The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  August 6. Raflin has died. He has been placed in a separate cell. I’m certain that he died in the course of an experiment with compressed air. The solidity of our crates is truly admirable, to be able to resist such internal pressures with no equilibrating pressure on the outside. Then again, how the devil are they made so as to avoid the mist that ought to condense on the surfaces of our walls, as on the windows of a warm room when it’s cold outside? A mystery.

  August 7. Raflin’s corpse has disappeared, but I didn’t see it thrown in the sea. Three women and a man—my English neighbor—are also dead, I don’t know how. I saw the Englishman and two of the women thrown away. Where’s the other?

  August 8. It’s certain that the cadavers are no longer of any interest to them. Life is of paramount attraction to them. They throw the dead away with their clothes, without paying any further heed to them. When an animal dies, though, I don’t know what they did with it. Living animals are still arriving—but no more humans.

  August 10. Nothing new; still the same horrors. I’ve seen the blonde hair again, and later I saw the grey dress. One or the other doubtless belongs to Marie-Thérèse, but not both; they weren’t in the same place—unless there was a change of cell between my two observations. How lonely and sad she must be!

  August 11. Event: for the first time, a prisoner has been taken down to Earth—and it’s Maxime! With what purpose? He looked like a condemned man when they grabbed him. His plunge was vertiginous. It was very early.

  8 p.m. Maxime hasn’t returned. There’s a woman who is laughing incessantly…

  August 12. Maxime not back. And yet, last night, the invisible fishers brought up animals. Thus, as I’m certain that there’s only one subaerian, only one aeroscaph, the aforesaid aeroscaph must have come back up without Maxime. Now, if the sarvants have abandoned him, it’s because he’s no longer anything but one of those cadavers they disdain. Maxime is dead! What’s happened?

  August 13. This morning, no animals, nor stones, nor plants, nor humans. That’s never happened. What’s up, then? Hazard might have chosen me instead of Maxime, and then I would surely have found a way to transmit my notebook to someone. If it were discovered on my inanimate body…

  11 a.m. We’ve been given water, as usual, but the salad was scarcely fresh.

  2 p.m. Finally, they’re annoying me, these sarvants! They don’t know what I’m capable of. I’ll show them. I’ll do them a bad turn. I’ll…

  [These last few lines, in an incoherent hand, were crossed out—badly, since one can still make them out. A few more lines follow, these completely obliterated. The next seven pages have been torn out. Then there are 15 lines masked by cross-hatching. Thus, nothing from August 13 to 24. Finally, it resumes as follows.]

  August 24. I’ve destroyed all the insanities I scribbled. For ten days I’ve been subjected to the cruelest experiments. Without being taken out of my cell, I’ve been subjected to all sorts of pressures, all sorts of decompressions, all sorts of mixtures of gases. I’ve passed from the most frantic overexcitement to the most profound prostration; breathed superoxygenated air, supernitrogenated air. They’ve also forced nitrous oxide on me, I’m sure of it—for an hour I couldn’t stop laughing, and I understood why that woman was laughing so much the other time. At one time, I remember trying to shatter my prison with a revolver bullet—but the bullet flattened against the wall—then trying to stop the flap-valves by means of my knife—so those weapons have been confiscated. The scraping sounds never stopped being audible. Finally, it’s over! I’ve recovered. Fortunately! What would have become of the notebook, then? They’d had thrown me in the sea without it!

  The vegetables they’re giving us are rotten, and the water we’re drinking tastes foul. The level in the cistern is decreasing. By connecting these facts with the facts that no prey has been captured since the twelfth, it’s easy to deduce that the reprovisioning boat has been lost. The aeroscaph has been shipwrecked. I can’t think of a better explanation.

  August 25. I’m wondering whether it’s any more than a hallucination due to some new experiment that I haven’t noticed. Down below, twenty meters from the façade of the aerium, at ground floor level, isolated in space and as motionless as a statue: Raflin! The late Raflin, whose death I witnessed! But who’s the rigid woman who’s emerging from beneath the nursery and advancing toward Raflin? Oh, it’s one of the women who died at the same time as him…

  She’s motionless beside him, and—this surely can’t be anything but an illusion—all those stiff, rigid animals are emerging from the same place, in procession, and are being arranged not far from the couple, the horrible human couple! My binoculars!

