The Fiery Wheel Read online

  “There must be water,” said Bild. “That yellow river bordering the red grassland, in the direction of the mountains...”

  “Let’s go there right away!” said Francisco.

  “No,” said Paul. “Let’s wait for the day to end and for the heat to decline. To judge by the perpendicular direction of the luminous rays coming from the clouds when we were in the grassland, it must be about midday, in the terrestrial sense. Bild, do you still have your chronometer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it intact?”

  “Intact,” Jonathan repeated, after examining his watch.

  “Well, wind it up and set it to one o’clock.”

  In the absolute silence they could hear the friction of the winding mechanism.

  “Good,” said Paul. “Now, has any of you seen an animal?”

  “Not the slightest trace of one,” Brad replied. The others shook their heads.

  “Perhaps they only come out at night?” Lolla suggested.

  “That’s possible…or at least at dusk.”

  “In that case,” said Jonathan, “let’s not exhaust ourselves with vain words, and get some sleep. By virtue of some unexpected phenomenon, we’re not hungry or thirsty for the time being, but the fall has worn us out. Let’s sleep—I think we might soon need rested limbs in good condition.”

  “I’m already asleep, myself,” muttered Francisco.

  “Go to sleep,” said Paul. “I’ll keep watch. We don’t know what dangers are threatening us.”

  He made a pillow out of his rolled-up jacket and arranged a kind of bed of flexible metallic leaves. Lolla lay down on it, after an affectionate handshake and a grateful smile. A few minutes later, everyone except Paul was asleep.

  Civrac reflected that the overexcitement that had animated his mind a little while before, and those of his companions in adventure, had been succeeded, as soon as they were in the forest, by a perfect calm, and even a slight prostration. They were also breathing more easily. That suggested that the air in the forest was not quite the same as that in the russet prairie. A strange phenomenon!

  And of what liquid was the yellow river that he had glimpsed composed?

  Was the red grass of the prairie edible?

  On the forest floor there were no more plants at all—not the slightest sprig of moss; nothing but the rusty carpet of metallic leaves.

  What was this planet, then? Paul started mentally reviewing all the astronomical knowledge that he had acquired on Earth. Curious about everything, and reading a great deal, he had kept up to date with the discoveries and hypotheses published by astronomers and summarized in the monthly bulletin of the Societé Astronomique de France.

  By a process of elimination, he arrived at the conclusion that only the planet Mercury responded, for the moment, to the atmospheric and climatic conditions he was able to observe.

  Mercury! The smallest of the planets and the closest to the sun—the one that received the most heat and light.

  While Paul was thinking along those lines, an irresistible somnolence invaded him. His heavy eyelids gradually closed, and if he had not been leaning against the rugged trunk of a tree he would have fallen backwards, also gripped by sleep. His feeble will struggled, however; he wanted to stay awake, to keep his eyes open—and he scanned the surroundings energetically, with an inexplicably vague gaze...

  But dreams were already being slowly woven in his mind. Above all, he saw Lolla, a smiling Lolla, her eyes languid with love, her lips murmurous with kisses…and he also imagined himself saving Lolla from fantastic dangers, carrying her away, gripping her in an embrace that was as amorous as it was protective...

  It was then that, in the indefinite quality of the dream, he saw a living being emerge from behind a tree and move toward him: an unexpected and bizarre animal.

  It was as tall as a child about twelve years old, black in color and shiny; its round torso supported, without a neck, a rat-like head with a trunk, and was itself supported by a single leg. A unique arm sprouted from the middle of the torso, terminated by three enormous shiny talons.

  It came forward, hoping, flexing the knee of its only leg and then straightening the thigh like a spring, carrying the animal forward with a leap of two or three meters.

  Above the trunk, which it was waving madly in all directions, an eye opened: a sparkling red eye.

  Paul de Civrac watched the little monster coming toward him. He gazed at it stupidly, unconscious of any danger. In the somnolence into which his mind had sunk, the Terran imagined that he was the victim of one of those imprecise dreams that one manufactures and sees before falling completely asleep.

