The Castaways of Eros

by Theo Varlet

  Bizarrely, that reply seemed to soothe him. Was he afraid of being left alone, then? Did he think he might weaken?

  I didn’t have time to be astonished, though. Aurore had switched on the light and screwed down the man-hole cover. She ushered us down through the narrow hatchway and we lay down on the couchettes as we had done the first time, with Madame Simodzuki.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Then…go!”

  Deflagration and thunder of engine…crushing beneath the fictitious weight of the acceleration; I rediscover the already-familiar sensations. The minutes spent in the typhoon of the departure already seem less long than the first time.

  Finally, silence…and loss of weight. The Rocket is traveling on its own momentum. The nauseating malaise begins.

  “Not too painful, Scar?” my wife enquires.

  “Ugh…no, not too bad…but I’m still quite deaf.” And he darts a long glance at the hatchway to the cockpit.

  Reassured, Aurore put on the headset of the wireless and makes a connection with the Uraniville station.

  “Hello, Madame, can you hear me?.... Yes, no problems... Yes, I’m listening... What’s that? Repeat, please... That’s terrible!”

  Very pale in the harsh light of the electric bulbs and the wan reflections of sheet metal, Aurore consults the chronometer with a rapid glance and turns to us. “Well,” she said, “the gendarmes have arrived. They’re looking for a spy. They’re negotiating with them, but the Comtesse expects the worst. At any rate, if we go back down to the Levant, there’ll be no more question of leaving tomorrow. We need to make an immediate decision. I propose that we leave now for good.”

  “Yes, yes—let’s go!” I said, enthusiastically.

  For an unknown motive, Oscar demurs. With his eyes glued to the hatchway to the cabin, he stammers: “But…but why not land elsewhere than the Levant, in some deserted spot?”

  “Because,” Aurore replied, impatiently, “no matter where we go down, we won’t be able to set off again. We’ve just expended fuel; we’ll need to brake the engine again when we land, and once we’re on the ground we’ll no longer have enough in the tank to complete a voyage as far as Eros…and we can’t refuel anywhere but the Levant. No—all three of us have resolved to go; we’re half way through the launch; to complete it we only have start the engine again, without losing a moment.

  Oscar gives in, reluctantly. His eyes quit the hatchway and he pronounces the traditional formula of desperate adventures: “Go with God!”

  Immediately, Aurore warns us: “I’m going to get under way again, acceleration 5G, for a quarter of an hour. Get comfortable in your beds—we’re soon going to weigh more.”

  Then, with her finger on the ignition, she spoke into the microphone. “Hello, Madame—it’s decided. We’re making a conclusive departure. If it’s still possible, I’ll try to communicate with you in twenty minutes.”

  The frightful thunder of the engine, at full blast...

  The crushing of the 5G acceleration embedding me in my couchette with my quintupled weight...

  Minutes of semi-consciousness, deaf, stunned, abandoned to the roar of the increasing thrust, which is taking us further from Earth’s gravitation with every passing second.

  With intermittent glances, I glimpse Aurore’s face in profile against the shiny wall; she is serene and attentive, watching the chronometer, with her hands raised, in spite of the crushing weight, on the controls.

  And the brutal silence...

  Still utterly dizzy, I emerge from the lamination, everything immediately replaced by the anguish of weightlessness...

  Now we’re in free fall, definitively removed from terrestrial gravity, launched into space, toward the conquest of a new world...

  I don’t, however, experience the heroic intoxication that I ought to feel. The nausea of space-sickness is injurious to grandiose sentiments. Behind my back I hear Oscar choking back his sighs, struggling against the malaise.

  On her mattress, seemingly reinflated, my wife verifies the heading, releases the automatic stabilization gyroscopes, which emit a continuous faint hum, then calls the Uraniville station, proclaiming, triumphantly: “Well, Madame…we’re safe. All going well aboard. We’re heading for Eros. Altitude 58,000 kilometers. Speed 48 kilometers a second...”

  This time, the loudspeaker is engaged, and the Comtesse’s voice resounds within the cabin.