  No, it’s not a fever-mirage. They’re stuffed animals, packed with something invisible. The sarvants have stuffed a specimen of each Terran species! There’s a taxidermist’s studio in the cellars of the aerium!

  [On August 26, 27, 28 and 29, Robert Collin abstained from recording his impressions in the red notebook.]

  August 30. For four days I’ve felt my reason totter. Moreover, I can hardly hold the pencil. If I want this journal to be rational, and if it’s to be of any use, it’s time to take stock.

  The water is better, but it’s no longer the same. The sarvants must be obtaining it by some other means. The vegetables are now quite fresh, because they’ve begun to harvest the ones in the plantation.

  Many empty spaces among the humans. The abomination of the aerium is nothing compared to the macabre museum facing it, perhaps on the other side of the road: that sinister museum of aerial oceanography annexed to the Institute where we are. With its invisible display-cases and its mummies it bars an even closer resemblance to some foreign wax museum. If I live a thousand years, I shall see that stuffed man and woman every day of my life.

  August 31. It’s vital that my journal, which now contains all the necessary indications, reaches Monsieur Le Tellier, or someone capable of getting it to him, without further delay. If I’m vivisected, or only dissected, the notebook might be lost. If I stay here, ditto. If I’m asphyxiated before I’ve taken my precautions, ditto. But if I die in my cell, with the red notebook under my clothing, I’ll be thrown away like that. It’s the only way in which I can be useful to Marie-Thérèse. I no longer have a knife; I have nothing that I can use to block the valves. I have, therefore, to do it myself.

  September 1. Like a coward, I hesitated all night. What! Shall I abandon Marie-Thérèse here? And abandon here forever? That’s also a frightful death. There’s still that journey through the void, which will deform my poor corpse…and that fall, about which no one can think without shivering on his cadaver’s behalf!

  Marie-Thérèse! If I could only see her once more, be it only her blonde hair or the hem of her grey dress! But it’s a long time since I’ve seen anyone I know here. They’ve been put back in their original places, behind that human wall. I’ll never see Marie-Thérèse again.

  September 2. I’ll fasten the notebook under my shirt, tightly secured with my belt.

  6 p.m. There are too many scraping sounds. I’m afraid of being spotted, stopped in my work and having it made impossible for me to start again. The frost will be seen immediately, at the outset, since the warm air won’t be coming any more. Just so long as the sarvants…

  September 8. There are no more scraping sounds. The stuffed specimens, down below, are oscillating and whirling around. It’s obvious that they’re being manhandled. It’s even possible that they’re being inaugurated, for the sarvants appear to have deserted the aerium. The unfortunates they’ve tormented in a hundred different ways have a respite. Our torturers have departed in a crowd toward the gallery opposite. It’s time. I’ll block the valve-pipes with my clothing, and I’ll put all my weight on them.

  I’m not writing any farewells; time’s pressing, and I don’t need to become maudlin.

  I’ll attach the notebook to my breast.”

  [Sixty-six blank pages follow.]

  XIV. The Aerial W
reck

  “Gentlemen! Citizens! Friends!” cried Monsieur Le Tellier. “I beg you to wait!”

  He threw himself in front of the metal-workers who had broken through the circle with a single thrust. The journeyman Virachol, alias Gargantua, the French steelworker who displaced the greatest volume of air, advanced at their head, waving his crowbar like a drum-major’s staff. “Enough humbug, my old astrologer!” he said. “Me, I only understand one thing—that there are brothers and sisters to free. We can hear them scraping. Let’s go, then, lads—get in there!”

  “Stop! For the sake of your life, stop—or I’ll have you thrown out right now! And listen to me. If I’ve let you stay here, instead of having the whole lot of you sent back to your workshop, it’s because I consider your special skills to be potentially useful—but I demand rigorous discipline from you. The first time you get out of line, goodnight! I insist that you allow yourselves to be guided in your work by the scientists and officers around me, and I demanded the same submission to me. For the moment, listen to me. Come closer, guards and firemen! And don’t worry about those scraping sounds, damn it!”

