The Navigators of Space

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  As loudly as I could, I shouted: “Jean! Jean!”

  A dozen upright creatures emerged, but much further away than their predecessors. They only stayed momentarily; the Stellarium was descending into the clearing. By the time it was a few dekameters from the ground, the clearing was deserted.

  Antoine was already emerging from the exit hatch. “Have you seen Jean?” I cried.

  “Jean? No, I haven’t seen him,” Antoine replied, in the tranquil voice that he maintained through the worst anxieties. “I arrived over the clearing just as you headed for the blue rocks. I saw the upright creatures appear; I understood that there was danger—and here I am!”

  “Jean has disappeared—and those creatures are evidently redoubtable. Like us, they can strike at a distance, and the energy they use paralyzes the muscles. I suspect that only the distance saved me!”

  While I was speaking, we never ceased scanning the expanse with our binoculars. Occasionally, a luminous face appeared in the distance, and then vanished.

  “We can’t abandon Jean,” said Antoine, “but what are we to do? To risk ourselves out there would probably be fatal. Creatures that know how to project energy at a distance are intelligent enough to set a trap for us—easy enough to do, since there are so many of them.”

  We looked at one another in immeasurable distress.

  “Something bad will happen to us if we remain here,” Antoine continued. “It’s surprising that we’re still safe. Let’s get back into the Stellarium. In any case, that offers us the best chance of discovering something. Come on!”

  He drew me to him and dragged me away. It seemed highly likely that Jean was already dead.

  We hovered above the forest, if it could be called a forest. There was nothing but Aerials and wild pentapods—no trace of the Verticals.

  “The Stellarium has probably frightened them,” said Antoine. “Let’s go up higher!”

  We climbed above the clearing without discovering anything, but once we had moved a few kilometers away we had no difficulty seeing the Verticals. They were wandering placidly or occupied in strange tasks. Occasionally, we saw one of them point the bizarre machine that had nearly stunned me at some pentapod; the animal was not long delayed in staggering and falling.

  “They’re definitely the equivalent of human beings on this planet,” Antoine said.

  I thought the same; furthermore, the movements of the beings gave rise to an activity completely different from those of other creatures, if only by virtue of their diversity.

  “So long as they’ve spared Jean!” I sighed.

  We came back to the clearing repeatedly, executing maneuvers in every direction. Nothing! As the hours passed, our faint hopes dwindled. Oh, how vain and ridiculous the expedition now seemed!

  “How did we dare to come here in such a small number?” I said, five or six hours after our friend’s disappearance. “We weren’t crazy, though.”

  “It’s only necessary to regret stupid actions,” Antoine retorted, severely. “All explorers risk their lives. That’s the rule. How many of those perished who set out in Columbus’s or Magellan’s caravels, or Cook’s ships, or ventures into forests, scrublands or deserts. How many others died who set course for the moon or landed on it? Their task was inferior to ours.” Firmly, he added: “Perhaps I’ll die here, but I don’t believe I’ll regret coming.”

  “We should have set out in greater numbers!”

  “It would have been necessary to build several Stellariums, and thus to wait—for a long time—for money and men to be found, at the risk of being anticipated. There’s no proof, in any case, that a larger party would have succeeded. If Mars contains many Tripeds armed like those who have abducted Jean, it might have been more dangerous for twenty, thirty or forty to come than two, three or four. Haven’t we made the sacrifice of our lives?”

  The day passed; fate condemned us to spend the night over the forest. We saw the Imponderable Living Beings reappear, but our hearts were too heavy for us to devote ourselves to observations or scrupulous experiments. Even so, we took better account of the individuality, the spontaneity and also the “speciation” of the Ethereals.

  Their movements were as discontinuous as the movements of a crowd in our city streets—more discontinuous, even, more varied and more variable—although associations of movements were formed for inconceivable ends.

