The Fiery Wheel Page 12

  “It’s a blockade,” said Francisco.

  “They’re expecting us to surrender, for, even if we succumb to cold and hunger, without moving, they certainly won’t come to fetch us from here. It’s obvious that the relative dusk that reigns on this plateau causes them an insurmountable terror.

  “We could surrender, after all,” said Francisco. “The dirty beats are quite intelligent. They understood you, in the grotto, when you explained to the two chiefs by means of gestures that we were hungry. You could try to make them understand that we won’t do any harm to anyone if no one touches us...”

  “That’s difficult to express in sign language.”

  “Try anyway, Señor. It’s the only means we have, in sum, of saving ourselves and getting Lolla back. Is your foot still hurting?”

  Paul stood up and tested his injured foot. Every time his heel touched the ground he felt a dull pain, but he was eventually able to walk, leaning on his staff.

  “Oh, well,” he said, “I’ll try to talk to them.”

  Francisco got up too. Mechanically, the two men turned toward the immensity of tenebrous space, and exclamations were stifled in their throats, while a volley of whistles stirred up echoes in the sky, and all the Mercurians stood up tumultuously.

  Down below, to the right, in the eternal darkness, a fulgurant light had just appeared, and, as if springing from a prodigious invisible lighthouse, it advanced, in a broad, rotating electric beam, directly toward the crepuscular platform.

  Chapter Four

  In which Bild and Brad provide prodigious

  evidence of their existence

  Stupefied, Paul and Francisco saw the beam approaching the platform, reach it and inundate it with light. They were dazzled by it, but it was already passing by, throwing panic into the crowd of monopods, although they could not perceive it themselves, since they were in the full glare of Mercurian daylight.

  The projection passed over, quit the plateau and continued its movement to the left. Some distance away, it halted momentarily, and then came back toward the plateau, more slowly, moving up and down, retreating and then advancing again. Paul and Francisco followed it anxiously with their eyes, and thought about the searchlights of a terrestrial ironclad, searching a harbor by night.

  An insensate hope caused their hearts to beat faster.

  “What can that be, Señor?” Francisco murmured.

  “I don’t know. A natural phenomenon? And yet, it seems to me that it’s being maneuvered by an intelligence. My God! My God!”

  Meanwhile, the beam came back. It touched the edge of the plateau. It slid over the smooth surface of the twilit rock—and when it had enveloped the two motionless men with its cone of light, it stopped.

  With an intense surprise, Paul and Francisco saw that prodigious ray, which came from the distant mysterious darkness, narrow down until it only had a diameter of about 1.5 meters, positioned directly in front of them. The beam shifted, and modifying its form, in order to design, almost at their feet, on the black slate of the plateau, an elongated diamond of white light.

  And they were staring at that diamond with their hypnotized eyes when they emitted a hoarse exclamation in unison.

  “Francisco!”

  “Señor!”

  “Am I going mad?” Paul stammered. “Can I see…?”

  “Me too—yes…I can see letters...”

  “Letters, Francisco! Black letters on that diamond of light. And they’re forming words—words!”

  “Yes, yes, Señor…and look...more, more letters...”

  The diamond grew larger. Yet more letters formed…yet more words...

  Fascinated, the two men knelt down in front of the marvelous diamond, and they waited, their hearts beating rapidly, their hands trembling. Their startled gazes could not settle on a single point of the geometric figure; it leapt from one word to another. Suddenly, the diamond, which was still expanding, was immobilized, and below the lines of black words that stood out from the light, four dark letters were designed at a stroke.

  “Bild!” cried Paul.

  For more letters immediately appeared.

  “Brad!” howled Francisco.

  And the two men, in a fit of delirious joy, fell into one another’s arms, laughing and weeping, while the motionless crowd of Mercurians massed at the entrance to the gorge considered the spectacle with thousand of expressionless red eyes.

  When Paul and Francisco had given free rein to their disorderly joy, they recovered their reason, and Paul said: “We’re mad, Francisco. We have to read...”

