Insistence of Vision (29 page)

Paris Conquers All

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by Jules Verne

(As told to David Brin & Gregory Benford)

I commence this account with a prosaic stroll at eventide – a saunter down the avenues of
la Ville Lumière,
during which the ordinary swiftly gave way to the extraordinary. I was in Paris to consult with my publisher, as well as to visit old companions and partake of the exquisite cuisine, which my provincial home in Amiens cannot boast. Though I am now a gentleman of advanced age, nearing my 70th year, I am still quite able to favor the savories, and it remains a treat to survey the lovely demoiselles as they exhibit the latest fashions on the boulevards, enticing smitten young men and breaking their hearts at the same time.

I had come to town that day believing – as did most others – that there still remained weeks, or days at least, before the alien terror ravaging southern France finally reached the valley of the Seine.
Isle de France
would be defended at all costs, we were assured. So it came to pass that, tricked by this false complaisance, I was in the capital the very afternoon that the crisis struck.

Paris! It still shone as the most splendid exemplar of our progressive age – all the more so in that troubled hour, as tense anxiety seemed only to add to the city’s loveliness – shimmering at night with both gas and electric lights, and humming by day with new electric trams, whose marvelous wires crisscrossed above the avenues like gossamer heralds of a new era.

I had begun here long ago as a young attorney, having followed into my father’s profession. Yet that same head of our family had also accepted my urge to strike out on a literary road, in the theater and later down expansive voyages of prose.

“Drink your fill of Paris, my son!” the good man said, seeing me off from the Nantes railway station. “Devour these wondrous times. Your senses are keen. Share your insights. The world will change because of it.”

Without such help and support, would I ever have found within myself the will, the daring, to explore the many pathways of the future, with all their wonders and perils? Ever since the Martian invasion began, I had found myself reflecting on an extraordinary life filled with such good fortune, especially now that
all
human luck seemed about to be revoked. With terror looming from the south and west, would it all soon come to nought? All that I had achieved? Everything humanity had accomplished, after so many centuries climbing upward from ignorance?

It was in such an uncharacteristically dour mood that I strolled in the company of M. Beauchamp, a gentleman scientist, that pale afternoon less than an hour before I had my first contact with the horrible Martian machines. Naturally, I had been following the eyewitness accounts which first told of plunging fireballs, striking the Earth with violence that sent gouts of soil and rock spitting upward, like miniature versions of the outburst at Krakatau. These impacts had soon proved to be far more than mere meteoritic phenomena, since there soon emerged, like insects from a subterranean lair, three-legged beings bearing incredible malevolence toward the life of this planet. Riding gigantic tripod mechanisms, these unwelcome guests rapidly set forth with one sole purpose in mind – destructive conquest!

The ensuing carnage, the raking fire, the sweeping flames – none of these horrors had yet reached the fair country above the river Loire... not yet. But reports all-too vividly told of villages trampled, farmlands seared black, and hordes of refugees cut down as they fled.

Invasion
. The word called to mind vivid pain all too easily remembered. We of northern France knew the pain just twenty-eight years back, when Sedan fell and this sweet land trembled under an attacker’s boot. Several Paris quarters still bear scars where Prussian firing squads tore moonlike craters out of plaster walls, mingling there the ochre life blood of communards, royalists and bourgeois alike.

Now Paris trembled before advancing powers so malign that, in contrast, those Prussians of 1870 were like beloved cousins, welcome to town for a picnic!

All of this I pondered while taking leave, with Beauchamp, of the Ecole Militaire, the national military academy, where a briefing had just been given to assembled dignitaries, such as ourselves. From the stone portico we gazed toward the Seine, past the encampment of the Seventeenth Corps of Volunteers, their tents arrayed across trampled grass and smashed flowerbeds of the ironically-named
Champs de Mars
. The meadow of the god of war.

Towering over this scene of intense (and ultimately futile) martial activity stood the tower of M. Eiffel, built for the recent exhibition – that marvelously fashioned testimonial to metal and ingenuity... and also target of so much vitriol.

“The public’s regard for it may improve with time,” I ventured, observing that Beauchamp’s gaze lay fixed on the same magnificent spire.

My companion snorted with derision at the curving steel flanks. “An eyesore, of no enduring value,” he countered, and for some time we distracted ourselves from more somber thoughts by arguing the relative merits of Eiffel’s work, while turning east to walk toward the Sorbonne. Of late, experiments in the transmission of radio-tension waves had wrought unexpected pragmatic benefits, using the great tower as an
antenna
. I wagered Beauchamp there would be other advantages, in time.

Alas, even this topic proved no lasting diversion from thoughts of danger to the south. Fresh in our minds were reports from the wine districts. The latest outrage – that the home of Vouvray was now smashed, trampled and burning. This was my favorite of all the crisp, light vintages – better, even, than a fresh Sancerre. Somehow, that loss seemed to strike home more vividly than dry casualty counts, already climbing to the millions.

“There must be a method!” I proclaimed, as we approached the domed brilliance of
Les Invalides
. “There has to be a scientific approach to destroying the invaders.”

“The military is surely doing its best,” Beauchamp said.

“Buffoons!”

“But you heard of their losses. The regiments and divisions decimated –” Beauchamp stuttered. “The army dies for France! For humanity – of which France is surely the best example.”

I turned to face him, aware of an acute paradox – that the greatest martial mind of all time lay entombed in the domed citadel nearby. Yet even he would have been helpless before a power that was not of this world.

“I do not condemn the army’s courage,” I assured.

“Then how can you speak–”

“No, no! I condemn their lack of imagination!”

“To defeat the incredible takes–”

“Vision!”

