The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

THE EARTH DWELLERS André Maurois

By the end of 1970 friendly relations had been established between the Earth and most of the major planets, and terrestrial scientists became anxious to compare their own hypotheses and doctrines with those of their colleagues in other worlds. But such comparisons were often difficult, because, as is well known, the eminent physicists of Venus, Jupiter, and Mars had no perception of either light or sound, and lived in a world of radiations of which we had hitherto been quite ignorant. But the theory of sensorial equivalents made rapid progress, and at the date of writing (1992) it may be said that we are capable of transposing every language of the planetary system into Earth language— except Saturnian.

One of the most interesting discoveries due to this new philology was that of books written about ourselves, the Earth Dwellers, by the scientists of foreign planets. Mankind had not the slightest idea that for millions of years past he had been under observation, thanks to instruments very much more powerful than his own, by the naturalists of Venus, Mars, and even Uranus. Terrestrial science lagged far behind the science of neighboring bodies, and as our organs were insensitive to the radiations utilized by these observers, it was impossible for us to know that, in the most secret moments of our lives, we were sometimes within the field of vision of a celestial ultramicroscope.

Nowadays these works can be consulted by any scholar in the library of the League of Planets. They provide most commendable reading for young men eager to devote themselves to the learned sciences, not only because of their great intrinsic interest, but also because of the sense of humility which they cannot fail to evoke. To observe the incredible errors made by beings of such high intelligence and so wonderfully equipped for research, one cannot refrain from reverting to a number of our own human affirmations, wondering whether we have not observed plants and animals very much as the Martians observed us.

One case in particular strikes us as worthy of careful study: that of the Uranian scholar A.E. 17, who published his book, Man and His Life, in 1959. [Original Uranian edition, 1959. First terrestrial edition, 1982.] Until the War that book was the standard work not only in Uranus but also, in translations, among the inhabitants of Venus and Mars. To ourselves it is readily accessible because, alone among our fellow-planetaries, the Uranians share with us the sense of sight, which makes their vocabulary approximate closely to ours. Moreover, the experiments carried out by A.E. 17 were such as completely to upset the Earth throughout a period of six months; and we have access to the terrestrial account of these events in the newspapers and memoirs of the time.

We propose here:

(a) To describe briefly a few of the events noted on our own planet in the year 1954;

(b) to show what interpretation the eminent A.E. 17 put on his own experiments.

THE MYSTERIOUS SPRINGTIME

In the month of March, 1954, numerous observers throughout the Northern Hemisphere gave surprising reports of atmospheric conditions. Notwithstanding fine and cool weather, storms of the utmost violence were bursting suddenly within strictly limited zones. Ships’ captains and airplane pilots reported to the Central Meteorological

Bureau that their compasses had for several seconds behaved quite wildly for no conceivable reason. In several places, under a clear sky, people saw what appeared to be the shadow of a huge cloud passing over the ground, although no such cloud was visible. The newspapers published interviews with the eminent meteorologists, who explained that they had anticipated this phenomenon, which was due to sunspots and would come to an end with the equinoctial tides. But the advent of the equinox only brought stranger happenings in its wake.

THE “HYDE PARK HILL” INCIDENT

On the third Sunday in April, the crowds of men and women listening to the open-air orators giving their pitch at Marble Arch, suddenly saw passing overhead the shadow of an invisible obstacle mysteriously interposed between the Earth and the sun. A few seconds later, from the park railings to a point some three or four hundred yards inside the park, there occurred an abrupt upheaval of the ground. Trees were uprooted and pedestrians tumbled over and were buried, while those who were on the edge of the disturbed area were dumfounded to observe that a great funnel at least three hundred feet deep had been scooped out, the soil from which had been thrown up to form a hill of corresponding height.

A policeman, giving evidence next day at the inquest on victims, said, “It all happened just as if a giant had been wielding a spade in the park. Yes, it was just like someone using a spade, because the outer edge of the cavity was trim and smooth, while the edge on the side where the hill came consisted of crumbling loose soil, with half-cut heads and bodies protruding from it.”

Over three hundred citizens walking in the park had been buried alive. Some who had only been covered with a light layer of earth managed to extricate themselves with difficulty. Some, too, suddenly lost their senses and rushed down the steep slope of the new hill, uttering dreadful shrieks. On the summit of the mound there appeared the upright figure of a Salvation Army preacher, Colonel R. W. Ward, who, with astonishing presence of mind, still shaking the dirt from his hair and clothing, began to bellow: “I told you so, brothers! You have sacrificed to false gods, and now the Lord God is angered with his people, and the hand of the Lord God has fallen heavy upon us....”

