The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  I would gladly have sent him to the devil. Aurore looked at me and raised her eyebrows resignedly. In any case, he didn’t wait for an invitation.

  “You don’t mind if I take off my overcoat? It’s a little warm in here and I’ve come up the Caulaincourt steps.”

  He shed his trench-coat deliberately and hung it up on the stand next to the trunk. Subconsciously, I noticed that he had a fresh complexion and did not seem to be inconvenienced by the heat, but I only remembered that detail later.

  The young phenomenon went into the studio, into which we followed him unhurriedly. For the sake of politeness, Aurore congratulated him on the success of his article. He blossomed.

  “You’ve read it? Marvelous, isn’t it? I’ve thrown a huge stone into the frog-pond—and it’s not over; it’s only just beginning. Now that attention has been brought to the subject, you’ll see, news will emerge from all directions. Here’s one already, whose publication will make a noise tomorrow.”

  So saying, he reached into the left inside pocket of his jacket with his right hand, shook his head, swiftly tapped the right pocket on the outside, affecting surprise and annoyance, and exclaimed: “Damn it! I put it in my overcoat without noticing, as when one loses one’s wallet. Excuse me.”

  He ran back to the hallway and came back a quarter of a minute later, his wallet in his hand, with a more triumphant expression than was warranted. In his haste to open the wallet and search for the document in question, a series of photographic prints escaped in a cascade and scattered on the divan.

  “Oh, that’s nothing—snaps taken at the Verem…those that the Jour didn’t keep. Some of them are curious, though. Look, that’s Herr Oberth. I managed to take it without him being aware of it.”

  Mechanically, Aurore picked up two or three of the prints, which had fallen close to her. One of the images attracted her attention.

  “A curious physiognomy, this woman. One might think she were a Slav.”

  I learned over, saw the face of a blonde with pronounced but delicate features with freckles, wearing spectacles with thin metal rims, over eyes that were strangely bright with mysticism.

  “Someone from the Verem?”

  “From the Verem, if you wish. That’s Ida Miounof, who I mentioned to you the other day. I also had difficulty photographing her! I had to catch her off guard, and when she noticed it, she wanted to force me to expose the film. She was really annoyed.”

  “But you made up, I hope?” Aurore interjected, in an innocent tone.

  Oscar looked at her, and nearly reacted—but then, without any reply, he put the snap away, and finally brought out the cutting, which he read to us.

  “A radio message from the T.O.L. agency informs us that the Cree Indians liking on the banks of the Saskatchewan River have handed over to the governor of the province a bizarre machine they found in the forest, where it set several hectares of larches ablaze. The description of the machine confirms that it is another rocket-torpedo analogous to the one recovered by the Cachalot-Blanc, but of a different model and provenance. Germany is therefore not alone in studying the new weapon. At least two countries are thus occupied.”

  And the young journalist added, without pausing, as if he were continuing to read, but raising his head and looking Aurore in the eyes: “And in addition to governments, there will even be individuals…billionaires…who are carrying out astronautical experiments on their own account…in favor or war or peace, no one knows...”

  I started at that evident allusion. Fortunately, I was out of Oscar’s visual range.

  Aurore met his gaze and appeared not to understand. She met the probe with indifference and detachment. “Really? That’s curious—but journalists say so many things.”

  There was a contest of gazes that lasted three seconds. I cordially detested my “nephew,” and remembered my indiscretion at the Frémiets remorsefully. There was no doubt that the young phenomenon was on the track of our relationship with Madame Simodzuki—but he had nothing but suspicions, for he dared not take it any further and pronounce the name, in order to transform them into certainties, as he would doubtless have done had he been more battle-hardened in his profession. My wife’s serenity disconcerted him; he flinched. Judging that his visit had missed its target, he got up to take his leave.

  “I wish you bon voyage, Aunt Rette, Tonton. I’m leaving too on a new investigation. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll meet up again soon. It’s a small world.” And he added, without transition, in the manner of an aside: “Oh, how exciting the job of a detective is!”

  With his hand on the doorknob, he seemed to change his mind and recover his audacity.

