by Theo Varlet
She trailed off in an inarticulate howl, and fell on to the ground, writhing in a nervous fit.
Aurore had listened impassively, without saying a word. For myself, confronted by someone who was all too obviously ill, I too did not feel the slightest inclination to address the slightest reproach to my nephew, whose distress was painful to see.
I provided the light while he lifted up his fiancée, who was suffering a tearful reaction, and carried her to a sofa. Then, leaving them my illuminated torch, I went back to my wife, and for the ten minutes that the crisis took to work itself out, I exchanged a few reflections with her in the shadows, in a low voice, which were as unreassuring as they were uncomplimentary to the Russian.
I don’t know whether the latter had any intention of offering us an apology, but when she came toward us with a faltering step, leaning on Oscar’s arm, Aurore started speaking as if nothing had happened.
“My friends, in the situation in which we find ourselves—which is to say, confronting the unknown—there isn’t much point in making plans. The night that has just begun won’t last long—no more than three hours, in my estimation. The days on Eros are six hours long instead of twenty-four; it’s necessary to live at an accelerated rhythm. In complete ignorance of what awaits us, the best thing to do is, first, to eat, and then to improvise beds with this furniture and get some sleep, in order to recover our strength and be able to confront whatever events might occur.”
“That’s a good idea, Rette,” opined young Frémiet, with a certain awkwardness. “For my part, I’m as hungry as a cannibal…what about you, Ida?”
“Oh me, I’ll do whatever you wish,” replied the fanatic of a little while before, in the voice of a well-behaved schoolgirl.
The snack we had had in the rocket before leaving had only served to sharpen our appetite. By the light of a torch, we took provisions from our bags, sat down on a sofa and ate in silence. Then, with a common accord, our two couples set up improvised beds in opposite corners of the room.
I didn’t succeed in going to sleep right away. I was overwhelmed by melancholy. So this was it, the great adventure? We had come to conquer a planet without an atmosphere, uninhabitable save for a hideous city half in ruins. We have been subject to the horrors of an interplanetary journey only to have ourselves thrown in prison by quasi-human slaves of intelligent lizards!
With the aid of the darkness and the silence, however, I ended up falling asleep, like my three companions.
It was already broad daylight when we were woken up by coarse laughter and barking voices behind the door. Doubtless our jailers were getting up—which reminded us immediately of our situation of captivity. Those three hours of sleep had done us good, though. Even Ida seemed to be in a good mood, and everyone said bonjour without rancor.
“After all,” I said, locking us up is a very natural precaution. Imagine if civilized lizards arrived in Paris one evening in the Place Dauphine...”
“With reasonable people,” Oscar suggested, “there’s always a means of reaching an understanding. These armored buildings prove that we’re not dealing with imbeciles.”
Aurore added: “They also prove that intelligence functions in much the same way here as at home. We’ll end up making that lizard or his lacertian brethren that we don’t have evil intentions.”
“Seriously?” queried Ida, very politely. “You believe that on Eros, it’s lizards who possess intelligence, and not our human equivalents?”
In the same tone of courteous discussion, my wife replied: “The fact seemed evident to me. Why should the king of creation on every planet necessarily and invariably be Homo sapiens, as on Earth? The resources of nature are more varied: diversity within unity. I admit that, all the bodies in the solar system being made of the same materials, extracted from the primal Nebula, life will be manifest here and there in equivalent homologous organic evolutions, but thought—the psychic miracle of each planet—must make its appearance at various times, profiting from circumstances, at different levels of the animal series. On this planet, the possibility came about earlier than on ours, and it’s the saurians who benefited from it instead of bimane mammals—with the result that, when the hominines appeared, intelligence already having been acquired, they remained blocked in inferior consciousness.”
