The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  It’s the relative vacuum that constitutes the second layer of atmosphere, whose thickness is problematic. It is an etherized atmosphere, according to Quételet:39 a vacuum scarcely seasoned by air; a slightly aerated vacuum in which human beings could no more live than in an absolute vacuum. A stable and serene zone, it is superimposed on the first—insensibly, the meteorologists say, but certainly somewhere around 50 kilometers—and gradually becomes an absolute vacuum.

  So, if my ascent continued much longer, I would penetrate that layer, as terrible for me as the bottom of the sea! And the milieu that I was traversing must already be extremely rarefied! What, then, was the spot?

  I studied the spot. Set against that extraordinarily dark blue sky, it was almost level with me. I was thus easily able to see it. As was logical, it had changed shape. But my eyes were mediocre, and I raised the binoculars to them. At the same time, I unbuckled the strap of my photographic apparatus in order to make use of it.

  Thud! A violent shock threw me down full length in the suddenly-splashing puddle. Bad luck!—my spectacles fell off and I dropped my binoculars! Simultaneously, it seemed to me that darkness abruptly fell above me. I heard metallic sliding sounds around me, dry clicks…

  The horrible rigid grip that had lifted me from the Colombier seized me again and, at the very instant when I took my spare pair of spectacles out of my pocket, I felt myself lifted vertically upwards, and then stop. I heard a metallic scraping beneath me; the grip lowered me by an inch, then released me, and I found myself standing on another invisible support—which had to be at the height of the cylinder’s ceiling, if I recalled the icy apparition correctly. Five meters lower down, though, the round pool became calm again. To complete my misfortune, my photographic apparatus had also fallen; I saw it floating, out of reach, next to my binoculars and my spectacles. It was a major disaster for me, but…

  [At this point, a few words were crossed out.]

  The sky had suddenly become as black as ink, even though it was day-time. From the height of the new cabin into which, I deduced, I had been transported after it was superimposed on the first, this is what I discovered:

  A horizontal surface extended into the distance in every direction, absolutely bare and calm. It described around me, to the horizon, the immense circumference of the open sea, and above it the firmament was a black cupola in which the stars shone excessively, all of them, and all fixed. And in that ultra-nocturnal sky, like that one would see from the Moon or any world without an atmosphere, the ray-less Sun was declining, a large, precise disk. The snowy surface of that slivery sea shone toward the horizon, but the nearer it was to me, the less it shone and the more it became diaphanous, unreal, phantasmal, finishing up by disappearing. Beneath me I had nothing but a 50,000-meter abyss, without anything interposed between its depths and my eyes, and that abyss was full of light.

  I found myself on the surface of an ocean of light, or rather of atmosphere—an ocean whose bed was visible: the Earth, with the algae of its forests, the shoals of its mountains. I had just emerged into a deadly milieu, on to the surface of an atmospheric sea; and that sea was nothing other than the first layer, the famous first layer, which did not conclude gradually, by progressive rarefaction, as science had every right to suppose, but concluded suddenly and neatly, like a true sea. Contrary as it was to the expansive properties of gases, the two atmospheres were superimposed like two liquids of differing density—and now, the horrific vacuum surrounded me.

  In my new receptacle, the same temperature and the same pressure as before; the same flapping sound. I palpated the invisible case experimentally, and found it cubic and narrow; I could touch the ceiling. As I devoted myself to this occupation, innumerable grinding sounds became audible in the walls of my cell and perhaps in the roof: the rattle of iron components, the clicking of hooks. None of that could have made any noise externally, in the vacuum, a poor medium for sound, but within my cube the air conducted sound as well as light and I could hear everything that touched the walls.

  Suddenly, I felt myself forcefully lifted up—me and my capsule. Thanks to my three lost objects, which suddenly seemed to sink downwards and describe a plunging arc, I deduced that I was being made to describe a rather complicated ascending arc, analogous to that of goods moved by a steam-powered crane when they are unloaded. The water in the pool down below had disappeared; doubtless the departure of my cabin had put it in contact with the vacuum, and everyone knows that in a vacuum, there can be no liquids.

