The vessel was divided into numerous very small cavities. There were no staircases, only inclined planes. Monsieur Martin-Dubois of the Institute discovered enclosed sections that had to be air-ballasts, and from the fact that the majority were full of air the deduced that the cause of the wreck was that the expulsion pump had broken down; the sarvants had then found it impossible to restore the void in the air-ballasts and, in consequence, impossible to regain the surface of the aerial sea.
In the middle, a broad chimney occupied the entire height of the aeroscaph. It was the unforgettable cylinder, which a momentary frost had caused to appear to Robert and which served as a temporary aerium for the sarvants’ victims. They were taken in at the base, whose double bottom could be slid open. At the top, sealed by the largest of the five hatches, they were transferred to their final cells.
It was Monsieur Le Tellier who was the first to palpate the terrible pincer mechanisms, complemented by a metallic chain-mail basket, with which the Invisibles cut branches, seized their prey and deposited it in the cylinder. Mounted on the end of long articulated arms, which were extended at the appropriate moment from the inferior opening of the chimney, this pincer-basket constituted a mechanical masterpiece, at least so far as could be judged blindly with mistrustful neophyte hands.
The sliding floor elucidated the miracle of the English cock. When the trap had opened so that the pincer could collect the cock from the bell-tower, a real cockerel, already captured, had become excited, and the opening had permitted the old lady to hear its cries of fear. In the same way, the dwarf from Ruffieux had slipped out on the summit of the Colombier at the precise moment when floor slid aside to allow the passage of the unfortunate reporter-photographer. Some unknown cause had prevented the sarvants from re-seizing their prey—probably the unexpected arrival of some remarkable quarry.
It still remained, however, to penetrate the anterior chamber of the aeroscaph, where the scraping sounds had been manifest. So interesting was the machinery that had been discovered that everyone had been diverted by other attractions when Monsieur Le Tellier announced that it was time to break into the last stronghold, where the mystery was entrenched.
The astronomer had forbidden the staving in of the hatch of that final portion for fear that the bodies of the invisible matelots might return skywards like the first. They had not felt objects resembling cadavers anywhere; the sailors had doubtless take refuge in the bow, in the subaerian’s most secure shelter, leaving one of their comrades behind. Dedication? Punishment? Accident? Chance? They did not know.
Drills, at the end of flexible cords, pierced aeration holes in the forward bulkheads. There was still a vacuum in the upper compartments. The others were found to be accessible by means of flexible metal doors that unrolled in the manner of our roller-blinds, like the shutters of our shops.
There was a series of small, very low-ceilinged spaces. Monsieur Le Tellier and Monsieur d’Agnès advanced into them prudently, bent double. Their hearts beating strongly, they arrived near Virachol’s crowbar. The Duc, bending down, moved it through the air with his hands.
“We’ll have to look for them on the ceiling,” the astronomer told him. “Hold on! Ah!”
Five inert bodies, stuck to the ceiling by their astonishing lightness, were palpated one after another and recognized as five human corpses. As was only to be expected, the enormous abnormal pressure had deformed them cruelly; they were bloated and bulging, due to the frightful death that so horribly swells up cadavers drowned in the depths of the sea. What was surprising, though, beyond all expression, was that the sarvants were human—exceptional humans, it goes without saying, but humans nevertheless! These creatures of the void, these invisible, almost imponderable creatures deprived of circulatory systems and denuded of respiratory apparatus, these collectors and torturers of humans, were human themselves!
Without wasting time in vain reflections, Monsieur Le Tellier had them laden with heavy chains, in order that they would not fly away. Zinc coffins full of ice were brought, in which the dead invisibles were laid. Then Monsieur Le Tellier entrusted them to Dr. Monbardeau, with orders to take them to his laboratory in the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in order that autopsies might be carried out. He promised to rejoin him there in due course, in order to begin the work.
Having said that, and overriding the protests of a few physicians who complained about the monopolization, Monsieur Le Tellier groped his way back to the machines. He realized then the strange disproportion that seemed to exist between the medium height of the invisible men and the narrowness of the aeroscaph’s cabins, where even the smaller matelots would have been unable to stand upright or lie down full-length.