  “It still holds, doesn’t it, Aunt Rette?”

  “What?”

  “You know very well—our agreement, that if you resume the service of astronautics and you need a mechanic, you’ll take me. Don’t forget that I’m a real mechanic.”

  “If I need one, yes, and if it’s possible, Scar, I won’t forget you.”

  “Anyway, I’ll be able to remind you about your promise when the time comes,” he concluded, with a smile that he tried to render amiable and anodyne.

  And his footsteps went down the stairs at an allegro rhythm.

  The door closed.

  Aurore said, pensively: “Do you know what I noticed? His wallet was already in his jacket when he pretended to go look for it in his overcoat. I’m convinced that he only went back into the hallway to read our destination on the label on your trunk.”

  I shrugged my shoulders indulgently. “Bah! The scamp knows now that we’re going to Toulon. So what?”

  “So, he suspects something. He had Madame Simodzuki’s name on the tip of his tongue. And the stupid thing is that he succeeded in extorting my promise.”

  “A promise that doesn’t count, my love! You can’t be a slave to the truth and honesty to the point of believing that you’re committed...”

  She shook her head. “It’s one more annoying coincidence. As if all this sudden rumor of rockets weren’t enough. Any kind of astronautical experiment is going to be suspected of concealing a military enterprise. We’ll need to be seriously wary of indiscretions and the curiosity of journalists.”

  On that note, she went to pick up the pile of underwear that she had put down when Oscar arrived, and started arranging things in the trunk.

  VII. Paris-Uraniville

  I have nothing to say about the journey except that I spent it in the same fever that had gripped me three days before. The region for which I was heading was no longer an objective, as it had been on the other occasions I have traveled there, alone or with my dear Aurore—a definitive paradise beyond which there was nothing to be imagined or desired. This time, the Midi was a simple relay-station, an introduction to something new and unknown, immense and superhuman.

  The first glimpse of the Mediterranean, in the dawn after Marseilles, the bay of Cassis and the majestic cliffs of Cap Canaille in shadow, then the beauty of the panorama increasing in stages, from the bays of La Ciotat and Les Lèques to that of Bandol, only excited a sort of retrospective enthusiasm in me. Before the fragments of landscape that appeared in series, from their propitious angles, “fully composed,” not once did I say to myself, as before: “Superb! What a pity I can’t stop here!” I simply thought: “I would have loved to paint that, in the days when I as a painter.” The enchantment was obsolete, its possession no longer one in which one’s desire might by couched. What did the Côte d’Azur and its banal delights matter to a man who was heading toward the discovery of a new and unknown world?

  Even after Toulon, the sea crossing aboard the motor-launch commanded by the first mate of the Fusi-Yama, Mr. Holborn, who was waiting for us on the quay of the mercantile port—that ecstasy-inducing promenade over the blue marble waters of the vast haven, where powerful ironclads were smoking at their moorings and joyful boats were gliding beneath the ocher of lateen sails; their seaward exodus limited by the wooded mass of Cap Sicié; the defile be
tween the cliffs of Giens, the wild Escampobariou beaten by changes in water-level, and the Île de Grand-Roubaud; the insular coasts of Porquerolles displayed beneath the fleecy green of pines, creeks reserved for sirens and silvery beaches “made for the performance of all the love-poems on earth” as Maupassant wrote of the Estérel—nothing in that entire spectacle succeeded in capturing my imagination.

  My love-poem was the triumphant adventure that was calling Aurore and me: adventure in all its plenitude of novelty, no longer permitted by the world, explored in every direction and every remote corner, reduced by rapid transportation and egalitarian stupidity to a ball in the hollow of the hand: a world for Cook’s tours, of standardized peoples clad in three-piece suits, wearing caps or bowler hats under every meridian and every parallel, from China and Greenland to Tahiti and Tierra de Fuego.

  Aurore smiled, indulgent to my lyricism, from the height of her most serene joy.