  Often, exchanges of phosphorescence, changing rhythms, with repetitions and pauses, suggested the notion of a language. There might or might not have been authoritative control within the groups; the number of those composing them varied from two to several hundred—once, in fact, we saw thousands of complex filaments whose length (stature?) attained seven or eight meters, moving through a near-vertical column of networks. That multitude rose up through the column at great speed, as if it were trying to reach the stars.

  In spite of our anguish, we rose up along with that singular multitude. It climbed to a height of several hundred kilometers. The column had faded out some time before; the Ethereals were creating a less obvious pathway, which was erased behind them. In the end, they stopped, but their agitation in place created a collective palpitation from which fluorescences escaped.

  After approximately half an hour, the crowd descended toward the planet again.

  “We’ve witnessed a great etherosocial event, if I might call it that,” Antoine murmured, when we had resumed our maneuvers above the forest. “I think those life-forms are far superior to ours!”

  “They seem to be unaware of us, though, while we can see them! Isn’t that a superiority on our side of the account?”

  “Haven’t we been unaware, throughout almost all of our ancestral evolution, of the microbes that nevertheless decimate humankind? Would you say that the microbial killers of negroes, redskins, Egyptians and Greeks were superior to the people they destroyed, who did not know of their existence?”

  “Who knows?”

  There was a pause. We directed beams of light at the cryptogamic forest, hoping against hope that we might see our poor companion. We sent out radiant signals in vain.

  Antoine took the first watch and I slept for a few hours—the feverish sleep of the condemned, with its nightmares and bewildered awakenings.

  It was still dark when my turn to be on watch arrived. Until dawn, I never ceased describing circles above the bleak forest. My soul really was mortally depressed; in this strange world, even if Jean had not been a dear friend, I would have felt his loss as an intolerable diminution of my own person. The journey across the interstellar abyss, the isolation in a star lost in the depths of space, had made the three of us into a single being.

  Dawn finally came, immediately mutated into broad daylight. I looked down hopelessly at the huge thalluses and the creeping plants. Suddenly, my heart leapt: emotion swept through me like a cyclone, traversed by lightning-flashes.

  Jean was there!

  He was there, in the same clearing from which he had disappeared, next to the blue rocks.

  I sent forth a “hailing” beam, to which he replied by repetitive signals—signals in our radiostenographic vocabulary.

  He said: “Safe and sound. I’m among the homologues of our human race. We understand one another, very vaguely. They’re gentle—gentler, I think, than humans. They captured me by stunning me; I haven’t been subject to the slightest violence. Their astonishment and curiosity are intense. They ardently desired to know where we come from; I finally succeeded in making them understand…”

  “But how could you eat…and breathe?”

  “As for respiration, nothing to fear—they left me two respirators—but I’m hungry…thirsty, especially. Their water isn’t drinkable for humans. I dared not eat their food…they’ve guessed that…”

  “You’re not free?”

  “No, and I doubt that they’ll let me go, until I can explain. Send me water—water above all.”

  “Soon, my dear Jean. I’ll wake Antoine.”

  Antoine,
who was sleeping as badly as I had slept, got up at the first appeal, and was stupefied by the sight of our companion, alone in the clearing.

  I explained the situation rapidly, while Jean stenotelegraphed: “I’ve been able to assure myself that their ‘fluidic bombardment’ only passes through objects of no great thickness—five or six centimeters at the most; it becomes harmless in passing through more than that. It doesn’t threaten life; it produces unconsciousness. At 100 meters its effectiveness is already much reduced. Take your precautions in consequence.”

  “Good!” said Antoine. “We’ll send down the provisions.”

  Rapidly, we made up a parcel and dropped it from some two hundred meters above the ground, its fall being slowed by a small gravitic field opposed to the Martian field.

  During that fall we saw some twenty Tripeds emerge from underground, who watched the operation with evident curiosity.

  “Thank you,” Jean telegraphed, when he had taken possession of the provisions. “I hope to give you precise information next time.”