  The astronomer accelerated his speech: “Gentlemen, you ought to be grateful to me now for having apprised you of the contents of Monsieur Collin’s journal before touching this invisible object. Thanks to my lamented secretary, who has so cleverly deduced the unknown from the known, we now know what machine it is with which we have to deal. It is not a matter of a machine from another world, as rumor has it, but an apparatus fallen from an invisible land superior to our own, which is part of our planet; it is neither a uranoscaph nor an etheroscaph; it’s quite simple an aeroscaph. It’s a subaerian, which travels in the air as our submarines travel in the bosom of the ocean—which further accentuates the oft-remarked resemblance between aerial and submarine navigation, and that between air, the common form of gas, and water, the common type of liquid.

  “This invisible boat has been freighted by an unknown, invisible, superaerian people. Without any doubt, it is manned by invisible matelots. One can affirm, furthermore, that it is equipped for prospecting the subaerian depths—or, to put it another way, our ground—with the aim of doing what is, for our neighbors above, ‘oceanography.’ If you compare that to the studies of His Highness the Prince of Monaco, you will agree with me that this vessel, whose shape recalls our submersibles even more than our dirigibles, is an invisible and submersible Princess Alice, a diving yacht designed to fish at the bottom of the sea: a Princess Alice and a Nautilus rolled into one. We possess nothing analogous…”

  “Pardon, Monsieur!” objected the captain of a frigate, who was listening attentively. “There is a submarine for collecting sponges, invented by a priest.45 It functions perfectly.”

  “In that case, the sarvants are not such original inventors as I thought,” Monsieur Le Tellier went on. “However, they are certainly not stupid, for, given the evident lightness of their constitutive substance, they have had to overcome singular difficulties in order to descend to the bottom of the atmosphere. Imagine natural humans trying to dive to the bottom of an ocean of water 50,000 meters deep! The sarvants have had as much trouble descending to our depth as we would have had in rising up to theirs. The material of their vessel must be to their individuality what lead is to our flesh…

  “The unfortunates, moreover, have paid for their audacity with a catastrophe. It is martyrs to science that we have before us, for—listen to me gentlemen; this is of the utmost importance for the success of the enterprise we are about to undertake—as Monsieur Robert Collin has admirably suspected, we are witnessing the epilogue of a drama parallel to those of the Lutin, the Farfadet and the Pluviose, which we all recall, and which put the French fleet in mourning.46

  “In the course of a dive effected on August 12 by this aeroscaph—this aerial submarine—a breakdown occurred in its mechanism, at a moment when it was still in the most elevated regions of the atmospheric ocean. From that day on, it has been sinking slowly. Gently impelled by the south-east wind that was blowing until Wednesday, the aerial wreck has finally run aground in Paris, after three weeks of uninterrupted submersion. It is, therefore a shipwreck, which would be terrifying, if its victims were not the ferocious enemies of humankind. Do you understand, Monsieur Virachol?

  “Everything indicates that some of the mysterious matelots are still alive. Those scraping sounds are evidence of their activity. In the same way that the crew of the Lutin or the Farfadet survived for long hours at the bottom of the ocean, with their provisions of air, the crew of the aeroscaph is surviving at the bottom of the air with their provisions of void, the latter doubtless being less exhaustible than the former, since no respiration can be taking place—in my opinion, the Invisibles must be exempt from lungs, just as they are deprived of hearts.

  “Yes, based on the revelations of Monsieur Collin’s journal, I affirm that this is a shipwreck. A point of the utmost importance, gentlemen, for, in consequence, we do not have to fear that this descent by the aeroscaph might be a ruse aimed against us. It follows from this that we are the masters of the moment. We may act, albeit with the most extreme prudence.