  “Read, Señor…I can’t, everything’s dancing in front of my eyes.”

  Paul leaned forward, and read aloud the prodigious message that stood out in black against the white background of the luminous diamond:

  “Are on planet Venus, where Fiery Wheel and Saturnians have been destroyed. Intelligence of Venusians prodigious. Divine perfection in their science. Have discovered you with their telescopes as soon as have been in hemisphere of Mercurian night. We are sending you this message by one of their astonishing projectors of solar light. We don’t yet know how to rejoin you; for the moment, Venusians cannot emerge from the atmosphere of their planet. But in forty-eight terrestrial hours we’ll send messages to Earth. Another projection is en route and will reach you 35 minutes after this one. Bild and Brad.”

  Paul had scarcely finished reading when the whole thing was effaced before his eyes. The light disappeared, and he could no longer see anything but the uniform black rock.

  “Francisco!” he cried, in anguish. I can’t see any more! Were we dreaming?”

  “But Señor, the thirty-five minutes must have passed…exactly! Here’s the second projection.”

  Indeed, a flash of light sprang forth from the distant darkness, and another luminous diamond expanded on the rock. In this one too, letters and words were inscribed in black...

  Paul and Francisco read aloud simultaneously:

  “We’re sending messages to Earth; for our part, we hope to come soon and get you away from the inhospitable surface of Mercury, for thirty Venusian scientists are working to resolve the problem of sending us to you. All that remains is for them to overcome a little difficulty stemming from our weight. As we can see everything happening around you, we understand that the greatest danger for you is dying of hunger. You have no other alternatives than these: either you die, or you feed on the monopods that are blocking your path. Don’t hesitate, and burn the dead monopods to keep warm. You need to stay alive until we can come to rescue you. But where is Lolla Mendès? Prisoner or dead? Expect a third projection.”

  Only five minutes went by before the second projection vanished. Almost immediately, the third appeared.

  Calmer now, and resolved above all to conserve their strength and their lives, and to recover Lolla, Paul and Francisco read the black message on the diamond of light together:

  “This third message will be the last of this first series. We’ll only be able to send you more in 96 hours, when the Venusians have made a sufficient new provision of solar radiation. To remain constantly facing you, we’re on a Venusian apparatus that remains motionless above Venus as it rotates in space. We’ll only leave it to send a message to Earth. At the very least, don’t lose sight of the plateau where you are, for if you go back to the sunlit zone of Mercury, we’ll no longer be able to see you. Kill Mercurians! But where is Lolla Mendès? We refuse to believe that she’s dead. Courage! Courage! Live, and wait for us. Bild, Br...”

  The projection vanished before Brad’s name could be written in its entirety.

  As if those diamonds of light had warmed up their bodies while they were shining, the Terrans felt a mortal chill invading their limbs as soon as the projection had vanished.

  “We’ll be frozen where we stand!” exclaimed Francisco. “We have to be able to move. Quickly—the Mercurians!”

  He seized his pike and bounded toward the crowd of monopods, now silent. With blows of the club he b
roke the arms and legs of a dozen of the monsters, while the others recoiled in panic, trampling one another.

  Paul had walked slowly after Francisco. He dragged two injured monopods behind a ridge of rock, which, while being in the twilight zone, formed a screen against the icy wind blowing from the eternal darkness. Francisco soon rejoined him, dragging two other Mercurians behind him, which he had grasped with one hand. As they were about to obey the ferocious instructions of Bild and Brad, however, the two men shivered in disgust, and even in pity...

  The Mercurians were very different from human beings, and yet Paul and Francisco sensed that an intelligence lived behind that unique eye and in the flattened skull—a little of the divine spark that established the demarcation between beings whose reason is expressed in a language, and animals whose actions only reveal instincts.

  “Francisco,” said Paul, “with other symbols and under another name, these Mercurians might perhaps worship the same ideal as us.”

