The Germans on Venus

by Brian Stableford

  Buildings, falling apart, were reduced to jagged fragments, their shadows covered with a red cloth; behind the buildings that collapsed on every side the fireballs spread. The crumbling masses seemed to be enormous heaps of red-hot iron. The city was nothing but a curtain of flames, bright in places, somber blue in others, with points of profound intensity, in which passing black shapes could be seen gesticulating.

  The portals of churches were inflated by the terrified crowd, which flowed everywhere in long black ribbons. Faces were turned, anxiously, towards the sky, mute with fear, eyes staring in horror. There were eyes that were wide open, by dint of stupid astonishment, and eyes hardened by the black rays they short forth, and eyes red with fury, mirroring the reflections of the conflagration, and eyes shining and pleading with anguish, and eyes that were wanly resigned, whose tears had ceased to flow, and eyes tremulously agitated, whose pupils roamed incessantly over every part of the scene, and eyes that were looking inwards. In the procession of livid faces, the only visible differences were in the eyes—and the streets, amid the shafts of sinister light hollowed out in the gutters, seemed braided by moving eyes.

  Enveloped by a continual fusillade, human hedgerows retreated into the squares, pursue by other human hedgerows that advanced implacably, the fleeing company agitating its strangely-illuminated arms tumultuously, while the company on the march was tightly-packed, dense, orderly and resolute, its members moving in step, without hesitation, following silent orders. The barrels of rifles formed single rows of murderous mouths, from which extended long, thin lines of fire, irradiating the night with their mortal stenography. Above the continuous roar, amid the frightful pauses, a singular and uninterrupted crackling sound was audible.

  There were also knots of people, grouped in threes, four and fives, interlinked and obscure, above which whirled the flash of straight cavalry sabers and sharpened axes stolen from the arsenals. Thin individuals were brandishing these weapons, furiously cleaving heads furiously, joyfully puncturing breasts, sensuously slashing bellies and trampling the viscera.

  And through the avenues, like scintillating meteors, long cylinders of polished steel rolled at high speed, drawn by fearful galloping horses with flowing manes. They looked like cannon whose barrel and breech were the same diameter: at the back, there was a sheet-metal cage manned by two busy men tending a furnace, with a boiler and a pipe from which smoke emerged; at the front, there was a large, shiny and trenchant indented disk mounted at an angle, rotating vertiginously in front of the muzzle of the central tube.65 Every time an indentation encountered the black hole, a clicking sound was heard.

  These galloping machines paused outside the door of each house; vague forms were detached from them, and went in. They came out two by two, charged with bound and moaning parcels. The stokers fed these long human bundles into each steel tube, regularly and methodically. For a second, jutting out to shoulder-level, a discolored and contorted face was visible; then the indentation of the eccentrically-turning disk threw out a head in the course of its revolution. The steel plate remained immutably polished, the rapidity of its movement launching a circle of blood which marked the vacillating walls with geometric figures. A body fell on the roadway, between the machine’s large wheels; its bonds broke in the fall and, as a reflex movement of the elbows propped it up on the flagstones, the still-living cadaver ejaculated a red jet.

  Then the rearing horses, their flanks pitilessly lashed by a whip, drew the steel tubes onwards. There was a metallic shriek, a profoundly shrill note in the sonority of the tube, two lines of flame reflected in their periphery, and an abrupt halt in front of a new door.

  Save for the lunatics killing in isolation, with naked blades, there was no evident hate or fury—nothing but destruction and orderly massacre, a progressive annihilation, like a continuously rising tide of death, inexorable and inevitable. The men who were giving the orders, proud of their work, surveyed the action with rigid faces, perfectly fixed.

  At the corner of one dark street, the clattering hooves of horse encountered a barricade of headless corpses, a heap of trunks. The battery of steel tubes paused amid the flesh; above confusedly contracted arms a forest of fingers was raised towards the sky, pointing in every direction, like the colored spearheads of a future revolt.