  Immobile now, higher than before, I gazed stupidly at my lost binoculars and detective equipment. I turned round abruptly in the direction of progress, beside myself at the thought that some accident might put me in contact with the void, and wanting to know where I was going…

  The spot was coming toward me.

  It appeared to be situated four or five kilometers to the south—the stars gave me better information than the compass, which was functioning poorly. To the extent that my spectacles permitted me to gauge it, it was a kind of lattice-work house. The sole characteristic of which I could be certain—and easily—was that it was not posed like a pontoon on the quiet phantom sheet, but that it seemed to be hovering in the void, at a considerable height—about a dozen times its own height—above the atmospheric sea.

  I think I’m describing this badly—but if one knew the situation I was in!

  And my invisible vehicle, too, was not moving at the level of the aerial sea. It was following an undulating course at a variable height, tracing sinuous curves vertically and horizontally, climbing and descending slopes, slowing as it rose and accelerating as it descended, but continually approaching the lattice-work house. One might have thought that it was rolling along an invisible road, on an invisible terrain set upon the surface of the air like a floating island. One might have thought that, having reached a certain celestial harbor, after a gaseous journey, lifting-tackle had deposited me on a quay, on a truck waiting there, and that the truck was transporting me along a winding road, through an invisible landscape, to the destination of that latticed building, visible itself but constructed on an indiscernible hill…

  I was finally about to meet my kidnappers and see the person for whose sake I had come once again.

  Vertigo, however, made itself felt again, more powerful than ever, aggravated by the roller-coaster movement of my wagon. (Was it a wagon?) I had to lay my cloak on the floor in order to solidify it for my eyes and hide the view of the Earth-bed abyss.

  What a situation!

  I tried to make myself to believe that the strange ground in question, unbreakable and invisible, sustained by the atmosphere at its periphery, might well be an artificial creation, a fabrication of engineers. I would have liked to believe it, to reassure myself that the fear generated within me by the idea that such a thing might be natural and unknown, an unsuspected attic of the Earth…an attic of Damocles…

  I was greatly overexcited. That idea fluttered in my skull like a panic-stricken butterfly in a box—the idea, in that puerile and morbid form, that certain savants, having taken to the air, had become the sarvants! But I had great difficulty; I felt in my bones that I was in a natural world. The best, most agreeable thing was to suppose that its inhabitants were the same human beings who had discovered it…perhaps men made invisible, or perhaps men as visible as me, whom I was about to see, finally, in their château of palisades.

  Of palisades. It still seemed to me that they were palisades. It was getting close, that château; I was climbing the hillside that led up to it. I was climbing the invisible mountain, in the midst of the void. I was climbing above the Air now, toward the construction. Again I felt a need to express the joy that came over me at the thought of the person that I was about to rejoin here…who was probably contained in that prison…

  [More words were crossed out here.]

  Ah, that prison! It reserved the most atrocious heartbreak for me…

  As he read these final words, Monsieur Le Tellier c
ould not help experiencing a great emotion. The red notebook trembled in his hands as if it were a living creature on the point of death. The reading concluded with a croak that was all the more harrowing for being slightly risible.

  Seeing that, the Duc d’Agnès, who was listening with his eyebrows furrowed, took possession of the journal and continued reading in the same fashion…

  XII. The Journal, Continued

  The visible mass toward which I was being ferried along a serpentine upward path, the steepness of which inclined my floor and made the wheels groan under a more forceful effort—the mass, the spot, the prison—was not a lattice-work house. It was not a good, solid and visible house, like those on Earth. Soon, my defective eyes saw that the mass was dispersed in a quantity of distinct small masses which, by the raw light of the black sky, seemed to me to be starkly white and black. These small masses were arranged on steps in horizontal rows, like things set on an invisible stage…

  And, obviously, that was what they were. How stupid I was not to have guessed it at the outset. It was the invisible warehouse of everything that the sarvants had brought up from the Earth!