  “They’re certainly savages!” said Francisco.

  “What do we know? They consider us to be malevolent and dangerous creatures, and yet our greatest desire would be to live in peace in their cities...”

  “That’s possible, Señor, but I can’t forget that they devour one another and that they threw themselves on the Señorita without the slightest provocation in order to...” Francisco made a gesture of horror and went on: “Nor can I forget that we don’t have any alternative. Either we drink the blood of these cadavers and burn them, or we die of hunger and cold. If we die, the Señorita is lost forever. I’m not hesitating...”

  And abruptly, with a light thrust of his pike, Francisco punctured the vitreous eye of one of the monopods lying dead in front of him. A thick white liquid spurted from the wound. The Spaniard bent down and, applying his lips to the hole streaming with Mercurian blood, he drank.

  Paul de Civrac had turned away, nausea making his gorge rise—but he heard Francisco’s voice say, gravely: “Señor! We’ve received life in order to conserve it until it pleases it to leave us. If it had been necessary, we’d have died a long time ago. Think of the extraordinary dangers we’ve run. Now we have to save the Señorita and return to the Earth for which we’ve been created. Drink, Señor, from the only source of life there is in this infernal world.

  Then Paul seized his pike, punctured the eye of a Mercurian, and set about drinking the nourishing liquid. In spite of his disgust, which was much more intellectual than physical, he did not lose his analytical habits, and he noticed, while drinking in long draughts, that the Mercurian blood, which was very thick, had a sugary taste and an unfamiliar but agreeable perfume. And there was something akin to a regeneration of his entire body, a marvelously rapid return of strength.

  In the meantime, Francisco had lit a match. He applied it to the cadaver that was now empty of blood, and with a slight crackling, the body burned slowly, giving off jets of white flame, from which a benevolent heat radiated.

  No Earthly fire resembled that strange conflagration. There was matter therein for much reflection. No longer suffering from hunger, however, their minds seething with hope, their hearts vibrant with as-yet-imprecise resolutions, the two men seated beside the slowly burning cadaver warmed themselves voluptuously, with no more intellectual curiosity, for the moment, than they would have had before a fire of dry wood.

  They thought about Lolla, a tenacious presentiment making them think that she was still alive…oh, they would find her, since they could stave off death now! They thought about Bild and Brad, about possible…probable…certain rescue—and they warmed themselves, their eyes fixed on the hissing flames but their gazes lost within themselves.

  Soon, another thought, even more tyrannical than the previous ones, invaded Paul de Civrac’s mind. Where did that unexpected memory spring from? By virtue of what phenomenon of thought-transmission did Paul suddenly recalled his meeting in Calcutta with the mysterious Ahmed Bey?

  He saw the emaciated face of the enigmatic scientist again; he heard the hermetic words again in which Ahmed Bey had predicted his love for Lolla Mendès.

  “Francisco!” Paul exclaimed.

  “Señor?”

  “Do you know what I’m thinking?”

  “But, Señor, it must be about our dear Señorita...”

  “Yes,” said Paul, “she is indeed at the back of my mind; but what’s particularly preoccupying my mind at this moment is the idea of Dr. Ahmed Bey—you know, the marvelous scientist I met in Calcutta...”

  Francisco looked at Civrac in surprise, made a scornful grimace and, shrugging his shoulders irreverently, presented his hands once again to the flames of the burning monopod.

  Twenty paces away, at the very limit of the crepuscular zone, in the dazzle of the eternal green light coming through the clouds from the invisible sun, the crowd of petrified Mercurians silently considered the natural phenomenon, with which they were probably unfamiliar, of fire.

  PART FOUR

  REINCARNATED SOULS

  Chapter One

  Which revisits an individual even more

  astonishing than the Fiery Wheel

  The panic caused all over the Earth by the two passages of the Fiery Wheel had only just calmed down, and people had recovered confidence in the tranquility of their astronomical heavens, when new marvel burst forth like a thunderbolt, if not as dangerous, at least as startling and unexpected as the first.