“You could be right,” said Ida, pensively. “I see that as an injustice to repair. Even if the saurians have confiscated intelligence, it doesn’t follow that they have the right to exercise an atrocious tyranny over our peers. Human solidarity requires us to intervene. Who can tell whether these beings that you call hominines are not simply humans like us, the descendants of terrestrial humans, whom the ancestors of these saurians—whose civilization must by very ancient and at least equal to ours—have brought back from an astronautical expedition and reduced to slavery? If so, it’s all the more reason for us to redeem them, to restore the consciousness that they have lost and the scepter of intelligence. Yes, that would be a fine task!”
She was getting carried away, quixotically, the little Russian with eyes overly bright with mysticism—but I couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy for her, in spite of everything.
The discussion was interrupted, however, by the entrance of two hominines in green leotards and yellow shorts. Each of them was carrying a laden tray. Our breakfast! Perhaps also lunch and dinner. Who could tell what the cadence of life might be on Eros? Whether there were one, two or three meals per three-hour day? Did they even eat every day?
At any rate, that attention was a good omen. If these beings were taking care to feed us, it was because they had no intention of putting us to death.
All four of us pored over the foodstuffs.
“We’re being offered two menus, it seems,” Aurore judged. “One vegetarian, one carnivorous.”
The vegetarian one: first, a full salad-bowl of green filamentous stalks similar to sticks of candied angelica. Oscar tried to chew one, in spite of the strong odor of turpentine they gave off.
“Hmm! It’s sweet, perhaps nutritious, but not very appetizing. It would be necessary to get used to that chemical reek.”
By comparison, clusters of fruits with the geometric forms of crystals, of all the colors in the rainbow, seemed more tempting. I tasted one, as did Aurore. It crunched in the teeth as if the pulp, which had a pronounced herbal taste, were full of grains of sand.
Put off, we passed on to the carnivorous menu.
The second plate also offered two choices: firstly, waffles of a yellow gelatinous material reminiscent of sheets of glue. The taste wasn’t repulsive—neutral and insipid, rather—but the rubbery consistency made chewing laborious.
“It must be synthetic meat!” I declared. And it was, as we were later to learn.
For her part, Ida had dipped a finger into the sauce in a vast bowl, in which a stew, appetizing in appearance, was steaming.
“Not bad—one might almost think that it was pork. What animal can it come from? We didn’t see any livestock under the pylons...”
Meanwhile, our jailers, who were watching everything we did, were eyeing the pseudo-pork with an indubitable predilection. Seeing that we remained indecisive, one of them approached Ida in order to encourage her, pointing to the meat and rubbing his stomach, uttering a hilarious: “Bowwow!” The other, even more persuasive, fished out a choice morsel and offered it to her in his fingertips.
She recoiled with a scream, and we stood there, open-mouthed with disgust and horror. One did not have to be an expert in anatomy to recognize that fine morsel as a hand…a child’s hand…the hand of a hominine child! Were the animals butchered on Eros for the people of the city, then, the savages from outside?
Our jailer, to finish convincing us, concluded his cannibal demonstration by delicately detaching a thumb from the cooked hand, which he nibbled like a mutton foot, with abject growls of delight.
There was no more question of touching that menu thereafter, but we had a great deal of difficulty persuad
ing the two “wrestlers” to take away the intact plates. Those hominines seemed to be at an intellectual level inferior to Papuans. They did not understand any gestures, and limited themselves to repeating them out of pure imitative mania, along with the final words of our sentences.
Ida was forced to use the initial ascendancy that she appeared to have acquired over them. “Go on, it’s finished, take it away, Comrade…Tovarich!”
They finally went away, repeating as a kind of howl: “Ta’arrick... Ca’arrade...”
The Russian exhaled her indignation. “What did I tell you, eh? It’s necessary that our presence here serve some purpose. We must attempt to regenerate these poor brutes, our racial brethren, who have been reduced to the utmost degree of debasement.”
“I’d like to,” Oscar conceded, “but it might not be easy.”
“In the meantime,” I remarked, “if that’s the only kind of food we’re going to be offered, we’re going to get hungry before long.”