  Stopping the guillotine-guns, the whinnying horses refused to mount an assault, their nostrils steaming, crushing the backwash of green entrails beneath their iron-shod hooves. Amid the palpitating flesh, between the branch-work of inanimate hands, desperately stiffened, there were spurts of flowing blood.

  The priests of the massacre climbed up on the human barricade, into which their feet sank, taking the horses by the head, dragging them by the bridle, while they snorted, and forced the wheels to pass over the scattered limbs whose bones cracked. Standing in the midst of their butchery, faces lit up from within by the Idea and from without by the conflagration, the apostles of annihilation gazed attentively into the depths of the darkness, at the horizon, as if they were expecting to see an unknown star.

  Before them they saw an accumulation of broken facades, randomly distributed stone steps and smoking rafters, with bricks, splinters of wood, pieces of paper, scraps of cloth and sandstone paving-blocks in vast numbers, jumbled up in heaps as if hurled by some prodigious hand.

  There was also a half-ruined poor-house, in which the chimneys, cut vertically, had released a long band of soot, with branches at different heights. The lower part of the wooden staircase had collapsed, broken half-way on the first floor, with the result that the shaky steps led nowhere in particular, towards rampant flames and contorted cadavers, like a frail footbridge descending from the heavens.

  All the interior life of these wretched rooms was visible, exposed to the light of day: the grate of a coal fire; a patched-up peat-burning stove; a brown clay fire-pot; dented black saucepans; rags heaped in corners; a rusty cage from which a few green sprigs still protruded, in which a little grey bird was lying on its back, its feet withdrawn into its belly plumage; scattered medicine-bottles; a camp-bed stood against a wall; torn mattresses from which tufts of seaweed were protruding; pots of withered flowers, mingled with soil and plant debris—and, sitting amid polished floor-tiles, torn away from the grey cement, a little boy face to face with a little girl, triumphantly showing her the brass spindle of a rocket that had fallen there.

  The little girl had a spoon stuck in her mouth and was looking at him with a curious expression. The little boy clenched his fingers, whose tender skin was already wrinkled, about a movable lock-nut and, rotating the screw, lost himself in contemplation of the device. They stamped their thin feet in turn, taking their shoes off, profoundly absorbed, not in the least astonished by the air that was coming in or the horrible light that was flooding them—until the little girl, drawing out the spoon that was swelling her cheek, said in a whisper: “That’s funny—mama and papa have gone, along with their room. There are big red lights in the streets, and the staircase has fallen.”

  All this the organizers of the Revolution saw, and the new Sun whose dawn they awaited did not rise—but the idea that they had in their heads suddenly flared up, they experience a sort of glimmer; they vaguely understood a life superior to universal death; the children’s smiles broadened, and brought about a revelation; pity descended upon them.

  And, with their hands over their eyes, so as not to see all the terrified eyes of the dead—all the eyes that eyelids could no longer cover—they staggered down from the rampart of slaughtered human beings that surrounded the new city, and fled recklessly into the red shadows, amid the racket of galloping machines.

  Louis Mullem: A Rival of Edison

  (1909)

  In his youth, Louis Mullem (1836-1908) was a composer of music as well as an author, but he gave up both vocations in order to concentrate on his career as a sober political journalist, which extended from the heyday Second Empire almost to the eve of the Great War. He is still remembered for a notable col
lection of Contes d’Amérique [American Tales], which exhibits the influence of James Fenimore Cooper, but is otherwise almost forgotten in the fields of literature and music. He was sufficiently successful in his subsequent endeavors, however, for the statesman Georges Clemenceau—who was later to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles—to attend his funeral.

