 kilometers per hour without the least fatigue. They slowed down somewhat when they were traversing woody terrain, and was reduced to an ordinary terrestrial pace when they went into a great forest that had all the characteristics of a jungle. In order not to go astray, O’Brien now walked with the rest of the group.

  While making their way, the men observed the strange nature of things on the planet. The wood of the trees, as the discovered by breaking their branches, was less dense than that of terrestrial trees, as light as cork, and the trees were much taller. In the same way, the bushes and the undergrowth rose to a height five or six times the height of a human being, in consequence of the lesser intensity of the Martian gravity. As for coloration, it extended through all the shades of red, from pale pink to vivid crimson. Red was, in Martian nature, what green was in Terrestrial nature.

  The men had been walking somewhat at hazard among giant bushes, between the trunks of prodigiously high trees, through thick grass that came up to their chins, for nearly two hours when a cry of “Halt!” released by Saint-Clair brought them to a halt. They saw the Nyctalope, at the head of the company, standing in front of a half-fallen tree-trunk extended over a little clearing. Saint-Clair’s extended arm was pointing at a gap in the forest. “Ruins, over there!” he cried.

  In a single bound the ten Terrans were beside their leader—and, indeed, they saw cyclopean ruins heaped up at the far end of an unexpected pathway that opened on the far side of the clearing within a thick agglomeration of trees and bushes.

  “Forward march!” said Klepton. And they ran forward. At the end of the pathway, however, amazement nailed them to the spot. What was all this? Were they confronted by the formidable remains of some Martian Thebes? Whence came these enormous blocks, made of some sort of red basalt, which were piled up in an orderly manner, forming an encircling wall, crumbling in places, behind which incomprehensible constructions could be seen in the oblique rays of sunlight?

  “Forward march!” said Klepton, again.

  Already, though, Saint-Clair had leapt through a breach. He was seen standing on a quivering block, and then jumped down and disappeared. They followed him. They jumped, and landed pell-mell on an esplanade invaded by brushwood, on the far side of which was a strange building. Circular, like a tower, it was composed of the same enormous blocks as the encircling wall; no window or loophole penetrated its looming surface. High up, at the summit of the tower, bizarre overhanging structures projected, their slender arms terminating in pulleys from which fragmentary chains still hung.

  Merlak ran forward. Crossing the esplanade, he went around the tower and was seen to reappear almost immediately, shouting: “There are four more similar towers behind.”

  At the same moment, a loud noise of wings was heard at the top of the first tower, and they saw an immense, apocalyptic animal, with a beak as large as its body, launch itself forwards. It hovered, released a long raucous croak, flapped its wings and disappeared with amazing rapidity beyond the treetops.

  “Not everything’s dead here!”! said Bontemps.

  “Merlak,” said Saint-Clair, “did you see a door on the other side of the tower?”

  “No, sir.”

  “In that case, my friends, it will be necessary to find another means of getting inside.”

  “I have one, sir!” declared O’Brien, with the gravity of a well-schooled domestic.

  “What is it?”

  “The tallest and stoutest of those trees won’t stand up to 20 well-aimed hatchet-blows delivered to the base of its trunk. To judge by the lightness of things in this queer place, eight men will be able to carry the felled tree easily. We’ll strip off its branches, but leave the ends in place to serve as footholds. If we lean it against the tower, the tree will serve as the most comfortable of ladders.”

  “Adopted!” said Saint-Clair.

  Four men went back over the wall and ran to the nearest tree, estimating at a glance that it was taller than the tower. Seventeen bows of a hatchet brought it to the ground, on to which it fell softly and noiselessly along the length of the pathway. Within ten minutes, it was stripped of all its branches by five men, while four others dug a deep hole at the foot of the tower. Then, under Saint-Clair’s direction, the whole company labored to bring the trees over the confining wall.

  The tree was relatively light but extremely long; it required skillful and complicated maneuvering. Finally, after an effortful half-hour, the base of the trunk was slotted into the cavity hollowed out at the foot of the tower for that express purpose, and the tree itself, an immense parrot-ladder,8 was stood up against the circular wall. Fragments of basalt were piled up and densely packed into the free space of the cavity around the trunk. That consolidated the swaying ladder somewhat. Then four men braced it strongly against the wall, with their legs on the ground and their arms against the trunk—and Saint-Clair set forth nimbly to climb the improvised ladder.

  The tower might have been 40 meters high. It took the Nyctalope four minutes to set his hands on one of the jutting metal structures. With a measured leap, he passed from the ladder to the wall itself, and Klepton, who was standing some way apart from the tower down below, saw him lean inside, leap again, and disappear.

  A minute went by, then Saint-Clair reappeared, carrying something under his arm which Klepton could not make out at first—but he saw that it was an armful of little chains when he let it dangle from the wall and used it to attach the tree securely to the jutting metal arm.