  My imperceptible delivery van went alongside the ground floor of the imagined monument. That ground floor was occupied by a veritable wood, very low, planted in squares of earth that had surely been brought from down below, one load at a time: brown soil, thickly disposed in unequal squares—squares separated by empty bands; or, to put it another way, by walls that could not be seen.

  It was a nursery set in a pancake of humus, which resembled a huge chessboard. And beneath it, the invisible ground thickened as far as the atmospheric sea on which it rested. And above that meager wood, where I recognized the various species of Bugist trees, I perceived a suspended expanse of dry branches, stones and rocks. It was easy to see that they were posed on the first floor, in rooms corresponding to the rectangles of earth, but they occupied a smaller surface area.

  Above these minerals, on the invisible parquet of the second floor, I saw all sorts of animals arranged in a space equal to that of the stones.

  While moving along that fantastic façade, I glimpsed fish swimming in the bosom of parallelepipeds of water whose receptacles could not be distinguished.

  Noah’s Ark, after a fashion.

  Finally, higher still, beneath a final floor reserved for birds, there were men and women. Were our tormentors also there? I was about to find out.

  Mademoiselle M-T LT… I searched for her with all my might…

  The men and women suspended in mid-air seemed very interested in my arrival. I clearly saw those who were disseminated along the façade leaning against the invisible wall to look at me more intently. The light of the void rendered them as white as clowns, with black shadows in their faces. The others—those who were not on the façade—were spaced out over the entire surface area of the story, like soldiers untidily arranged for drill exercises. They were looking at me through the sparse layer of animals below them. On seeing them thus isolated from one another, like pawns carelessly arrayed on the squares of a chessboard, and seeing them stay there instead of running toward the façade, I understood that each of them had a small separate room.

  I was brought to a halt almost in the middle. There was the sound of something hooking on to the top of my cabin; grinding sounds became audible all around, and I was lifted up again, past the level of the plants, then the rocks, then the animals.

  On the human floor, I came to an abrupt halt. My cell was slid on to the floor of that story, and I deduced that it would now be incorporated into the mass of the building, and that it was no more than a cube filled with air, juxtaposed with other similar cubes, each containing its man or its woman. Very close to me, in the next compartment, a young man was studying me, and all my Terran brothers had turned toward me: apparitions supported by nothing, it seemed, camped paradoxically in the void, pale and somber at the same time, dirty and repulsive, with faces from an asylum, hospital or prison.

  I looked for Mlle. LT in the dispersed crowd. I didn’t recognize any of those nightmare physiognomies. There was definitely no one there but victims. The sarvants, too, were invisible!

  That’s where I am now.

  My neighbor is obviously a young Englishman, beardless, haggard and dressed as if for a round of golf. Captured while traveling, or on a day trip? He and I are on the line of prisoners along the façade, who seem to constitute the façade. Another line is parallel to it, then another, and yet others. There must be corridors between the lines of invisible cells. The row along the façade concluded with the Englishman when I arrived; as the last arrival, I have extended the line by one cube. The first arrivals must have been lined up in the distance, on the other façade. That takes away any chance of my seeing Mlle. LT.

  The brown humus of the nursery down below forms a bizarre grid with bars of light. Through these gaps, bands of France appear at the bottom of the gulf. Then I see the layer of scattered stones, then the backs of the animals. Immediately beneath my feet a pink and grey pig is sleeping in mid-air. Immediately above my head, a tawny eagle with nocturnal plumage prances in the void, its yellow talons flattening out and clutching at the invisible floor of its cage, soiled with its excreta.

  From time to time, one thinks that something is about to fall on one’s head—but it stops, without apparent cause, in mid-fall.

  And still no jailers! Invisible, therefore, or made invisible. Is it their presence that produces the odious intermittent scraping, whose sound, along with that of the flapping, is the only sound one hears here?