Timidly, for he knew my views, he advanced, “I saw in the Match that the British have consulted with the fantasist, Mr. Wells.”

To this I could only cock an eyebrow. “He will give them no aid, only imaginings.”

“But you just said –”

“
Vision
is not the same as dreaming.”

At that moment the cutting smell of sulfuric acid wafted on a breeze from the reducing works near the river. (Even in the most beautiful of cities, rude work has its place.) Beauchamp mistook my expression of disgust for commentary upon the Englishman, Wells.

“He is quite successful. Many compare him to you.”

“An unhappy analogy. His stories do not repose on a scientific basis. I make use of physics. He invents.”

“In this crisis –”

“I go to the moon in a cannon ball. He goes in an airship, which he constructs of a metal that does away with the law of gravitation. Ca c’est tres joli! – but show me this metal. Let him produce it!”

Beauchamp blinked. “I quite agree – but, then, is not our present science woefully inadequate to the task at hand – defending ourselves against monstrous invaders?”

We resumed our walk. Leaving behind the crowds paying homage at Napoleon’s Tomb, we made good progress along rue de Varenne, with the Petite Palais now visible across the river, just ahead.

“We lag technologically behind these foul beings, that I grant. But only by perhaps a century or two.”

“Oh surely, more than that! To fly between the worlds –”

“Can be accomplished several ways, all within our comprehension, if not our grasp.”

“What of the reports by astronomers of great explosions, seen earlier this year on the surface of the distant ruddy planet? They now think these were signs of the Martian invasion fleet being launched. Surely we could not expend such forces!”

I waved away his objection. “Those are nothing more than I have already foreseen in
From the Earth to the Moon
, which I would remind you I published thirty-three years ago, at the conclusion of the American Civil War.”

“You think the observers witnessed the belching of a great Martian cannon?”

“Of course! I had to make adjustments, engineering alterations, while designing my moon vessel. The shell could not be of steel, like one of Eiffel’s bridges. So I conjectured that the means of making light projectiles of aluminum will come to pass. These are not basic limitations, you see” – I waved them away – “but mere details.”

The wind had shifted, and with relief I now drew in a heady breath redolent with the smells of cookery rising from the city of cuisine. Garlic, roasting vegetables, the dark aromas of warming meats – such a contrast with the terror which advanced on the city and on our minds. Along rue St. Grenelle, I glanced into one of the innumerable tiny cafes. Worried faces stared moodily at their reflections in the broad zinc bars, stained by spilled absinthe. Wine coursed down anxious throats. Murmurs floated on the fitful air.

“So the Martians come by cannon, the workhorse of battle,” Beauchamp murmured.

“There are other methods,” I allowed.

“Your dirigibles?”

“Come, come, Beauchamp! You know very well that no air permeates the realm between the worlds.”

“Then what methods do they employ to maneuver? They fall upon Asia, Africa, the Americans, the deserving British – all with such control, such intricate planning.”

“Rockets! Though perhaps there are flaws in my original cannon ideas – I am aware that passengers would be squashed to jelly by the firing of such a great gun – nothing similar condemns the use of cylinders of slowly exploding chemicals.”

“To steer between planets? Such control!”

“Once the concept is grasped, it is but a matter of ingenuity to bring it to pass. Within a century, Beauchamp, we shall see rockets of our own rise from this ponderous planet into the heavens. I promise you that!”

“Assuming we survive the fortnight,” Beauchamp remarked gloomily. “Not to mention a century.”

“To live, we must think. Our thoughts must encompass the entire range of possibility.”

I waved my furled umbrella at the sky, sweeping it around and down
rue de Rennes,
toward the southern eminence of Montparnasse. By chance my gaze followed the pointing tip – and so I was among the first to spy one of the Martian machines, like a monstrous insect, cresting that ill-fated hill.

There is something in the human species that abhors oddity, the unnatural. We are double in arms, legs, eyes, ears, even nipples (if I may venture such an indelicate comparison; but remember, I am a man of science at all times). Two-ness is fundamental to us, except when Nature dictates singularity – we have but one mouth, and one organ of regeneration. Such biological matters are fundamental. Thus, the instantaneous feelings of horror at first sight of the
three-ness
of the invaders – which was apparent even in the external design of their machinery. I need not explain the revulsion to any denizen of our world. These were alien beings, in the worst sense of the word.

“They have broken through!” I cried. “The front must have collapsed.”

Around us crowds now took note of the same dread vision, looming over the sooty Montparnasse railway station. Men began to run, women to wail. Yet, some courageous ones of both sexes ran the other way, to help bolster the city’s slim, final bulwark, a line from which rose volleys of crackling rifle fire.

By unspoken assent, Beauchamp and I refrained from joining the general fury. Two old men, wealthier in dignity than physical stamina, we had more to offer with our experience and seasoned minds than with the frail strength of our arms.

“Note the rays,” I said dispassionately, as for the first time we witnessed the fearful lashing of that horrid heat, smiting the helpless trains, igniting rail cars and exploding locomotives at a mere touch. I admit I was struggling to hold both reason and resolve, fastening upon details as a drowning man might cling to flotsam.

“Could they be like Hertzian waves?” Beauchamp asked in wavering tones.

We had been excited by the marvelous German discovery, and its early application to experiments in wireless signaling. Still, even I had to blink at Beauchamp’s idea – for the first time envisioning the concentration of such waves into searing beams.

“Possibly,” I allowed. “Legends say that Archimedes concentrated light to beat back Roman ships, at Syracuse... But the waves Hertz found were meters long, and of less energy than a fly’s wingbeat. These –”