And indeed this inexplicable event bore such a likeness to certain divine punishments as described in Holy Writ that skeptics among the bystanders were instantly converted, and began lives of practicing religion to which they have from that moment been steadfast.

The episode enabled people to appreciate the virtues of the Metropolitan Police. Three members of the force were among the victims, but a dozen others, arriving instantly on the scene, set to work at digging with great courage. Telephone messages were sent out at once to the military authorities and fire stations, and General Clarkwell, the Commissioner of Police, took command of the rescue forces, and within four hours Hyde Park had resumed its normal appearance. Unfortunately, the dead numbered two hundred.

Scientists gave the most varied explanations of the disaster. The theory of an earthquake, the only reasonable one if the supernatural were ruled out, did not seem plausible, for no shock had been recorded by any seismograph. The public was fairly well satisfied when the experts informed them that it had been an earthquake, but an earthquake of a very special sort which they had labeled a “vertical-montiform seismic variant.”

THE HOUSE IN THE AVENUE VICTOR HUGO

The Hyde Park incident was followed by a considerable number of similar occurrences, which attracted much less public attention because they caused no human fatalities. But at different points these strange mounds were seen taking shape with die same swiftness, each of them bordered by a precipice with sheer, clean-cut fall. In certain places these hills are still in existence: as for instance the one in the plain of Ayen in Périgord, that of Roznov in Wallachia, and that of Itapura in Brazil.

But the mysterious spade which was thus apparently wielded on bare land was now, alas, to attack human erections.

About midday on April 24, a strange noise, compared by some who heard it to that of a whizzing blade, by others to that of an extremely fine and powerful water jet, astonished the passersby in the region of Paris bounded approximately by the Arc de Triomphe, the Avenue de la Grande Armée, the Avenue Marceau, and the Avenue Henri Martin.

People happening to be opposite the building known as 66 Avenue Victor Hugo saw an enormous oblique cleft appear across it; the house was shaken by two or three tremors, and suddenly the whole of the top story, occupied by the servants’ rooms, seemed to crumble away as if under powerful pressure. The frenzied inhabitants appeared at the windows and on the balconies. Fortunately, although the building was literally cut in two, it did not collapse. Halfway up the staircase the rescuers came upon the fissure produced by the invisible instrument. It looked exactly as if a blade had cut through the wood of the steps, the carpet, the metal balustrade, following a line at right angles to these. Everything in its path—furniture, carpets, pictures, books—had been cut in two with a clean stroke, very neatly. By a miracle nobody was injured. A girl sleeping on the third floor found her bed sliced obliquely across; but the cut had just missed her. She had felt no pain, but did experience a shock like that of a weak electric battery.

In this case, too, there were numerous explanations. The word “seismic” was again produced. Certain newspapers accused the architect and proprietor of the building of having used faulty materials in its construction. A Communist deputy raised the question in the Chamber.

THE TRANSPORTATION PHENOMENA

Like the Hyde Park occurrence, the accident in the Avenue Victor Hugo was followed by several almost identical in kind, which we shall not recount, but which ought, as we now see, to have convinced observant minds of a hidden will engaged in the furtherance of a definite plan. In numerous countries, houses, great and small, were sundered by an invisible force. Several farmhouses, one in Massachusetts, another in Denmark, another in Spain, were raised into the air and dropped back onto the ground, smashed to pieces with their inhabitants. The French Building in New York was cut in two. About fifty men and women met their deaths in these occurrences, but as they took place in very different countries, each isolated case being responsible only for a few victims, and also as nobody could provide an explanation, very little was said about them.

It was different with the subsequent series of happenings which kept the whole planet in a ferment of excitement throughout May and June, 1954. The first victim was a young Negress of Hartford, Connecticut, who was leaving her employers’ house one morning when a postman, the sole witness of the accident, saw her suddenly soar into the air, uttering terrible cries. She rose to a height of three hundred feet and then crashed to the ground. The postman declared that he had seen no aerial apparatus of any sort overhead.

The second case of “transportation” was that of a customs official at Calais, who was also seen rising vertically and disappearing at high speed toward the English coast. A few minutes later he was found on the Dover cliffs, dead, but with no visible injuries. He looked as if he had been laid gently down on the ground; he was blue, like a man hanged.

Then began the period of the so-called “successful transportations.” The first victim to arrive living at the end of his journey was an aged beggar, who was seized by an invisible hand when he was begging for alms in front of Notre Dame, and ten minutes later was deposited in the middle of Piccadilly Circus at the feet of a stupefied policeman. He had not suffered at all, and had the impression of having been conveyed in a closed cabin to which neither wind nor light could penetrate. Eyewitnesses of his departure had observed that he became invisible immediately after he was raised from the ground.