  The fantastic being suddenly made two rapid leaps that brought it to the immediate vicinity of the sleepers. With its blazing eye it looked at them one after another, curiously, and then that gaze settled on Paul.

  The mobile trunk uttered a shrill whistle, and immediately, from behind the trees where they had been hiding, three other individuals similar to the first emerged, and approached rapidly. Their unique arms were agitating, their trunks whistling, and their red eyes emitting flashes.

  And Paul considered the four monsters, unthinkingly....

  The first of the monopods8 suddenly leapt forward, reached out its arm, and its three talons dug into Paul’s thigh.

  With a cry of alarm, Paul stood up, finally conscious of the reality.

  The aerial echoes repeated his cry in rolls of thunder, and the four monsters, bounding away, disappeared into the depths of the forest.

  “Bild! Brad! Francisco! Wake up!” Paul howled. “Get up! I’ve seen them! I’ve seen them!”

  He shook his three recumbent companions. They opened their eyes, grumbling.

  “What is it?” said Bild. “What have you seen?”

  “The…the…”

  “Well, what is it?” groaned Brad.

  “I’ve seen…the Mercurians.”

  “Mercurians? Why Mercurians?”

  Bild leapt to his feet, at the same time as Brad and Francisco.

  “Where are they?” cried the Spaniard.

  “Why Mercurians?” Bild repeated.

  “Because,” Paul replied, suddenly calm, “I thought about it while you were asleep, and my reflections convinced me that we’re on the planet Mercury. Anyway, we’ll soon know for sure...”

  “How?”

  “I’ll tell you in a couple of hours.”

  “But what about the Mercurians?” cried Francisco, searching the forest with his gaze. “The Mercurians!”

  “They’ve gone.”

  “How many were there?” asked Brad.

  “And what were they?” asked Bild.

  Civrac described the four monopod monsters briefly.

  “Let’s pretend to be asleep,” suggested Jonathan. “They’ll come back. Does anyone not have his revolver?”

  “We dropped them at the moment...”

  “That’s true! Perhaps the Fiery Wheel has been destroyed...”

  “I have my knife,” said Francisco. He took a long Catalan knife, with a crosspiece at the hilt, from his belt.

  “Put that weapon away!” Civrac ordered. “The Mercurians are afraid of us. Besides which, they don’t have any hostile intentions. The one that scratched my thigh only wanted to touch me to see what I was. We mustn’t open hostilities. Remember that we’re only four men against perhaps millions of individuals. Then again, what if these monsters are only animals, not intelligent Mercurians? We need to be patient. Let’s only fight to defend our lives.”

  “You’re right, Paul,” said Jonathan Bild, gravely.

  “Before lying down again,” Civrac added, “let’s drink a little of Francisco’s cognac, in order to vanquish the prostration to which we yielded.”

  “Good idea!” said Brad.

  And the flask passed from hand to hand.

  Paul and Francisco lay down to either side of Lola, who was still asleep, in such a way as to defend her from the monopods’ touch.
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br />   Bild and Brad lay down some distance away, in order that they could get behind a curious Mercurian. They had agreed that they would try to take a prisoner. Francisco’s long broad belt would serve to attach the captive to a tree.

  An hour went by without any creature appearing. Between their squinting eyelids, the Terrans looked in all directions. To help them stay awake, they spoke to one another occasionally in low voices, and pinched one another’s arms. Bild frequently looked at his watch, trying to take note of the figure marking the time.

  It was quarter past four when Brad was the first to see a monopod. He signaled the sighting, as agreed, with a long sigh, and the four Terrans strove to remain motionless.

  With short hopes, punctuated by prudent pauses, the black Mercurian advanced, arm forward, trunk agitated, eye bright.

  When it was no more than six paces away from the recumbent humans, it whistled with its trunk. Immediately, other monopods emerged from behind the trees.

  There were four of them, and then ten…and then twelve…and then twenty-two. They gathered together, seemingly consulting one another, their trunks whistling in turn.