  How do these sarvants contrive to live in the void? Is it an ancestral adaptation that permits them to exist outside the atmosphere?—the atmosphere that is as indispensable to humans as water is to fish; the atmosphere, with its warmth, its pressure and it oxygen. Are they a race of humans completely modified by the long passage of time? It’s hardly probable. Our kidnappers are more likely provided with diving-suits as invisible as they are…unless it’s the diving-suits that render them invisible. The diving-suit of Gyges!40 Unless they’re not human at all…but that conclusion is repugnant, although…there’s the question of classification.

  All the specimens of terrestrial fauna and flora are arranged in order, but not in the order of naturalists. One indubitable fact is that I’m an integral part of a collection of types—a museum or a menagerie….or, rather, an aquarium, since, instead of truly being like beasts in cages, we’re plunged in our vital element, as fish in an aquarium are…or rather, since that element is air, we’re in an aerium. Yes, an aerium as well-designed as the aquarium devised by Maxime Le Tellier for reproducing the environment of the submarine depths. And all those scraping sounds that give me gooseflesh might be a mysterious multitude admitted to stare at us—perhaps on payment of an entry fee?

  This hypothesis occurred to me in the first minute; its obsessive horror still imposes itself upon me. It came to me as I looked at all those frightened faces directed toward mine. There were shouting, questioning me. I heard nothing, but I saw them crying out. The exceedingly low sun is illuminating us at an upward angle, putting us in the glare of theatrical footlights, brutal and livid. Our shadows can only be projected on ourselves. All of us, all of us are Peter Schlemihls.41 All of us are men without shadows!

  The Sun set into the aerial sea. The surface of the Air was scarcely discernible, and only at the horizon, as a flat, diaphanous, visionary ring. The immense Earth, deep and blurred, became golden in the twilight. There was a blue ribbon between the terrestrial horizon and the horizon of the aerial sea, a circular ribbon, and, as my eyes made a tour of that ribbon—when I was given my binoculars, which I found a little while ago—I was able to pick out regions.

  From here one can see the Balearics, half of Sardinia, and as far as Leipzig, Amsterdam, London and Rome. From here one can discover a European circle fifteen hundred kilometers in diameter, a geographical carpet spread out in the form of a cup, which is much wider than the square scr
een made by the nursery on the ground floor. The seas look like dark plains. There is a great deal of mist, especially in the distance.

  The Sun set abruptly, but the day had lasted longer than on Earth, and I saw nightfall darkening Germany while the Atlantic Ocean was still sunlit.

  In the fearfully dark sky, the stars were shining with incomparable brightness. The atmospheric sea gleamed serenely. Here and there, in the dark Earth, vaporous phosphorescent patches revealed the sites of large cities. The valves were flapping in a sepulchral silence. My courage failed; I was afraid of these unknown and formidable individuals who have captured me, afraid of this frightful place. I was ashamed of no longer being anything but a number in a collection, an item doubtless labeled…the beautiful stars no longer appeared to me as an oasis in the desert of darkness…a nameless fatigue wearied me, and I went to sleep in the invisible world, after having experienced a singular relief in closing my eyes—which is to say, in finally no longer seeing what could not be seen.

  I thought I was mad when I woke up this morning, July 4. Ah, my poor companions in misery, by the rays of that exceedingly low sun, in that light from beyond the tomb! The Earth was a greenish expanse, muddled and dappled by clouds; from time to time, the Alps threw forth a white flash. But the aerium, with its detainees in all the postures of misery, despair and malady, sustained in the air as if by invisible strings!

  During the night, my binoculars and my photographic apparatus had been returned to me, doubtless in order to see what I would do with them. The camera is broken; I mourn it! With the binoculars, I began make a review of the humans. Salad leaves, carrots and beautiful water affecting the form of its invisible jug—flattened at the top and bottom—had been slipped into the cage of every prisoner in the aerium, and every animal too, during the night. It was a droll spectacle. My neighbor was devouring his salad. Underneath him, a sheepdog was lapping up its ovoid water.