For several weeks longer these “transportations” continued. Once they were known to be quite harmless, they were regarded as rather comical. The choice of the invisible hand seemed to be completely whimsical. Once it was a little girl of Denver, Colorado, who found herself set down in a Russian steppe; another time a Saragossa dentist turned up in Stockholm. The “transportation” which caused most talk was that of the venerable President of the French Senate, M. Paul Reynaud, who was picked up in the Luxembourg Gardens and deposited on the shore of Lake Ontario. He took the opportunity of making a journey through Canada, was triumphantly welcomed back at the Bois de Boulogne station, and this unsought publicity was probably largely responsible for his election as President of the Republic, in 1956.

It should be noted that, after their journeys, the subjects of “transportation” were smeared with a reddish liquid that stained their clothing, for no ascertainable reason. This was the only inconvenience of these otherwise harmless adventures. After about two months they ceased, to be followed by a new and still stranger series which began with the famous episode of the “Two Couples.”

THE “TWO COUPLES” EPISODE

The first of the two famous couples was a French one, living in a small house close to Paris, in Neuilly. The husband, Jacques Martin, was on the teaching staff of the Lycée Pasteur, a sporting and scholarly young man, and the author of a remarkable biographical study on Paul Morand. He and his wife had four children. On July 3, toward midnight, Mme. Martin had just fallen asleep when she heard that steamlike whistling which we have already mentioned, felt a slight shaking, and had the impression of being very rapidly raised into the air. Opening her eyes, she was stupefied to see that the pale light of the moon was flooding her room, a whole wall of which had vanished, that she was lying on the edge of a bed cut in two, and that on her left hand, where her husband had been lying a few second before, there was a bottomless gulf, above which the stars were glittering. She flung herself in terror toward the still solid edge of the bed, and was amazed (and at the same time reassured) to find that it did not wobble, although it was left with only two legs. Mme. Martin felt that she was rising no higher, but was being moved very fast in a straight line; then she was made aware, by a feeling in the heart like that which one has in a lift descending too quickly, that she was dropping. Imagining that her fall would end with a crash, she had already closed her eyes in anticipation of the final shock. But it was gentle and elastic, and when she looked around her, she could see nothing. The room was dark. Her own narrative continues:

“I put out my arm; everything was solid. The abyss had apparently closed up again. I called my husband’s name, thinking that I had been passing through a nightmare and feeling anxious to tell him about it. My groping hand felt a man’s arm, and I heard a strong unknown voice say in English, ‘Oh, my dear, what a fright you gave me!’ I started back and wanted to turn on the light, but I could not find the electric switch. ’What’s wrong?’ said the unknown. He himself turned on a light. We both uttered simultaneous cries. In front of me was a fair-haired young Englishman, with a small short nose, rather shortsighted, and still half asleep, in blue pajamas. Down the middle of the bed ran a crack; sheets, mattress and bolster were all cut in two. There was a difference of three or four inches in the level of the two portions of the bed.

“When my bedfellow had recovered his wits, his demeanor in these difficult circumstances gave me a high opinion of the British race. After a short but very excusable moment of confusion, his correctness was as complete and natural as if we had been in a drawing room. I spoke his language and told him my name. He told me that his was John Graham. The place we were in was Richmond. Looking around, I saw that the whole of one half of my own room had accompanied me; I recognized my window with its cherry-colored curtains, the large photograph of my husband, the small table with books beside my bed, and even my watch on top of my books. The other half, Mr. Graham’s, was unknown to me. On the bedside table there were a portrait of a very pretty woman, photographs of children, some magazines, and a box of cigarettes. John Graham looked at me for a very long time, examining the background against which I had appeared to him, and then said with the utmost seriousness, ‘What are you doing here?’ I explained that I knew nothing about it, and, pointing to the large portrait, I said, “This is my husband.’ Pointing likewise, he answered, “This is my wife.’ She was delightful, and the disturbing thought came to me that she was perhaps at that very moment in the arms of Jacques. ‘Do you suppose,’ I asked him, ‘that half of your house has been transported to France at the same time as half of ours has come here?’ ‘Why?’ he said. He annoyed me. Why, indeed? I knew nothing about it at all.... Because this affair had a sort of natural symmetry of its own.

“ ‘A queer business,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘How can it be possible?’ ‘It isn’t possible,’ I said, ‘but it has happened.’