  We were slightly acquainted with the Île du Levant, by virtue of having been there on an excursion from Lavandou the previous year. Mr. Holborn, an Englishman who spoke French well, named the places for us. Having gone past the cliffs of Port-Cros in the north, the launch, instead of continuing its course along the northern coast of the island, where the jetty of Petit-Avis and the house of the Heliopolis colony are situated, veered southwards to go through the pass separating Port-Cros from Levant. At the bottom of the cliffs that loom over the old Fort de l’Arbousier, a few pale silhouettes extended on the rugged rocks of Aiguade revealed the presence of naturists. When the point was doubled, the southern part of the island appeared before us.

  On that coast, generally only frequented by fishermen from Lavandou, a large white yacht was moored near the shore. Soon I recognized the inlet of Riou-Frey—but how much it had changed since the previous year! Now there was a kind of wharf there, and huts flanked by an enormous pile of tanks of gasoline, from which the sound of a motor reached us. Above the inlet, a cable-car system extended obliquely from the strand to the summit of the northern cliffs, over which loomed the pylon of a wireless mast

  Mr. Holborn, lifting his gold-braided sleeve, pointed upwards.

  “Uraniville.24 That’s where Madame la Comtesse is waiting for you.”

  My artist’s eye would have been scandalized by such an outrage to the natural beauty of that previously-inviolable spot, but I knew now what that massacre of the landscape by industrial décor signified, and I absolved it, since it was the ransom of my splendid adventure.

  Going past the yacht, whose captain saluted us in passing, the launch continued on its course into the embrace of the inlet, and the rocky walls echoed with the splutter of the exhaust, combined with the rumble of the electricity generating station next to the wharf. Whistle-blasts regulated the maneuvers of a crew of sailors in the process of disembarking crates from a lighter moored to the quay.

  A big fellow with red hair in dungarees welcomed us on the jetty and introduced himself: “Engineer Northwell.”

  Aurore had already recognized him, though, and shook his hand cordially. He was the former technical director of the Columbus factory.

  While speaking, for my sake, a perfectly comprehensible but atrociously accented French, he guided us to the cable car: a kind of elevator, in which all three of us took our places. A bell rang and we set off—and the floor of the inlet, its shingle reddened by the sun, appeared to drop away, as the landscape changed its perspective.

  The ascent concluded on the plateau. In a enclosure fashioned in the wood of Alep pines and parasol pines, a recently-excavated clearing 150 meters in diameter, improvised in the savage heart of the Île du Levant, was an industrial establishment with a spacious collapsible chalet and a number of hangars with steel beams and corrugated iron roofs. Under the largest one, through the battens of the partly-open door, the sunlight caused a metal apparatus to gleam.

  “My new Rocket!” the engineer said, proudly, pointing at it from a distance.

  Already, Madame Simodzuki—“la Comtesse,” as she was known here—had emerged from the chalet and was advancing toward us, her hands extended.

  “My friends! You were all that was lacking. The Ad Astra is all ready. We can get to work right away.”

  VIII. Astronautics in Full Swing

  The spaceship: a giant shell of magnalium—an ultra-light alloy of magnesium and aluminum—two meters by seven, held vertically by its mooring-stays, which also serve in flight, as radio antennas, splayed and jointed like a spider’s legs.

  At the base, a lattice frame about one meter fifty high encloses the explosion-chamber and the propulsion tube. Higher up, the full cylinder commences. It comprises, for the first meter, the fuel tanks. Then, extending for a further two meters, the engine-room, cluttered with control levers and dials the radio post, the periscopes, the gyroscopes for automatic stabilization, the auxiliary motor for lateral orientation and inclination, and the cylinders of breathable oxygen. Finally, extending over two meters fifty, the cabin, terminated by a cone fitted with two portholes for astronomical observations and the man-hole—the only entrance to the vehicle, accessible via an external ladder.

  “The three of us won’t have a lot of room in this cabin,” I remarked, when Madame Simodzuki had the engineer Northwell show us that apparatus. There was hardly enough space there for four people to stand. The presence of the circular storage-lockers enclosing water supplies, food supplies and exploration equipment—respirators, weapons, etc.—and the head of the ladder down to the lower floor reduced the two-meter diameter of the cabin to an available floor space of about a meter and a half.