The machines occupied a dozen tiny chambers, only separated by slender columns. You can imagine the difficulties they had to surmount in order to count all these housings and to draw up an approximate plan of them, without being able to see anything. There were many learned men there who, although stumbling because of vertigo, adapted themselves ardently to contours they could not see. They were nourished by an avid curiosity with respect to the machinery and the motive force employed by the Invisibles to activate the propeller, the pumps and perhaps even the cylinder’s heater. The majority were sure that they were about to discover an electricity-capture mechanism even more advanced than the Epervier’s.
When they arrived at the end of the machine opposite to the propeller, they found a great many boxes regularly separated on shelves. Mobile pieces of metal connected them to the transmission apparatus. These seeming accumulators or piles were opened easily enough….
Each one contained the cadaver of a squat and baroque animal: a kind of exceedingly muscular toad, imprisoned in a rotating drum that its mission was to put in motion and which, each one turning by virtue of the force of all the rest—obliging the animal to run within its hollow wheel, under threat of being harshly shaken, thus contributing to the general labor. This energy, communicated by little crank-shafts to the central axle, was transformed in a thousand ways within a mechanical jumble.
Thus, the civilized beings of the world above—these people whose science seemed to be advanced—were still making use of animal power! Their toad-slaves were turning in their drums like squirrels rotating their round cages and horses operating threshing-machines moving in endless circles. They were mechanized animals, brute-instruments, reminiscent of the drum-regulated rowers of the triremes of old; they were galley-frogs!
The lightness of these domestic batrachians was extraordinary. They tended to rise up like animals inflated by hydrogen. Compression had damaged them severely. There were 130 of them, which caused Monsieur Salomon Kahn to say, jokingly, that the aeroscaph was a 130-toad-power machine.
This demonstrated the superaerian existence of an entire void-based fauna, invisible and of a constitution analogous to that of the sarvants.
Monsieur Le Tellier set aside a few of the new victims of asphyxiation. Weighted down and packed in ice, they went the same route as their masters.
In the meantime, the engineers caressing, tapping and rubbing the machines could not help admiring their ingenious complexity. Nevertheless, the sphere played a role therein so ludicrous and preponderant that the most earnest technologists burst out laughing on finding so many marbles, globes, balls and pommels beneath their fingers. They were laughing, but also groaning, for the accursed invisibility prevented them from getting a firm grasp of the mechanisms. Several young blind people, chosen for their intelligence from among the inmates of an institution, rendered them valuable service with their enhanced sense of touch, but that was no more than a half-measure, and Monsieur Le Tellier soon perceived that it would be indispensable to render the aeroscaph and its details visible if they wanted to study it effectively.
Oh, if only they could coat it with something! But the aeroscaph resisted any kind of daubing. Nothing marked it, any more than Virachol’s chalk had done. From distemper to gloss, all the paints in the world were tried, one b
y one; they might as well have been trying to paint glass with water-colors.
This inconvenience incited the astronomer to have fragments of the subaerian taken away for chemical analysis, in the hope that the analysis might lead to the invention of a paint capable of attaching itself to the invisible material, and, in consequence making it visible. While awaiting this fortunate eventuality, Monsieur Le Tellier contented himself with summoning a crew of workmen equipped with sacks of plaster. They set out to make molds of the simplest pieces, including the pincer-basket and the propeller. That way, they would at least have molds of the invisible objects.
Dusk fell.
“Come on,” said the astronomer to the Duc d’Agnès. “We’ll go dissect the sarvants now. When I think about my daughter, it seems to me that I’d gladly have butchered them alive. Come, Monsieur. We’ll take that blind man you can see over there; his name is Louis Courtois and he knows anatomy. The director of the institution recommended him to me warmly. Go fetch him, please.”