  Finally, the first monopod detached itself from the group, and with a single bound, jumped in front of Bild and Brad. It bent its knee, extended its arm, and touched Bild’s chest gently with its three talons. Then it touched Brad’s shoulder in the same fashion. The two Americans did not budge, observing the little black being between their eyelashes.

  The Mercurian straightened up, and a long modulated whistle emerged from its trunk. Immediately, four monopods separated from the group and came to join the first with a long leap. Leaving Bild and Brad, the five black beings surrounded Francisco, Lolla and Paul.

  They crouched down, and touched Paul and Francisco cautiously with their talons. They whistled with their trunks; their eyes sparkled; the expressionless rat-like heads made rapid movements.

  Evidently, the Mercurians were communicating the new impressions caused by the sight and feel of the unknown beings that had come to their planet from some unknown elsewhere.

  But as two monopods, directing their arms simultaneously toward Lolla Mendès, appeared to want to take hold of the young woman’s head, presumably to examine her hair, Paul and Francisco sat up at the same time, immediately imitated by Brad and Bild.

  Howling, the four men leapt upon a monopod, which was knocked down instantaneously, and within a minute, had been tied up with Francisco’s red belt, solidly attached, in an upright position, to the trunk of a tree.

  At the first cry uttered by the Terrans, all the Mercurians except the prisoner had fled.

  “A ludicrous individual,” said Brad, planting himself in front of the monopod attached to the tree.

  Furiously, the Mercurian’s gleaming red eye rolled in its orbit. Its trunk whistled and agitated madly, and its one arm, secured at the elbow with a twist of the belt, struggled in vain to free itself.

  Awakened by the racket, Lolla had stood up. Paul brought her up to date with events, and the five Terrans, arranged in a semicircle around the captive, examined it at their leisure.

  The monopod’s head was shaped like a rat’s. The trunk, about thirty centimeters long, prolonged the muzzle. Beneath the trunk, which was equipped with a sucker at the extremity, there was neither a mouth nor a chin. The root of the trunk extended directly to join the body, for the strange being had no neck; he upper body scarcely narrowed to give birth to the head. To either side of the trunk was, not exactly an ear, but an auditory apparatus similar to a fish’s gills. Finally, above the trunk, in the middle of the skull, that unique, enormous, bloody eye opened—and the skull immediately turned back, forming the back of the head.

  The unique arm emerged forwards from the middle of the torso; it was disproportionately long.

  With the aid of his knife whose dimensions he knew precisely, Francisco measured the Mercurian. The entire body, from the foot to the top of the skull measured 1.2 meters. The head alone measured twenty centimeters. The arm, from its point of origin to the tips of the claw, was sixty-five centimeters long. The leg, from the foot to place where the thigh ended and the torso began, was sixty centimeters long.

  The captive was rather thin and slender in proportion to its size.

  Like its hand, which terminated in three enormous sharp talons composed of a strangely metallic substance, its foot, in the form of a horse’s hoof, also had three talons, shorter but thicker, two in front and one behind, like a cockerel’s spur.

  But the most prodigious thing of all in that extraterrestrial creature was its texture, the substance of its body; on feeling its arm, its thigh, its torso and its skull, the Terrans had the sensation of touching hot ebony-wood. Evidently, the density of that flesh was superior to the density of human flesh; the body was more solidly constructed and framed, and yet it was evident that its specific weight was inferior to the weight of a human body of similar size.

  When all these observations had been made, Paul de Civrac said gravely: “We’re in a world very different from our own. Later, perhaps, we’ll be able to explain it. For the moment, we have to think about staying alive.

  “That might not be easy,” said Brad.

  “We need to establish friendly relations with these indigenes,” suggested Bild.

  “How do we persuade it that w don’t mean it any harm?” asked Lolla.