  “Hello, dear friends—my heart and my spirit go with you. Here, the gendarmes are searching the hangars and the chalet. Northwell has been arrested. Lat has succeeded in telephoning me. I’m accused of harboring a dangerous spy, an envoy of the Soviets, who came here from the naturist camp this morning... Oh, they’ve found the radio station. They’re coming in. I’m...”

  The voice fell silent, abruptly cut off. But another sound—a confused sound, incomprehensible at first, which has been mingled with it for several seconds finally reveals its nature in the silence. It’s a disturbance in the upper chamber, something knocking on the walls and floor of the cabin. One might think that someone rendered awkward by weightlessness were panicking up there.

  Frozen with amazement, Aurore has raised her head. I look at Oscar, who is standing up, his eye glued to the communication hatch. He knows who is up there! And that explain his strange conduct just now.

  With a clownish leap, he sprang on to the ladder, clinging to the rungs more to stop his momentum than to hoist himself up, while a woman’s face appeared in the opening…a blonde face with pronounced but delicate features, with patches of color, and eyes strangely bright with mysticism, behind spectacles with thin gold rims.

  Ida Miounof!

  With a strong foreign accent, she yelped: “You have no right! I forbid you to take me! I’m expected—I have an urgent mission to fulfill. I demand that you put me on the ground!”

  The first moment of surprise having passed, Aurore got a grip on herself. With a haughty composure, she faced up to the intruder and replied: “On board, Mademoiselle, I am the pilot and captain; I’m in command aboard this spaceship. It’s me who expects an explanation from you. You introduced yourself here fraudulently—with what intent? Your unexpected and unjustified presence risks compromising the success of our voyage and putting us all in danger, if only by virtue of the excess of your weight, everything being calculated almost to the kilo. So much the worse for you, though: your fate is linked to ours now. You shouldn’t have come.”

  The face with the gold-rimmed spectacles, which had moved aside briefly to let Oscar through, blocked the opening again, breathless with fury and the onset of sickness. A “Come on, Ida! Please!” was audible—whispered, although the resonance of the walls enabled it to reach us—and a masculine hand passed around the neck of the fanatic strove to draw her backwards. That violence completed her panic. She clung to the edge of the trap with one hand and pointed a revolver at my wife with the other, while howling, hysterically: “I order you! I order you!”

  I launched myself forward, but Oscar had finally succeeded in dragging the madwoman away from the hatchway. The weapon, torn from her fist, was heard colliding with the wall.

  During that nightmare scene, only Aurore had kept calm. She shouted a warning. “Watch out for that pistol! It would be sufficient for a bullet fired at random to crack the hull, and we’d lose all our air in two minutes.

  I went through the trap in order to lend a strong hand, but there was no more need. In the arms of the young reporter the girl was choking with rage and grinding her teeth, but she was under control and hardly struggling any longer.

  I was seething, but that sight disconcerted me. It was a grotesque and tragic situation: all three of us, almost nose to nose, in the minuscule cabin, on a square meter of floor. The stinging abuse that I was ready to launch faded into a simple reproach: “Damn it, Scar! What a stupid idea it was to impose this crazy clandestine passenger on us…who refuses to be one as soon as we’ve left!”

  Very embarrasse
d, my nephew put up a poor show. “But Tonton, it wasn’t a matter of leaving. She wouldn’t even have been aboard for the test flight if we’d taken off at three. And then, you see, this is my fiancée, Ida Miounof…I’ll explain later. Come on! She’ll ill!”

  Ida had suffered a reaction. Space-sickness was affecting her all the more violently because her crisis of fury had abated. Her excitement disappeared, a convulsive sob agitated her breast; suddenly tearful, she stammered a few words, struggled for air, and collapsed, inert. A burden devoid of weight, Oscar applied her to rather than depositing her on the lower bunk. He was having difficulty breathing himself, and he stretched himself out unashamedly on the storage-lockers.

  As for me, my heart lurching, I felt an immense desire for rest. It was not a time for hostilities; a truce was imperative.

  Aurore emerged from the hatch. She was pale, but marvelously self-controlled. “How ironic!” she said, with a bitter smile. “We’re the pioneers of an endeavor of peace, and we inaugurate the voyage with a dispute! But it’s no time for reproaches, or even explanations. Clandestine or not, Ida Miounof is a passenger on the Ad Astra. Oscar, stay with her and took after her, if you can. Monitor her respiration. If the heartbeat weakens too much, give her an injection of caffeine. Here’s a syringe and ampoules. You know how to use it? Anyway, I’ll come back up in an hour to see how you’re both doing.