  We saw him eat and drink, without anyone interfering, but when he wrapped up the parcel again four Tripeds emerged from underground to take him away.

  “What does that signify?” Antoine muttered. “Are they sparing him permanently, or is it only a respite?”

  “I have an idea that they won’t do him any harm—unless they think that they’re under threat themselves. They want to know what we are and where we come from. Think what our state of mind would be in analogous circumstances!”

  “A civilized state of mind—but what if they’re savages?”

  “I imagine that they’re more likely to be ‘retrogrades’—underground habitation implies the impoverishment of the planet.”

  “Possibly! At any rate, their weapons—the fluidic bombardment that Jean mentioned—appear to indicate a present or past civilization.”

  “And how captivating it is!”

  “Anthropocentrist!” cried Antoine. The Ethereals, not to mention the Zoomorphs, ought to appear much more exciting! These are only a sort of equivalent of Terrans…”

  “That’s true—but which of them, deep down, interests you the most?”

  “I have the same weakness as you, damn it! Then again, there’s Jean—safe and sound, but captive. Until he’s set free, that’s where the poignant episode, the tragic turn of events, will take place…”

  “He must be set free!”

  Antoine shrugged his shoulders sadly. “How? Even if the Tripeds are powerless against the Stellarium, and even if our rays are sufficient to vanquish them, they’re holding Jean—his life is at their disposal. We can only count on chance or the good will of his kidnappers.”

  “I shan’t despair of that good will.”

  “Nor I—but it’s a baseless impression.”

  “Their gentle treatment of Jean…”

  “Might be a trick! I’m thinking about Cook’s massacre.”

  We spent long hours—even bleaker than the hours of darkness—hovering over the forest. In the middle of the day Jean reappeared in the clearing and immediately stenographed: “I firmly believe that their mores are very gentle, gentler than ours, and that they don’t wish me any harm. A sign language is slowly being established between us. I’ve been able to make them understand that we come from another world. There’s no doubt about their intelligence; it must be the equivalent of human intelligence, with particularities that are related to their structure. Since yesterday we’ve received many visitors, who come from other regions…”

  “Do you think that their society is increasing or decreasing?”

  “Deceasing—there’s no doubt about that. Like humans, they belong to an animality whose life depends on liquid. Now, their liquid—their water—has become rare, and is perhaps not the same water as in the past.”

  “Can we hope for your liberation?”

  “I’d dare to bet on it…”

  One by one, Tripeds had emerged from underground. They were attentively observing the exchange of signals between their prisoner and the navigators of the Stellarium.

  “They really are very beautiful!” said Antoine.

  “Much more beautiful than us!” I sighed.

  We were able to observe their gait and gestures at our leisure. As I have already said, they only moved one leg at a time, in such a way that their steps were taken in three stages; their gestures were in some respects very similar to and in some ways greatly different from ours. The extremity of each of their upper limbs was “digitized” but did not exactly form a hand; the extremities that replaced our fingers emerged from a sort of shell; there were nine of them to each hand and we soon noticed that they could curve over in every direction, without the movement of any one of them influencing the movement of others. They thus obtained, at will, the most various dispositions, and could grip several objects at the same time, in different directions. Their garments were made of a sort of mossy vegetation that was exactly fitted to the body.

  One of them, who as standing close to Jean, was observing our friend’s gestures, and ours, with a particularly intense attention.

  “This is an important person,” Jean told us. “He has a certain influence over the others—he’s the one with whom I’m designing a system of signals—but it will require a few days more to exchange elementary ideas.”

  “Do you still have food and water?”

  “Until tomorrow morning.”

  At that moment, the influential individual traced various signs.

  “I think I understand that he’s trying to reassure us about the future,” Jean said. “Fundamentally, I sense more melancholy than anxiety.”

  IV.

  A week vanished into the imponderable. We communicated with Jean every day. More than once we thought about disembarking in the clearing, but the captive asked us to wait a little longer. Because our continuous presence was unnecessary, we made long excursions. They revealed three zones inhabited by Tripeds: three zones of lakes and canals that, in combination, scarcely attained the extent of the Mediterranean.