We shared six bananas and four biscuits, the last remaining provisions brought from the rocket.
XV. Zilgor
We were still under the impression of that abominable incident when the door opened again. A saurian in a red cape appeared, who addressed a little speech to us in his sibilant language, mingled with hoarse breaths and hissing aspirations, and made us signs to follow him. Was it the same lizard as the days before or another? We were not yet able to identify those beings individually, any more than a white man can recognize one back man in a crowd. The four wrestlers that accompanied him did not intervene.
Without waiting for the injunction of their sticks, we followed the saurian meekly, dragging Ida, who wanted to put up some resistance. Through a series of corridors and decaying staircases, in which elevator shafts could be seen devoid of cabins, we came into a hall twice the size of our prison, but well-maintained and heated to an almost-uncomfortable temperature of at last thirty degrees. As their warm waistcoats indicated, the saurians were very sensitive to cold.
There were twenty of them in front of us, lined up in a row, who examined us with their lateral eyes.
These lizards all wore green togas, and seemed to have a higher status than or red-caped mentor, who spoke to them respectfully, almost kneeling. With a slight murmur of astonished reflections, they drew closer to us in a semicircle, ten to the right and ten to the left, in order to get a better look at us.
Our ulterior relations with these beings rendered us familiar with their physiognomy and a part of their psychology analogous to ours. In spite of their animal appearance and the instinctive horror that their proximity caused us in the beginning, however, we immediately had the impression of being in the presence of transcendent minds. These lizards, clothed and adopting a human posture, had faces with mobile features, revealing an intense intellectual life. Their small round eyes, devoid of lashes, whose lids never blinked, darted a fixed and impassive gaze: a superhuman gaze, very knowledgeable and very ancient.
The adventure suddenly took on all its cosmic grandeur. At that moment, we represented the genius of human beings and the Earth before that court, the elite of a planetary civilization at least the rival of ours. It was a matter of putting on a good show.
That wasn’t easy. Except for Aurore, who confronted the examination of all those eyes with a noble dignity, we remained bewildered in the midst of those twenty thinking saurians, in a ridiculous and inescapable situation.
With curious, delicate and disgusted gestures of their little lizard hands with neatly trimmed fingernails, they patted our clothing, palpated our limbs and stroked our skin: a cold contact that gave us gooseflesh. They asked us questions, which parted their thin lips, allowing glimpses of pink tongues, pointed and quivering, horny arches replacing teeth in the gums.
They gazed at us for a long time, first with their lateral eyes and then with their frontal eyes with the fluorescent depths—after which they turned to one another, exchanging reflections, either by means of speech, when the interlocutors were not looking at one another, but often, also, when they were face to face, simply by lowering their heads, by means of a mute exchange of the fluorescences of their third eye, whose telepsychic role was thus revealed.
The last to persist was a tall individual, who tried on all of us, to all appearances, a collection of various idioms, among which I recognized the “bowwow” dialect. He seemed very annoyed by his lack of success. We thought for a moment that he would give up, but he had not finished. On his orders, a lacertian usher in a red cape set up in front of us an apparatus in the form of a graduated lens, like the “optic” of a lighthouse. The instrument seemed to have come from the display-case of a museum of physics where it had been languishing for centuries.
Meanwhile, the nineteen other “Academicians”—as Oscar had already dubbed them, by virtue of their green costumes—arranged themselves on the platform again, leaving an empty place in the middle, and the handful of other red-caped lacertians present (there were no hominines to be seen) took up positions at the back of the room.
The word “Zilgor?” passed from mouth to mouth, in an interrogative tone. Suddenly, springing from an invisible loudspeaker, but vaporous and as if generated spontaneously in the atmosphere, the music of a grandiose hymn, simultaneously melancholy and triumphant, was sketched out…and a newcomer appeared in the midst of the Academicians, all of who were bowing so profoundly that only their third eyes were visible.