  “I’m going to try!” Paul moved his companions aside and remained on his own in front of the Mercurian. He took three steps back and began a series of bows, amicable gestures and smiles. He put his hands to his mouth to mime eating, and lay down on the ground to simulate sleeping. Then, drawing closer to the monopod, he pointed to the vault of the forest, picked up a stone, threw it up in the air and followed its fall with his extended finger.

  By means of that mime he hoped to make it understood that, having fallen from the sky, the only desire the five of them had was to eat and sleep tranquilly.

  Then he waited.

  The monopod had followed the human’s movements with an irritated eye. Its only response as a long whistle.

  Then Civrac untied the belt and gradually set the captive free. When the entire belt was unwound, he stood back.

  Once free, the monopod started waving its arm and leg, which had presumably gone stiff. Then it looked successively at the four men and—for a long interval—the young woman. Its bloody eye was devoid of expression. Its trunk emitted five brief whistles. Then, suddenly, it flexed its knee extended like a spring, leapt up, bounded over Brad’s head, and disappeared in a matter of seconds into the mystery of the forest.

  Chapter Three

  Which ends with two dissimilar abductions

  “Adios!” said Francisco, when the monopod had gone.

  “Do you think it understood?” asked Lolla.

  “I doubt it!” Civrac relied.

  “Ludicrous individual!” muttered Bild.

  “But why is it made of wood, damn it?”

  “Wood, do you think?” said Brad, sardonically.

  “Decidedly,” said Paul, as if talking to himself, “I’m more and more convinced that we’re on the planet Mercury.”

  “Eh?” said Bild. “A fine conviction—but what is it based on?”

  “The intensity of the light and heat. You know that Mercury is the planet nearest to the sun. There are other indications too. Look, our astronomers know, thanks to the comparative observation of the planets, that on Mercury the density of materials is a third greater than on Earth. Hence the hardness of the monopod’s flesh, the resistance of the red grass...”

  “How is it, then, that we weren’t crushed by falling on such hard grass and ground?” objected Bild.

  “Exactly!” said Paul. “The atmosphere of Mercury is much denser than Earth’s; in addition, our weight has diminished by half. We fell almost as gently as a piece of paper thrown from a tower. All that makes me think that we’re on the planet Mercury. And look there, through that gap in the foliage...”r />
  “Well?”

  “Notice that beam of light. It’s falling perpendicularly, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Half past five,” said Bild, after consulting his watch.

  “Perfect! Do you remember that at one o’clock, on the red plain, the light was coming down in perpendicular rays from the clouds? Our shadows could only be seen between our parted feet—do you recall?”

  “Yes.”

  “That proves, therefore, that the sun above the clouds hasn’t changed its position relative o us. Now, do you know the most recent opinion of the French astronomer Camille Flammarion?”

  “No.”

  “This is it, in summary: Because of the proximity of the planet, the sun has, so to speak, immobilized the globe of Mercury, just as the Earth has done for the Moon, forcing it to present the same face constantly. In consequence, there’s eternal daylight in the sunlit hemisphere, and perpetual night in the other hemisphere, which a broad twilight zone between the two.”

  “I understand!” exclaimed Bild. “We’ve fallen in the middle of the sunlit hemisphere, and the sun will never set for us. We’re immobile beneath it. Well, since we’re on Mercury, hurrah for Mercury!”

  And Bild brandished his enormous hands in the air, while Lolla admired Paul and Brad and Francisco, somewhat indifferent to what they had just heard, searched the forest with their eyes.

  “Whether it’s Mercury or not,” said Brad, in a dull voice that contrasted with Bild’s, “this world doesn’t fill me with joy. Shut up a minute and listen.”

  Everyone pricked pup their ears...

  And in all directions of the mysterious forest, there were faint whistling sounds, still distant, but continual and innumerable. Their shrill whine was incessantly drawing nearer.

  “We’re going to have thousands of those little black monsters on our backs,” Bild murmured.

  “What shall we do?” asked Lolla, fearfully.

  “Wait,” said Paul de Civrac, taking her hand. In a lower voice, for her alone, he added: “Don’t be afraid, Lolla; I’m here. I’d die rather than...”