  The lakes scarcely extended beyond the tropical regions, although we found several of them in latitudes that would have enjoyed a temperate climate on Earth. Elsewhere, there was nothing but more or less diluted vapors that sometimes resembled light mists, or—in the polar regions—fields of snow.

  There could scarcely have been more than seven or eight million Tripeds on the entire planet. The majority lived underground; the others, much smaller in number, lived in stone dwellings whose style was vaguely reminiscent of the Roman style.

  These dwellings—evident vestiges of the past—were always part of an important agglomeration. One might have thought these cities entirely composed of large and small Roman churches, the majority of which had fallen into ruins—which left little doubt as to the decadence of the Tripeds. Many centuries, perhaps millennia, before there had been seven or eight cities as populous as Paris under Louis XIV or London under Cromwell; they now contained a few hundred individuals in total.

  It was easy to tell that the Tripeds’ industry was in complete decadence. They constructed tools, some of which were reminiscent of terrestrial tools, agricultural machinery and mechanical means of transport. The last-named, which were rare, did not move on wheels—they seemed to crawl rather swiftly over the ground. Once, no doubt, the Tripeds had had flying machines; they communicated at a distance by means of apparatus whose mechanism escaped us, but which evidently used waves.

  It did not take long for our presence to become known; we were observed with the aid of instruments similar to our own binoculars and presumably constructed on the same principles. As we passed by, crowds assembled in the cities; elsewhere, groups emerged from underground; the agitation and curiosity seemed lively.

  In sum, the Tripeds displayed the vestiges of a civilization once comparable to the terrestrial civilization of the nineteenth century; we conjectured that, following the successive abandonment of many industries, thei
r science had diminished over the centuries.

  As for their animals, very few attained the size of our elephants, giraffes or large buffaloes.

  The domain of the Tripeds and their Realm only comprised a rather restricted fraction of the planet—a tenth at the most; it stopped part way between the equator and the poles. The surface occupied by the zoomorphs was more extensive and extended much further to the north and the south; the future belonged to them.

  Was the retreat of the Tripeds due to a conflict between the Realms, to the impossibility of living in certain regions or to a spontaneous decadence? We made little attempt to answer these questions; nevertheless, the presence of Zoomorphs excluded that of the Tripeds. What seemed evident to us was that the realm of the Zoomorphs was much less ancient than the other.

  “The future is theirs!” said Antoine, one day when we had traveled through several zones. “They’ll possess the whole planet eventually!”

  “They already possess three-quarters of it. What about the Ethereals?”

  “They, my friend, are so far in advance of us that I have renounced any thought of forming an idea of their future.”

  “Are they really in advance of us? More subtle, undoubtedly, less exposed to brutal contingencies—but perhaps after all, less intelligent…”

  “Possibly. The very essence of their organization nevertheless appears to me to be of a higher order.”

  “Do you think so? One may doubt it. Free electrons have movements more ample and rapid than those of a living cell, but I deem them inferior to a cell nevertheless.”

  “A poor comparison. We’re dealing here with a complex organization of radiations…radiant cells, if I might put it like that. In sum, it’s a vain discussion. We can only resort to our intuitions—woefully inadequate, alas!”

  On the eleventh day, we saw Jean appear in the middle of the clearing, alone. Not a single Triped was visible.

  Our friend raised a smiling face toward the Stellarium. “I’m free!” he affirmed.

  My heart was beating furiously. Jean went on: “As you see, they’re keeping their distance. In any case, I’ve been able to convince them that, if they had evil designs, they would be impossible against our vessel. Their weapons are inadequate, their instruments are incapable of penetrating the argine walls and they don’t possess any powerful explosives. Besides, they don’t wish us any harm! They’ve told me that repeatedly. I can’t have misunderstood it.”