When the trio left the Grand Palais arm-in-arm, the white plaster helix was emerging from its mold, unorthodox and implausible—a faithful reproduction of a marvelous propeller that had not yet been conceived by those who, until now, had been the only ones to call themselves human beings.
XV. The Truth About the Sarvants
Dr. Monbardeau was waiting for them impatiently in the laboratory in the Boulevard Saint-Germain: a fine painter’s studio on the sixth floor of its building, which Monsieur Le Tellier had fitted out for all sorts of scientific investigations. The doctor was pacing back and forth there under the harsh glare of electric arc-lamps. On a table, he had set out gleaming steel implements and liquids with chemical tints, borrowed for the occasion from Parisian colleagues.
The five zinc coffins were lined up side by side, and the refrigerated boxes containing the toad-motors were lined up with them.
The Duc d’Agnès and the astronomer set about opening one of the coffins; in the meantime, the doctor, without ceasing to march back and forth, questioned the blind man and summoned him as a witness to the horrific turn of events.
“Human beings, Monsieur! What shame! Humans! Macrocephalic bipedal bimanes, like you and me! Beings who have the honor of resembling Claude Bernard,51 Pasteur and…Tolstoy!..and who fish for their own kind as if for gudgeons. And who collect them! Oh, a wretched humankind, Monsieur!”
“Bah!” replied Monsieur Courtois. “We’d do the same if we could. Under the pretext of ethnography, savages have been exhibited in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in a manner reminiscent of the sarvants’ aerium. And consider, doctor, the perverse enjoyment people seem to obtain from watching a woman through a keyhole without her suspecting it; it’s simply the passion of the collector!”
“A wretched humankind, I tell you!”
“Come and help us, Calixte,” said Monsieur Le Tellier.
The lid of the coffin was removed. Amid the chains and the melted ice, a void confusedly marked out the “three-dimensional silhouette”—to coin a phrase—of a human being, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short.
This temporary and imperfect visibility suggested to the Director of the Observatory the idea of having the cadavers molded the following day, like the propeller, and permitted the sarvant to be grabbed by the feet and under the arms without groping. Its buoyancy neutralized the weight of the chains; the whole ensemble weighed zero grams, centigrams and milligrams.
It was laid out on a hurdle, and the four operators began to palpate it, not without aversion.
Impulsively, the sighted men looked at the places where their hands were, as if their gazes had the power to render things visible, and the appearance or non-appearance of objects were simply a consequence of visual attention. They quickly perceived, on the contrary, that their touch was more sensitive when their eyes were closed. The blind man with the wise hands held his head up, and his fingers moved in the air with a prestidigitatory agility. There were four blind men then, of which three were voluntarily blind—with the aim of enlightenment!
After a silence, Monsieur Le Tellier opened his eyelids. He was troubled by the bewilderment painted on the usually-impassive face of Louis Courtois. “Horribly deformed, isn’t it?” he said. “I can’t feel the eyes or the mouth.”
“No, no eyes,” the other confirmed, excitedly, “and no mouth. But there’s worse—the face…the features…are so coarse, so rough…and tell me, gentlemen…it seems to me that this man is wearing clothes?”
“Damn!”
“Undoubtedly!”
“Yes indeed…”
“Very well—but feel this: there’s no difference between the skin of the face and the fabric of the costume…or the skin of the hands…”
“Hands, those!” protested the doctor. “Those grainy vestigial stumps, which are revolting to touch!”
Monsieur d’Agnès repeated, in a tone of disgust: “What a vile contact! Mamillated, viscous…”
“Ah yes!” said the blind man. “But they’re not clothes. They’re part of the individual’s body. They have the same consistency, the same substance! One might think it a sort of soft effigy, made of coarsely agglomerated pads. These pads…these pads…ah! I’ve got one!” His fumbling fingers were seen to grasp something in the emptiness, on the invisible breast. “I’ve got it…I’m detaching it…with difficulty…it’s coming. Here it comes! Good, I’ve freed it!”
There was an abrupt click from the ceiling.