  “Un Rival d’Edison” is taken from Contes ondoyants et divers (1909), a posthumous collection assembled as a memorial by Mullem’s friends. The collection is conscientiously dedicated to Clemenceau, but Gustave Geffroy, who wrote the preface, did not bother to stress the author’s political achievements, preferring to remember such distant occasions as their chance meeting in a café with Mullem’s literary hero, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and a Christmas Eve when Mullem played the organ to accompany Maurice Rollinat’s carol-singing.

  The collection contains two other speculative conversation-pieces, “Le Progrès supreme” [Ultimate Progress] and “L’Éternité chimique” [Chemical Eternity]; like them, “Un Rival d’Edison” was probably written some time before its publication, although its representation of Edison in middle age implies a date no earlier than the late 1880s, and—like other items in this anthology, but again in very different fashion—the story might well have been inspired by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s publication of L’Ève future. This was not the earliest fictional anticipation of television broadcasting, even if one allows for a substantial time-lag before its publication, but it is interesting as a study of technological disenchantment whose gentle tone stands in stark stylistic contrast to “The Future Terror.”

  Monsieur Jonathan Dubourg had invited a number of the most famous scientists to his native town. Dinner had just finished and they were enjoying coffee in the drawing-room. Learning and expertise of every sort, speculative and practical, was represented by a local elite of professors, engineers and industrial bigwigs. This harmonious gathering would have had everything required to found a veritable provincial Institut, had it not been fearful of that bothersome ostentation.

  The scientists in question each reserved for himself an admiration strictly limited to his particular specialism. With regard to Jonathan Dubourg, they were of one accord in holding in high esteem his considerable wealth, his comfortable and hospitable house, and the luxurious feast laid on by his venerable housekeeper, a cordon bleu cook of the first order. They also appreciated the beautiful lawn edged with trees that was attached to the dwelling. Finally, they enjoyed the uninterrupted flow of the ever-exquisite beer and the excellent cigars that the admirable householder distributed to his guests in that shady arena.

  As for certain ultra-scientific opinions too stubbornly maintained by Monsieur Dubourg, his continual claims to be engaged in researches similar to those of the famous Edison and his ill-concealed bouts of bad temper when the illustrious Yankee beat him to the solution of some important problem—all of that drew nothing from these distinguished friends but an exchange of discreet smiles, emphasized by a furtive tapping of index fingers against foreheads. By this means, they surreptitiously indicated to one another an inoffensive mania attributable to old age.

  Today, though, despite the indulgence consequent upon a good meal, they judged that Monsieur Dubourg had overstepped the normal bounds of moderate infatuation, and even went so far as to dread that the amateur enthusiasm of their honorable host might now be verging on pure and simple madness. He had, in fact, written a postscript to his letter of invitation: “Finally! Finally, I have arrived first at a discovery that the glorious American has attempted in vain until now: the transmission of visual images over long distances—that’s what I’ve achieved! This is the extraordinary marvel that I shall have the honor, after dinner, of displaying to your eyes!”

  Such a boast! Such a proclamation of victory over impossibility! His aberration must certainly have become extreme, and the guests, exaggerating their usual signals, seemed to be acknowledging the urgency of subjecting Monsieur Dubourg’s increasing excitement to restorative medication.

  With a contained cheerfulness, however, they followed Monsieur Dubourg on to the large lawn, where the promised magic was to be produced in the radiance of the summer evening. There, the assembly was suddenly plunged into a limitless amazement by the strange arrangements that the inventor had made.

  At the far end of the garden a stage had been set up, with a dozen steps, surmounted by a vast mirror framed—not inelegantly—by multicolored drapery and attached laterally to the trees. Two clock-faces suspended in the foliage to the right and the left marked incomprehensibly different times. Beyond these decorations was open countryside bounded by a hill, about which wound a mysterious network of telegraphic wires supported at the tips of poles.

  The almost mortuary calm of the distant town was magnified hereabouts into an august depth of silence—in which Jonathan Dubourg began to speak, after having shown the assembly the waiting chairs arranged in a semicircle around a table amply supplied with the famous beer and the incomparable cigars mentioned above.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “about being bored by a long speech. I’ll get straight to the point, Gentlemen, after a few indispensable but very brief explanations.”