“At this moment cries were heard apparently coming from upstairs, and the same thought struck us: ‘The children?’ John Graham jumped out of bed and ran barefoot toward a door, the door of his half. He opened it, and I could hear cries, the sound of coughing, and then the Englishman’s powerful voice mingling oaths with words of comfort. I made haste to rise, and looked in the mirror. My face looked just as usual. I then noticed that my nightdress was décolleté and looked around for my kimono; but I remembered having hung it in the half of the room which had stayed behind. Standing there in front of the mirror, I heard a pitiable voice behind me.

“The cries in the nursery were redoubled, weeping and appeals mingling with them.

“ ‘Come and help me,’ he said in a beseeching tone.

“ ‘Of course I will . . . but have you got your wife’s dressing gown, and slippers?’

“ ‘Oh, yes, of course. . . . ‘

“Handing me his own dressing gown he showed me the way to the nursery. The children were splendid. I managed to soothe them. It was the youngest, a lovely fair baby, who seemed to be suffering most. I comforted him as best I could, and took his hand; he accepted my presence.

“In this way we spent a couple of hours in that room, both in a state of mental anguish, he thinking of his wife, and I of my husband.

“I asked if we could not telephone to the police. He tried, and found that his telephone had been cut off; his radio aerial had also been cut; the house must have been looking extremely odd. When dawn appeared, Mr. Graham went out. The children had fallen asleep. In a few minutes he returned for me, saying that really the front of the house was well worth looking at. And it was! The unknown contriver of this miracle had evidently wanted to pick two houses of the same height divided in the same way, and he had succeeded; but the styles were so different that the combined effect took one’s breath away. Our house at Neuilly was of brick, very plain, its tall windows framed with stone; the English house was a small black and white cottage, with wide bay windows. The juxtaposition of these two utterly different halves formed a most ludicrous ensemble—like a harlequin of Picasso’s.

“I urged Mr. Graham to put on his clothes and send off a telegram to France to find out what had happened to his wife. He told me that the telegraph office did not open till eight o’clock. He was a stolid creature, apparently incapable of conceiving that in such peculiar circumstances one could infringe on regulations and awaken the telegraph clerk. I shook him energetically, but in vain. All I could get out of him was ‘It only opens at eight.’ In the end, about seven o’clock, just when he was going out, we saw a policeman arriving. He was gazing at the house in amazement, and had brought a telegram from the head of the Paris police, asking if I was there and announcing that Mrs. John Graham was safe and sound at Neuilly.”

It is not worth while continuing the quotation of this narrative in extenso. Suffice it to say that Mrs. Graham tended Mme. Martin’s children as devotedly as the latter did the little English ones, that both couples declared themselves charmed by the amiability of their companions in adventure, and that both households remained close friends to their dying days. Mme. Martin was still alive ten years ago, in her family home at Chambourcy (Seine-et-Oise).

The space allotted to this chapter in the general plan of this volume does not allow us to recount the analogous adventures which astonished mankind throughout that month of August, 1954.

The series of “sliced houses” was even longer than that of the “transportations.” Over one hundred couples were interchanged in this way, and the changes became a favorite theme with novelists and film writers. An element of whimsical sensuality which was much to the public’s taste continued. Besides, it was diverting to see (as it really happened) a queen waking up in a policeman’s bed, and a ballet girl in that of the President of the United States. Then the series stopped dead, and gave place to another. It looked as if the mysterious beings who amused themselves by disturbing the lives of humans were capricious, and quick to tire of their games.

THE CAGING

Early in September, the hand whose power was by now known to all the world fell upon some of the finest minds on its surface. A dozen men, nearly all chemists or physicists, men of the highest achievement, were simultaneously abstracted from different points among the civilized countries and transported to a clearing in the Forest of Fontainebleau.

A group of lads, who had come there in the early hours of the morning to climb the rocks, noticed some old men wandering forlornly among the trees. Seeing that they were in difficulties, the young men tried to approach them to offer help, but were taken aback to find themselves suddenly checked by some transparent but insurmountable resistance. They tried to find a way around the obstacle, but after making a complete circle around the clearing they realized that it was completely ringed by an invisible rampart. One of the scientists was recognized by a few of the youths as their professor, and they called him by name. He did not seem to hear them. Sound could not penetrate the barrier. The celebrated personages were there like caged beasts.

Before very long they seemed to accept the situation. They were observed to be lying down in the sunlight; and then, drawing pieces of paper from their pockets, they began scribbling mathematical formulas and arguing quite cheerfully. One of the young onlookers went off to inform the authorities, and by noon many curious spectators were beginning to come on the scene. By noon the scientists were showing signs of anxiety; they were all of advanced years, and they dragged themselves rather wearily to the edge of the ring, where, seeing that their voices were not reaching anyone, they made signs that they should be supplied with food.

