Planet of the Apes (2 page)

Why, after the exploration of the solar system, all the planets of which are inhabited, why was such a distant star chosen as the target for the first interstellar flight? It was the learned Professor Antelle who made this decision. The principal organizer of the enterprise, to which he devoted the whole of his
enormous fortune, the leader of our expedition, he himself had conceived the spaceship and directed its construction. He told me the reason for his choice during the voyage.

“My dear Ulysse,” he said, “it is not much harder, and it would scarcely take any longer, for us to reach Betelgeuse than a much closer star: Proxima Centauris, for example.”

At this I saw fit to protest and draw his attention to some recently ascertained astronomical data:

“Scarcely take any longer! But Proxima Centauris is only four light-years away, whereas Betelgeuse …”

“Is three hundred, I’m well aware of that. But we shall take scarcely more than two years to reach it, while we should have needed almost as much time to arrive in the region of Proxima Centauris. You don’t believe it because you are accustomed to mere flea hops on our planets, for which a powerful acceleration is permissible at the start because it lasts no more than a few minutes, the cruising speed to be reached being ridiculously low and not to be compared with ours.… It is time I gave you a few details as to how our ship works.

“Thanks to its perfected rockets, which I had the honor of designing, this craft can move at the highest speed imaginable in the universe for a material body—that is to say, the speed of light minus
epsilon
.”

“Minus
epsilon?
”

“I mean it can approach it to within an infinitesimal degree: to within a thousand-millionth, if you care to put it that way.”

“Good,” I said. “I can understand that.”

“What you must also realize is that while we are moving at this speed, our time diverges perceptibly from time on Earth, the divergence being greater the faster we move. At this very moment, since we started this conversation, we have lived several minutes, which correspond to a passage of several months on our planet. At top speed, time will almost stand still for us, but of course we shall not be aware of this. A few seconds for you and me, a few heartbeats, will coincide with a passage of several years on Earth.”

“I can understand that, too. In fact, that is the reason why we can hope to reach our destination before dying. But in that case, why a voyage of two years? Why not only a few days or a few hours?”

“I was just coming to that. Quite simply because, to reach the speed at which time almost stands still, with an acceleration acceptable to our organisms, we need about a year. A further year will be necessary to reduce our speed. Now do you understand our flight plan? Twelve months of acceleration; twelve months of reducing speed; between the two, only a few hours, during which we shall cover the main part of the journey. And at the same time you will understand why it scarcely takes any longer to travel to Betelgeuse than to Proxima Centauris.
In the latter case we should have to go through the same indispensable year of acceleration, the same year of deceleration, and perhaps a few minutes instead of a few hours between the two. The overall difference is insignificant. As I’m getting on in years and will probably never be able to make another crossing, I preferred to aim at a distant point straight away, in the hope of finding a world very different from our own.”

This sort of conversation occupied our leisure hours on board and at the same time made me appreciate Professor Antelle’s prodigious skill all the more. There was no field he had not explored, and I was pleased to have a leader like him on such a hazardous enterprise. As he had foreseen, the voyage lasted about two years of our time, during which three and a half centuries must have elapsed on Earth. That was the only snag about aiming so far into the distance: if we came back one day we should find our planet older by seven or eight hundred years. But we did not care. I even felt that the prospect of escaping from his contemporaries was an added attraction to the professor. He often admitted he was tired of his fellow men.…

“Men!” Phyllis again exclaimed
.

“Yes, men,” Jinn asserted. “That’s what it says.”

There was no serious incident on the flight. We had started from the Moon. Earth and its planets quickly disappeared. We had seen the sun shrink till it was nothing but an orange in the sky, then a
plum, and finally a point of light without dimensions, a simple star that only the professor’s skill could distinguish from the millions of other stars in the galaxy.

We thus lived without sun, but were none the worse for this, the craft being equipped with equivalent sources of light. Nor were we bored. The professor’s conversation was fascinating; I learned more during those two years than I had learned in all my previous existence. I also learned all that one needed to know in order to guide the spacecraft. It was fairly easy: one merely gave instructions to some electronic devices, which made all the calculations and directly initiated the maneuvers.

Our garden provided an agreeable distraction. It occupied an important place on board. Professor Antelle, who was interested, among other subjects, in botany and agriculture, had planned to take advantage of the voyage to check certain of his theories on the growth of plants in space. A cubic compartment with sides about thirty feet long served as a plot. Thanks to some trays, the whole of its volume was put to use. The earth was regenerated by means of chemical fertilizers and, scarcely more than two months after our departure, we had the pleasure of seeing it produce all sorts of vegetables, which provided us with an abundance of healthy food. Food for the eye, too, had not been forgotten: one section was reserved for flowers, which the professor tended lovingly. This eccentric had also brought some birds,
butterflies, and even a monkey, a little chimpanzee whom we had christened Hector and who amused us with his tricks.

It is certain that the learned Antelle, without being a misanthrope, was not interested at all in human beings. He would often declare that he did not expect much from them any more, and this probably explains…

“Misanthrope?” Phyllis again broke in, dumb-founded. “Human beings?”

“If you keep interrupting me every other second,” said Jinn, “we shall never get to the end. Do as I do: try to understand.”

Phyllis promised to keep quiet till the end of the reading, and she kept her promise
.

This probably explains why he had collected in the craft—which was big enough to accommodate several families—countless vegetable species and some animals, while limiting the number of the passengers to three: himself; his disciple Arthur Levain, a young physician with a great future; and myself, Ulysse Mérou, a little-known journalist who had met the professor as a result of an interview. He had suggested taking me with him after learning that I had no family and played chess reasonably well. This was an outstanding opportunity for a young journalist. Even if my story was not to be published for eight hundred years, perhaps for that very reason it would have unusual value. I had accepted with enthusiasm.