  Soon, Saint-Clair shouted: “Climb up!”

  They all climbed up: Jolivet, Gaynor, Merlak, Bontemps, O’Brien, Pacard, Johnson, Tardieu and, lastly, Klepton. And if anyone had remained down below, he would have seen the 11 Terrans, outlined against the luminous sky as slender black silhouettes, disappear one by one, leaping lightly into the unknown.

  II. The Council of XV

  Oxus knew the human heart and soul too well to risk making a definitive decision regarding the fate of the 15 young women without first consulting his affiliates. Everything in the still-recent past—the very facility with which he had previously permitted the XV to bring the enigmatic element that is woman to the planet Mars; the optimism with which he had envisaged the human race taking root and propagating on Ma
rtian soil; and, finally, the carelessness with which he had allowed himself to be seduced by immediate projects other than those constituting the preliminary conquest of a major part of the planet by humankind—inspired prudence in Oxus. To destroy that which he had permitted, and even lauded; to deprive the XV of these young women—who were already no longer their slaves, and at least two of whom were their queens and masters, to the extent of having compromised the loyalty of one and sent the other to certain death—was a grave resolution full of dangers.

  Thus, while Alkeus and Koynos were in flight, with a purpose that Oxus thought identical but was, in fact, quite different, with respect to the hypothetical Saint-Clair, Oxus reflected, gathered information, interrogated and inquired…

  He saw all the young women one after another, from Xavière and Yvonne to Félicie Jolivet. He found that some were rebellious, like Yvonne. Some, like Xavière, apparently resigned, were even more dangerous because they were intent on seduction and domination. There were others who were simply unhappy, but whose proud sadness itself gave them an even more seductive charm. He found none who was submissive, none who intended to serve as an indifferent plaything, satisfied or passive, of the caprices of the master to whom fate had given her. On the feminine side, therefore, Oxus’ plans were not working out—and the man of genius was then convinced that, however wise and strong he might be in all sorts of matters, he was completely ignorant of the tortuous labyrinth of a young woman’s heart.

  In the meantime, Oxus saw—at first by means of chance encounters in Cosmopolis, and afterwards individually in his study—the 13 affiliates that remained with him in Argyre Island following the departure of Alkeus and Koynos. He interrogated them insidiously or brusquely, according to the character of each one. By this means, he discovered something that, in his heart of stone against whose walls nothing resonated, he had never been able to imagine; he discovered that these men were not so utterly absorbed by the ambition to conquer another world as to be unable to entertain any other ambition.

  He had selected them from the hardest, the strongest and the most arid of all the men of Earth. He had chosen them out of a hundred, from the ranks of the young fanatics who had once followed him and his accomplice, the monk Fulbert. He had shaped them in his own school. He thought that he had made them into creatures of pure brain, dominated and motivated by a superhuman ideal: to conquer a new world and to carve out a formidable empire on an unknown planet, which would dictate his moral law to the entire universe of thinking beings. He had thought them heartless, devoid of bestial passions—in a word, asexual. And now he discovered each of them possessed by the infantile ambition and unhealthy desire to be accepted, admired, and beloved by the young prisoner that had been awarded to him.

  One alone among them seemed not to have submitted to the general entrapment. In accordance with the bizarre names that the affiliates had taken, he called himself Kipper. He was a thin, wiry man of medium height, of the Anglo-Saxon race, who was as hard, supple, sharp and cold as a steel blade. He must have been near 40, and he was a mathematician of genius. Fate had given this Kipper the charming Félicie Jolivet, a sparkling and lively young Parisian artisan who had, a few days before her abduction, been elected Queen of Queens according to the old Parisian custom.

  Without a care for Félicie’s slender and lovely hands, curvaceous and lithe figure or sensuous features, Kipper had made her his servant—not that she had to work in the kitchen or wear herself out with repugnant tasks! In Cosmopolis, the XV had numerous slaves—natives captured in Africa—who performed all services, from the domestic to the most noble forms of labor, entrusted on Earth to those soldiers who formed élite troops. Félicie was, however, charged with keeping her master’s study and library in meticulous order, cleaning out, stuffing and lighting his pipe, and delicately balancing the hammock in which he had the habit of lying down to smoke and surrender himself to the complicated speculations of mathematics. And when Oxus skillfully interrogated him, Kipper replied: “Master, my slave is satisfactory enough. She knows how to get rid of the dust that dishonors a book without tearing or scuffing the binding; she knows how to arrange my papers without mixing up the sheets; she cleans my pipe well enough, and a brief period of instruction sufficed to enable her to stuff it and light it according to my taste.”

  “Is she not pretty, like the others?” said Oxus negligently.

  Kipper looked at the Master with astonishment. “Pretty? I haven’t seen the others, and I’ve never looked at Félicie.”