A few officers were present, and one of them had what appeared to be the excellent notion of supplying the unfortunate men with supplies by airplane. A couple of hours later the drone of a motor was heard, and the pilot, passing skillfully over the circular clearing, dropped some packages of food exactly over the center. But, unfortunately, about sixty feet above the ground the packages were seen to stop in their fall, bounce back, and then were left suspended in midair. The cage had a roof composed of the same invisible radiations.

Toward nightfall the old men became desperate, signaling that they were dying of hunger and dreaded the night chills. The anguished onlookers could do nothing for them. Were they going to witness the perishing of this remarkable assemblage of great intellects?

In the pale light of the dawn it was at first thought that the situation had not changed, but closer examination showed that quite a new setting had appeared in the center of the “cage.” The invisible hand had staged things so that the packages dropped by the airplane were now suspended at the end of rope about fifteen feet above the ground, while alongside this rope hung another which actually reached the ground. To any young man it would have been an easy matter to swing himself up and reach the packages that held the hopes of safety. But unhappily there was little likelihood that any of these venerable men of learning could undertake this difficult gymnastic feat. They were seen walking around the ropes and gauging their strength, but none of them ventured further.

A whole day went by in this way. Night fell. Gradually the curious throng melted away. About midnight one young student took it into his head to ascertain whether the barrier of radiations still held. To his great surprise he found nothing barring his way, walked straight on, and uttered a cry of triumph. The cruel powers which had made men their toys for two whole days were consenting to spare their victims. The scientists were fed and warmed, and none of them succumbed.

Such are the chief facts which distinguished this period, at the time inexplicable, but which we now know to have corresponded to a period of experiments on the planet Uranus. We shall now give a few extracts, in our opinion the most interesting, from the book of the famous A.E. 17.

The reader will understand that we have been obliged to find terrestrial equivalents for the Uranian words, and the translation is only approximate. Uranian time consists of years very much longer than ours, and wherever possible we have made a transposition into terrestrial time. Furthermore, to designate ourselves the Uranians use a word which signifies, roughly, “apterous bipeds”; but this is needlessly complicated, and we have in most places substituted the words “men” or “Earth Dwellers.” Similarly, we have translated the queer word by which they designated our cities by the word “manheaps,” which gives in our view a fair suggestion of the associations of analogous ideas. Finally, the reader should not overlook the fact that the Uranian, although endowed like ourselves with the sense of sight, is ignorant of sound. Uranians communicate with each other by means of a special organ consisting of a series of small colored lamps which flash on and off. Observing that men were without this organ, and being unable to imagine speech, the Uranian naturally supposed that we were incapable of communicating our ideas to each other.

Here we can offer only a few brief excerpts from the book by A.E. 17 on Man and His Life. But we strongly advise the student to read the book in its entirety; there is an excellent school edition published with appendix and notes by Professor Fischer of Peking.

MAN AND HIS LIFE

By A.E. 17

When the surface of the small planets, particularly that of the Earth, is examined through an ordinary telescope, large stains may be noticed, more streaky in texture than those formed by a lake or ocean. If these stains are observed over a long enough period, they are seen to expand throughout several terrestrial centuries, pass through a period of maximum size, and then diminish, or even in some cases disappear. Many observers have thought that they were related to some unhealthy condition of the soil. And indeed nothing could be more like the development and reabsorption of a tumor in an organism. But with the invention of the ultratelemicroscope, it has been possible to detect that we are here confronted by an accumulation of living matter. The imperfections of the first apparatus did not allow us to see more than a confused swarming, a sort of throbbing jelly, and excellent observers, such as A. 33, then maintained that these terrestrial colonies were composed of animals joined to each other and living a common existence. With our present apparatus it is at once obvious that things are quite otherwise. The individual creatures can be clearly distinguished, and their movements can be followed. The stains observed by A. 33 are in point of fact huge nests which can almost be compared to Uranian cities and are known to us as “manheaps.”

The minute animals inhabiting these towns, Men, are apterous biped animals, with an indifferent electrical system, and generally provided with an artificial epidermis. It was long believed that they secreted this supplementary skin themselves. But my researches enable me to declare that this is not so; they are impelled by a powerful instinct to collect certain animal or vegetable fibers and assemble them in such a way as to form a protection against cold.