  “Thanks, Aunt Rette—you’re very kind,” Oscar replied, in a faint voice. “Don’t be too angry with Ida. I’ll explain...”

  Without saying another word, Aurore drew me down into the engine-room with her, where I installed myself on one of the frames. Oh, this was far from being the lyrical adventure I had imagined! Space-sickness—and we would have it for more than a hundred hours!—was emptying my body and limbs, dissolving me in a sort of vertiginous somnolence. Although I no longer had any weight, the slightest gesture cost me enormous fatigue.

  I soon sank into an inert torpor, in which I no longer perceived anything but my own heartbeat, whose intervals seemed to me to be excessive, and the monotonous hum of the stabilization gyroscopes.

  XII. Four Days in a Spaceship

  My wife’s efforts to keep my attention alert were futile. During the first day, I was no help to her. Heroic and serene, mastering her malaise with inexhaustible will-power, she supervised the progress of the spaceship on her own.

  I saw her, from the depths of my somnolence, moving back and forth: watching the graduated dials; activating the servo-motor to raise the temperature, which had dropped, by exposing more of the blackened side of the apparatus to the sun; regulating the semi-automatic regeneration of breathable air and the oxygen level; looking through the periscope and making micrometric measurements; noting her observations in the ship’s log.

  Once, she went into the cabin and seemed to me to stay there indefinitely...

  Would she come back? Might she not have become drowsy too, like the other two up there, who were no longer moving…like me? I envisaged with a strange ataxaria what would happen if the rocket, deprived of direction, missed Eros and went on to be lost in space...

  Death was indifferent to me. I even saw something sublime in the fate that awaited me: sailing indefinitely in that metal tomb, as a vagabond heavenly body, playing its part in the sidereal harmony that I imagined hearing amid the hum of the gyroscopes...

  But the human organism has unsuspected resources of adaptation. It becomes accustomed to the most unusual circumstances.

  Many hours later, I was recalled to life by the consciousness of a sort of luminous and reinvigorating warmth. Aurore had just made me drink a few drops of cognac. Leaning over me, her features pinched by fatigue, she was smiling at me affectionately.

  “Better, darling? Yes, I can see, the crisis has passed. You haven’t suffered too much?”

  “No, not at all—I was just wiped out…as if intoxicated. But how about you? How long have you been awake? What time is it? What day is it? Have you had any news from the Levant?”

  “It’s the eighteenth of April, twelve noon. It’s twenty-two and a half hours since we took off. Nothing more received by radio. Since Madame Simodzuki’s arrest, the station at the Levant has stopped transmitting, and only ultra-short waves directed at us from Earth can reach us.”

  I lowered my voice. “And the others, up there?”

  “The Russian—for she’s definitely Russian—is very ill, but her heart is resistant and in spite of her fits of mental prostration, I don’t think there’s anything to fear in her case. Oscar will pull through too, although he’s suffering a great deal. The poor fellow, very depressed, confessed a few things to me, from which I was able to comprehend that in Mademoiselle Miounof we have a spy of the first magnitude, and that she’s the one the gendarmes were looking for in coming to the Levant…an emissary of the OGPU charged, among other missions, with discovering the secrets of our apparatus on behalf of the Soviets. She seems to have obtained an absolute empire over our nephew.

  “He confessed, weeping and begging my pardon, that he introduced her into Uraniville himself…the sailor on guard benevolently believed that the permit was valid for a couple…and hid her in the bushes near the rocket’s hangar, into which she slipped surreptitiously a few minutes after noon, as soon as the technicians had gone to lunch. She expected to have until two o’clock to examine the rocket in detail, but, surprised by the sudden arrival of Northwell and his crew, she didn’t have time to get out of the apparatus and hid, sandwiched between the two folded bunks. Oscar, suspecting as much, came in first and told her that it was a simple matter of a test flight and that she could remain hidden...