  “There are creatures of the void in there, which are not dead. Therefore, there is still a vacuum inside; the air whose infiltration provoked the descent has not invaded it completely—far from it. That might do us harm—not to mention that this substance is so hard…

  “In conclusion, to facilitate our task and our understanding of the question, let us suppose that we are about to handle something that has sunk to the bottom of the sea—for everything applicable to bodies plunged into water is applicable to bodies plunged into air, all proportions being taken into account. Be wary, too, of the tricks that invisibility might play upon you. In sum, in this respect, what is happening is the opposite of what the red notebook recounts—instead of there being a collection of a few exceptionally visible individuals in an invisible world, there’s a single exceptionally invisible object in a visible world.

  “Patience Monsieur Virachol! And prudence! Let’s not risk our own lives to extract two or three brutes who will die as soon as they are in the air. That’s what you’ll never understand. Like fish, Monsieur Virachol! Like fish! Do you get it?

  “Now, if everyone will follow my instructions…”

  At this point, the indescribable discovery of the aeroscaph truly began.

  Under the direction of Monsieur Le Tellier, with the Duc d’Agnès serving as his secretary, everyone did his best to obtain a tactile impression of the thing. Monsieur d’Agnès carefully noted down Monsieur Le Tellier’s findings. Ladders were brought, which were stood up against the invisible. They gave the impression of being magical ladders, leaning in unstable equilibrium. Those who employed them seemed to be marvelous acrobats toying with gravity to the point of annulling it. Having reached five meters above ground, they set foot on the nothingness; then, with a thousand precautions, they went forward in mid-air like novice gods. Some walked; the soles of their shoes could be seen from below. The majority got down on all fours and proceeded in that manner. Everyone experienced difficulty in standing upright on that platform, level and resistant as it was, solely by virtue of its being invisible.

  The subaerian was measured precisely. It was five meters eight centimeters tall, but 40 meters ten centimeters long. Contact revealed nothing but a surface that was both icy and smooth—some compared it to marble, others to steel or glass—with no joints, devoid of rivets or bolts, as if its hull had been sculpted in one piece from a colossal block of invisible matter. The mighty crash in the Carrefour Louis-le-Grand had not even dented it. On the sides, two lines of rounded hollows were discovered, like two rows of soup-dishes. Monsieur Monbardeau maintained that they were portholes, and he frightened everyone with the notion of the grimacing faces possibly installed at these bull’s-eyes, staring at the crowd in a frightful manner, grinding their teeth in that exasperating fashion that never ends.

  Monsieur Le Tellier
told him, correctly, that it was necessary for the sarvants to scrape the hull in order to make themselves heard, since they were in a vacuum. At the same moment, a sequence of five slightly raised disks was discovered on the flat top of the aeroscaph, arranged along the median line. The middle one was four meters in diameter, the others only fifty centimeters. Everyone wanted to feel them. It was agreed that they had to be lids: panels sealing hatchways.

  Meanwhile, an animated group stood at the rear and set up several double ladders, tightly bound together. The invisible propeller was the reason for this. Its shaft was two and a half meters above the ground. It could easily be turned by hand, without making any sound—which proved that the workings of the machinery were still functioning in the void.

  The propeller astonished the Duc d’Agnès. Short and broad, cleverly curled, multiple, mobile and susceptible to banking, like the shaft of a hirsute and jagged corkscrew, it was, in sum, a much-improved Archimedean screw. There was no need to look elsewhere for the involuntary siren that had hummed its soft and somber song in the fearful nights, the ventilator whose wind had added to that of the aeroscaph’s passage to shake the trees and made Mirastel’s weathervane spin when the aeroscaph described its approaching spiral around it.

  One by one, the men of science came to play with the incomparable propeller, with the result that one of them—Monsieur Martin Dubois of the Institute—was rudely smacked on the head by one of the blades when one of his colleagues rotated the helix. After that accident, Monsieur Le Tellier decided to ameliorate the inconveniences of invisibility as much as possible, by effecting a delimitation of the aeroscaph. For the time being, it was circled by ropes—the very ones that had served to support it. They then had before their eyes an extraordinary carcass, somewhat reminiscent of the skeleton of a whale modeled in string: a skeleton that only had ribs; a thoracic cage of hemp, in the form of a cigar squared off in the middle. Poles were set up around the propeller.