I use the word “instinct,” and from the outset of this work I must lay stress on a clear indication of my feelings regarding a question which ought never to have been raised and has, especially during recent years, been treated with incredible levity. A curious mode of thought has become habitual among our younger naturalists, in attributing to these terrestrial vegetations an intelligence of the same nature as that of the Uranian. Let us leave to others the task of pointing out the distressing nature of such doctrine from the religious point of view. In this book I shall show its absurdity from only the scientific point of view. No doubt the beauty of the spectacle rouses a quite excusable enthusiasm when one views for the first time under the microscope one of these particles of jelly, and suddenly sees the unfolding of countless lively and interesting scenes —the long streets along which Men pass to and fro, sometimes stopping and apparently exchanging speech; or the small individual nest in which a couple keep watch over a brood of young; or armies on the march; or builders at their work.... But for a profitable study of the psychic faculties of these animals, it is not enough to profit by the circumstances that chance affords the observer. It is essential to know how to procure the most favorable conditions of observation, and to vary these as much as possible. It is necessary, in a word, to experiment, and thus to build up science on the solid base of fact.

This is what we have sought to do in the course of the long series of experiments reported here. Before embarking on their description I must ask the reader to imagine and to gauge the immense difficulties which such a project was bound to present. Long-distance experiment, no doubt, has become relatively easy since we had at our disposal the W rays, which enable us to grasp, handle, and even transport bodies through interstellar space. But in dealing with creatures so small and fragile as Men, the W rays are very clumsy and brutal instruments. In our first tests it turned out only too often that we killed the animals we desired to observe. Transmitting appliances of extraordinary sensitiveness were required to enable us to reach exactly the point aimed at, and to treat the sensitive matter with the necessary delicacy. In particular, when first carrying out the transference of Men from one point to another on terrestrial territory, we omitted to take full account of these animals’ respiratory difficulties. We made them move too rapidly across a thin layer of air which envelops the Earth, and they died of asphyxiation. We had to construct a real box of rays, inside which the swiftness of transportation produced no effect. Similarly, when we first attempted the bisection and transference of nests, we did not make sufficient allowance for the constructional processes used by the Earth Dwellers. Experience taught us to prop up the nests after their division, by the passage of certain massive currents of rays.

The reader will find here a sketch map of that portion of the terrestrial surface on which our main experiments were carried out. We would ask him particularly to note the two great manheaps on which we made our first tests, and to which we gave the names, later adopted by the astrosociologists, of “Mad Manheap” and “Rigid Manheap.”

These names we chose on account of the singularly differing plans of these manheaps, one of which at once impresses the observer by its almost geometrical star patterns of roadways, while the other is a complex maze of rather tortuous streets. Between “Mad Manheap” and “Rigid Manheap” stretches a gleaming line which is believed to be sea. The greatest manheap on the Earth is “Geometrical Manheap,” which is even more regular than “Rigid Man-heap”; but is far distant from the other two, and separated from them by a wider gleaming surface.

FIRST ATTEMPTS

At what point of the Earth was it best to direct our first efforts? How must we interfere with the lives of these animals in such a way as to obtain instructive reactions from them? I must confess to real emotion when I prepared for the first time to operate on the Earth, armed with an apparatus of adequate range.

I had around me four of my young pupils, who were also deeply moved, and in turn we gazed at the charming miniature landscapes in the ultratelemicroscope. Aiming the apparatus at the “Mad Manheap,” we sought a fairly open locality so as to see the consequences of our action more clearly. Tiny trees gleamed in the spring sunshine, and multitudes of small motionless insects could be seen forming irregular circles; in the middle of each of these stood an isolated insect. For a moment we speculated on the meaning of this game, but failing to find one, we decided to try an application of the rays. The effect was staggering. A hole was scooped in the ground; some of the insects were buried under the debris; and instantly an astounding activity was loosed. It really looked as if these creatures were Intelligently organized. Some went to the rescue of their overwhelmed companions, others went off to get help. We then tried applying the rays on several points of the Earth, but this time we chose uninhabited areas, so as not to endanger our subjects at the very beginning of our researches. We thus learned how to reduce the power of our rays, and to operate more skillfuly. Being now sure of our means of action, we decided to start the first series of our experiments.

It was my plan to take individuals in a certain manheap, mark them with a touch of a brush, transport them to different points, and then observe whether the transported individuals would find their way back to the original man-heap. At first, as I have said, we encountered great difficulties, first because the animals died during transference, and then because we had neglected to take into account the artificial epidermis with which these creatures provide themselves. They doff these coverings with the utmost ease, and so once we had set them down again in the midst of a manheap, we lost sight of them. For the subsequent transportations we tried to mark them directly on the body, tearing off the supplementary skin; but in these cases the animal made itself a new skin as soon as it arrived in the manheap.