Slightly taller in stature than his colleagues but dressed in the same fashion, the president of the lacertian assembly was distinguished by a metallic yellow cranium, so highly developed that his head seemed bowed down by the weight of his brain. Triangulating the forehead, which one might have thought laminated with gold, the normal eyes and the eye devoid of an iris, black and fluorescent, scrutinized us with an almost-unsustainable gaze. One forgot that their possessor was not human. Only those eyes existed, taking the place of the face, and they radiated an intellectual majesty so enormous that one felt psychically crushed by them.
I looked at my companions. To my left, Aurore, in a concentrated and respectful attitude, was contemplating the apparition with wonder. To my right, Oscar was making notes, feverishly. Further away, the Russian had drawn her small stature up to its full height, in rebellion against the intimidation that was taking hold of her. To her, these intelligent lizards—including Zilgor—were simply odious tyrants, oppressors of humans, and hatred gave her the strength to confront the being of genius who incarnated the central mind of Eros.
A new examination began, in accordance with a singular ceremony. Each of us was beckoned forward by the linguist—his name was Styal—to stand before the apparatus reminiscent of a lighthouse projector; after which Zilgor, as if he wanted to study the subject through that sort of composite magnifying glass, directed his third eye thereto. Maneuvered by Styal, the median lens modified its curvature, contracting and dilating like an iris diaphragm. When the focusing was complete, the linguist retired behind the lens, to stand beside Zilgor, and the latter pronounced a few sibilant words in an interrogative tone.
Oscar was the first to be subjected to this bizarre ordeal. He thought it polite and requisite to introduce himself.
“You have before you, Messieurs Lizards,” he said, striving to be bold, “the one and only Oscar Frémiet, correspondent of Le Jour, the most important daily newspaper in Paris and Europe. As I say: Oscar Frémiet.”
Like a docile phonograph, the linguist repeated every word, quite intelligibly. A rumor of curiosity ran through the rank of Academicians. Under the gaze of Zilgor, however, my nephew’s verve had run dry. After two or three stuttering attempts he muttered: “Oh, no, enough! He’ll end up hypnotizing me, this Zilgor fellow. I give up. Over to you, Ida—try to tell them something.”
It was the Russian’s turn. She named herself, dryly, with no flourishes, and the phonographic linguist repeated the words after her. But when Zilgor said something to her in the lacertian language, she sti
ffened, restive and peevish.
“Hey! It’s idiotic, your system! What do you expect, since I can’t understand you?”
And she abandoned the apparatus.
I replaced her there. In front of the lens, which magnified Zilgor’s psychic eye enormously and monstrously, with its palpitating fluorescences, I felt a strange impression, as if a foreign mind…a penetrating antenna…were digging into my brain, tentatively.
Suppressing the disturbance that invaded me, I succeeded in pronouncing my name—but the syllables “Gas-ton Del-vart,” repeated, were all I could contrive. The mysterious malaise increased, the stifling warmth of the room was making me uncomfortable to the point of vertigo, and Zilgor’s interrogation only served as a further impediment to my cerebral mechanism. In that interplanetary examination, I was a pitiful failure, like the first two candidates. Would my wife be any more fortunate?
Her name having been pronounced and repeated by Styal, she had sufficient inspiration to carry on, slowly, as if she were striving to “realize” every idea intensely.
“We are inhabitants of Earth…which is to say, the bright planet that rises at present shortly before the sun. We have come, we humans of Earth, to your planet, which we call Eros.”
If that had not been my beloved and admired wife, I would doubtless have found the idea baroque of giving those explanations to people who did not understand French—but Aurore is worthy of the superior intelligences who are seeking to engage in conversation with us. She has determined by intuition what is wanted of us, and what the purpose of the psychic lens is. She has entered into the game. She had offered her ideation, at the requisite angle, to the mysterious apparatus that replaces, for her, the third eye absent in humans, and which permits Styal and Zilgor to read in her brain the psychic images corresponding to each of her words, as they are able o read one another’s thoughts, I and by means of the third eye...