  “In principle, only two people will be here at the same time,” our future pilot explained. “One person will always have to be on watch in the engine-room. Anyway, one can sit down on the lockers, and there are two bunks.”

  The latter, metallic frames superimposed as in a sleeper car, were normally collapsed together and relegated to the vault in a rectangular block that did not impede movement.

  The lighting was electric. As for heating, the space was so narrow that the sun would suffice for that. The cylinder comprising the cabin and engine room had its external walls half-blackened in order to absorb calorific radiation. On the other half, the bare magnalium, polished like a mirror, reflected it. It would therefore be easy to maintain a comfortable temperature in the two chambers by directing a larger or smaller section of the blackened surface sunwards with the air of the orientating servo-motor.

  I shall not bore the reader by reporting here the entire conversation in which the exact possibilities of the new apparatus was discussed in technical terms. The engineer and Aurore devoted themselves to it wholeheartedly, covering a blackboard with chalked formulae in the drawing-room of the collapsible chalet. The Comtesse seemed to be following the calculations with ease, but I confess that I didn’t understand very much.

  This is what I was able to take aboard.

  The spaceship weighs about a ton when empty, and two and a half tons fully equipped, with its tanks full of fuel and three passengers collectively accounting for 180 kilos. As for the engine, a new “electronic activation mechanism” invented by Engineer Northwell gives the Ad Astra I an enormous superiority over the MG-17 of the first Columbus-Cassis flight.

  “By means of my system,” the engineer declared, “I’ve succeeded, the temperature of the gas still being 5,000 degrees, in increasing the ejection velocity from 6,000 meters per second to 12,000, which, according to the formula mv2/2, results, not in a doubling but a squaring of thrust. Thanks to that supplementation of disposable energy, we’re no longer, as we were two years ago, at the extreme limit of the possibilities of realization.

  “Instead of the little apprentice craft that the MG-17 was, the unlimited financial resources put at my disposal by Madame la Comtesse have permitted me to build a long range spacecraft. With the Ad Astra I we have a considerable safety margin, which will reduce the duration of the interplanetary journey considerably. Thus, with the M
G-17, it would only have been possible, aiming at the planet Mars, to fire the rocket for ten minutes, just long enough to free it from terrestrial gravitation, and it would then have been necessary to let it run at its own pace, by virtue of the acquired velocity, which would have required a journey of thirty days. Now, once the initial ‘detachment’ has taken place, the engine can be maintained in operation for a further twenty minutes, at an acceleration of 5G, which reduces the duration of an Earth-Mars voyage to twelve days. New landing facilities also result, no longer requiring the delicate employment of a parachute.”

  The week that remained to us before the departure would permit Aurore to familiarize herself with the Ad Astra I, and above all to initiate me into its operation, to enable me to work shifts with her and take my turn on watch. Then again, it would also be necessary to test the Rocket in space, flying for a hour or two in order to verify that all is apparatus was working properly, to check the expenditure of fuel under various conditions, and test the resistance of the passengers to the troubling “space-sickness.”

  One can be a passable car-driver without knowing anything about the theoretical functioning of the engine. Fortunately, I had no need to acquire any profound understanding of dynamics to fulfill my role as second mechanic. The perilous maneuvers of take-off and landing would be reserved for the chief pilot; it was sufficient for me to be able to supervise the working of the apparatus during the hours when Aurore was resting.

  Every day, usually before lunch, which took place in the cottage of Uraniville, I practiced with her and the engineer, and was soon able to respond to their posers in a satisfactory fashion. In the afternoon, I took a course in triangulation, completed in the evening by practical exercises on Venus and Mars, whose apparent diameter I had to measure and whose distance I had to calculate by means of parallax.

  At sunset, we went back to the yacht, and met up after dinner in the music room, with the Comtesse, the inevitable secretary, Miss Lat, mutely telling her Buddhist prayer-beads, the engineer and the captain, and sometimes Mr. Holborn, to chat or listen to the wireless.