With a little practice my assistants were at last able to follow one particular animal with the ultratelemicroscope and keep it constantly in sight. They found that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the man returns to his starting point. I attempted the transference of two males from the same manheap—the “Mad Manheap”—with the extremely remote one which we termed the “Geometrical Manheap.” After ten (terrestrial) days my esteemed pupil E.X. 33, who had followed them night and day with incomparable devotion, showed me them returning to the “Rigid Manheap.” They had come back, notwithstanding the fact of their unfamiliarity with the places to which I had transported them; they were individuals of stay-at-home habit (we had kept them under long observation), who were obviously seeing for the first time the country where we had deposited them. How did they find the way back? Their transference had been so rapid that observation was out of the question. What was their guide? Certainly not memory, but a special faculty which we must confine ourselves to noting without claiming to explain it, so remote is it from anything in our own psychology.

These transferences raised another problem. Would the returning individual be recognized by the others? Apparently he is. Generally speaking, great excitement is to be seen in the nest when the absent one reappears. The others place their arms around him, and sometimes even place their lips on his. In certain cases, however, the feelings manifested appeared to be those of rage or displeasure.

The first experiments showed that some instinct enables Men to recognize their own manheaps. The second problem to which we turned was to find out whether, among these creatures, there existed sentiments akin to those of Uranians, and whether, for instance, conjugal or maternal love could exist on the Earth. Such an hypothesis struck me as absurd; it attributed to the Earth Dweller refinements of feeling which the Uranian has attained only through millions of years of civilization. But the duty of the experimental scientist is to approach his subject with an open mind, and to make all his experiments without any prejudice regarding their outcome.

At night the male Earth Dweller generally rests beside his female. I asked my pupils to bisect some nests in such a way as to separate the male from the female without injuring either, and then to join up one half of Nest A with the half of Nest B, observing whether the little animals took notice of the change. For the experiment to be carried out under normal conditions, it was essential that the selected nests should closely resemble each other; and for this reason I instructed my collaborators to select two nests containing cells of the same size and broods with the same number of young. E.X. 33 showed me, not without pride, two almost identical nests in the “Mad Manheap” und the “Rigid Manheap,” each of them containing a couple with four little ones. The bisection of the houses, and their transportation, were carried out with admirable skill by E.X. 33, and the results were conclusive. In both cases I he couples thus artificially put together by us showed slight surprise at the moment of waking, adequately accounted for by the movement and shock. Then, in both cases, they remained together with no attempt at flight, and in apparently normal attitudes. An almost incredible fact was that, from the very first moment, each of the two females tended the other’s brood with no sign of horror or distaste. They were plainly incapable of realizing that they were not dealing with their own offspring.

This experiment was repeated on numerous occasions. In 93 per cent of cases, the nests and offspring were tended by both couples. The female retains a stubborn sense of her proper functions, without having any idea of the individuals toward which she performs this duty. Whether the children are hers or not, she toils with equal fervor. It might be thought that this confusion is caused by a close resemblance between the two nests; but at different stages we chose nests of quite different appearances, joining up, for instance, the half of a shabby nest with the half of a rich nest of a different species. The results were more or less the same; Man does not distinguish between his own cell and another.

Having thus shown that in the matter of sentiment the Earth Dweller is an animal occupying a very low place in the scale of creation, we sought an appropriate means of gauging his intellectual faculties. The simplest way, it seemed to us, was to isolate a few individuals in a ray cage, and to put at their disposal food which could only be reached by means of more and more complex actions. I took particular pains to choose for this experiment certain Earth Dwellers for whom my colleague X. 38 claimed signs of scientific intelligence. In Appendix A will be found the details of this experiment. It showed beyond any possible doubt that the space of time within which Man lives is extremely limited in the past and future, that he immediately forgets, and that he is incapable of imagining the simplest method of self-preservation as soon as he is confronted by problems slightly different from those which he has, by heredity, become used to solving.

After a long period of experimenting on individual Earth Dwellers, my pupils and I became familiar enough with the movements of these animals to be able to observe them in their ordinary life without intervention on our part. It is of the utmost interest to follow, as I have done, the history of a manheap through several terrestrial years.

The origin of these human societies is unknown. Why and how did these animals abandon their freedom to become slaves of the manheap? We cannot tell. It may be that in this grouping process they found a support in warfare against other creatures and against natural forces; but it is a support for which they pay highly. No animal species is so ignorant as this one of leisure and the joy of living. In the great manheaps, and particularly the “Geometrical Manheap,” activity begins at dawn and is prolonged through part of the night. Were this activity necessary, it would be comprehensible; but Man is a creature of such limited nature, so much dominated by his instincts, that he produces hardly anything beyond his requirements. Over and over again have I seen objects accumulating in the reserve stores of a manheap in such numbers that they seemed to be a source of embarrassment; and yet, only a short distance away, another group would continue to manufacture the very same objects.