  It was the morning of the eleventh day after the appearance of the Fiery Wheel over Colombia and its definitive disappearance. The four million readers of the Universel, the great world daily produced in six languages and printed simultaneously in all the capitals of the Old and New World, found themselves, on opening their newspaper, confronted by a sensational first page. The enormous headline occupied a quarter of it, and was thus conceived:

  A MESSAGE PROJECTED FROM

  THE PLANET VENUS

  There followed, in large print, the following lines:

  Last night, at eleven thirty-five, Monsieur Constant Brularion, the director of the astronomical observatory of the Bois de Verrières,10 saw on an immense circular projection outlined on the flat extent of an uncultivated field.

  For several nights, Monsieur Brularion, who was observing the planet Venus, had noticed with astonishment that a luminous ray projected from that planet, more intense than its ordinary light, was rapidly drawing nearer to the Earth.

  Last night, at eleven thirty-four, the extremity of the prodigious beam struck the Earth, on the abovementioned field.

  Amazed by the phenomenon, Monsieur Brularion emerged from his observatory and, having arrived before the luminous circle, observed that letters of the alphabet, a trifle fluid but clearly legible, were standing out in black from the lighted surface, which measured four meters in diameter.

  Aided by three of his colleagues, the savant astronomer took several photographs of the projection.

  Monsieur Brularion, who is, as our readers know, our astronomical reporter, immediately sent a photograph to our Parisian editor, who immediately telegraphed and cabled our editors worldwide. Here is the exact facsimile; our readers can easily complete the text by adding the words of secondary importance that are missing.

  No doubt can remain; this is a message from the planet Venus.

  It is evident that such an event, which we record with emotion, is rich in consequences. It justifies in a striking manner Monsieur Brularion’s theories regarding the plurality of habitable worlds.

  Our readers will find tomorrow, in the same place, and article by our collaborator of genius on the subject of the Message.

  We will finally remark that the Universel alone is making this prodigious event known to the world today.

  The facsimile of the projection was framed by these lines, all the way to the bottom of the page.

  It read:

  Four men and a woman, abducted from Barcelona and Bogota by the Fiery Wheel, marooned on the planet Mercury. Two undersigned, retaken by the
Wheel, now on planet Venus, sending message to Earth by marvelous apparatus storing and projecting solar light. Woman and other two men remain on Mercury, threatened by death. Will strive to rejoin them, rescue them. Numerous conditions make this message visible fifty-eight minutes on Earth, near French astronomical observatory, which Venusian telescopes permit distinguish. Same conditions will enable Venus to send second message in direction of Earth in eight years, three months, eight days, eleven hours, thirty-four minutes. Arthur Brad, Jonathan Bild, citizens free America, temporarily City of Scientists, Venus.

  The excitement caused on Earth was indescribable. At ten o’clock in the morning, all the important newspapers in the entire world published a second edition reproducing the front page of the Universel. Cables and telegraphic wires made their own contribution.

  Rapid investigations were carried out, and the next day, all the printed newspapers recalled the abduction of Señorita Lola Mendès and the valet Francisco in Barcelona, as well as the disappearance in Colombia, thus far inexplicable but now explained, of the geological mission composed of Messieurs Paul de Civrac, Arthur Brad and Jonathan Bild.

  Monsieur Brularion’s article was read by the entire human race, or at least the fraction of it able to read. In any case, it did not reveal anything new, but concluded the existence of life on all the planets and, naturally, the habitability, for human beings, of Mercury and Venus. It asked questions that were to remain unanswered for a long time, since the Venusian message would not be renewed for a little more than eight years.

  What was the Fiery Wheel and what had become of it?

  What was the threat of death faced by Paul de Civrac, Lola Mendès and Francisco, left behind on Mercury?

  How did the Venusian projector work—and also the telescopes that permitted the annihilation of the distance of sixteen million leagues that separated Venus and Earth at the moment when the message was received?