The voyage thus occurred without a setback. The only physical inconvenience was a sensation of heaviness during the year of acceleration and the one of reducing speed. We had to get used to feeling our bodies weigh one and a half times their weight on Earth, a somewhat tiring phenomenon to begin with, but to which we soon paid no attention. Between those two periods there was a complete absence of gravity, with all the oddities accruing from this phenomenon; but that lasted only a few hours and we were none the worse for it.

And one day, after this long crossing, we had the dazzling experience of seeing the star Betelgeuse appear in the sky in a new guise.

The feeling of awe produced by such a sight cannot be described: a star, which only yesterday was a brilliant speck among the multitude of anonymous specks in the firmament, showed up more and more clearly against the black background, assumed a dimension in space, appearing first of all as a sparkling nut, then swelled in size, at the same time becoming more definite in color, so that it resembled an orange, and finally fell into place in the cosmos with the same apparent diameter as our own familiar daytime star. A new sun was born for us, a reddish sun, like ours when it sets, the attraction and warmth of which we could already feel.

Our speed was then very much reduced. We drew still closer to Betelgeuse, until its apparent diameter
far exceeded that of all the heavenly bodies hitherto seen, which made a tremendous impression on us. Antelle gave some instructions to the robots and we started gravitating around the supergiant. Then the scientist took out his astronomical instruments and began his observations.

It was not long before he discovered the existence of four planets whose dimensions he rapidly determined, together with their distances from the central star. One of these, two away from Betelgeuse, was moving on a trajectory parallel to ours. It was about the same size as Earth; it possessed an atmosphere containing oxygen and nitrogen; it revolved around Betelgeuse at a distance equivalent to thirty times the space between the Sun and Earth, receiving a radiation comparable to that received by our planet, thanks to the size of the supergiant combined with its relatively low temperature.

We decided to make it our first objective. After fresh instructions were given to the robots, our craft was quickly put into orbit around it. Then, with engines switched off, we observed this new world at our leisure. The telescope revealed its oceans and continents.

The craft was not equipped for a landing, but this eventuality had been provided for. We had at our disposal three much smaller rocket machines, which we called launches. It was in one of these that we embarked, taking with us some measuring instruments and Hector, the chimpanzee, who was
equipped as we were with a diving suit and had been trained in its use. As for our ship, we simply let it revolve around the planet. It was safer there than a liner lying at anchor in a harbor, and we knew it would not drift an inch from its orbit.

Landing on a planet of this kind was an easy operation with our launch. As soon as we had penetrated the thick layers of the atmosphere, Professor Antelle took some samples of the outside air and analyzed them. He found they had the same composition as the air on Earth at a similar altitude. I hardly had time to ponder on this miraculous coincidence, for the ground was approaching rapidly; we were no more than fifty miles or so above it. Since the robots carried out every maneuver, I had nothing to do but press my face to the porthole and watch this unknown world rising toward me, my brain reeling with the excitement of discovery.

The planet bore a strange resemblance to Earth. This impression became clearer every second. I could now discern the outline of the continents with my naked eye. The atmosphere was bright, slightly tinged with a pale green color verging from time to time on yellow, rather like our sky in Provence at sunset. The ocean was light blue, also with green tinges. The form of the coast line was very different from anything I had seen at home, though my feverish eye, conditioned by so many analogies, insisted wildly on discerning similarities even there. But there the resemblance ended. Nothing in the
planet’s topography recalled either our Old or New Worlds.

Nothing? Come now! On the contrary, the essential factor! The planet was inhabited. We flew over a town: a fairly big town, from which roads radiated, bordered with trees and with vehicles moving along them. I had time to make out the general architecture: broad streets and white houses with long straight lines.

But we were to land a long way farther off. Our flight swept us first over cultivated fields, then over a thick russet-colored forest that called to mind our equatorial jungle. We were now at a very low altitude. We caught sight of a fairly large clearing occupying the top of a plateau, the ground all around it being rather broken. Our leader decided to attempt a landing there and gave his last orders to the robots. A system of retrorockets came into action. We hovered motionless for a moment or two above the clearing, like a gull spotting a fish.

Then, two years after leaving our Earth, we came down gently and landed without a jolt in the middle of the plateau, on green grass reminiscent of our meadows in Normandy.

We were silent and motionless for quite a time after making contact with the ground. Perhaps this behavior will seem surprising, but we felt the need to recover our wits and concentrate our energy. We were launched on an adventure a thousand times more extraordinary than that of the first terrestrial navigators and were preparing ourselves to confront the wonders of interstellar travel that have fired the imaginations of several generations of poets.

For the moment, talking of wonders, we had landed without a hitch on the grass of a planet that contained, as ours did, oceans, mountains, forests, cultivated fields, towns, and certainly inhabitants. Yet we must have been fairly far from the civilized
regions, considering the stretch of jungle over which we had flown before touching down.

We eventually came out of our daydream. Having donned our diving suits, we carefully opened one porthole of the launch. There was no hiss of air. The pressures inside and outside were the same. The forest surrounded the clearing like the walls of a fortress. Not a sound, not a movement disturbed it. The temperature was high but bearable: about seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit.

We climbed out of the launch, accompanied by Hector. Professor Antelle insisted first of all on analyzing the atmosphere by a more precise method. The result was encouraging: the air had the same composition as the Earth’s, in spite of some differences in the proportion of the rare gases. It was undoubtedly breathable. Yet, to make doubly sure, we tried it out first on our chimpanzee. Rid of his suit, the monkey appeared perfectly happy and in no way inconvenienced. He seemed overjoyed to find himself free and on land. After a few skips and jumps, he scampered off to the forest, sprang into a tree, and continued his capering in the branches. He drew farther away and finally disappeared, ignoring our gestures and shouts.