Little is also known of the division of Mankind into castes. It is established that certain of these animals till the soil and produce nearly all the foodstuffs, while others make the supplementary skins or build nests, and others seem to do nothing but move swiftly to and fro over the planet’s surface, eating and coupling. Why do the first two classes consent to clothe and feed the third? That remains obscure to me. E.X. 33 has written a notable thesis seeking to prove that this tolerance has a sexual origin. He has shown that at night, when the individuals of the superior caste foregather, the workers collect around the entrances to these festivities in order to see the half-nude females. According to him, the compensation of the sacrificed classes consists of the aesthetic pleasure provided by the spectacle of these easy existences. The theory strikes me as ingenious, but not so firmly based as to convince me of its truth.

For my own part, I would rather seek an explanation in Man’s amazing stupidity. It is a supreme folly to be forever seeking to explain the actions of Men by Uranian reasonings. That is wrong, profoundly wrong. Man is not guided by a free intelligence. Man obeys a fatal and unconscious incitement; he cannot choose what he shall do; he slides along haphazard, following an irresistible predetermined slope which will bring him to his goal. I amused myself by following the individual existences of certain Men in whom the functions of love seemed to be the essentials of their existence. I saw how the conquest of one female to start with brought upon his shoulders all the burdens of nests and young; but, not content with that first load, my male would go off in search of a second mate, for whom he set up a new nest. These simultaneous love affairs led the wretched animal into endless battles of which I was the spectator. It mattered nothing to him; his successive woes seemed to hold no lessons for him, and he went on putting his head into his wretched adventures without seeming to be one whit the wiser after the third than after the first

One of the strangest proofs of this inability to keep contact with the past and imagine the future was afforded me by the frightful struggles which I witnessed between individuals of one and the same species. On Uranus it would seem a grotesque idea that one group of Uranians could attack another group, hurling on it projectiles meant to injure it, and trying to asphyxiate it with poisonous gases.

That is what happened on the Earth. Within a few terrestrial years my observation showed me compact masses of men thus confronting each other, now in one corner of that planet, now in another. Sometimes they fought in the open; sometimes they crouched in earthworks and strove to demolish the adjoining earthworks by showering heavy lumps of metal on them. Note that they themselves were at the same time peppered in the same way. It is a hideous and ridiculous sight. The scenes of horror which one witnesses at these times are such that if these creatures had the slightest faculty for remembering, they would avoid their recurrence for at least several generations. But in the course of even their brief lifetimes, the same men will be seen plunging madly into the same murderous escapades.

Another striking example of this blind subservience of Man to instinct is to be seen in his habit of tirelessly rebuilding manheaps at certain points of the planet where they are fated to destruction. Thus, for instance, I have attentively watched a very populous island where, within eight years, all the nests were destroyed three times by tremors of the outer coating of the Earth. To any sensible observer it is plain that the animals living in these parts ought to migrate. They do nothing of the sort, but pick up once more, with a positively ritual action, the same pieces of wood or iron, and zealously rebuild a manheap which will once more be destroyed in the following year. But, say my critics, however absurd the goal of this activity, it remains true that the activity is regulated, and proves the existence of a directing power, a spirit. Again, a mistaken idea! The swarming of Men disturbed by an earthquake, as I have shown, resembles the movement of gaseous molecules. If the latter be observed individually, they are seen to describe irregular and complicated trajectories, but in combination their great number produces effects of decided simplicity. Similarly, if we demolish a manheap, thousands of insects collide with each other, hamper each other’s movements, and show every sign of disorganized excitement; and yet, after a certain time, the manheap is discovered to be built up again.

Such is the strange intellect in which it is now fashionable to see a replica of Uranian reason! But fashion passes, facts remain; and the facts are bringing us back to the good old beliefs regarding the Uranian soul and its privileged destiny. For my own part, I shall be happy if my few experiments, modestly and prudently carried out, have helped toward the downfall of pernicious teachings, and restored these animals to their proper place in the scale of creatures. Curious and worthy of study they certainly are; but the very naïveté and incoherence of Man’s behavior must force us to bear in mind how great is the gulf fixed by the Creator between bestial instinct and Uranian soul.

DEATH OF A.E. 17

Happily, A.E. 17 died before he could witness the first interplanetary war, the establishment of relations between Uranus and the Earth, and the ruin of all his work. His great renown endured to his last days. He was a simple, kindly Uranian, who showed vexation only when contradicted. To ourselves it is an interesting fact that the monument erected to his memory on Uranus bears on its plinth a bas-relief designed from a telephotographic picture showing a swarming mass of men and women. Its background is strongly reminiscent of Fifth Avenue.