  “She’s now reproaching him for having dragged her into an adventure that will keep her away from her cherished occupations for a long time and probably bring her into disgrace with her superiors. He’s very annoyed, our nephew! But we have even less reason than him to rejoice. It’s a troublesome companion that circumstances have inflicted on us in that young woman, and I suspect that we haven’t finished with her.”

  “In brief, she’s Oscar’s femme fatale. Do you think she’ll be the same for us?”

  “Materially, no. The supplement of weight she represents reduces our radius of action, and might render it difficult to reach Mars, but we’d already decided not to go further than Eros. The reserves of breathable air were broadly calculated, and our consumption so far is less than was anticipated. Even if Eros has no atmosphere, we’ll have a fortnight’s oxygen for the respiratory masks.

  “What about the food supplies?”

  “Oh, they’ll last longer than the air.”

  “Then what do you fear from the woman?”

  “Nothing precise—but I have an intuition that she’ll cause us serious difficulties...”

  I felt sufficient fit to take my turn on watch and permit my wife to get some sleep. I asked her for instructions. They were simple. For the moment, the spaceship was on track, without requiring any maneuver. Unless something unexpected happened, my role would be limited to checking our progress and calculating our position hour by hour.

  Before going to sleep, Aurore wanted to see me at work.

  “Show me that you’ve profited from my lessons!” she had the strength to joke.

  I leaned over the periscope.

  The Earth! What a strange impression to see, for the first time, the Earth’s globe floating in infinite space like a mere planet! The image I had before my eyes resembled a small moon in its first quarter—but with the magnification of the telescope, the blue-tinted veil of the atmosphere was discernible, the cloudy bands of the tropics, the dark green seas, and a continent—Asia—more luminously yellow...

  Suppressing my mental torpor, I carried out the observation. With the aid of the micrometric screw, I brought the lines into tangency with the two edges of the terrestrial diameter, read 5ʹ 10ʺ on the Vernier scale, calculated the parallax and announced with the pride of an improvised astronomer: “Distance, 4,155,000 kilometers…out of se
venteen million. We’ve covered a quarter of the trajectory.”

  “What about our speed? Compare it with the measurement I made an hour ago and refer to the ready-reckoner I’ve fixed there.”

  “It was 6ʹ 4ʺ…which is a decrease of 54ʺ. That gives 42 kilometers a second. It’s marvelous to count in kilometers per second and millions of kilometers per day!”

  Aurore smiled.

  “Marvelous for you, for us, who are the first to employ these new speeds in the history of humankind—but it’s inevitable progress. The automobile, with its hundred and hour, was twenty times as fast as a mere pedestrian. The hydroplane record is six hundred an hour, or a hundred meters a second. Big Bertha shells cover a kilometer and a half per second, but that’s only one and a half times the Earth’s orbital velocity. Bolides reach sixty or eighty kilometers a second. We’ve passed from the scale of terrestrial distances to that of interplanetary distances; it’s necessary that velocities follow the same progression. In a few years, it will be as banal to count in tens of kilometers per second in interplanetary navigation as it is today for aviators to count in hundreds of kilometers per hour...”

  At one o’clock, my companion finally consents to lie down—“Lie down! That’s a joke, when one has no weight,” she said; but habit associates sleep with a horizontal position—and go to sleep. So here I am, alone on watch in this magnalium shell. The temporary wellbeing procured by the cognac has dissipated; space-sickness is tormenting me again. For fear of falling back into lethargy, I go up into the cabin in order to measure the diameter of Eros.

  On coming through the hatchway I see the Russian woman asleep on her couch. Without her spectacles she has a naïve and childlike appearance, with her freckles and her thin features, as if shrunk by suffering. Oscar, beside her, is floating in mid-air, only touching the circular banquette with one elbow. A bowl between them indicates the condition of the invalids—pitiful wrecks—clearly enough.

  At the sight of the baleful spy and my nephew—the idiot!—a surge of resentment passes through me. But, in addition to the fact that space-sickness has reduced us all to a sort of equality, I’m only too well aware, at present, of our isolation far from Earth. Between the four passengers in the rocket, a reciprocal indulgence is imperative, a fraternity of humans exiled from their planet, embarked on a adventure that suddenly inspires me with a sort of secret terror...