  The reassuring promises of this opening encouraged the listeners to plunge themselves into the attentive impassivity induced by smoking choice Havanas. Monsieur Dubourg climbed the steps of his stage. He manifested a noble intellectual bearing by virtue of his lofty presence, his fine white hair elevated by the frissons of the breeze. As a gleam of enthusiasm lit up his eyes, Jonathan Dubourg also had a sort of vengefully ironic twist to his lips. In truth, he was not unaware of the fact that his beloved fellow townsfolk suspected him of a slight cerebral deficiency. He had, in consequence, the fine attitude of an innovator who was no less disdainful of anticipated criticism than he was confident of the future of his work.

  “For the moment,” he continued, “what you see is a simple pane of glass backed by a tinted metal plate. Thus far, nothing new—it’s merely a somewhat sketchily-improvised mirror. But this, Gentlemen, is where my work becomes more specific: the sheet of metal is composed of a special substance, totally unknown to science as yet, whose formula, I take pride in informing you, is known only to me. Take note, I beg you, that this substance, defying analysis before employment, leaves no trace after one has made use of it, Now, submit this layer of metal to the effect of a powerful electric current. Immediately, its surface liquefies into an infinite number of microscopic globules, whose iridescent oscillation exactly reproduces the image and movement of all objects present in the field of light in which the electrical transmitter—whose disposition, composed of a sequence of graduated lenses, is also my secret—receives its initial influence…”

  The audience jeered. “Pooh! Is that all!” the puffs of cigar-smoke seemed to murmur.

  “I sense your objections,” said Monsieur Jonathan, with some slight annoyance. “You’re saying to yourselves that this is the usual effect of any mirror, and proves nothing except that the electricity plays some role in this most banal repetition of reflective phenomena. But wait—oh, wait! The spectacle that is, I hope, about to be displayed to your eyes in this mirror will be the instantaneous reproduction of a scene from which we are separated by thousands of leagues. The people, their actions, and the objects that surround them will be represented in all their exactitude, in motion and in color. The colored transmission of reflection, Gentlemen—that is the miraculous and natural experiment to which you will bear witness!”

  A few complaisant bravos emerged from the clouds of smoke. They wanted to push the implausible Jonathan to the limits of supreme madness.

  “The living image of which I speak,” the imperturbable Monsieur Dubourg continued, can be multiplied in any quantity of reflectors, thanks to the perfect homogeneity of metallic layers and the absolute parallelism of fluid effects. Unfortunately limited by my personal resources, I could only carry out this first attempt with two mirrors, which will relay their imag
es reciprocally, but they are linked to on another by the transatlantic cable. That’s already quite long, as distance goes. And I flatter myself that your surprise will not be small, in witnessing the appearance of the spectral image of the eminent person who has deigned to assist me—and who, for his part, will have the similar advantage of perceiving you.

  “I now appeal for your most intense attention. These projections, for the present, do not last long. After a few seconds, the metal being molten, the globules evaporate, like spherical droplets on a red-hot iron, and the picture dissipates into a thick mist. Later on, we shall avoid this inconvenience by means of a prompt succession of plates. Later still, capitalists on the lookout for millions will hasten to generalize my process. Before multiple mirrors the theater of the universe will display its beauties, its festivals and its disasters. Even ships, in continuous communication by means of cables, will be visible throughout their perilous journeys, until the tragic moment of their explosion. Thanks to me, I tell you, the viewing public will be able to contemplate sights, living creatures and things—the sum of all luminous and moving life! Isn’t that magnificent? Isn’t it sublime?”

  The invited learned men put on a show of ecstatic enthusiasm. “Quickly! Quickly! The formula, the launch, the shareholders, the millions, the billions!” they clamored, madly.