“It’s risen up and stuck there, like the sarvant in the Grant Palais which went through the glass,” Lois Courtois continued. “Now there’s a cavity in the breast where that bubble came away.”
“We have to recover it,” the astronomer decided. “With a step-ladder…”
But the blind man’s white hands clenched for a second time. “No need,” he said. “I’ve got another…which won’t get away. There! God in Heaven!”
“What’s up?”
The other three watched the hands, then the face of the blind man. His fingers moved frantically, and horror tinted his face. A quivering gesture caused him to recoil in an attitude of the most invincible repulsion; his hands opened. There was a second abrupt click on the ceiling.
“Ugh!” He shivered as if he were cold. “It’s a spider! An immense short-legged spider, the size of a hen’s egg. A dead spider…”
They drew away from the invisible cadaver.
Monsieur Le Tellier summoned up all his strength and immediately returned to the hurdle where the chains sketched out the configuration of the terrible sarvant. “Come on! Show some guts! We need to know. All this…”
He resumed the hideous manual work on his own. Then, formulating his discoveries as he made them, he pronounced words whose enormity will remain for centuries to come: “No, no…you’re right, Monsieur; it’s not a human being that I’m touching…it’s an agglomeration of creatures aggregated in human form, and those creatures are definitely spiders…yes…or large lice, if your prefer…”
“I prefer the spiders!” whispered the Duc d’Agnès.
The astronomer went on: “They’re tightly bound together in a compact mass, in the position in which the aerial drowning surprised them. They’re mingled in the fashion of little garden-spiders whose gathering on their mother’s back makes a horrible swarming fleece—but here, it’s a creature entirely constituted by animals…animals grouped in human form…and the form of a human wearing clothes. It really is!”
“So,” said the doctor, slowly, at the height of excitement, “our children’s torturers are spiders!”
Monsieur Le Tellier broke the ensuing silence by remarking: “Robert anticipated that when he said: the creatures of the void must be more different from human beings than the inhabitants of a planet that is immensely distant, but which is endowed with an atmosphere.”
A short while before, Monsieur Monbardeau had been indignant to think that the sarvants were human; now he wished wholeheartedly that they were. Spiders! Intelligen
t and civilized, perhaps—but spiders all the same! Could one imagine anything more sordid?
Their repugnance increased further when the Duc, having donned his gloves, detached another invisible arachnid from the body, which he had the inspiration of coating with powerful glue fortified with red ink.
Entirely immersed in red-stained secotine,52 the little monster stood out, bloody and gelatinous. Its hideousness was so unbearable to those who knew about the abominations of the aerium that someone threw it out of the window. Weighed down by its sticky burden, it rose up slowly toward the stars—toward the superaerian world—and was soon lost in the fallacious darkness, treacherously flourishing with exquisite lights.
The courageous blind man palpated the remains of the sarvant for a second time, his agile hands now seeming to be two five-legged spiders, living their own lives, busy with their mysterious task.
“That human form!” muttered the doctor. “But why? Why?”
“I’ve got it!” Monsieur Le Tellier suddenly announced. “We’re confronted by a phenomenon of mimicry! It’s a defense-mechanism—a stratagem of war! When they found themselves in our power, these spiders thought that we might respect creatures similar to ourselves, and that’s why they agglutinated in such a manner as to represent human beings! It might be purely instinctive mimicry, or rational mimicry; in either case—it’s mimicry!”
Three exclamations burst forth in unison.
“That’s what it is, my boys! And that’s why the spaces in the aeroscaph were so confined. Compared to the stature of the matelots who lived in them, they were large rooms. For the sarvants, the aeroscaph is a huge liner, proportionate not to its crew but to the prey that it was charged with capturing and transporting.”
“We’re not gudgeons, doctor,” said the Duc d’Agnès. “We’re sperm whales.”
“Small consolation, Monsieur. However, I confess that…miserable dwarfs…spiders though they are…”
“Oh, extremely skillful dwarfs! Exceedingly clever spiders. What a monument the aerium is, in those circumstances! An aquarium for whales!”
The Blue Peril Page 28