  “I meant,” Oxus went on, satisfied, “that women, especially young women, sometimes have external charms that strike the eyes of a man agreeably.”

  “Félicie is proper, docile and silent,” Kipper said, dryly. “That’s all that I require of her.” He shrugged his shoulders and, with the humor of his race, added: “As for external charms, I only find those in a geometric figure neatly-traced in white on a blackboard.”

  One, however, was not many out of 15—and Oxus set about studying the problem with prudence, patience and sagacity.

  Days passed…

  No new Martian attack troubled the peace of Cosmopolis, where each of the affiliate Brothers either devoted himself to his habitual work in the various sciences or to two occupations new to him: reveries filled with voluptuous images, and conversations—however difficult they might be—with the young woman who had, involuntarily, provoked the reveries.

  The Martians, rendered circumspect by the defeats that they had already suffered beneath the walls of Cosmopolis, were doubtless preparing a new attack with much more care—but Oxus was the only one thinking about that. Perhaps Kipper thought about it too; not once did he omit, as was his role and his duty, to inspect the sentry-posts in which warrior slaves served shifts before various items of telemechanical apparatus, ready to signal the slightest approach by sea or air that the apparatus might indicate.

  No apparatus had indicated any such thing for six days.

  In Oxus’ study, though the needle of the automatic register still stood at 150, thus signifying that the radiomotive station in the Congo, on Earth, was still emitting waves at maximum intensity. Oxus spent entire hours—anxious hours—in front of that dial and that needle. “Has Saint-Clair the Nyctalope left Earth? Are these waves still propelling his radioplane? If so, the watchmen should now be signaling his presence in our sky. What has become of Alkeus and Koynos? Three days have gone by since they passed beyond the range at which any passage is sensible by our apparatus, and we’re now in the 20th hour of the sixth day since their departure. I don’t want to convene the Council, or legislate as to the fate of the young women, until I have some indication of what might have become of Alkeus and Koynos…”

  Suddenly, Oxus’ monologue was interrupted by a loud ringing. The old man shivered, raised his head and looked instinctively at the microphone above which the hammer was vibrating against the sonorous shell…

  The ringing stopped; a sort of latch clicked, and a metallic voice immediately emerged from the microphone. It said: “Hello? Hello? Master?”

  Oxus reached out a hand and pressed down one of the keys in a switchboard that occupied a corner of his vast desk. It was the signal responding in the affirmative to the phonograph’s appeal.

  “Hello?” the voice went on. “Aerial sentry-post. At the limit of our range, in the direction of Earth, a radioplane moving at maximum speed. Hail to the Master!”

  There was another click, an abrupt trill of the sonorous bell, and then silence.

  Elbows on the table, Oxus took his head in both hands. “Who’s that?” he murmured. “Alkeus, Koynos, or Saint-Clair? He’ll be here in three days. Three times 24 hours of uncertainty and expectation!”

  Absolute uncertainty! Cruel and dismal expectation! Oxus had never felt so much inaction around him. The Brothers hardly saw one another any longer in the streets of Cosmopolis, where once they had gone back and forth incessantly, always busy, formulating new plans of attack or defense against
the Martians, on their way to try out recently-discovered explosives, or machines invented and constructed within 24 hours, or departing on geological surveys of Argyre Island. No! They were shut up in their houses, probably recommencing, across space and centuries, the story of Hercules turning the spinning-wheel at Omphale’s feet.

  “Ah, this must stop!” Oxus growled. “It must stop! If only that radioplane would arrive, so that I would finally know…and immediately, whatever the circumstances might be, I’ll summon the Council, dictate my orders, finally mobilize the army of slaves—and while subtle poisons put these accursed women to sleep forever, we’ll get on with the conquest of Mars! That conquest, for which we have been preparing so long, and which the adventure of abducting the 15 young women has delayed, is already a week behind schedule! A week!”

  Thinking that he had nothing to fear from a single radioplane, Oxus gave no orders to the defense-posts. Alkeus and Koynos alone among the XV knew that the radiomotive station in the Congo was still active. Except for Oxus, and also Xavière and Yvonne, who had neither an opportunity nor a motive to divulge the secret, no one knew the reason for the absence of Alkeus and Koynos. The affiliate Brothers thought that they had left for Earth to carry out some final order of the Master’s, perhaps the order to prepare the final destruction of the Congo station—a destruction that had been planned for a long time but which had already been ordered by Oxus without the Brothers’ knowledge. Thus, no one else was worried about the approaching radioplane, which was assumed to be Alkeus or Koynos. Oxus alone was alert.

  Three days after the sentry-post’s advertisement, the Master was on the terrace of his house at the hour at which the enigmatic radioplane was due to arrive. By way of precaution, Oxus was armed with an electro-mirror: a portable but terrible device that projected an electric current of formidable intensity, blasting from a distance…